2.50
Now and then, someone will say, ‘now we’ve found the real basis’ — which is a form of ‘colonizing logic.’ — Such a statement presupposes several things. It presupposes that ‘we’ have found the real with knowledge that cuts through illusion. It says, ‘what you thought was illusory’ and negates the experience of an other, typically, of another group.
‘But what if we have found the basis? It’s not then respectful to pretend we haven’t!’
What does this mean? That we’ve found the way to look at things? How can that claim even make sense? Perhaps the claim emerges when, for example, we’ve found the cure for a disease. Do we not then say that we’ve used our science and knowledge of the real to make the discovery? Well, but, neither the cure nor the disease are context-free. And we needn’t suppose that we’ve tapped into ‘the (singular) real’ to make this discovery: rather, connections were made, and this enabled a certain structure of meaning, through which we were able to uncover a cure. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ways of looking at and encountering phenomena.
Let’s take up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, setting aside its accuracy, to criticize a general and related way of thinking. Physiological and safety needs are placed on the bottom and each need must be secured for a person to be able to move on to the next.[1] It’s clearly a universal developmental hierarchy[2] that’s often seen as deferring ethics, art, spirituality, and so on until later. It assumes that underneath culture, we’re all biological beings.[3] But why think this way? What sense is there in making claims about us ‘under’ or separate from our culture or group? What kind of operation must be done to perceive us this way?
Well, the response is that we see the truth of this in the deprived and poor who are reduced to ‘bare life.’ – But there are unwarranted assumptions here. There’s no natural way to engage with the world opposed to an artificial/group way. Displaced peoples continue to carry with them group-based structures of meaning from their place of dispersal. Sure, practices change: radically new situations demand radically new engagement. Yet, we always approach things in particular ways: in metaphysical, enworlded ways.
People in these situations aren’t devoid of ethics, art, and spirituality (later stages in the hierarchy). We’re ethical beings, always responding to our situation, at times better than at others. If we steal food because we’re starving, there’s a particular context within which that theft takes place.
Our ethicality, our artistry, our spirituality — these aren’t superficial qualities added to base biology; rather, they well up from our deepest recesses. They’re fundamental ways of understanding our situation: hunger, for instance. They’re ever-present modes of being-in-the-world, but not in the way we tend to think them: not as universalist Kantian or utilitarian ethics, or detached aesthetics, or pious spiritual pomp and circumstance. But, rather, as an opening to ethics (to response; which is always about asymptotically approaching beings in their situation in the world; §2.14), an opening to artistry (to alternate response; a creative reassembling of meaning-arrangements in alternate displays), an opening to spirituality (to ‘passive’ response; swept up in meaningful arrangements, noticing the reverberating, resonating of things deeply rooted in their web of relations).[4]
The type of claim in Maslow’s hierarchy is reductionist. It insists on its meaning above all others and has real consequences, in, for example, how something like structural adjustment plans are conceived. It prepares the ground for ongoing colonizing activity.
‘But you haven’t foreclosed on the universality of claims that purport to reach the real basis of things; you’ve merely argued against the particular claims of Maslow’s hierarchy.’
Reductionism, in this kind of case—i.e., ‘now we’ve found the real basis’—creates a world in which a distinction is made across the board between reality and illusion, after which zealots for this reality emerge. — As a particular way of responding to things, it’s one that denies and flattens the phenomena.
[1] A.H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): p. 370–96. See p. 375; this is the case even if by ‘securing’ a need, we mean partial, percent-wise ‘securing’: “For instance, if I may assign arbitrary figures for the sake of illustration, it is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 per cent in his [sic] physiological needs, 70 per cent in his safety needs, 50 per cent in his love needs, 40 per cent in his self-esteem needs, and 10 per cent in this self-actualization needs” (p. 388–9).
[2] Which, undoubtedly, admits of some exceptions. See p. 386–9.
[3] P. 370. More precisely, for Maslow, we’re all unconscious beings, but unconscious motivators are primarily rooted in biology: see p. 370, 373–4, 389.
[4] None of this denies the importance of physiological and security needs.