The Little Red Blog

Who's Afraid of Herbert Marcuse?

{Pascal, the existential Russian blue cat who wrote yesterday’s post, is a tough act to follow. I will try to bring my A-game.}

“One-Dimensional Man tried to show how ideology concealed the grip of domination and the reality of alienation. This meant that any sort of protest had to begin with a recognition of how spiritually impoverished and politically barren life—even in prosperous America—had become. Marcuse assigned himself the task of telling his readers how little autonomy they really enjoyed, that their economic security was in fact a form of servitude to irrational and impersonal forces designed to maximize productivity at the expense of pleasure.” (Stephen Whitfield) ¹

“The containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society; the general acceptance of the National Purpose, bipartisan policy, the decline of pluralism, and the collusion of Business and Labor within the strong State testify to the integration of opposites which is the result as well as the prerequisite of this achievement.” (Herbert Marcuse)

All the New Thinking is about Cultural Marxism. In this, it does not resemble the Old Thinking, because back in the day (i.e., the Sixties) we had other things to think about, and we were probably high.

So-called “cultural Marxism” is associated with Critical Theory, which is hotly contested these days (especially its subset “Critical Race Theory”) by people who, for the most part, know nothing about it. Against my better judgment, I keep getting drawn back into the controversy, even to the point of reading (alright, “browsing”) works by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and their various colleagues at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), a left-wing, neo-Marxist academic enterprise founded in 1923 and more commonly known as the Frankfurt School. 

For whatever reasons, the obscure left-wing theorists at the Frankfurt School are villains du jour, devious neo-Marxists using Critical Theory to subvert American values and American institutions. “Cultural Marxism,” to the extent it exists, is in fact an elaborated refutation and rejection of orthodox Marxism and of the foundational premises of Marx himself, nor does it issue calls for violent revolution—but no matter. What matters here is that “cultural Marxism” is a phrase invoked today by right-wing alarmists who ride through our cities, towns, villages, and school boards, shouting, “Critical Theory is coming! Critical Theory is coming!” The alarmists want you to believe that the Democratic Party intends to round up you and your neighbors and march all of you off to the nearest gulag; to hear them tell it, the Cultural Revolution will be announced any day now, probably on MSNBC, and of course it will be televised, podcast, and live-streamed.

Alas, the problem with the alarmists on the Right is that, as I mentioned, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Case in point: one of the best-known Critical Theorists linked to the Frankfurt School was Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a German émigré who moved to Switzerland in 1933 (he was 35), just as Hitler was coming to power; he came to the US the following year. During World War II, he helped craft anti-Nazi propaganda for the Office of War Information; he went on to work for the Office of Strategic Services and, after the war, for the US State Department. He established himself as the US government’s leading analyst on German and Central European affairs. He went on to teach Political Theory at major universities: Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis, among others.

In Germany and Switzerland, Marcuse was associated with the Institute for Social Research, under the direction at the time of Max Horkheimer. Marcuse’s association with the school was sporadic; like most members of the ISR, Marcuse had been a Marxist, but his work, while drawing on elements of Marxism, became increasingly heterodox, especially after World War II. Marcuse’s 1955 Eros and Civilization was an attempt to leaven Marxist doctrine with Freudian theory; his 1964 One-Dimensional Man became a seminal text in the Sixties for ideologically precocious (or intellectually pretentious) individuals in America’s vaguely defined “New Left”. Laden with sociological jargon and written in a ponderous style, One-Dimensional Man was one of those books which was more brandished than read, more a totem of the tribe than a text anyone managed to get through. It contained two key ideas, the “Great Refusal” and “repressive tolerance,” both of which were easily misrepresented and widely misunderstood, and both of which are worth a look.

If nothing else, the idea of a “Great Refusal” (a phrase coined by Alfred North Whitehead in the early 20^th century) aligned Marcuse with the spirit of the times. According to Arnold Farr’s entry on Marcuse at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The student protests of the 1960s were a form of Great Refusal, a saying “NO” to multiple forms of repression and domination. This Great Refusal demands a new/liberated society. This new society requires what Marcuse calls the new sensibility which is an ascension of the life instincts over the aggressive instincts. This idea of a new sensibility is yet another move beyond Marxism insofar as it requires much more than new power relations. It requires the cultivation of new forms of subjectivity. Human subjectivity in its present form is the product of systems of domination. We rid society of its systems of domination by ridding it of the forms of subjectivity formed by those systems and replacing them with new forms of subjectivity. This is why Marcuse was so interested in the feminist movement. He saw in this movement the potential for radical social change. The process of rethinking femininity and masculinity could be the beginning of redefining male subjectivity so that it develops in a way that males become less aggressive.

The cultivation of a new sensibility would transform the relationship between human beings and nature as well as the relationships among human beings. The new sensibility is the medium of social change that mediates between the political practice of changing the world and one’s own drive for personal liberation.

In Marcuse’s own words:

The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible. The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest. They can do so only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing. It is precisely this need which the established society manages to repress to the degree to which it is capable of "delivering the goods" on an increasingly large scale and of using the scientific conquest of nature for the scientific conquest of man. ²

There was, Marcuse emphasized, no one right way to perform the Great Refusal or to cultivate the “new sensibility”. You could drop out, of course, or you could protest in the streets, or live on the street, or you could compose music or write poetry or be an artist; you could be a hippie or a Yippie; you could stay in school to join in the “long march through the institutions,” intent on undermining 2500 years of Western culture; as long as you were doing your own thing, whatever it was, and not letting the Man tell you what to do, you were a refusenik—unless, of course, your “thing” was to mindlessly perpetuate the existing social order, in which case, you were a victim of false consciousness, part of the problem and not part of the solution, and probably a real drag to be around. On the bright side, in that case, you would likely get your degree, get a job, raise a family, and, who knows, maybe get elected at some point to public office, so long as you admitted to having tried marijuana but insisted you had never inhaled. 

As for “repressive tolerance,” the Marcusian trope to which today’s conservatives point when conjuring the specter of left-wing totalitarianism: Marcuse said that society had the right to suppress, by a variety of means, ideas it found unacceptable. From Marcuse’s standpoint, of course, that meant allowing left-wing and “progressive” ideas while suppressing right-wing and “reactionary” ones. In promulgating “repressive tolerance,” Marcuse was, in effect, following the lead of the late Pope Gregory XVI, who had reminded Catholic clergy that such things as free speech, freedom of the press, and liberty of conscience constituted “a pestilence more deadly to the state than any other.” Gregory’s 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos restated the long-standing Catholic position that “error has no rights,” at least none that it can effectively invoke in its defense. ³   

Marcuse’s call for intolerance prompted conservatives, utterly unaware of the irony or the hypocrisy, to demand his removal from his university teaching position. The fact that all societies do in fact set limits of some kind on speech as well as conduct (a practice traditionally approved of by conservatives and sometimes opposed by liberals) was overlooked in the hysterical response to Marcuse; moreover, the controversy came on the heels of a decade of McCarthyism, of “Red-baiting,” of investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and of loyalty oaths, all of which made risible the right-wing pearl-clutching about “repressive tolerance”.   

There was (and still is) a genuine debate to be had about what Karl Popper called the “open society”: about the limits of tolerance, that is, and about how best to enforce them. Is there such a thing as “intolerable ideas”? Are there political/ideological equivalents of “fighting words” or of falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater? Is “tolerating intolerance” a paradox, an oxymoron, a civil necessity, or just an annoying question for high-school debate teams? The limits of free speech are constantly being argued and constantly being redrawn; even as we speak, Republican-controlled state legislatures are banning the teaching in public schools of the “1619 Project” and of whatever they believe is “Critical Race Theory,” just as legislatures once banned the teaching of Darwinian evolution.    

Aside, then, from those two essential ideas, how influential was Marcuse? His Germanic prose, like that of his Frankfurt colleagues, tended to be ponderously academic, hardly the stuff of sloganeering:

In critical theory, the established way of organizing society is measured against other possible ways, ways which are held to offer better chances for alleviating man's struggle for existence; a specific historical practice is measured against its own historical alternatives. From the beginning, any critical theory of society is thus confronted with the problem of historical objectivity, a problem which arises at the two points where the analysis implies value judgments: (1) the judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to be made worth living. This judgement underlies all intellectual effort; it is the a priori of social theory, and its rejection (which is perfectly logical) rejects theory itself; and (2) the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human life, and specific ways and means of realizing these possibilities. Critical analysis has to demonstrate the objective validity of these judgments, and the demonstration has to proceed on empirical grounds. The established society has available an ascertainable quantity and quality of intellectual and material resources. How can these resources be used for the optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs and faculties with a minimum of toil and misery? Social theory is historical theory, and history is the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources, which ones offer the greatest chance of an optimal development?

Phrases like “frameworks of domination” and “cultural hegemony” rolled trippingly off the tongues of the cultural Marxists, never to be heard outside the groves of academe. To be fair, Marcuse, at the height of his popularity/notoriety in the Sixties, could sometimes be a firebrand as well. In “An Essay on Liberation,” he came across as a professorial Alan Ginsberg, howling imprecations against Moloch: “This society is obscene in producing and indecently exposing a stifling abundance of wares while depriving its victims abroad of the necessities of life; obscene in stuffing itself and its garbage cans while poisoning and burning the scarce foodstuffs in the fields of its aggression; obscene in the words and smiles of its politicians and entertainers; in its prayers, in its ignorance, and in the wisdom of its kept intellectuals.”

In short, in summary, and in conclusion: Herbert Marcuse was an ephemeral cultural phenomenon in the best Warholian sense of getting fifteen minutes of fame. His critique of the modern West, whatever its merits, was drowned out the minute Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival and all the budding young refuseniks (like me) ran out to buy his albums and to upgrade our music systems, thus giving corporate capitalism a vital role in our lives. The revolution would not be televised but it would be recorded and distributed on vinyl; henceforth, we would get our marching orders through our stereo headphones.

Whatever the Right wants to say about Herbert Marcuse, I will guarantee you this: more young people were turned on to the Great Refusal by Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” than by all the tomes of the Frankfurt School put together.⁴ You say you wanted a revolution? It turns out you just wanted to be a rock & roll star.

_______________________________

¹ Marcuse Today | Boston Review (Archives 2014)

² Coincidentally (?), Marcuse’s proposed “Great Refusal” appeared in print not long after Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Great Society” speech of May 1964.

³ Something about Marcuse apparently struck a nerve in the modern papacy, as Stephen Whitfield has observed: “In 1969, Pope Paul VI condemned Marcuse by name, blaming him—along with Sigmund Freud—for promoting the “disgusting and unbridled” manifestations of eroticism and the “animal, barbarous and subhuman degradations” commonly known as the sexual revolution.”

⁴ Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival - YouTube  (A classic performance, with Mike Bloomfield providing blistering lead guitar, and, at the end, a chorus of Boos from the audience. At least no one shouted out “Judas!”)

Satan, aka "Herbert Marcuse"

Existential Wednesday: Irrational Man?

{The following is a guest post from the blog’s new mascot/contributor: Pascal, the existential Russian blue cat. Pascal’s interests extend to philosophy in general, and theology as well, but Existentialism is his wheelhouse. I have given him leave to post to the blog once each week on what will henceforth be called “Existential Wednesday”. Here, then, is the first of what I can only hope will be many contributions from Pascal.}

“The desire for meaning still slumbers, though submerged, beneath the extroversion of American life.” (William Barrett)

William Barrett’s 1958 Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy is as good a guide as you are likely to find to postwar existentialism. Barrett felt it necessary to add a brief, apologetic Preface to the 1960 edition of the book: “The reader may, if he wishes, imagine the title printed with a question-mark at the end: ‘Irrational Man?’ After all, when the classical definition of man as the ‘homo rationalis,’ the rational animal, has prevailed for centuries, and prevailed without being radically questioned and explored, there may be some point in a title that may shock some people to question whether that definition is really the ultimate statement about man. If reason is really human reason, we should expect it to be problematic like everything human.” I doubt that Barrett, were he alive today, would bother with that Preface; we are all too painfully aware of the limits of human reason.

In any case, I present here some of Barrett’s opening chapter from Irrational Man:

The themes of Existentialism—anxiety, death, the conflict between the bogus and the genuine self, the faceless man of the masses, the experience of the death of God—are themes of life. People do die, people do struggle all their lives between the demands of real and counterfeit selves, and we do live in an age in which neurotic anxiety has mounted out of all proportion so that even minds inclined to believe that all human problems can be solved by physical techniques begin to label ‘mental health’ as the first of our public problems.

The roots of Existentialism reach down into the remotest depths of the Western tradition. Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers are, strictly speaking, the creators of existential philosophy in the twentieth century; but what impelled them to give a new voice to the intellectual consciousness of the age was their decisive relation to two older nineteenth-century thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche was an academic philosopher; neither developed a system; both in fact gibed at systematizers and even the possibilities of a philosophical system; and while they proliferated in ideas that were far in advance of their time and would be spelled out only by the following century, these ideas were not the stock themes of academic philosophy.

Ideas are not even the real subject matter of existential philosophers, and this in itself is something of a revolution in Western philosophy: their central subject is the unique experience of the single one, the individual, who chooses to place himself on trial before the greatest questions of his civilization. For both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the gravest question was Christianity, though they were driven to opposite positions in regard to it. Kierkegaard’s ideas were simply sparks thrown off in the fiery process of seeking to realize the truth of Christ in his own life. Nietzsche begins with the confession of bankruptcy: God is dead, says Nietzsche, and European man, if he were more honest, courageous, and had keener eyes for what went on in the depths of his own soul, would know that this death has taken place there, despite the lip service still paid to the old formulae and ideals of religion. Nietzsche sought to answer the question: What next? What happens to the race when at long last it has severed the umbilical cord that bound it for millennia to the gods and to a transcendent world beyond this earthly world?

The seriousness of existential thought does not arise merely out of the despair of a world from which God has departed. Modern experience is the bond among existential philosophers. Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has attempted to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man. Existential philosophy attempts to grasp the image of the whole man, even where this involves bringing to consciousness all that is dark and questionable in his existence. In this respect it is a more authentic expression of our own contemporary existence. Beginning with the Reformation, Protestant man is the locus of the West’s fateful encounter with Nothingness—an encounter that was long overdue and is perhaps only now reaching its culmination.

One of the elements of modernity that Barrett cites as existentially problematic is “the rational ordering of society,” a phenomenon contrasted with supposedly “organic” societies of the past whose order was the product of natural growth rather than rational calculation. It will be worth considering that issue at length in our next “Existential Wednesday” post.  

--Pascal, the existential Russian blue cat

Waiting for the Superbugs

{First it's a pandemic, then it's murder hornets, now it's superbugs; if it's not one thing, it's another. It's always something, is all I'm saying.}

At The Hedgehog Review, Andrew Lynn suggests that current critiques of Liberalism too often miss the point: the problems and “blind spots” associated with modern Liberalism stem from its “opaque understanding of the social order”. Liberals, Lynn writes, “sideline the role of enculturation and customs, instead championing independent reasoning as the source for crucial moral knowledge. This metaphysic of individualism,” he adds, “then gets mistaken as an actual account of how human societies work.”

The “postliberal” account, coming from both the Right and the Left, is that, wanting to set mankind free from its chains, Liberalism unwittingly severed the ties that bind, liberating “individuals fully from surrounding social contexts, authorities, and encroachments on autonomous will.” Lynn cites numerous postliberal critics who insist that “Our social pathologies are a consequence of this Faustian emancipation: social isolation, polarization, economic inequality, consumerism, moral relativism, and many others.” For such critics, evidence of Liberalism’s failure includes “the ‘deaths of despair’ in communities forsaken by postindustrial capitalism, the rise of loneliness in the wake of shrinking household size, the ubiquity of activist CEOs and corporations, the failures of cosmopolitan elites, and the need for policies that protect working-class families.”

All well and good, says Lynn; but where the critics go wrong is in believing that Liberalism achieved its goal and that the fully emancipated individual now exists. Haunted by this figment of the Liberal imagination, fearing anarchy and chaos, and seeing moral relativism and nihilism around every corner, postliberal thinkers incline as a result towards Populist authoritarianism (Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin). With social institutions everywhere in decay or reduced to a state of impotence, only the power of the State can restrain the centrifugal force of individualism. These critics fail to realize, says Lynn, that “The individual purportedly stripped bare of all cultural entrapments by liberalism, now standing naked before the state with only his or her individual rights, is nothing but a fictitious character invented by political theorists enticed by natural philosophy. Indeed, anyone alert to twenty-first-century life could hardly accept the idea that the individual stands naked before the state. Even if more traditional social hierarchies like the family or the church have become attenuated, new forms of power—such as social codes, labor relations, and financial credit—shape the way that people live and work in contemporary society.”

“No individual,” Lynn insists, “achieves independence” from social factors; those factors change, evolve, and assume new forms, but they are always present. The very things that make us human—our “mode of relating to one another, maintaining peace, [and] caring for one another”–involve socialization and enculturation. The corrective to the corrosive effects of Liberalism is not brute force or a retreat to tribalism, but a patient, careful attention to the social fabric, repairing what needs to be repaired and making it strong enough to hold us all.  

Where the Critics of Liberalism Go Wrong | THR Web Features | Web Features | The Hedgehog Review

At Law and Liberty, Daniel Mahoney recommends Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel trilogy, a series of novelizations of the 1917 Russian revolutions. Mahoney praises Solzhenitsyn effusively:

Rarely is such a long work as The Red Wheel so riveting, so exciting. If The Gulag Archipelago remains the book of Solzhenitsyn’s that means the most to me, that speaks with depth and light to my heart and soul, The Red Wheel, on each reading and rereading, grows greatly in my esteem. February, even more than October, conveys the crisis of authority that is coextensive with a certain decayed liberalism common to radical or late modernity in all its forms throughout the world.

In addition, Solzhenitsyn’s art in this work conveys deep truths, and opportunities lost, in a way that academic history, increasingly torn between ideology, abstruse methodology, and soulless reductionism can rarely if ever do. Art, dramatized history, wisdom about statecraft and the art of politics, and a deep, passionate but measured patriotism find elevated expression in the literary art of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Whatever one thinks of his politics, Solzhenitsyn is to be admired for his literary accomplishments, his courage, and his honesty. Unfortunately, Mahoney cannot resist taking a potshot at his own ideological and political foes, none of whom had anything to do with the Russian revolutions of 1917:

The American reader probably cannot imagine Red October, or its equivalent, in our immediate future. But essential aspects of the February Revolution—contempt for all authority and hierarchy, disdain for the past and a desire to repudiate it or negate it altogether, demands to abolish the police, intolerance of anything that smacks of conservatism or tradition—are all around us and are the hallmark of what it means to be “progressive” today. 

Decades ago, Solzhenitsyn was adopted as an unofficial spokesperson by the American Right—until his venomous dislike of liberal democracy and the modern West became an embarrassment. That is not excuse, however, for Mahoney’s attempt to enlist for his own cause either Solzhenitsyn’s literary genius or the historical tragedies about which he wrote. 

The Ideologues of March 1917 – (lawliberty.org)

At Scientific American, Avi Loeb asks “Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory?” Professor Loeb has become something of a controversial figure, due to his interest in UFOs and his openness to the idea that aliens have already visited our planet. Loeb heads up the Galileo Project, under the aegis of which he plans to install a network of small telescopes around the globe in hopes of detecting evidence of non-terrestrial life. As for his “universe in a lab” hypothesis, he considers it worthwhile to consider, if only as a thought experiment and as a reminder that there is more to heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies. The idea should appeal to readers who are fascinated by questions like “Are we living in a computer simulation?” or “Can you prove the existence of other minds?”

Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory? - Scientific American

Finally, today's big story: at Statnews (“Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine”), Kevin Outterson warns us that the superbugs are coming and we had best get ready for them. The “superbug storm” is a predicted increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the obvious solution to which is new antibiotics (to which bacteria will then adapt, requiring newer antibiotics, etc.).  Insisting that we are engaged in a bacterial arms race, Outterson advocates for a Congressional bill called the PASTEUR Act, which, he says, has already been introduced in Congress with bipartisan support and which would “establish a Netflix-like subscription system under which the federal government would pay a flat fee to drug companies for pre-paid access to highly innovative antibiotics.”

Setting aside the details and logistics of that proposal, as well as the creepiness of "superbugs" and the questionable relevance of Netflix to the issue, I am struck by this statement from Outterson: “The cost of the PASTEUR Act is less than one latte per American each year.” I find that cost/benefit analysis so persuasive that I hereby suggest that all future legislation—as well as the federal budget, the national debt, the cost of military expenditures and entitlement programs, and the rate of inflation—be explained in terms of “lattes per American per year”. Innumerate as we are, we might not be able to comprehend Uncle Sam's spending billions or trillions of dollars at a time; but lattes we can understand.   

In the calm before the superbug storm, the world needs to prepare - STAT (statnews.com)

Sunday Sermon: "What Work Is"

Philip Levine, "What Work Is”: 

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

Forget you. This is about waiting,

shifting from one foot to another.

Feeling the light rain falling like mist

into your hair, blurring your vision

until you think you see your own brother

ahead of you, maybe ten places.

You rub your glasses with your fingers,

and of course it’s someone else’s brother,

narrower across the shoulders than

yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin

that does not hide the stubbornness,

the sad refusal to give in to

rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,

to the knowledge that somewhere ahead

a man is waiting who will say, “No,

we’re not hiring today,” for any

reason he wants. You love your brother,

now suddenly you can hardly stand

the love flooding you for your brother,

who’s not beside you or behind or

ahead because he’s home trying to   

sleep off a miserable night shift

at Cadillac so he can get up

before noon to study his German.

Works eight hours a night so he can sing

Wagner, the opera you hate most,

the worst music ever invented.

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,   

just because you don’t know what work is.

 

 

What Work Is by Philip Levine | Poetry Foundation

Saturday Lecture: "The Revolution of Everyday Life"

{Written in 1967, The Revolution of Everyday Life became a manifesto of sorts for the 1968 Paris uprisings. Like the Port Huron Statement of Students for a Democratic Society, Raoul Vaneigem’s book denounced capitalism, consumerism, bureaucratization, the industrialization and depersonalization of education, militarism, nationalism, racism, sexism, bourgeois existence, liberal democracy, and much more. Vaneigem republished the manifesto in 2010 in the wake of the financial crash of 2008; he added a brief preface, which I have here appended at the end of the excerpt.}

Raoul Vaneigem, from The Revolution of Everyday Life

1968:

Since humans came upon the earth, everything has been said, yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is fundamentally banal, it can be of value only to minds that are not.

The modern world has to learn what it already knows, become what it already is, through a great exorcism of obstacles, through practice. We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

The struggle between subjectivity and everything that corrupts it is widening the battleground of the old class struggle, revitalizing that struggle and making it more bitter. The desire to live is a political decision. Who wants a world where the guarantee of freedom from starvation means the risk of death from boredom?

The man of survival is a man ground up in the machinery of hierarchical power, caught in a net of crossed purposes, a chaos of oppressive techniques whose ordering awaits only patient programming by programmed minds.

The man of survival, however, is also the unitary man, the man of absolute refusal. Not a moment passes without each one of us experiencing, on every level of reality, the contradiction between oppression and freedom; without each one of us being caught up and weirdly twisted by two antagonistic perspectives simultaneously: the perspective of power and the perspective of supersession.

*************************

Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation. No illusion, sacred or secular, collective or individual, can now hide the poverty of our day-to- day actions. The enrichment of life calls for an unblinking analysis of the new forms taken by poverty and the perfecting of old weapons of refusal.

Is this dawning lucidity essentially new? I don’t think so. Everyday life always produces the demand for a brighter light, because of the need felt by all to walk in step with history. There are more truths in twenty-four hours of an individual’s life than in all the philosophies. Even a philosopher cannot ignore it, for all his self-contempt— that same self-contempt that the very comfort of philosophy has taught him. After somersaulting onto his own shoulders to shout his message to the world from a greater height, the philosopher finishes by seeing the world upside down; and everything in it obligingly goes askew, and walks on its head, to persuade him that he is standing upright. But he is the center of his delusional state, and struggling to contest it merely renders his delusion more uncomfortable.

The moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries presided over a vast stock of platitudes, but so active were their efforts to conceal this fact that a veritable stuccoed palace of speculation arose above it, an ideal palace to shelter and imprison real experience. From its gates emerged a conviction and sincerity quickened by a sublime tone and by the fiction of the ‘universal man’ but contaminated by a breath of permanent anxiety. The analytic approach of these philosophers sought to escape the gradual atrophying of existence by attaining some essential profundity; and the further into alienation their philosophy led them by embracing the age’s dominant imagery (the feudal image in which God, monarchy, and the world are indivisibly united), the more their lucidity photographed the hidden face of life, the more it ‘invented’ everyday experience.

Enlightenment philosophy accelerated the descent into the concrete, for the concrete was in some ways brought to power along with the revolutionary bourgeoisie. From the ruins of Heaven, humanity fell into the ruins of its own world. What happened? Something like this: ten thou- sand people are convinced that they have seen a fakir’s rope rise into the air, while so many cameras prove that it hasn’t moved an inch. Scientific objectivity exposes mystification. Very good, but what does it show us? A coiled rope of absolutely no interest. I have little inclination to choose between the doubtful pleasure of being mystified and the tedium of contemplating a reality which does not concern me. A reality which I have no grasp of— isn’t this just the old lie recycled, the highest stage of mystification?

From now on the analysts are in the streets. Lucidity is not their only weapon. Their thinking is no longer in danger of being imprisoned, either by the false reality of gods or by the false reality of technocrats.

*********************

Religious beliefs concealed humans from themselves, a Bastille walling them up in a pyramidal world with God at the summit and the king just below. Alas, there was not enough freedom to be found on that fourteenth of July among the ruins of unitary power to prevent those ruins themselves from becoming another prison. Behind the rent veil of superstition appeared, not naked truth but the slime of ideologies. The prisoners of fragmented power have but a shadow of freedom as their only refuge from tyranny.

Today no action and no thought evades the web of received ideas. The slow fall-out of particles from the old myth, now exploded, spreads the dust of the sacrosanct everywhere, choking the spirit and the will to live. Constraints have become less occult, more blatant; less powerful, more numerous. Docility is no longer ensured by priestly magic; it results from a mass of minor hypnoses: news, culture, city planning, advertising, mechanisms of conditioning and suggestion ready to serve any order, established or to come. We are like Gulliver, stranded on the Lilliputian shore, with every part of his body tied down; determined to free himself, he looks keenly around him: the smallest detail of the landscape, the smallest contour of the ground, the slightest movement, everything becomes a sign on which his escape may depend. The surest chances of liberation lie in what is most familiar. Was it ever otherwise? Art, ethics, philosophy bear witness: under the crust of words and concepts, the living reality of maladjustment to the world is always crouched ready to spring. Since neither gods nor words can any longer decently cover it up, this commonplace creature roams naked in railway stations and vacant lots; it confronts you at each self-evasion, it grasps your shoulder, catches your eye, and the dialogue begins. You go down with it, or make your escape with it.

********************

Too many corpses strew the paths of individualism and collectivism. These seemingly contrary principles cloak one and the same gangsterism, one and the same oppression of the isolated individual. Everywhere the same law holds good: ‘There is no weapon of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn against you.’ If anyone says or writes that practical reason must henceforth be based on the rights of the individual and the individual alone, he negates his own proposition if he does not incite his audience to make this statement true for themselves. Such a proof can only be lived, grasped from within. That is why everything should be tested and corrected by everyone’s immediate experience. Nothing is so valuable that it need not be started afresh, nothing is so rich that is it has no need of continual enrichment

********************

2010:

Ever since consumerism spread patronage everywhere and harnessed the lies of ideology to the needs of merchandising, the free-for-all of market democracy has obliterated any consciousness of the need to fight exploitation.

The crimes committed in the name of the liberation of the proletariat have helped in no small measure to spread a spirit of apathy and fatalism highly conducive to that suicidal impulse which, with or without religious buttressing, works for a universal and apocalyptic death. The plunder of existential and terrestrial resources carried on with impunity by state and private mafias fuels a creeping dread, a state of funk that is absurd inasmuch as Europeans no longer need to fear tanks in the streets or brutal and systematic police intrusion. This internalized terror is, quite simply, a fear of living, of autonomy, of self-creation.

But no matter how exhausted the life forces grow, a moment always comes when consciousness rouses itself, reasserting its rights and retrieving its outgoing exuberance. I have always wagered on a reversal of perspective which, razing a past dominated by contempt for human beings, will usher in a new society founded on the creative capacities of individuals and on an irrepressible desire to revel in oneself and in the world.

We are in the midst of a civilizational shift, one that the Occupations Movement of May 1968 in France illuminated in that it strove to accelerate it, thus hastening the collapse of consumer society and the emergence of a society committed to life. I still believe that, despite the bewilderment of oppressors and oppressed alike in face of the collapse of the old world, individual and social emancipation is the only way out. Identification with an ethnic or national community, with a religion, ideology, or any abstraction is nothing but a blood-soaked delusion. There is only one identity: that of men and women with what is most vital and human within them.

The future belongs to self-managed communities which, not content merely to place the production of goods at the service of the whole society, will decree that the happiness of all must depend on the happiness of each. This principle is the basis of a direct democracy that will put to rout those destructive shadows of tyranny and universal corruption which parliamentary democracy continues to spread— ever more visibly— across the globe.

The Revolution of Everyday Life : Raoul Vaneigem : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

What Work Is

"You know what work is—if you’re / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it." (Philip Levine, “What Work Is”)

At Current Affairs, Matthew James Seidel favorably reviews Gavin Mueller’s book Breaking Things at Work, a book which asserts as its thesis the claim that The Luddites Were Right. This claim has been advanced before—most notably by Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1995 Rebels Against the Future—but it seems especially timely now, what worth employers bemoaning an inexplicable labor shortage which has nothing at all to do, I’m certain, with low wages, minimal benefits, or generally unpleasant working conditions.

As Seidel notes, the Luddites have been maligned and caricatured as simple-minded technophobes. In fact, “they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves.” Alas, even the 19^th- and 20^th-century Left, including Marx and Lenin, embraced the promised abundance of industrial capitalism and its quasi-magical technologies, even while aspiring to put the proletariat in charge. According to Seidel, “The ‘two-stage’ strain of Marxism holds that societies must evolve from one stage to another, with the last transition being from capitalism to communism. It follows that if the erosion of workers’ autonomy via new technology is part of capitalism’s road to self-destruction, well, workers must simply accept it, while holding out for a better future.” Thus did Lenin import ‘Taylorism’ and ‘Fordism’ into Russia hoping to keep pace with the industrialized West while awaiting the development of the proletariat; “The Taylor system,” said Lenin, “is preparing the time when the proletariat will take over all social production.”

That was then, and this is now: “The oppressive power of technology,” writes Seidel, “is clearer in our own day than ever before. Consider the algorithms used by Amazon to surveil, discipline, and punish employees. Mueller cites a case where a worker failed to keep up with the inhuman, brutal pace set by the algorithms. After exceeding three automated warnings, she was fired. But managers were quick to explain, “We didn’t fire you, the machine fired you because you are lower than the rate.” The threat of new technology extends far beyond the workplace. The police frighten citizens with robot dogs and use drones to spy on unsuspecting beachgoers, while firms like Cambridge Analytica secretly harvest online data in order to predict and influence the behavior of millions of voters. Silicon Valley has armed surveillance capitalism with tools to threaten autonomy not only over our jobs, but our data and our very identities.”

In Seidel’s estimate, “Breaking Things at Work lays out the unprecedented threats to our autonomy in the workplace and beyond, but it’s not just doom and gloom. Mueller also reminds us people are fighting back. Burgeoning tech worker unions, the decelerationist movement, tractor-hackers—all are infused by the spirit of Luddism whether they know it or not. By acknowledging the connection between activism today and Luddites of the past, we can unite seemingly disparate struggles into a single front.” He concludes, “A socialist analysis is crucial to resisting the reactionary tendencies of the tech industry. But Mueller makes it clear that, unless this analysis is informed by Luddism, the Left is bound to make the same mistakes all over again.”

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The Luddites Were Right ❧ Current Affairs

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Along the same lines, Aaron Benanav (at The Nation) takes a deep and extended dive into James Suzman’s Work: A Deep History. Suzman is a South African anthropologist who asks, in this book, “whether we might learn to live like our ancestors did—that is, to value free time over money. Answering that question takes him on a 300-millennium journey through humanity’s existence.” According to Benanav, “The ‘principal purpose’ of his undertaking, Suzman explains, is ‘to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held’ over our lives and thereby ‘diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth.’ It is an arresting intervention, although one that reveals the limits of both contemporary economics and anthropology as guides to thinking about our era of climate emergency.”

Allow me to quote Benanav at length regarding the fundamental confusion in mainstream economic thought:

Economics positions itself as the study of how the choices we make under the constraints of scarcity facilitate the allocation of our productive capacities. Every gain in economic efficiency loosens those constraints just a bit, so some of us can afford to satisfy a few more of our desires without taking away from other people’s ability to meet their own needs. Why the wealthy few are able to satisfy so many of their whims before the world’s poor achieve basic levels of economic security has always been an uncomfortable question for the economic profession. But economists assure us that, in any case, the only long-term solution to global poverty is more economic growth.

That is why economists speak of our history primarily as one long story of economic expansion, as if our task as humans always has been and always will be to struggle out of penury and acquire more things. Seeing the world that way has enormous consequences for how we think about climate change, among the many other ecological threats to human well-being, such as deforestation and overfishing. If confronting these threats means making do with less, such a limitation can only appear, in the economist’s eyes, as a regression against which human nature will rebel.

The account of human nature undergirding this standard economic perspective is precisely what Suzman’s anthropological evidence allows him to reject. In reality, the scarcity postulate applies only to a limited period of humanity’s existence. For the vast majority of our history, humans have thought of their material needs as limited. Families divided up the work required to meet those needs, and when the work was done, they called it a day. When people have found themselves in possession of an abundance of goods, they have generally seen those goods not as resources to be deployed in the service of economic expansion, but rather as so many excuses to throw gigantic parties. In many cultures, giving away or even ritualistically destroying one’s possessions at festivals has been a common way to show one’s worth. That people all over the world continue to spend their meager incomes on elaborate marriage celebrations and funerals is something mainstream economists can understand only as anomalous.

For Suzman, anthropological insights into our pre-scarcity past lend support to a post-scarcity tradition in economics, which he associates with the work of John Maynard Keynes, who wanted not merely to stabilize Western economies but to advance beyond them, to a post-scarcity society in which economic concerns had largely faded from human consciousness. To so much as conceive of this alternative, Keynes asserted, economists would have to reconsider the nature of economics.

The “dismal science,” as economics has been called, famously knows the price of everything but not the value of anything. It is based on inaccurate history and inaccurate assumptions about human nature; and it condemns us, if we continue to grant it authority, to a lifetime of work intended towards the pointless acquisition of money and the accumulation of things that money can buy, none of which are ultimately of much importance. If we want to avoid such a bleak future, we need to embark upon what historian Harvey Kaye has called “the education of desire,” a humanistic reorienting of our efforts towards the things that matter most. ¹

As well as citing economists such as Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith, Suzman also draws on the work of other anthropologists—James Scott, David Grabeber, and David Wengrow, among others—“who have mustered the available evidence to demonstrate that human nature is far different from what economists have long led us to believe. We humans are capable of ‘moderating our personal material aspirations,’ but only, as Suzman suggests, if we address currently unsustainable levels of economic and social inequality.”   

Aaron Benanav, it should be noted, is skeptical about some of Suzman’s claims, e.g., the rate at which automation will displace human workers; Benanav believes that will be a much slower process than does Suzman. “Humanity,” Benanav writes, “can’t just wake up to the end of work.” He is likely correct, but can we not wake up sooner rather than later to a different understanding of what work is? That would be a welcome start.

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Do We Need to Work? | The Nation

¹ Daniel Bell Jr.’s book The Economy of Desire has a similar premise.  

Strangers to Ourselves

{N.B. This is not another rant about capitalism. It is a rant about something else. I rant, therefore, I am.}

“Alienated labor alienates nature from man and alienates man from himself, from his own active function, his life activity. It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life, and his human life. Each man is alienated from others, and each of the others is likewise alienated from human life.” (Karl Marx) ¹

That is a whole lot of alienation, but Marx’s statements raise the question: Is alienation an invention of modernity? Does it even exist? Did Karl Marx simply make it up, conjure it from his own fevered mind? Or is it possible that alienation, existential angst, is characteristic of the species and just part of what it means to be human? Are we by nature strangers to ourselves and to each other?

The laments of Ecclesiastes (“All is vanity and vexation of the spirit”), of Saint Paul (“Wretched man that I am? Who will deliver me from this body of death?), and of Augustine (“What then am I? What is my nature? I dive down deep as I can and I can find no end…”) suggest that, long before capitalism and secularism or Hegel and Marx, humans struggled to make sense of themselves and of their place in the universe. Every myth of Eden or of a Golden Age was a response to our sense of being, as Walker Percy put it, “lost in the cosmos”. Even Socrates’ famous injunction to “Know thyself” implied that most of us have not overcome our essential estrangement; neither self-knowledge nor self-acceptance can be attained without a struggle.  

In writing about Marx and about Marxism (Main Currents of Marxism), the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski briefly considers some of Marx’s predecessors in the articulation of alienation. For instance, Francois Fenelon (1651—1715) was a French Catholic Archbishop whose existential sensibilities, at least as shown in the following passage, nearly rivaled those of Blaise Pascal (“We disguise and conceal ourselves from ourselves”). Unlike his countryman and predecessor Rene Descartes, Fenelon could not even manage a simple Cogito ergo sum:

Alas! I am almost that which is not. I see myself as an incomprehensible middle point between nothingness and existence; I am one that was and one that will be, I am he who no longer is what he was and is not yet what he will be; and in that betweenness, what am I? A thing, I know not what, which cannot be contained in itself, which has no stability and flows away like water; a thing, I know not what, which I cannot grasp and which slips through my fingers, which is no longer there when I try to grasp it or catch a glimpse of it; a thing, I know not what, which ceases to exist even as it comes to be, so that there is never a moment at which I find myself in a state of stability or am present to myself in such way that I can say simply ‘I am’.

Along the same lines, but with considerably more concision, the Dutch mystic Jakob Bril wrote, in 1715, that “All things in nature are what they are except for man, who, considered in himself, is not the thing that he is; for he imagines himself to be something when he is not.” 

Given the evidence, Leszek Kolakowski concludes that alienation “is an unchanging feature of man’s speculation about himself, assuming different forms in different cultures but equally capable of finding expression within a religious or a radically anti-religious framework.” If that is correct, then what Karl Marx thought could be remedied by leveling economic inequalities (and the inequalities of power and status that accompany them) seems to require a different cure—if a cure can be found and if a cure is even deemed necessary. Alienation—from ourselves, from each other, and from the world we inhabit, and from a God who may or may not even exist—may be precisely the thing that impels us to question, to create, to invent, to build, to dream, and to imagine. It may be that the incurable existential itch, constantly demanding to be scratched, makes us, for better and for worse, who we are.

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¹ Soc 250 - Marx on Alienation (uregina.ca)

Of Interest

Two recent items of possible interest:

(1) At Psyche, Andrew Reiner, accredited expert in Men’s Studies, provides a guide for developing “a more nuanced and customized form of gender identity that meets men’s individual emotional needs. What is needed to be a man today,” he explains, “[is] the freedom to customize one’s gender identity and not be forced into what’s on the rack.” Given the confusing times in which we live, “If there was ever a time that we needed to think about, reassess, and reimagine what it means to be a man, it’s now.”

Has it not always been thus? Has manhood not always been a work in progress, and has progress not always been distressingly slow? Perhaps so; but, according to Reiner, today’s men are increasingly lonely, emotionally isolated, prone to disguising and repressing their feelings, and in the habit of acting out in ways harmful to themselves and others: e.g., driving too fast, drinking too much, running for office, starting wars, etc. Extensive research (conducted, no doubt, in a variety of sports bars around the nation) has shown that “many males stick to bonding with buddies over beer and sports or other activities that can prevent us from developing deeper emotional trust and intimacy. This is what we’ve learned that men are supposed to do – downplay our emotional lives, making sacrifices when it comes to our emotional needs. It seems that far too many of us would rather keep our Man Cards in good standing than meet those deeper needs.”

It is all too easy to mock Reiner’s plea that we men “embrace emotional honesty” and sit down with our buddies, chums, and bros to talk (over tea, perhaps) about things like “What qualities of traditional masculinity are worth keeping? Why? Which ones are worth letting go of? Why? What kinds of things should men be able to discuss openly without judgment? What kind of behaviors should men be allowed to engage in without judgment? What feelings should men be able to feel and show without judgment?”

Having urged men to bare their manly souls for all to see, Reiner then encourages them to think of “a time from your past when you felt sad, scared or lonely. Write about the event that led to this emotional state. It’s OK to keep the recollection general if it’s still painful to recall. Now imagine yourself at your present age, sitting next to your past self, at the time when these feelings arose. Write down what you would say to your past self as gentle advice or suggestions for sitting with and accepting these feelings. Let your younger self know that it’s okay and safe to have these feelings – that they are a normal, natural part of being a healthy human.”

With all due respect for Andrew Reiner and his Men’s Studies program: this sort of pabulum would make Iron John sick to his stomach. (Iron John - Wikipedia)

   

How to be a man | Psyche Guides 

(2) For anyone looking for something more suited to grownups, I recommend Samantha Rose Hill’s article (at Aeon) “When Hope Is a Hindrance,” in which Ms. Hill discusses Hannah Arendt’s beliefs regarding the inadequacy of hope and the necessity for action. “Hope” having been long established as a cardinal virtue, Arendt’s thoughts on the subject were distinctly unconventional, as Hill admits:

Many discussions of hope veer toward the saccharine and speak to a desire for catharsis. Even the most jaded observers of world affairs can find it difficult not to catch their breath at the moment of suspense, hoping for good to triumph over evil and deliver a happy ending. For some, discussions of hope are attached to notions of a radical political vision for the future, while for others hope is a political slogan used to motivate the masses. Some people uphold hope as a form of liberal faith in progress, while for others hope expresses faith in God and life after death.”

“Arendt breaks with these narratives,” writes Hill. “Throughout much of her work, she argues that hope is a dangerous barrier to acting courageously in dark times.” Of course, Arendt was known to be something of a buzzkill; “She rejects notions of progress, she is despairing of representative democracy, and she is not confident that freedom can be saved in the modern world. She does not even believe in the soul, as she writes in a letter to her husband.” Writing about the Holocaust (“The Destruction of Six Million”), Arendt singled out the insidious futility of hope in the face of evil; “It was holding on to hope, Arendt argued, that rendered so many helpless. It was hope that destroyed humanity by turning people away from the world in front of them. It was hope that prevented people from acting courageously in dark times.” 

Having dismissed hope, Arendt did not, says Hill, leave us empty-handed. Rather, she replaced hope with what she called “natality”:

Coining natality as a concept, Arendt found the principle of new beginnings, the root of political action, and the possibility of freedom. An uncommon word, and certainly more feminine and clunkier-sounding than hope, natality possesses the ability to save humanity. Whereas hope is a passive desire for some future outcome, the faculty of action is ontologically rooted in the fact of natality. Breaking with the tradition of Western political thought which centered death and mortality, Arendt turns towards new beginnings, not to make any metaphysical argument about the nature of being, but in order to save the principle of humanity itself. Natality is the condition for continued human existence, it is the miracle of birth, it is the new beginning inherent in each birth that makes action possible, it is spontaneous, and it is unpredictable. Natality means we always have the ability to break with the current situation and begin something new. But what that is cannot be said.

Hill quotes Arendt directly:

“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion in Pandora’s box.”

One might say that, for Arendt, “hope” is a verb. As Hill puts it: “Hope in human affairs can come only from the fact that each new person born into the world has the ability to create something new, to act, and so to set in motion a chain of events, the outcome of which cannot be predicted.  Action is ‘the one miracle-working faculty of man’.” 

Hope, we are frequently reminded, is not a plan; but neither, to be fair, is action. “Make it new,” declared Ezra Pound; “You must change your life,” wrote Rilke; “In the beginning was the deed,” insisted Goethe’s Faust; yet not one of them provided a blueprint, any more than did Arendt with her invocation of “natality”. Circumstances, however, do not always allow the luxury of planning; and when our choices are reduced to action or inertia, then there is nothing for it but to do something. Hope, after all, is only the thing with feathers; in times of crisis, according to Hannah Arendt, what we need are wings.  

For Arendt, hope in dark times is no match for action | Aeon Essays

Sunday Sermon: "Childish Things"

James McMurtry, “Childish Things”

Aunt Clara kept her Bible right next to the phone
In case she needed a quote while she talked to someone
In my memory she smiles while the blessing is said
And visions of freeze tag dance in my head
She says I’ll grow up big if I eat all my roast
I’ll still believe in heaven, but I won’t believe in ghosts anymore

I’ll put away childish things
I’ll put away childish things

Every other weekend, age o' thirteen
With my fishing pole and my Field and Stream
Ridin' back home on the Trailways bus
I looked out the window ’til I saw too much
And I called my parents by their own first names
I played in the alley, but I didn’t play the game anymore

I’ll put away childish things
I’ll put away childish things

The wolves howl all night long
They won’t stop and they won’t go home
Beneath my window they run
Probably it’ll be alright
If I keep it all locked up tight
And wait ‘til daylight comes

Now my boy goes like a house on fire
He’ll never burn out and he’ll never retire
And I remember when I used to think like that
When I was young and the world was flat
But I’m forty-some years old now and man, I don’t care
All I want now is just a comfortable chair
And to sell all my stock and live on the coast
I don’t believe in heaven, but I still believe in ghosts

I’ve put away childish things
I’ve put away childish things
I’ve put away childish things
I’ve put away childish things

The original: Childish Things - YouTube

A first-rate cover: Sarah Jarosz - Childish Things (James McMurtry cover) - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: The Business of Philosophy

{Lev Shestov (1866—1938) was a Russian philosopher who has been variously described as a ‘Biblical philosopher,’ an ‘anti-philosopher,’ a ‘solipsist,’ a ‘nihilist,’ and (my favorite) a peddler of 'spiritual terror'. He was a long-time friend of the better-known philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and of the theologian and priest Sergei Bulgakov. Unlike them, Shestov took no interest in social or political issues; he was too busy dismantling the rationalistic premises of Western philosophy to bother with Bolshevism or revolution. His intent was to preserve the freedom of both man and God over against the ‘chains’ of ‘necessity’; his method of argumentation was to throw the book (the Bible) at opponents--figuratively, of course; and his primary argument amounted to ‘because God’. Metaphysically, at least, Shestov would have been at home in the speculative fictions of Philip K. Dick in which all things could be (and perhaps already are) other than they seem. Of course, Dick’s protagonists tended either to go insane or to doubt the reality of the world itself; Shestov, on the other hand, left Russia after the revolution to live in exile in Paris, where he died of tuberculosis at the age of 72.} 

Lev Shestov (from All Things Are Possible):

We are forced to admit that anything whatsoever may result from anything whatsoever. This does not mean that a stone ever turned into bread, or that our visible universe was ever ‘naturally’ formed from nebulous puffs. But from our own minds and our own experiences we can deduce nothing that would serve us as a ground for setting even the smallest limit to nature’s own arbitrary behavior. If whatever happens now had chanced to happen quite differently, it would not have seemed any the less ‘natural’ to us. In other words, although there may be an element of inevitability in our human judgments concerning natural phenomena, we have never been able and probably never shall be able to separate the grain of the inevitable from the chaff of accident and random truth. Moreover, we do not even know which is more essential and more important, the inevitable or the random. Hence, we are forced to the conclusion that philosophy must give up her attempt at finding eternal truths. The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty—man who is supremely afraid of uncertainty and who is forever hiding himself behind this or that dogma. More briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them.

The universe might be so constituted as to admit of the most fantastic metamorphoses. At present a stone remains a stone, a plant remains a plant, an animal an animal. But it might be that a stone turned into a plant before our eyes, and a plant into an animal. There is nothing unthinkable in such a supposition. I am compelled to repeat that anything you please may come from anything you please, that A may not equal A, and that ‘logic’ is dependent on the empirically derived law of the unchangeability of the external world. Admit the possibility of supernatural interference and logic will lose its certitude, the inevitability of its conclusions which is so attractive to us.

The so-called ‘ultimate’ questions troubled mankind in the world’s dawn as badly as they trouble us now. Nobody has ever been able to understand why God preferred Abel’s offering to that of Cain. According to Pushkin, “All say there is no justice on earth; but it is as clear to me as a simple scale of music that there is no justice up above.” No man on earth can fail to recognize in these words his own tormenting doubts, the outcome of which is creative tragedy, which for some mysterious reason has been considered the highest form of human creation.

Everything is today being unriddled and explained. If we compare our knowledge with that of the ancients, we appear very wise. But we are no closer to solving the riddle of eternal justice than was Cain. Progress, civilization, all the conquests of the human mind have brought us nothing new in that regard. Like our ancestors, we stand still with fright and perplexity before ugliness, disease, misery, senility, and death. All the wise men have been able to do so far is to turn earthly horrors into ‘problems’. We are told that perhaps all that is horrible only appears horrible, that perhaps at the end of our long journey something new awaits us. Perhaps! But the modern educated man, with the wisdom of all the centuries of mankind at his command, knows no more about it than an ancient bard. We, the children of a moribund civilization, old men from our birth, in this respect are as young as the first man.

Plato taught that our life was only a shadow of another reality. If this is true, then surely our first task is to begin to live a different life, to turn our back to the wall of the cave above which the shadows are walking and to turn our face to the source of light and to those things of which the visible outlines give only a remote resemblance. We must be awakened, if only in part; and to this end, what is usually done to a person sound asleep must be done to us. We must be pulled, pinched, tickled, beaten, and if all these things fail, still stronger and more heroic measures must be applied. At all events, it is out of the question to advise contemplation, which may well make one still sleepier, or quietude, which leads to the same result. Philosophy should live by sarcasm, irony, alarm, struggles, and despair.