💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › mitchell-cowen-verter-self-and-property.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:38:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Self and Property Author: Mitchell Cowen Verter Date: May 15, 2009 Language: en Topics: property, intellectual property, Emmanuel Levinas, Hegel, John Locke Source: http://www.waste.org/~roadrunner/writing/Levinas/SelfAndProperty_FinalEssay_WEB.htm
One of the pillars of modern political economy is the notion of property
ownership. This idea has been important throughout the history of a
country like the United States of America, whose 18^(th) century
struggle for independence was largely motivated by the desire to prevent
the British from infringing upon its citizens’ “life, liberty, and
property.” This idea still motivates the contemporary US domestic and
international efforts to create “ownership societies” that would turn
socialized goods into private property. Although property relations may
seem inevitable to us living in today’s society, this idea of private
ownership is one whose importance depends on certain historical and
cultural conditions. Writing in 1821, G.F.W. Hegel expresses its recent
emergence saying “But it is only since yesterday, so to speak, that the
freedom of property has been recognized here and there as a principle”
(§62). Although property was an important legal category in ancient Rome
and throughout the medieval era, it was a privilege reserved only to the
portion of the populace whose status entitled them to own. In contrast,
modern political thinking is predicated on the notion that all
individuals are free persons, and that the general right to possess is
one component of this universal freedom. Because the relationship of
ownership is historical and dependent on a variety of cultural factors,
it should not be considered an inevitable one, but rather something that
is subject to change. With this in mind, this paper will endeavour to
examine the idea of property, starting with its most influential modern
exponent John Locke, and then looking at G.F.W. Hegel and Emmanuel
Levinas’s critiques of the ideas he presents.
The idea of property ownership is one that implies a certain kind of
relationship between the individual and the world. In order for the
world to be opened to ownership, it must appear as an assemblage of
objects that could potentially become possessions, and the human person
must be manifested as a subject who could potentially become an owner.
Furthermore, if the relationship between the owner and her property is
considered definitive for her identity, it might also entail that
persons relate to each other as owners, interacting with one another
through their properties. These roles for self, world, and other are
exemplified in the modern ideology which C. B. MacPherson calls
“possessive individualism”
Its possessive quality is found in its conception of the individual as
essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing
nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral
whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of
himself.... The individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as he is
proprietor of his person and capacities. … Society becomes a lot of
free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own
capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise (3).
According to MacPherson’s model, the modern conception of individual
freedom derives several intertwined ownership claims. First of all, the
individual is seen as the proprietor of her own internal nature; she
owes neither her identity nor her position to the surrounding social and
political environment. Secondly, property rights emerge from and are
justified by this initial possession: by exercising her internal
capacities through labour, she acquires the right to possess objects in
the external world. Finally, having no prior social debts to other
persons, each individual relates to the others through the medium of her
internal capacities and her external properties.
The idea that the capacities internal to the subject allow him to
appropriate something external raises the deeper question: what does it
mean to appropriate? The idea of the “self” is already complicated
enough, one which various philosophers and psychologists have sought to
define. Even if we understood what the self is, what would it then mean
to say that the self owns something, that (1) a thing which is not the
self nevertheless acquires the attribute of being-owned by the self, and
(2) the self extends some element of its selfhood onto things that are
not the self? This paper will argue that there are two possible ways of
construing this relationship between self and things. The first model is
an extrovertive and productive one: the self expands outwards into the
world, leaving marks of its selfhood upon things. The most influential
modern exemplar of this argument is John Locke’s Two Treatises on
Government, which argues that the self appropriates things by exerting
its labour upon external objects. Although Hegel is quite critical of
aspects of the Lockean theory of property, he even more directly grounds
property in the self’s extroversion. In contrast, Levinas construes the
relationship between the self and the world as an introvertive and
consumptive one: the self is created by internalizing the world, through
a process which he describes using metaphors of eating. By substituting
a consumptive model for the productive one, Levinas helps to undermine
the notion of property. The conclusion of this paper will meditate upon
the revolutionary implications of this substitution.
John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government provides perhaps the most
important and influential modern defense of individual property rights.
Locke’s thinking exemplifies MacPherson’s notion of “possessive
individualism” by defining the individual as a self-sufficient being who
employs his talents to appropriate property and relates to other
individuals through this property. Furthermore, Locke constitutes a
prototypical example what this paper considers to be an extrovertive and
productive theory of appropriation. Locke asserts that that exerting
one’s own internal energy onto external things – that labouring upon
things – is the foundation for claiming things as property. Whereas
most readers typically recognize Locke’s espousal of a productive labour
theory of property in the Second Treatise, we will also draw attention
to a prior grounding of property that Locke asserts in the First
Treatise.
In order to understand Locke’s notions of property ownership, it is
useful to trace its emergence from the tradition of natural law.
According to Karl Olivecrona, natural law theories of property began
with the Stoic principle suum cuique tribuere, according to everybody
his own (222). This maxim was typically interpreted negatively as a
prohibition against causing inuria (injury), forbidding one person from
harming another person and from infringing upon her belongings.
Olivecrona explains that this Stoic conception was grounded on the
notion that each person had a certain sphere that pertained to itself,
its suum. Assuming that nature itself provided individuals with this
sphere, various teachers of natural law delineated what was already
within it and how it could be extended. For example, Hugo Grotius argued
that each person owned things such as her life, body, limbs, reputation,
and honour. In addition to encompassing these various entities, the suum
also included a productive capacity, one’s actiones propriae (own
actions). According to Grotius, natural law also allowed one to sustain
one’s suum by collecting from nature means of subsistence.
Not only did the sphere of the suum already have some latitude within
nature, various covenants further allowed the human will to establish
dominium (legal property ownership). Natural law theorists argued that
all dominium originated from God’s original dispensation to Adam, as
described in the book of Genesis:
Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And God said,
Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face
of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree
yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the
earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creeps upon
the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for
meat: and it was so (1:28–30).
Most legal scholars interpreted these verses to mean that God had given
all earthly creation to mankind in common. Therefore, they were left
with the problem of how individual ownership could have arisen from this
original communism. Early in human history, they posited, people must
have agreed to divide the whole of creation among themselves into
separate parcels, while still leaving a portion available for common
consumption. Writers had conflicting opinions about the nature of these
compacts: whereas Grotius maintained that individuals had a natural
right to acquire things necessary for subsistence, Samuel von Pufendorf
argued that even this private acquisition from the commons would
constitute an injury against others. Instead, he reasoned, there must
have already been some form of prior general consent.
In contrast to both Grotius and Pufendorf, Robert Filmer dispensed with
the idea that any general agreement was necessary to establish dominium.
In his justification of absolute political power and exclusive
ownership, Filmer argued that the only significant covenant was the one
detailed in the Bible. Whereas Grotius and Pufendorf interpreted Genesis
as an account of God’s dispensation of the earth to the entirety of
mankind in general, Filmer’s Patriarcha argued that God gave dominion
specifically to one man, Adam (7). From this first patriarch descended
genealogically all rightful political power and property ownership. This
divinely-sanctioned dominion, Filmer claimed, was ultimately inherited
by contemporary monarchs, who continued to maintain “a natural right of
a supreme father over every multitude” (11).
John Locke wrote Two Treatises on Government as a direct refutation of
Filmer’s absolutism. Against Filmer, he endorsed Grotius and Pufendorf’s
interpretation of the divine dispensation, explaining “it was not to
Adam in particular, exclusive of all other men: whatever dominion he had
thereby, it was not a private dominion, but a dominion in common with
the rest of mankind” (1^(st), §29). Like the natural law theorists,
Locke was then compelled to confront the question of how private
appropriation became possible. “But I shall endeavour to shew, how men
might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to
mankind in common, and that without any express compact of all the
commoners” (2^(nd), §25).
In the Second Treatise, Locke returns to the classical theme of the suum
and proceeds to explain how ownership arises through an extension of
one’s personal sphere. “Though the earth, and all inferior creatures be
common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person; this
no body has any right to but himself” (2^(nd), §28). Not only are
property rights grounded in the very fact of one’s own identity as a
self and a body, Locke argues that this initial fact enables one to
extend one’s physical ownership to things in the outside world. Locke
seems to adapt within his own conception of labour the natural law idea
that one’s own actions (actiones propriae) are an extension of one’s
suum. He goes beyond the natural law concept by claiming that not only
does one own one’s actions, but also that the exertion of this embodied
action upon external things converts these objects into one’s property.
“His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature … and hath
thereby appropriated it to himself.” (2^(nd), §29) With his labour
theory of property, Locke exemplifies the notion the extrovertive idea
of appropriation, that a force inside the self is projected upon
external objects, transforming those things into its property.
Although Locke claims that the self’s internal power of labour allows it
to appropriate things outside of the self, he does not seem to treat all
selves equally. Locke’s individualistic theory of appropriation becomes
problematic because not all individuals have their efforts rewarded with
property. Locke emphasizes throughout his treatise that labour is what
establishes personal property rights out of the common good. For
example, he states that labour “excludes the common right of other men:
for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no
man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to” (2^(nd),
§27). However, the achievement of this right seems to apply to those
labourers who are fully capable of asserting their dominion. In
contrast, another class of persons do not acquire property rights from
their labour. C.B. MacPherson argues that, by correlating labour with
property, Locke’s analysis not only justifies the acquisition of
property through labour, but also allows labour to be treated as a
commodity that can be owned or alienated (215ff).
Locke’s attitude towards the labouring class can be read most clearly in
his assertion that my property results not only from my own direct
labour but also from “the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant
has cut, and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to
them in common with others, become my property, without the assignation
or consent of anybody. The labour that was mine, removing them out of
that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them.”
(2^(nd), §28) Without fully explaining why, Locke asserts that the
labour of the servant does not establish his own property right, but
instead constitutes part of the labour of the master and helps to
establish the property right of the master. Although Locke neglects to
consider the position of the wage-labourer in the Two Treatises,
MacPherson points out that elsewhere he explains that labourers lack all
resources but their wages (216–7). Therefore, Locke seems to posit
labour both as a means to property and as itself a property that can be
exchanged for any other property. The fact that labour has this odd
double relationship with property would seem to indicate that it could
not be the simple root of ownership. If the person who labours is also
the person who lacks property, then one would be wise to re-examine
Locke’s labour theory of property.
Locke presents his theory of appropriation in his Second Treatise, in
the chapter entitled “Property,” famously asserting:
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet
every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right
to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we
may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state
that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour
with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it
his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath
placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that
excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the
unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right
to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as
good, left in common for others.
Although Locke’s words are well known, Karl Olivecrona points out that
the process of appropriation is still obscure and requires further
investigation. What does it mean to “annex” a thing to oneself?
According to Olivecrona, Locke expresses this idea most clearly in the
following passage, “The fruit, or venison, which nourishes the wild
Indian, who knows no enclosure, and is still a tenant in common, must be
his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any
right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his life.”
(2^(nd), §26) Olivecrona interprets Locke to mean that one owns
something because that thing has become a part of oneself. He argues
that Locke is assuming here that the personality is something that can
be extended — an assumption, Olivecrona claims, that Locke borrows from
natural law.
This extension of the personality was no random construction by the
teachers of natural law. They built on an idea that seems to be
universal. We all of us assume the existence of a spiritual ego. The “I”
is not identical with the body. But it is immanent in the body. In that
sense the body “belongs” to the ego. An attack on the body is
experienced as an attack on the ego itself. The same is the case with an
attack on, e.g., one’s reputation or honour. This is an attack on
oneself, on the spiritual ego. Similarly my actions are “my own” because
they are directed by the ego.
…
Since being one’s own means being a part of oneself, making a thing
one’s own means making it part of oneself. This is what Locke wants to
say in this passage. Something of oneself is infused into an object.
Then the object contains something of oneself; in this sense it is part
of oneself. Nobody else can have any right to it. That would imply that
he had a right over another free individual, which is out of the
question. (224–25).
Olivecrona’s analysis seems dubious on two points. First of all, he
asserts the self-evidence of the separation between spirit and body. He
claims that this is a “universal idea,” but there are countless examples
of thinkers and cultures that refuse to make this split. It seems
especially unlikely that Locke — an empiricist who grounds mental
processes in sensible phenomena — would separate the spiritual ego from
the physical body. Secondly and more importantly, Olivecrona collapses
together two inverse processes which may or may not be equivalent,
extension and incorporation. The first process, the extension of
personality, implies that some part of oneself marks the external object
or, as Olivecrona puts it, “is infused into an object.” The second
process, the incorporation into personality, implies that one brings
external things into one’s selfhood. The two processes work in opposite
directions: the first is externalizing and producing; the second is
internalizing and consuming. Olivecrona simply equates these two
dynamics, “Then the object contains something of oneself; in this sense
it is part of oneself” (225). In this assertion, Olivecrona seems to be
reiterating Locke’s idea that mixing oneself into a thing makes that
thing one’s own: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that
Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and
joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his
Property (2^(nd), §27).” Despite Olivecrona’s explanation, it is unclear
what Locke means here by ‘mixing labour’ with Nature. Even if one’s
own actions belong to one’s personal sphere, does that necessarily mean
that the things acted upon also become part of that same personal
sphere? Why would this cause the sphere of selfhood to expand rather
than just dispersing pieces of the self into the external world? This
question brings up an even deeper problem with the notions of
appropriation and acquisition: can acquisition even be considered as a
type of labour? Why should taking something as one’s own be considered a
positive, productive act? Doesn’t this seem more like an act of
consumption than of production?
When one reexamines the entirety of the Two Treatises to find how Locke
solves the mystery of property — the question of how a part of the
common good can become the property of a single individual – one quite
a discovers a more complicated answer than is often noticed. Whereas he
asserts his “labour theory of property” in the Second Treatise, this
explanation of appropriation is already predicated upon an argument from
the First Treatise. Locke’s egotistical theory of production is already
justified by an egotistical theory of consumption. Although Locke argues
that the earth was given to all men in common, he pays little attention
to the notion of communal well-being. Instead, he argues that welfare is
an individual matter, emphasizing the particular interests of each
separate individual. “The first and strongest desire God planted in men,
and wrought into the very principles of their nature, being that of
self-preservation, that is the foundation of a right to the creatures
for the particular support and use of each individual person himself”
(1^(st), §88). In this statement Locke seems to be staking out a
distinct opinion in the debate that had separated Grotius and Pufendorf.
Locke explicitly rejects Pufendorf’s notion that all humanity must have
reached a common agreement to divide property; people would have starved
to death while they waited for these negotiations to conclude (2^(nd),
§28). In addition, Locke also goes much further than Grotius: Grotius
claimed that persons have an immediate natural right only to
self-subsistence, but more substantial property rights require various
types of social agreement. In contrast, Locke argues that the individual
drive to self-preservation is so powerful that it validates all
ownership. He explains, “But how far has [God] given us [all things]? To
enjoy. As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life
before it spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in”
(2^(nd), §31). Thus, Locke defines the matter of welfare as an
individual one rather than a social one. By doing so, he justifies the
appropriation of the commons with the idea that the individual has an
unlimited right to self-preservation and enjoyment.
In addition to claiming that one’s own personal welfare is the original
and primary right, Locke furthers his defence of private property by
arguing that the institution of ownership benefits the welfare of
others. He asserts that private labour creates the value of utility.
According to him, things left in their common natural state possess no
intrinsic value. It is only human industriousness that creates use
value, and enclosure of the commons that increases productivity. Thus,
Locke claims that the labour which determines private property
ultimately benefits the welfare of all, boasting that common labourers
in England are better clad than the native chiefs in America because
British industry has created value whereas everything in the Americas
has been left in its natural state.
Although Locke’s concern for social utility does seem to indicate a
concern for the well-being of others, he also employs this idea to
legitimate the concentration of ownership in the hands of a certain
class. Given that men have the natural right to promote their own
well-being and that human labour creates real use value from the raw
material of nature, those who most diligently expand their enterprise
are also those who most fully realize their purpose as human beings.
Locke argues that “God gave the world … to the use of the industrious
and rational, (and labour was to be his title to it;) not to the fancy
or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.” (2^(nd), §36) David
McNally points out that Locke’s Two Treatises express the attitudes of a
nascent capitalist class identifying itself in opposition to the feudal
class that had maintained power and property solely by virtue of
heritage. He explains that Locke’s patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury,
represented a new breed of landowner who “looked on his estates not as a
passive rentier but, rather, as an improver who used his intelligence
and his capital to augment the productive powers of nature” (24). In
contrast to this rising class of rational capitalists, Locke regularly
remarks on the lack of rationality among the working class, explaining
that they never have the “opportunity to raise their thoughts above
[bare subsistence]” and that “when the hand is used to the plough and
the spade, the head is seldom elevated to sublime notions” (Quoted in
MacPherson, 223–4).
Locke’s discussion of spoilage similarly demonstrates how he assumes the
perspective of the proprietary class in considerations of social
well-being. As mentioned above, natural law theory expounded upon the
idea of inuria, the negation of one’s suum. Whatever rights one had to
one’s own personal sphere, one was always forbidden from injuring the
personal sphere of anyone else. Locke adopts this notion in his
discussion of spoilage. Given that the promotion of usefulness validates
the ownership of property, allowing things to degenerate into
uselessness would cause injury to others. Thus, Locke argues that if an
owner allowed his property to spoil, it would damage the potential
rights of other persons to promote their own well beings. “God has given
us all things richly … But how far has he given it us? To enjoy. As
much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it
spoils, so much he may by his labour fix a property in: whatever is
beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others.” (2^(nd),
§31) Although one does not need the common consent of mankind to
establish positively a property claim, dissent over negligence could
theoretically negate it. However, Locke quickly introduces an argument
that circumvents this apparent limitation to accumulation. Olivecrona
explains that the spoilage limitation only presented a real problem for
people during the first ages of the world. However, it also required
them to develop a solution to this problem. Locke explains that, through
mutual consent, men agreed upon establishing a standard that would not
spoil, affixing value to pieces of metal that would function as money.
Olivecrona explains that the effect of this agreement “was as follows:
One was no longer prohibited from appropriating more than one could
immediately consume” (230). This capacity to stockpile and accumulate
effectively enabled a class of owners to maintain control over the items
that would fulfill the consumer needs of other people, thereby
compelling them to labour for their subsistence. MacPherson cites
Locke’s economic treatises to explain how this occurs.
[Money] by compact transfers that profit, that was the reward of one
man’s labour into another man’s pocket. That which occasions this, is
the unequal distribution of money; which inequality has the same effect
too upon land, that it has upon money … For as the unequal
distribution of land, (you having more than you can, or will manure, and
another less) brings you a tenant for your land; … the same unequal
distribution of money (I having more than I can, or will employ, and
another less) brings me a tenant for my money (206)
Thus, Locke’s defence of property right is already predicated on
inequality: the accumulation of the proprietary class depends upon the
neediness of the other classes.
Locke’s inequitable view of consumption becomes apparent when he
presents his skewed understanding of the general welfare. He articulates
his notion of general social welfare when he explains why it is
necessary to form a political union. Locke defines society narrowly to
protect only a certain set of interests. What he calls a “common-wealth”
is formed through “the consent of any number of freemen capable of a
majority to unite and incorporate into such a society” (2^(nd), §99).
Locke’s analysis seems to beg the question of what would criterion make
a freeman “capable” of constituting a member of either the consenting
majority or the dissenting minority. Locke clarifies throughout his
justification of legitimate government that what makes these freemen
capable is their membership in the proprietary class. He explains that
government arises among people who are “willing to join in society with
others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual
preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the
general name, property” (2^(nd), §123). In this passage and throughout
the Two Treatises, Locke equates the notion of social well being, of
common-wealth, with the promotion of the aggregated self-interests of
those classes which are socially and economically privileged enough to
acquire and maintain property.
Given that political societies are formed to protect the private
interests of property owners, Locke further argues that political power
is the capacity to make laws and penalties “for the regulating and
preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community, in
the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the common-wealth from
foreign injury; and all this only for the public good.” (§3) Locke’s
definition can again be understood as an adaptation of the Stoic and
natural law conception of inuria as the infringement upon suum. However,
throughout the Two Treatises, Locke always assumes the perspective of
the proprietor who is defending himself from injuries committed by
forces that are typically described as “foreign.” Locke justifies the
usage of absolute force in defence against this alien trespass. Already
within the pre-political state of nature, the right to self-preservation
is so paramount that it allows for murder. Locke asserts, “This makes it
lawful for a man to kill a thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor
declared any design upon his life, any farther than, by the use of
force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he
pleases, from him” (§18). The absolute right to protect one’s property
against any invasion applies not just to petty cutpurses but to the
sovereign himself.
Locke explains that acts akin to foreign injury can even emanate from
within the state, explaining “As conquest may be called a foreign
usurpation, so usurpation is a kind of domestic conquest” (§197). Once
men have consented to band together in order to protect their property,
Locke argues that it would be contradictory for any government to
infringe upon this right. No political power can ever have an absolute
power over the propertied class. If a ruler attempts to seize the
property of the people without its consent or even to impose a
non-consensual tax, this would effectively render this government
illegitimate and place it into a state of war with its citizens. Under
such conditions, Locke argues, one may “oppose the unlawful violence of
those who were their magistrates” in the same way that an “honest man
may oppose robbers or pirates” (§228). Just as an individual maintains
the right to kill the thief who invades his home, he may fight against
the ruler who endeavours to seize his property. Once the government has
dared to throw its people into a state of war, the people have a similar
right to respond in their own defence and to rebel, to bring back the
war (re + bellare, to war), against their government (§226).
Given that Locke attributes such importance to private property and
selfish enjoyment, it seems unclear how individuals could band together
for long enough to form a government. If individuals were motivated only
by self-interest, than any coalition between individuals would
constantly be threatened with disintegration, as various interests would
inevitably clash with each other. In contrast, G.F.W. Hegel’s Elements
of the Philosophy of Right proposes a new political model which presents
a more compelling case for a stable social order. For Hegel, the state
unites and supersedes the personalities which compose it, giving actual
shape to their interests while integrating them into the will of the
state. Rebalancing the interaction between the individual and the social
further requires Hegel to rethink the status of property and welfare,
and of production and consumption. The next section of this paper will
investigate these complex interactions.
Like Locke, G.F.W. Hegel understands the central importance of
individual property for the modern era. Even more dramatically than
Locke, Hegel proposes an externalizing theory of property: property is
the first way that the individual expresses herself in the external
world. However, this initial expression of particular personality is
consummated and superseded by the universality of the ethical sphere,
which imposes social limits upon property rights and the expression of
personality. Whereas Hegel echoes Locke’s individually productive notion
of property, his analysis of consumption does not begin with individual
self-preservation but rather with social welfare. Nevertheless, Hegel
contends that individual particularity impacts the universal social
realm in a way that ultimately makes individual welfare dependent upon
productivity.
Within Philosophy of Right, Hegel employs logical terminology to explain
his political concepts. He explains that the basis of right is the
freedom of the will. At first, however, this freedom is expressed only
negatively, as the fleeing away from all commitments. To overcome this
stage, the will must strive to give a concrete actuality to its freedom
by positing itself as a particular, individual person. Private property
is one of the expressions of the subjective particularity, which Hegel
claims is “the pivotal and focal difference between antiquity and the
modern era” (§124). Unlike Locke, Hegel does not try to ground ownership
in the human necessity of self-preservation, but rather insists that it
has its own separate value. “In relation to needs – if these are taken
as primary – the possession of property appears as a means; but the
true position is that, from the point of view of freedom, property, as
the first existence of freedom, is an essential end for itself” (§45).
For Hegel, property is the initial way that the will establishes its
freedom in the world. The only way that a freedom becomes determinate is
when the subject fixes itself in a particular content, by establishing
its objective presence through property. In an even more radical manner
than Locke, Hegel describes property as the foundation of human right.
Jay Lampert explains, “It is not that we have a right to property but
rather that that right is at first property” (58). That is, property is
the manner in which self-determination is first enacted. In order for
the free subjective will to emerge as something actual, it must posit
itself as something in the external world, externalizing its interior
will in an object that becomes its property.
Whereas the person has a right to externalize himself, the external
world has no contrary capacity to resist acquisition. Only the human
being has a free will that can determine ends; raw matter does not.
Hegel assumes that the environment has no rights of its own. Nature is
volitionally empty, awaiting its animation by the human spirit. “A
person has as his substantive end the right of putting his will into any
and every thing and thereby making it his, because it has no such end in
itself and derives its destiny and soul from his will. This is the
absolute right of appropriation which man has over all ‘things’” (§44).
In this and other statements, Hegel clearly articulates the idea that
Olivecrona attributed already to Locke: the spirit of the self can
infuse itself into things, incorporating them into its personal sphere
and making them part of its property. Even more emphatically than Locke,
Hegel justifies ownership with the logic of productive extroversion.
Hegel employs the concept of res nullis to explain further how things
become capable of being owned. For a thing to become private property,
it must not already have a will attached to it; it must be a null thing,
a res nullis. According to Hegel, the actuality of ownership depends
upon the persistence of a present will. He asserts that a will is
present within a possessed object over the course of a certain time.
When this time elapses, all will is absented from the object. According
to Hegel, this justified the reappropriation of historical artefacts, as
well as the seizure of Church property during the Reformation (§64).
Hegel’s employment of the ancient legal concept of res nullis raises
important questions about how the world is constituted. Hegel insists
that one’s property claims persist as long as one’s will continues to be
expressed in them, and becomes res nullis after this. However, doesn’t
the fact that the world has been constructed by the labours of other
people already place an individual into a certain kind of debt? How does
one determine when the presence of a will has expired? There are many
cases in which a certain group of people fights to regain rights to the
artefacts of their culture. For examples, natives in the Americas still
petition for the repatriation of their ancestors’ burial remains from
the museums that display them as curiosities (“Reclaiming Identity”).
The question of whether or not to consider a given thing a res nullis
can easily become a contentious issue, with one party claiming that a
disputed item had been abandoned and the other party claiming it had
been usurped.
As a counterpoint to this notion of a will-annulled world, Hegel insists
that one’s property claims must necessarily respect the free wills of
others. A thing can become property (1) because things have no wills of
their own, and (2) when other wills have been absented from it. In
contrast, a thing could not become property if it were already possessed
by someone else. A will cannot appropriate something that is already
infused by the will of another. Because the will has absolute power over
things, ownership must be free, complete, and exclusive: at any given
time, property rights can only be claimed by one particular entity.
Therefore, Hegel explains that ownership and first occupancy are
correlative notions, because one can never make a claim on something
already occupied and one can always make a claim on something unoccupied
(§50).
Because a single property manifests an exclusive will, the totality of
properties can function as a medium through which various wills can
communicate. One person can interact with another through this
objectivity. According to Dudley Knowles, Hegel’s imperative of right
“Be a person and respect others as persons” (§36) thus results in a
corollary, “claim property rights and respect the property rights of
others” (56). Through property, the person establishes a concrete
existence in the external world. This substance is not merely a hunk of
anonymous matter: when one claims possession of a thing, one imposes a
representative mark upon it, indicating the presence of one’s will in
it, externalizing the subject into an objective thing that others can
recognize. By doing so, one indicates to others that one is the rightful
owner of this thing and that their acquisitive wills are excluded from
it. Thus, property provides the initial means through which one person
can rightfully recognize another. The first way in which this type of
mutual recognition can be exercised is the contract.
Contracts interest Hegel for the way that they transform the human will.
In a contract, separate parties relate to and exist for each other as
property owners. One person creates a bond with another by identifying a
common will that binds them. In an exchange of properties, each party
alienates his own possessive will infusing an object so that the other
party may possess it. At the same time, however, the contract itself
already expresses this wilful abandonment of the will: although the
particular will attached to the particular object is negated, volition
persists in a higher form. Thus, contract does not merely exchange two
objects but more importantly affects a synthesis between separate wills,
in which different wills surrender their differences to form a greater
unity, a common will, while still maintaining their own separation and
distinctiveness.
Whereas contracts create a common will out of two or more separate
wills, they can never produce the universal will embodied by the state.
The universality of the state conditions and makes possible every
transformation of individual particularity and every common agreement.
Hegel applies this argument to criticize the idea — found in Rousseau
but equally resonant with Locke — that the state emerges out of
contractual relationship of everyone with everyone.
In a contract, there are two identical wills, both of which are persons
and wish to remain owners of property …. But in the case of the state,
this is different from the outset, for the arbitrary will of individuals
is not in a position to break away from the state, because the
individual is already by nature a citizen of it. It is the rational
destiny of human being to live in the state. (§75)
Against the idea that the assemblage of individual wills is sufficient
to comprise the totality of the state, Hegel insists that the
imperatives of the state transcends the arbitrary interests of
particular personalities collected together. Thus, Hegel also dispenses
with the Lockean notion that the goal of the state is merely to promote
private interests. According to Locke, the state originates out of a
general contract made among all individual property owners to promote
and protect their separate properties. Although Hegel agrees that the
state provides a context within which each individual will can express
her individuality, it also constitutes a larger social unity. “Union as
such is itself the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals
is to lead a universal life; their further particular[ity] have this
…substantial and universally valid basis as their point of departure
and result” (§258). According to Hegel, one only achieves genuine
individuality when one becomes a member of the state (§258), when one’s
particular will is integrated into its universal will. Therefore, the
destiny of the state necessarily supersedes the interests of the
individual, transcending the mere protection of private property.
For Hegel, man’s substantial existence culminates with the development
of the state. However, the state does not eliminate the rights of the
individual but rather fulfills them in a concrete manner. The state must
respect individuality and safeguard the abstract rights of persons. As
mentioned above, Hegel asserts that the most significant development of
the modern age is its assertion of subjective personality. This spirit
only becomes manifested in the modern state: “The principle of modern
states has enormous strength and depth because it allows the principle
of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in the self-sufficient extreme of
personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to
substantial unity and to preserving this unity in the principle of
subjectivity itself” (§260). Thus, he criticizes Plato’s Republic for
denying the general value of individual personality and for violating
the specific right to hold private property (§262, §48). Because it is
such a fundamental part of being an individual, Hegel asserts that
everyone must have property, even though the amount does not necessarily
have to be equal.
Hegel explains how the state promotes and protects property through a
variety of institutions. Acquisitions of property and transactions
between owners do not occur in some pre-civilized state of nature, but
rather already within a social context. The rights of the person already
depend upon the laws of the state. In order to ensure that one can
exercise the freedom to acquire things and that one’s claim will be
respected by others, this appropriation must be given a universal
sanction. The ownership of this property must be socially recognized
through abiding with social formalities, such as physical boundary
markers and notarized deeds and state registries (§217). According to
Hegel, most property is acquired through contracts, which also must
accord with the legal norms stipulated by the government. Because
property is sanctioned and validated by society, crimes against it are
not just wrongs committed against individuals, but rather against
society as a whole (§218). For this reason, the state therefore must
maintain the security of society by enforcing the rights of property
owners through its administration of justice (§208).
As the universal element that sanctions the particular interests of
individuals, the state also maintains the capacity to curtail those
interests. Hegel thus disagrees with Locke’s notion that the right to
property is paramount above all else, even above any governmental
attempt to infringe upon it. Hegel directly contradicts this idea,
explaining that the state’s “substantial essence does not consist
unconditionally in the protection and safeguarding of the lives and
property of individuals as such. The state is rather that higher
instance which may even itself lay claim to the lives and property of
individuals and require their sacrifice” (§100). Hegel further asserts
that when the state supersedes an individual’s immediate self-interest,
it is actually fulfilling his more profound rights. The first place
where this is demonstrated is in the realm of criminal wrong. In the
Second Treatise, Locke focuses only on the injury of theft, the unjust
seizure of personal property. In contrast, Hegel argues that crime
develops from personality itself. When the person attaches more
importance to individual particularity than the universal, she can
become evil. Hegel asserts that “self-consciousness is capable of making
into its principle either the universal in and for itself, or the
arbitrariness of its own particularity, giving the latter precedence
over the universal and realizing it through its actions – i.e. it is
capable of being evil” (§139). The individual’s moral agency allows him
both to act out of particularity and to be held responsible for those
actions. Whereas one would have the freedom to do whatever one wished if
one lived in isolation, one already exists within a social sphere in
which one’s particular will and one’s private property maintains
relationships with the external world. Under such circumstances, one’s
arbitrary actions can potentially act bring harm to others. For this
reason, the state maintains a police force and other regulatory powers
to curb the potential misuse of property “with or without the consent of
individuals.” (§100) In the end, though, Hegel argues that these
punishments do not merely harm but actually honour the criminal
individual by treating him as a rational person.
Hegel declares that there is one moment within the ethical life of the
state in which it absolutely overrides all rights of personality and
property. In times of war, citizens have the substantial duty to defend
the sovereign state even at the sacrifice of their own lives and
property. Hegel remarks, “It is a grave miscalculation if the state when
it requires this sacrifice is simply equated with civil society and if
its ultimate end is seen merely as the security of the life and property
of individuals” (§324). He reasons that, because life and property only
take upon a concrete significance within the universal realm of the
state, it would be contradictory to refuse to support it on selfish
grounds. Moreover, war itself has an ethical meaning relative to
property. War is not a terrible accident that befalls unfortunate
nations, but rather is a necessary negative moment in the dialectical
development of world spirit, shaking nations free from stagnation and
strengthening them through conflict. Under such conditions, the
particularity of persons and their property is revealed as that which
should be sacrificed in order to reach a higher level of universality:
“War is that condition in which the vanity of temporal things and
temporal goods – which tends at other times to be merely a pious
phrase – takes on a serious significance, and it is accordingly the
moment in which the ideality of the particular attains its right and
becomes actuality” (§324). For Hegel, war is thus the ultimate example
of how universality can assert its prerogative over particularity,
disintegrating individual interests and property rights in favour of its
grander destiny.
One’s particular interests are limited by the universal not just in the
form of the state, but also within intersubjective relationships. Hegel
insists that any legitimate contract must allow each individual to
maintain the universal part of himself, his own free will. One can
rightfully alienate only what is alienable, either things produced or
moments of labour, but not the entirety of personality. Therefore, Hegel
claims that slaves always preserve an absolute right to free themselves
from their bondage (§66). In addition, Hegel also argues that certain
rights of other people are more universal than my own right to property.
As mentioned above, Hegel argues that property ownership is an
expression of human freedom rather than a fulfillment of human need. In
contrast, Locke had directly concluded the right to appropriate from the
right to self-preservation, the right to accumulate upon the right to
enjoy. Locke further claimed that this would allow one to kill a thief
because of the way he infringes upon this natural right. In contrast,
Hegel states that
Life, as the totality of ends, has a right in opposition to abstract
right. If, for example, it can be preserved by stealing a loaf, this
certainly constitutes an infringement on someone’s property, but it
would be wrong to regard such an action as common theft. If someone
whose life is in danger were not allowed to take measures to save
himself, he would be destined to forfeit all his rights, and since he
would deprived of life, his entire freedom would be negated (§127).
Thus, Hegel claims that the right to property is a restricted embodiment
of freedom, whereas the right to human life is an infinite right, the
very right to have any rights at all. Here, Hegel’s analysis seems more
sensible than Locke’s. Locke’s assertion that one has the right to
murder a thief seems unreasonable, a punishment whose severity far
exceeds the nature of the crime. Theft is a crime that is (1) inflicted
upon a thing and (2) damages part of one’s estate; whereas capital
punishment is (1) inflicted upon a person and (2) damages the entirety
of their life. In justifying the right to murder, Locke seems to be
taking the self’s right to self-preservation and property to a dangerous
extreme. Furthermore, Hegel’s analysis seems notable for the way that it
transcends the perspective of the property-owning self. Although he
agrees that theft constitutes a criminal wrong, Hegel recognizes that
even the criminal has rights. In certain cases, therefore, a crime
against a property-owning self might be mitigated because of the other,
criminal person’s more fundamental right to self-preservation.
Whereas property rights emerge initially from one’s particular freedom,
Hegel explains that the notion of welfare already involves the welfare
of other people. Not only does moral duty compel one to work towards the
general good (§134), one is already involved in the dynamic interactions
of civil society, which coordinates the self-interests of the
multiplicity of individuals. For this reason, one’s own personal needs
already relate to the needs of other people. Hegel explains
“particularity … is subjective need, which attains its satisfaction by
means of external things which are likewise the property and product of
the needs and wills of others” (§189). Within a political economy that
weaves together aggregate commercial relationships, an individual
discovers new social requirements and possibilities that are created by
other individuals.
Like Locke, Hegel asserts that human labour creates social value,
enabling one to transcend to the merely natural. However, Locke tends to
consider labour mostly from the perspective of the person who owns
labour power. When he discusses its role in fulfilling needs – for
example, when he contrasts the comforts of the native American with
those of the English day-labourer – he does so in order to promote the
concept of private ownership and private industry. In contrast, Hegel
provides a more multifaceted analysis of the economic dynamic,
explaining:
The mediation whereby appropriate and particularized means are acquired
and prepared for similarly particularized needs is work. By the most
diverse processes, work specifically applies to these numerous ends the
material which is immediately provided by nature. The process of
formation gives the means their value and appropriateness, so that man,
as a consumer, is chiefly concerned with human products, and it is human
effort which he consumes (§196).
In this passage, Hegel considers not only the role of the producer in
creating value but also that of the consumer who enjoys things produced
by others. Given that the productive effort of mankind generates the
capacity to consume, Hegel one must again confront the question of how
human welfare is distributed, of how the right to consume is predicated
on the duty to produce.
For Hegel, differences between particular individuals entail differences
in the degree to which one can partake in consuming value. Because it is
such a fundamental part of being an individual, Hegel asserts that
everyone must have property. However, he dispenses with the notion that
the amount should be equal, calling the notion that everyone should be
able to meet the needs of their subsistence a “moral wish” (§49).
Instead, he contends that the each person’s particular skills and
resources will inevitably produce inequality (§200). Nevertheless Hegel
argues that civil society must endeavour to provide basic livelihood and
social welfare for everyone, through the administration of civil
society’s regulatory police powers (§230), and through the corporations
that tend to the concerns of the commercial classes (§250).
By consistently linking together welfare and livelihood, however, Hegel
ultimately roots the right of consumption in the capacity for
production. Hegel’s logic is most evident in his discussion of the
social underclass, the rabble. Society, he argues, not only must be
concerned with the right to subsistence, but also with the duty to
perform. “It is not just starvation that is at stake here; the wider
viewpoint is the need to prevent a rabble from emerging. Since civil
society is responsible for feeding its members, it also has the right to
press them to provide for their own livelihood” (§240). Although Hegel
does assert that people should have enough to survive, he also warns
that the state should not indulge them. They must also maintain the
honour that comes from supporting themselves with their own labour. Even
subsistence consumption should require some sort of productive activity
— perhaps, Hegel suggests, the poor should be directed to beg (§245).
Hegel’s analysis of property and welfare advances significantly upon the
Locke’s model, introducing a social and ethical dimension into processes
which Locke considers to be fundamentally individual. Although Hegel
proposes a notion of property that is even more explicitly productive
and externalizing than Locke’s, he introduces social limits upon
ownership. Furthermore, he grounds the concept of welfare in social life
rather than in individual self-preservation. However, Hegel asserts that
the productive powers of the particular individual should rightfully
determine the extent to which one should be allowed to consume social
welfare. In contrast, Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of selfhood begins with
consumption rather than production, leading him to reconceptualise
radically the role of property.
The work of Emmanuel Levinas attempts to rethink the position of the
individual self, reconsidering the way it is structured as a
responsibility to the other person. Such an inquiry into selfhood
necessarily raises the question of what is subsumed within the personal
sphere, the suum. In his first magnum opus, Totality and Infinity,
Levinas expresses this idea with a phrase borrowed from both Hegel and
Sartre, writing that individual is ‘for-itself.’ “The subject is
‘for itself.’ It represents itself and knows itself as long as it is.
But in knowing or representing itself, it possesses itself, dominates
itself, extends its identity to what of itself comes to refute its
identity” (87). Selfhood, Levinas explains, is not a stable identity but
a process of self-identification, of appropriating the diversity of
otherness and integrating it back into a unitary selfhood. Within
Totality and Infinity, he delineates the steps by which this procedure
occurs. Before the self involves itself in productive self-creation, he
explains, its experience begins through consumption.
Levinas explains that the ego is first produced as something that enjoys
existence. The ego is neither a particular instance of a universal
category nor something that partakes of elemental forces or codes, but
rather something that lives a contented life, living from its contents,
fulfilling itself by filling itself. Levinas describes this initial
relationship to the world using the metaphorical language of eating,
stating “Nourishment … is the transmutation of the other into the
same, which is in the essence of enjoyment: an energy that is other,
recognized as other … becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, my
strength, me. All enjoyment is in this sense alimentation” (111). This
description of the dynamic emergence of selfhood contrasts dramatically
with the analyses of Hegel and Locke. For Hegel, particularity first
develops through the exercise of freedom, by the way one expresses
oneself through the externalization of one’s will in property. Although
Locke begins with self-preservation and the biblical dispensation for
enjoyment, it is productive labour that turns the world into one’s own.
In contrast, Levinas explains that the self initially relates to the
other through a process of incorporation and not externalization,
through consumption and not production. By emphasizing consumption,
Levinas seems to be drawing attention the way in which one begins one’s
existence — not as an agent asserting its sovereign will and projecting
its spirit onto things but rather as someone vulnerable who needs to be
sustained by the world in order to survive.
More than a reaction to either Locke or Hegel, Levinas’s emphasis on
consumption seems to be a response to the way that Heidegger initially
situates Dasein (human being). According to Heidegger, Dasein finds
itself already thrown into a situation that surpasses it (174:135).
Although this state of thrownness indicates certain susceptibility
within its constitution, Dasein overcomes this passivity by recognizing
how it is already engaged in the world. Dasein is already involved in a
variety of productive relationships; it is related to things through
relationships of utility that beckon to its hand. Once Dasein recognizes
its engaged existence through the possessive relationships of mine-ness
(Jemeinenigkeit) and authenticity / own-ness (Eigenlich), it can
actively grasp things as they refer to it as ready-to-hand (Vorhanden),
concerning itself by “producing, manipulating, and the like” (88) .
According to Levinas, one first relates to the world through the mouth
that eats rather than the hand that uses: man’s initial relationship is
consuming the elemental rather than acting within Being. He remarks,
“The consumption of foods is the food of life” (114). Therefore, he
criticizes Heidegger’s analysis for its overemphasis on productivity at
the expense of consumption, remarking, “[Heidegger’s model of the] world
as a set of implements ... bears witness to a particular organization of
labour in which foods take on the signification of fuel in the economic
machinery.... Dasein in Heidegger is never hungry” (134).
Levinas describes several phenomenological transformations that respond
to this dynamic of hunger. Part of this process entails the development
of an economy in which personal property can exist. In itself, pure
enjoyment does not engender any property ownership. Levinas employs the
notion of the “elemental” to explain why this is so. Whereas Hegel finds
a lack of will, a res nullis, within the natural world, Levinas
describes it as permeated by anonymous elemental forces. Qualities
without substances content sensible enjoyment. For example, Levinas
states that one enjoys the “blue of the sky” (141). Here, he seems to be
claiming that affectivity responds to the adjectival blue rather than a
nominal thing such as the ideal of blueness, or the particular object
described by blue, the sky. Affect responds to intensities, not to
objects. Thus, Levinas states that these elements are “coming always
without my being able to possess the source” (141). That is, within
sensibility, one does not find concrete things which could be seized as
property. Furthermore, Levinas explains enjoyment as a passive process,
in which one is affected, undergoing waves of sensation. Levinas thus
claims that ownership is ambiguous within this realm, writing “to
possess by enjoying is also to be possessed” (158). In order for private
property to emerge, the relationship of enjoyment must be transformed
into a new configuration, a phenomenon which Levinas calls the Home.
Levinas’s notion of the Home seems to be an adaptation of Heidegger’s
description of how the individual relates to the world. In Being and
Time, Heidegger argues that the self is not separated from things as a
subject is from an object, but is already engaged in the world.
According to Heidegger, the reason why Dasein is always already in a
productive, manipulative relationship with the world is because it is
always already “dwelling alongside” the world (54:80ff). Levinas’s
discussion of the “Home” seems to indicate his ironic critique of this
idea. For Levinas, the Home is precisely the event that terminates
engagement, separating the individual from the immediacy of his
enjoyment. “Man abides in the world as having come to it from a private
domain, from being at home with himself, in which at each moment that he
retires” (152). Emerging from the welcome granted to him by an other
person’s hospitality, the home establishes a private being, walled off
from the anonymity of sensible elements.
By situating oneself inside the private realm of one’s domicile, one can
relate the outside world back to oneself, laying claim to things within
it as one’s property. This home enables labour and possession by
creating a breach between the self and the elements in which it had been
absorbed. Through this distance, one can exercise the power of a
labouring hand which exercises labour and identifies property.
Overcoming the transience of sensual affect, the hand draws from the
element concrete things, objects that endure through time. In many ways,
Levinas’s description of how property is acquired echoes Hegel’s notion
that possession negates the independence of the thing (§59): “labour in
its possessive grasp suspends the independence of the element… as
property the thing is an existent that has lost its being” (158). For
Levinas as for Hegel, possession entails the absolute domination of the
property by the owner.
According to Levinas, my encounter with the other person prevents the
spread of this domination. This transcendental experience of confronting
another person is not akin either to sensual enjoyment or to masterful
possession. The other person is an exterior entity, someone that cannot
be absorbed into my internal sphere or made into part of my identity.
However, this encounter is not experienced as a negative limit but
rather as a something that is overly positive. The other person,
according to Levinas, is not something that eludes the grasp of
possession but someone who overwhelms it. In this experience, he claims,
“the I, nonetheless, contains in itself what it can neither contain nor
receive solely by virtue of its own identity” (27). Envisioning the
other person’s visage, one’s mind is confronted with a paradoxical
experience of containing more than its capacity, something that could
not have come from consciousness itself and that consciousness can not
integrate into the self’s own identity. When the other person expresses
herself, she produces an image or a work that can be appropriated, yet
simultaneously she also expresses a transcendence that cannot be
dominated. However she presents herself, she both preserves her own
privacy and maintains the ability to respond in unforeseeable ways.
According to Levinas, the other person transcends not just the self’s
power, but its power for power (198). The only way that one could
attempt to exercise absolute power over another person, to appropriate
them as property, would be to murder them. However, murder would grant
one possession of only a corpse, not the person herself.
The encounter with the other person alters the self’s intimate
relationship to the world it possesses and allows for the emergence of a
common sphere. Complementing the phenomenology of the Home, Levinas
describes another process that conditions ownership, the genesis of the
general. He explains that, because the other person halts the self’s
effort to appropriate, it both throws property into question and
conditions it. “Possession itself refers to more profound metaphysical
relations: a thing does not resist acquisition. Other possessors –
those whom one cannot possess – contest and therefore can sanction
possession itself” (162). The presence of other persons challenges my
immediate enjoyment of goods, and removes me from my solitary experience
of them. Paradoxically, however, this same interaction also allows for
the establishment of property. In order for appropriation to occur, a
subject must be counterposed against a field of objects. According to
Levinas, one achieves this separation by presenting oneself and one’s
goods to the outside gaze of the visage, to the other person’s vision.
“In order that I be able to see things in themselves, that is, represent
them to myself, refuse both enjoyment and possession, I must know how to
give what I possess” (171). According to Levinas, I become aware of the
general sphere once I generously offer my world to the other person.
With this analysis, Levinas’s account of the commons differs
dramatically from Locke and Hegel. Although Locke believes that the
world was given to man in common, only the negative duty to avoid
injuring others remains after creation. Since the right to existence and
the right to property are individuated, generality can only emerge from
a consent reached between separated persons pursuing their own ends. On
the other hand, Hegel understands the universal order of the state as
that which already conditions the substantial objectification of the
particular person. In contrast, Levinas asserts that I move from my own
solitary enjoyment to the common world through communicating with the
other person and entering into commerce with him. Levinas’s analysis of
the commons seems to be preferable than that of Locke, who treats the
commons either as a something natural that should be privatized or as
the epiphenomenal outcome of aggregated interests. The contrast between
Hegel and Levinas, the question of whether we move from the general to
the interpersonal or the interpersonal to the general, is much more
subtle. Here it seems worth noting, though, that within The Philosophy
of Right, Hegel only seems to consider the logical categories of
particularity and universality. He has no comparable term for alterity,
no way to discuss the unique phenomenon of the other person, as he did
in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
For Levinas, the realm of generality is populated not by property or by
objects, but by works. Labour not only incorporates things into my
existence, it also produces a thing exterior to myself, a work, a thing
that attests to the absence of the worker. Levinas uses this notion of
the work to argue against Locke and Hegel’s assertion that labour
creates property. “The product of labour is not an inalienable
possession, and it can be usurped by the Other. Works have a destiny
independent of the I, are integrated into an ensemble of works: they can
be exchanged, that is, be maintained in the anonymity of money” (176).
Whereas Hegel explained how property expresses the self by the way it
embodies the human will, Levinas insists that the work expresses the
will as something from which the will has removed itself. Production for
Levinas does not expand the personal sphere, but rather creates
something external to it, something that can be expropriated and
manipulated by other wills. For Levinas, my labour not only secures what
belongs to me, but also situates those expressions of myself in a
general economy where they can be appropriated by anyone. Therefore, the
very act of self-assertion and self-manifestation is already a primary
exposure and self-alienation. “The other can dispossess me of my work,
take it or buy it, and thus direct my very behaviour; I am exposed to
instigation. The work is destined to this alien Sinngebung
[meaning-giving] from the moment of its origin in me” (227).
Levinas describes the reverse process in a manner that further
complicates the idea of ownership. Just as our absence is signalled in
the ways that we express ourselves in our works, we also appropriate
absences through our acquisitions. The other person, Levinas explains,
is symbolized through the way that he has expressed himself in his
works. Thus, I can acquire a certain kind of access to him through the
way the person has expressed himself, but, Levinas explains, “we
penetrate into this interior world as by burglary” (177). Levinas’s
metaphor of burglary seems particularly striking in this discussion of
property. As mentioned before, the primary threat against which Locke’s
treatise defends is that of robbery: because the primary right of
individuals is to promote their own self-interest, any infraction upon
this privilege legitimates severe retribution. In contrast, Levinas’s
describes how property is already theft: property is already situated in
a public realm, and thus already subject to the economic dynamics of
dispossession. More strikingly, Levinas’s example reconstrues the notion
of thievery and the way it affects the personal sphere. For Levinas, the
thief does not represent someone who takes property away from the sphere
of selfhood, the suum, but rather someone who penetrates into it.
Levinas further explores the susceptibility of the personal sphere in
his second major book, Otherwise than Being. Otherwise than Being
reworks the conceptual architecture of Totality and Infinity, focusing
more closely on how the personal sphere develops from its responsibility
to other persons. According to Levinas, the Western idea of selfhood is
based on the idea that the self can possess itself through an act of
identification. “In self-consciousness we identify ourselves across the
multiplicity of temporal phases. It is as though subjective life in the
form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and
finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself,
proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth” (99). In this
statement, Levinas seems to be locating the problem of
self-consciousness in what he refers to in an early essay as
Heraclitus’s problem of the “illusory present” (“Reflections,” 65).
Given that everything changes through the dynamic flux of time, how
could one ever posit a stable identity for a thing such as the self? If
one is always changing, isn’t the self already dispersed in otherness?
Levinas claims that philosophy has consistently tried to resolve these
problems by developing ways that one can integrate this diversity. It
has proposed various themes through which one can grasp phenomena,
allowing one to convert the external other into internal property and
thereby establish self-possession.
Levinas challenges the authority of these thematic organizing principles
by demonstrating that before consciousness can appropriate the
ex-ternal, the self is already ex-posed, already open to otherness. From
the very beginning, the suum is already directed by its responsibility
to other people. Otherwise than Being explains this prior exposure by
clarifying one of the most puzzling aspects of Totality and Infinity:
how is the “other” related to the “Other.” Totality and Infinity had
presented two stages of the self’s development. First, the self emerges
by integrating the “other” into the same, creating the identity of the
self. Secondly, the self relates to the human “Other” as a
transcendental entity that can not be appropriated. In Otherwise than
Being, Levinas looks more carefully at the first stage of this process,
explaining how sensible enjoyment and consumption is already ethical.
Within sensibility, the self does not yet exist as a self-sufficient
entity. As in Totality and Infinity, Levinas explains that consumption
is the process by which the self achieves its identity. “The taste is
the way a sensible subject becomes a volume, or the irreducible event in
which the spatial phenomenon of biting becomes the identification called
me, which becomes me through the life that lives from its very life”
(73). Levinas argues that within this eating there is already a hunger
that drives it. Whereas consciousness is driven to fulfill itself with
contents, there is an underlying emptiness that perpetually troubles
this fullness. According to Levinas, this emptiness indicates the
presence of the other person’s absence. “The relationship with the other
puts me into question, empties of myself and empties me without end,
showing me ever new resources. I didn’t know I was so rich, but I no
longer have the right to keep anything for myself” (“Meaning”, 94).
One’s responsibility towards the other splits me open, preventing me
from isolating myself as a self-sufficient, self-possessed identity.
Levinas describes this process as an inversion and reversal of
consumption: eating not only creates identity by internalizing the
outside; it is also a “gnawing away at this very identity – identity
gnawing away at itself – in a remorse” (OTB, 114).
According to Levinas, the phenomenology of sensibility indicates an
underlying vulnerability and exposedness to other persons. In contrast
to Totality and Infinity‘s claim that the self could be characterized as
“for itself,” Levinas describes it in Otherwise than Being as a
“for-the-other.” The very movement of incorporating otherness is also
equivalent to being haunted by others already within oneself. The self
is already committed to others before it is concerned with itself: it is
exposed, posited in an external space filled with the wills of others.
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas explained that the sphere of
generality was comprised by works that testified to the absent wills of
other people. This would suggest that, when we consume what the world
offers, we are appropriating the remnants of others, incorporating their
works and their actions as our own. We are thus claimed by others from
the inside; we are created as entities who are already responsible for
the legacy that other persons have left behind. Levinas explains “There
is a paradox in responsibility, in that I am obliged without this
obligation having begun in me, as though an order slipped into my
consciousness like a thief, smuggled itself in me” (13). As in Totality
and Infinity, Levinas’s reference to the thief refers not to the act of
taking away an external object, but of penetrating into the interior. In
Otherwise than Being, Levinas pushes this metaphor even further, to
assert that consumption animates one’s own identity from the inside as a
responsibility towards others.
With this understanding of the world, Levinas helps us to reconsider and
perhaps to overcome the prominence that the notion of private property
has assumed in this moment of history. Levinas does so by reconsidering
the notions of self, world, and other upon which are founded the
ideology of possessive individualism and the institution of ownership,
as well as the theories of both Hegel and Locke. In both of these
writers, (1) the self is understood as an agent who exercises his labour
to extend his sphere of selfhood; and (2) the world is understood as an
empty vessel awaiting animation by the human will. Locke and Hegel do
differ significantly with regard to their views on other people. Locke
practically ignores social duties, whereas Hegel shows how universal
social concerns always limit individual actions. Nevertheless, even
Hegel argues that the particularity of each individual’s capacities and
resources counterbalance the general right to social welfare, thereby
sanctioning inequities in property ownership and modes of subsistence.
In contrast, Levinas does not understand the world as merely an empty
field awaiting human agency. For Levinas, the world is already occupied,
haunted by the efforts of past generations of workers. The self begins
its existence not as a productive labourer but as a consumer already
enjoying the environment that others have created. Whereas Levinas’s
viewpoint seems to be a vast improvement over both Locke and Hegel’s, he
still shares a blind spot with the two of them. All three writers seem
excessively humanist: for all of them, what matters the most in the
world is the presence of human wills, either the self’s or the other
person’s or society’s. The natural world itself exerts no significant
claim on its own behalf. For this reason, we still need to consider what
sorts of new ethical thinking will be adequate to respond to the
environmental challenges confronting our planet today.
By analysing the primary encounter between self and world as one of
consumption rather than production, Levinas becomes interesting for
modern political-economic thought. He dislodges the central category of
property ownership, conceiving selfhood as an absolute generosity. “The
subjectivity of a man of flesh and blood … is a being torn up from
oneself for another in the giving to other of the bread from one’s
mouth” (142). Although Levinas’s hyperbolic language is rhetorically
radical, it is not entirely clear the extent to which it can be read as
being politically radical. Despite Levinas’s occasional references to
Marx and his philosophical usage of the term “anarchy,” he still seems
to support politically the “pathos of liberalism” (TI, 120).
Nevertheless, this paper will conclude by trying to push Levinas’s
thought in a more revolutionary direction. This will be done by
analysing how this essay’s themes of property, production, and
consumption are discussed by the Peter Kropotkin in his seminal
declaration of anarchocommunism, The Conquest of Bread.
Kropotkin criticizes the idea of property ownership because, like
Levinas, he understands the world to be constituted by the works of
other people. Thus, Kropotkin argues that no individual can lay claim to
any particular object because the value of each thing depends on the
efforts of an incalculable number of others. “And even to-day; the value
of each dwelling, factory, and warehouse, which has been created by the
accumulated labour of the millions of workers, now dead and buried, is
only maintained by the very presence and labour of legions of the men
who now inhabit that special corner of the globe” (6). According to
Kropotkin, property claims are impossible because one’s existence
already depends upon an infinite debt to others. The world within which
one acts is already constituted by the historical deeds of past workers;
one’s actions only become significant because they occur within a
contemporary environment where other people currently labour.
Given that everyone’s personal effort depends radically upon the efforts
of others, Kropotkin further argues that ownership claims cannot be
based on labour. Here, his claim is quite different from the critique of
private property levelled by Karl Marx. In Although Marx’s early
“humanist” writings are quite concerned with social needs (Heller, 40),
his later critique of capitalism focuses more intensely on the inequity
of social production, on an analysis of how the capitalist extracts
surplus value from the labourer. In Capital, Marx roots the source of
social value in human labour. In the first chapter, he claims that the
total labour power of society can be divided into discrete units of
average labour expended in a given hour (129), further distinguishing
between simple and skilled labour. Kropotkin objects that Marxists and
other collectivists place too much emphasis on determining the
appropriate value of various kinds of labour. Thus, he argues:
It is utterly impossible to draw a distinction between the work of each
of these men. To measure the work by its results leads us to an
absurdity; to divide the total work and to measure its fractions by the
number of hours spent on the work also leads us to absurdity. One thing
remains: to put needs above works, and first of all to recognize the
right to live, and later on the right to well-being for all those who
took their share in production. (231)
Rather than focusing on labour, ownership, and production, Kropotkin
asserts that people should organize themselves in such a way as to
satisfy the human needs of consumption.
Kropotkin criticizes the tradition of political economy from Adam Smith
to Marx for consistently commencing their analyses with production
rather than consumption. He defends his own decision to reverse the
order by explaining
Perhaps you will say [putting production before consumption] is logical.
Before satisfying needs you must create the wherewithal to satisfy them.
But before producing anything, must you not feel the need of it? Is it
not necessity that first drove man to hunt, to raise cattle, to
cultivate land, to make implements, and later on to invent machinery? Is
it not the study of needs that should govern production? It would
therefore be quite as logical to begin by considering needs and
afterwards to discuss the means of production in order to satisfy these
needs (238).
Our capacity to produce, he claims, is sufficient to produce well-being
for all, enough housing, clothing, luxury items, and food. The thing
that prevents people from meeting their needs is the exploitation
practiced within the contemporary system of private ownership, a system
that reduces the majority of people to the barest subsistence. Instead
of allowing this economic system to legitimate itself with the alibi
that it practices efficient production, Kropotkin argues that we must
begin by considering consumption. Society, he declares could only hope
to meet the needs of all if it returns to the most fundamental question,
the question of bread. “We have the temerity to declare that all have a
right to bread, that there is enough bread for all, and that with this
watchword of Bread for All the revolution will triumph” (69).
Filmer, Robert. Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. J. P. Somerville.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Friends Committee on National Legislation. “Reclaiming Identity: The
Repatriation of Native Remains and Culture.” March 17, 2008.
http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=1470&issue_id=96
. (Accessed September 5, 2008)
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson.
New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
Hegel, G. F. W. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Heller, Agnes. The Theory of Need in Marx. New York: Saint Martin’s
Press, 1976.
Knowles, Dudley. “Hegel on Property and Personality” The Philosophical
Quarterly 33:130 (Jan 1983), 45–62.
Lampert, Jay. “Locke, Fichte, and Hegel on the Right to Property.” In
Hegel and the Tradition: Essays in Honour of H. S. Harris, ed. Michael
Baur and John Russon, 40–73. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Levinas, Emmanuel: “Meaning and Sense,” trans. Alphonso Lingis. In
Collected Philosophical Papers. New York: Kluwer, 2004, 75–108.
------. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne Press, 2004.
------. “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand.
Critical Inquiry 17:1 (Autumn 1990), 62–71.
------. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne Press, 1998.
Locke, John. Two Treatises on Government, ed. Peter Laslett. New York:
New American Library, 1965.
MacNally, David. “Locke, Levellers and Liberty: Property and Democracy
in the Thought of the First Whigs.” History of Political Thought. X:1
(Spring 1989), 17–42.
MacPherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:
Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1, trans. B. Fowkes. New York: Penguin,
1990.
Olivecrona, Karl. “Locke’s Theory of Appropriation.” The Philosophical
Quarterly 24:96 (Jul. 1974), 220–234.
Wood, Allen W. Hegel’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.