~ 2 Necessity/Possibility ~
Here is a famous excerpt of Nietzsche’s that, in the present context, warrants existential criticism:
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati[1]: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
– The Gay Science, 157.
First of all, what’s existentially problematic is his fixation upon necessity at the expense of freedom’s possibility — as Kierkegaard would put it. Creativity’s free possibility is the return to the conceptualization of “beauty” or “ugly” as willed conceptualization in imagination - in the mind, not its dogmatic reality (or value seriousness) in the world. I think that much of art today is restrained by dogmatic (seemingly objective) traditions and norms as opposed to creative or individual freedom. This is why, if Nietzsche had gotten around to reading Kierkegaard, who is said to be the father of Existentialism, they might’ve been at odds with each other. Kierkegaard knew precisely that sample-men, stoics, in their spiritless millions say, “one must take the world as it is”, whereas an original individualist commits to the conscious or subjective “world as it ought to be”, i.e., to freedom’s possibility[2].
By factual necessity, one does not create anything but instead submits to a dogmatic reality — or to fatalism. Regarding the latter segment, Nietzsche couldn’t remain consistent in his life in trying not to negate others — to accuse — since he resentfully accused his enemies in and following The Gay Science. All accusation possibly harbors resentment, while being reactionary, as in Burke, entails as much accusation as being progressive, as in Wollstonecraft and Paine. Actions have causal consequences all around the world and to moralise that one shouldn’t accuse or blame others today sets a precedent to hypocritically accuse and blame.
These days, the allegedly un-resentful — Hicks and, impressionably, Peterson — preach against resentment altogether too resentfully. They don’t know that their own yes-saying, or positivity, to their universal values can and does entail negativity in various forms, which is relativistic to history and the particular – to the ideas, actions, and emotions of oneself as well as others – not yet the universal. Anne-Josèphe’s slanderers disrespected her human identity on account of misrepresenting who she was or what her actual radical intentions and actions were. Camus argued that, “If I renounce the project of making human identity respected, I abdicate in favor of oppression, I renounce rebellion and fall back on an attitude of nihilistic consent. Then nihilism becomes conservative”[3]. So too are the reaction-oriented Stephen Hicks, Peterson, Haidt/Lukianoff, Murray, Shapiro, and Gad Saad disrespecting the human identity of both leftists and trans people. However, the US Existential Psychologist Rollo May explained Kierkegaard’s conception of possibility as opposed to fatalism, necessity, or what could be natural law.
Rigid thinking can give temporary security, but at the price of the loss of the possibilities of discovering new truth, the exclusion of new learning, and the stunting of capacities to adapt to new situations. Especially in times of transition like the present, the person is then left marooned on his rock as evolution passes him by. Kierkegaard adds that the belief in fate or necessity, like the belief in superstition, is a method of avoiding full responsibility for one’s conflicts. One can thus circumvent anxiety but at the price of loss of creativity. When the values the individual needs to protect are especially vulnerable to threat (often because of their own inner contradictions) and one is relatively less able to adapt to new situations, rigidity of thinking and behavior may also take the form of compulsion neurosis.
– The Meaning of Anxiety.
Sartre noted that there are even individuals such as caretakers, supervisors, and prison guards “whose social reality is uniquely that of the No, who will live and die, having forever been only a No upon the earth.” So it could be with Nietzsche’s yes-saying to his ideal system or reaction’s yes-saying to its own ideal system at present, and at the expense of many individuals. Such is possibly the case, too, with the resentment of older generations directed at the younger. Kierkegaard had his own conception of resentment as the envious leveling of middle-class modernity, which finds nihilism’s resentment just as much in today’s elders as in the young – in the tone-policing, moderating, and bantering reactionary rather than the radical:
Envy in the process of establishing itself takes the form of leveling, and whereas a passionate age accelerates, raises up and overthrows, elevates and debases, a reflective apathetic age does the opposite, it stifles and impedes, it levels. Leveling is a quiet, mathematical, abstract enterprise that avoids all agitation.
– Two Ages, 84.
Just as well, Kierkegaard noted that the sickness of spirit characterizing young people having “hope” had a counterpart in the sickness of spirit of older generations: that of “recollection”[4], i.e. nostalgia, which can be a pretext for an unaccommodating social order and tyranny. On that note, the classical liberal Paine himself wrote in The Rights Of Man: “Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it” (393), so there is a necessity to accommodate the freedom, possibility, of all generations.
Our culture’s understanding of “toxic positivity” might as well correspond with Kierkegaard’s explanation of sophistry because, as he wrote, profound consideration understands sophistry’s positivity to be negativity[5]. Also, casuistry’s seemingly positive lists of rules to live by conceals this same secret that sophistry hides. So it is with reactionaries demanding only constructive criticism or “productive”/“useful” ideas from radicals in our debates. It’s frequently only in service to reaction’s own seriousness as it conceals their nihilism. They want to “hear your solutions” online and in-person only to negate them with banter and ridicule. On that note, reactionaries assume for the lower orders that 1) their suffering is intrinsic to the human condition or even, according to Burke, 2) “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper”[6]. Both these ideals could, on the contrary, be stagnating, hindering, and poisoning community, the individual, and progress.
Through the cancelling of, say, women’s freedom, civil society reveals how it really cancels. Civil society doesn’t reflect enough on how much it makes being a lack for so many people already. Yet encouraging “personal responsibility” – or mere atomized individualism – in others doesn’t cut it. It practically absolves oneself of “personal responsibility” the moment it’s encouraged on someone else, since it assumes the other’s actions must be accounted for yet not one’s own or those all around in a community. Max Scheler’s book Ressentiment understands modern morality’s “personal responsibility” concept to be “the principle that each man’s responsibility, guilt, and merit is limited to himself and his own actions” (137). Underlying that, however, is, “the negation of all primary ‘co-responsibility’”, which can eliminate the very responsibility to one’s actions regarding others. Civil society is passionless and soul-crushing without co-responsibility in everyone, as well as subjective inwardness, or having the interior strength to face despair, which could be what Nietzsche meant by the coming of nihilism requiring the “deepest self-reflection”. Where “co-responsibility” or intersubjectivity is concerned, we can muster the strength to face despair with others when the signs of despair and need are clear.
Where perpetual antagonism is the politico-economic asceticism of our age, we arrive at the absurdity of Sisyphus. However, we don’t have to imagine his internal state as happy, a yes-sayer, despite Camus’ own claim[7], since Camus formulated the rebel, later on in his book The Rebel, as someone who says “no”, “this has been going on too long”, and “up to this point yes, beyond it no” (13). We’re advised by ascetic priests to be masochistic yes-sayers in corresponding acceptance to the sadism of a system — their system. There’s an absence of co-responsibility there, too, in addition to a failed understanding of Socratic Irony — of measured no-saying to a deceptively positive philosophy, i.e., unquestioned norms, traditions, and obedient children. Where Kierkegaard said that, “Irony as the negative is the way; it is not the truth but the way,”[8] commitment to negative criticism is commitment to the mind and, yes, to imagination, the passions, and ideas — to purely open and anxious possibility.
More often than not, reaction’s projects are of a mindless, or idea-less, facticity and the naturalization of its hierarchy. Analogous to Husserl’s criticism of scientific Naturalism, Scheler explained that the “ressentiment man” of Enlightenment boasts mere empirical data as universal facts, forsaking actual creativity or the smallest possibility of success. Scheler said of this resentful man that, “the ‘generality’ or ‘general validity’ of a judgment becomes his substitute for the true objectivity of value”, and, “Already the philosophy of the Enlightenment has pushed this substitution of ‘generality’ or ‘general validity’ for ‘objectivity’ to the utmost extreme”[9]. Radical, revolutionary, and creative possibilities (as well as actual individualism and Enlightenment’s own knowledge-seeking), are undermined this way. Mass conformity of the middle-class public and a system, both as Kierkegaard perceived in Europe in his time, are then preferred. In the eyes of ressentiment man today, for instance, all he sees is collectivist and socialist failures, even when public services, solidarity movements, and co-operatives prevail and are cherished. To the degree that radical transcendence is a utopic pipe dream to him, the empirical “is” regarding the prevailing system is insisted on as the natural and moral ”ought” for our future, which is not only Hume’s Guillotine, the is/ought problem[10]; it fosters more envy and nihilism in himself and others, not less, because nothing is happening – nothing is looked forward to – nothing is being strived towards. The “End of History”, so claimed by Francis Fukuyama, has occurred. Therefore, no one is making history.
On that note, our older generation’s demands of submission to authority, time-honoured institutions, and “experience” is common today. It’s juxtaposed against the alleged incompetence of the lower-class and of youth. But this might obscure its very own incompetence, which is what many in France came to realize of the Thermidorian government, followed by the Directory. The 1794-1804 period for France could be the parable of the system run by men of experience and of property. It also tracked Sieyès’ own disillusionment in shaping France as he liked[11]. What could be analogous to the post-Terror Thermidorian Reaction could be our own Post-Cold War Era, which is why this play has the imperative of not merely stopping at the Terror’s end but going further.
Today, the middle-class “man of experience” touts only his anecdotal evidence, that is, experiential “generality” and extrapolates “human nature” out of it. Not only does he expect the “real world” to be a reflection of himself and his own ideology, it validates his insistence that all radical overhauls of the system lead to failure – universally and necessarily. Favouring the mere probability this empirical/experiential “generality” has to offer, transcendence (as possibility and individualism) is discredited, devalued, and envied by this Enlightenment “ressentiment man” as Scheler called him. This same psychology produces a tendency to moralize, conserve, and conform, not to individualize:
Little children and slavish natures have the habit of excusing their acts by asking: "Have the others not done what I did?" According to genuine morality, companionship in badness makes it worse, for the badness of imitation and slavishness is added to the badness of the desired content. But here such companionship becomes a presumed "right" to make "good" what is bad! Thus the herds of ressentiment-laden men flock together more and more, thinking that their herd mentality is a substitute for the previously denied "objective goodness."…. In all problems of value -- whether they concern law, the state, religion, economy, science, or art -- that which all men can produce and judge takes on the importance of an "ideal" by which we should measure the concrete and positive creations of civilization. The meaning of the expression "generally human" is endowed with the highest value. However, the psychological basis of this attitude is nothing but hatred and negativism against every positive form of life and civilization, which is always a courageous rise above what is merely "generally human".
– Scheler, Ressentiment, 70-1.
Decades before Scheler, Kierkegaard summarized this conformist mentality even better. “Generality” for Scheler means “probability” for Kierkegaard here:
The philistine-bourgeois mentality thinks that it controls possibility, that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse of probability, thinks that it holds it prisoner; it leads possibility around imprisoned in the cage of probability, exhibits it, imagines itself to be the master, does not perceive that precisely thereby it has imprisoned itself in the thralldom of spiritlessness and is the most wretched of all.
– Sickness Unto Death, 41-2.
A literal manifestation of this mentality was one of Philippe Pinel’s own directives for his modern madhouses in post-revolutionary France. He would lie to his patients by making a coercive impetus “appear necessary” when it wasn’t necessary.
To render the effects of fear solid and durable, its influence ought to be associated with that of a profound regard. For that purpose, plots must be either avoided or so well managed as not to be discovered; and coercion must always appear to be the result of necessity, reluctantly resorted to and commensurate with the violence or petulance which it is intended to correct.
– Pinel, A Treatise On Insanity, published in 1801[12].
But this could be the same disciplinary and allegedly impartial attitude living on today against trans people, radical feminists, and all those who want actual freedom as it relates to possibility: to choosing, shaping, and negating one’s own nature, or else in organizing themselves by association to better their material conditions. A malicious strategy of ascetic priests and their followers is to attack radical psychologies as “disordered” or else “irresponsible”, and just as Nietzsche noted of the Christian tendency of blaming only oneself, i.e., to take up “personal responsibility”[13] and against the anxiousness of social possibility. But then the utopic idea of “personal immortality”, “immortality of the soul”, takes precedence over life and community, even by Nietzsche’s own interpretation in The Antichrist, which actually identified Saint Paul, a stoically-oriented (39) apostle, as a resentment-driven figure who inverted Christianity in its beginnings: “When the emphasis of life is put on the ‘beyond’ rather than on life itself – when it is put on nothingness –, then the emphasis has been completely removed from life”, Nietzsche argued, and, “What is the point of public spirit, of being grateful for your lineage or for your ancestors, what is the point of working together, of confidence, of working towards any sort of common goal or even keeping one in mind? . . . These are all so many 'temptations', so many diversions from the 'proper path' - 'one thing is necessary’” (39). “What he needed was power; with Paul, the priests wanted to return to power,” Nietzsche earlier explained, “he could only use ideas, doctrines, symbols that would tyrannize the masses and form the herds” (39). As soon as Christianity took up the sword of the Roman Empire, it became coercive of thought, as evidenced by the Codex Theodosianus (as the imperatives of Emperors Gratian, Valentinian, and Theodosius Augustus):
…We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest, however, whom We adjudge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of Our own initiative, which We shall assume in accordance with the divine judgement.[14]
Ascetic priests and resentment are detailed later in section 4.
Just as Nietzsche said metaphysicians “hate the irrational, the arbitrary, the accidental” as they “fear change, transitoriness: therein is expressed an oppressed soul, full of mistrust and bad experience”, so it was with stoics and Albert Ellis as they proposed “absolute ‘rationality’ and ‘purposiveness’” in their therapy. Feeling secure in the arms of probability, say, a 95%+ odds of success (whether in the election of Hillary Clinton or the survival rate of COVID-19) is all well and good until the undesired event occurs. Then one despairs and blames as one enters into an anxiety relation with their more concrete existence[15]. There’s an analogous abuse of “generality” and “probability” in the development of Rational Therapy (RT). It’s in Ellis’ irresponsible use of “largely”. Stoicism provides RT with its origins and is a precursor to Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT, please note, tends to triumphally announce how much it helps patients today – as in Haidt/Lukianoff’s The Coddling Of The American Mind weaponizing it politically – long before we can actually determine its positivity over decades and ages. Ellis was the pioneer of so-named RT and REBT. Yet the creation of RT was premised on Ellis’ failings in the business world, being socially anxious[16], disappointed in his lack of career progress in psychoanalysis[17], and then reading Epictetus and other stoics for two years.
Sparked by philosophy, I worked on my psychotherapeutic theory from 1953 to 1955, and finally came up with what I called Rational Therapy (RT) in January 1955. In it I presented the rather unique ABC theory of emotional disturbance. This held that when people were confronted with Adversity (A) and reacted with disturbed Consequences (C), such as severe anxiety and depression, it was largely their Belief System (B), together with A, that led to their dysfunctions. Thus A x B = C.
– Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy: A Therapist’s Guide, 10.
With much harder equations to work with, mathematicians would probably be embarrassed by how over-simplistically Ellis is trying to bolster his psychological theory with mathematical validation. This is just as Husserl predicted of psychologists absurdly trying to objectivize subjectivity into a hard science. We nevertheless can work with it to demonstrate stoicism’s absurdities, as in one of the stock phrases of stoicism “It isn’t the things themselves that disturb people, but the judgements that they form about them” (Enchiridion, or Handbook, of Epictetus, 288).
Regarding Ellis’ ABC theory, where B (your belief system) has a value equal to 1, no more and no less, then it is actually corresponding to the external world itself (A and C) being the problem, not the internal beliefs. If A x 1 = C is equivalent to saying A=C, then high amounts of so-called “disturbed consequences” correspond, logically, with high adversity outside of someone’s mere beliefs. One could indeed have exaggerating beliefs that multiply disturbed consequences. But by diminishing “disturbed consequences” (C), i.e., passions in others, anything less than the value of 1 for B that’s not 0 or less actually starts to diminish real adversity (A) in the world. Just as an apple being multiplied by .4 results in .4 an apple, so does .4 of a belief system correspond in Ellis’ equation to a diminishing of adversity in order to diminish the “disturbed consequences”. 0 as the value of B could mean not having a belief system at all. It might as well be believing in nothing, as in nihilism and that just won’t do. The “rational” or stoically-ideal amount of belief system must necessarily be 1 in value (as the accurate multiplying factor of “A”) so that means that belief systems, even one’s political ideology, can’t be done away with at all. They are inherently indispensable in our understanding of “objective” reality, as a phenomenologically-relating actuality from our internal state towards the external. But an actual problem Ellis’ pseudo-mathematical equation has is how one can actually judge or value the belief system as having the value “1” to a perfect certainty. It would devolve into utilitarian bean-counting of other people’s belief systems, i.e., their internal state or subjectivity. But not only do Ellis’ RT and REBT have this problem of “largely” blaming one’s belief systems, so does Aaron Beck’s creation of Cognitive Therapy and CBT when he wrote that
the philosophical underpinnings of this approach go back thousands of years, certainly to the time of the Stoics, who considered man’s conceptions (or misconceptions) of events rather than the events themselves as the key to his emotional upsets. This new approach – cognitive therapy – suggests that the individual’s problems are derived largely from certain distortions of reality based on erroneous premises and assumptions. These incorrect conceptions originated in defective learning during the person’s cognitive development. Regardless of their origin, it is relatively simple to state the formula for treatment: The therapist helps a patient to unravel his distortions in thinking and to learn alternative, more realistic ways to formulate his experiences.
– Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, 3.[18]
With heightened “disturbed consequences” in people’s behaviors all around them, whether they are “rational” or “irrational”, “realistic” or “unrealistic”, stoics nevertheless tend to latch on to the internal beliefs of others, neglecting that the external world could be what is problem-laden. One can’t change the external world, Epictetus states. Also, Seneca: “It’s not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad”[19], so the belief system is fixated on, almost as a malicious ad hominem rather than an actual grasp of the problems, and of reason, regarding the small possibility of actually changing things and surrounding nature. Recall that Ellis and Beck say beliefs are “largely” informing our problems, yet Epictetus and other stoics would say it is the “only” thing (as in it’s not adversity that upsets you, only your belief systems about adversity upsets you) so there is serious inconsistency. A x B = C for RT, REBT, CT and CBT as Donald Robertson’s book The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy applies it. But this is contra stoicism, since Epictetus as well as Seneca, say only B=C. Either it’s “largely” and we assault people’s belief systems, or it’s “only” and we still assault people’s belief systems, or else the external world has actual problems to address. As a corrective, the stoical Moving Of The Goalposts – applied as an argumentative fallacy – would be that only after trying to change the world, and failing, then we know it’s not in our power. But is there much of an effort from stoics to change the world or only the world by means of changing people’s belief systems?
It is perhaps unsurprising that stoic “self-reliance” and Christian “personal responsibility”, or self-blaming, stand in tandem as a particular desert psychology in their asceticism. The desert psychology of ascetic priests is susceptible to its own nihilism, as Nolan Gertz argues in his book Nihilism. That, however, is ignored by Peterson who is making a whole new career out of the sophistic promotion of “personal responsibility”; he likes to see his adherents’ faces light up at the appeal to this one-sided responsibility! Likewise, his reactionary psychology, sharing similarities with Haidt/Lukianoff, Saad, Murray, and others, is the same psychology of ascetic priests. Co-responsibility deteriorates and so does responsibility as a whole. Peterson doesn’t address the worldly, unchristian materialism that also guides him, built Canada’s Residential Schools, and is the ascetic “rectitude”, i.e., the morality, of the rich in accordance with their self-image and their own subjective interests.
[1] Rather than an existential sentiment, “Amor Fati”, the love of fate, is a stoical one associated with Epictetus who, according to legend, accepted his slavemaster breaking his leg without rebellion. In Enchiridion of Epictetus or Handbook of Epictetus, Epictetus proclaimed, “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy”. Such is the stoical mind’s dissociation from its own self as something willing to be unwilling. As Pascal rightly noted in Pensée, “What the stoics propose is so difficult and worthless”.
[2] The Journals of Kierkegaard, 1832-1854, 247.
[3] The Rebel, 286.
[4] Sickness Unto Death, 58.
[5] The Concept of Irony, 208.
[6] Reflections On The Revolution In France, 141.
[7] The Myth Of Sisyphus, 123.
[8] The Concept of Irony, 327.
[9] Ressentiment, 71.
[10] Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature.
[11] Sewell Jr., William H., A Rhetoric Of Bourgeois Revolution, 196 and Jeremy D. Popkin, A New World Begins, 527.
[12] As quoted in Thomas Szasz’s The Age Of Madness, 22.
[13] The Anti-Christ and Other Writings, 208-9.
[14] As quoted in Thomas Szasz’s The Myth Of Psychotherapy, 153-4.
[15] This sentiment is in conjunction with Rollo May’s explanations of market society’s contradictions and responses to crises in The Meaning Of Anxiety “Chapter 7: Summary And Synthesis of Theories Of Anxiety”, yet this work was listened to after the fact.
[16] Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, 11.
[17] Ibid, 7.
[18] As quoted in Mitchell Mueller’s The Stoic Roots of Christian Asceticism and Modern Psychotherapy, 21.
[19] As Ryan Holiday translates Seneca’s section XII of On Peace Of Mind in The Daily Stoic, 13.