Of tomes,triads and tectonics

When I first received John Levi Martin’s The Good, the True, and the Beautiful: The Rise and Fall of an Architectonic of Action (GTB for short), I was astonished at its monumentality. First, its sheer size. This fat brick of a book weighs in at around 5 pounds (I checked). On at least two occasions a crowd swarmed (incurably shy) me in public as I read, marveling at the strange object. Naturally, they asked whether it was the Bible. Thus, I came to resent the book, save for everything between its two covers. Physically it is a tome, yet to leap from ‘what a tome!’ to ‘better used as doorstop or makeshift ladder than reading material’ would be a terrible mistake. If Martin’s book has the look and feel of a tome, it does not read like one. It is not slow and plodding, but active and vibrant. Innumerable side quests! But the main storyline is the draw, and in GTB, Martin provides a genealogy of something we might be surprised to learn is even available to it, or available to any history for that matter: the theory of action (or ‘grammar of action’, folk psychology maybe even). GTB is a ‘genealogical diagnosis of how we got where we are, when the “we” is theorists of action in the human/social sciences’ (GTB, xii). As I will argue, perhaps Martin has every justification in GTB to make that ‘we’ much more inclusive.

The story that Martin tells is not of a restricted field of production, and the exceedingly small fraction of people who might engage seriously with the theory of action today are not as marginal as they might seem, particularly if they are smart enough to, in their best moments, become ‘architectonic’. Much is at stake in theories of action – like executive power (steamrolling ahead, to places unknown, in the United States at present writing) for starters. Why? Because ‘executive power’ is premised on a division of the faculties. And so what are the ‘faculties’? Well, Martin has another question for you first: How would you divide the ‘human soul’? What capacities would you, dear reader, give us, the suffering sentient creature? Odds are you will follow a strict script (e.g. work within a structure) in your answer, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about Martin’s exhaustive research is just how many times he documents the phrase ‘the good, the true and the beautiful’ by writers distant in time and space, across barriers of language and culture, unknown to each other. Another common triad: ‘We think, we will and we feel’. In Martin’s genealogy, these are human potences identified for 2000 years, in part because of their alignment with the triad of excellences. But are we missing something? Is there more?

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1983 [1972])) wrote these lines to begin their Anti-Oedipus: ‘It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks’ (p. 8). The ‘it’ here is us, a ‘desiring-machine’. Martin mentions the early nineteenth-century writings of Christoph Wieland, author of the first Bildungsroman, and his similar scatological proposal of our propensity to ‘belch, fart, and piss’. What are these? Are they faculties? Are they human faculties? Ants fart and shit. Some even fuck. But do they ‘think’ and ‘feel’? Books are dedicated to the question, though it might not be the right one to ask.

According to Martin, it is the human soul that is at stake in ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ – they are part of a ‘grammar of action’. When we say, ‘He crossed the road because he thought he saw a good sandwich shop’ or ‘He felt like crossing the road, and so he did’, both explanations contain a ‘grammar’ that is architectonic (more than linguistic) and also human. Any good anti-anthropomorphist will remind us that to apply the grammar of action to an ant is simply human hubris. Embedded in their advice, however, is an unstated distinction between what is human and what is exclusively human. Where does the Venn diagram among species lose its overlap and the human stand out? What faculties (thinking, feeling, willing) are exclusively human? How are they connected? Are they more serial (one prior to the others) or parallel (working at the same time)? Is there a hierarchy between them? Conflict perhaps?

For Martin,

the mark of a great thinker . . . is in the details . . . [G]reat thinkers are not the source of great thoughts. Rather, they are the source of fine thoughts . . . so fine that they slip through the fingers of even the most dedicated followers. (GTB, 37)

‘Greatness . . . comes not from solving problems, but from grappling with momentous contradictions, going right to those places where the ideational tectonic plates pull apart or crash into each other’ (p. 37). What occurs across the arc of great thinkers – some familiar (Aristotle, Aquinas, Rousseau) some less so (Tetens, Sulzer, Cousin) – who appear from the time of the ancient Greeks to German idealism is the

consolidation of [a] trifunctional grammar that mapped onto (1) a division of the faculties, (2) a division of the structure of the polity, (3) a division between sciences, and (4) a division of the most important excellences to which the human could strive: truth, goodness and beauty. (p. 40)

Kant’s three Critiques of the 1780s and 90s – Pure Reason (thinking/truth) to Practical Reason (willing/goodness) and Judgment (feeling/beauty) – stand as exemplars of architectonic thinking in this regard, a grand attempt to map the human soul and document the faculties, to explain potences with such perspicacity that these many iterations might finally be understood. Kant plays a starring role in Martin’s genealogy. To explain an action requires you do a whole lot more, a point which Kant was maybe the first to grasp. You divide the faculties, impose a division on the polity and the sciences, and more generally take a stand on what is excellent. But in Martin’s genealogy, things have (more or less) gone downhill, or at least remained in stasis, since Kant, as what Kant singles out as ‘reflective judgment’ – or thinking about thinking, a reflexive check on our application of general concepts to particular cases or individuals – is seldom seen among subsequent thinkers. Hence, a problem bedevils them, even the greatest among them: in the course of explaining those human events known as actions, how to connect ‘knowledge to will’?

Suppose a well-meaning sociologist ‘has knowledge that small-business persons tend to overrate the importance of sexual propriety’ (GTB, 631). Being a good public servant the sociologist informs their local small-business person of this fact. The small-business person does not dispute the finding; what he disputes is the determination found therein. What if he really does believe in the importance of sexual propriety? Still, the sociologist persists, ‘even when [this] layperson does not introspectively find confirmation that this determination is extraneous to his true will’ (p. 631). Does the small-business person really will his belief? What creates his belief if not our knowledge? For Martin, the de facto response to this tangled mess can be summarized as follows: it does not matter if the small-business person says he really does believe in sexual propriety, for it is not him (particularly) who believes but his small-business person-ness (or the like). Subtle indeed! But far from irrelevant, as it is on these points that Martin concludes a discussion of Durkheim and Weber and their lasting impact on sociology as more or less turning, and stumbling, on exactly these issues.

Durkheim and Weber track the birth of social facts and the birth of values, respectively, as the birth of sociology, constituting its domain and speciality, the very need for it. But there is a problem in these projects. While both were diligent Kantians, Durkheim and Weber seem to have forgotten Kant’s critique of judgment. Their sociologies had little choice, then, but to link knowledge and will using their own (unjustifiable) cognitive authority. Hence, Durkheim’s sociologist comes across as an annoying know-it-all, while Weber’s is a humorless advocate of fate. What odd concoctions! They make action heteronomous despite the persons acting telling the sociologists that, no, I am the first mover in what I do, think, and feel! Loggerheads! Other fields typically pursue knowledge or will. Sociologists, however, must reconcile them if they want to improve on folk accounts, or perhaps even secure a raison d’etre. We sociologists can know patterns, but all we have is a trail left behind, breadcrumbs on the road. How are the patterns an order of action?

Martin makes reading recommendations on these grounds, and if followed, they would make Kant’s Critique of Judgment a bestseller. But the step must be so radical, and the genealogy so necessary, just in order to see that a direction has been given to the human sciences, especially sociology, so successfully that we in the present did not even know the point decided was ever debatable, and that our pursuits had any history at all. Though, as is Martin’s gamut, if recovered, that history can reveal ‘paths not taken’ that we might now take as we recover from amnesia.

Martin begins his story with Plato and Aristotle. As keenly observed in a visual (GTB, 47), Plato’s architectonic, his division of the soul, is an ordering of Athenian classes – quite literally a territorialization of them. From the Parthenon on high to the agora at mid-range and modest dwellings on down, we will find different kinds of people, embodiments of different faculties, differently valued. So too in Aristotle, for whom the ‘body’ and its ‘instinct’ cannot be disassociated from enslavement. We do not have to dig deep to find these connections. Plato and Aristotle did not mince words, nor see the need to. In later writers, things become more complicated as the layers accumulate, requiring that we analogize, find transpositions. With Kant’s efforts, the grammar shifts to emphasize the intellect in the ‘creation of meaning out of sense data’. As a faculty, the intellect begins to ‘pull away’ by the early nineteenth century. By the time we get to Talcott Parsons in the middle of the 20th, action is tied to ‘reasons’, which is the only way to ensure that it is also tied to values. Contemporaries of Parsons, like Horkheimer, make a similar discrimination using ‘objective reason’ as their barometer.

All of these are iterations of cognitive authority – the capacity to wield a standard against others that tells them what they would (and should) be like, what faculties they should have, and if they are not like that, a basis to claim they have no autonomy at all and are incapable of action. Digging into the marrow here yields several questions. What does that standard (values, objective reason, imagination) signify? Does it imply ‘will’? Determination? But a determination of what? That which is determinable of course – but what is that? Perhaps Kant is so novel because he makes it clear that human being (whatever it is) can be determined by faculties (Foucault called this ‘subjectivation’). But how does that determination work? Presumably it implies a relation in time – what is determinable (human being) precedes what determines it (thinking activity). If the determinable is not a faculty, then when it becomes a faculty, is that when ‘human being’ finally occurs?

Only two thinkers mentioned in Martin’s account appear to glimpse these finer points – Charles Sanders Peirce and Friedrich Nietzsche – which led both of them toward semiotics (or semiology). For Peirce, the determinable is simply referred to as ‘chance’ or firstness – ‘percipuum’ to us – though a semiotic habit will tame most of what is unexpected. It can’t tame it all, however, as chance still forces itself upon us routinely. A sign cannot remain a sign without some (unpredictable) independence of its object. Beyond this, as Martin notes, Peirce presents an architectonic completely devoid of will. For Nietzsche (2006 [1887]), it can seem that will is all, but consider his claim that ‘[e]very purpose and use is just a sign . . . the whole history of a “thing”, an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations’ (p. 51). In Nietzsche’s own telling, Kant’s championing of the limits of reason is the distinguishing effect of ascetic priests in a force field with nobles. Is there a relevant difference between what the faculties are and who can have faculties and why?

In Martin’s reading, faculties are reiterated in class structure. For Nietzsche, faculties are class struggle, as for every faculty there corresponds a ‘mode of existence of those who judge and evaluate’. Ascetic priests who create ‘action’ do so by splitting force in two, first as cause and then effect. Faculties like memory and even consciousness are called into being, but this is class struggle, a check on ‘what is noble’ and noble faculties like forgetfulness. Symbolic space is already social space, and for his part Nietzsche prefers the socio-symbolic space of the Old Testament relative to the New Testament because in the former’s ‘heroic landscape’, there is no action, and no responsibility, no bad conscience.

Nietzsche’s (1999 [1872]) Birth of Tragedy finds Socrates attempting a mastery of being – which for him took the form of the random Athenians he would pounce upon and prove incoherent in their understanding of ‘justice’ and ‘beauty’ – with a ‘theoretical attitude’ (p. 82). This is the script upon which Plato charted the reassertion of his own elite status through cognitive authority. Martin uses ‘philosophy’ and ‘theory’ interchangeably in GTB. For Nietzsche, they are distinguishable. Both are ascetic, but philosophers (presumably, like Nietzsche himself) are active (creative) rather than reactive (as theorists, like Socrates, are). When ‘everyone becomes a philosopher’ during what Martin calls ‘constitutional moments’, faculties directly transpose into governance; we can see ‘more explicit connections of narrowly philosophical thought with broader understandings’ (GTB, xi). Martin therefore reads Kant alongside the US Constitution (1791), Weber alongside the Weimar Constitution (1919) and Habermas alongside the EU Constitution (1993). But perhaps it is not the philosopher as legislator that comes into play during constitutional moments as much as the philosopher as world-maker. But how, then, can we ever recommend a faculty without being fueled by ressentiment or trying (and inevitably failing) to turn chance into habit?

For its part, a judgment can be met with pleasure or pain, satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The ‘community’, as Kant understood, was key. But is judgment a faculty or does it express a relation between the faculties? Reflective judgment implies the possibility of that harmony (GTB, 639). If a doctor is diagnosing a patient, the judgment in question would not be reflective should the doctor simply use a known concept (the flu) and apply it to an individual case. A machine could do this just as well if not better. As, however, more particularity is added to the diagnosis, the judgment becomes more reflective, not to mention democratic. The order that appears would be accepted as inherent in the phenomena (this individual with these symptoms). Concepts would be involved, but only in ways satisfactory to intuition. Cognitive authority would be relinquished, however, and with it, that greatest of prizes: control of autonomy, in creating belief, in being capable of action, and principally an answer to the question: who is autonomous and how?

But who’s to say who is autonomous? In GTB, the answer given over 2000 years goes something like this: ‘they would be if only they . . .’ with various thinkers filling in the blank with stuff like ‘had slaves’, ‘had reason’, ‘were not duped by the culture industry’. The meaning of faculties is what they do within the force field, however, and it is hard to distinguish a faculty from a mark of class distinction. As Martin appreciates, an alternative can be found in the admittedly conservative tradition of thinkers like Heidegger, Gadamer and Michael Oakeshott: thinkers who, in one way or another, are skeptical of reason and which, as in the case of someone like Edmund Burke, can make them seem strangely tolerant of difference. These are thinkers who demonstrate a concern with what is known as practice, which in Martin’s view is among the few conceptual frameworks that demonstrates serious concern with reflective judgment (as evident in the work of someone like Pierre Bourdieu). Thus, in a way, what Martin provides is a narration of how being both intellectual and claiming authority is a real association but not a necessary one. It is possible to still be intellectual without cognitive authority. But does it require that we join the conservative tradition? Is a left practice theory possible? ¹

The tendency to assert cognitive authority in lieu of reflective judgment is latent across nearly all the thinkers Martin deals with, and perhaps GTB demonstrates its true brilliance when Martin reveals this substitution underneath layers upon layers of theoretical abstraction. Habermas’ theory of communicative action, for instance, has every intention to dissolve cognitive authority, especially that of the metaphysics-wielding philosopher. Yet, Habermas cannot avoid the trouble: he always seems to find a way of telling people what they would be saying when they talk, if they only had access to the kind of speech that is music to his ears – and his ears alone. Who or what is the mirror of Habermas? That can be found in the governance structure of the European Union, and its tendency to create administrative law (lots of it!) with no input by representation let alone a public sphere.

If Martin ends his narrative with Habermas, then the recent, and likely last, work by the German philosopher is arguably the closest analogue to what Martin attempts in GTB. In his three-volume Also a History of Philosophy, Habermas (2023) provides a ‘genealogy of post-metaphysical thinking’, covering much the same terrain, and including many of the same thinkers, as Martin. If Martin puts stock in reflective judgment, Habermas also finds his leverage point in Kant as ‘rational freedom’. But where Martin starts his tale with the emergence of architectonic thinking, Habermas does so with the emergence of philosophy itself. What is more, there is no real implication of ‘learning’ in Martin’s account as there is in Habermas’s. For him, post-metaphysical thinking is the result of a lot of trial and error. There is a direction to Habermas’s genealogy of irreversible change. For Martin, this is not the case; though not exactly because Martin’s adoption of structuralism from Levi-Strauss forbids history (making it ‘cold’). Essentially no one gets it right, in his view, except for Kant (briefly) and Hannah Arendt, though she died (with literally the title page in her typewriter) before she could pursue the third and final volume her Life of the Mind on ‘Judging’ (after ‘Thinking’ and ‘Willing’). But maybe there is a form of judgment that Martin does not notice in a great thinker he claims to lack it.

In his famous essay on ‘Western Marxism’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that a key concept from Weber finds its way into the writing of Gyorgy Lukacs, and in turn to Critical Theory, but it is not only or even primarily rationalization. It is ‘objective possibility’. This concept becomes so important to Lukacs’ reformulation of Marxism that Merleau-Ponty mentions an equivalent phrase for the movement, though which did not catch on: namely, ‘Weberian Marxism’. As Merleau-Ponty (1973) elaborates,

Class consciousness in the proletariat is not a state of mind, nor is it knowledge. It is not, however, a theoretician’s conception because it is a praxis; that is to say, it is less than a subject and more than an object; it is a polarized existence, a possibility which appears in the proletarians’s situation at the juncture of things and his life. In short – Lukacs here uses Weber’s term – it is an ‘objective possibility’. Precisely because this difficult notion was new, it was poorly understood. (p. 47)

Objective possibility is as poorly understood today as it was in the 1950s when Merleau-Ponty wrote these lines (despite Merleau-Ponty’s own heterodox probabilism in Phenomenology of Perception. The confusion is due, in part, to a mistranslation and misunderstanding of Weber’s probability theory, particularly how he uses the polyglot word Chance. For Weber, Chance is an ontological term not an epistemic one, which makes his arguments more or less impossible to reconcile with contemporary understandings of probability that hinge on frequency. Chance, it would appear, does require judgment, however, specifically a judgment of objective possibility. And at least judging by an essay Weber published in 1913 that serves as a prelude to Economy and Society, he does seem to find judgment mediating between actors and Chance, yielding expectation.

Strikingly, Martin seems to move toward a similar heterodox probabilism with a tantalizing suggestion about midway through GTB. Here he remarks upon a distinction ‘between expectations that we feel entitled to expect, and expectations that, if foiled, we chalk up to ignorance or bad luck’ (GTB, 572). In this part of his book, Martin cites Weber’s 1913 essay, arguing that while Weber granted an empirical validity to the same distinction, he ‘later eliminated this nod to validity’, which presumably is a reason why Martin finds Weber ultimately trapped in cognitive authoritarianism. But revisiting Weber’s claims on these points might be worthwhile, particularly with a new translation of Economy and Society by Keith Tribe that demonstrates, in Tribe’s (2019: 65) words, Weber’s ‘relentless use of Chance’. If, in Weber’s view, people appear to ‘follow regular patterns of a probabilistic sequence’ (GTB, 574), perhaps they do so more or less as Martin recommends.

GTB is neither a history of ideas nor an intellectual history. For that matter, it is not a sociology of ideas. Instead, it is one of the most thorough-going reflexive engagements with human science ever attempted. It is in the same peer category (as Martin himself appreciates) as Foucault’s The Order of Things. It is a genealogy, specifically a critical one, seeking not to affirm but to liberate us from a history. Perhaps, Martin’s efforts here extend farther than he imagines.

The critique he levies at Habermas is kindred to Alvin Gouldner’s (1979) ‘new class’, which Martin provides a perspicacious discussion of toward the end of GTB. Attention on this class has been rejuvenated in recent years alongside the truly dismal showing of the US Democratic Party and center-left parties all over the world. In a sense, what GTB provides is a genesis and structure of how ‘reason’ becomes appropriable, able to be lent to government and science, and even folk psychology. Much, then, is at stake when a great thinker changes (‘rotates’) the configuration of the human soul. It is within a social space that this occurs, then, which produces tools and signs that can be picked up and put to work.

Gouldner’s (1965) story of the new class starts in the same place Martin starts – ancient Greece – and Gouldner and Martin both understand themselves to be documenting an intellectualism that, since its beginning, blurs its boundary with authority and is hard to distinguish from a mark of distinction. To read GTB in alignment with Gouldner’s argument, however, offers a different spin on Gouldner’s conclusions and moves beyond the limitations of others who’ve since analyzed the same class (as professional-managerial ‘virtue hoarders’ [Liu, 2021] or ‘woke’ symbolic capitalists (al-Gharbi, 2024)). ‘Reason’ is, more or less, what this group now monopolistically claims (e.g. those ‘In this house we believe . . .’ signs that appeared in wealthy American suburbia during the plague years may count as indirect evidence), lording it over unreasonable others on every front. If Gouldner finds himself amid ‘the new class’ without an escape hatch, Martin not only charts the space that makes them possible but also shows the rules of its game and how to play it, not to mention how to play it differently. The new class (among whom would include, very likely, you dear reader) would be well-advised to pick GTB up, then, in all of its weight, and learn how we might attempt a reformation before it is too late.