~ 3 Either/Or ~
Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript criticized Hegel for attempting to mediate the course of history into a positive, reconciled system by rationalized necessity (that is, “as a matter of course”), which is supposed to compulsorily make Christians of us all and reach God in heaven as the ultimate rationalized destination. While this destination is supposed to be absolute freedom (the absolute spirit or logos), where is our own freedom? Consequently, even though Kierkegaard was a Christian, he doubted – and with skeptic negation – because Hegel intended to reach absolute freedom “as a matter of course”, but through various pitstops through his varying philosophies of nature, logic, and history. In other words, Hegel intended to reach absolute possibility through necessity as his means. But it’s easy to get bogged down in the necessity of our humdrum, everyday, mechanistic, material, and commercial life while losing sight of possibility. One’s possibility is one’s free choosing, acting, and questioning (as in, say, the Socratic method), which involves our subjectivity, not a mere objective observing or accepting of matters, least of all a rationalization of faith through science, reason, or upbringing. This stands in opposition to the sophistic positivity of the age, where the progress of science is assumed.
In our age, scientific scholarship has come into possession of such prodigious achievements that there must be something wrong somewhere; knowledge not only about the secrets of the human race but even about the secrets of God is offered for sale at such a bargain price today that it all looks very dubious. In our joy over the achievement in our age, we have forgotten that an achievement is worthless if it is not made one's own.
– The Concept of Irony, 327.
If Camus’ nihilist says no and Camus’ absurd man says yes, Camus’ rebel “says no and yes simultaneously”[1]. To what and to what? That is the question. Egotism, nihilism, and narcissism are too commonly accused of those who simply want to understand, to choose, to judge for oneself, and to not conform unthinkingly to matters. Contra this individuality, Shapiro catastrophizes as a resentful naturalist by writing, “We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring moral subjectivism and the rule of passion”, and also, “If you are told repeatedly that your self-esteem is threatened by the system and the structure, and that even statistics and science must not offend you—if you are taught that your bliss matters more than objective truth—you become weak and fragile, unable to cope in the real world”(The Right Side of History). This, however, is in spite of Shapiro not weighing the possibility that this is not a “real world” but his own conservative hero Burke’s dreaded world of “sophisters, economists, and calculators”[2], as in Shapiro and Peterson both. Each exalt Greek natural law and Judeo-Christian values in spite of both value systems showing negative culmination in the middle-class left and upper-class right respectively through this, the French Revolution.
Hicks himself wrote that Peterson is attempting to combine his Judeo-Christian values, a narrow subjectivity, with “rational-scientific” facts, nature and objectivity, in order “not to be either a wishful thinking pre-modernist religious person nor a coldly robotic modern scientific person, but to find a synthesis”[3]. Yet that means to be the mediated “Both/And” not a “Neither/Nor” of being a genuinely transcending individualist. Also, in the context of Peterson’s attempted synthesis of both, Hicks claims that “outright nihilists are mounting a full assault on both pillars of western civilization”. But this is yet another Objectivist’s falsehood because he’ll have a hard time identifying said “outright” nihilists, while it was actually Enlightenment’s own natural philosophy, natural religion, and natural science altogether that bore nihilism, and as a repudiating movement against Russia’s traditionalism and superstitions in Judeo-Christian values. Russia, in an ironical turn, then acted nihilistically in repudiating nihilism with incarcerations and demonizing literature. To take Turgenev’s character, Bazarov, as the exemplar of nihilism, nihilism is imbedded in scientism.
Yet “objectivity” as rhetoric and naturalism as they emerged from 18th century Enlightenment (so one-sidedly praised by Peterson and Hicks) also fostered scientism, and correlated with the rise of natural philosophy and natural religion. Factoring in Walters’ Revolutionary Deists, natural religion could have been Enlightenment’s already posed synthesis in the 18th century because “it convinced many churchmen that religion needed to speak to the head as well as the heart, and that a viable and healthy theological tradition is one that does not balk from the enterprise of reinterpreting its central beliefs in the light of changing scientific and philosophical modes of explanation” (265). Yet there is something ominous regarding Enlightenment deism’s conversion of a professed religion of spiritual inwardness (subjectivity) towards scientific objectivity, which isn’t actually to “speak to the head” because it would have diminished subjective thought and agency. The Both/And mediation collapses in favor of an Either/Or, or outright confusion, just as Kierkegaard was sure would result for modern Christendom as it attempted to justify itself as scientific. Walters explains:
For all the sincerity of their humanistic ideals, the American deists endorsed a philosophical anthropology that simplistically objectified the human spirit. Given their fidelity to mechanistic Newtonianism and its accompanying pan-rationalism, such a view of human nature was perfectly consistent. But consistency notwithstanding, it must be confessed that the perspective was shallow. In their efforts to extend the domain of scientific method to all arenas of investigation, they tended to ignore or dismiss those elements in experience that resisted such incorporation. In the case of their analysis of what is meant to be human, this resulted in a radical de-subjectivization of persons: humans were little more than animated physical objects that, like all other objects, necessarily conformed to immutable natural laws…. But this type of humanism, very much like the cosmological mechanism that served as its foundation, in fact was rather lifeless and flew in the face of ordinary experience. Humans are not predictable, rational cogs in a complex world machine, and this fact became increasingly apparent to critics of Enlightenment deism.
– Revolutionary Deism, 254-5.
Such a criticism of Deism from Walters could be extended as Existential criticism towards naturalism altogether. This is understood in greater detail in section “8 Political Economy and Natural Law” and onward. From actually learning the lessons of history, not performatively saying so – going by Hicks and Peterson, it becomes a necessity of its own for many individuals to transcend history, not get bogged down by conservative ideology, nostalgic idealization, or else historical mummery. Not to be confused with the ascetic, that is the Aesthetic Attitude, which Beauvoir described as a “fleeing the truth of the present”[4] and could also be a fleeing from a creative future.
Free choice is personal, inward, and sometimes irrational in your view of others or in the view of others towards you, and it’s been fundamentally discredited by a rationalizing, quantifying, modern system that demands your “objectivity”, which could mean your objectification to the subjectivities or ideas only of others, or of God, but not your own. Yet such a system that nullifies the principle of contradiction for its polite, mediating end goal is a problem: an irreconciled reconciliation. This attempt by civilized, rationalizing society is idealistic, not just in the German Idealist sense that Hegel was of the German Idealist movement, disposed to romanticizing; it sophistically ignores the contradicting phenomena, which in turn festers into individual resentment, communal decay, and failure to reach the intended end goal, as in Hegel cheering a dictator, later a failure, Napoleon, as such a “world-soul” or a “man of action”[5].
In The Philosophy Of History, Hegel slated “world-historical individuals” or “great men” as embodiments of spirit, of freedom, but, in his words, “so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower — crush to pieces many an object in its path”[6] and that does entail crushing the freedom of many or all. Even one’s own responsibility to communal decay is ignored, especially by an objectivizing observer who takes no responsibility for his own concrete, existing presence and choices when he makes his valuations upon the world and other people as objects. A contemporary example I can give is Peterson grasping for mediation between today’s liberal and conservative factionalism, as if a balance really can be struck (in his mind) between two dysfunctional antagonists in ideology, both of whom were bloody and tyrannical long before socialism came around. And they were precisely why socialism came around as the French Revolution shows, yet Peterson has the mendacity to fixate on (yet overgeneralize, scapegoat, misrepresent, and ignore) socialism rather than ever consider liberalism’s or conservatism’s own genocidal, actual histories corresponding to their own bad theories and philosophies.
The casuist rulebook Beyond Order makes Husserl prophetic in Husserl’s claim in his early paper, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, that a naturalist is an “idealist and objectivist in his conduct”, that “he is filled with the aspiration to bring to knowledge scientifically, thus in a way that binds every rational being, that which is everywhere genuine truth, the genuinely beautiful and good, how it is to be determined in its universal essence, and the method by which is it to be gained in the individual instance” (254). Husserl described further that the naturalist, “teaches, preaches, moralizes, and reforms…. But he denies what every sermon, every demand as such presupposes by its very sense” (255). And I believe this “sense” Husserl alludes to is that these notions of beautiful and good more likely have subjective choosing and valuing rather than objective certainty:
The naivete of speaking about "objectivity" without ever considering subjectivity as experiencing, knowing, and actually concretely accomplishing, the naivete of the scientist of nature or of the world in general, who is blind to the fact that all the truths he attains as objective truths and the objective world itself as the substratum of his formulae (the everyday world of experience as well as the higher-level conceptual world of knowledge) are his own life-construct developed within himself.
– The Crisis Of The European Sciences, 96.
This is analogous to the dispute Kierkegaard had with Hegel and other speculative philosophers of the 19th century. Kierkegaard wrote in Either/Or: Part 2 that
Philosophy has nothing at all to do with what could be called the inner deed, but the inner deed is the true life of freedom. Philosophy considers the external deed, yet in turn it does not see this as isolated but sees it as assimilated into and transformed in the world-historical process. This process is the proper subject for philosophy and it considers this under the category of necessity. Therefore it rejects the reflection that wants to point out that everything could be otherwise; it views world-history in such a way that there is no question of an Either/Or.
Kierkegaard insisted on subjectivity as the source of qualitative judgement on all life as we live it – imparting meaning and value – in the “inner deed”: the mind. But the mind has been discredited in our modern age in favour of the mere quantitative view of hard science, logic, mathematics, credentialed backgrounds, empiricism, and statistical surveys. There’s a sense of possibility, individuality, and free choice to life that is distinct from mere naturalistic, biological, mathematical, empirical, and even logical necessities. But here’s a naturalist in 2021 grasping at “inborn” or “innate” characteristics of humans who are, in turn, determined by necessity in his view, and he reduces humans to mindless non-humans to make things easier for himself:
Much of what people believe politically — ideologically, let us say — is based on their inborn temperament. If their emotions or motivations tend to tilt one way (and much of that is a consequence of biology), then they tend to adopt, say, a conservative or liberal tendency. It is not a matter of opinion. Imagine, instead, that animals have a niche—a place or space that suits them. Their biology is matched to that place.
– Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order, 331.
Such is the basis of naturalistic prejudices, of natural law as dogma, so promoted by stoics and sophists, while stoicism apparently contributed to modern biology, according to Arthur F. Holmes. Peterson even more evidently patronizes as a naturalist in the following, contradicting one of his own politically useful heroes, Nietzsche. Nietzsche formulated the Übermensch as the individualistic value-creator. He also promoted the edict of a “Transvaluation Of All Values”, while Peterson, in a reactionary/thuggish bent, responds, “We have a nature—or, too often, it has us—and only a fool would now dare to claim that we have sufficient mastery of ourselves to create, rather than discover, what we value.”[7] Yet because Peterson additionally believes in individualistic ideology today (or, if he and all these political actors he speaks of really possess human minds, i.e., beliefs, thoughts, and creativity of their own in any capacity), his argument is fundamentally contradictory, just as Husserl said naturalists are fundamentally contradictory with regard to acknowledging their own spirited (subjective, beliefs-driven, and value-projecting) basis. Kierkegaard also noted of our objectivist times that nowadays a man can talk so much, say the most contradictory things, which, “coming from him, is the bitterest satire on his own life.”[8] So it is with Peterson, Hicks, Saad, Haidt/Lukianoff, and all rhetorically reasonable or else rhetorically individualistic people.
Kierkegaard explained the concept of spirit as inwardness, individuality, and even as Christianity (“Christ is spirit, his religion that of spirit”). Women, men, trans people, atheists, all can have spirit, even if they aren’t Christians, for spirit predates and exists outside Christianity, and particularly in Socrates according to Kierkegaard. Whereas Kierkegaard admitted that many Christians can end up spiritless. Spirit stands in contrast to nature. Therefore, spirit stands in contrast to naturalists such as Peterson, an allegedly spiritual man in his religion. Kierkegaard on spirit:
Very carefully introduced for an hour or so in the distance of the imagination, natural man can bear it, it even pleases him. But if it is brought nearer to him, so near that it becomes, in all seriousness, something required of him: the natural instinct of self-preservation rises up so powerfully in him that a regular uproar follows, as with drink or as one talks of a furor uterinus[nymphomania]. And in that condition, in which he is beside himself, he demands the death of the man of spirit, or rushes upon him to put him to death….
– The Journals of Kierkegaard, 1832-1854, 254.
Where naturalists lay claim to objective factful-ness (as they subjectively determine it) and discount the subjectivity of other individuals, so too is the naturalist Peterson arguing deterministically as a supposedly existential or Christian individualist. At rock bottom, he fears the individual in favour of the ascetic psychologist tradition of ordering, policing, and herding the mind, despite individuality, as in Pinel policing “the passions” stoically with only the veneer of liberation, or else Howard inventing solitary confinement on the basis of saving souls through moral repentance. Rather, they were to make us all useful members of a nation, an economy, and mechanical philosophy.
Free, individual choice can be taken as a good, contra nature. It could be a real good. If that is so, then women having free choice regarding abortion is a good. It is itself evil, then, for Peterson to shame them with objectivist yet toxically emotivist truth claims that “abortion is clearly wrong. I don’t think anybody debates that. You wouldn’t recommend that someone that you love have one.”[9]These happen to all be laughable and falsifiable claims to knowledge typical of an on-stage naturalist, whether possibly or actually, because the phenomenon of our everyday, lived existence negates them. He also makes the claim that, “We all axiomatically assume the reality of our individual existences and conscious experiences, and we extend the same courtesy to others (or else).”[10] But this is ignorant of all the blatant fictions peddled in our everyday, whether by an aristocratic press or else a vulgar, tabloid, clickbait press of the middle-class[11]. It’s also ignorant of philosophy’s justifiably doubtful attitudes, across many eras, towards perceptual (empirical yet still subjective) experience, as in Plato’s Theaetetus or Descartes’ “Evil Genius” in Meditations On First Philosophy. So our naturalist, Peterson, also has the problem of not just being unreasonable but in being intellectually dishonest in what he knows, which is nothing.
Kierkegaard was far more insightful at 28 than Peterson’s lifetime of credentialed research because Kierkegaard understood negativity as freedom over-and-above the sophist, the touring advise-giver. Kierkegaard: “sophistry is precisely the everlasting duel of knowledge with the phenomenon in the service of egotism, which can never terminate the duel in a decisive victory because the phenomenon rises up again as quickly as it falls”[12]. So it could be with casuistry, which is the extrapolation from particular experience general rules to then apply to particular experience again. The particular experience of each individual renders general rules impracticable in life’s infinite and varied situations. The same applies to the casuist’s own attempt to follow his own rules.
Furthermore, if the beautiful and good are remotely subjective, it means they are willed and constructed by people; they might not be in an absolute real world somewhere. If so, then they are constructed by each of us making up our minds about them and not merely accepted as objectively-certain, or even scientific, fact. But even acceptance presumes someone is making up their mind about it as a subjectivity. Certainly, to resurrect the literal mind as a neglected factor of fact-finding in today’s anti-subjective (and therefore mindless) sciences has devastating implications for modern science and knowledge. The mind is especially devastating to the naturalist’s absurd presumptions that he can really know “inborn” or “innate” facts regarding human nature, or that he can know what is good and beautiful anywhere without every other individual’s say in the matter on their own perspective of life – on their own circumstances and their own meaning.
Nevertheless, the naturalist, being too removed from actual philosophical knowledge in his overspecialized “place”, still chatters at the podium as a sophist, in a presumably objective manner, and very passive adherents reciprocate him and his fact and advice-giving in an echo chambered, herded dependence. Where Beauvoir and Camus’ notion of “sub men”, or Kierkegaard’s “sample-men” (who could be embodied by Monsieur Tallien in the play) are concerned here, such men don’t want to come to terms with the possibility they themselves are more narcissistic, relativist, nihilist, divisive, and resentful than their idealized, Strawman antagonists (as in Haidt/Lukianoff’s invented “Misoponos” and his “three bad ideas”, which no one on university campuses even have), just as the aristocratic press didn’t want to come to terms with Anne-Josèphe’s identity but instead chattered endlessly. With sophistical bantering, “It was always a matter of the particular case and of victory in the particular case”, said Kierkegaard, and worse still, “the sophists' pompous, confident parading, their matchless self-sufficiency (all of which we learn from Plato), is proof enough that they thought themselves able to satisfy the demands of the times, not by shaking the foundations of everything but, after having shaken the foundations, by making it all secure again”[13]. Such is the case, I believe, with all the pomp and pseudo-rebellion amassed around Peterson’s failed effort to oppose Bill C-16 on the basis of liberal principles. Peterson’s sappiness is also explained when Kierkegaard said that sophists knew so well how to work on the passions with their art of public speaking above all.
The right-wing is strong-arming its way into liberalism even though liberalism’s actual history is undoubtedly opposed to the right-wing. Today, right-wing liberals claim to transcend group or class interests, and in favour of classical liberality (which nevertheless had equalizing, class, and revolutionary interests). Yet their under-read casuist Peterson validates their errors, ignorance, and intolerance in the interest of political reaction.
By his own relativistic reinterpretation, Peterson even inverts the concept of “meek”, as in the Christian claim that “the meek shall inherit the Earth.” In the context of mediating “meek” with the Jungian “Shadow”, Peterson overgeneralizes with the following: “everyone says you should be harmless, virtuous, you shouldn’t do anyone any harm.... No. Wrong. You should be a monster, an absolute monster, and then you should learn how to control it.”[14] Such is the un-Christian moral laxity Pascal accused of casuists, however.
Never was the name of the blessed Jesus more grossly prostituted than when applied to a Society which is certainly the very opposite, in spirit and character, to Him who was "meek and lowly,” "holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners." The Jesuits may be said to have invented for their own peculiar use, an entirely new system of ethics. In place of the divine law, they prescribed, as the rule of their conduct, a “blind obedience" to the will of their superiors, whom they are bound to recognize as "standing in the place of God," and in fulfilling whose orders they are to have no more will of their own "than a corpse, or an old man's staff."
– Rev. Thomas M’Crie, “Historical Introduction”,
The Provincial Letters, 90.
They neglected Christian grace, just as a Christian commentator today, Joseph Kirby, also says of Peterson’s inversion of “meek”[15]. “It is possible for grace to heal it”, the shadow, “to transmute corrupted emotional energy back into the love of God…. Let us be meek, not monsters”, says Kirby to Peterson[16]. From neglect of actually learning from history, however, casuistry is strong-arming its way back into Christianity. The implicit 25th rule: “Be An Absolute Monster, Control It Later.” Abiding that rule is Peterson’s twitter feed, where his resentment, ideology, emotional reasoning, irresponsibility, and nihilism continually pile on during COVID. Based on my arguing with his followers, they apologetically nod their heads to the casuistic impetus to become monsters – overgeneralizing that men these days are “emasculated” otherwise. So we might as well regress to the excessive duelling of 17th century France, or else the murder sprees of the Unabomber, Lépine, and Breivik, so as to coddle our threatened masculinity against leftism. That’s not so much a slippery slope than saying an individual should be a “monster, an absolute monster”.
To be a Christian is to be charitable, honest, passive, harmless, and virtuous. That is incontestable, especially for aggressive, “natural” men. To contest or invert the meekiness of Christianity is to, therefore, be un-Christian. Either one is Christian or one is not, in this matter, and where Peterson’s crusade to fight nihilism, resentment, or irresponsibility is concerned, he is naturally Kierkegaard’s own characterization of a casuist in that he, “always has seven pieces of advice, seven answers right at hand”, yet, “nourishes the sickness he wants to cure” and he is not conscious of it[17]. And this historically was the case with the original casuist writers who were employed by Jesuit priests to offer cures to Catholicism’s declining marketability with their lists of rules to live by. But these positive rules were not authentic – and therefore not effective – solutions from the declining church. Consequently, Jesuits then became resentful and combative of negating criticism, as Pascal’s negating work brilliantly showed:
Let them seriously ponder, as in the sight of God, how shameful, and how prejudicial to the Church, is the morality which your casuists are in the habit of propagating; the scandalous and unmeasured license which they are introducing into public manners; the obstinate and violent hardihood with which you support them.
– Provincial Letters, 311.
The “master plan” (as Shapiro so names and values European Judeo-Christianity) of universal value believers was forsaken by particular and contradicting disputes over what their universal values are. Just as in Judaism and Christianity, Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglican and non-conformists, so too in Jansenists and Jesuits. Jesuits were so resentful, in fact, that they called troops into Port-Royal, the Jansenist monastery, for their own ideological interests[18]. So it is with many allegedly non-ideological right-wingers, but also centrists, stoics, and naturalists today where the analogy to Port-Royal could be to call 911 on today’s universities[19].
So civil society finds itself contradictory. It proves it cannot tolerate opinions and their corresponding opposites all at once in an over-abundantly liberal ideal. It cannot cancel the act of cancelling without contradiction either. “The immediate consciousness, secure and confident as it relies upon what it receives from the past, like a sacred treasure, scarcely ever notices that life is full of contradictions”, wrote Kierkegaard[20]. Nevertheless, Haidt/Lukianoff, Shapiro, and Murray all absent-mindedly reference Martin Luther King jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, as all moderates too often do as a means of moderating all in their system. But they ignore just how radical in the anti-capitalist bent King really was[21]; also that in the same year as the “I Have A Dream” speech, King wrote from inside a prison cell:
I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. ….the white moderate, who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
– Letter From Birmingham Jail.
Civil society is moderate and irresponsible this way today in that it has its own shrewd cancelling – a fostering of injustice through moderate, objectivist, and anonymous neutrality, as well as through attacks against radical leftists, “social justice warriors” (SJWs), and “identity politics” liberals. To be sure, Mark Lilla’s attempt at mediating identity politics into the anonymous mass of US Democratic Party interest in winning elections happens to be so slanderous, over-generalizing, and poorly-representative of college campuses and identity politics, it doesn’t mediate anything. SJWs and “identity politics” end up being weaponized even more for the right.
Worse still is Lilla’s obnoxious and absurd insistence that identity politics is a religious orientation. If identity politics displays acts of shaming and guilt, it is because the Christian notion of it has commonly assigned guilt to the sinner responsible for bad conduct in relation to God alone. Yet our age is neglectful of the fact that guilt can and sometimes should be found in the consciences of those responsible for bad conduct to each other in community. This happens to be by Lilla’s own rubric of commonality and duties to one another.
Ironically, as a liberal, Lilla despises individualistic identity. His favoured identity, however, as his rallying call for progressives, is to make everyone into an anonymous citizenry – a characterless mass. Just as Enlightenment modernization contrived to form France’s departments and the elimination of “patois” for France’s national language (thereby homogenizing regional identities into a national identity), so too does Lilla wish to make a completely anonymous voting public out of US individuals. Yet this is completely ignorant of Kierkegaard’s polemic against an abstract public.
The demoralization of absolute monarchy and the decline of revolutionary periods have frequently been described, but the decline of an age devoid of passion is just as degenerate, even though less striking because of its ambiguity. Thus it may be of interest and significance to think about this. In this state of indolent laxity, more and more individuals will aspire to be nobodies in order to become the public, that abstract aggregate ridiculously formed by the participant's becoming a third party.
– Two Ages, 94.
As an unpublished supplement to Two Ages, Kierkegaard can also be found making something of a naturalistic insult, but at least it’s to goad natural men to become concrete, existing individuals:
The apathy of indolence and the at best only inquisitive but conceited, self-important indifference eventually deposits an unorganic something that could be called the public…. This public likes to transform all actuality into a theater, to have nothing to do itself but imagine that everything anyone does happens in order for it to have something to chatter about. Little by little this public increases in numbers. The superior ones remain outside the union or choose more modest tasks; those who did have any drive and enthusiasm soon find it is not worth the trouble to work but far easier to join the great alliance. Now the leveling begins, but precisely because the age is devoid of idea it gives birth to no forceful individuals but instead produces what might be compared to the flies physicians tell us precede the outbreak of cholera.
– Two Ages, 136.
Because Lilla’s identity as a Democrat suffered a Democrat loss in 2016, his first instinct is to blame internally in the Democratic Party – a “will to persecute” – though he himself claims to oppose the blaming of identity liberals. As his token, centrist, middle-way, and self-ignorant qualifier, Lilla admits the concrete problems of persecution as pointed out by identity politics. But this is said only in passing:
the concrete issues they care about are all too real. It is unconscionable that black motorists and pedestrians have been regularly singled out by police officers who then handled them violently, with impunity in some places. It is obscene that some young men, minorities in large part, are handed long sentences for selling drugs used by the poor, while those who sell drugs to the rich serve short ones. It is undemocratic that some women receive lower pay for the same work men perform. It is wrong that in some places gay couples walking hand in hand can be threatened on the street—and transgender people, suffer far worse—without the perpetrators fearing punishment. It is shameful that for so long their partners were not accorded the basic rights and dignities that married couples enjoy.
– The Once And Future Liberal, 127.
So then address them, Lilla, rather than digress to your project of harmonizing all into absurd anonymities as US voters and an abstract public, ignorant of identities and persecution. Lilla claims openly regarding the uncompromising stance of affirming people’s identities that “Not everything is a matter of principle—and even when something is, there are usually other, equally important principles that might have to be sacrificed to preserve this one”. Then Lilla dabbles in being unprincipled where, as is typical of politicians, political promises don’t align with actions. This is a problem of Either/Or, not Both/And, where Lilla wants a nationally-harmonizing platform for US Democrats, yet still attacks and divides by attacking identity politics.
Kierkegaard once again: “The principle of contradiction strengthens the individual in faithfulness to himself, so that, just like that constant number three Socrates speaks of so beautifully, which would rather suffer anything and everything than become a number four or even a very large round number, he would rather be something small, if still faithful to himself, than all sorts of things in contradiction to himself.”[22] Concrete life, as Kierkegaard understood it, becomes a problem of Either/Or regarding contradicting beliefs, just as Kierkegaard meant to show with his comments on Hegel’s “mediation” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Two Ages. By Hegel’s mediation, one belief is sublated in turn by another belief, passively, to a degree of relativism such that the individual becomes anonymous – devoid of decision and thought. Regarding Lilla, he took a loss in the US 2016 election to be a pretext to scapegoat identity politics for causing divisions and to frame college campuses as severed from “reality”. Yet as Trump and his fanbase deflected to Obama instead of accounting for themselves for causing so much national division, so too does Lilla fail to account for his own causing of divisions. His own self could be severed from reality.
The overly-liberal mindset certainly pays no attention to its own contradictory absurdities, as in the Canadian liberal Prime Minister McKenzie King praising Hitler’s pre-war regime and expecting world harmony and peace in return – while many radicals were already laying down their lives to fight fascism[23]. We’re slogging through our own similar time of conflict and polarization. As for Haidt/Lukianoff referencing Thucydides to moralize against intolerance and toward centrist harmonization, they don’t reflect on the very words they referenced, that “the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action”. It’s alternatively translated as, “moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing”, though let’s just say unmanliness means childish naivety here.
Appeal To Moderation happens to be a logical fallacy. Granted, it doesn’t apply to every appeal to moderation yet, contrasting the age of revolution, Kierkegaard argued that what is wrong with the present age, our age, is that everyone knows everything but nobody does anything. That if one were to act, a thousand reflections would descend upon them. He also argued that, “Neutrality is founded on a positive acknowledgment of the respective validity, [according to the intrinsic value] of each faction. Remove the presupposition of this condition for neutrality and eo ipso [precisely thereby] the neutrality is negatively qualified as satire”[24]. This play can then be qualified as satire, just like our own age.
Granted, I don’t want to cultivate a one-sided dogmatism. Rather, I can demonstrate through this essay, as well as the play, the sheer piling-on of contradictions that weigh on us altogether by mediating all opinion, weighing all sides, as in Condorcet’s idyllic liberal society of endless discourse. Regarding the civil harmonizing of all opinion, think of Kierkegaard’s systematizing philistine, Hegel, who, “without regard to compatibility, takes along every Tom, Dick, and Harry when he goes on an excursion to the woods”; Hegel’s ill-fated ideal is that, “inasmuch as there is room enough in the four-seated Holstein carriage, so also is the system hospitable – there is indeed plenty of room”[25]. Even Nietzsche considered objective, compromising people to be full of it, while the objectivist professor Kierkegaard ironically describes above is also an idealist of his own with little regard to pragmatism, realism, or contradiction. His hope of fitting everything into his system is futile as he himself contrives not to live within it but in a shack outside of it, as Kierkegaard would say. To be sure, all self-satisfied objectivists, realists, naturalists, and pragmatists – especially in the political sphere – don’t face up to the problem of everything still possibly amounting to the mere idea – as in George Berkeley’s idealism – not reality itself.
Nietzsche has a constant problem of his own of being an idealist in the philosophical sense, in spite of him denouncing idealists[26]. Specifically, Nietzsche is absorbed in his own mind’s interpretation of the world – his own consciousness freed – as to what reality is for him, and he rarely characterizes the minds of others accurately – mostly his own. This is freedom without responsibility to other freedoms, or Beauvoir’s notion of the Adventurer in Ethics of Ambiguity. Nietzsche’s idea of spirited nobility entailed slavery or spiritless-ness in others. He wrote in The Gay Science, “We rejoice in all men, who like ourselves love danger, war and adventure, who do not make compromises”, but then, “We ponder over the need of a new order of things, even of a new slavery”[27]. This is also why Nietzsche is considered more of a phase than life philosophy. For Beauvoir, this solipsistic degree of freedom (as the “Adventurer”) isn’t authentic freedom yet.
If Nietzsche’s own ideality had become actuality, his lapse into insanity would’ve rendered him uncared for by the women in his life. “Pity is only a virtue for decadents”, he said with an accusing tone in Ecce Homo; and in The Antichrist: “Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type.”[28] Thus spoke a master over life. Too much care can indeed stifle one’s own life for another’s, but then the privileged care of Nietzsche could’ve been accordingly given to the Anne-Josèphes in history who wanted freedom, wanted life itself, by appealing to pity out of their asylum windows. Comparing Anne-Josèphe and Nietzsche, who each struggled for their freedom through a precarious sanity, this could be the double standard of gendered experience.
Nietzsche fails to be phenomenological by, in an intersubjective sense, objectifying his mind for a moment as a listener and reader. Many reactionaries fail just as hard – and it is in their resentful interest to do so – to get the character of someone infamously wrong, as reactionary journalists and historians did of Anne-Josèphe. An example from reaction today is the insistence that the left[29] obsesses over power. With its own power-preserving intent, the contemporary right’s moral handwringing[30] against the left’s scholarly analysis of power just so happens to be ignorant of Jeremy Bentham’s own conception of power. Foucault interpreted Bentham (a classical liberal deeply influential in British statecraft), to critique the panopticism of classical liberals and the modern rationalizing – that is, the biopolitics and biopower – of populations in general. Yet Bentham is rather Gothically enshrined in London – and in British and Canadian law – despite reducing human nature to this:
Human beings are the most powerful instruments of production, and therefore everyone becomes anxious to employ the services of his fellows in multiplying his own comforts. Hence the intense and universal thirst for power.
– Jeremy Bentham, “The Psychology of
Economic Man”, 300.
Bentham’s panopticon, though a failure in its literal manifestation, nevertheless lives on in the surveillance gaze of the business owner. In the mid-twentieth century, Canadian economist Stephen Hymer said the employer ideally “saw everything, knew everything, and decided everything.”[31] Smith subsidized such an all-seeing gaze with a preference for illiberality: “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.”[32] Even the halfway moderation of this preference, towards humane liberality, still means half an expectation of illiberal discipline.
But what if the reasoned, Enlightened Individualism that classical liberals appeal to isn’t reasoned, Enlightened Individualism? What then? What if it can be appealed to as sophistic rhetoric – along with “rationality” and “impartiality” – to mask power relations, un-Enlightened group interests, Moral and Epistemic Normativity and Relativism, and co-irresponsibility? That, I believe, is Foucault’s criticism, not necessarily Foucault’s obsessive worldview or “fatal” error, regarding power. Factor him away and the phenomena of historical writing itself still yields the private passions and wills of men and groups relating to power, as Discipline and Punish reveals with meticulous quoting.
To oblige conservatives with their own interpretation of power, Russell Kirk wrote in his Concise Guide to Conservatism that “Power, politically speaking, is the ability to do as one likes, regardless of the wills of one’s fellows and neighbors” and yet in the same chapter, wrote, “power cannot be abolished; it always finds its way into someone’s control”, and “no one, I repeat, ever succeeds in abolishing power. Like energy, power is not dissipated; it merely changes forms”. But these are trivially true statements if we consider power to also be freedom, as Nietzsche and Foucault might. “If there are relations of power throughout every social field it is because there is freedom everywhere” Foucault said in an interview[33]. More negatively regarding freedom, then, here is the conservative Burke applying his interpretation of the classically liberal French Revolution:
Where have you placed the real power over monied and landed circulation? Where have you placed the means of raising and falling the value of every man’s freehold?.... The whole of the power obtained by this revolution will settle in the towns among the burghers, and the monied directors who lead them.
– Reflections on the Revolution in France, 165.
For academia to reflect on these statements on power is to reflect on who is rendered powerless: that is, unfree. Scapegoating is the futile absolving of collective sins through one particular person or group, and the way Enlightenment ought to work is where people try to be grounded in the beliefs that are not just their own.
If the centrist or rightist idealogue isn’t going to acknowledge that the negative traits might also be in his own camp (as double-speak, he might degrade a radical’s views as “power-obsessed” yet validate his own as “freedom-oriented”), it might be, altogether, ideological scapegoating of leftist academics to accuse them of power-obsession, or to patronize them for seeing things in only economic terms – as if that’s not what economics itself has been doing to shape the world and its populations long before (and while) socialism has been scapegoated for “social planning”, “engineering”, or “conditioning”. After all, it was Locke’s Tabula Rasa, or the “blank slate” of the mind, that gave countless expert others the pretext to condition life via the prison, the workplace, the hospital, the school, the Residential School, and psychology, as Michael Ignatieff’s A Just Measure Of Pain shows. This was in spite of one’s natural innateness or individual freedom.
In Explaining Postmodernism, Hicks credits both naturalism and Tabula Rasa to Anglo-US Liberal Enlightenment in several of his comically oversimplistic charts. What these concepts actually amount to in either direction, however, is the erosion of individuality. This is in spite of Hicks idealizing individuality in his philosophically “objectivist” worldview. If one is sophistical, naturalism can be wielded as a slight-of-hand insistence on the factual unchangeableness and “innate” character of the human being as the social engineer decides, yet Tabula Rasa could be a pretext for changing human beings, also as the social engineer decides. Ignatieff calls this “Materialist Optimism”, which pre-dates the Historical Materialism attributed to Marx. Ignatieff explains:
English materialism derived largely from the work of David Hartley and John Locke. Since their doctrine denied the existence of innate ideas, it offered an immensely influential "scientific" rebuttal of the idea of original sin, and hence of the notion that criminals were incorrigible. Materialism enabled prison reformers to ascribe criminality to incorrect socialization rather than to innate propensities. As Bentham put it, criminals were "froward children, persons of unsound mind," who lacked the self-discipline to control their passions according to the dictates of reason.
– A Just Measure Of Pain, 66.
Yet it’s noteworthy that criminality in that time could be and was extended to the social deviant, the unemployed vagrant, the upset and contradicting woman, the absentee employee, and the idler, any who didn’t conform to the commercial morality and etiquette of the upper classes.
Hicks doesn’t elaborate on the contradictory tension of his naturalism, Tabula Rasa, and individuality, let alone the despotic implications of this Materialist Psychology that arose from his favoured Enlightenment era. The English philosopher Locke; the English philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard; the English lawmaker and Utilitarian philosopher Bentham; French asylum reformer Pinel; and the US founder of American Psychiatry Benjamin Rush: these pre-socialist social engineers comprised what Ignatieff calls the “disciplinary enthusiasms of the age”[34]. The penitentiary correction of the criminal took its place at the bottom of a disciplinary scale in the middle-class – yet liberal reformist – rationale of economic society: school-workhouse-asylum-prison. And then “Wedgwood, Strutt, and Boulton, the creators of the new factory discipline, drew inspiration from the same discourse on authority as the makers of the prison”[35], says Ignatieff. The increase of rhetoric of freedom and humanity from classical liberalism’s camp correlated with an increase in disciplinary control, which actually “denied individual responsibility”[36] so far as the individual became ordered and pliant under a lawful, religious, medical, and industrial gaze.
In 1936, Husserl explained that, “in naive naturalism the soul is now taken to be like an isolated space, like a writing tablet, in [Locke’s] famous simile, on which psychic data come and go.”[37] Through said data inputs, the individual can be habituated or disciplined for certain uses as a machine, so this Materialist Optimism goes. And Enlightenment psychology really did wield naturalism and Tabula Rasa this way – with the intention of habituating the body to work on the one hand and subjugating the mind to Christian moralization on the other. Just as it was with Europe’s lower class, so too was with First Nations peoples on Turtle Island, i.e., North America. It assumes the passive reception of this, now that, data, but it’s devoid of individualistic negation, refusal, activity, or inwardness because the person is ideally render an inert thing in accordance with objectifying or mechanical orderliness. One can be susceptible to this, or else that, trend of ideas as a pure passivity, anonymity, or animality.
Husserl described the development of said ideas after Locke, “This data-sensationalism…dominates psychology and the theory of knowledge for centuries, even up to the present day.”[38] Yet this paradigm prompted Husserl’s sense in the 1930s of an impending crisis of the European sciences, which we haven’t even resolved. It became a shallow objectivization by psychology of other people’s minds, i.e., their subjectivity, spontaneity, transcendence, creativity, spirit, inwardness, perception, and free will. This is in the shrewd though futile ambition of being validated as a hard science. Husserl explained:
One has expected the same objectivity from psychology as from physics, and because of this a psychology in the full and actual sense has been quite impossible; for an objectivity after the fashion of natural science is downright absurd when applied to the soul, to subjectivity, whether as individual subjectivity, individual person, and individual life or as communally historical subjectivity, as social subjectivity in the broadest sense.
– Philosophy as Mankind's Self-Reflection, 337.
All objectivism mystifies one’s own subjectivity from oneself. And the appeal to objectivity from another is thus an attempt to eliminate one’s own mind so as to be ordered by the other’s own.
What helps with being read is that you do the reading and quoting of others to – at least mostly – understand what is meant: To ‘engage with the material’ as any wise teacher would instruct a failing student. Just as well, before you commit to (or oppose) ideas, systems, or persons, it’s important to try to know them as a whole – even to know what’s opposed. It’s important not to misrepresent or slander them, and it does one’s conscience little good to cherrypick Nietzsche much (as Hicks tries to weaponize Nietzsche’s “ressentiment” concept) since, during one of his shallow and accusing jaunts, Nietzsche deemed “conservatives of all times” to be “adventitious liars”[39]. This was argued in the span of just one paragraph so Nietzsche offers something for everyone across the political spectrum when that something is toxicity.
Nietzsche, it turns out, personally corresponded with and praised Hippolyte Taine[40]. Taine was a French right-wing historian and naturalist of the 19th century – the very scientifically positivist, yet regressive, century following the French Revolution. By the end of this play, Taine is honored here with ironic use of one of his actual quotes about France’s radical women. It explicitly mentions Anne-Josèphe and Claire Lacombe as a complaining sentence that spans a whole paragraph. Nietzsche and Taine could have exchanged their reactionary ideas towards “emancipated women”. Further still, Dostoevsky himself was influenced by Taine[41] while Nietzsche was – by his own admission in Twilight of the Idols – influenced by Dostoevsky’s novels. Nietzsche’s disdain in Twilight Of The Idols, then, of anarchists, socialists, and emancipated women might be a result, in part, of his reading Dostoevsky’s The Possessed: a demonizing and fictional story of the same wave of nevertheless dysfunctional, even nihilistic, though still confusingly moderate, elitist, asylum-building classical liberalism that swept across France – and then into Russia in Dostoevsky’s time.
Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, a French Protestant Pastor and Girondin moderate of the National Assembly said during the French Revolution that “All establishments in France crown the unhappiness of the people: to render them happy it is necessary to renew them; to change their ideas, to change their laws; to change their manners; ...to change men, to change things; to change words…to destroy everything; yes, to destroy everything; since everything is to be re-created.”[42] - I am not so nihilistic as this. Yet one gets the sense here of 18th century Enlightened liberalism harbouring its own pent-up nihilism and resentment, which it today scapegoats upon the socialist left. Then, as in now, one finds an incredible amount of righteous resentment against the middle-class because the middle-class is actually ignorant of its hypocritical legacy of radicalism and revolution.
Now, once you explore the beliefs and works of Taine, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, it’s hard to see if they depicted radicals or “the women question” (as some of Dostoevsky’s own characters in The Possessed and Brothers Karamazov call it) in good faith[43]. After all, what Adam Smith termed the “lower ranks” or “the great multitude”, Nietzsche termed the slave-minded “herd” and the French right inhumanely termed “canaille” (“pack of dogs”) as early as the 17th century[44]. Permitting the common people and women the ability to actually govern themselves is prohibited from the right as a matter of both their history and principles, just as elitism is opposed to “mobocracy” or “tyranny by the majority”. And yet representative chambers, juries, and supreme courts of law still depend on majority voting. Liberal centrism also upheld the same views over the lower class, as one finds out in this essay’s later section “5 Classical Liberalism”. In a more particular case, Peterson fearmongers of today’s leftist radicalism as necessarily leading to totalitarianism, i.e., a system centralized under total control by the few, a party, or else a state. Instead, he favors a faith in competence and hierarchy in the west, yet that could only reaffirm faith in the competence and hierarchy that justifies a party vanguard or elite, as in the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union; but also a doctor in an asylum, as in Esquirol; or else a king, a legislature only of propertied men, a Committee Of Public Safety, an Abbé Sieyès, or an emperor Napoleon – all of whom put stock to the nation’s acceptance of “rule of law”, a dog-whistle easily favorable by Napoleon, just as in John Adams, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.
It might, then, be too naïve to assume that learned thinkers, experts, authors, heroes, idols, and leaders in our history are ever fully uncommitted, let alone uncompromised, in their ideas of hierarchical mastery, competence, or reason. In plain language, they might be wrong and dogmatic about what they write on regarding “human nature” as we all might be. Engagement in nature, then, still becomes a matter of each of our own individual choosing between the Either/Ors of life, but that means subjective engagement, not an objectivist nullification of the principle of contradiction – of reasoning itself. Does one favor nature or spirit - easily understood as objectivity or subjectivity? Does one favor mere facticity or else freedom – easily understood as human nature or human freedom? One absurd existence lived out by people who professes to be for spirit, for freedom, actually inheres in Nietzsche’s Ascetic Priest in On The Genealogy Of Morality. Such a priest promotes soulfulness, spirituality, yet inversely dogmatizes human nature as inherently “flawed”, innately sinful. He paints life as inherently suffering and then profits immensely, in a worldly way, from his listeners who have taken up this same view of life as suffering…for he is their cure. Ascetic priestliness, or else materialistic asceticism, is the nefarious, disciplinary means of subjugating the individual. He actually cancels spirit – cancels the life of the human being.
[1] The Rebel, 13.
[2] Reflections On The Revolution In France, 65.
[3] “Jordan Peterson’s Religious Facts and Values”, Jordan Peterson: Critical Responses.
[4] Ethics Of Ambiguity, 76.
[5] Broussard, Nicolas, Napoleon, Hegelian Hero, https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/napoleon-hegelian-hero/.
[6] Hegel, G.W.F., “Introduction: III. Philosophical History”, The Philosophy Of History, 32.
[7] Beyond Order, 164.
[8] Two Ages, 103.
[9] Peterson, Biblical Series IV - Adam & Eve : Self-Consciousness, Evil, & Death.
[10] Beyond Order, 166.
[11] See the Historical Introduction to Kierkegaard’s Two Ages as well as Hong And Hong’s The Corsair Affair.
[12] The Concept of Irony, 25.
[13] Ibid, 207.
[14] Kirby, Joseph. A Meek Monster. https://www.christiancourier.ca/a-meek-monster/
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] The Concept of Irony, 208.
[18] Pascal, Blaise, Provincial Letters, 51-2.
[19] Haidt, Jonathan and Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling Of The American Mind.
[20] The Concept of Irony, 204.
[21] Honey, Michael K., To The Promised Land.
[22] Two Ages, 97.
[23] Teigrob, Robert, Four Days in Hitler’s Germany, 78-80.
[24] Two Ages, 56.
[25] Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
[26] Nietzsche segment in Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s entry on "Idealism".
[27] The Gay Science, 343.
[28] The Antichrist, 6.
[29] Or specifically Foucault? I mean, who knows what the right means when all the left and even the right have been mischaracterized by the right. Foucault did take interest in Nietzsche’s Will-to-Power but that doesn’t mean all leftists do as they choose their own “Will-to” aims. The Fallacy of Composition is worth looking up. Yet “power”, as Nietzsche and Foucault probably meant for it to be, is freedom itself, and that’s being lost in translation for the ideological ends of today’s critics, catastrophizers, and witch hunters against “power politics” or “oppressed-oppressor” dichotomies, yet both actually predate today’s era, as well as Marx, as in General Lafayette praising the US revolution: “May this great monument, raised to Liberty, serve as a lesson to the oppressor, and an example to the oppressed!”, as quoted in Paine’s Rights Of Man (pg. 96). Do we discredit the US revolution as an “oppressed-oppressor” dichotomy? An “us vs. them”?
[30] Murray, Douglas. The Madness Of Crowds, 53.
[31] As quoted in Michael Perelman’s The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 226.
[32] Smith, Wealth Of Nations, 513.
[33] The Final Foucault, 12.
[34] A Just Measure Of Pain, 109.
[35] Ibid, 215
[36] Ibid, 69.
[37] The Crisis Of The European Sciences, 85.
[38] Ibid, 85.
[39] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science.
[40] Miller, Randolph. “Properly Speaking Man Is Imbecile”: Nietzschean Skepticism in the Political Thought of French Conservative Hippolyte Taine.
[41] Medzhibovskaya, Inessa. “Like a Shepherd to His Flock: The Messianic Pedagogy of Fyodor Dostoevsky—Its Sources and Conceptual Echoes”, Dostoevsky Beyond Dostoevsky, Science, Religion, Philosophy.
[42] A footnote in Burke’s Reflections On The Revolution In France, 142.
[43] Dostoevsky’s personal views on the woman question are evidenced – though perhaps as a politically intentional in account – in “Vladimir Meshchersky: He Was the Most Loyal, Dedicated and Conservative Monarchist”, The Dostoevsky Archive, 204-5.
[44] Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, ed. Janet Todd, 342.