Georges Sorel: Reflections on Violence. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth translation. New York: Collier Books, 1967. (Originally published in 1908.)

Born in 1840s France, trained as a civil engineer, at first politically liberal, Georges Sorel came to Marxism in the 1890s. Initially, ‘scientific socialism’ appealed to him, but he soon began to question Marx’s historical determinism. He preferred to think of himself as “a self-taught man” who, for two decades, “worked to deliver myself from what I retained of my education,” reading books “not so much to learn as to efface from my memory the ideas which had been thrust upon it.” Accordingly, he found philosophic systems distasteful. “Every time that I have approached a question, I have found that my inquiries ended by giving rise to new problems, and the farther I pushed my investigations the more disquieting these new problems became. But philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists.” “Abysses” suggests Nietzsche, or perhaps Schopenhauer, and sure enough: “Greek philosophy did not produce any great result because it was, as a rule, very optimistic. Socrates was at times optimistic to an almost unbearable degree.” In politics, optimism becomes dangerous, yielding either petty reformism or (as in France) the Terror. (He “does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughtering existing egoists.”) In their greater sobriety, pessimists recognize that “the march towards deliverance” is “conditioned” by “experimental knowledge,” knowledge acquired by encountering obstacles and accompanied by “a profound conviction of our natural weakness.” 

The emphasis on knowledge acquired by experience and on the natural weakness of human beings (human minds not excluded), brings Sorel close to historical relativism. “It may be laid down as a general rule, that in order to understand a doctrine it is not sufficient to study it in an abstract manner, nor even as it occurs in isolated people: it is necessary to find out how it has been manifested in historical groups.” And these groups are perpetually on the move: “the Wandering Jew may be taken as a symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind, condemned as it is to march forever without knowing rest.” There will be no ‘end of history,’ as predicted by the great modern teleologists, Hegel and Marx. The “Wandering Jew” and the rejection of teleology suggests Henri Bergson, whose Creative Evolution had made its sensational appearance the year before. 

At the same time, Sorel denies that natural right exists, as it is, he charged, tautological, amounting to little more than the assertions that what’s just is good, what’s unjust is bad—a more or less Nietzschean critique. Moreover, it is not universal (hence not natural); the same practices may be praised or condemned at different times and in different places. That is, Sorel assumes that the diversity of human conventions disproves the existence of natural right, a characteristic argument of many kinds of relativists. At the same time, he complains, natural right is much too universal, too capacious, as “there is hardly anything, not excepting even war that people have not tried to bring inside the scope of natural right: they compare war to a process by which one nation reclaims a right which a malevolent neighbor refuses to recognize.” Given his esteem for violence, it may seem odd that Sorel finds war repulsive, but he condemns war not for its violence but for its inclination toward statism. The revolutionary movements of the past century, too, have only “ended in reinforcing the power of the state.” Sorel detests the state, along with its contemporary ruling class, the bourgeoisie, because it impedes the freedom of the proletariat. He leaves the moral content of “freedom” unexamined, decrying both “intellectualism” and “moralism.” [1] He is thus a moralist, too, in his own way, ‘relativizing’ only the principles of his opponents—admittedly, a very large group.

He instead endorses a form of irrationalism, borrowed from Henri Bergson, who derived it from Nietzsche. [2] Transferring Bergsonian intuitionism to politics, he celebrates not reasons but “myth,” the belief of the participants in “a great social movement” that “their cause is certain to triumph.” Examples include Christianity, including Catholicism (the Church against Satan), Marxism, and Syndicalism’s “General Strike.” While “the world of today is very much inclined to return to the opinions of the ancients and to subordinate ethics to the smooth ordering of public affairs, which results in a definition of virtue as the golden mean,” Sorel rejects such compromise and does not consider the smooth ordering of public affairs to have any ethical weight, since his moral principle is freedom. Myth is indispensable to free action because “to say that we are acting, implies that we are creating an imaginary world placed ahead of the present world and composed of movements which depend entirely upon us.” “In this way our freedom becomes perfectly intelligible.” But so long “as there are no myths accepted by the masses, one may go on talking of revolts indefinitely, without every provoking any revolutionary movement; this is what gives such importance to the general strike and renders it so odious to socialists who are afraid of a revolution”—socialists like Jean Jaurès, who comes in for repeated bruisings throughout the book. Jaurès headed the reformist, democratic socialist French Section of the Workers’ International, which rejected the Marxist-Leninist regime of proletarian dictatorship. 

Sorel distinguishes a myth from a utopia. A utopia (as seen in Thomas More and Plato) is an intellectual product; it is analyzable, refutable if it can be shown to contradict realizable existing conditions—today, “the necessary conditions of modern production.” A myth, however, “cannot be refuted” because it is “at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement.” The role of the intellect, and of intellectuals, on the contemporary Left should be confined to polemical critique of the enemies of socialism, “attacking middle-class thought in such a way as to put the proletariat on its guard against an invasion of ideas and customs from the hostile class,” as for example the pacifism and parliamentarism espoused by democratic socialists. For his part, Sorel aims to “help ruin the prestige of middle-class culture.” 

For the purpose of advancing freedom, Sorel lauds Syndicalism, the movement of trade unions which set self-organization and self-help against the rule of the modern state, which Syndicalists intended to replace with a civil society organized along federal and entirely economic lines, institutionalized as a set of workers’ cooperatives. The revolutionary means of resisting the state was the general strike. “Revolutionary syndicalism keeps alive in the minds of the masses the desire to strike, and only prospers when important strikes, accompanied by violence, take place.” That is, revolutionary Syndicalism reinforces the myth with action even as the myth inspires the action. It is “a philosophy of modern history,” the “history of contemporary institutions.” Because philosophic rationalism, particularly in the form of grand systematizing as seen in Hegel and Marx, impedes freedom and indeed denies it in the name of historical determinism, the Syndicalist “philosophy” is unsystematic, irrational, particularist. It lauds myth, invulnerable to rational criticism, a myth of violent action, in the name not of reason but of freedom defined implicitly in the democratic impulse to do as one likes or, at very least, to refuse to do as one doesn’t like. 

Sorel therefore does endorse Marxian class warfare, along with Marx’s claim that a man’s morality is largely determined by his socioeconomic position in civil society. “Duty has some meaning in a society in which all the parts are intimately connected and responsible to one another, but if capitalism is inexhaustible”—Marx assumed that production under the capitalist system was limitless, given the technological and organizational power of the modern project to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate—then “joint responsibility is no longer founded on economic realities, and the workers think they would be dupes if they did not demand all they can obtain; they look upon the employer as an adversary with whom one comes to terms after a war.” Thus, “social duty” under modern conditions “no more exists than does international duty” among states, which are in a perpetual condition of real or potential war with one another. How, then, to resist the bourgeoisie and the modern state it controls if not by violence? “The workers have no money,” like the bourgeoisie, “but they have at their disposal a much more efficacious means of action; they can inspire fear.” Indeed, “the most decisive factor in social politics is the cowardice of the Government,” whose members must eventually buckle under the pressure of revolutionary violence by proletarians. Syndicalist leaders “must profit by middle-class cowardice to impose the will of the proletariat.” “A social policy founded on middle-class cowardice, which consists in always surrendering before the threat of violence, cannot fail to engender the idea that the middle class is condemned to death, and that its disappearance is only a matter of time. Thus, every conflict which gives rise to violence becomes a vanguard fight”—vanguard in the Marxist-Leninist sense, the leading edge of historical progress toward freedom. The democratic socialists, “theorists of social peace,” find “these embarrassing facts” too grim to look at; “they are doubtless ashamed to admit their cowardice,” being socialists infected with bourgeois fear of violent death, socialists with the soul of Hobbes, of Locke, of Englishmen, so despised by Nietzsche. “Many Englishmen believe that by humiliating their country they will rouse more sympathy toward themselves; but this supposition is not borne out the facts,” as “these worthy progressives prefer to pay, or even to compromise the future of their country, rather than face the horrors of war.” Indeed, “we might very well wonder whether all the high morality of our great contemporary thinkers,” whether English or Jaurès, “is not founded on degradation of the sentiment of honor.” In this way, Sorel appropriates Nietzsche’s aristocratic principle for democratic egalitarianism—a move that has become characteristic of the Left of our own time. Throughout, Sorel’s rhetorical strategy is to equate domestic class conflict with international conflict and then to appeal to both hard-nosed realism and to realists’ contempt for cowardice in the face of reality to valorize violence deployed in class conflict. 

The “moral theology” of those whom Sorel derides as the “responsible Socialists” is “not one of the least of the buffooneries of our time.” Although Jaurès displays a certain praiseworthy “peasant duplicity” with his insight into the stupidity of the bourgeoisie, “the ideology of a timorous humanitarian middle class professing to have freed its thought from the conditions of existence” has been “grafted on the degeneration of the capitalist system,” whose rulers have shifted from being “bold captains who made the greatness of modern industry” (a nod to Thomas Carlyle) “to make way for an ultra-civilized aristocracy which asks to be allowed to live in peace”—no real aristocracy at all, but a class that “has become almost as stupid as the nobility of the eighteenth century,” the rotten fruit supplanted by the Jacobin Tree of Liberty. Only two things might interfere with such rulers, including such Socialists: “a great foreign war, which might renew lost energies, and which in any case would doubtless bring into power men with the will to govern”; “a great extension of proletarian violence, which would make the revolutionary reality evident to the middle class, and which would disgust them with the humanitarian platitudes with which Jaurès lulls them to sleep.” Worse, these faux-democratic Socialists “stupefy the worker,” too, making him lose his “revolutionary energy.” As long as the bourgeoisie is really capitalistic (bold, energetic, calculating), Marxian predictions of proletarian revolts will be true, but “if, on the contrary, the middle class, led astray by the chatter of the preachers of ethics and sociology, return to an ideal of conservative mediocrity, seek to correct the abuses of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and irrational element  is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.” To succeed, Socialists must sharpen class conflict, not ameliorate the class oppression that sparks it.

The great meliorist Jaurès contradicts himself, “found[ing] his own hopes on the simultaneous ruin of the capitalist and revolutionary spirit.” [3] Even Marx did not foresee “a middle class which seeks to weaken its own strength,” but he was nonetheless correct in understanding that “proletarian violence comes upon the scene just at the moment when the conception of social peace is being held up as a means of moderating disputes; proletarian violence confines employers to their role of producers and tends to restore the separation of the classes, just when they seemed on the point of intermingling in the democratic marsh.” Such violence will not only ensure “the future revolution” but, in so doing, will prove “the only means by which the European nations—at present stupefied by humanitarianism—can recover their former energy.” In this, Sorel regards himself as a writer in the Marxist line, emphasizing what Marx and Lenin would call the synthesis of capitalist practices with socialism—the use of (for example) the capitalist practice of accounting within the future socialist milieu. To overthrow a strong capitalism would be “a very fine and heroic thing”—again, the rhetoric of Nietzsche, with his “planetary aristocracy,” turned to the purposes of egalitarian freedom.

The political caution Sorel despises arose in the aftermath of France’s disastrous war against Prussia in 1870-71. Since then, socialists have attempted to ground reform on rationalism, particularly on ‘scientific’ social experimentation or on Jaurèsian attempts to revive “the most melodramatic images of the old rhetoric” of republicanism, à la Victor Hugo, now laced with reassurances of peaceableness. “In the eyes of the contemporary middle class, everything is admirable which dispels the idea of violence. Our middle-class desire to die in peace—after them, the deluge.” If, regrettably, war should break out, it should be “carried on without hatred and without the spirit of revenge,” they hope. But in real war, Sorel insists, “force is displayed according to its own nature, without ever professing to borrow anything from the judicial proceedings which society sets up against criminals.” He predicts that Syndicalism will abandon these “old superstitions,” making social conflict more like war, while at the same time “refin[ing] the conception of violence,” making it less vengeful and bloody. “We have the right to hope that a Socialist revolution carried out by pure Syndicalists would not be defiled by the abominations which sullied the middle-class revolutions.” 

Why so? Sorel wants Bergsonism to be applied to the theory of the general strike. Although “there is no process by which the future can be predicted scientifically,” as Marx and his demi-bourgeois epigone have imagined, the myth of the general strike, consisting of “a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by socialism against modern society,” can carry the proletariat to victory. That myth also can temper the necessary violence of working men as they struggle against the bourgeoisie. “Strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest, and most moving sentiments that they possess; the general strike groups them all in a coordinated picture, and, by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts, it colors with an intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness. we thus obtain that intuition of Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clarity—and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously,” an example of Bergson’s intuitive “global knowledge.” That is, the general strike, with its clear-cut oppositions, with no compromises, no muddle, and no utopian “programme for the future,” educates workers as it proceeds. Bergson “has claimed for the philosopher the right to proceed in a manner quite opposed to that employed by the scientist” in society, equipped with his “little science” of rationalism and description. Real science “know[s] what forces exist in the world, and then take[s] measures whereby we may utilize them, by reasoning form experience.” The myth of the general strike (and even Marx, insofar as he is a sound guide, has limned a myth, not a scientific prediction) resembles the concept of “a modern physicist [who] has complete confidence in his science, although he knows that the future will look upon it as antiquated.” In this way, Syndicalists possess “the scientific spirit.” That is, Sorel’s “myth” is the rhetorical equivalent of a scientific hypothesis, refutable not by ratiocination but by experience. And the experience of one generation will differ from that of another, as circumstances change. [4]

Syndicalists must take care to engage in the “proletarian general strike,” based on the conflict of socioeconomic classes, not the “general political strike,” a heterogeneous affair in which economic elements are combined with other kinds of factions. The general political strike leads to unrealism, utopianism, as “there are plenty of young barristers, briefless and likely to remain so, who have filled enormous notebooks with their detailed projects for the social organization of the future.” Avoid alliances with such people, demagogues who “believe that the best way is to utilize the power of the State to pester the rich.” The true, proletarian general strike, by contrast, “awakens in the depths of the soul a sentiment of the sublime proportionate to the conditions of a gigantic struggle; it forces the desire to satisfy jealousy by malice into the background; it brings to the fore the pride of free men and thus protects the worker from the quackery of ambitious leaders, hungering for the fleshpots.” Or so Sorel supposes. The proletarian general strike resembles the heroic ancient Greek and French Republican spirit of war, whereas the political general strike resembles the cynical view of war taken by pacifists, which claims that soldiers are mere instruments of ambitious rulers, who use war to increase state power. That is in fact how many wars are conducted, but the proletarians will be exempt from such venality.

Why so? Proletarians use violence; statists use force. Violence is a term “that should be employed only for acts of revolt,” acts aimed at destroying an existing, oppressive order. Force is used by those in power; its object is to impose order, as seen in parliamentary legislation enforced by the gendarmerie. Sorel criticizes Marx for failing to make this distinction. Syndicalism “cannot accept the idea that the historical mission of the proletariat is to imitate the middle class; it cannot conceive that a revolution as vast as that which would abolish capitalism could be attempted for a trifling and doubtful result, for a change of masters.” Syndicalism “endeavors to separate what disfigures the work of Marx”—particularly the ‘proletarian dictatorship’ of ‘state socialism’—from “what will immortalize his name.” Sorel effectively claims that Syndicalism can obviate the need, claimed by Marx and Lenin, for an intermediate stage of ‘History’ between capitalism and communism; Syndicalists can bring society straight to communalism without statist coercion of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a preliminary.

How will this measured, consciousness-raising violence be achieved? “It may be questioned whether there is not a little stupidity in the admiration of our contemporaries for gentle methods.” Sorel quotes the French social economist Paul de Rousiers who, in his 1890 book, La Vie américaine, describing the actions of vigilantes in the American West, wrote that “the American who happens to be honest has one excellent habit—he does not allow himself to be crushed on the pretext that he is virtuous.” That is what proletarian general strikers will be: vigilantes claiming freedom from injustice. “There is no danger of civilization succumbing under the consequences of a development of brutality, since the idea of the general strike may foster the notion of the class war by means of incidents which would appear to middle-class historians as of small importance,” even as the small number of Christian martyrs inspired a vast change in the spirit of mankind. The myth will moderate the psyches, and therefore the actions, of the strikers. At the same time, Sorel makes the Machiavellian argument against Christianity itself; its morality is too lofty. A lofty morality can be realized in a state of real, not spiritual, war, a war limited not by respect for ‘international law,’ which is ineffective, but by the nobility-engendering myth. “The proletariat has none of the servile instincts of democracy,” with its compromises and “scandalous corruption.” The best proletarians are “Homeric,” embodiments of myth as much as Achilles and Hector. (In this, Sorel follows Nietzsche’s invocations of Homer against such rationalists as Plato and Aristotle.) Like the heroes of the Bronze Age, the workers embody their own standards. “The free producer in a progressive and inventive workshop must never evaluate his own efforts by any external standard; he ought to consider the models given him as inferior, and desire to surpass everything that has been done before.” Being democrats rather than aristocrats, these paragons will have no concern for fame, however.

Democratic nobility is as democratic nobility does: “It is to violence that Socialism owes those high ethical values by means of which it brings salvation to the modern world.” For “it was war that provided the republics of antiquity with the ideas which form the ornaments of our modern culture,” and “war, carried on in broad daylight, without hypocritical attenuation, for the purpose of ruining an irreconcilable enemy, excludes all the abominations which dishonored the middle-class revolution of the eighteenth century.” And the “social war” of the general strike, “by making an appeal to honor which develops so naturally in all organized armies, can eliminate” the “evil feelings” of jealousy and envy “against which morality would remain powerless,” inasmuch as “in undertaking a serious formidable, and sublime work, Socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world.” Eventually, this generation of Socialists will pass away, but “what will remain of the present Socialist movement will be the epic of the strikes.” [5]

One might suggest, then, that Sorel begins his book as a pessimist but ends it with eyes glistening with optimism. The 1919 edition confirms the suggestion, with Sorel appending a paean “In Defense of Lenin,” whom he describes as “the greatest theoretician that Socialism has had since Marx and the head of state whose genius recalls that of Peter the Great,” the most prominent of the czars who propounded Enlightenment principles. “The ideology of the new form of the proletarian state will never perish,” Sorel predicts. “If we are grateful to the Roman soldiers for having replaced abortive, strayed, or impotent civilizations by a civilization whose pupils we are still in law, literature, and monuments, how grateful will not the future have to be to the Russian soldiers of socialism!”

Well, not much. But the optimist presses on: “How lightly for the historians will weigh the criticisms of the rhetoricians charged by democracy with denouncing the excesses of the Bolsheviks.” Less lightly than you suppose, Monsieur Sorel. “New Carthages must not triumph over what is now the Rome of the proletariat.” But they did, anyway. “Cursed be the plutocratic democracies which are starving Russia!” Still more cursed, then, the Russian tyrants who murdered tens of millions of Russians?

A generation later, a young American writer, Janet Flanner, began her expatriate life in Paris. Decades after that, looking back on her life there in the 1920s, she recalled, “Up until the 1930s I mostly lunched in my rue Jacob restaurant in the company of some minor Surrealists, Surrealism having become the lates Paris intellectual revolutionary aesthetic movement such as Paris always foments when the cerebral sap of the Gallic mind runs in two opposite directions at once, at the destruction of a present society and the other at setting up a utopian on which no one can agree.” [6]

Notes

1. For a discussion of the “philosophy of freedom” see “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.’ (Although hardly a philosopher, as an ideologist Sorel borrows heavily from philosophers, and so I have placed this review, also under that category.) Here, again, Sorel borrows from Bergson, this time from his critique of mechanistic causation and his notion of la durée. Bergson argues against mechanistic theories of causation in favor of free will. As stated in his first important book, Time and Free Will, intensity should not be confused with extensity. Feeling some things intensely, the human mind overlooks the gradual accumulation of forces, the duration, that predates (for example) the pain we are feeling. This leads us to mechanistic theories of causation, the substitution of spatial concepts (mechanisms, things that take up space) for the Heraclitean flow of events in time. (In his later essay on laughter, Bergson explains comedy as the intrusion of mechanical behavior upon free-flowing life, with its élan vital. His young contemporary, Charlie Chaplin, would come to exemplify this understanding of comedy. But there isn’t much laughter in Sorel.)
2. “Life transcends intellect,” Bergson writes in Creative Evolution because life consists of la durée and intellect can only limp after duration with its need for the fixed ideas that make the principle of non-contradiction possible. If all is flux, as in Heraclitus-Nietzsche-Bergson, then life cannot be captured by logical analysis, a practice that follows from our having put “artificial abstractions” into our heads instead of “concrete phenomena.” This does not commit Bergson to mere capriciousness, however, as “to behave according to caprice” entails “no real maturing of an internal state, no real evolution,” whereas genuine evolution, true freedom, sees a life that “ripens gradually.” Even biological evolution sees “species pass[ing] through alternate periods of stability and transformation.” Duration, “the living mobility of things” (An Introduction to Metaphysics [1903]), is thus “constitutive” or creative as well as noetic.
3. Jaurès (1859-1914) rejected Marxian internationalism for a (decidedly non-Hitlerite) national socialism; “Socialism implies France; it implies the Republic” (Louis Lévy, ed.: Anthologie de Jean Jaurès. London: Éditions Penguin, 1947, p. 39.) More offensive to Sorel is his refusal to partake in hatred of the bourgeoisie, remarking that the bourgeoisie “is not an impenetrable bloc” (p. 110); he connects Socialism with the tradition of the French Revolution (pp. 117-119), an extension of the Rights of Man to all classes, in practice. (Ironically, Jaurès uses quotes from The Communist Manifesto to fortify his position.) He does show some affinities to Sorel and to notions fashionable in Europe at the time: vitalism (Socialism “is a great force of life” (p. 125); and a decided optimism respecting the character of the workers (“this egoism of the proletariat”—i.e., their ardent pursuit of self-interest—is “an impersonal egoism” (p. 180). But in all he is much too ‘bourgeois’ for either Marx or Sorel.
4. As Bergson contends in his 1896 book, Matter and Memory, both objectivism/realism and subjectivism/modern idealism assume that “to perceive is above all to know,” but the human body, including its brain, orient themselves toward action, not knowledge; while “the past is essentially that which acts no longer,” the present is “that which is acting,” a “system of nascent acts which plunges roots deep into the real.” Reality is neither constructed, as in subjectivism, nor reconstructed, as in realism, but “touched, penetrated, lived” a matter of intuition which dissolves the dichotomy of subjectivism and objectivism. “None of our mathematical symbols can express the fact that it is the moving body which is in motion rather than the axes or the points to which it is referred.” That is, the geometry of the calculus can deceive us; “geometry and logic are strictly applicable to matter; in it they are at home, and in it they can proceed quite lone,” but outside this domain, pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an altogether different thing.” It is realism (seen in the systems of Hegel and Marx) which claims that matter “evolves in such a manner that we can pass from one moment to the next by a mathematical [logical, scientific] induction.” Not so for Bergson, and more or less not so for Sorel. For Bergson, intuition is “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible” (An Introduction to Metaphysics); for tough-minded Sorel, revolutionary experience takes the places of that. Both reject historical determinism. Both contend that theoretical reasoning cannot, as Bergson puts it, “comprehend life,” of which reasoning is merely a part, and both contend that intuition (Bergson) or experience (Sorel) is “disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its subject and of enlarging it indefinitely” (Creative Evolution).
5. There is a suggestion of something along these lines in Creative Evolution: “In a general way, in the evolution of life, just as in the evolution of human societies and of individual destinies, the greatest successes have been for those who have accepted the heaviest risks.” He tempers this, however, insisting that “the duty of the statesman is to follow [the evolution of society] and to modify the institutions while there is still time: out of ten political errors, nine consist simply in believing that what has ceased to be true is still true,” but he tenth, which might be the most serious, will be no longer to believe true what nevertheless is still true.” Sorel prefers to miss that last point.
6. Janet Flanner: Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939. Irving Drutman, editor. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

Laurence Lampert: Strauss, Plato, Nietzsche. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024. 

Lecture 5: “Nietzsche Becomes Nietzsche.”

Lecture 6: “Nietzsche’s Philosophic Poetry.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, Lampert writes, “My Nietzsche lectures reflect my debt to Nietzsche and my alignment with Nietzsche, and the way that both Strauss and Plato further that alignment.”

Like Plato and Plato’s Socrates, Nietzsche “laid claim to an ontology, an understanding of the being of beings,” and crafted an exoteric philosophic poetry. Nietzsche became Nietzsche, the philosopher Nietzsche as it were, in consultation with eight previous philosophers: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. “Whatever I decide,” he wrote at the end of Human, All Too Human, “think through for myself and others, upon these eight I fix my eyes and find theirs fixed on me.” Lampert cautions that Nietzsche “does not mean that he takes his thinking from them”; his thinking “through” them, before coming to his own philosophic decisions, for “Nietzsche’s thinking is wholly his own.” Nietzsche (and Lampert) count themselves among those rare thinkers “who want to know exactly how they differ from everyone else in their thinking: they ‘go down’ to examine others and they ‘go inside’ to know themselves”—that is, “they do what Socrates did.” For example, the philosopher does “not feel the standard effects of tragedy, which are pity and fear” and, while understanding that “tragedy remains tragedy,” that life itself remains tragic, tragedy strikes the soul of the philosopher differently than it does in the souls of others, causing a different sound in him.

As to the philosopher’s public response to the tragic character of life, Nietzsche judges that modern men need a new teaching, a new philosophic poetry. This teaching “will not lie about suffering by inventing or endorsing some comedy of a purpose to existence that gives suffering meaning,” as Plato did. “The philosophic tradition of exoteric noble lying comes to a self-conscious end with Nietzsche,” even or perhaps because “the eyes of his underworld judges,” his eight philosophic companions remained fixed upon him. 

The first step of Nietzsche’s “turn to the philosophic life” occurred in 1876, and consisted of freeing his mind from conventional opinions, including opinions that had become conventions by the art of philosophers. Five years later, in the fourth chapter of The Gay Science, he took the next step, which consisted no longer so much of a critique of human culture, the history of philosophy, and modern science as an effort to show “what the free mind can come to know,” what it can bind itself to, rightly. In his 1881 notebook, and indeed in his earlier book, Daybreak, he had rejected the moral claim that egoistic actions are bad, altruistic actions good. Rather, he claimed that “all human actions, including moral actions, are based on drives or passions that are in principle egoistic or self-serving.” Love (for example) amounts to “a passion to possess and to possess all of the desired object”; this suggests that the agapic love of the Christians and the erotic love of the pagans are at root identical. But all drives are not equal, as “the highest of the drives is the passion for knowledge,” the passion that Nietzsche “recognized as his own most powerful passion,” the most intellectual one. Further, “within the individual soul the drives exist in a constant war with one another for supremacy, or for rule.” As in Plato, what holds for the individual soul holds for “the actions of all things”; psychology (at its best, self-knowledge) “expands” to biology (to “all aliveness”) and to physics, since “the same common property is the ultimate explanation of what is at work” in everything. This common property is the will to power. The will to power encompasses not only the desire to have but the desire to overcome; in Socratic-Platonic terms it is both appetitive and thumotic or spirited—rational, too, but only at the highest level, in some human souls. “What is ultimately at work in all things is force that always exists within a field of forces.” Nietzsche calls this force the will to power “because what it is is its need to discharge the excess of force against resistance which is itself force.”

Nietzsche compares the will to power to sea-waves. “The waves are an image for what we are.” But how so? What is the “secret” that we share with the waves? Nietzsche highlights two words he did not publish: Habsüchtigen, German for “possession addicts,” and Wissensgierigen, those who are “greedy to know.” The waves are “greedy” for the shore; if sufficiently powerful, they devour it, overcome it, causing a new shoreline to appear. This is the waves’ “way of being.” Even knowing is a kind of overcoming, an overcoming of ignorance, “the highest or supreme drive of the human way of being.” “The two words name the drive of all beings and of the highest being.” 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche publishes his discovery of the will to power and adds his second discovery, the eternal return. In introducing a new instance of philosophic poetry, Nietzsche “knew that he faced the founder’s abstract problem of introducing novelty into a culture that had already incorporated a different view,” a different poem. By “incorporating” Nietzsche means “taking in” to the corpus, the body. He extends the scope of the word to include geistig, which means “spiritual and intellectual.” “To be a mature human being is always already to be formed or stamped by the inescapable processes of incorporation that have made us,” body and soul. Nietzsche’s first step in the philosophic life, freeing his mind from conventional opinions, was precisely the arduous act of freeing himself from “the necessary errors of cultural incorporation”—necessary because they culture is for all those who live within its sway, most of whom are not philosophers, and none of whom begins as a philosopher. These errors “can be changed because they have all been taught, and it is possible to teach different ideals and values.” The eternal return consists of thinking a new moral principle, one that “says to the world now known: that’s what I want, I want that world, the world as it is, and I want it again, and I want it all an infinite number of times again exactly as it is—because I want my life just as it is again.” The eternal return reorients human desire, redirecting it from resentment of the evils of this world, its ineluctable tragedy, and longing for a different world, whether the Bible’s Heaven, Plato’s City in Speech, or any of the moderns’ utopias, toward the most intense “Yes to life”—to life as it is. The steadfast, impassioned longing for life, which is at its core the will to power, provides a moral/poetic, exoteric doctrine that will affirm the philosopher’s more fundamental discovery and the way of life that enabled him to discover it. The exoteric, poetic account thus may be said to register the esoteric, philosophic insight, protect the philosopher and his insight from censorious eyes by fitting non-philosophers with opinions that are not the same as, but do not contradict, the insight.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche shows the transition that he wants the free spirits, the contemporary atheists to make when he has his prophet sing “The Dance Song,” “abandon[ing] his skeptical ‘Wild Wisdom,'” his belief that “life or being is unfathomable,” for the conviction that life is indeed fathomable as will to power. Having learned this, Zarathustra calls upon the free spirits to join him, armed with the exoteric doctrine of the eternal return, to build “the house yet to be built,” the one that will “house future human beings, or be incorporated into future human beings.” The will to power is the insight for the few, “those with the most powerful passion to know”; the eternal return is the teaching for all. Will to power is philosophy, eternal return philosophic poetry. 

Both doctrines “assert the sovereignty of becoming,” not timeless Ideas or the eternal God. “Both assert that there is direction “in ever-self-renewing activity“—that the will to power is not random or aimless. And both assert that the “discharging of energy or force” of each individual, each particular part of nature, encounters similar discharges of energy from all other parts, which strive to overcome one another in the “total field of such relations,” which is “all that is.” This means that the striving to overcome honest human souls, requires self-overcoming, a grinding-off of weaknesses.

Whereas “Plato’s language of eros is attractive and affirmative,” Nietzsche’s “language of will to power is less attractive,” harsher because he would overcome Platonic-Christian “word-tinsel,” which has by now covered over the reality of the world, softening human souls, rotting them with sentimentality. Lampert says that this difference obscures “the fundamental kinship of understanding shared by Plato and Nietszche,” since “genuine philosophers are genuine kin.” At this, the end of Lampert’s first lecture on Nietzsche, an auditor might think of Platonic dialectic—driven by love, a passion for truth but hardly soft or sentimental—as this possible underlying understanding.

Lampert then turns, however, not to Nietzsche’s philosophy but to his philosophic poetry as the basis of this kinship. “Genuine philosophy generates philosophic poetry, a teaching that can be lived.” Plato and Nietzsche, genuine philosophers, each generated philosophic poetry is intended to enable human beings to live under the circumstances of the times and places in which those philosophers lived. In Nietzsche’s time, the “free mind” had arrived at “epistemological skepticism,” the Kantian skepticism concerning the conviction “that anything can really be known.” Nietzsche charges that the “hidden motive” behind that skepticism is moralism, Voltaire’s “seek[ing] the true only to do the good” or perhaps, to stay with Kant, to live by the “categorical imperative.” But this assumes that “the true and the good must coincide,” an assumption that “curbs” those philosophers’ “search for the true, making skepticism about knowledge an appealing fallback position protecting their view of the good,” which now consists, in their mind, with equal rights and the end of suffering. You may not know the true, but “you can keep on believing in the good, the modern good”; “skepticism gives permission to place morality above knowing.”

Free minds should become skeptical about their skepticism, re-open the quest for the true. Modern men do in fact claim to have some knowledge of the true, however tentative; this is the truth gained by the scientific method, which begins with hypothesis, tests the hypothesis with experiment, then arrives at a provisional conclusion, the proviso being that further experimentation may disprove the conclusion. Nietzsche challenges free minds with his own hypothesis, namely, that mechanistic physics (Newton, Descartes) are “effects of will.” That is, the “mechanics of cause and effect” upheld by modern physics may exist within an overall field of force. To test his hypothesis, he further challenges free minds to an act of Cartesian introspection, a sure Cartesian method will not offend the modern free minds, supplemented by close observation of other persons and things, again a method that modern science endorses. Can the “instinctual life” of human beings, be explained, first, “as different forms of Habsuch, the addiction for having?” Can this addiction or drive then explain all life forms, or “organic functions”? If, then, the will to power does indeed explain the whole realm of living things, “then” [Nietzsche writes] one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power.” The investigator will find that the hypothesis of the will to power offers him the most comprehensive explanation of all living phenomena. Without undertaking these experiments of introspection and observation, free mind will remain unfree, stuck in modern moralism. If they do undertake these experiments, they will recognize that “their good of perpetual peace at the end of history in a paradise of equality of rights and the end of suffering is neither attainable nor true.”

This will leave them directionless, and therefore incapable of directing the permanently unfree minds of ‘the many.’ They will become nihilists, free minds who think “that nothing is truly of worth.” But such a “world-denying” mindset only reprises the world-denying mindset of Plato and of Christianity; it is the last vestige of moralism. Nietzsche counters (to use the language of Christian morality) that what you thought of as God is evil, anti-life, and what you thought of as the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of this world, symbolizes the divine, the life-force, the will to power that animates everyone and everything. Nietzsche “makes his free-minded atheist friends ask, What is a god?” More, why speak in Biblical terms, “in the popular way,” at all? Aren’t you free thinkers, free minds? As Lampert puts it, Nietzsche “stays with religion while suggesting that, no, his philosophic view does not refute God but vindicates God, properly understood”—God understood as will to power. A religion based upon a doctrine consistent with the will to power is necessary because “religions are good for, necessary for, any social order,” incorporating into the young “guidance to what is good and bad, noble and base, what is worth living for and what is necessary to reject.” “The problem is not gods as such, the problem is the god of revelation,” the eternal changeless ‘Platonic’ God of the Bible. The doctrine consistent with the will to power Nietzsche offers is the eternal return, a “transvaluation of values,” the values of the older morality. In so offering, Nietzsche “is not driven by a need for a new morality or a new religion.” As a philosopher, he is driven by “the need to understand,” not the drives of the moralist or the prophet. But the comprehensive affirmation of ‘this world’ by human beings “makes the philosopher possible, because the world generated a spectator who is rational, self-conscious, knowing fragment of the knowable whole.”

To replace Jesus, the God of the Bible, Nietzsche recommends Dionysus, the “tempter-god,” the “philosophizing god” of antiquity, and his mate, Ariadne, “the god of femaleness or womanliness,” who “does not philosophize” because “in some more fundamental sense she already knows,” possessing “the thread that leads out of the mystery at the heart of the labyrinth,” and being the one who actually gives birth. Dionysus and Ariadne are “the universal gods of earthly reproduction given local or Greek names.” This mated pair generate life, “belong[ing] together in their difference” as both “the war between the sexes and the love between the sexes.” If Dionysus is the tempter-god, he resembles Satan more than Adam; it is as if Eve rejected that dull fellow the God of the Bible matched her with and preferred the bad boy (as women are sometimes known to do). 

So, you freethinking atheists, see “the necessity of religion,” a necessity that your Voltaire completely misses, and which his epigoni tried to meet with their inane ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’; instead of that niaiserie, see “the universal naturalness of Dionysus and Ariadne as gods of life,” then build your religious institutions for ‘the many’ upon them. One way to do that, Lampert argues, is to embrace what’s now called ‘ecology.’ “Nietzsche is the first Western philosopher to teach a comprehensive ecological philosophy; his is a comprehensive moral and political teaching based fundamentally on love of the earth.” As we now notice, an ethics of ecology ‘goes down’ more easily into modern throats, digests better in their stomachs, and can be incorporated readily into their bodies and minds. Ecology also teaches something of the limits that of the modern scientific project, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, a conquest for which modern science can set no limits. Modern science’s inability to set limits for its own activity threatens the nature it seeks to understand in order to ‘conquer’ or manipulate. Leo Strauss “warns against the conquest of nature as the conquest of human nature through the modern ideals of equality of rights and the end of suffering,” and (Nietzsche would add) the unreality of both those ideals. Nietzsche sees that “modern conquest of nature would mean the end of philosophy on earth, because philosophy depends upon the recognition and encouragement of an order of rank and the continuation of suffering properly understood, understood as the human struggle to attain the high, most especially knowledge; that known suffering from a lack can be remedied only through sacrificial struggle—subordination of every drive to the drive for knowledge.” The “ministerial” character of Nietzsche’s philosophic poetry “assigns limits to the modern conquest of nature out of the love of nature, a love expressed in the highest ideal that the whole of nature return just as it is an infinite number of times.”

The Cartesian-introspective dimension of the Nietzschean challenges works through a characteristic feature of modern philosophy, individualism, while “mov[ing] out beyond the exclusiveness of egoism and out beyond the feeling of altruism and to broader fields beyond the I and the other.” Only this can bring “progress in morality by aligning it with the true,” being a “better reorganization of the drives,” one that “fosters stronger and more noble specimens of the human species,” more alive, and therefore more consistent with all of nature. Human beings strive; they have drives. “Drives always strive for something.” “Incorporation” or enculturation “train[s] us to strive in this direction and not that direction.” Nietzsche’s “new process of incorporation” aims to “redirect striving in order to foster the new I-feeling, leading to the new feeling for the you and for the all.” It redirects us away from mere possessiveness (British-all-too-British), away from the prestige found in commanding others (will-to-power in the vulgar sense), toward (in Nietzsche’s words) “Letting us be possessed by the things (not by persons) and by the largest possible range of true things,” “to let the true things be the things they are” in us, “in their continuous becoming and decaying, in their natural order of rank, and in all the other facets of their naturalness.” The conquest of nature can be limited by nature, if human beings incorporate as much of it as they can into themselves—ultimately, possessed neither by God or Satan and his demons. If possessed by things, not persons, Nietzsche writes, “we become farmland for the things”—fertile, generative, fulfilling the Biblical God’s command to be fruitful not by obeying a command ‘from above’ but by integrating nature, the ‘ecosystem’ into ourselves. From this fertility, human beings, by nature “the making beings,” will forge the “images of existence” of philosophic poetry, “within which human beings will dwell on the earth.” “Philosophers rule by legislating the images”—Nietzsche’s version of one activity of Plato’s philosopher-kings, but evidently intended without the irony Plato deploys. In Nietzsche’s judgment, it was Christianity that overlooked the irony of Platonism, attempting to enforce otherworldliness. Continuing to block any return of Platonic irony while sweeping a weakened Christian civilization aside, Nietzsche rejects any image of “eternal fixity” or of monotheism or of Christian virtues or of the virtues of secularized Christianity. In their place he puts change, the cyclical change of the eternal return and a “transvaluation” of Platonic, Christian, and ‘christian’-Kantian virtues. 

Thus, Nietzsche’s “story ends in the human love of the earth as it naturally is and a love of the human as it naturally is, or as it can be, beyond the rule of images of existence that teach unnatural ideals wreaking vengeance on life as it is. His whole story ends in ecology, in knowledge of the interconnectedness of life on earth that generates the human imperative to be true to the earth.” Lampert happily predicts that “seeing” Nietzsche as “the founding thinker of an already popular movement that appeals to late modern people,” the ecology movement that “is bound to get stronger as the evidence becomes ever more undeniable that environmental disasters are caused by human-initiated climate change” will be good for politics and good for philosophy.

Leaving aside the claim that humans have initiated climate change and considering Lampert’s more important observations, it is noteworthy that he has replaced the will to power, with which Nietzsche replaced both Platonic and Christian love, with love—this time, love of the world, love of the earth. Nietzsche’s ‘realism’ has been softened. Why? It might be that, looking back on the catastrophic political consequences of the will to power, which was not so nearly esoteric a doctrine as he has said it is, Lampert considers it judicious to push it into the background more thoroughly than Nietzsche did. A doctrine that was so easily discerned, and so readily vulgarized, by the German military officers in the run-up to the First World War, by Benito Mussolini, and by throngs of warrior-spirits, Right and Left—a supposedly esoteric doctrine that has achieved far more ‘popularity’ than its intended exoteric cover, the eternal return—bespeaks a massive failure of philosophic poetry. Nor does the ‘ecological’ interpretation or application of the doctrine impress; yes, ecology sets limits on the conquest of nature, but in reality, Nietzsche’s predicted ruling class, his “global aristocracy” (unmentioned by Lampert), which would run the ecological show will never be aristocratic in any Nietzschean sense. It will be administrative, bureaucratic, which is to say dull and graceless. Not very Nietzschean.

More generally, Lampert’s approach to philosophy—that political philosophy is ‘politic,’ only, a form of poetry, that political regimes may teach citizens ‘out of’ philosophic discoveries but have nothing to teach philosophers—may be questioned. If human beings are political animals, political in their nature, then political life does not simply impede philosophic noēsis. It provides a window, if a far from transparent window, through which  a philosopher might approach the truth.