Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1983)

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn’t get you anywhere. (p. 177)

Seinfeld‘s George Costanza once had an epiphany. He recognized that his life was the exact opposite of what it should be; every single decision of his life had been wrong. Seinfeld convinces him that “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” Humor ensues as the ill-fated George suddenly profits from his new, inverted approach to life.

Botched, bungled, vulgar, vile, sinister, sickening, disgusting, disgraceful. Negation: the theme of Journey to the End of the Night. In the modernism of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, we necessarily reject life by affirming it, which means we paradoxically affirm life only by its reversal. Our narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu, journeys through the trenches of WWI, the jungles of French colonial Africa, the streets of New York City, the factories of Detroit, and, in Paris as a medical doctor, the halls of science, medicine, and psychiatry. The point of all this?

“What with being chucked out of everywhere, you’re sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that’s why they’re so dead set against going to the end of the night.” (p. 189)

Seekers of nihilism will not find nothing here (yes, you read that correctly); Céline had a fearless hunger for reality. Not that Céline delivered a doctrine; every possible answer to life struck him as bizarre. Rather, he uncompromisingly assessed the human comedy in all its contingency.

In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that’s absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like. (p. 247-8)

I. Ferdinand Bardamu’s Bogus Journey

Bad guys lose, good guys win. A hero animated with a vision initiating and sustaining a journey over all sorts of obstacles. Yes, the odyssey. A well-worn plot structure, it classically offers many devices affirming life without sacrificing narrative propulsion: electrifying escapes from setbacks, temptations, monsters, annihilation. Often, our pilgrim gains insight into his quest via the spiritual world by climbing down into an underworld of death. Upon his return home, the transformed protagonist overcomes a series of frustrations, perhaps putting himself in a position to prove haters wrong by passing a set of ordeals. Life is worth the trouble. Duh, winning!

Unlike a traditional odyssey — The Aeneid, Le Morte d’Arthur, Lord of the Rings — Bardamu’s adventure begins with no great summoning; he joins the military merely on a whim. He continuously escapes the monsters of contemporary life, not through courage and heroism, but through explicitly acknowledged cowardice. His journey includes no party, no companion, no close friend, except Léon Robinson, a hopelessly corrupt acquaintance Bardamu absurdly and accidentally meets at every step. Bardamu must resist temptations of credulity: happiness, status, citizenship, respectability, science. As a contrast, giving into temptation simpliciter signifies sanity.

To counter the abomination of being poor, why deny it, we are in duty bound to try everything, to get drunk on anything we can, cheap wine, masturbation, movies. No sense in being difficult, “particular” as they say in America. Year in year out, we may as well admit, our concierges in France provide anyone who knows how to take it and coddle it close to his heart with a free-gratis supply of all-purpose hatred, enough to blow up the world. In New York, they’re cruelly lacking in this vital spice, so sordid and irrefutably alive, without which the spirit is stifled, condemned to vague slanders and pallid bumbled calumnies. Without a concierge you get nothing that stings, wounds, lacerates, torments, obsesses, and adds without fail to the world’s stock of hatred, illuminating it with thousands of undeniable details. (p. 182-3)

Journey is many things, but it is not cynical. Contemporary cynicism doubts displays of integrity on the assumption that everyone necessarily acts from their perceived rational self-interest. Cynics demand more rationality in life: we’re not acting as rationally as we can, either from faulty reasoning, false premises, incomplete information, et cetera. A cynic doubting the merits of higher education may explain that greedy professors financially exploit naive students with hopes for careers that simply do not exist. As a contrast, someone who finds absurdity in rationality itself would have a completely different complaint. Consider Céline’s take on professionalized science.

Grey-haired, umbrella-carrying schoolboys, stupefied by the pedantic routine and intensely revolting experiments, riveted by starvation wages for their whole adult lives to these little microbe kitchens, there to spend interminable days warming up mixtures of vegetable scrapings, asphyxiated guinea pigs, and other nondescript garbage.

They themselves, when all’s said and done, were nothing but monstrous old rodents in overcoats. Glory, in our time, smiles only on the rich, men of science or not. All those plebeians of Research had to keep them going was their fear of losing their niches in this heated, illustrious, and compartmented garbage pail. What meant most to them was the title of official scientist, thanks to which the pharmacists of the city still trusted them more or less to analyze, for the most niggardly pay incidentally, their customers’ urine and sputum. The slimy wages of science. (p. 240)

The prestige of science is a completely modernist phenomenon, not in the sense of systematic learning, but the broad vision that we can in principle achieve a purely detached, objective, neutral way of approaching the world. Céline found the entire business of science grotesque — the mania for unimportant detail, the incomprehensible material sitting in unread academic journals, the status jockeying, etc. Not coincidentally, Bardamu’s experiences with ordinary people differ little from his experiences with the insane.

Because I was always kind to the inmates, which was my nature, I lived on the dangerous rim of madness, on the brink, so to speak. I didn’t go under, but I felt in constant danger, as if they had lured me by stealth into their unknown city. A city whose streets became softer and softer as you penetrated further between its slobbery houses, with their melting, ill-closed windows and their dubious sounds. The doors and the ground are unstable, shifting… And yet something makes you want to go further, to see if you’ll have the strength to retrieve your reason from the wreckage. Reason can easily become an obsession, as good humor and sleep are for neurasthenics. All you can think of is your reason. Everything’s out of kilter. It’s no joke. (p. 367-8)

This modernist atmosphere breathes irrationality into rationality, bean counting that misses the inarticulate aspects of experience. Theologians once employed philosophers as their henchmen; in modernity, the professors became autonomous, spending their efforts working for “the religion of the flag.” Progressives designed modern society as a giant classroom, spreading literacy, responsibility, so everyone can march in step as mass-produced heroes, always looking busy at all costs. Be happy or else! Céline concluded that the do-gooder rabble-rousing started by men of learning directly led to the Great War’s absurdity. After all, if we think about utilitarianism from the strictly rational perspective of squaring means with ends, we should be able to maximize the average happiness of a population by murdering unhappy people, telling ourselves pleasant falsehoods, and mobilizing every dimension of life with economic improvement.

The lies that were being told surpassed the imagination, far exceeded the limits of the absurd and the preposterous — in the newspapers, on posters, on foot, on horseback, on pleasure boats. Everyone was doing it. In competition, to see who could lie the most outrageously. Soon there wasn’t a bit of truth in the city.

The little that had been left in 1914, people were ashamed of now. Everything you touched was phony, the sugar, the aeroplanes, the shoes, the jam, the photographs… Everything you read, swallowed, sucked, admired, proclaimed, refuted, defended was made up of hate-ridden myths and grinning masquerades, phony to the hilt. The mania for telling lies and believing them is as contagious as the itch. Little Lola’s French consisted of only a few phrases, but there were all patriotic: “On les aura!…,” “Madelon, viens!…” It was enough to make you cry. (p. 44-5)

Everything is going great. We’re passionate about what we do. Going forward, always improving, better and better, a can-do attitude, a positive outlook. Céline found the essence of vulgarity in mindless enthusiasm, the rah-rah fan-like attitudes humans readily catch from others. Experiencing the receiving end of marketing, advertising, propaganda, was an ineliminable feature of the modernist experience. Refusing to childishly embrace calculated promises, Céline had a humanist interest in the human condition. Nihilism? One doesn’t need a book for that, just a smiling salesman.

If we lived long enough, we wouldn’t know where to go to start a new happiness. We’d have strewn aborted happinesses all over, the whole earth would stink of them, unbreathably. The ones in the museums, the real abortions, turn some people’s stomachs, the mere sight of the things makes them want to vomit. And our loathsome attempts to be happy are miscarried enough to sicken you long before you die for real. (p. 328)

II. A Maze of Modernity

Bardamu had a fundamentally aesthetic grudge against reality. A quest for grace, never perfection. Any idealistic striving — for truth, for goodness, for beauty — looked no different than a clinically diagnosed “conviction mania.” It isn’t as if Bardamu had to slay a Minotaur before he could escape his Labyrinth. Rather, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth fused into one; reality was both Minotaur and Labyrinth.

Maybe those vast accretions of matter, those commercial honeycombs, those endless figments of brick and steel didn’t affect the habitués the way they did me. To them perhaps that suspended deluge meant security, while to me it was simply an abominable system of constraints, of corridors, locks and wickets, a vast, inexplicable architectural crime. (p. 177)

This dissonant world simultaneously united and divided man with his rationalized, mechanized environment. A floor of a factory.

Everything trembled in the enormous building, and we ourselves, from our ears to the soles of our feet, were gathered into this trembling, which came from the windows, the floor, and all the clanking metal, tremors that shook the whole building from top to bottom. We ourselves became machines, our flesh trembled in the furious din, it gripped us around our heads and in our bowels and rose up to the eyes in quick continuous jolts. The further we went, the more of our companions we lost. In leaving them we gave them bright little smiles, as if all this were just lovely. (p. 193-4)

Such an atmosphere left nothing stable as a remainder, only impressions and intuitions. Even love refused to gain traction; nothing solid persists.

When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth—how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It’s not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, its sticking together that’s difficult. Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state — that’s the unconscionable torture.

Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick, or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but ‘us,’ the jerks of infinity. We’d burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us by our pride. (p. 291)

Every odyssey’s protagonist must draw a balance between how he imposes himself on his environment and how he adapts to the world’s demands; Bardamu, no different, must walk a narrow path. But Bardamu has no insight into the intelligible order of the real. He isn’t left with relativism, as if it is arbitrary where the above balance is established. Rather, the very attempt to impose rationality on life itself leads one into darkness as its own brand of insanity. If so, wisdom consists in narrowing our horizons.

Now and then the lunatics would stand at the few dining hall windows that opened out on the street and terrify the neighborhood with their bellowing, but mostly they kept their horror to themselves. They took good care of their horror, defending it against our therapeutic efforts. That resistance of theirs was the spice of their lives.

When I think now of all the lunatics I knew at Baryton’s, I can’t help suspecting that the only true manifestations of our innermost being are war and insanity, those two absolute nightmares.

Maybe what makes life so terribly fatiguing is nothing other than the enormous effort we make for twenty years, forty years, and more, to be reasonable, to avoid being simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, vile, ghastly, absurd. It’s the nightmare of having to represent that halt subhuman we were fobbed off with as a small-size universal ideal, a superman from morning to night. (p. 359)

III. Notable Quotes

Can you take a joke? If life is a joke, then we don’t have much choice. Céline’s style isn’t as revolutionary as one might think. It has the rowdy indecency of a Rabelais, the pithy conciseness of a La Rochefoucauld, the relentless mockery of a Voltaire — squarely in the French literary tradition. But Céline didn’t have the same lightness; by temperament, he resembled Schopenhauer: both men were acutely sensitive to human suffering; both men used misanthropy as a facade, like a psychological defense mechanism; both believed suffering was inseparable from living, therefore distrusting any willful, calculated pursuit of pleasure. And both men could take a joke — but only if supersized to cosmic proportions.

He was fond of conversation, and there was a kind of terror in the way he insisted on being amusing, reassuring, and above all thoroughly sane. (p. 358)

I didn’t understand. I was being hornswoggled by everything and everybody, women, money, and ideas. I was a sucker, and I didn’t like it. (p. 63)

Did Jesus Christ go to the toilet in front of everybody? It seems to me his racket wouldn’t have lasted very long if he’d taken a shit in public. (p. 315)

“This world, I assure you, is only a vast device for kidding the world!” (p. 56)

I’d seen too many puzzling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. (p. 172)

I would never again succeed in sleeping fully. I had lost, so to speak, the habit of trust, the enormous trust you need to sleep soundly among human beings. (p. 369)

Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it’s the present that counts. Invoking posterity is like making speeches to worms. (p. 28)

Hurry, hurry, don’t be late for your death. (p. 329)

Truth is inedible. (p. 315)

When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit. (p. 236)

Existence was reduced to a kind of hesitation between stupor and frenzy. (p. 195)

Maybe we like to think different, but the world leaves us long before we leave it … for good. (p. 395)

Hegel: A Biography

Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm.

– Hegel

The voyage into the unknown: G.W.F. Hegel did more than anyone else to combine liberalism with progressivism. Liberty, as self-ownership: freedom to be who you want to be. Progress, as rational evolution: reasonability winning over unreasonability in an intelligible cosmos. At the nexus of freedom and progress, Hegel advanced a model of learning that integrated knowledge with our own lives, an approach resembling what Carl Sagan would later, in a different context, describe as an “asymptotic” approach to the universe. Pinkard thus works with an “anti-metaphysical” interpretation of Hegel, one emphasizing life in a self-standing world that dynamically evolves without a first principle.

I. Hegel the Philosopher

Embrace individuality and frown upon stereotypes! Boring accountants. Pushy salespeople. Sleazy lawyers. Geeky techies. Greedy bankers. Don’t think like this, because everyone is special and unique. Right? Yet, at least with respect to professions, stereotypes persist not through prejudice alone. We all trust salespeople with confidence in their product more than those without, just as we all prefer a lawyer representing us who wins. A lack of congruence between a profession and a member of a profession creates uneasiness among those with habitual expectations; an unsaid background of conformity quietly rules the day, despite everyone’s lip service in favor of authenticity.

Philosophy as a profession is not immune from social expectations. The stereotype of a philosopher? Deep, serious, aloof, strange, uncompromising, living solely on a metaphysical plane, a lack of concern with the details of daily life. This image exists for a reason — a philosopher aims to deliver insight into the universe’s general structure and organization. Commonalities can ruin the mystique, for if philosophers are no different from you or me, why bother with philosophy? But a mystique has the opposite impact when we suspect the mystique is all there is. This, I believe, has unjustly happened with G.W.F. Hegel.

Common resources on Hegel usually use one of the following two images:

The first image makes Hegel look like a mean, miserable untouchable. The second shows a stern, resolute, unfriendly, bug-eyed Hegel. If we begin with Hegel’s woolly prose style, and combine it with criticisms from a Schopenhauer, a Russell, a Popper, many an intelligent man will quickly judge Hegel as some sort of freak weirdo with a philosophy both totalitarian and obscurantist.

Of course, we could start with a different Hegel.

Who was Hegel? Spirit, perhaps?

[Hegel's] students remembered him as an inspiring teacher; after dictating things to them, he encouraged the students to discuss what had been dictated, to learn to think for themselves and to ask questions: One student remembered that “each could demand to speak and seek to assert his opinion vis-á-vis the others; the rector himself only instructively stepped in now and then in order to guide the discussion.” Just as he had done in Jena, he paid much attention to his students and their needs, even though these students were much younger and obviously not nearly advanced as the university students at Jena. Once a year, all the students in the Gymnasium – which in 1811, for example, amounted to 126 children – had to bring all their work, including their homework, to the rector, who would read all of it and make personal recommendations for improvement, would discuss with them the books they were reading outside of class, offer them tips for better study, and praise them for the progress they were making (when they were making any, which was frequent). (All of this was carried out in addition to his other administrative duties as a rector, his sixteen hours a week teaching philosophy, and his own private work on the Logic!) He was also particularly remembered for his concern and care for students who came from backgrounds of slender means, a concern that stayed with him all his life. (p 281-2)

Pinkard’s Hegel is a jovial character who makes friends rapidly, a dumb goofball who likes to joke and play rather than discuss heavy matters. Here is family life mixed with festivities, costumes, theaters, operas, balls, food, wines, all in the spirit of merriment rather than hedonism. This is charm, but not stage presence; Hegel had a cozy, supportive, generous air about him, someone who would talk a lot, but rarely about himself. This is not to say Hegel lacked seriousness or industry, quite the opposite. Suppose someone wanted ambitious reforms of the social order, but, not one to rock the boat, simultaneously wanted membership within such an order. We would need to have some notion of continuity through change, and change through continuity — central themes in Hegel’s thought.

II. Hegel’s Philosophy

Have you ever changed your mind about something important? Beliefs, convictions, commitments, goals, priorities, preferences, values, and such? If so, it didn’t happen all at once, and definitely not because a stranger impersonally gave you abstract reasons. After all, a list of facts means nothing without standards from which we not only evaluate the facts, but determine what is to even count as a fact. Those with different standards, if they aren’t explicit about their standards, will inevitably talk past each other. Of course, standards change, but they do so when held opinions become irrelevant, as if the ground shifts beneath our feet. Normative evolution advances not merely through direct debate, but when various partisans give up, stand aside, and let their opposition take the lead. Normative failures are therefore internal failures: de-moralizations. Alternatively, what sustains allegiance to oneself, and, what motivates us to participate, collaborate, and identify with others, both simultaneously realize a normative order.

Kant liked to describe Reason in terms of self-legislation. For Kant, our ability to follow through with a policy to achieve a goal was something intelligible, but never a candidate for a mechanistic explanation. Pinkard views Hegel as extending Kant’s critical project by asking what counts as self-imposition in the first place. Hegel took self-activity, self-development, and self-direction, and moved them away from the Kantian perspective of impersonal self-coercive policy-making, and toward the act of taking up something. Hegel paid close attention to human motivation, what we can feel for ourselves, and what social practice instills. This is holism in the sense of the whole. Hegel believed impersonal reasoning never tells a complete story, for our general orientation toward life is always prior. Rules/laws/principles cannot have a central philosophical position since the question always remains how principles square with cases, and that requires a sense of what we are about: what we take on ourselves, what counts for ourselves, what resonates with us, what directs our attention; our form of life, our aspirations, our self-certainty; the inward, uncomprehended background of experience.

The complex act of identifying oneself as the same subject of experience of an objective world of objects in space and time distinct from those experiences of it – that act, Kant argued, was neither a “given” nor a matter of “habit” or “association.” Just as much as this self-consciousness was necessary, it was, as Kant put it, therefore also “original,” underived from anything else: It could not be a matter of applying “criteria” to discover that we are the same “I,” the same point of view in all our experiences. Kant drew the conclusion that the activity of combining these representations can therefore only be that of full spontaneity, an activity that does not rest on anything else but itself – it is, as Kant put it, a “self-activity,” a Selbsttätigkeit. (p. 119)

Is your self-conception more important than life itself? At some point, we all play with something more than Monopoly money. For Hegel, these weren’t abstract questions. During his life, centuries-old laws, states, and institutions abruptly vanished. Additionally, the hapless French became unstoppable overnight when they discovered they could enlist swarms of people to fight for a cause. Cut free from traditional ties, millions now felt the world of their parents could no longer guide them; either hoping for a revolutionary new world or longing for a restored old world, everything was up for grabs.

Hegel’s early formative experiences in hometown life accentuated his sharp awareness of what counts as home and alienation, social inclusion and social exclusion. The hometowns were communitarian — they knew who belonged and who was an outsider, enforcing rights without any written statement. Local guilds protected privileges, provided circles of socialization, offered assistance in tough times, celebrated reaching various benchmarks, and oversaw professional standards. What was wrong with this? Careers weren’t open to talent. Marriages were arranged. Aristocratic privileges were maintained. One could not set up a business where one pleased. Hometowns obstructed large, sweeping reforms, such as uniform, paved roads. With a cosmopolitan attitude opposed to backward Germanness, Hegel viewed the French in emancipatory terms, particularly admiring Parisian shops, industry, and overabundance.

[T]he very notion that the ideal of “love and piety” lay in celibacy and childlessness was absurd, itself only a “corruption of ethics.” Equally absurdly, Hegel argued, the old (Catholic) church made “poverty into a religious virtue.” This meant that it did not reward industry, conscientiousness, and all the other related virtues which had made modern life so prosperous and had put the moderns in the position of actually being able to help others as the Christian virtues commanded them to do. Even worse, the old (Catholic) church had only put on a “show” of poverty, reserving wealth and luxury for its more highly placed clerics. Finally, the old (Catholic) church had enforced a “blind obedience” and “thrown human understanding into subjection.” (p. 630)

Having unconditional respect for learning, Hegel liked to think of himself as an educator of humanity. Universities of the time had a reputation as retrograde, medieval, anti-modern, theologically oriented diploma mills; Hegel advanced the new, dynamic, evolutionary model of knowledge, one that encouraged students to integrate learning with their own lives. A modernized university allowed the freedom to publish, to criticize, to contradict, to experiment, to understand, to motivate, to encourage. Hegel’s central lesson is that free inquiry gives a society traction with reality in a way dogmatic systems cannot, underwriting freedom by organ-izing knowledge. Influenced by Wilhelm von Humboldt, this was a move both against religion and the utilitarian educational outlook of the 18th century. If the university was the focal point of modern self-consciousness, systematic philosophizing must be the central fact of modern life.

Hegel launched modern historicism by examining movements in the spirit of age, how the center of gravity of life shifts. While Realpolitik is always necessary component of social change, it is not essential, that is, it is not what animates the entire social process. Expressed differently, telling people to be free and rational is not an effective method to meet any social challenge. Surely what is efficacious counts as rational. But what is efficacious? Goals are pointless if no one buys into what one is trying to achieve. Hegel believed in top-down reform led by trained civil-servants with university educations, emphasizing changing not merely rules but attitudes. The pragmatism of the 1700s no longer seemed pragmatic; to change the world, change is not enough — we need change we can believe in.

In Hegel’s mind, the idea that there was anything like an iron law of history was just wrong; there were simply no laws of history at all. History was the scene of great human drama and human meaning but the attempt to find “laws” for history was tantamount to confusing Geist with nature. There was no “secret plan” of history hidden in some set of natural laws waiting to be discovered; the meaning of history lay in the way in which a kind of “mindedness” and “like-mindedness” – Geist – was to be understood in terms of its collective aspirations, and history was the drama of how certain forms of collective aspiration have necessarily failed and how they had been taken up by succeeding peoples. Hegel’s own interpretation of that story was that humanity’s collective aspiration had been “freedom,” that since ancient Greece this had been more or less a self-conscious aspiration, and that the line from ancient Greece to 1830 was one of attempts to work out what was entailed by such an aspiration and was more assuredly not the effects of some quasi-natural law at work forcing European humanity to lurch along a preordained path from Greece to modern Europe. What was at work in world history was the “negativity” embodied in European life, a constant self-doubt and skepticism even about what mattered most to people that drove Europe to become “philosophical” and progressive. “Who” we ended up being at the end of any historical progression, though, depended entirely on “who” we made ourselves to be. (p. 633-4)

Pinkard emphasized the lack of historical laws in Hegel; Hegelian freedom is the teleology of progressive self-consciousness. Hegelian nature developing within itself also rules out all extra-natural explanations. Yet nature so conceived has a place for the explainers; since supposedly we are always at some deep level in touch with an intelligible world, the difference between subject and object is not bedrock; everything drives toward conscious activity — the Absolute Idea, in Hegel’s jargon.

Hegel’s haters in today’s Anglosphere frequently label him as the source of postmodernism, collectivism, and a source, if not the source, of the perceived irrationalism identified in contemporary life. But Hegel was a rationalist who thought reality was fundamentally intelligible; there is nothing in principle unknowable for Hegel. The nineteenth century better understood Hegel, rejecting him as a hokey optimist, not as a merciless tyrant. Kierkegaard found vulgarity in Hegel’s Churchianity that drowns out the personal and the particular in a sewer of goody-goody self-satisfaction. Schopenhauer perceived a lack of realism in any system not placing weight on objective factors outside the reach of immediate consciousness. Marx didn’t like the inner development of forms of consciousness, seeing them as interwoven with the power relations of a given society’s economic mode of production. Additionally, since philosophy must always arrive late on the scene in Hegel, Marx lamented Hegel’s lack of activism. Marx had conviction that a particular doctrine will triumph; Hegel contented himself by describing what kinds of doctrine will tend to win out. While we can evaluate the justice of these complaints, they at least make sense. Contemporary criticisms rarely do.

Any liberal philosophy needs to meet the challenge of value relativism. Liberalism traditionally speaks in the eternal language of rights, but recommends an open future leaving everything negotiable. Intelligent critics will complain that liberalism creates conditions that undermine its own possibility. Do we tolerate the intolerant? Do rights extend toward those working for their abolition? We need men with a reasonable temperament in an open society, but if everything has relative value, then why value reasonability, and the evidence and truth that goes along with it? This is where we can’t ignore the metaphysical dimension of Hegel’s thought; Hegel, an Aristotelian in many senses, didn’t recommend liberal values, but liberal virtues. Again, his philosophy has a teleology where reasonability has its own karma, a kind of traction with reality, as something that goes with the grain. This implies there is a “grain” — Hegel, a rationalist, argues everything has its own developmental pattern, and that any such pattern is in principle intelligible, thus licensing the conclusion that there is nothing in principle beyond the reach of knowledge. Hegelian progress occurs as the creativity of man overlaps with the productivity of the universe, as we learn to actively undertake change rather than passively undergo change. It still remains the most ambitious form of rationalism ever attempted.

Further Reading:
Charles Taylor, Hegel
Frederick Beiser, Hegel
J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

The Reactionary Mind

Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

The TORIES, as men, were enemies to oppression; and also as ENGLISHMEN, they were enemies to arbitrary power. Their zeal for liberty, was, perhaps, less fervent than that of their antagonists; but was sufficient to make them forget all their general principles, when they saw themselves openly threatened with a subversion of the ancient government. From these sentiments arose the revolution; an event of mighty consequence, and the firmest foundation of BRITISH liberty.

– David Hume, Of the Parties of Great Britain

Conservatives as losers, conservatism as failsauce. This is Corey Robin’s brilliant theory explaining any possible form of the political right. I ain’t be trollin, yo! It has all of the hallmarks of an acceptable model, explaining a lot of diverse phenomena, even apparently contradictory phenomena, with a small amount of theory. Like, seriously man, I’m totally serious.

What is conservatism? Evolutionary progress, wariness of change, adaptation, intimation, liberty, reform, virtue, limited government, a bromance between capitalists, religionists, and warriors. Psych! That’s just marketing. Robin, who somehow stole a copy of our super-secret right-wing playbook, rightly claims that international and historical perspectives suggest something amiss within these common conceptions.

[O]ne must look to the underlying arguments, the idioms and metaphors, the deep visions and metaphysical pathos evoked in each disagreement and statement. Some conservatives criticize the free market, others defend it; some oppose the state, others embrace it; some believe in God, others are atheists. Some are localists, others nationalists, and still others internationalists. Some, like Burke, are all three at the same time. But these are historical improvisations – tactical and substantive – on a theme. Only by juxtapositioning these voices – across time and space – can we make out the theme amid the improvisation. (p. 36)

Conservatism is a supremely modern phenomenon. During antiquity, like the medieval period, everyone was conservative, precisely because no one was *a* conservative. There simply wasn’t much change between generations, and modernity, if anything, is about change. Change as change, any kind of change — technological change, economic change, cultural change, demographic change, political change — all dislodge various individuals from visions of the universe once taken for granted. Change spawns desperadoes, people who, if not without hope, at least have no practical use for it. A meetup of conservatives often has the atmosphere of a gathering of fugitives. Indeed, playing the truant is what makes being a conservative fun. Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

From the beginning, conservatism has appealed to and relied upon outsiders. Maistre was from Savoy, Burke from Ireland. Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock in Nevis and rumored to be part black. Disraeli was a Jew, as are many of the neoconservatives who helped transform the Republican Party from a cocktail party in Darien into the party of Scalia, d’Souza, Gonzales, and Yoo. (It was Irving Kristol who first identified “the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism” as the conversion of “the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.”) Allan Bloom was a Jew and a homosexual. And as she never tired of reminding us during the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin is a woman in a world of men, an Alaskan who said no to Washington (though she really didn’t), a maverick who rode shotgun to another maverick. (p. 57-8)

Left homeless within a hostile universe, a pressing need emerges to reevaluate the big questions. Disaffection leads to a contempt for common pieties. Conservatism, to be conservatism, must have, at its spiritual root, a fundamentally activist, futurist, innovating, initiating, egoist, transformative, forward-looking character. Why? The pain of loss forces one to fearlessly deal with the flux of reality as flux.

The Counter-Enlightenment, as expressed in thinkers such as J.G. Hamann and F.H. Jacobi, first gained a foothold in Germany, still a backwater at the time compared to England and France. It took its inspiration from another outsider, David Hume, a Scottish atheist. Why? Hume, primarily a historian, hated Whig histories, that is, the presentation of human civilization as a cheesy moral tale of angels righting wrongs, a uniform, goody-goody march toward an inevitable happy ending certified by reason. Conservatism has a fundamentally modern idea at its core: the physical universe, indifferent to human affairs, does not take sides. Living happily ever after is never guaranteed; losing is fo realz. Progressivism, which embraces what Hume would contemptuously call “the monkish virtues,” requires a teleological understanding of human perfection to thrive. Yet by the time of the Enlightenment, the scientific worldview seemed to leave no eternal foundation for any human perfection.

The grand march of progress didn’t gain a proper footing until G.W. F. Hegel integrated the conservative criticisms from the Counter-Enlightenment into his own liberal philosophy, resulting in a dynamic powerhouse of thought. He realized it isn’t enough to know and preach natural and legislative laws to build a better tomorrow; people need to identify with principles if such principles are to have a living impact. Hegel literally invented hopenchange by resurrecting the old Christian scholasticism within History, rebooting Providence as Progress, transforming perfection into something immanent within the temporal world, thus clearing the ground for Marxism in Europe and pragmatism in the United States. While we may not find this mirrored outside of the skulls of progressives, reconciling opposites and avoiding extremes has been part of the progressive self-image for roughly two centuries. Because we haven’t reached our destination, we are the moderates, and because history only moves in one direction, you are the one that should compromise. And don’t accept the false dichotomy of the lesser evil. After all, we’re doing this for your own good. We aren’t the red states, or the blue states, but the United States. Yadda yadda yadda.

As a contrast, the spirit of challenge and mastery makes conservatism extravagant, wild, grandiose, larger-than-life. The sublime is extreme; the extreme is sublime. Robin looks to Burke to find worries about a world turned gray: curiosity can lead to weariness, pleasure to indifference, enjoyment to torpor, imitation to stagnation. Later, the Soviet Union became the ultimate symbol of bean-counting rationalism — dull, uninspired, colorless. Preferring the bold over the bland, conservatives have a transgressive mindset that enjoys having its mettle tested; the flux demands struggle and contest. Loss means one must seek new fields of dramatic self-disclosure.

Conservatives usually style themselves as chastened skeptics holding the line against political enthusiasm. Where radicals tilt toward the utopian, conservatives settle for world-weary realism. But, in reality, conservatives have been temperamentally antagonistic, politically insurgent, and utterly opposed to established moral convention. Ever since Edmund Burke, thinkers from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Martin Heidegger have sought a more intense, almost ecstatic mode of experience in the spheres of religion, culture, and even the economy – all of which, they believe, are repositories of the mysterious and the ineffable. Indulging in political romanticism, they draw from the stock-in-trade of the Counter-Enlightenment, celebrating the intoxicating vitality of struggle while denouncing the bloodless norms of reason and rights. (p. 113)

Robin identifies two other important features of conservatism. One, unlike the infatuation progressives commonly have for their leadership, conservatives more often than not have contempt for the existing regime, viewing it as clueless, corrupt, soft, et cetera. Secondly, conservatives almost always admire the movements they fight, especially the hardness, vision, ruthlessness, and intelligence they perceive. What explains this? If order can be destroyed, it follows that order can be created. Suspicious of all eternal political faiths, conservatism constantly reinvents itself, a protean feature making it a moving intellectual target. To defeat a revolution, reactionaries learn they must become the revolution. In other words: conservatism as Empire Strikes Back.

Robin locates the basis of modern conservatism in the thought of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), a man who reinvented our understanding of power. (Others locate the basis of modern liberalism in the thought of Thomas Hobbes; both are correct, a testament to Hobbes’s genius.) Power, as the ability to act, for centuries had a teleological interpretation, our ability to realize eternal, universal ends. But in Hobbes, power is nothing more than the ability to restrict options. Hobbes, a materialist, theorized that the human will isn’t reasoned deliberation about our appetites and aversions — it *is* our appetites and aversions. This implies there is simply no such thing as voluntarily acting against one’s will, including hard decisions under duress.

Such metaphysical assumptions enabled Hobbes to conclude that “democraticals” make a fundamental mistake by confusing liberty with sovereignty: we should not define freedom as participation in a collective process of deliberation about common goals. Liberty is not sovereignty. In one sense, submission to government entails an absolute loss of liberty; submission to the majority is still submission. On the other hand, if we interpret freedom as unimpeded motion, an absolutist government may offer us more freedom than a republic. This isn’t necessarily so, just a state of affairs that is possibly so. This proves that participating in a political process does not make us free. Note that Hobbes, a modern thinker, works with a theory of consent and a theory of representation; he makes no Christian political assumptions about good and evil. Not surprisingly, the rise of the European state system during the absolutist period introduced other modern consequences unpalatable to those of the monkish virtues. It accepted war as a legitimate means of changing territorial settlements; the concept of a just war fell off the radar. This means legal order rests upon no higher political or ecclesiastical authority. Neo-classical economics would later unsettle men of monkish temperaments by affirming the relativity of value.

Robin makes an insightful point in that the libertarian political model involves coercion as a condition of its success, which makes it self-contradictory. A market-based society is conventional, not natural. It had to be theorized and created. Classical liberalism has been a top-down reform movement led by intellectuals from its inception. Curiously, Robin does not notice the continuity between classical and modern liberalism in this regard.

Why are wackademics suddenly so interested in conservatism, especially at a time of conservative decline? For decades, professors consoled themselves with the Marxist theory that money is power/hierarchy, conservatives represent money, so they represent hierarchy, and those without power who align themselves with money simply have false consciousness, i.e., they have been duped by religion or some other part of the cultural “superstructure,” the pretty lies disguising the exploitative reality of the economic “base.” I have a conjecture: progressivism, in 2012, has become conscious of its own stasis, conscious of itself as a conserving agent. The liberal aspiration, like anything in life, has had diminishing returns. They once dreamed big, even wanting to colonize outer space at one point; now progressives focus on tiny concerns, such as free contraceptives for, uh, sexually liberated women. Yay!

Secondly, democratic socialism has stalled all over the world; the welfare-statist recipe of getting into debt to get out of debt has only led to more debt. So? Tactically, the left is in great shape — even crusty old white reactionaries don’t want to give up their Medicare gimmiedats; teachers, cops, and other vermin generally know who butters their bread. And Jesus rode a donkey or something, right? Contemporary liberalism increasingly resembles a sports team that wins championships purely through solid defense: hold your gains, and keep your inept opponents from putting points on the board. Liberalism is now its own tradition, quiet, proper, obedient, ordinary, artless, and also a scold — liberalism is becoming a ritual, a set of predictable incantations aimed at evil sinners who would change the sacred order of things. It is backward-looking, focused on its achievements rather than its plans, never wasting an opportunity to preach about slavery and Hitler. A liberal looks at the world, sees only douches and tools, and wonders why everyone can’t be nicer, like a brony. It is telling that Robin uses the metaphor of a march to describe his own political philosophy; progressivism doesn’t care about the destination of our march, only whether we are all marching in line and in step. Progressive pundits today love to prove that conservatism isn’t conservative. And you know what? They’re all correct. *Progressivism* is the new conservatism.

Though conservatives are often reputed to favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine – all the comforts of bourgeois life – Clinton’s conservative critics hated him for his pursuit of these very virtues. Clinton’s free-market obsessions betrayed an unwillingness to embrace the murky world of power and violent conflict, of tragedy and rupture. His foreign policy was not just unrealistic; it was insufficiently dark and brooding. “The striking thing about the 1990s zeitgeist,” complained Brooks, “was the presumption of harmony. The era was shaped by the idea that there were no fundamental conflicts anymore.” Conservatives thrive on a world filled with mysterious evil and unfathomable hatreds, where good is always on the defensive and time is a precious commodity in the cosmic race against corruption and decline. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and an almost barbaric virtú, qualities conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity. It is no accident that Paul Wolfowitz, the darkest of these dark princes of pessimism, was a student of Allan Bloom (in fact, Wolfowitz makes a cameo appearance in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s novel about Bloom.) For Bloom – like many other influential neoconservatives – was a follower of Leo Strauss, whose quiet odes to classical virtue and ordered harmony veiled his Nietzschean vision of torturous conflict and violent struggle. (p. 173)

Let me ask this question: why participate in public affairs? Why even bother voting? One vote is statistically insignificant in an election with even a few hundred people. Why not have no ambitions, and live a life devoted to, let us say, video games? If hierarchical standards are evil, why not select our representatives in government randomly? Why even test the excellence of prospective representatives through elections? Similarly, for you academics droning on about “hierarchy” — why aren’t you admitting students randomly at elite institutions? Why have grades? Why not give A’s to anyone who wants one, regardless of attendance or completion of work? Robin pushes a Weberian idea of a disenchanted world, opposing it to the Romanticism he finds in Nietzsche, missing how Weber’s thought is a consequence of Nietzsche. After all, if it is a fact that the only values are instrumental values, then why value fact? Weber, in a dystopian spirit, honestly admitted he had no answer.

Strauss criticized Nietzsche through his criticism of Heidegger and Weber. Conservatives only seem like they’re controlling the debate because they’re the only ones offering alternatives. I’m not talking about an alternative grocery list of policy objectives; I’m talking about taking modernity seriously. Strauss merely wanted to develop a philosophical strategy that keeps our ears open to the big questions. Progressives are offended that there are any questions at all. They’ve unwittingly universalized the conforming values of the marketplace like a law of nature. Progressives proclaim to tolerate all ideas, and then act shocked that there are ideas.

Further Reading:
D.C. Stove, On Enlightenment
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America
Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions

Studies in Hegelian Cosmology

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1984)

The self is so paradoxical that we can find no explanation for it, except its absolute reality. (p.26)

Brute facts: the deflationary thrust. Such was the modernist goal of analytic philosophy, identifying the raw, basic, irreducible realities at the limits of explicitness, the fundamental units that enable us to assemble all other possible realities. Not all philosophy has shared this methodology. Renaissance philosophy often employed humanistic techniques. “Baroque” period philosophy used ideas as loci of intelligibility. Nineteenth-century philosophies typically assumed a subterranean current of activity underlying reality. Brute facts are rarely candidates for ultimate realities because nothing is more unreal than a brute fact. While reality is always in transit, a brute fact stands still, something paralyzed, artificial, frozen in time like a dream — a snapshot. Brute facts thus have a system requirement: an aesthetic outlook, a perception of realities bracketed off from other realities and taken as realities in themselves, for their own sake. Recognizing this, analytic philosophy in recent decades began adding both holist and pragmatist features. They see a smiling man at the end of this road, but can’t yet make him out. That man is Hegel.

If Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore are the fathers of analytic philosophy, J.M.E. McTaggart is its grandfather. Which seems paradoxical, since McTaggart self-identified as a Hegelian. The early analysts aimed to emancipate philosophy from Hegel. Kant has been liked and disliked by the various analysts depending on the weather, but Hegel always had the status of a villain in analytic circles, a status that persists through today. The reason is obvious. There are no brute facts in Hegel, but in analytic philosophy, everything was nothing except brute fact. There seems to be no common ground.

But is there? McTaggart, a paradoxical man, was a Hegelian who believed in brute facts. How?

I. McT’s Hegelianism

All philosophy, no matter how shoddy or sublime, contains unity and plurality. Too much unity, and the unity becomes empty, vanishing into nothing. But too much plurality resolves into flux, and everything washes away as chaos. That everything is not nothingness, and that everything is not chaos, is one of many brute facts in McTaggart’s gentle system.

Reality is a differentiated unity, in which the unity has no meaning but the differentiations, and the differentiations have no meaning but the unity. The differentiations are individuals for each of whom the unity exists, and whose whole nature consists in the fact that the unity is for them, as the whole nature of the unity consists in the fact that it is for the individuals. And finally, in this harmony between the unity and the individuals neither side is subordinated to the other, but the harmony is an immediate and ultimate fact. (p. 19)

Epistemologically, McTaggart believed empirical knowledge is justified by familiarity, what Russell would later call “knowledge by acquaintance,” a distinction that goes back to the philosopher John Grote (1813-1866). McTaggart added a Hegelian flavor, arguing elsewhere that there cannot be anything radically unlike ourselves; it follows that we know nothing except that which has the nature of our self. Yet, if consciousness is always consciousness of something that is not itself, then something outside us must make our knowledge true, just as something inside us must make our knowledge possible.

If we take all reality, for the sake of convenience, as limited to three individuals, A, B, and C, and suppose them to be conscious, then the whole will be reproduced in each of them. A, for example, will, as conscious, be aware of himself, of B, and of C, and of the unity which joins them in a system. And thus the unity is within each individual.

At the same time the unity is not in the individuals as isolated. For the whole point of saying that the unity is for A, is that it exists both out of him and in him. To recur to our example, the essence of consciousness is that the contents of consciousness purport to be a representation of something else than itself. (In the case of error, indeed, the contents of consciousness have no external counterpart. But then it is only in so far as consciousness is not erroneous that it is an example of this category.)

Thus the unity is at once the whole of which the individuals are parts, and also completely present in each individual. Of course it is not in the individuals in the same manner as the individuals are in it. But this is not to be expected. The dialectic cannot prove that contraries are not incompatible, and, if it did, it would destroy all thought. Its work is to remove contradictions, and it succeeds in this when it meets the demand that the unity shall be in the individuals, and the individuals in the unity, by showing that both are true, though in different ways. (p. 14)

McTaggart therefore selected selves as the final differentiations of spirit of a Hegelian system. The gist is only personal identities have both the strength and flexibility to glue reality together as a self-consistent system.

We may notice, too, that as our personality becomes more self-determined, its relations with outside reality become more vivid, intimate, and complex. A man of clear thought, firm will, and intense feelings, living under favourable circumstances in a community of civilized men, is surely a more perfect person, and more completely self-determined than an idiot, or a baby. But such a man certainly realises more vividly than an idiot or a baby the distinction between himself and the surrounding reality, and is more fully conscious of the way in which his relations to that reality permeate and determine his whole nature. (p. 79)

The above would later become McTaggart’s theory of determining correspondence. It echoes Leibniz, where the nature of each part reproduces the nature of the whole, though McTaggart, rather than having independently configured monads humming away on their own, works with a system of reciprocal dependence. What makes it work is McTaggart’s metaphysics of substance. McTaggart argued a substance is a substrate of identity, not an abstraction from something else, nor something inferred from something else. But while each substance has its own factor of particularity, the relations of a substance with other substances constitute its essence. Combined with the considerations above, McTaggart deduced that only the absolute is completely self-standing; it is not a self, but an eternal system of persons. The absolute has no sense of self since it isn’t an indivisible unity. But without substantial selves, the absolute would be nothing.

This discrimination of the self from the object of knowledge increases with the increase of knowledge. In proportion as I know a thing more completely, I may, from one point of view, be said to have it more completely in myself. But it is equally true to say that, as I more thoroughly understand its nature, it takes more and more the form of a completely and clearly defined object, and, in proportion as it does this, becomes more emphatically not myself. The same course may be traced with will and emotion. My will can only find satisfaction in anything in proportion as it appears a distinct, though harmonious, reality. If it should become something which I could not distinguish from myself, the sense of satisfaction would vanish into a mere emptiness. And, in the same way, while nothing draws us so close to others as intense emotion, nothing enables us to appreciate more clearly the fact that those others exist in their own right, and not merely as phenomena subordinate to our own reality. (p. 22-3)

II. Wuv

McTaggart identifies the supreme reality with the supreme good, the goal of the process of the universe. This teleology is a static teleology, not a dynamic, Aristotelian model. The absolute system of persons is not only the only true reality, but the highest truth and the sole truth. McTaggart argues that because action is always incomplete, the universe, since complete, is not fundamentally active. This rules out knowledge and virtue as the highest goods, since both depend upon activity, thus leaving something as a remainder rendering the universe contingent and irrational, which is impossible on the assumption of the completeness of absolute reality.

The ideal which we should then have reached would be one in which we realised the entire universe as an assembly of spirits, and recognized that the qualities and characteristics, which gave to each of these spirits its individuality, did not lie in any contingent or non-rational peculiarity in the individual himself, but were simply determined by his relations to all other individuals. These relations between individuals, again, we should not conceive as contingent or accidental, so that the persons connected formed a mere miscellaneous crowd. We should rather conceive them as united by a pattern or design, resembling that of a picture or organism, so that every part of it was determined by every other part, in such a manner that from any one all the others could, with sufficient insight, be deduced, and that no change could be made in any without affecting all. This complete interdependence is only approximately realised in the unity which is found in aesthetic or organic wholes, but in the Absolute the realisation would be perfect. As the whole nature of every spirit would consist exclusively in the expression of the relations of the Absolute, while those relations would form a whole, in which each part, and the whole itself, would be determined by each part, it follows that any fact in the universe could be deduced from any other fact, or from the nature of the universe as a whole. (p. 256-7)

In short, McTaggart argues that love is not only the highest thing, but ultimately the only real thing in the universe. Our character fundamentally persists through our personal relations, the way the Absolute manifests itself in the individual. We need not be conscious of consciousness to have a conscious identity. This rules out memory as a criterion of personal identity; it increases the probability of us living multiple lives, different temporal manifestations of timeless persons.

McTaggart’s idealism depends upon the primacy of abstract sensory impressions, not specific qualitative units of sensory experience, but a sense of familiarity, or “again.” Such a theory has several advantages, many of them of an axiological nature. If selves are only real insofar as they are connected with other realities — in McTaggart’s case, other selves — we have proved the impossibility of skepticism and solipsism. If only perfection is rationally worthy of love, we can explain why we love others despite their imperfections. While love appears to lack proportion with dignity and motivation, we can unconditionally love others as they can be and will be. Instinct, intuition, attention, spontaneity, interest, readiness to act, all reduce to impressions of familiarity persisting from past experience, or even past lives. We can also explain why we care about ourselves and own future.

[P]hilosophy can give us very little, if any, guidance in action. Nor can I see why it should be expected to do so. Why should a Hegelian citizen be surprised that his belief as to the organic nature of the Absolute does not help him in deciding how to vote? Would a Hegelian engineer be reasonable in expecting that his belief that all matter is spirit should help him in planning a bridge? And if it should be asked of what use, then, is philosophy? and if that should be held a relevant question to ask about the search for truth, I should reply that the use of philosophy lies not in being deeper than science, but in being truer than theology – not in its bearing on action, but in its bearing on religion. It does not give us guidance. It gives us hope. (p. 196)

III. Aesthetical Ethics

McTaggart’s ethics rests on a complete separation of ought and is — in his system they can and do ultimately coincide with each other, but they can never produce each other. Existence isn’t good for McTaggart merely in virtue of being existence. Though he does have an idea of perfection — it is intelligible that a drunkard or a fool is not who he or she should be. If we are imperfect, it isn’t because we are in relation to a non-actual reality; it is because we are in the wrong relations in this reality. There are no hermits, martyrs, or individualists in McTaggart’s ideal; he likes the idea of us being cultured by culture, civilized by civilization, educated by education, and so forth. It is not an ethics of suffering or conflict, but one of comfort and nurturing.

Conversely, McTaggart believed the essence of evil resides in placing your own will in a position of supremacy by affirming one’s motives are justified because they are one’s motives. Expressed differently, evil is self-isolating. This isn’t an ethic of sacrifice; like Hegel, McTaggart finds innocence morally inferior to sin, since sin at least contains an element of conscious self-regard. But unlike sin, McTaggartian virtue places self-regard in a wider unity where conscious self-realization occurs in the context of others. Strictly speaking, if McTaggart is correct, self-sacrifice is metaphysically impossible.

This system of ethics foreshadows the ideal consequentialism of G.E. Moore, who also placed our highest ideal within the context of human fellowship. McTaggart believed in what he called intensive quantities — we can estimate the amount of pleasure and pain involved in different courses of action. Moral action would not be fundamentally based upon general rules, but upon particular intuitive judgments of value. Objections are handled with a thoroughgoing probabilism: difficulties calculating hedonic sums are difficulties in practice, but not difficulties in principle. Moral skepticism, to be a distinct ethical stance, must say more than the fact that human life is doubtful and difficult. Just because we can make mistakes when judging someone’s height doesn’t mean someone’s height doesn’t have a real relation to units of measurement. McTaggart sees no different in principle between intensive and extensive quantities in our judgments.

And of the degrees of perfection it is impossible to speak except quantitatively. If we can say – and we must be able to say something of the sort, if perfection is to be our criterion – that a man who stays away from the poll acts more perfectly than a man who votes against his conscience for a bribe, and that a man votes according to his conscience acts more perfectly than one who stays away – then we are either talking about quantities or about nothing. (p. 113-4)

IV. Analysis

McTaggart pioneered a modernist method of doing philosophy: identify a set of structural principles needed to account for all of the basic facts about life. This style of philosophy assumes its working material is neutral, impersonal, static, inert.

Consider McTaggart’s a priorism. It suggests that philosophical questions cannot be settled by direct observation. It also suggests that any proportionality conjured by the imagination has no bearing upon philosophical conclusions. While McTaggart believed contradictions force us to look for higher unities in reality, the analysts, keeping the a priorism, handled contradictions in a deflationary way, choosing to discard any demand for unity.

McTaggart acknowledges he has no rational response to his deliberate naivety; he is content to show we have no reason for or against it, as if naivety is a natural, desirable human attitude. Expressed differently, McTaggart was willing to live with unanswerable questions, not outside of his system, but within it, something that would have huge deflationary consequences for the analysts. For example, how is change possible given a timeless absolute? How we even pass into eternity is inexplicable, but McTaggart responds that every kind of transition is inexplicable, until it happens, a consequence of a phenomenalist interpretation of Hume. The same follows for how evil and unhappiness are possible, given the eternal harmony. McTaggart denies chance, defines efficient causation merely as a category of relative truth, and leaves no place for the existence of matter in his system. Yet, in an anti-Hegelian twist, one contingency remains: the universe as a whole. We can’t answer why the universe as whole is what it is and not something else.

Why does a timeless and perfect Absolute appear as changeable and imperfect selves? And it is as impossible to return any answer to this question as to the other. The gap between the perfect and imperfect has to come in somewhere. The difficulty is the same whether we place the true nature of the selves on the side of perfection, and find the gulf between that and their appearances, or whether we take the selves as imperfect, and then find the gulf between them and the Absolute. (p. 35)

America Alone

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2006)

Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.
– William Makepeace Thackeray

It is an untypical journalist who can show us ordinary realities in new ways. In America Alone, Mark Steyn takes the mundane idea of the coming “post-American” future, and, with novelty, combines it with an immanent critique of the welfare-state, penetrating the conceptual substrate that underlies liberalism of every variety, exposing the inner oppositions.

Let’s divide this critical synopsis into three quick pieces, starting with Steyn’s exceptionally insightful analysis of the welfare state. Then we’ll examine and refine Steyn’s blurry vision of Islam before asking a very important question: does America actually need a hug?

I. The End of Liberalism

Liberalism in every form rests upon the philosophical notion of autonomy; this serves as a standard of value for various social practices. This means that ideally, we ought to have maximum freedom of choice. Negatively, we can do anything we want, as long as we’re not hurting anyone. Positively, government has a role in removing restrictions upon our choices that we didn’t impose upon ourselves — stupid parents shouldn’t be a reason to receive a bad education, just as physiological accidents shouldn’t lead to a poorer quality of health care, et cetera.

Steyn notices an error in this equation. Maximum freedom of choice increases the phenomenon of deferred adulthood; this implies families, where they exist, will have children later in life and in fewer numbers. In other words, demographic decline. On the other hand, the entitlement programs protecting citizens from circumstances beyond their control require growing, or at least stable, populations, especially as life expectancy rises. So a contradiction appears: the welfare state runs debt to give to its children, while forgetting to have any children. This is the primary demographic driver explaining the current economic stagnation in mixed, democratically socialist economies, including the United States.

Ah, but liberals believe we have a safety value consistent with their system of thought: immigration. We can outsource our baby production. But this theoretically only works, Steyn observes, on the assumption that human beings are fungible. Immigrants may not only place additional burdens on entitlements — they may completely reject liberalism’s ideal of autonomy, in some cases actively working for its demise. Liberalism lacks the inner conceptual resources to deal with such realities, for if it acknowledged that human beings are not fungible, that culture counts, then it would no longer be liberalism. There is no role for gradual, deliberately assimilated immigration in the liberal perspective which does not violate its own assumptions about value neutrality.

Those ignorant, grunting, knuckle-dragging English masses understood something that the technocrat experts either miss or glide smoothly over — that there is something wrong and reductionist in seeing human beings only as economic entities. Fine, we need bus drivers, or auto workers, or seasonal fruit pickers, or whatever it is. But if the price of a cheap pool of bus drivers is the transformation of Yorkshire into something that would be unrecognizable to any Yorkshireman of the mid-twentieth century, then the smart set should at least be smart enough to address the larger cultural questions. (p. xvii)

II. Islam

Conservatives love bad guys. If bad guys didn’t exist, they would invent them. And they do. Without bad guys, there are no good guys; conservatives want to be the good guys, so they need bad guys. Steyn therefore casts Islam in the role of the bad guy. He also forecasts the Muslim world receiving the most of the geopolitical benefits from the demographic decline of the major welfare states, since Islam at some point will gain a significant political voice in Europe. While Steyn exaggerates some of the specifics, this is certainly a matter of when, and certainly not if.

Are Muslims really the bad guys? Or, if not all Muslims are bad guys, will most of the bad guys be Muslims? I want to offer a provocative statement: most Muslims are good guys, especially Muslim radicals. I’ll explain.

Think about some of the classic bad guys in the twentieth century: fascists. Disciplined and practical, they sought domination, to assume a leadership role in shaping the future of the globe. Now, think about Muslim men. Steyn feels they are big, macho, brawny meanies who want to dominate others, especially women. If this was true, from a male perspective, Islam sounds like a good deal. But Islam isn’t about domination. It is about submission. And everyone must be submissive in Islam, especially men. Go watch a lot of video of Muslim preachers — they completely fail the audition for Bad Guys of the Twenty-First Century. You’ll find delicate, weepy, obedient, servile, effeminate, defeated-looking “men” with very high-pitched voices. In short, the ranks of Islam swarm with beta males who get off on their own betaness. A badass skull-cracking Mussolini, Islam is not. Believe it or not, cartoons of their stupid religion really do hurt their feelings. It quickly becomes obvious that Islam couldn’t lead a dog on a leash.

Now, think about Muslim philosophy and theology. It places emphasis on God and the soul, usually to the point where the world disappears in the sands of eternity. This is a feature, not a bug. Without grounding in anything within the physical universe, Muslims become vulnerable to catching emotions from others like an epidemic. Someone makes a low-budget film, a hillbilly in Nowhere U.S.A. burns a Koran, a loser in a European ghetto dies while pursued by law enforcement, whatever — a rumor spreads, and maybe protests and violence ensue, maybe not. Perhaps the weather is a better analogy. My conclusion: Islam is dangerous, but not menacing. The fanaticism, like the September 11th attacks, is destructive but aimless, lacking any strategy to realize any practical objective in the temporal world.

What do such considerations imply for Steyn’s prognosis? He’s correct that it is foolish to attempt to appease Muslim terrorism, but for the wrong reason. Like his ideological adversaries, he thinks Islam has organized, consistent, masculine goals; he only differs by claiming we should cut off the ideological pipeline. The problem is, there is no such pipeline. There is no unified institution called The Mosque, just a community of submissive beta males horrified by those who do not share their submissiveness. Muslims are preprogrammed for inspired, whimsical outrage; there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. Again, because of theological reasons, their emotions are not measured and proportioned against any worldly object. One can’t satisfy (or eradicate) a coherent, systematic platform that never existed in the first place.

III. Murica

We all have our imperfections; Steyn’s come from an occupational hazard of his craft: sensationalism. Despite using the prophylactics of comedy and self-conscious irony, America Alone falls neatly under that dusty, stupid, conservative genre I call despair porn.

Steyn’s apocalyptic tone gives the impression that Fortress Murica will be the last country standing against a planet filled with barbarians. Yet civilized nations such as Brazil, India, Singapore and so forth will still exist. Granted, the United States will lose its current leadership position, simply because a Europe with a heavy Islamic component leaves no one to lead; friendly emerging nations will prefer to do their own thing rather than act in concert. So what? This “problem” is psychological. Americans, like a relationship toward parents, have always defined themselves in terms of Europeans — the Murican left is the obedient child, the Murican right is the rebellious child. The coming demographic transition will feel melancholy, like selling the house after the death of one’s parents, getting married to someone with different roots, and forging a path on one’s own.

A lot can happen over a few decades. Fifty years ago, America segregated blacks. Now it has a black president. If Steyn isn’t hinting at a war of extermination against Islam, then he is thankfully posing. Hypocrisy is the sanity of Christendom. Steyn doesn’t take his own bullshit seriously; he’s not Anders Breivik. Steyn merely wants us to thump our chests, spike the football and so forth when circumstances require institutional violence on our part in the Islamic world, even though recent experience has shown the prudence of staying low-key when making war upon Muslim fanatics. While there are many progressive pacifists, they thankfully are posers too, for they always approve of a lack of pacifism in practice from their own establishment elite.

In the meantime, we should all take a better look at the courageous “men” who wish us harm.

Schelling and Modern European Philosophy

Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1993)

The fact that there is knowledge, reflection, cannot be deduced from knowledge itself. (p. 138)

The spectacular collapse of applied Marxism in the late twentieth century dramatically decreased the prestige of ideological Marxism. As a consequence, if Hegel was no longer seen as a stepping stone to Marx, no motivation remained to view post-Kantian philosophers as stepping stones to Hegel. The philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854), in virtue of resembling that of Hegel more than any other philosopher, stood the closest to the shadow of History. The additional fact that Schelling’s speculative forays into natural science lacked staying power resulted in a total eclipse: Schelling seemed to offer nothing substantial to both the continental and analytic philosophical styles.

Andrew Bowie advances a provocative thesis: it was Schelling, not Hegel, who set the stage for twentieth-century thought. The insight that being stands prior to thought supplies the underlying unity of Schelling’s protean philosophical career. The absolute in Schelling is positive. The pure That — the unthinged, the unconditioned — just is. More precisely, Schelling believed Hegel failed to deal with the raw fact that the world is at all.

What is to be understood must already be there before it can understand itself: such an existence is not something that can be proved, in that it is always already in existence and cannot, as the Initia showed, claim itself as the necessary ground of its being. (p. 152)

In Hegel, nothing is a raw fact; the absolute is radically mediate, leaving everything interdependent. But in Schelling, identity always excludes otherness. Hegel wanted to explain all immediacy within mediacy, which would bridge all dualisms without abolishing them: the unlimited and the limited, eternity and temporality, unity and plurality, stasis and dynamism, end and process. The possibility of such syntheses would leave nothing fundamentally alien/unintelligible to man.

The point of the Logic, in line with Hegel’s whole system, is to avoid a founding presupposition: everything in the system must be justified within the system, as otherwise what founds the system is, like the thing in itself, left outside it. The way to avoid the problem of the founding presupposition is to reveal that it depends upon something else. What appears as ‘immediate’, absolute within itself, can thereby be shown to be ‘mediated’ and brought within the system by showing its dependence on the other elements of the system. The complete revelation of interdependence is the Absolute Idea, which has taken up into itself the truth of all the preceding elements. The apparently most immediate – being – is in fact the most abstract and in need of concretisation by showing what it really is. Whereas being is presented by the likes of Schelling as immediate, for instance in ‘intellectual intuition’, where it is ‘as though shot from a pistol’, it actually must be understood like everything else: ‘there is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature, or in Geist, or wherever, which does not contain both immediacy and mediation’. … Schelling’s basic thought is, of course, that being cannot be ultimately considered to be mediated in this way. (p. 161)

In Schelling, everything is other, but only within a context where everything is fundamentally the same. This should sound mysterious yet evocative, as if something primordial is hidden, obscured by eons of transitions between evolutionary stages. This distinguishes him from both Hegel and existentialism. Hegel’s vision sharply merges romanticism with classicism, as if the humanities have an inner intelligibility of their own. But for Schelling, thinking cannot enlighten us about its own facticity. Yet, unlike existentialism, a Schellingian self is not fundamentally alien from the world; if the prior activity of the world was not consciousness’s condition of possibility, there would be no possibility of making any meaningful identifications. Schelling thus has the bold spirit of Melville, that which loves “to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” His thought is naturalistic in the adventurous, speculative sense of an explorer in a wilderness, who may encounter strange tribes, hidden geological formations, or new species. We’re still somehow within nature, though we cannot unfold nature from our own essence. His point is that being or absolute identity is irreducible to reflection. Our self-consciousness is not the “consciousness” of nature.

One cannot positively say what being is, but this does not mean that it disappears from philosophy: it is the dependence of reflection on what cannot appear as knowledge that means that being must be prior to knowledge. Being cannot appear as itself precisely because something appearing as something is what defines the structure of reflection and knowledge. (p. 136)

This accounts for the romantic tone we find in Schelling, what he called the “veil of melancholy which is spread over the whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life.” Reality is always already lost. Schelling therefore believed he found a way of being a monist without being a reductionist. Oppositions in reality must have a ground of identity which is metaphysically prior to their contradiction. The priority of interaction over self-standing action guarantees the relativity of scientific knowledge, a conclusion which does not entail metaphysical relativism.

Expressed differently, Schelling believed reality is fundamentally synthetic — something active and creative — but we never can know such productivity directly in itself, only the products of such productivity. We have no direct intuition of our own drives, only representations: dreams, fantasies, language, and such. Bowie elsewhere described such products as “eddies in a stream, which temporarily keep their shape via the resistance of the movement of the fluid to itself that creates them, despite the changing material flowing through them.” If this seems metaphorical, Schelling would find this unavoidable; Schelling argued all thought is ultimately metaphorical, like art, irreducible to any final objectification. As Schopenhauer would later affirm, any system of symbols remains meaningless without insight, the portable, intuitive core upon which everything conceptual hangs.

Taking account of metaphor can help to explain why key terms and conceptual structures in Schelling’s work play a part in the most varied subsequent theories. The examples are legion: Schelling uses a notion of the unconscious in ways which point to Freud; his cosmological speculations lead him to notions that sound like the ‘big bang’; his Naturphilosophie echoes contemporary ecological concerns; the way he analyses the question of being points to Heidegger and Derrida; his conception of language points to Jacques Lacan. These links are not fortuitous: one can trace historical patterns of influence in all these examples. A central interpretive problem is that many of these ideas begin as conceptions in grand Idealist philosophy, but seem productive when they have been re-worked on the level of conceptions, such as psychoanalysis, that are concerned with the world of individual human consciousness. The key question underlying these preoccupations, though, is precisely the question of how consciousness is conceived in relation to the rest of nature, and it is here that Schelling arrives at some of his greatest insights. (p. 8-9)

Schelling denied the world emerges via any kind of logical necessity. This has several implications. The a priori status of the logical is not itself logically grounded. Nature is self-organizing, but is not a self organizing. Reality is not a result; the absolute is free. The world is completely contingent; if the end is always included for any process, such a process would exclude any actual historical development. Schelling finds any kind of Hegelian eternal happening both senseless and nihilistic because, if what emerges is only what already once was, even if in a latent form or mode, then this means there is no free action into the future. Hegel’s radical freedom comes at the expense of individuality.

[T]he subject must be more than that which of necessity leads to the objective attributes of the world: it must be able to account for the fact that the world is not a completed object. In one sense Hegel would agree, but the way in which this lack of completion is understood is what counts. For Schelling the determinacy of the subject entails a fundamental dissonance, in that the subject’s essential nature is precisely not to be any thing. … In order to be ‘as something’ the subject must become what it is not. (p. 156)

As in Sartre, Freud, and others, the self in principle cannot be known statically like a snapshot; it always leaves itself or attracts itself.

The idea that thought is the underlying principle turns out, though, to be a misapprehension, since if knowledge is continually changing it cannot finally know itself as itself because the fact of its identity – which, remember, Schelling does not question – depends on an other that it cannot encompass within itself: namely, the principle of change, ‘eternal freedom’, the absolute subject. (p. 137)

Schelling emphasized the impossibility of a system of reason grounding itself. It follows that problem-solving and world-disclosure cannot be kept separate; we must leave an open interpretive space. Being is transreflexive, not self-reflexive. Since even key words cannot be cashed in within Schelling’s universe, we rely upon our pre-understanding of the world combined with models along with the heuristics of questions, innovating with language in non-standard ways through analogy, comparison, and images. This isn’t skepticism about evidence, only an alertness to the conceptual organization that must be in place before evidence collection even begins.

For Schelling we must both try to develop beyond the nature we are and find ways of coming to terms with the necessity that it imposes. In philosophy, as elsewhere, all we can do is reform the interpretations that we have of the world, for reasons which can never be finally transparent to us. This reforming is, however, no merely subjective projection, because the process is itself part of the manifest world in ways which we have no means of finally grasping. New interpretations can, though, still be validated, even if we have no Archimedean point from which to survey that validation. Here Schelling’s notions of ‘positive philosophy’ and ‘philosophical empiricism’ already point to what Heidegger will term ‘world-disclosure’, the happening in which we as subjects – Schelling may subvert the subject, but he does not eradicate it – are always already located. Schelling’s philosophy begins to reveal the inherent fallibility which any form of interpretation must confront: there is nothing which could ultimately mirror interpretation’s own validity back to it, as Davidson, Rorty and others now remind us from within a different tradition. (p. 180)

Reason in History

Claudia M. Schmidt, David Hume: Reason in History (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003)

I have shown that Hume’s philosophy, his study of history, and his contributions to the development of the other academic disciplines are part of a single integrated project: a constructive study of human cognition in its historical context; or, in other words, a study of reason in history. (p. 416)

Empiricism, as an epistemological strategy, aims to offer a comprehensive account of both the acquisition and the limits of knowledge, emphasizing the role experience plays in demarcating knowledge from error, ignorance, and opinion. The implementation of empiricism can vary, perhaps employing a different set of distinctions, starting assumptions, and the like; we can therefore evaluate empiricists in terms of their originality, truth, insight, comprehensiveness, influence, and other factors. But great philosophers distinguish themselves from merely competent philosophers in also having a proactive aspect within their philosophy which sees around corners, reaching out to the critics of their own philosophy, both real and imagined, meeting anticipated objections directly. David Hume (1711-1776) was such a philosopher.

What are the common objections to empiricism? Some claim it implies man is a passive spectator, though the force of this objection turns on an empiricist not believing this as the truth of the human situation; some empiricists have no problem with a spectator theory of man, which would lead to no inconsistency with the objection. More hard-hitting criticisms focus on the role of context in phenomena; the empiricist needs to account for, not merely separate units of sensation, but the wholes and unities encountered in the lived world. Most serious to the entire empiricist enterprise are rationalist complaints about the unavoidability of norms. The empiricist will want to defend many distinctions and principles ranging from the kinds of knowledge available to the rational updating of belief. Can such standards be defended within a system of empiricism? If not, the destabilized empiricism decays into something like skepticism or relativism. But if so, an empiricist needs to explain normativity without a direct appeal to rational insight, otherwise the empiricism would no longer be empiricism, but some kind of modified rationalism. Hume met these challenges using history as his starting point.

[Hume] indicates that our normative principles, or standards of critical judgment in different areas of thought and action, including the natural sciences, the human sciences, ethics, aesthetics, and politics, are products of philosophical reflection upon our historical experience, as individuals and as participants in a cultural tradition. By contrast, he rejects any claim that these standards are self-evident principles of criticism that can be derived directly from an autonomous faculty of reason, apart from any individual or historical experience. (p. 420)

Hume, known by others during his life and well into the nineteenth century primarily as a historian, believed history offered the possibility of a detachment immune to the distorting influence of philosophical speculation. History expands the scope of the imagination by unfolding the full array of possible characters and events. An even cursory survey of the historical record proves the universe, moving in no direction, does not take sides; we often find the precarious gains of civilization rolled back by a myriad of factors. Hume also took from history the extroverted conclusion that we depend upon the men in our immediate surroundings far more than our individual pride allows to believe. None of us choose our parents, our first language, our expected style of dress, our social taboos. Looking down from a high altitude, we’re more similar than we think, all socialized in a particular historical setting, every one of us. Hume therefore employed the idea of a cultural whole as a principle of explanation, a culture arising from what Hume called “moral” causes, a model which differed from Montesquieu, who, with a more materialist outlook, emphasized physiological, geographical, and environmental determinants. Hume used the irresistible adaptive tendency in man to account for both our patterns of intersubjective agreement and our ability to establish disinterested standards which express and coordinate such agreement. Since this historical-genetic method of explaining our concepts rests upon man’s innate credulity, we make intellectual progress by introducing the experimental method into cultural subjects, learning how to be critical, agnostic, detached, non-committal, leaving questions open, in suspense, proportioned to the evidence. Hume’s neoclassicism makes everything a balancing act.

I. Humean Beings

Hume’s theory of our species resembles that of Thomas Hobbes in its fissile nature. But while Hobbes conceived man as a gas of selfish atoms, Hume used social atoms. In any given country, we find different accents spoken in different regions. In history, we observe Hindu societies generating more Hindus, just as Catholic societies generate more Catholics. How can all of like phenomena be explained? We “sympathize” with others as a function of proximity as social atoms — again, each man an atom — impact each other through lively impressions. We can consequently imagine passions, inclinations, manners, opinions all as something akin to a contagion. Men are not only adaptable. They are credulous conformists who more often than not find open and direct disagreement highly unpleasant. Hume thus systemically explains prevailing social assessments impacting individual evaluations as a result of a general tendency toward equilibrium.

In Hume’s philosophy, human motivation has a universal structure. What he has in mind is something like this. Consider facial expressions. We know that unimpaired members of our species can recognize joy, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise in others. Perhaps, on vacation, we encounter a Japanese man, and notice he is disgusted. Unfamiliar with Japanese culture, we might not know why the Japanese man is disgusted, but we know that he is disgusted, and we know there must be some reason why he is disgusted. We have a responsive schema giving us blanks to fill. So Hume’s model has our passions directly arising from (but not constituted by) pain and pleasure, which can then be indirectly conditioned by existing social expectations encompassing family, status, law, property, religion, nationality, historical memory, et cetera. We all have an innate capacity allowing us to recognize, explain, and predict the causes of passions in others, which, if we did not have, we could never be taught.

[Hume] maintains that it is impossible to formulate a “just definition” of a given passion, since every passion is a simple and uniform impression without any parts that could be enumerated in a definition. Accordingly, he does not attempt to offer definitions of the individual passions, or even to describe their distinctive sensations. Instead, he presents a description of the individual passions by identifying their “nature, origin, causes and objects,” or in other words the particular objects, circumstances, and relations that gives rise to each passion, as a specific modification of pleasure or pain. (p. 172)

Schmidt noted that Hume did not deny the intentionality of the passions, only a copy theory of the passions, as if they could be judged true or false in virtue of conforming to an object. Hume’s passions are the teleology of life, that which directs our interest and concern. Reason does not supply aims, nor do we have insight into aims. According to Hume, a conflict between reason and the passions never occurs; we can only have a conflict between passions. What many believe to be conflicts between reason and passion, Hume explains, are conflicts between calm passions and violent passions; calm passions are not determinations of reason.

II. Customs and Cognition

Hume’s empiricism accounts for how normativity is possible, given changing historical conditions, without collapsing into relativism. It is a middle position between the eternal fitnesses frequently employed by rationalists, and an egoist-styled empiricism making all questions of value relative to will. Hume’s philosophy contains an element of unity-in-diversity, in that, human motivation has a general form with varying content. Societies cohere, as if under the force of some kind of social gravity, though how they cohere remains conditioned by contingencies. Yet Hume is not strictly naturalistic; our standards are relative to our cultivated nature, that which would universally please, or would be universally admired, etc., if we reflectively removed the extraneous and the haphazard from the equation.

Contemporary empiricists like reducing standards to other factors — raw behavior, subjective preferences, ejaculations of emotion, and so forth. Hume would judge this trend as a factual mistake, for every person, no matter what kind of open-minded or thick-skinned pose
they choose to adopt, at some point is sensitive to criticism. Criticize someone’s music, food, dress, living arrangements, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, and they are bound to get annoyed. Contemporary empiricism misses the personal element, our innate vanity, our tendency to take criticism personally. Why don’t we readily adopt an impersonal outlook? If Hume is correct, we really do have an innate instinct to be liked, to get along with the group, however the group is defined. Life everywhere, not only aesthetics, but morality, politics, religion, testifies to the same assured pattern of fanboys and butthurt.

Consider aesthetic judgments. We often value agreement from our peers. When we don’t, we still disvalue disagreement. Think of not only of how we take pleasure in wit, but also how poor, awkward wit produces uneasiness. Like humor, Hume asserts we can never fix aesthetic rules by a priori reasonings. At best, we inductively arrive at aesthetic rules through observation (or genius) in discovering what generally pleases. The perception of beauty, Hume continues, is a response to a utility of form, an idea directly anticipating Kant’s formal subjective purposiveness. The possibility of a uniformity of sentiment gives us an idea of perfect beauty, which in Hume’s view always relative — we can have an idea of a beautiful automobile or a beautiful woman, but never beauty in itself.

This kind of empiricism ultimately grounds stability in human nature itself. Continue with aesthetics. Since art ultimately involves a unity of familiarity and novelty, a refined critic stays alert to the interplay of custom and caprice. On the side of custom, a disinterested critic recognizes models and classics in a given genre; such a critic has experience in making learned comparisons. On the side of caprice, a disinterested critic understands that actual differences in taste result from differences in custom and temperament. This means a subtle critic has freedom from prejudice, the ability to bracket off one’s affections and animosities and aim for an impartial judgment, something universally satisfactory. Hume therefore accounts for cognition in aesthetics, though it has a completely negative role. Just as we can evaluate execution and verisimilitude, we can identify peculiarities clouding our judgment, just as we can remove the influence of speculative opinions from our assessments.

A striking expression of Hume’s broadly neoclassical view of beauty, as especially valuing simplicity and order, is found in his remarks concerning Shakespeare. In the History of England he criticizes Shakespeare for the “many irregularities, and even absurdities” that often “disfigure” his dramatic scenes, although “at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties, on account of their being surrounded with such deformities.” In Shakespeare we indeed find vivid sentiments and picturesque expressions, but without any “purity or simplicity of diction,” so that he combines a “great and fertile genius” with a “want of taste,” in both his tragic and comic works. For this reason, Hume indicates to his friend, the dramatist John Home, in a letter of 1754, that Shakespeare should be admired and enjoyed, but perhaps not emulated. Hume’s general neoclassicism is also reflected in his two main ventures into literary criticism: his assessment of Home’s tragedy Douglas, and his letters on behalf of the Epigoniad, a Homeric epic by William Wilkie. (p. 319)

Hume used the same strategy in morality. Rather than building eternal fitnesses and unfitnesses of things into his philosophy, or using the device of egoistic conventions, Hume affirmed the passions do not stand in need of explanation; our moral responses are self-standing realities that do not enter into relations of agreement and disagreement with objects. Our character refers to our prevailing passions/dispositions. It follows that moral statements are factual statements about sentiments concerning character, if we consider moral responsiveness to character from a general point of view without interference of particular interests.

Hume favored the classical virtues over the Christian virtues. This implied that pleasure arises from a balance of activity and leisure, solitude and sociability, a prudent regard for our future happiness combined with a generous concern for others. Hume did not like the accompaniments of monkish behavior — celibacy, fasting, penances, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and reverence for hierarchy, relics, saints and such; he preferred pride, heroism, nobility, prudence, style, excitement, natural talents. Christian ethics frequently discounts natural talents because we don’t choose them. But for Hume, this is an error; our idea of self is complex, not simple. We overcome individual deficiencies through education and convention. Universal benevolence simply is too remote and sublime to offer any motive power; our passions lead us to prefer acquaintances, friends, and family.

In Hume’s view, the good life for human beings thus includes physical security, material prosperity, interesting and satisfying activity, opportunities to pursue knowledge and enjoy the arts, and the sociable pleasures of civility, friendship, and domesticity. A good society is one in which these are available to the whole population: including both men and women, and members of the working classes as well as the gentry and aristocracy, though with differences relative to their different stations in life. Finally, the best political order is one in which the possibility for achieving these is granted to the entire population through equitable laws under a stable and effective government. In his view, these goals were being gradually secured in Britain and in Europe through what we call “progress,” or the advance of civilization. (p. 405)

Hume also followed through the implications of his philosophy for politics and economics, explaining in what way we can have (dis)agreement in judgment, establishing a role for cognition in both assessment and motivation. Again, this entailed a rejection of both conventionalism and rationalism. Hume rejected conventionalism in politics since his historical perspective placed society prior to government. Not only do governments come and go, we lack the ability to create them out of nothing. The behavioral inertia of existing social arrangements has an infinite advantage over abstract argumentation. Expressed differently, habit and popular opinion place limits upon what legislation alone can accomplish. We can only hope for piecemeal reform.

Rationalism also had no place in Hume’s political economy; attempting to create policy outcomes from inspiration alone has fundamentally maladaptive results. First, Hume believed an empty appeal to a speculative principle makes no specific demand or proposal, which denies the possibility of feedback from reality. Secondly, human beings, as credulous conformists who lust after unanimity, find themselves shocked by disagreements, even in remote, speculative ideas. This leads to unnecessary animosity, since differences of opinion on specific political decisions are always relative, never absolute; there is no conflict in principle between a party that would like a 20% tax rate and one that prefers a 60% tax rate. Hume also argued that we cannot create specific outcomes a priori; trying to regulate trade, wages, or the conditions of labor guarantees counterproductive results. Hume found egalitarian schemes of redistribution particularly impractical and dangerous; inequality among the constitutions of men is the most empirical of all facts.

In Hume, we have a believer in progress who is not a progressive. While he didn’t believe all change is necessarily for the better, he did believe in the possibility of progressive change, the possibility of making things more convenient and agreeable. The monkish values of self-sacrifice simply make life more difficult than it needs to be. Politics rightly conceived is merely the attempt to reflect upon our self-interest without distortion.

Hume accordingly seeks to improve the morals of contemporary British society by encouraging individuals in the prudent pursuit of their long-term interest, the enjoyment of enduring pleasures, the expansion of sympathy, and the cultivation of sociability, all of which he expects to increase their own happiness and the happiness of society. By contrast, he criticizes the artificial systems of morality that are generated by religious superstition and enthusiasm, as tending to detract from the happiness of agents and those around them. Finally, he seeks to encourage the development of those character traits which may be expected to promote the advance of industry, commerce, prosperity, civic order, civility, and the arts and sciences, all of which, in his view, tend to further the happiness of the individuals within a modern society. (p. 257)

III. David Humes

Interpretations of Hume fall under three categories: skeptical, disjointed, and naturalist — four if we add a positivist interpretation under the skeptical heading. We can call Schmidt’s interpretation a humanist interpretation, though it may only modify the naturalist interpretation into a critical naturalism differentiated from the uncritical naturalism of Stroud and N.K. Smith. But with the proper context, we can resolve Schmidt’s Hume distinctly into what I shall call the neoclassical interpretation of Hume.

The positivist vision of Hume passively reduces everything phenomena. Schmidt however noted the active role imagination performs in Hume. Custom frequently refers to our ability to apply a term to appropriate objects, like a schema or recognitional capacity; even images can be present in power. In Schmidt’s view, Hume’s copy principle, in the context of the imagination, isn’t a criterion for accepting or rejecting statements; it traces the derivation of our concepts and establishes precise definitions. For Hume, a judgment of identity is an empirical fact, sometimes a discovery; twentieth-century philosophers treated the content of such judgments as analytic.

As to skepticism, the world is an unproven starting point in Humean philosophy; reality, indifferent to our skepticism or lack thereof, doesn’t rest on a foundation. Hume’s skepticism extends to those who believe they have an ultimate insight revealing the secrets of reality; insight in Hume is relative, relating sensible objects only. Such skepticism does not touch the activities of daily life — commerce, statecraft, science, etc. But it does imply there are no purely idiosyncratic events; everything is public, shareable, regulated; Hume’s criticism of miracles makes no sense without the externalist emphasis.

Is Hume’s philosophy disjointed? N.K. Smith suggested Hume extended the moral philosophy of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to the cognitive realm, Hume’s philosophy then comprising a single positive doctrine. While keeping the anthropological emphasis, Schmidt’s Hume had a historical model of man, and the epistemological components of his thought function critically to counteract the natural human tendency toward credulity. In Hume, deductive reasoning rests on probable reasoning. But was Hume some sort of inductivist? If so, we might prefer the skeptical interpretation, since Hume’s inductivism floats without any justification of itself. This misses the active energy in Hume’s philosophy — doing comes first, and philosophy begins when we ask, what are we doing? For example, conviction in religion, Hume tells us, is more affected than real — something shammed, posed, attitudinal — just like chauvinism and demagoguery in politics; we get caught up in how we look in the eyes of others, rather than the precise meaning of our words. If philosophical decisions are nothing more than common life organized, Hume wants us to weigh testimony, to evaluate the influence of circumstances and motive. Once we recognize how the critical and cultural aspects of Hume’s thought form a single unit, they seem mangled in isolation.

Naturalism in the late nineteenth century represented humanity tossed around by unconscious stochastic factors only understood by specialists. Was Hume a naturalist in this sense? No. His philosophy gives us a method of reaching an interpretive equilibrium stabilized by realist constraints. This explains Hume’s nonchalance about whether mental activity is free or determined; since nothing in his philosophy turns on the question, he can leave it suspended. His laws are simple, not statistical; his human nature is fundamentally universal, not a temporary product of other changing factors; his cosmos is characterized by regularity, never chance. It is definitely a smooth, secular, clinical neoclassical system. Schmidt’s detailed effort thus improves our understanding by rounding out Hume’s thought in its entirety.