The New Constructivist Communism in Short, Part 3: Is it really a man s world? By Timo Schmitz, Philosopher Human-beings are no animals, though they have an animalic instinct inside, but unlike animals, they are not solely driven by their natural instincts, but humans are the only ones who can decide everything with their mind. This goes to all human-beings, no matter how they identify themselves and all in all roles within human-beings are humanly created. The most outstanding human creation is the gender. In nature, men and women are exactly the same, including that both have a menstrual cycle (though the men s is not bloody for obvious reasons), the only difference among humans is that there are two reproductive forms, one who creates life, and the other one gives life but there is no further difference among them at all and they both have the same capabilities. However, for a long time men and women were segregated seeing them as two completely different kinds of humans, and despite sexual segregation, people were defined by skin colour or beliefs, making human classes which are completely abstruse and absurd. In the 2015 version of the New Constructivist Communism, I adopted the Juche outlook to define human-beings, who according to Juche philosophy, are master of themselves and shape their destiny themselves. The problem here however is that it bans all kind of religion, since there is no space for God, since not God is the highest form of creation for Jucheists, but man (in the sense of humanbeings) is the highest form of creation, and therefore man can decide over everything and shape his destiny and everything depends on him. One cannot flee back to God and make God responsible for everything, as remember Sartre man exists before God, thus God is created by man. This atheistic presumption has the advantage that all men are equal, since gender roles, skin colours and religious backgrounds play no more role, as none of them is God-given and therefore people can shape and reshape their own world. The clear disadvantage is its radical atheism which leaves no space for God s creation and kills the faith in a world which is protect-worthy since humans are just God s trustees. Without God, the world s humanity gets human-less. In my 2017 version of the New Constructivist Communism, I took Hannah Arendt s view in which man consists of three categories: the first one is his animalist instinct to survive (basic needs), the second one is what makes humans be human, and the third one is what a specific human makes him or her
unique (a one and only one). As I pointed out in my article The human nature in the face of God, one can sum up the three categories in short like this: animal laborans = force (which is identified with the body) homo faber = end in itself (things that human-beings do for themselves, but not because they have to; which is identified by materialism) persona agens = the attributes which make a person unique, UNIQUENESS (every individual just exists once; which is identified with action) Based on this human outlook, we can see that every human-being has to act according to his nature which at first are his desires, such as eat, sleep, and sex. After human-beings ensured their basic needs they build houses to feel safe and create things they need. If we compare Juche Idea, man who is master of everything and shapes his destiny has three basic tools: independence, consciousness, and creativity. This does not oppose Hannah Arendt s basic view. People use their creative force to build things they need, and human-beings are independent beings who can act on their own. Unlike instinctdriven animals, human-beings are conscience of their actions. According to Hannah Arendt, it is action what makes man unique. Every man acts in his own way and this way of action is unique to everyone. The advantage of Arendt s approach is that it does not take all room for God away. We still can put a metaphysical concept inside. Let s take the soul for instance. In my New Constructivist Communism, I focus on Plato s view on the soul: the tripartite soul. It consists of the reason (λογιστικόν), the heart or the spirited (θυμοειδές), and the desires or appetites (ἐπιθυμητικόν). The latter two parts are rather bodily, while the first one survives death, and the amount of every λογιστικόν in this world makes up the world soul (ψυχή τοῦ παντός, the soul which encompasses everything, or everything s soul). In Western thought, it is the soul which keeps the body alive and when the soul leaves the body, then a person dies and just the corpse is left. It is often said that in Buddhism people have no souls, they are an-atman (non-soul). However, this is not hundred percent correct. The point here is that Buddhists do not see the soul as own entity and see liveliness as purely physical processes. Especially Chinese Buddhists are not soulnegating, what they negate is just the self-reference of a soul. As such, the soul does not see itself as I or does not give the person a me-ness, which is the reason why the principle of anatman is called wuwo (no-me) in Chinese. Even further, the classical Chinese soul conception that survived till today does rather come close to Plato s thought, however, the soul is not parted, but separated. As such, people have a terrestrial soul and a celestial soul. It is a counterconception to the Daoist idea that everything is part of the one soul, which comes close to the Hindu supersoul and the Platonist world soul, as the Dao is something that encompasses everything. 2
So while I take as a ground that man is responsible to keep care of God s creation and that man has internal soul conflicts between the desires and reason, some people hide behind God s creation and regard reality to be reasonable as such. They developed a belief in a just world. However, every single unjust thing is a threat towards their just world belief and as a result, they say that people who receive injustice must have deserved it. According to their view, if a woman gets raped then it is her fault that she drew a man s attention and fueled his desire. This kind of worldview is very dangerous since it stigmatizes victims and protects the perpetrators. In some conservative countries, these girls are even seen as sluts and get shamed, though they never voluntarily copulated. The belief in a just world is the most terrible belief in this whole word, since it is an eyeclosing arrogance beyond any moral ethics. And here we go back to part one: we said that everybody is free to do what he or she wants and that no one has any right to interfere in one s freedom. This also includes that no one interferes in a person s physical freedom (Part 1: primary ethics, rule 3). In addition, societal harmony has to be ensured, however, everyone shall decide oneself how to act since this shows a person s uniqueness (Part 1: primary ethics, rules 8, 10). The question now is how to define an ethical society. There have been two approaches in history: the cognitivists and the non-cognitivists. The cognitivists believe that there is an objective ethics that every healthy human-being can cognate and follow. However, at first, all kind of feeling is subjective, this also goes to ethics, and thus no one can objectively recognise ethics. Second, a normative ethics based on sentences which tell someone what ought to be or what one ought to do are equally to force. Forcing people to follow ethics is against complete freedom since all people shall have the right to define themselves what is right and what is wrong and act according to it. Non-cognitivists claim that there is no universal ethics and therefore we cannot create any normative ethics. We just can say what we think one should do or not, but we cannot force them to do so. I think this approach is the best one, however, isn t the basic ethics proposed in the New Constructivist Communism just another normative ethics and therefore already cognitivist? This is honestly spoken a difficult question, as they are normative indeed. However, they are so basic and universal that people of all times and all societies followed them. They are like a basic contract to ensure that people have basic rights that they can claim and that their most intimate space is protected. However, unlike cognitivists, everything that goes somewhere further than the basic ethics can only be formulated as advice or wishes, but not as rules that must be kept. In addition, I do not claim that my basic ethics are the whole truth of morality. Even my éthique primaire is just a suggestion. It is the try to find objective normative phrases out of subjective moral constructions. These normative phrases can never be the whole truth, but they can be a good basis. Since everybody can define oneself how liberal one wants to live and people can decide for themselves to stay rather conservative, my New Constructivist Communism is a pluralist and thus humanist thought. The main thing what counts is the community, but that doesn t mean that everybody shall be forced to think and act the same. 3
Anyways, as already mentioned in Part 1, my New Constructivist Communism is not a political idea at all, but shows how the society works. When we choose our friends, we want to be treated well, we kind of demand for primary ethics, a space of tolerance. If someone rejects our individual self, lies at us steadily, betrays our money or trust, and tolerates injustice towards us or the people we love, we would never accept them as our friends, wouldn t we? We probably would even try to avoid these people as much as we can. At the same time, we want to pursuit our dreams and go for the goals we have set. We hate being determined by others, since it takes our uniqueness and nativity away. We all want to be treated as persona and not as human mass ware. At the same time we have human desires, we neither want to starve nor want to suppress our sexual lusts. Our soul struggles always between what is the most rational solution and our deep wishes and desires. The New Constructivist Communism teaches that human-beings shall become aware of their environment and develop a community spirit. This community shall not be defined by gender, race or religion, by in-grouping and out-grouping. We construct all our relations, and in the same way we also construct the images of our relations. If everyone accepts the uniqueness of human-beings something which is often ignored today then people will be valued for who they are. Traditional Communist ideologies used to praise that all men are equal and therefore shall be treated equal and everyone is a comrade but to become a comrade one most adopt the party s line. As a result, everybody is equal in status, position, and thought. However, the New Constructivist Communism clarifies that all societal relations are just constructed and that equality is achieved by accepting people s pluralism and their individualist wishes, but restrict this egoism by using compassion and openness towards others. The idea of Communism is that all people in a specific commune shall be common. We use to communicate with people who have as much in common as we have, and distance ourselves from people whose views we don t like. We group them in cool and uncool, modern and old-fashioned, good girl and bitch, etc. but nothing of that is really true. It is a mind construction, it is our fantasy! Only by getting over these barriers, we can achieve real equality by being human to humans. Many countries call themselves free, but even though laws seem to be liberal, the society represses other members if they do not follow a certain line. Anyways, there are two types of people. First, those whose societal opinion is more important than their self-worth. They are called man-in-society (l être dans la société). For the man in society, receiving benefits is important and being shamed has to be avoided. For the man-in-nature (l être dans la nature) being oneself and following one s wishes is more important than the societal opinion. The society might shame the person now, but through pursuing one s dreams and goals, it will probably be the man-in-nature who laughs about the society one day and people will look up to the man-in-nature for using the chance to develop oneself, while others missed it and made nothing out of their lives. We shall support the man-in-nature, since his creative processes and conscious behavior has a larger 4
contribution to the society than a man-in-society who just follows others and has no own idea, and therefore cannot bring in any valuable input. A common environment is stuck together through diversity but unity, rather than ideological egalitarianism. Instead, practical egalitarianism will be achieved through Communism only on economical questions. When it goes to the human-beings in a state and society, the development of the soul shall be in the foreground rather than ideological dogmatism. If the soul is balanced, people will strive for good, through care and good deeds and in this way, one can gain εὐδαιμονία a successful life. Literature: Arendt, Hannah: Vita activa, München: Piper, 1983 Schmitz, Timo: Individualism between Moral and Virtues, Government and Religion, in: Collected Online Articles in English Language 2013-2016, Berlin: epubli, 2017 Schmitz, Timo: Cognitivism failed!, self-published online article, 20 July 2017, https://schmitztimo.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/cognitivism-failed.pdf (retrieved on 9 November 2017) Schmitz, Timo: The human nature in the face of God, self-published online article, 10 June 2017, https://schmitztimo.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/the-human-nature-in-the-face-ofgod.pdf (retrieved on 9 November 2017) Timo Schmitz. Published on 10 November 2017. http://schmitztimo.wordpress.com Citation: Timo Schmitz: The New Constructivist Communism in Short - Part 3: Is it really a man s world?, self-published online article, 10 November 2017, http://schmitztimo.wordpress.com 5