Russia, nihilism, utopia

I am currently reading Nihilism Before Nietzsche by Michael Allen Gillespie. The first section is not an easy read, and not a good entry point into philosophy, as it deals with the difficult ideas of German idealist philosophers like Fichte and Hegel. The book, however, is an important one as it ties the ideas of these philosophers to the political nihilism that came later in the nineteenth century.

We often think of nihilism in terms of a depressed person who doesn't find meaning in life. But German idealist philosophy, particularly that of Fichte, had a complex reading of human consciousness in which an "absolute I" attempted to negate the phenomenal or empirical aspects of self and the world around it. So the act of negation becomes central to the activity of self.

Gillespie links this philosophy to the adoption by leading intellectuals of figures like Faust, Prometheus or even Satan as models who were at least partly admired. It's interesting to note that the young Marx fits into this mould. He liked to quote Faust that "Everything in existence is worth being destroyed" and he wrote a drama called Oulanem in which the title character declaims "If there is a something which devours, I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins–the world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses."

This emphasis on negation, i.e., on the belief that what exists, whether good or bad, needs to be destroyed, so that a higher aspect of self can be realised, effectively set the self against the existing nature of things. This formula played out in a variety of ways, but I want to focus on one particular instance that Gillespie describes in his book, namely that of the Russian nihilist Chernyshevsky. 

This story begins with a novel written by the famous Russian author Turgenev. Turgenev was influenced by the philosophy of his times, admitting once that "I prefer Prometheus, I prefer Satan, the type who revolts, who is an individual". In Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons the lead character Bazarov is a nihilist:

Bazarov is one of the great Promethean revolutionaries in modern literature...The negative character of Bazarov's greatness, however, is part and parcel of his nihilism. As he himself admits, he does not stand for anything. He wants merely to clear the ground...He is a monster of negation and of freedom...As a nihilist, he stakes out a position against not merely autocracy but nature itself, including his own human nature.

Turgenev portrays Bazarov as a flawed character, who is, as one contemporary critic put it, "destroyed in his destroying":

Bazarov is in rebellion against the world and indeed against life itself. Like Fichte's I, he is a monster of will but his will has no object other than freedom. He is thus a creature of pure negation, a destroyer and revolutionary...As sheer negativity, this will cannot construct a positive new reality...

Bazarov believes he is an autonomous, self-creating being, a Prometheus who has freed himself from the rock of political and theological despotism...Turgenev, however, tries to show us that this heroic Prometheanism is essentially tragic, because it rests upon a faulty understanding of man and nature...Bazarov's belief in his own autonomy leads him to violate "natural laws" and he must pay the price that nature extracts...he discovers he is not thoroughly autonomous but bound by nature in ways he cannot overcome.

Some nihilists admired the character of Bazarov, but others saw in him an attack on the nihilist movement. One of those in the latter group was Nicolay Chernyshevsky, who wrote his own highly influential novel What is to be done?, which was an attempt to show that it was indeed possible to organise love, family and social life so that the individual remained absolutely independent.

In the novel, Vera Pavlovna marries Lopukov, but she then falls in love with Kirsanov. Lopukov fakes his death and leaves Russia so that his wife is free to marry Kirsanov. Vera Pavlovna "is driven by a desire for autonomy, to live as she pleases".

This all sounds tawdry, but according to Chernyshevsky it represents the height of human nobility:

These people, according to Chernyshevsky...are only what all men would be if they were not deformed by corrupt social institutions. Jealousy and all the other emotions that degrade human nature are the result of the corrupt "order of things," that is, the existence of private property. He suggests that in a properly ordered society the ill-tempered will all become kind because it will not be contrary to their interests to be kind."

Chernyshevsky sees human nature as being regenerated to an extraordinary degree, as is described in a dream had by the character Vera Pavlovna:

There is nothing loftier than man; there is nothing loftier than woman...It was her own face, kindled with the brightness of love; more beautiful than all ideals left to us by sculptors of ancient time and by the great artists of the great age of art...I have the reverence for purity which "chastity" possessed. But in me it is not as it was in them, but fuller, loftier, keener...till I appeared, people had no idea of perfect enjoyment of freedom.

Gillespie goes on to describe Chernyshevksy's newly configured world as follows:

It is a world of aluminium and glass, a communal world in which almost all work is done by machines and in which there are few old men and women since they remain healthy and youthful until shortly before they die. There is only freedom, satisfaction, and enjoyment, "an everlasting spring and summer, an everlasting joy".

This reminds me of the vision of a new society by the poet Shelley. He too thought that by overthrowing power structures in society that you would radically regenerate human nature. Shelley wanted an Edenic condition of life and bitterly opposed Christianity for suggesting that man's nature was too fallen to realise such an ideal in this world. 

There is a difficult mishmash of incompatible visions in Chernyshevsky's novel. He wants absolute autonomy for the individual, so that we can do whatever we please. He also wants to maintain traditional European moral ideals, such as nobility of character, purity and faithfulness. But how can you have people acting egoistically and still maintain moral character? 

Chernyshevsky believes that the solution is partly technology (machines will do all the work) and partly social organisation (removal of private property will harmonise my own rational self-interest with a beneficence toward other people).

Even on his own terms, though, the results are hardly persuasive. We are supposed to believe that a young woman who is liberated to act however she pleases, and who therefore leaves her husband for her husband's best friend, is acting according to an unparalleled level of chastity and fidelity. 

And, in practice, we know how the attempt to maximise individual autonomy works out. It means, as a matter of logic, accepting that everyone's choices in life are equally valid. This means that the traditional moral structure collapses. There is no longer noble and base, pure or impure, loyal or disloyal. There is only a technocratic organisation of society for enabling the maximum satisfaction of individual desire. The moral ideals change substantially, to focus on non-discrimination, inclusion, openness and tolerance of whatever people choose to do or to be, rather than on the quality of the choices themselves.

And we have had the liberation of sexual choices for women. It does not bring about the highest possible level of purity, chastity and nobility in either men or women. It does not even lead to people making judicious rational choices for their own longer-term interests. It is gradually having a disordering and dissolving effect, and not just because of the existence of jealousy. 

The main point I would emphasise here is the reliance of the nihilists and other revolutionaries of the time on the idea of a radical regeneration of human nature. They wanted radical autonomy and a pursuit of self-interest, alongside a higher realisation of traditional moral ideals. They pinned their hopes on the idea that something would change human nature so significantly that such an unlikely and seemingly contradictory utopia might be possible. Many hoped that the regeneration would take place once power structures were overthrown, whether these involved kings and priests, or capitalists (or, in today's language, whiteness and patriarchy).

Again, we had the overthrow of private property in Chernyshevsky's own nation of Russia in 1917 (and Lenin was a great admirer of Chernyshevsky). You would struggle, I think, to view the results as being "an everlasting joy" and a "perfect enjoyment of freedom" brought about by the creation of a loftier and nobler human nature.

A painting best left hidden?

Several paintings lost in the aftermath of WWII have been found hidden in an apartment in Munich. One of them is interesting for the wrong reasons. Painted by the German Otto Dix it is a reminder of how corrupt European high art was in the early 1900s. It is meant to be a portrait of a woman:



Portrait of a woman by Otto Dix


Otto Dix is one of the better known painters of the era, and the painting above is estimated to be worth about ten million dollars.

Dix was part of an art movement called the "Neue Sachlichkeit" or "New Objectivity." He belonged to the "verists" subgroup of this movement:

The verists' vehement form of realism emphasized the ugly and sordid. Their art was raw, provocative, and harshly satirical. George Grosz and Otto Dix are considered the most important of the verists.

The problem is that the other competing art movements, at least in Central Europe, were equally unappealing. You had the Dada movement, which took the nihilist line of destroying everything in the belief that something better would appear afterwards:

This dissolution was the ultimate in everything that Dada represented, philosophically and morally; everything must be pulled apart, not a screw left in it customary place, the screw-holes wrenched out of shape, the screw, like man himself, set on its way towards new functions which could only be known after the total negation of everything that had existed before. Until then: riot destruction, defiance, confusion. The role of chance, not as an extension of the scope of art, but as a principle of dissolution and anarchy. In art, anti-art.

Note the aim of "the total negation of everything that had existed before" - this I take to be an expression of nihilism.

And then you had futurism, which was also committed to destroying traditional Europe, particularly "closed and predetermined forms" (which suggests a belief in the autonomous, self-determining individual "liberated" from whatever is predetermined):

The Futurist programme was based on the refusal of all closed and predetermined forms, on the exigency of a constant renewal of the arts, and the affirmation of the individual’s creative mind above all social hierarchy.

In their manifestos of 1909 to 1913 the Futurists celebrated the dynamism of great cities, the energy and destructive force of modern inventions. The hectic, deafening chaos of a mechanized world would destroy the old morality, the old society, the outmoded human product. They saw the cycle of death and rebirth repeated in men's entanglement with the machine, with electric power and kinetic force.

I've written recently about how liberal modernity bases itself, in part, on a certain understanding of human individuality, namely a belief that the creative unfolding of self is best achieved when the individual is detached from natural forms of human community such as the family, ethny and nation. It is possible that this was part of the futurists' "affirmation of individual's creative mind above all social hierarchy."

There were Australian artists who looked on in dismay at what was happening in the Old World. Australian art was still in a golden age, particularly when it came to landscapes:

Hans Heysen, Droving into the light

Finally, back to Otto Dix. It is sometimes said that the paintings of Otto Dix were the product of his traumatic experiences in the First World War. But there is evidence that Dix was a certain kind of nihilist prior to this. His thought shows the influence of both realist and vitalist forms of nihilism. Eugene Rose described realist nihilism this way:

He is the believer, in a word, in the "nothing-but," in the reduction of everything men have considered "higher," the things of the mind and spirit, to the lower or "basic": matter, sensation, the physical...the Realist world-view seems perfectly clear...in place of vague "higher values" naked materialism and self-interest.

Dix claimed later in life that he volunteered for service in WWI because he wanted to experience violence and death close at hand, because "I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself." We learn that:

Dix himself took a perverse pleasure in the events unfolding around him. Olaf Peter relates how Dix would often appal his friends by providing a “detailed description of the pleasurable sensation to be had when bayoneting an enemy to death.”

For a time, too, it seems that Dix was influenced by a vitalist nihilism:

Dix's worldview was deeply influenced by Nietzsche and the vitalism in life's 'will to power'. He, like the majority of his contemporaries, saw World War I as an opportunity to achieve both personal and national greatness through struggle and battle. In this spirit Dix intentionally signed-up with the German Army to fight, to experience life and action as it happened.

But the war was not transforming in the way that "struggle and battle" was supposed to achieve:

He was embittered and disappointed that the war, in which he and many others of his generation had placed such great hopes of vital change, had altered neither men nor their environment.

I've set all this out because when you look at the timing of European decline it becomes clear that a certain nihilism amongst the intelligentsia was prominent even before WWI (it may even have been part of the push toward war).

Have a look at the Otto Dix painting again. That is the disfigured soul of Otto Dix looking at you, a man charged with the cultural leadership of Europe in the early decades of the 1900s.

One of their motives?

Daybreaker wrote an interesting comment in the last post. In it he pointed out how all-embracing the charge of racism has now become:

You can't avoid being charged with racism if you are white. That's because "racist" basically means "white".

University of Delaware:

“[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”

That means that whites count as racist, and non-whites do not.

That means that the mandatory policy in all white nations to get rid of "racism" is the same thing as a policy to get rid of whites.
 

I agree with Daybreaker that this is the logic of the leftist position on race.

Left-liberals choose to explain race differences in terms of one race (whites) being socially constructed to exploit and oppress other races. Whites get to be exceptional in a highly negative way. Whiteness is held to exist as a manifestation of privilege, discrimination and racism. Therefore, those who defend being white must be, by the leftist definition, "white supremacists" - people who want to maintain a supremacy over others.

As Daybreaker points out, the logical solution then becomes to defeat whites and whiteness through mass immigration and the breaking up of formerly white societies. The demographic decline of whites becomes, for leftists, a mark of progress to be cheered on.

Leftist anti-racism becomes, in effect, an anti-white movement. Getting rid of racism comes to mean getting rid of whites and white societies.

Daybreaker also made a point in his comment that I've made at this site as well. Whites get targeted by the left in this way, despite the fact that we are not even the most privileged ethnicity. On measures of income, careers, family stability and education, Asians are on average the best off in countries like America or Australia.

So why target whites? I don't want to attempt a complete explanation in what follows. I just want to point to one particular strain of thought on the left.

It seems to me that there exists a certain kind of person who reacts badly to the existence of order, authority or structure in society or within reality itself. Why? Perhaps because they think of this as a power existing outside of their own self which, in their pride, they think of limiting their own self, rather than as giving meaning to it. Perhaps they want their own self to be the organising power. Perhaps there is a personal bitterness or disappointment toward representatives of authority or power in their own lives, for instance, in the relationship with their father.

Whatever the reason, such people seem to view white, conservative, Christian males as symbols of an order or authority that they see as a hostile force at an existential level - it scares them or at least discomfits them at some level of self and being to be confronted by such symbols.

And it's what traditional whites mean symbolically that seems to matter. Asian Americans, for instance, are more privileged in a range of fields, but their success doesn't carry the same symbolic weight, as they aren't (yet) associated with traditional structures of authority or value or order in society. Similarly, Republicans are mostly right-liberals who self-neutralised a long time ago. And yet there are some on the left for whom the symbolism of Republicans as white, conservative, Christian males still very much matters.

This helps to explain too why some on the left see themselves as anti-establishment outsiders, even though they became the establishment decades ago. They continue to understand their own political mission in terms of opposition to the symbolically powerful white, Christian male. They are still, in their minds, fighting an entrenched power structure, whereas they themselves, no matter how powerful, are the liberating force, opening society up to some new possibility or some new experiments in living that will somehow take things forward, i.e. that will open up the path to human progress.

If I'm right on this, then so much the worse for liberal Christianity. The Christian tradition has always set itself strongly against a spirit which, on sensing a power or authority or order outside itself, reacts nihilistically out of pride or hubris. In the Christian tradition the fall of Satan is understood along these lines. And yet so many Christians today fall in with a programme that has its origins, at least in part, from this spirit which is so strongly condemned within the Christian tradition.

For instance, there are those on the left who use open borders to destroy the existence of a "whiteness" which they associate negatively with order or authority. Instead of condemning this as a manifestation of nihilism (or of the kind of pride which led to Satan's fall), there are many in the churches who fall in line with it or even put a Christian gloss on it as being an act of charity. The churches have not confronted what they ought to have confronted; they have not examined what might lead a person to be disloyal or to seek to destroy. It's an uncomfortable fact that a relatively small number of nihilist spirits have ended up on the winning side, despite transgressing a core aspect of Christianity.

Dead stream, live stream II

I wrote in an earlier post of my feeling that society was increasingly bifurcating into a nihilistic modernist stream and a still living traditionalist one.

Today The Thinking Housewife has a short post up about a pro-abortion campaign in the US. This campaign is based on the idea that abortion should be regarded as "a normal and necessary part of women's reproductive lives". The campaigners hope that by encouraging women to share their abortion stories that some of the stigma surrounding abortion will be removed.

So I went and read the stories. And some of them clearly fit into the dead stream category. There are people in our society who are now thinking along these lines:

“I got knocked up over spring break— as a 32-year old married graduate student. Having children was never something that my husband and I considered to be an option. The decision to terminate the pregnancy was easy...Every day since then, I am grateful that my birth control slip-up did not determine the path of my career or my life. No regrets.” -- Jess

She's 32 and married but is so determined to remain childless that she made the "easy" decision to have an abortion. She did not want a child to "determine the path of my career or my life" (she wanted to remain a self-determining individual).

It seems to be a common theme:

"I was married, but my husband and I were not eager to have children. At this point, we had been married for 16 years and our lives felt complete and were enjoyable just as they were. Neither of us had ever really entertained thoughts of children."

Heather is in the same boat:

"Never wanted children, but had healthy, heterosexual relationships...abortion was an easy decision for me -- I knew I didn't want children...I had been raised to believe that women are smart, moral creatures who have both the capacity and the responsibility to make such decisions...my second unplanned pregnancy at 38. Still clear that I didn't want to have a child and having made sure my (monogamous) partner understood that before we ever began sexual relations, I had my second abortion...It is unthinkable to me that millions of women are not able, or soon will be unable, to control their own lives, are not considered intelligent enough or moral enough to be entrusted with the work that is our birthright"

I'm not sure what Heather believes is the work that is her birthright (having casual unprotected sex with boyfriends?) but it doesn't appear to be motherhood.

These stories did not make me think that abortion is a normal and necessary part of women's reproductive lives. They made me think that some Western women have turned in a nihilistic or hedonistic way against the idea of having children. They are dead streamers.

Catherine Deveny is a Vitalist?

There's been one Catherine Deveny column that I've had trouble explaining. I filed it away six months ago, but now I think I've finally got it.

The breakthrough came from reading a short item at View from the Right. Lawrence Auster briefly describes in the item Fr Seraphim Rose's idea that there are four stages of nihilism.

The four stages mark a progress away from a traditional belief in an objective, higher truth. In the first stage, Liberalism, the higher truth is no longer believed in but the concepts (the "names") are still made use of. In the second stage, Realism, there is a more aggressive denial of higher truth, with only the materialistic and deterministic aspects of reality being recognised.

It is the third stage, Vitalism, that I want to focus on. Vitalism is a reaction against the sterile world created by the Liberals and Realists. However, Vitalists don't return to the traditional higher truths as an antidote to sterility. For them, what matters is not whether something is true, but whether it promotes vitality - whether it is life-affirming and life-giving.

Nietzsche was a Vitalist when he wrote:

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it.... The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving ...

The key quote regarding Vitalism is this one from Lawrence Auster:

In the Vitalist stage of society, people deliver themselves over to an unending search for sensation and excitement, for the exotic and the experimental, for ever-greater freedom and satisfaction of desires, for the “riches of diversity,” for the transforming “energy” that is produced by a society in constant change and motion--and with all these things being seen as, even explicitly promoted as, a substitute for any inherent truth and goodness in existence.

I believe that Catherine Deveny had such a Vitalist moment when she wrote the column that puzzled me six months ago.

Consider the following excerpts:

What confronting and confusing times we're living in. It's not just the environmental catastrophe and the financial crisis. Technology is advancing at breakneck speed ... Add to this our general existential melancholy, exacerbated by and contributing to many turning their back on organised religion. Depression is rising, obesity's an epidemic, binge drinking's up, divorce is through the roof ... sometimes it feels like: "Where are we going and what are we doing in this hand basket?"

We have no idea what's going to happen next. What once worked no longer does ... Everything's changing. We're terrified, we're excited. We've got no choice.

Think back to the 1960s ... No one could have predicted the massive cultural change ... Who would have known we were in for such culturally vivid times?

... the truth is, my friends, we're off the map. What an adventure.

... we do know that the times ahead will be full of massive change and huge challenges

Don't just be prepared to stuff up, expect it. Encourage it. Experiment. As Zorba the Greek says: "Life is trouble. Only death is not. To live is to undo your belt and look for trouble."

I found it difficult to process this message because it seems so reckless. Catherine Deveny is telling us that we are going to hell in a handbasket, that we have no control over what happens, and that this is a great, terrifying adventure to be embraced.

This differs markedly from earlier forms of radicalism. The philosophical radicals of the early 1800s, for instance, held that everything was determined by association and that you could therefore achieve unlimited social reform by changing the way that people were conditioned (e.g. through the education system). These radicals belong to the earlier Realist stage of nihilism, the one emphasising materialism and determinism.

So one group of radicals promoted the idea that we can scientifically control social development to achieve increasing levels of human happiness; Deveny, in contrast, believes that things are out of control, that there are signs of social deterioration, but that this chaotic state of flux provides the conditions for a meaningful life.

This makes sense if we think of Deveny as a third stage Vitalist rather than a second stage Realist. And it does seem undeniable that Deveny's message fits Lawrence Auster's description of Vitalism.

Auster: In the Vitalist stage of society, people deliver themselves over to an unending search for sensation and excitement, for the exotic and the experimental ... for the transforming “energy” that is produced by a society in constant change and motion.

Deveny: Everything's changing. We're terrified, we're excited. To live is to undo your belt and look for trouble. Experiment. We're off the map. What an adventure. Who would have known we were in for such culturally vivid times? The times ahead will be full of massive change.

One final point. An advantage of the Vitalist position for radicals like Deveny is that it allows them to wash their hands of the damage that they themselves have done to society. They get to present social change as being an unpredictable, accidental result of natural forces beyond anyone's control, rather than a predictable result of the liberal politics that has dominated the West for some generations.