~ 6 Nihilism and the Division of Labour ~
Considering The Banalization of Nihilism written by Karen L. Carr, nihilism has become utterly banal and doesn’t necessarily arise in youth, or in the radical on the far left or far right. In fact, nihilism as a movement to repudiate everything in Tsarist Russia correlated with the waves of natural science, physicalism, and natural religion sweeping into Russia, as opposed to the conservative’s Revealed Religion and outdated feudalism. Implied here is that capitalism doesn’t account for itself in its battle with feudalism when it posits itself as the higher. On nihilism’s origins, Alan Pratt’s Internet Encyclopedia Of Philosophy entry states that:
The movement advocated a social arrangement based on rationalism and materialism as the sole source of knowledge and individual freedom as the highest goal. By rejecting man’s spiritual essence in favor of a solely materialistic one, nihilists denounced God and religious authority as antithetical to freedom.
According to Frank’s biography Dostoevsky, the developments in radicalism in Dostoevsky’s time demonstrated Enlightenment liberal-capitalist features, not strictly socialist ones as Peterson might be fearmongering after his reading of The Possessed. He thinks the book implicates socialist utopianism but it actually implicates his own classical liberal ideology and Russia’s right-wing, conservative antagonism to it also. Frank on Dostoevsky’s return to St. Petersburg after ten years of Siberian exile:
he thus found it impossible to accept the reigning ideas of the new generation of the 1860s that had arisen during his absence. Promulgated by Nikolay Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov, these ideas were a peculiar Russian mixture of the atheism of Ludwig Feuerbach, the materialism and rationalism of eighteenth-century French thought, and the English Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. Russian radicalism had acquired a new foundation, labeled “rational egoism” by Chernyshevsky, that the post-Siberian Dostoevsky found it impossible to accept.
– Dostoevsky, xvi.
Certainly, the actual-historical Young Russia was a radical pamphlet for its incendiary nihilism in St. Petersburg and calls for the death of the royal family, yet Fyodor Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail believed that they weren’t taken seriously by most. The climax of Dostoevsky’s book The Possessed results in a series of fires in a fictional town in Russia. Yet Dostoevsky intentionally left who started it as ambiguous. This is because it was inspired precisely by the unexplained series of fires that actually occurred in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1862, right when Young Russia was also circulating in the city. Though the culprits were never actually found, it was a pretext to scapegoat and catastrophize against the radical and progressive sentiments of the Russian liberal gentry, the educated officers of the army, and the professors and students at colleges. Frank citing N. G. Rosenblyum: “….It made even more suspicious, in the eyes of the people, literacy, science, enlightenment—gifts coming from our hands, those of the gentry.” Frank forebodingly explained, “The tsar was reported to have told the lower ranks of the army and the non-commissioned officers of a plot against his life, and explained that he relied on them but not on the officers, because the upper ranks no longer believed in God.” The Tsar’s reaction was so catastrophizing, so much of a moral panic (comparable to the Reichstag Fire of Weimer Germany among other right-wing, scapegoating pretexts in history up to our day), that he ushered in even more waves of right-wing repression, which probably set Russia back and worsened resentment from the left further down the line, as the 20th century approached.
Dostoevsky or Mikhail (probably both in collaboration) wrote an article for Time asserting that there was not a scrap of evidence to link the blazes with Young Russia or to imagine that the students as a body sympathized with the gory ideas advocated in the proclamation. When this article was rejected by the censorship, the Dostoevskys wrote another, with no better success…. In view of the lynch mob mentality of the moment, these articles represent a considerable act of political courage. Indeed, after being forbidden by the censorship, the articles were sent, by special order of the tsar, to the secret police and then to the commission set up to investigate the cause of the fires…. (339)
The Dostoevsky brothers’ article stated that Young Russia had been written by “Three scrofulous schoolboys, of whom the oldest is in fact not more than thirteen” yet when pressed to name the three, Mikhail was forced to admit it was only a “literary expression”.
“I have nothing at all to do with people who write such things as Young Russia,” he declared with firm dignity. This ended the matter so far as the Dostoevsky brothers were aware, although in fact Time narrowly escaped being prohibited. A decision to this effect was taken secretly and then withdrawn, with the proviso that Time should be kept under close observation…. Encouraged by the popular outrage directed against the suspected revolutionary destroyers of the capital, the government decided to strike while the city was still smoldering. On June 15 the Petersburg censorship committee suspended publication of both The Contemporary and the equally left-wing Russian Word for eight months. On July 7 Chernyshevsky was taken into custody…. (340)
Even after his softening in Tsarist Russia’s penal system, Dostoevsky still maintained sympathies with the progressive youth, as Frank notes during various other repressions, writing “The sympathies of most of the intelligentsia, including Feodor and Mikhail Dostoevsky, were on the side of the students. When those arrested were incarcerated in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, Dostoevsky surely recalled his own long months of solitary confinement in the same forbidding prison” (333). Yet if the reactionary right’s harsh disciplinary institutions might have produced a success in Dostoevsky’s case in softening his dabblings in radicalism, it wasn’t so to the British liberal reformers, decades before him.
In Britain, liberal reformers were critical of the “Bloody Code” laws, which mostly comprised of death sentences for the poor who stole or forged money. This law for the defense of property was so severe that many judges neglected it. According to Ignatieff, the reformer Samuel Romilly opinioned of this law: “The frequent occurrence of the unexecuted threat of death in a criminal code tends to rob that punishment of all its terrors, and to enervate the general authority of the government and its laws.” So it could be with Dostoevsky’s infamous mock execution. A surreal counterpart to the Russian existential writer is the Kafka-inspired Argentinian writer Antonio di Benedetto. He didn’t even have ideologically radical leanings. Yet, during the CIA-planned Operation Condor’s repressive wave across 20th century Latin America, di Benedetto was not only imprisoned and tortured by the right-wing dictatorship for no apparent reason, he was mock executed, not once but four times.
An interesting similarity between Russell Kirk’s historical account of conservatism and anti-capitalist leftism happens to still be that both rejected the mechanical and dispiriting aspects of Liberal Enlightenment. Kirk explains broadly of 19th century European politics:
What the [Conservative] Romantics dreaded in a world subjected to Utilitarian domination was an indiscriminate destruction of variety, loveliness, and ancient rights in the name of a devouring industrialism and a Philistine materialism. They hated Bentham and James Mill and their associates because Utilitarianism stood for the age of the machine, the hell-hole city, and the barrenness of' liberal morality. The Benthamites applauded the transformation of the modern world into a densely-populated industrial community, its obsessing aspiration the indulgence of the senses, its standard a gross mediocrity. "The state of society now leads to such accumulations of humanity, that we cannot wonder if it ferment and reek like a compost dunghill," [Walter] Scott wrote in his diary, in 1828. "Nature intended that the population should be diffused over the soil in proportion to its extent. We have accumulated in huge cities and smothering manufactories the numbers which should be spread over the face of a country; and what wonder that they should be corrupted?'' The false egalitarianism of these new reformers, he believed, was in fact surrender to the most vicious inequality – spiritual inequality. To Maria Edgeworth, he declared with intense feeling: "The state of high civilization to which we have arrived, is perhaps scarcely a national blessing, since, while the few are improved to the highest point, the many are in proportion tantalized and degraded, and the same nation displays at the same time the very highest and the very lowest state in which the human race can exist in point of intellect....”
– The Conservative Mind.
This could also explain why Dostoevsky could write Poor Folk and Notes From Underground from the perspective of wretched characters in urban Russia. Yet nihilism as a movement, dated sometime in the 19th century, is placed suspiciously alongside liberal capitalism’s declared campaign to wrangle nations out of the hands of the monarchal, feudal, mercantile, and ecclesiastical. If nihilism is rationalistic, materialistic, and, as Pratt says, a “crude scientism” (naturalism), then nihilism might even be intrinsic to capitalism itself as its own sickness and potentially its own negation. If the most infamous nihilist character Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers And Sons says “A good chemist is twenty times as useful as any poet” and "We act on the basis of what we recognize as useful…. Nowadays the most useful thing of all is rejection—we reject", then he writes exactly as the middle-class does in the trades and in commercial society today as a whole; that is, in the naturalistic, materialistic, and mechanistic sense while spiting the creative arts and the human sciences as useless pursuits. Arkády describing Bazarov to his father, Nikolai Petrovich:
"His main subject is natural science. But he knows everything. Next year he hopes to qualify as a doctor."
"Ah! He's a student in the medical faculty," observed Nikolai Petrovich and fell silent.
– Fathers And Sons.
Here also is nihilism’s biological reduction of the individual as tree into the abstract universal of a forest, or else “human nature”, for Bazarov says:
…it isn't worth the trouble to study separate individuals. All people resemble each other, in soul as well as body; each one of us has a brain, spleen, heart, and lungs, all made similarly. So-called moral qualities are also shared by everyone: small variations don't mean a thing. A single human specimen's sufficient to make judgments about all the rest. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would study each birch individually.
– Fathers And Sons.
Russian Orthodox Christianity, expressed through Turgenev and Dostoevsky’s literature on nihilism, antagonized this nihilism but also the Enlightenment Liberalism that correlated with it as the individualistic and rationalizing march of modernity[1]. Yet religious asceticism (lending itself to middle-class economic morality and Pinel’s own asylum organization) proves how overly-tolerant, un-enlightened, and unradical liberals really became as they preserved illiberal, right-wing ideals of hierarchy and drudgery to this day, starting with their rational penitentiary. Ignatieff once again, “the historians of liberalism have neglected the way in which the extension of popular sovereignty was accompanied by the elaboration of institutions and the deployment of philanthropic strategies designed to implant the inner disciplinarians of guilt and compunction in working-class consciences” (A Just Measure Of Pain, 212-3), or more simply: “humanitarianism was inextricably linked to the practice of domination” (214). Just the same, religious asceticism lending itself to middle-class economic productivity (or “the demon of gain” as some priests judged it in criticism of penitentiaries during the Industrial Revolution), shows how contradictorily many of the right-leaning spiritual live in the material/worldly – the nihilistic – forsaking the spiritual.
Much further back than the 19th century, Pascal’s Christian criticism of Christian casuists in the 17th century, by way of The Provincial Letters, really hits the nail on the head on how to spotlight contradiction and moral laxity in Christians. Just as liberalism and nihilism were worldly and materialistic threats to Christian spirituality, casuist doctors in Pascal’s day were apologetic for material or worldly gain, forsaking Christian spirituality. This implicates Peterson and Haidt/Lukianoff, of course, not just as spiritless materialists through their apologetics of capitalism but also as nihilists. Centrist and liberal slander towards the radical young on campus today seems analogous to the Jesuit’s slander of Jansenists. For instance, while the Great Recession happened to correlate with young people’s increased anxiety and depression levels, Haidt/Lukianoff only offer the insight of partially-interested and irresponsible deflection. They concede that it’s “possible” that fewer economic opportunities for young people correlate with anxiety and depression levels, but they deflect to other possible correlations. Namely, that young people get more screen-time on phones. Between Haidt and Twenge, they cannot conceive that the health of the economy doesn’t actually correlate with the mental health of its workers but could be inversely related. Their 2021 article, “This Is Our Chance to Pull Teenagers Out of the Smartphone Trap”, says in passing of the decade-long increase of teenaged depression and anxiety from 2012 leading up to the 2020 pandemic: “The U.S. economy was steadily improving over these years, so economic problems stemming from the 2008 Great Recession were not to blame”. This could be its own casuistic “probabilism”, which Pascal took issue with as moral laxity and sophistry. In this dialogue in Letter V of The Provincial Letters, a Jesuit monk explained probabilism to Pascal:
“’….The generality of [our authors], and, among others, our four-and-twenty elders, describe it thus: 'An opinion is called probable, when it is founded upon reasons of some consideration. Hence it may sometimes happen that a single very grave doctor may render an opinion probable.’ The reason is added: ‘For a man particularly given to study would not adhere to an opinion unless he was drawn to it by a good and sufficient reason.’”
" So it would appear," I observed, with a smile, "that a single doctor may turn consciences round about and upside down as he pleases, and yet always land them in a safe position."
"You must not laugh at it, sir," returned the monk, “nor need you attempt to combat the doctrine. The Jansenists tried this; but they might have saved themselves the trouble—it is too firmly established. Hear Sanchez, one of the most famous of our fathers: ‘You may doubt, perhaps, whether the authority of a single good and learned doctor renders an opinion probable. I answer, that it does….”
– The Provincial Letters, 205.
Instead of actually calculating probability or weighing the opinions of other doctors, a single doctor “claiming” seemed to be enough for the Jesuits (as an Appeal To Authority fallacy). Further on, Pascal poses the problem of actually choosing between opinions when the contrary opinion might turn out to be more probable:
"But, father," I remarked, "a person must be sadly embarrassed in choosing between them!" "Not at all," he rejoined; “he has only to follow the opinion which suits him best.”–“What! If the other is more probable?” “it does not signify.”–“And if the other is the safer?” “It does not signify,” repeated the monk; “this is made quite plain by Emanuel Sa, of our Society, in his Aphorisms : ‘A person may do what he considers allowable according to a probable opinion, though the contrary may be the safer one. The opinion of a single grave doctor is all that is requisite.’”[2]
This “probabilism” entailed an excess amount of faith in a learned expert, a sophist, as one chooses him to affirm one’s own pre-established opinion, neither in truth nor even probability. This, I believe, is the criticism that can be aimed at Haidt/Lukianoff. As for justifying moral laxity in that time, all one had to do was find just one casuist to apologetically excuse one’s un-Christian behaviour.
In their desperate attempt to define the endless forms of depravity on which they were called to adjudicate…, the casuists sank deeper into the mire at every step and their productions, at length, resembled the common sewers of a city, which, when exposed, become more pestiferous than the filth which they were meant to remove. Even under the best management, such a system was radically bad; in the hands of the Jesuits it became unspeakably worse. To their "modern casuists,” as they were termed, must we ascribe the invention of probabilism, mental reservation, and the direction of the intention, which have been sufficiently explained and rebuked in the Provincial Letters.
– Rev. Thomas M’Crie, “Historical Introduction”, The Provincial Letters, 94.
Much later in his diaries, Dostoevsky fairly accurately described the system of Jesuits as “violence as the body, falsehood as the soul”. Their casuistic literature became apologetic for wealth, lying, murder, and worldly immorality altogether, going by Christianity’s own moral rules.
As theologians, they have uniformly preferred the views of Molina; regarding these, if not as more agreeable to Scripture and right reason, at least (to use the language of a late writer) as “more consonant with the common sense and natural feelings of mankind.” As controversialists, they were the decided foes of all reform and all reformers, from within or without the Church. As moralists, they cultivated, as might be expected, the loosest system of casuistry, to qualify themselves for direction the consciences of high and low, and becoming through the confessional, the virtual governors of mankind.
– Rev. Thomas M’Crie, “Historical Introduction”, The Provincial Letters, 92.
Where casuistry in a declining Catholicism was concerned, or else Howard’s reformed prisons in Britain, the National Assembly’s guillotine in France, and Pinel’s modern asylum in France: they were all middling non-solutions to much bigger problems. Like Howard’s reform of prisons in particular, Haidt/Lukianoff and Twenge’s solution of “less screen time” for young people could also be today’s middling non-solution of middle-class reconciliation, as Ignatieff described of British penitentiaries. “The movement that began with Howard established among a skeptical, middle-class public the ideal that prisons ought to reform, without ever having to convince them that penitentiaries actually did so”, Ignatieff writes, and “The general decline of crime rates after 1855 in England…owed little or nothing to the consolidation of the penitentiary system, and much more to the general rise in real wages among the working class” (A Just Measure Of Pain, 209). If one actually asks young people about it, their own economic opportunities are absolutely dismal today – regardless of their employment – and that still contributes to their depression and anxiety. If crime rates decreasing during the Industrial Revolution simply correlated with wages increasing, as in the consciousness and organization of labor, the alleviation of poverty, and the equalization of society[3], then maybe working towards that is a more tangible solution to depression and anxiety. But until that realization from our casuistic experts such as Haidt/Lukianoff and Peterson, stoicism and sophistry is the basis for the gaslighting and tone-policing of the emotional, of the “unnatural”, of the lower ranks, of the radical, of trans people, and especially of women.
Pascal’s Socratic negation of casuists and the Jesuit Order might have shaped Voltaire’s ironical and negating assault on Christian institutions, which shaped the succeeding 18th century’s mostly-Deistic and revolutionary Enlightenment[4]. What could have happened, in turn, is that the literary nihilist could have been the moralistic construct of Christian writers in reaction to approaching Enlightenment, natural philosophy, natural science, and natural religion – going by how the literary nihilists are characterized in Fathers And Sons and The Possessed. That, then, implies Christianity forms its own repudiating, however; its own nihilism.
Nietzsche is important for Existentialism’s overarching sense of concepts reaching their decadently opposite meaning, as in Christianity doing so. It is also why he considered Christianity itself to be suffering from nihilism, or as Camus put it in The Rebel, “Christianity believes that it is fighting against nihilism because it gives the world a sense of direction, while it is really nihilist itself in so far as, by imposing an imaginary meaning on life, it prevents the discovery of its real meaning” (69). Kierkegaard himself repeatedly lambasted Christianity for its spiritless-ness in his journals. Ranging from the established Catholic church in Denmark, to Lutheranism, Protestantism, and the Bible Societies, all were repudiated by Kierkegaard as un-Christian, worldly hypocrisy. “If God wishes to intervene in the world it must be through the individual” who, in Kierkegaard’s view, is foiled by worldly discourse with another about God; “The moment I talk to another man about my highest concerns, of what God wills for me, in that very moment God has less power over me” (The Journals Of Kierkegaard, 1834-1854, 203-4). Then all worldly discussion of the most un-worldly, infinite absolute is eo ipsocontradiction, sophistry, and twaddle.
All this isn’t to say Existentialism has nothing but negativity going for it. It’s only that half of the phenomenological equation to life is still the mind. That is, one’s own subjectivity, thought, soul, inwardness, transcendence, or freedom. “Truth is related to being 'spirit', Kierkegaard wrote, "and that is very hard for flesh and blood and the physical lust for knowledge to bear. Between man and truth lies mortification – you see why we are all more or less afraid”. Conservative values, traditions, norms, and religion could be existentially valid, assuming they’re enlivened with subjective spirit again, as they possibly once were, rather than nostalgic mummery. Yet it’s trending now to anxiously frame traditions and norms as persecuted, not so they are defended from destruction, but so they are promoted and dogmatized – as something of a sadomasochistic about-face. Further still, what are commonly appealed to in the defense of these traditions and norms are book sales, views online, and crowd sizes as an “Appeal To A Majority” fallacy to, therefore, discount a lot of individual opinion and valid arguments. The individual’s mind still is, up to a point, negative. It is criticism, and it is so to the extent that the other half (positivity; the world; religion; nature; gender; traditions; the family; the social order; facts) isn’t built upon lies, dogma, contradiction, or tyranny. Hence why Phenomenology (also interested in discerning that claimed truths could possibly be lies) informed Existentialism, informed Critical Theory, informed Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Postmodernism.
Remember not to be too anxious when doubting! Existentialism has foundational certainty in phenomenology. What we certainly know is that we (subjects) are experiencing the objects (whether illusion, hallucination, reality, or outright lie) as phenomena. There can possibly be an objective truth, values, or nature to speculate about in pure thought, but there is no way to absolutely eliminate the subject (which is thought itself) to then grasp the object in its absolute/universal truth without still being a subject still grasping, still possibly being mistaken, still a finite being facing infinity. This is precisely why Kierkegaard repeats that one is not only a thinking person but also an existing person. It is also why Nietzsche says of man in On Truth And Lies In A Non-Moral Sense (an important essay for post-modernist developments against Enlightenment) that “only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.” But it is this forgetting of the subjective perceiver that Nietzsche considers to be “life against life” and nihilism. A house can still stand over you, accounting for all the repairs you have done to maintain it. It is nonetheless a phenomenological actuality to still be standing, not an objective reality. “You have to see it to believe it”, as the saying goes. And where today’s natural science, or naturalism, might insist that objectivity is attained through scientific method, peer review, lack of bias, and replication, the results are only subjectively-experienced and subjectively-interpreted just the same. The empirical sciences, after all, are hardly anything but a matter of subjective sensing and thinking.
Beauvoir gives an effective analogy to objective truth in Pyrrhus and Cineas. She compares our attempts to know the absolute to Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle as he endeavours to communicate with the castle (105). This is quite the struggle.
Man can receive messages and even see the messenger. But isn’t this one an impostor? And does he know who sends him? Hasn’t he forgotten half the message along the way? Is this letter that he hands over to me authentic, and what is its meaning? The Messiah says that he is the Messiah; the false messiah also says it. Who will distinguish one from the other? One will be able to recognize them only by their works. But how will we decide whether these works are good or bad?
– Simone de Beauvoir, Pyrrhus and Cineas, 105.
What this means for us and Anne-Josèphe, Anne-Josèphe and the French Revolution, and us and the French Revolution is a constant distancing of both. It also distances us from truly knowing what is good or bad about the revolution. While good and evil people tend to get their respective comeuppance in our moralizing stories, the play follows the arbitrariness and ambiguity of actual history.
The full rationalization where all is solved and done might not even be a miracle but a dreaded crisis for human existence. Mill admitted as much, according to Simon Critchley’s Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction, and Beauvoir later argues as much in Ethics of Ambiguity. It becomes a problem of “And after that?” In Pyrrhus and Cineas, Beauvoir wrote that, “The sweetest melody, repeated indefinitely, becomes an annoying refrain” (95-6). So it possibly is with many situations and social orders, not just with Judeo-Christian heaven or socialistic utopia, but with our comedic norms, family structures, romantic relationships, and suburbs. Our consciousness, our spontaneity, wants to rationalize through projects and suffering but we then require new projects. Political or otherwise, if every utopic end is at the same time a new point of departure, we are not irrational but, in a sense, arational subject-object combinations such that, where we cannot live and create as free spirits, we will destroy in order to live and create. Lastly, consciousness wants to make the seemingly impossible made actual. There is no end in history to the ambitious person being deemed crazy but the empirical past and present do not suffice. Revolution, struggle, and change are desired because we are human and not just repetitive machines trapped in the false naturalism and facticity of others.
To be safe, I simply presume that appeals to objectivity from subjectivities, including my own, are all annoying and possibly falsifiable but are nonetheless required for human existence. That is why, after this preliminary doubting of my own objective authority, I do try to painstakingly allow the characters to speak for themselves. Objectively, so-called, but I am still subjectively choosing what is said. What was said then might not have even been said! It could have been the historians’ own subjective choices, misinterpretations, misquotes, and fabrications! History and figures as I have researched them are certainly open to dispute…along with literally everything else in the world apparently.
Though some figures such as Anne-Josèphe, Claire Lacombe, Madame Roland, Madame de Condorcet and the Talliens may have never come together, it is a historical understanding of its own for us to see their personal motivations, private correspondences, and the historical groups they represent converging in one space. Kierkegaard: “Aristotle remarks in his Poetics that poetry is superior to history, because history presents only what has occurred, poetry what could and ought to have occurred, i.e., poetry has possibility at its disposal.”[5] Claire Lacombe possibly never wore trousers, yet it is true that sans-culottes women of her group were reported wearing trousers[6] and that, by itself, offended reactionaries to no end as to the perfect essence or stoical “nature” that is considered woman (irrespective of what women themselves want, of course!).
The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women were ridiculed and arbitrarily judged unreasonable by men of the same caliber who stalk our internet and monopolise public discourse. In Pierre–Joseph–Alexis Roussel’s published memoirs, an Englishman relates to a Frenchman as they observed a session of the revolutionary group of women:
Your nation possesses the remedy: the weapon of ridicule and banter, which it knows so well how to wield, will destroy these comical pretensions. Among the follies we have just heard, one can find nothing based in reason.
–“Account of a Session of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women”, published 1802.
If we find repetitiveness in our contemporary time to what we see in this play, it is because we have not transcended aspects of that time at all and have had few new ideas in a so-called modernity that prides itself in newness, entrepreneurship, civility, and individual distinction.
Assuming too quickly their own values as truth, the Serious Man, the Adventurer, and the Sub-Man selectively doubt the values of others only to affirm their own. It is their Socratic negating by directing criticism at others (outwardness) while lacking the authenticity of Socrates negating himself (inwardness). “All I know is I know nothing” was attributed to Socrates, not just, “My opponent knows nothing”, as in sophists enshrining their false positivity, egotism, and easy income[7]. In reference to Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, the Adventurer-turned-Tyrant (as embodied in Charles) destroys the free projects of others. Consequently, his own. One’s subjectivity, one’s freedom, is inwardness but is also not inwardness since it is also outwardness by its acknowledgment from others through intersubjectivity.
Man is socially conditioned by culture and upbringing to be the free and assertive spirit in his situations, which is ironically so factual a role as to undermine spirit. If there is one moralizing takeaway from this work, it is that man’s spiritedness ought to deflate a little, or toward inwardness. In man’s humble act of making himself a lack of being (where being is to be a certain gender, take up a role, or practice a faith), his choice of being can then be affirmed more consciously; hence, more authentically. Alternatively, he can be a chauvinist, a term hailed from Napoleon’s own soldier according to legend. It is spiritedness without fact, as a soldier without his general or his nation’s glory. Yet that is also spirit’s despair of needing itself in someone else or in a thing, as in the Adventurer in Nietzsche, or else Charles in this play. Consequently, he offers himself as a cog, a useful body for the calculations of others. With Nietzsche’s warrior pride, he doesn’t know he is dialectically mummified into cannon fodder, as in Napoleon’s campaign losses or losses further on in France’s historical development (or un-development), as depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), another existential film.
Where naturalism and the sexual Division Of Labor make women into pure passivity, men into pure activity, our own human consciousness, our spontaneity, makes a satire of both in time – if there’s anything to learn from Madame Roland’s gender beliefs and the Roland marriage. To subjugate women first is to subjugate men in turn and that is where my personal commitment in this comes in. Man must have freedom (spirit or soul) but everyone else must also have freedom for him to be free, just as Beauvoir concluded in Ethics Of Ambiguity: “the individual is defined only be his relationship to the world and to other individuals. He exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others.”
Assuming full consciousness, authentic individuals rebel against the bare facts of themselves to make new facts. This is true of space exploration, competing athletically, and creating art as it is for gender transformation, while the common sense crowd saying, “A man is a man is a man…” is tautological overkill that amounts to little actual reasoning being done. Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” [8] is alternatively: your freedom to decide your essence precedes your essence. If essences, or facts, comprise Kant’s Things-In-Themselves objective realm and we are also free to doubt and change essences, we cannot deny our paradoxical existence between facticity (object) and freedom (subject): An in-itself realizing it is for-itself, in Hegel-speak, which Kierkegaard[9], Sartre, and Husserl would later use.
The objectivization and hyper-individualization of our lives, on the contrary, necessarily leads to the desert of nihilism, an increase in resentment and depression, regardless of the efforts psychology and psychiatry will exert in our evident crisis of mental health, which still implicates Haidt/Lukianoff’s CBT. Arendt argued:
Modern psychology is desert psychology: when we lose the faculty to judge – to suffer and condemn – we begin to think that there is something wrong with us if we cannot live under the conditions of desert life. Insofar as psychology tries to “help” us, it helps us “adjust” to these conditions, taking away our only hope, namely that we, who are not of the desert though we live in it, are able to transform it into a human world.
– Introduction Into Politics as quoted in Nihilism by Nolan Gertz, 154-5.
Kierkegaard himself defied the notion of “one must take the world as it is” as only the philosophy of millions of sample-men[10]. Authentic individuality, that of action and courage, is to shape the world as it ought to be for each of our active, not passive, consciousnesses. Yet the unsolicited advice of the sophist and the stoic telling others how they factually ought or ought not to live are historically and ethically dogmatic. That is, they are objectifying, excluding, and irrational in the face of an arational individual still rejecting facts to create facts[11] through one’s freed possibilities or projects. CBT has, on the contrary, negativized “ought” judgements as “should/must” thinking and stigmatized them[12]. That can then underlie Haidt/Lukianoff’s cited sentiment “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child” as an assumption that the child cannot have valid should/must judgements regarding the road. Ironically, the only should/must judgement permitted is the child’s acceptance of the road as it is, or as parents and preceding generations build and dogmatize it.
Gertz’s book Nihilism notes of Arendt’s Introduction Into Politics that politics, or the participation in the polis, was freedom for the Greeks. Its activity signified that one was free as well as equal because it was premised by the fact that material necessities were met, certainly through the security of property as well as the capacity for human spontaneity, i.e., possibility. And yet this propertied security presupposed an inhuman and necessitating role for those at home, as in, whoever had to, of necessity, remain in the domestic sphere. This justified the child’s place but also the roles designated to slaves and to most women as a Division Of Labor. The privileging of men and slaveowners as free and equal assumed there were those who were unfree and unequal in being relegated to do the work at home. In spite of women’s passionate participation in the events of the French Revolution, this was also how it resulted for them.
Our modern Division of Labour has extended too far as role designation today in the above-mentioned sense as well as another: a process of rendering people mindless en masse through their abstraction. Here’s another philosopher’s sermon:
In the progress of the Division of Labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined by a few very simple operations.... But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties…. He naturally...becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.... But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.
– Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1040-1.
Many today probably think us wordy philosophers amount to nothing regarding our everyday. But since John Locke, Adam Smith, Nicholas de Condorcet, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and a few other philosophers have contributed to capitalism, we probably amount to literally everything, I’m sorry to say.
Ricks’ First Principles documents the profound contributions ancient Greco-Roman philosophy provided the US revolution. But in its mostly Spartan, Roman, and stoical character, it might also be yielding the same problems (protracted over time) as the French Revolution did, since the French Revolution foundationally had almost the same reading material and the same ideas, especially stoic ones[13]. And the US is still underperforming in actualizing its abstract natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all its citizens by way of originally sophistic-stoic natural law[14] as in The Declaration of Independence. And this is just as Bentham doubted it would as a reactionary writer to that work. It’s comical to also note that our own reactionaries today are chiding radicals for ungratefulness[15] for what our revolutionary forefathers have given us when Bentham himself scolded the US as an “ungrateful and rebellious” people[16] for their revolution. Where gratitude is sometimes, as Emma Goldman wrote, another kind of tyranny, ingratitude is sometimes just what freedom is[17].
On the flip side, the devaluing of philosophy today – us philosophers rendered irrelevant and almost unemployable – happens to be by the hands of our own ungrateful children (stoical and religious naturalism, mechanical philosophy, mathematics, economics, psychology, and the natural sciences as everyone abstracts themselves away from each other in specialization). And this is no less than what we philosophers deserve since we’re irresponsibly oblivious of ourselves and amounting to little in our Division Of Labour field where we’ve reduced philosophy to mere aesthetics and reflection. We get what we give!
The Division Of Labor, as specializing abstraction, is still applied dogmatically (alongside Master-Slave or subject-object divisions) by the modern west to gender, race, workplaces, global hemispheres, classrooms, families, and classes. We see its trampling over the true possibilities of the individual because one moralizes over oneself and others that they can only, and should, remain in their place. Moreover, women authors today still go so far as to obscure their own gendered names, e.g. Robert Galbraith, to transcend their Division of Labor field, as Virigina Woolf documented in her own time. We see it trampling over our possibility to see things causally connected to then and now, to each other and the whole. We ought to realize that gender, economics, science, politics, sociology, philosophy, work, art, etc. are really always intertwined, not fields to devalue in their specialized isolation.
The naturalistic Division Of Labor for the sexes means that men read and behave with particularly men’s interests; women read and behave with particularly women’s interests. In this specialization, alienation arises between one another. As one devalues the other in their view, love can be lost; distance, misunderstanding gained, and resentful nihilism, too, can be the result. And just as it is with men and women, so it is with the professions and education.
The Division Of Labor for me, as an existentialist, dictates I should go be sad in a French café somewhere and leave off history and politics. To be fair, if you dare to see Le Feu Follet (1963) or Un Homme Qui Dort (1974), there is something very aesthetic about Existentialism’s stereotyped image. However, Existentialism refuses to be confined to morose 60s and 70s black-and-white films in virtue of still being about freedom. It should be free to transcend its own stereotypes. It should not just be anxious and depressed. It should also be free to be joyful, to sing, or to argue economics. That is why I have come full circle to have economics in a play. That is why Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own talks about economics also. It is also why the Division Of Labour is problematically a generator of ignorance (by Smith’s own admission), yet of resentment and nihilism as well.
While Smith’s concern about the Division Of Labour was that it reduced the masses to an ineffective recruiting pool for war, my concern for the Division Of Labour is that it effectively creates a mass society wherein the inhuman (that is, the animalistic and passive) consumer exists. This consumer can certainly be surveyed and measured by natural science effectively and universally, since one is drained of spontaneity and thought as mere object, animal, habit, and facticity. According to Arendt, however, the same consumer depends on prejudices more than understanding. At the same time, demanding that politics be relegated to a realm outside of our lives (away from all our sacred values, perhaps having it specialized in our institutions, professional politicians, and scientific experts) is itself a prejudice. It flees from the problem of all concerns of our lives and values actually having political, normative, and constructed relevance and origins. Gertz argues that this demands our political participation, and not in the dependence of representative (which is liberal) democracy.
Liberal democracy emerged out of the Enlightenment Era. Considering its widespread ideological distrust of the lower orders of society, however, liberal democracy was fundamentally conceived from elitism. With the Division Of Labour specialization of politics in representative, excessive bureaucracy, as well as an electoral college, self-governing democracy doesn’t really exist for most. We must, instead, foster direct participation – direct democracy – and at local levels:
What is logical, what is rational, what is normal, cannot be taken for granted, but must be questioned and challenged. And it is precisely such questioning and challenging of what is taken for granted that used to be known as politics. It is thus only by returning political activity to the public realm, by reclaiming public spaces as spaces for freedom, by seeking consensus rather than seeking votes, by acting as humans rather than surviving as animals, that we can begin to overcome nihilism togetherrather than continue to suicidally adapt to it alone.
– Gertz, Nihilism, 159.
Plato’s own dialogue The Republic actually suffers from a Division Of Labour problem. To the degree that “justice” is found in the harmonization of a soul between its “Spirit”, its “Reason”, and its “Appetitive” aspects, Plato abstracted that into a whole society of class specialization whereby the military are the spirited, Philosopher Kings are the learned and reasonable (and forebodingly drawn from the military), and the appetitive are the commonfolk. In this systemizing process of losing sight of a single tree for the forest, Plato’s system lost sight of the individual who is supposed to harbour all three within. Given one’s specialized “place” in this utopia, the soul loses its capacity for the other aspects of the soul. Yet Plato, as an aristocrat in his era, distrusted the lower orders of society and also had an interest in “arresting all change”, as Karl Popper put it:
Individualism, equalitarianism, faith in reason and love of freedom were new, powerful, and, from the point of view of the enemies of the open society, dangerous sentiments that had to be fought. Plato had himself felt their influence, and, within himself, he had fought them. His answer to the Great Generation was a truly great effort. It was an effort to close the door which had been opened, and to arrest society by casting upon it the spell of an alluring philosophy, unequalled in depth and richness. In the political field he added but little to the old oligarchic programme against which Pericles had once argued. But he discovered, perhaps unconsciously, the great secret of the revolt against freedom, formulated in our own day by Pareto: ‘To take advantage of sentiments, not wasting one’s energies in futile efforts to destroy them.’ Instead of showing his hostility to reason, he charmed all intellectuals with his brilliance, flattering and thrilling them by his demand that the learned should rule. Although arguing against justice he convinced all righteous men that he was its advocate. Not even to himself did he fully admit that he was combating the freedom of thought for which Socrates had died; and by making Socrates his champion he persuaded all others that he was fighting for it. Plato thus became, unconsciously, the pioneer of the many propagandists who, often in good faith, developed the technique of appealing to moral, humanitarian sentiments, for anti-humanitarian, immoral purposes. And he achieved the somewhat surprising effect of convincing even great humanitarians of the immorality and selfishness of their creed.
– The Open Society And Its Enemies, VII.
Interestingly, Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History Of The French Revolution noted that at least one commentator compared France’s revolution to Plato’s Republic. But that, “Until 2 June 1793, the Revolution was no ‘model of liberty’ but a chimera like Plato’s Republic, admired only by savants, philosophes, and sophistes” (567). This is in the context of liberal Girondins having been forcibly ousted from the National Convention for increasingly, and at times correctly, being perceived as elitists by the more populist sans-culottes and Montagnards. Evidenced in their delegation as well as their snobbishness towards the sans-culottes, many Girondins were distrustful of the lower orders of society, as Plato was. Yet Anne-Josèphe was a liberal Girondins.
[1] Carr, Karen L., The Banalization of Nihilism, 13.
[2] Pascal, The Provincial Letters, 206-7.
[3] A Just Measure Of Pain, 209.
[4] Popkin, A New World Begins, 49-58. Also, “Historical Introduction”, The Provincial Letters, 116.
[5] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
[6] “Discussion of Women’s Political Clubs and Their Suppression”, 29–30 October 1793,” Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, accessed December 24, 2020, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/294.
[7] Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony.
[8] Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism is a Humanism.
[9] The Concept of Irony, 281.
[10] The Journals of Kierkegaard, 1832-1854, 247.
[11] Kierkegaard: “Just as commonplace people do not have any in-itself but can become anything, so also the ironist has none” if they are free (The Concept of Irony, 281). So it is with gender.
[12] Star, Katharina, How “Should” Statements Contribute to Panic and Anxiety, https://www.verywellmind.com/should-statements-2584193.
Also, Robertson’s The Philosophy Of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, 119.
[13] Ricks, Thomas E. First Principles. Also, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution By Bernard Bailyn, 24.
[14] Koterski, Joseph. “Lecture 15: Natural Law and the Founding Fathers”, Natural Law and Human Nature.
[15] Peterson, Jordan. “Rule XII: Be Grateful In Spite Of Your Suffering” Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life.
[16] Bentham, Jeremy. A Short Review of the Declaration.
[17] My Disillusionment In Russia, 6.