into ethical and socially beneficial behavior. The very word "interest"--which also means theprofit on a loan--suggests that those who live by finance and banking are like animals, whichneed to be controlled by the disinterested and the noble, or even, if they threaten human freedom,violently put down. The characters of Alberich and Hagen in Wagner's
Ring
cycle, who in theirobsession with gold become the murderous enemies of the noble disinterested hero, are symbolsof this danger; and tragically the stereotype of the bestial and bloodsucking moneylender has ledto much misguided slaughter in the last century. Another implication was that artists must make apoint of being impractical, poor salesmen, whose integrity can only be proved by starving ingarrets. Yet another implication of the Kantian analysis was that the word "beauty", with all itscorrupting implications of pleasure and emotional reward, must be replaced by Kant's coinage,"aesthetic", which connotes a forbidding and difficult encounter with all that contradicts physicalwellbeing and mortal happiness.I believe that the rift between the sciences and the humanities is profoundly dangerous bothintellectually and culturally, leading to deep errors of understanding and unwitting crimes.Certainly at the time it seemed the only defense against what looked like a brutal pragmatism inpersonal relationships and a ruthless historicism in international realpolitik, where the victors inboth cases would write history. But the apparent cure--the
cordon sanitaire
between science andthe humanities--had side effects perhaps worse still. Let us look briefly at the history of thosekey humanistic ideas: freedom in moral action and originality in art.To be free one must have free will. Will became the core concept of nineteenth century moralphilosophy. It was will or intentionality that set us apart from brute nature. But what was thedirection of will? It could only be the extension of its own field of action, since any focussingdown on a specific object in the world would enslave it to the deterministic motivations of physicality. "Extension of the field of action" is nicely glossed by the word "power": so "Will"now became "the Will to Power". Thus power eventually became the key idea of the Humanities,as it remains today in its Foucauldian, Feminist, Postcolonialist, Lacanian, and Neomarxistversions. Strangely, our original enterprise, which was to delineate an alternative humanisticworld to the deterministic realm of physical forces, has logically morphed itself into the veryenemy it was designed to escape. Power, whether expressed in oppressive violence by areactionary elite, revolutionary acts by the disenfranchised, or legal sanctions by an enlightenedruling group, is the same thing as physical force: politically it means that you can send men withguns to make people do what you want. If beauty has been culturally relativized out of existence(which is indeed the result of avant-garde theory) and if logical reasoning is, as part of theregnant regime of power and knowledge, no more than the linguistic property of the oppressor,the only way to persuade people is through force. Force is the more perfect, the fewer side-effects and unintended consequences it entails, the less it needs to consult its victims, the fewerreasons it needs to give, and the less it needs to disguise itself. Force, after all, is a deterministic
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