“Setting off from idealism… I hit upon seeking the Idea in the real itself.”
–Karl Marx (1837)

 

Maybe Marxism hasn’t gone wrong. When asked why Christianity hasn’t ‘succeeded,’ Christians offer two responses: (1) It hasn’t really been tried, and (2) Just you wait, sinner. Marxists too have the right to hunker down and wait for the apocalypse.

Still, they have less right than Christians have. Christians, after all, await a divine intervention. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; God’s time is not our time (or, more accurately, our time is God’s time, not ours). Marx’s proudest claim is: I give you the first scientific socialism, not a prophecy but a means of making rationally demonstrable predictions and, more, a means of making those predictions come true. Marx offers not only a social physics but a social engineering, a synthesis of theory and practice. Like any philosophic argument, Marx’s does not reject but invites rational inquiry and criticism. The ‘bourgeois’ regime of commercial republicanism has delivered on most of its promises; it does a fairly effective job of securing the unalienable rights it holds to be self-evidently true. The ‘proletarian’ regime of state socialism ruled by those who claim to be in the vanguard of history has failed to deliver on most of its promises, whenever and wherever it has been tried. Most conspicuously, it has failed to end class struggle.

Why is this so? Perhaps the criticism is merely premature. The worldwide advance of capitalism may not yet have gone far enough. Perhaps a world-state backed by international corporations is the necessary, but still uncompleted, first step toward a genuinely revolutionary circumstance, prefigured by the Great Depression of the 1930s. This possibility notwithstanding, it is surely fair to say that Marx (rather like the Apostles) expected the apocalypse to come much sooner than it has; in Marx’s case, it isn’t enough for the pious apologist to point to the mysterious ways of Providence. A critical reexamination of Marxism turns up problems. To say that they are fatal problems would be to substitute one prediction for another, a move I have learned not to make.

“The modern state is an accommodation between the political and the unpolitical state,” Marx writes. Machiavelli had said this, thinking of Christianity; Rousseau had said this, thinking of the bourgeoisie. Marx too claims that freedom, “the feeling of man’s dignity,” “with Christianity vanished into the blue of heaven,” leaving earthly life open to bourgeois egoism. Marx too wants to ‘de-feminize’ or re-thumotize the world: the Manifesto ends with a conspicuously ‘manly’ and spirited peroration. Unlike the Declaration of Independence’s manly and spirited peroration, the Manifesto predicts victory, relies on no Providence, refuses to moderate its spiritedness. Commercial republicanism doesn’t go far enough; it is a merely formal liberation, “the negation of alienation within alienation,” the final order of liberation within the prevailing order of things. In America, the State is free but men are not; the tyrannical relations of employer and employee remain. Modern natural right is egoistic/individualist, yielding a society based on the inhuman cash nexus. Money is the “alienated essence of man’s labor and life,” a social relation disguised as a thing, a ‘thingification’ of social relations, the externalizing of a social practice, labor, such that the labor looks at his own work as a thing to be sold, a mere means to get money, rather than an authentic life activity. We get money in order to buy ‘goods’ to consume and time in which to lay about: Human means aim at animalistic ends. Hobbes’s state of nature reappears within society itself, a war of all against all pitting men alienated from their own humanness and from their fellows. Godlike, the bourgeoisie has created a world after its own image, moving like a (decidedly unholy) world-spirit, ever-changing, destroying old life-ways in order to create anew. This is the penultimate, deformed but necessary, movement in human history which is the story of the self-creation of human being through labor, including the Machiavellian/Baconian conquest of external nature. Self-creation makes man the free/universal being, the only species that remakes/synthesizes all of nature, bending it to his (collective) will, humanizing it. Freedom is power, “the principle of politics is will.” With international capital comes an international proletariat as disenchanted and dis-enchanting as the bourgeoisie, but more numerous (90% of the population, according to Marx), more productive, and potentially far more powerful than the bourgeoisie. The international proletariat, once fully conscious of its own power of the ways of power, will expropriate the expropriators, establish its own brief dictatorship, abolish private property, and thereby abolish politics as we have known it—that is, politics as the instrument of class domination.

What is wrong with this impressive critique and prediction? Nietzsche predicts, famously, not class war but national war, not economics but politics, because the will to power will endure. Marx might accuse Nietzsche of ‘reification’: “Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented?” Marx fails to see that the real answer is ‘yes.’ The thumotic man remains alive in the modern world, not only as a physical warrior but as a mind-warrior. He is no longer named Achilles or Odysseus; he is named Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche, V. I. Lenin or Adolf Hitler. Marx, Hegel-as-materialist, is deficient precisely in self-knowledge.

The warrior-spirit, the man of dialectical polemic, remains a man-of-war. He will remain (as Nietzsche sees, and Marx does not) a man tending not to stop at freedom and dignity but to run to tyrannical rage, like Achilles dragging the corpse of Hector. To run to tyrannical rage is to ignore or despise the natural right (to say nothing of divine commandments) that sets limits to the exercise of human will or ambition. Marx makes two important criticisms of natural right and natural law: (1) Modern natural right puts the individual before society, but in fact ‘the individual’ develops after society does; (2) modern economists confuse particular social circumstances with ‘natural’ laws of production, smuggling natural law into conventional social relations. Marx sensibly concludes that one must always look at the particulars of social relations within any given society in order to understand and to improve it. Look (as Aristotle did) at who rules, and how they do it, to understand how a society works.

Unfortunately, the excessively spirited man is unlikely to be sufficiently ‘erotic’ or receptive to study concrete circumstances patiently, without giving way to moral indignation or bending what he knows to polemical purposes. In Marx, one sees the most remarkable conflict between eros and thumos, a conflict that, in his disciples, saw the unqualified victory of thumos, precisely because Marx eschews all natural right in his critiques of a particular kind of natural right and a particular misapplication of natural law. This lack of a moderating standard led to as series not of supermen but of super-Robespierres, who told the workers they had nothing to lose and a world to win. Instead of recognizing each social class as a potential faction, as the natural-right commercial republicans did, Marxists treated a particular class as religionists often think of themselves, as the God-bearing (or ‘History’-bearing) class. Whereas religionists teach the God-fearing nation that God’s law is a yoke, that God is the greatest imposer of responsibilities, the Marxists ‘realistically’ speak of power, of ‘laws’ inhering in social relations, of self-made and ’empowering’ laws, not laws untouched by what human beings think or do. So far, this has turned out to be unrealistic and destructive.

“All mythology subdues, controls and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; it disappears when real control is established.” To which Publius replies: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and tin the next place oblige it to control itself.” To oblige anyone to do anything, you need a standard beyond his own will and yours; you will also need institutions so arranged to check him from doing as he or you will if, in a state of libido dominandi or even honest moral indignation, one or both of you inclines to violate that standard. Marxism is deficient on both counts, in theory and practice. It is more thumotic, and less genuinely scientific, than it knows. Even if the Marxian analysis turned out to be right—the progressive, ‘dialectical’ enrichment of the haute bourgeoisie and the proletarianization of everyone else, with the ‘vanguard’ in the lead, poised to strike back—Marxism would remain an inadequate guide to government. Marxism claims that government exists only or mainly as an instrument of class domination, rather than as an  instrument of class domination and a great many other things, which functions would not necessarily disappear if, per impossible, classes one day disappeared

Dewey and Freud wed biology to history, producing doctrines of ‘growth.’ In this they follow Darwin—Freud doing so less directly, more soberly.

Dewey begins The Public and Its Problems with some silly polemics on religion. Claiming that “religious emotions… attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it”—a charge that ignores the impact of, for example, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to name a few—he asserts that there has been no “large idea about the world… independently generated by religion,” overlooking that little matter of creation ex nihilo. One may also pass over the nonsense about static philosophic ideas necessitating political stasis, inasmuch as such ideas might as easily serve as measures of how far one needs to go.

More seriously, Dewey argues that Darwin “conquered the phenomenon of life for the principles of transition,” freeing it from ancient Greek ‘idealism’ and teleology rather as modern astronomers, physicists, and chemists had done in their fields, earlier. This liberation in turn freed the new, empiricist logic “for application to mind and morals and life.” As a matter of fact, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke had done this already, as Dewey acknowledges elsewhere in his vast corpus, but in one sense Dewey’s claim may be defended. Earlier empiricisms, with their crude, atomistic reductionism, fail the plausibility test for most people. Dewey may mean that Darwin was the first empiricist to give a plausible account of biological complexity, and to link this with the contemporary fascination with historical change. Darwin changes biology into natural history, and incidentally enables Dewey to construct a comprehensive historicism does not depend upon Hegel’s Absolute-Spirit/’idealist’ dialectic or upon its Marxist/’materialist’ derivative, centered on socio-economic class struggle. He retains the Hegelian and Marxist claims for a historical teleology (as Darwin does not), but a gentler form than any of his predecessors.

If intelligence can plausibly be made to arise out of things, if things and intelligences reciprocally shape each other, if both divinity and natural teleology are discarded as elaborate tautologies, and if the grander ‘German’ forms of historicist teleology are to be feared as ‘totalizing’ invitations to tyranny (Dewey was an early and honorable critic of Bolshevism), we are left with an empirical historicism of social experimentation, with “verifiable and fruitful” results expected—any day now. Dewey’s neo-Darwinism (a democratic-socialist Darwinism, though emphatically not Social Darwinism) does posit an end of sorts, although it is an endless sort of end: growth. It isn’t clear that Dewey can show what constitutes social ‘growth,’ inasmuch as Dewey’s moral distinction between ‘positive’ social interaction and a life of crime—which may be seen in Experience and Education (New York, 1939, p. 29)—is merely risible, leading to his own indulgence in tautology: “When and only when development in a particular line conduces to continuing growth does it answer to the criterion of education as growing” (ibid., p. 29).

As for Dewey’ social-experimental method, it curiously combines pride and humility. In one paragraph he promises what Machiavelli promises in plotting the mastery of fortune, and what Bacon and Descartes promise in proposing the conquest of nature: a method. In the next paragraph he speaks of humbling philosophy’s pretensions, particularly its supposed claims to answer large and, by Darwinian lights, rationally unanswerable questions. This combination of pride and humility will issue in “responsibility,” Dewey says. As with any social experimentalism, Dewey’s is vulnerable to the critique Madison (that earlier advocate of responsibility in politics) makes of Jefferson’s proposal for constitutional convention cycles—the same critique Aristotle makes of the Greek reformer who offered a prize to anyone who thought of a legal innovation adopted by the city: laws require obedience; obedience requires respect; respect requires stability; legal tinkering breeds a casual attitude toward the laws, injuring respect and inducing lawlessness. Reformism defeats the purpose of the very rule of law the reformer seeks to refine. This is especially true when the reformer denies from the beginning that there is any set end to human life. In the actual course of history—by which any historicism must be judged, if it is to be judged in its own terms—Deweyism has issued in the current American public school system, of whose current ills a Deweyan might say, as Dewey says of American democracy, the cure of the ills of Deweyism is more Deweyism. Or not.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud subtracts the puerilities from progressivism, without denying that progress is possible. Human beings retain a nature, in Freud, and a recalcitrant, ‘discontented,’ cussed thing it is. He too conjures away religion with empiricism—a move that usually presupposes the falsehood of what it wants to disprove—but does not supposed that social science, or even his psychoanalytic techniques, can replace it with complete success, despite his Baconian rhetoric about “subjecting” nature “to the human will.” Freud is a Hobbesian, albeit one who leave room for eros as something more than a power-relation. “The essence of [civilization] lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual [in the state of nature] knew no such restrictions,” but lacked the power to master nature. Freud rejects the Rousseauian and Marxist claim that property causes aggression; assumption of natural human gentleness and of the possibility for a community of sexual partners are chimerical. In entering community life, the individual trades a portion of natural freedom and happiness for security. He will never get those things back in their pure form, without trading back his security.

Productive of association and therefore of civilization, eros exists in a state of tension, sometimes war, with the Ego, which would preserve the body but also contains a contradictory instinct toward destruction. “The evolution of civilization” consists of “the struggle between Eros and Death.” The Super-Ego, consisting of authoritative customs, beliefs, and laws, constitutes the third term that mediates between these natural instincts. When the Super-Ego becomes too powerful, when human beings ‘over-compensate,’ imposing excessive guilt upon their fellows by setting impossibly rigorous standards, the science of psychology can relieve the pressure that induces alienation and increased violence by lowering the individual’s felt need to meet the Super-Ego’s demands, and conducting the psyche toward a more orderly development or growth that will result in happiness. With this, Freud provides a new variation on a characteristic modern theme, as may be seen in Chapter XV of The Prince, and in Bacon’s aphorism on the stars (they give us weak light because they are too high). But Freud must not be understood to usher in an age of sexual license, or indeed of any kind of license. Like any good Hobbesian, he criticizes democracy (“America”) for failing to develop adequate leadership (the book was published during the Hoover Administration), and, while insisting on the need to liberalize public opinion concerning diverse sexual drives, he could hardly be said to tout a society founded upon the ‘polymorphous-perverse.’ This was a task adopted by intellectuals who wanted to combine psychotherapy with Marxism in yet another failed attempt to ruin the bourgeoisie.

Freud’s doctrine stands or falls on his conception of Eros. His psychological framework of Super-Ego, Ego, and Id resembles to some degree the structure of the soul described in Plato’s Republic: logos, thumos, and eros. The differences are important. Freud leaves no well-demarcated natural place for his own scientific enterprise. In Plato, reason causes the philosophic soul’s ascent from the ‘cave’ of conventional opinions, enabling the philosopher to discover natural right. In contrast, Freud rejects the idea of transconventional justice, saying that there is no standard of “normalcy” to appeal to, from one society to another. It is not so much that psychotherapists can only ‘adjust’ individuals to existing social conditions but that Freud cannot account for his own scientific enterprise. If psychoanalysis is an advance in modern science, what is the source of scientific knowledge, and indeed of the capacity to analyze anything, in the human psyche? How does the Super-Ego ‘attach’ to the human mind? Where does the human capacity to reason fit in?

Freud claims not only that individual Egos and Ids can be adjusted to existing Super-Egos, but that Super-Egos and their norms can also be adjusted. Perhaps because he cannot arrive at any standard of conduct that transcends the demarcations between one Super-Ego and another, Freudian psychology provides no basis for addressing the problems of war. This point becomes evident in his 1932 letter to Einstein, in which he can only recommend somehow diverting destructive impulses by getting people to pursue shared interests. His unacknowledged mentor Hobbes has more interesting things to say on the issue of war and peace than that.

In addition to criticizing Freudianism from the standpoint of Platonic-philosophic eros and logos, one might also note that Freud’s misunderstands love as understood in Judaism and Christianity. Freud associates Christian love with eros; to him, Christian charity is only humanitarianism—an attempted, and dubious expansion of affective love to social relations. But, as Anders Nygren had shown around the same time Freud wrote, Christian love is not eros but agape, not affectionate at all but a kind of stern goodwill found not in Greek philosophy but in the Jewish thought from which Christianity derives. Given the Jewish and Christian teaching on shalom or peace—a clear-cut alternative to the Hobbesian and Platonic views—Freud’s misconception is disappointing.

In both Dewey and Freud, developmentalism inadequately answers the question of exactly what constitutes ‘growth.’ Neither solves the typically modern problem of subjectivism. Take the ‘end of history’ away from history (including ‘natural history’) and you begin to see the makings of ‘relativism’ or nihilism.  

 

If the Last Man reads Nietzsche, what then?

Sartre’s Nausea answers this question, and it’s not a pretty picture. The novel’s anti-hero, Roquentin, undertakes a distinctively modern enterprise, a diary, in order “to see clearly” and to “classify” the “small happening” of his life, which changes imperceptibly. (Hence his desk-clerking: observer of endless comings and goings.) He lacks “self-knowledge,” puzzling over the Cartesian question, Have I changed, or have objects changed? He is a man of ressentiment, for whom small, unconscious sentiments build up, resulting in angry seemingly sudden decisions—rather as a political revolution builds up under an accumulation of remembered injuries. This is the way the novel itself proceeds: through foreshadowings of the resolution in the last pages.

This burned-out Cartesian lives alone, speaks to no one. “I receive nothing, I give nothing.” “When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell something: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends.” The classical-philosophic exit is closed; eros doesn’t move him, only sex without passion. He gave up his lover because he and she lacked “the strength to bear the burden” of “implacable, torrid love.” The religious exit is also closed: “I’m neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.” His proposed exit, historiography, is turning out to be another dead end: “Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigor of the order I wish to give them, but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.” Having invented the fact, modern man knows not what to do with it. His self-examination yields only “self-contempt.” The longer he looks at his ugly face in the mirror, the more he sees that “nothing human is left.” Self-examination leads not to self-knowledge but to a feeling: “It seems that I see my own [face] as I feel my body, through a dumb, organic sense.”

Society is no exit, either. People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.” Humanity is sociality, but society too is empty, as seen in the card game he watches. Our time—after the Great War—is a “viscous puddle,” nauseating. (Recall Nietzsche: nausea over man is a great danger. But Roquentin is no Zarathustra.) Politics is a realm of hatred and blood, as seen in the torn campaign posters he passes. The jazz song he hears relieves the nausea for awhile, but leaves him within it; for the moment, art is no exit, either. Only the coldness and unloving purity—the opposite of viscosity—of the Boulevard Noir appeals to him: “To be nothing but coldness.” But in the end “I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.”

So Roquentin begins to define himself against. He is not Gustave Impetraz, the school inspector immortalized in stone, whose “Christian ideals” have themselves become statuesque, unloving dead authority fof the “narrow, small ideas” of the bourgeoisie. The slave-morality Nietzsche excoriated has become an enslaving morality of, by, and for the mediocre. Roquentin is not the Self-Taught Man, who represents something like the exhaustion not of Christianity but of Hegelianism, proceeding dutifully and arbitrarily through the contents of the library, starting at ‘A’ and heading toward ‘Z’—at which point, what then? The prophetic power of the religious and also the Hegelian tradtion end in Roquentin watching an old woman and seeing the future. “What advantage will accrue from its realization?”

Adventure, another attempt to make the bourgeoisie more spirited, has of course been a modern theme from the beginning. It is no exit. Adventure means that your life is a story, with beginning, middle, and end. But your life cannot be a story for you, if you are honest. Everydayness is no adventure, as Heidegger and Lukacs were also saying around this time; everydayness is banal, compromised, altogether bourgeois. It is another form of the Cartesian problem of subject and object: “a man is always a teller of tales,” “but you have to choose: live or tell.” In the grips of the Cartesian problem, Roquentin lacks the strength (or the self-deception?) to seize the Machiavellian/Cartesian solution: resoluteness, spiritedness. “When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes. I knew I was inflating myself with heroism, but I let myself go, it pleased me. After that, the next morning I felt as sick as if I had awakened in a bed full of vomit.”

The Last Man is sick with himself. So he gives Maurice Barrès a spanking. Barrès seduced bourgeois, turn-of-the-century French youth with faux-Nietzschean patriotism and sent them into battle in the Great War, anticipated as a great adventure, there to suffer unheroic deaths. Fighting in the Great War was a practical substitute for reading Nietzsche, a substitute accessible to everyone. The Last Man is a democrat.

The Rights of Man? They are fossilized in the portraits in the Bouville Museum, portraits of haute bourgeois rulers of the town from 1875 to 1910—that is, from the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (particularly the reaction against the Paris Commune) to the futility of the modern ambition: “They had enslaved Nature: without themselves”—with their sanitation projects, their improved roads and civic betterment—”and within themselves”—the deathbed farewell to the wife, “I do not thank you, Thérèse; you have only done your duty.” They are only five-foot-tall men made to look like eminences by artists who sold themselves out. “Farewell, beautiful lilies, elegant in your painted little sanctuaries, goodbye, lovely lilies, our pride and reason for existing, good-bye you bastards.” This is the critique of the ruling bourgeoisie not by Zarathustra but by the Last Man: no spirited overcoming, only resentment.

“There is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing,” Roquentin tells the Self-Taught Man, who yatters about socialist humanism. The Self-Taught Man claims that “All men are my friends,” has no friends, and lusts after adolescent boys. He is not even the Enlightenment figure of the misplaced abstraction Burke criticized, the philosophe who loves humanity and hates people; the Self-Taught Man lacks the strength to hate. In Carlyle’s terms, he can’t even get to the ‘Everlasting No.’ Roquentin can get to the ‘No.’ There is no reason for existing. Self-preservation, the bourgeois principle par excellence, is therefore meaningless. It too is an abstraction from reality, a mere symbol for that which exist. The humanist’s “tender, abstract soul will never let itself be touched by sense of a face”; it fends off nausea with illusions.

La nausée, c’est moi. The viscous, the “soft, monstrous masses all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness (imagery perhaps taken from Malraux’s La Voix royale, its title an ironic use of a Cartesian trope) is what really exists beneath the “veneer” of life. “The world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence”; things or facts have a “passive resistance to explanation and even to sense perception.” Only by feeling this, in “horrible ecstasy” or emptying-out, can Roquentin understand and possess ‘the nausea.’ Only the resolute admission of radical contingency, not the high-modern attempt to dominate it by politics and technology, can a man exit the Cartesian trap. Cartesian resoluteness remains, but redirected to a different branch of technē: writing of songs and stories, realms of purifying imagination. “Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you….” This is prophetic and apocalyptic language, whereby ‘existence’ replaces the Christian Holy Spirit and the Hegelian Absolute Spirit; it also replaces the Nietzschean will to power, which makes beings seem too spirited, too youthful and resolute. “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.” This is Nietzsche for the middle-aged and disillusioned, for the Last Man. he can now meet with his old lover and come to terms with her in his own mind; he can now feel sympathy for the real person that is the Self-Taught Man, and not for his abstract ‘Humanity.” He can now wish to be transformed, not into a statue but into music, a jazz tune, and decides to write a novel—a non-ossifying art-form. In his autobiography, The Words, Sartre criticizes this final move in the novel. “I palmed off on the writer the sacred powers of the hero.” “Like all dreamers, I confused disenchantment with truth.”

Sartre himself never overcame ressentiment. One of his funniest scenes is Roquentin’s imagining of the great Doctor Rémy Parottin, surrounded by acolytes, taking a special interest in the headstrong, rebellious youth, saving the lad’s soul, enlightening him by bringing him to understand “the admirable role of the elite.” Parottin’s cure for rebellion consists of an appeal to vanity. In the last decades of his life, Sartre did nothing to discourage acolytes, and one can easily imagine him taking special interest in the most headstrong, saving/enlightening their souls with pep talks on Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara, an elite of a different sort.