An Anthropobiological Therapy for an Unrestrained Mercantile Capitalism Volume 60- Issue 5

Jacques Poulain*

• University Paris, France

Received: February 22, 2025; Published: March 03, 2025

*Corresponding author: Jacques Poulain, University Paris, France

DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2025.60.009511

Abstract PDF

The neoliberal globalisation is to-day producing the self-destruction of the humanity of mankind although it is not appearing necessarily as such. It seems motivated by the most rational motivation that we could have: The good moral will to produce the Smithean sharing of richness, but its results are the worst that we could imagine and we must constate. The neutralisation of civic rights and the phenomenon of exclusion are happening to-day in the neo-liberal context of globalization through the deprivation of financial rights that the welfare-State once used as a way of compensating the social injustice caused by the development of private capitalism. As Sheldon Wolin has shown it in its journal Democracy [1], this deprivation happened in a paradigmatical way in the development of American industrial society, but it is now global because it is too characterising the development of all the other industrial societies. It is indeed inscribed in the advanced capitalistic mind and in the total experimentation of mankind that is programmed by this mind but is seems compatible with an integral multiculturalism. It is therefore able to claim its tolerance towards all the cultures that are living in the neoliberal society. It may also affirm with a certain arrogance the legitimation of the attraction that it is exercising on the populations of the underdeveloped States, although it may barricade efficiently itself towards overwhelming migrations. It is unable anyway to help from occurring the transcultural dialogue that is developing in these neoliberal societies for overcoming the neutralisation of these cultures. This neutralisation is happening to-day in the realm of the communicative experimentation that we are making of ourselves and of our addressees in our daily life as well as in our political life.

Science and technology emerged from a total and unrestricted experimentation of the external world, involving our mathesis universalis. In the same way, our private and public life are fields of unrestricted experimentation of human being, involving our sapientia universalis, inherited from religions by our juridical, moral and political systems since the 18th century. As C.S. Peirce taught us, it is throughout the experimentation of the visible world that scientists ask the visible world to confirm or to disconfirm their hypotheses by answering either “yes” or “no” to the question: “are our hypotheses true ?” In the same way, the daily and political experimentation with the field of human life involves the submission of ourselves to the consensus that can be obtained from our social partners. Communication is used here as a test of our present and mutual hypotheses of life. By invoking the transsubjective authority of social consensus in the same way as scientists are invoking the consensus of visible world with their hypotheses, we are seeking some objective authority, which could be able to tell us what to do and what to desire. We trust in the infallibility of this consensual authority insofar as we came to discover that it has been no other than this social consensus that was always speaking through our words, thoughts and institutions and that has thereby regulated our social and mental life. This social consensus thus seems to have the same authority and validity with respect to our “internal” nature as the visible world has with respect to our knowledge of the “external” world.

But it also seems to be the only authority, which could possess this absolute validity. Why? Because we must answer to every need of our human fellows by complying for their need of truth. Each of our utterances is presumed to express whatever ultimate truth our addressees might wish to know. We must therefore express a kind of god-like omniscience. But at the same time, we must necessarily experience personal guilt about our inability to express that ultimate truth. The only way to avoid this experience of guilt is to apply to our everyday and political life, the social consensus that we obtain by means of communication and to find in the consensual successes of the capitalistic experimentation of the social market, the cognitive experimentation of our secular salvation. The weberian explanation of the logical dynamics of this capitalistic experimentation is well known, but its radicality remains rarely understood. As the predestined Calvinists could be sure that they were elected by God for salvation, provided that they were successful in their earthly life, the liberal quest for individual and social happiness is measured by means of the successes of capitalistic enterprises. But it considers these successes as the only source of confirmation of the choice of the actions, which determine the development of the liberal enterprises. The successes of life offered the certainty that Calvinists could be saved if and only if they were able to restrain themselves and to prevent themselves from enjoying immediately the fruits of their enterprises.

In the same way the capitalists have to reinvest their benefits in their enterprises in order to be able to increase their certainty about their own social salvation, because it was the only means which enabled them to feel themselves as disinterested as they were meant to feel. This moral consciousness of the liberal was nonetheless necessarily perverse because it was subordinating the will for happiness and social welfare of their social partners to an arbitrary and egoïstic self-certification of their own personal will for salvation. In the name of the social consensus, they asked their social partners to work in order to be themselves sure that they enjoyed the social happiness that the actions of these workers had brought about. In this way, they enjoyed exclusively their ability of subordinating the welfare of their partners to the satisfaction of their moral consciousness. The maximisation of the experimentation with human desires which takes place to-day in the era of advanced capitalism and throughout the maximisation of the production of goods is still exclusively oriented by this maximisation of their certainty to be saved. As it is well known, impoverishment, unemployment and exclusion of the poor are the prices that must be paid for this increase of capital and they bring about, in the long run, a radical falsification of the liberal way of life.

As Sheldon Wolin wrote in his journal Democracy, the deprivation of civic rights followed necessarily from this impoverishment and the neoliberal disappearance of the Welfare-State Why is this cognitively perverse moral consciousness unable to recognize itself as such? Simply because the social market of the world and the social consensus that is supposed to control it, are invoked as god-like authorities which answers always in a favourable way and cannot commit any error about social truth. They are supposed to incarnate an infallible mutual certification of mutual interests: They are always right because they are mutual. These authorities are protected by an autistic interdiction which forbids us to put their oracles into question, to criticize them, as it was forbidden by the religions of the sovereign gods and by the monotheistic religion to judge and to criticize the truth revealed by their gods. Because revelation came only from God Himself, it was true and required an unconditional faith from their believers. This prohibition constituted a safety mechanism of mutual protection. Because none of the believers could use the divine word, they were not allowed to condemn their fellowmen in God’s name. But this prohibition gave nonetheless an autistic dimension to this religious language-game because it did not allow the only authority that is working in religious communication as well as in the contemporary experimentation of human being to speak: The judgment of truth that we are necessarily building as our own addressees about our utterances as speakers.

We are indeed necessarily building this judgment about the propositions asserted by our social partners as their addressees, but we have to apply it as well, as legislators of our own life and of the life of these partners when we are applying our experimental social consensus. By preventing us from judging this spontaneous and necessary judgment, the revelation of the divine social world market becomes nowadays as autistic as the religious revelation of the past. The answer given by the global neoliberal market seems for us to be as necessary and natural as the answer of the visible world to the scientific experimentation. The contemporary impoverishment of whole countries and groups of workers, the generalised exclusion of the poor, the economic deprivation of civic rights lead therefore to the disappearance of this shared common judgment of human beings that we are striving for and that we have the right to build about our objective social conditions of life. During the 18th century, the discovery of our democratic condition was not only the recognition of the right for everyone to contract relations of property and to sell his work force, it was the recognition of an equal status to all the citizens of this world. First of all, because they were presumed to have the same theoretical and practical human reason. The deprivation of standard conditions of life and of civic rights is scandalous and unacceptable because it steals, from the excluded people, not only the goods that are necessary for them to survive and their right to vote: But, it is, first of all, scandalous because it is a priori depriving them from their reason, from their faculty of judgment which once allowed them to believe that they took part in a common, globalized world of culture.

In this context, we can nevertheless constate the development of a multi-culturalism: It is developing itself as if we could, on behalf of it, respect all the cultures that are cohabitating in all these economical democracies. The cultures seem also to be the incarnations of minorities or of national consensuses, but these consensuses are as inefficacious and blind as the economical consensus. They are used as sanctuaries by all the people that are enslaved by the neoliberal use of consensus, but that are unable to recognise themselves in the lack of social judgment that is characterising the development of advanced liberalism. These cultures are inviting them to respect all the other cultures as if these ones would merit this respect for one and only reason, because they are indeed existing and must be understood and respected as if they were “moral persons”. The economic democracies seem from this point of view developing a cosmopolitical republic of cultures, but these cultures are only giving a kind of retreat to the people that are abandoned by the liberal State. But the effect of this general retreat is quite the contrary: They are developing a war between the cultures that are miming the fight between multinationals in order to let triumph their monopolies. As cultures, they are pretending to be the only ones that could express the truth about human life and afford the happiness that they are looking for. This war is grounded on the transfer of the hegemonical State pretention into the cultural field. Every particularistic culture is pretending to universalize itself as the only valid culture for the whole world.

The globalized submission of everybody to the communitarian judgments is bringing about a primitivisation of these diverse cultures: The identification of their members to their cultural consensus mimes and brings again about the identification of the members of archaic societies to the word of their gods and tries to impose a cosmopolitical inequality between cultures that is directly deriving from their hegemonical pretention to be true. If a nation like to-day American United States is imagining itself as being the only political power that is responsible for the whole contemporary human species, and that it may impose its unrestrained use of the capitalistic will for power, it can also imagining itself that it is itself above all truths and is therefore authorized to let triumph everywhere its own post-truth political judgment about all the mercantile needs of the world.

The most difficult task that we meet in this situation is not to reproduce this same hegemonical dynamics in the effective cosmopolitical dialogue itself. The reason is simple: This war is condemning the communities to fall back into a kind of consensual totemism where anybody extern to this community is wrong only because he is in a different community and because he is therefore sharing another culture. It is in this context that a big and paradigmatic hiatus seems necessarily arousing between the occidental culture, European or American, on one side, and the islamistic culture on the other side. The war between the different cultures is indeed reactivating the fundamentalisms of all the religions.

It is transforming these cultures into singular powers that are proclaiming the universal character of their critical mind and the invalidity of the critical spirit of the other cultures. It is in this way that the diverse cultures are miming the economical globalized pursuit of monopoles and are trying to impose themselves as possessing the universal truth for the human life: they are trying to let disappear the other cultures in the same way by which the liberal enterprises are sweeping away their competitive adversaries and are imposing their economic monopoles [2].This context reinforces the conviction that this war could only be overcome by means of a transcultural dialogue. Motivated by these deadly methods, these cultures are dispensing themselves from exercising any critics at all towards themselves and they are therefore disqualifying themselves as cultures: They are purely and simply following the total experimentation of humankind by means of the adulation of a blind cultural consensus. This consensus seems indeed the only authority that could restore the harmonisation between their state of liberal slaves and their own consciousness of the dignity of their lives. The reason is simple: Its emergency does not depend upon the will of the individuals, but it is imposing itself because it is able to emerge as the authority ruling the “internal nature” of the human life. The communitarian life is therefore transforming itself and brings about completely closed communities that are interdicting all external members to integrate their communities and are promoting strong limited selections towards the people that belong to the Third World.

The States are proud to be able to exercise a control of theses totemistic imperatives and interdictions as moral authorities that are entitled to protect their members whatever the price could be because they are the only institutions that could develop and control the cultural public politics. This cultural experimentation is therefore as blind and deadly as the neoliberal economic experimentation and is unable to overcome the intercultural conflicts that are now overwhelming the social life, inside and outside these States. It is calling in particular everywhere violent reactions against the neoliberal will to let triumph its hegemonic economic culture and these reactions are condensing themselves into a kind of terrorism that desires to be as universal as the social injustice that is occurring everywhere and to which it is opposing itself. It lets revive the medieval ordeals by instrumentalising the life sacrifices of their kamikazes as the only answers that this generalized and globalized injustice is worth receiving. Their expansion is testifying as well the failures of the neoliberal experimentation of humankind by consensus, as the failures of this transcultural dialog as long as this one remains within the limits of the moral respect of the cultures. But this tragical situation does not need to be although it could look like a kind of destiny for the impoverished and excluded people as well as for underdeveloped nation-states that are vassalized by a hegemonic power. It is indeed based on a purely negative conception of freedom and of human rights and this social illness is deriving from a philosophical error: From the belief that human being has to transform oneself directly into a perfectly moral animal of justice which has to master its own desires and interests by means of its moral consciousness.

This total experimentation of mankind which is happening blindly through neo-liberal capitalism does not need to remain blind and to let speak only the voices of the economical and mercantile market. This experimentation is indeed opening also a positive anthropological issue for the human being: Because the anthropology of language is teaching us to-day that the dynamics of the human soul and of the institutions is communicative and that the use of language is involving us as speakers and addressees of ourselves towards our social partners, we have learnt that our thought and our use of language are based upon a verbal and mental pre-harmonisation with our human fellows, with the world and with ourselves, that is altogether affective (love oriented), cognitive, practical and hedonistic: It means that we have learnt too that we are not the enemies of our human fellows and that we have not to protect ourselves against them by means of a system of rights based on a purely negative conception of freedom. The philosophical contemporary anthropo-biology of A. Gehlen, of F. Kainz and of A. Tomatis [3] is teaching us too that this direct appropriation and transformation of ourselves by ourselves that we are trying to achieve by the liberal maximisation of our desires and interests and by a purely negative juridical and legal respect of the interests of the other people is indeed forbidden by the communicative structure of our mind and of our institutions. The transformation that we are intending to achieve by means of this total experimentation of ourselves can only occur indirectly, i.e. by using an objective judgment about ethical and political life, by means of a social and cultural judgment that is as true as our scientific judgment may be.

In order to be as conscious and lucid as it has to be, this experimentation of ourselves needs indeed that we take into account this use of judgment through a positive use and conception of human rights: As a collective and private development of this judgment and of its consequences in public and private life. This use and this conception are already working by means of this experimentation and are expressing themselves because the social illness which is developing through the globalisation is letting them unviolated. But this use and this consciousness need to be recognized as such and to be applied if we want to cure us efficaciously from the will to power which is to-day deregulating the blind experimentation of mankind. In order to be able to open an efficacious therapy in front of this situation, a radical change is needed in our conception of human rights and of a transcultural development, I must stress the following point. This step is constituting a radical challenge for a philosophical theory of human rights and requires from this theory that it will become able to criticize its own most well-rooted prejudices, namely those that inspired the formation of our occidental societies and that limited, from the beginning, their own ways of understanding themselves. This prejudices are expressed throughout the philosophical and moral dualism inherited from Plato and Descartes: This one is conceiving the mind, logos and soul, on one side, as something that has to master the human body, the desires and the interests which this body inspired to the soul, on the other side.

This philosophical programming of a dualistic justice of the soul, by means of the subordination of the body, of the desires and of the interests - up the highest interests of the mind - is a false one and it is based on a false description of the human being. It has generated a false conceptualisation of the juridical systems, of ethics and of politics because it used to repress the necessary individual and collective use of judgment by the will of programming a human being that would have to become a perfect animal of justice, an animal which could regulate perfectly, once for all, its thoughts, actions and speech acts and which would neither have to judge their truth nor objectivity. The injustice, caused by the repression of this judgment of truth and of objectivity in juridical, ethical and political matters became evident throughout our contemporary globalisation of impoverishment. Because this repression is only happening at the level of self-reflexion, in other words, at the conscious level, our actual use of our faculty of judging remains nonetheless unviolated and enables us always already to step outside the blind neo-liberal consensus, which is used in this globalisation as a form of life, by judging this blind consensus as an impossible and a false way of living for any human being. But in order to be able to assume a positive and philosophical use of our judgment individually and collectively, we must, first of all, cure ourselves from our will to become these morally perfect beings that we are forever unable to be and find in the aesthetics of truth the foundation of a transcultural and cosmopolitical life.

Because this cultural scandal is much deeper than a pure deprivation of material goods, it is not enough anymore to ask the multi-national enterprises and the nation-States to redistribute wealth, jobs, health and home, it is above all necessary to secure the redistribution of this use of the faculty of judgment by enabling the people to judge this scandalous injustice as such and to begin bargaining with the dominant groups and persons. The only right answer to this cultural scandal is a philosophical and cultural therapy: It has altogether to let recognize the right to use one’s faculty of judgment in social matters as the human right that is founding every other one and to ensure this use in the international democracy which is building itself throughout this globalisation of social market. In order to do this, one must, first of all, recognize as false the philosophical image of a human being which is still in use through this neoliberal impoverishment. This philosophical image depends upon the dualistic conception of a human being in which reason, mind and morally good will have to master body, desires, passions and interests, ensuring thereby a just harmony in the human soul. The drive towards the liberal experimentation with mankind by means of the consensus and of universal valid contracts forces us to discover that we do not have to believe anymore that the human being is - as body, desires, passions and interests- his own enemy as mind, soul, or good will. This drive toward an experimental blind consensus has forced us to recognize that the origins and the dynamics of thought and human reason were constituted by the use of language as the power of emitting and receiving sounds and of linking them to our experience.

The priority of human judgment toward human condition of life conditions is the possibility of human life and must be respected in the formation of our social conditions of life. Reason and thought are generated by our use of language: This means that our use of language obliges us indeed to see ourselves as our own addressees who have to judge the objectivity of our desires, interests and ethical actions in order to be able to enjoy these experiences, and to recognize them as our objective conditions of life. Because the human being is not a wellformed biological being, but is born one year too early - if it is compared with mammals endowed with a similar complexity -, it has only intraspecific drives (nutritional, sexual and defensive). It needs too to invent its visual perceptions, physical actions and consummatory actions by projecting the harmony between its emitted and received sounds in its relations with the world, with its fellowmen and with itself. It is for this reason that primitive man and human child have

(1) To let speak animistically the world by means of using language as a kind of magical prosopopoie as Vico and W. von Humboldt have remarked that it does, in order to be able to perceive it with their eyes, and

(2) To feel this word of the world as the answer of the world itself, which is invariably as favourable as the voice of their mother.

This harmony is experienced in the use of sounds because of the inability of the child and of primitive man to perceive a difference between their own emitted sounds and their own received sounds. It is the source of our invented link to the sacred in human sensibility, i.e. the source of the sacred prosopopoie revered in all the religions. This harmony offers its own law to the dynamics of imagination, thought and desires in the following way: Every hiatus and disharmony with the world, with one’s human fellows and with oneself must be overcome by projecting a new form of pre-harmonizing oneself with the world, with one’s fellowmen and with oneself. This is done according to the model of the harmonized sound and dialogical model. As we spontaneously harmonize the sounds that we are uttering with the same sounds that we are receiving, we pre-harmonize our perceptions, our actions and our desires as the best favourable ways by means of which the world and our fellow men could answer to us. This dialogical perpetual move is also the core of the mental dynamics of our imagination. The cognitive and logical imaginative pre-harmonization which is initiating and bearing the propositions by means of which we objectivize these perceptions, actions, thoughts, feelings and desires is always the same: we are unable to think a proposition, i.e. to produce it, without thinking that this proposition is true, or, in the terms of C. S. Peirce: “Every proposition affirms its own truth”. We must think our propositions as true in order to be able to objectivize the visual facts that are corresponding to them, our physical actions and our consummatory actions or desires in order to produce the only relation to reality that we can obtain, for example, the visual perception of the visual fact or the realization and the perception of our physical action.

Therefore, all our relations with the world, with other human beings and with ourselves cannot be produced nor completed without judging whether or not these pre-harmonized linguistic relations that are shown in our propositions are showing these objective conditions of life that they are presumed to show in order to be able to come into existence. Our relations with others and with ourselves are therefore necessarily indirect. We cannot judge and transform ourselves without judging the objectivity of our relations to the world, nor without judging the objectivity of the speech or thought experience which ensures these relations and these experiences, i.e. without judging the truth of the propositions expressing knowledges, needs for action or desires. This whole dynamic of the soul is resting itself upon the self-objectification of our speech-acts and is made explicit by this one. It is submitted to the law of truth: In its creative moment of thinking a proposition for oneself as well as in its reflective moment: The act of judging its actual truth by judging the objectivity of the represented experience. As hearers of ourselves, we are necessarily judging the truth that we are saying to ourselves. This law of truth is regulating too our dialogues with other persons. One must take seriously this truth dynamics of the soul, of the thought and of the speech-acts. It means that we cannot accept the description of the speech-acts that the so-called theoreticians of speech-acts like J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice and J. Searle usually give of their magical characteristics.

They define indeed these speech-acts as the only acts that it is sufficient to designate to realize them and to fulfill our intentions. But it means, to the contrary, that all these speech-acts are redescriptible as affirmations in the following way: “I affirm that p is true” means: “p is as true as I say that it true and as the fact described in p exists”. But we can and must re-describe our promises, for example, in the same way if we want to make explicit the dynamics of truth and of objectivity which is internal to them: “I promise that I shall come tomorrow” means indeed: “it is as true that I shall come tomorrow as I say it and, by saying it, I judge that somebody has to come tomorrow and that I am the person who has to come to-morrow”. I don’t contract some obligation by expressing it as a public truth and as a fact, as Searle affirms it, but my utterance registers my recognition of the objective necessity of doing such and such an action as well as the fact that I recognized that I have to do this action by means of the true judgment that I am uttering. This utterance of truth is expressing a common desire of truth about the action that I am designating by my words and it is at the same time fulfilling this desire of truth as an experience that I am bringing about and that my addressee only is able to complete and fulfil by his agreement.

This speech-act creates and registers actually three operations:

(1) The recognition of the objectivity of an action as recognition of the objective desire of doing it,

(2) The true judgment by mean of which the speaker identifies himself as the person who has to do it, and

(3) That it is as true that he will do it, as it is true that he has to say it and to express thereby that he will do what he claims to do.

In this speech-act - if these conditions are fulfilled - the fact that I will come tomorrow is affirmed and recognized philosophically as an ethical action. Declarations, orders, expressions of feelings have to be re-described in a similar way in order to attain the aim of every real dialogue: The consensus of truth that we are needing to live. But the fact that I have to express this speech-act means that I cannot judge the truth of the propositions as a private and solipsist subject: I cannot reach a position which would enable me to judge this truth once and for all from the point of view of God. I desire and need the approval of what I am saying by my social partners and I need their positive and affirmative judgment as the only authority which could confirm or disconfirm the truth of this judgment. Because this common and spontaneous use of our judgment of truth remains unviolated in spite of our errors concerning our magical speech-acts faculty and our will towards a moral competence for mastering ourselves, this use is nevertheless always working although we are not necessarily conscious of this. The reason is simple: As our own addressees of ourselves, we are unable not to do it. This constitutes already the philosophical use of judgment in which we are all already involved and that is constituting the core of anthropobiological therapy for our to-day social life. What we are used to call “philosophy” is only the intellectual discipline, which has to recognize this use of judgment already working in our use of language.

This discipline has to help us to become actually what we already are by giving us the desire and the knowledge that we actually need in order to proceed in dialogues that may produce a human life as happy as we may enjoy our common enjoyment of truths. We have to realize and to fulfill the transcription of our utterances into actions by executing these actions as the objective modes of being that all of us are judging mutually that we are and because this common agreement is giving us the happiness that we have to enjoy in these actions. We have to forget too all the other modes of being. This is the constitutive and universal law of the formation of human being and of the recognition of themselves in their cultures from which it follows that we must share our duties: A law that is recognized as such as common to all of us, as different ways of enjoying in our lifes what we are allowing us to enjoy with our words. Philosophy, understood as a discipline, has not only to describe the conditions of the recognition of ourselves in the use of this judgment by means of showing the biological, psychological, sociological and linguistic facts, which are describing this judgment as the conditio sine qua non of our existence. Philosophy has also to show how we can be consciously obliged to do what we usually only feel forced unconsciously to do: Only the dialogue may fulfil this need of using our philosophical judgment and a philosophical formation of our judgment can and must be given to all of us as the right to be what we, all of us, have to be.

The anthropobiological issue that is here at stake, is that this unconscious and conscious philosophical way of using our judgment of truth in order to be able to live, is the only means that we have at our disposal to get completely harmonized with ourselves, with our world and with our social partners [4]. The linguistically conditioned social aesthetics governed by this desire of harmonization is only governed by this law of truth. The anthropobiological therapy of the unrestrained and mercantile capitalism is therefore already ruling the transcultural and international life. It is therefore worth recognizing it and to apply it, every day and everywhere, in order to enjoy the cosmopolitical and transcultural happiness that we are striving for.

1. S Wolin (2010) “What revolutionary action means today” in Democracy, and Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, New York, 1982 2(4): 19.
2. (2017) See J Poulain Peut-on guérir de la mondialisation ?, Paris, In: Hermann(Edt.,), p. 24-30.
3. (2001) See A Gehlen Der Mensch, Francfort am Main, Athenaüm, 1939 and Urmensch und Spätkultur, Athenaüm, 1957. F. Kainz Psychologie der Sprache, Stuttgart, Tome 1-5, 1960-1975. A. Tomatis L'oreille et le langage, Paris, Seuil, 1991. J. Poulain, De l’homme. Eléments d’anthropobiologie philosophique du langage, Paris, (Ed.)., du Cerf.
4. C Wulf Le (2013) développement humain dans un monde globalisé. Revista Espanola de Pedagogia 71(254): 71-86.