Misanthropy Read online

  MISANTHROPY

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

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  To all my family, friends and mentors

  ‘I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. …’

  MISANTHROPY

  The Critique of Humanity

  ANDREW GIBSON

  Bloomsbury Academic

  An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  And now I think you see what would become of the world if all men should be wise; to wit it were necessary we got another kind of clay and some better potter.

  (ERASMUS, In Praise of Folly, trans. John Wilson, 1668)

  Respue quod non es: tollat sua munera cerdo:

  Tecum habita: noris quam sit tibi curta supellex.

  Spit out what isn’t you; let the cobbler take back his gifts:

  Live with yourself: you will come to know how meagre are your furnishings.

  (PERSIUS, Satire IV)

  I just want to walk

  Right out of this world,

  ‘Cause everybody has a poison heart.

  (THE RAMONES)

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction: The impossibility of misanthropy

  1Misanthropy and the old order

  2Misanthropists and the body

  3Misanthropy and history: A few philosophers

  4The Irish misanthropic tradition

  5Women, modernity and misanthropy

  6Misanthropy and the new world

  Conclusion: Contemporary culture and the end(s) of misanthropy

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I owe particular debts of gratitude to many relatives, friends, colleagues, students and former students, not least those who pointed me in fertile directions or pulled me up short when I was going too far or getting things wrong. They include Phil Baker, Judith Balso, Andrew Benjamin, Martin Blocksidge, Roy Booth, Jonathan Boulter, Joe Brooker, Jonathan Catherall, Warren Chernaik, Christopher Church, Sandra Clark, Ursula Clayton, Jim Cohen, Thomas Docherty, Jonathan Dollimore, Martin Dzelzainis, Bill Eason, Finn Fordham, Brian Fox, Duncan Fraser, Greg Garrard, Alan Gibson, Thomas Gibson, Harry Gilonis, Elaine Ho, Peter Johnston, Séan Kennedy, Douglas Kerr, Declan Kiberd, Karen Langhelle, Natalie Leeder, Ian Littlewood, Ruth Livesey, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Vicki Mahaffey, Annaleen Maschelein, Beatrice Michaelis, Martin Middeke, Steven Morrison, Tytti Rantanen, Adam Roberts, Kiernan Ryan, Lenya Samanis, Sam Slote, Liisa Steinby, Yoshiki Tajiri, Jeremy Tambling, Lyn Thomas, Mark Traynor and Colin Wright.

  I am especially grateful to Ahuvia Kahane for his generous help with classical sources (he is not of course responsible for any of the uses to which I have put them); and to Anthony Ossa-Richardson and Justin Wintle, who read the whole book in draft, and whose work was conscientious and immensely meticulous, helping me rectify a host of shortcomings. Many heartfelt thanks to Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury, who picked the book up and ran with it wholeheartedly, after my initial setbacks; to Ken Bruce and Grishma Fredric for all their hard editorial work; and especially to Holly Hickman, for double-checking.

  I owe a serious debt and am very grateful to Bloomsbury’s initial readers. One of them suggested that I bolt a politics on to the end of this book. I thought long and hard about doing this. But the book is really partly about not getting as far as a politics. Unlike so many of my contemporaries in the academy, and indeed younger academics, I see no point in taking up a political position or proposing a political theory if it is going to have no effect at all (or none beyond the academy) and cannot conceivably make a serious appeal to any constituency. The main purpose of such theoretical work all too frequently seems to be the psychic (and perhaps the moral) reassurance of the political subject him- or herself, rather than the construction of a significant and viable praxis. From my point of view, we might do better for the moment to meditate on what I think of as the pre-political condition, in the stark recognition, not only that it is where we are, but that it is even where we may have to stay. This condition is, objectively, a truth, but saying that by no means necessarily spells absolute disappointment, imminent disaster or feeble capitulation. In a way, my next book, Modernity and the Political Fix (Bloomsbury, too), will state the case all over again – but, more paradoxically, in conformity with the reader’s suggestion, in clearly political terms; though it will not offer a political theory, but rather a political theology that is also a political memorandum.

  I finished this book at the end of 2016, the year of Farage, Brexit and Trump. (I was making my last corrections to the copy-edited text around the time of the Trump victory). Some might feel that recent events partly bear out some of the perspectives I adopt here, but also threaten to make them look redundant. The ‘new’ populism, however, was always there in the contemporary culture of ‘toxic positivity’ I indict in my conclusion. Its emergence was a product of that culture and intricately linked to it. The early signs are that the ‘new’ populist drive will actually be about walling the culture of ‘toxic positivity’ off from those who threaten to invade and claim a share in it or to incriminate it. In any case, even if the culture goes into a mild recession for a while, that will not mean that it is defunct. Might more intellectuals at least begin honourably to defect from it? We’ll see.

  Except where otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

  INTRODUCTION: THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF MISANTHROPY

  Between 414 and 411 BC, in Aristophanes’ The Birds and Lysistrata and Phrynicus’s The Recluse, there are three references to a single, great, dark, misanthropic eminence: Timon. In real life, Timon was apparently an Athenian citizen who treated his friends with lavish generosity, only to have them desert him once his coffers were empty. He was reduced to labouring in the fields. There he discovered gold. His friends, agreeably, promptly returned. Timon, however, threw clods at them. As he did so, he bellowed out his misanthropy, his repudiation of the whole human race, humanity itself, tout court. In the late fifth century BC, he became a popular topic of conversation, not least because misanthropy seemed to chime with the mood of Athens at that time.1 Earlier in the century, in philosophy, literature, architecture and art, Athens had reached glorious heights. It had developed advanced political and social institutions to which we still owe a debt today. But in the later 420s and the 410s, Sparta repeatedly defeated it in battle. In 415, the great Athenian military leader Alcibiades defected; then, in 412, the enemy city allied itself with the Persian Empire. For Athens, the shadows appeared to be rapidly darkening. Finally, in 411, what was in effect an army coup overthrew the rule of democracy. It is precisely at this point in time that Timon begins to loom large in the Athenian imagination. Thereafter, for the Greeks, he was a legend, the paradigmatic hater of mankind, a touchstone and focal point.

  The myth of Timon had extraordinary power and tenacity. So much is apparent, for example, more or less two millennia later, in Shakespeare’s decision to write a tragedy about it. Timon of Athens is roughly the historical tale, and, once undeceived, the fictional Timon’s conviction is the same as the real one’s: humankind is detestable, for it possesses ‘an iron heart’.2 Indeed, what is remarkable, coming from the pen of Coleridge’s ‘myriad-minded man’,3 with his exquisitely variegated, endlessly nuanced imagination, is how unrelentingly one-dimensional a character Timon is. It is as though Shakespeare were briefly experimenting with a simplicity otherwise quite foreign to him. Timon spends, with ‘an untirable and continuate goo
dness’ (TA, I.i 11, p. 4), then hates, utterly and without restraint. ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest’, Apemantus says to him, ‘but the extremity of both ends’ (TA, IV.iii 300–1, p. 108). Timon is an absolutist: he goes just about as far as it is possible to go with the misanthropic attitude. We shall come across plenty of misanthropic men, and some women, who threatened to flee to the desert to get away from their fellow humans; a number of writers have had a lot of fun with this. But Shakespeare’s Timon is Phrynicus’s μονότροπος, monotropos: he really does flee to the desert, or at least, the wild, where, in the words of one of his former servants, he ‘Walks like contempt, alone’ (TA, IV.ii 15, p. 87). His misanthropy becomes all-devouring, a profound curse on the ‘long sickness/Of health and living’ (TA, V.i 186–7, p. 130). Timon remains consistent to the end, as his epitaph shows: ‘A plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left!/Here lie I, Timon, who all living men did hate’ (TA, IV.iv 71–2, p. 140). In effect, we could regard him as a benchmark for the rest of our examples in this book.

  A benchmark, perhaps, but not a type. In possibly the greatest and certainly the most famous European work on misanthropy, Molière’s Le misanthrope, the playwright grasps a more basic feature of the misanthropic attitude than Timon can represent: its incoherence. The misanthropist declares a comprehensive rejection of the object of his or her loathing. But, though Molière’s misanthropist Alceste asserts that he will ‘rompre en visière à tout le genre humain’,4 that he will break violently with the whole of humankind, the complete break is necessarily implausible or unachievable; true misanthropy is finally impossible. This is the case, not least because the categorical misanthropic judgement would mean contempt for all humanity, everyone, including the individual who passes the judgement. Misanthropy, it would seem, is an intellectual attitude that is extremely difficult if not impossible to sustain. In his or her very declaration of misanthropy, the misanthropist stands self-condemned, the prisoner of a fundamental contradiction.

  The logic of Alceste’s position suggests that he should announce an end to human relations of every kind. In fact, he remains vitally tied to the world he affects to despise, most notably in the case of his love for coquette Celimène. So, too, a principled misanthropy should logically entail a profound self-hatred. But part of Molière’s admittedly complex thesis is that Alceste’s misanthropy is actually in some degree a form of self-love. This however is precisely not a recognition at which Alceste can arrive. Indeed, his critique of humanity functions on the basis of a kind of willed ignorance as to how far he is included in it and complicit with its failings: his, he thinks, is the ‘merit’ that should be set apart (‘Je veux qu’on me distingue’, LM, I.i 62–3, p. 49). Hence the irony that haunts his utterances, conceived of as emanating from a solitary voice of reason. Indeed, we might even think that there is an irony to Alceste’s speaking at all. Given that, for the misanthropist, communication must be a pointless effort at connection with a worthless recipient using valueless human tools, should he or she not abjure it? Yet Molière craftily suggests that Alceste is actually charmed by the language in which he articulates himself, a language that he takes to be that of an inner man, characterized by its unique ‘frankness’ and ‘sincerity’ (LM, III.v 385–90, p. 126). As even he must concede, then, Alceste has committed himself to an incoherent position. Hence both a pathos and, again, a founding irony: he may repeatedly declare his own desire to run off to a desert. In reality, however, the roots of his needs and identity in a social life are constantly, immediately and vividly evident onstage. Thus Molière sees misanthropy as an intrinsically comic attitude. As his friend Philinte says, punning, comedy accompanies Alceste everywhere (‘Partout où vous allez, donne la comédie’, LM, I.i 106, p. 52).

  Of course, for all Molière’s laughter – a laughter he encouraged and that many have shared with him – misanthropy survived. There were also many who felt that Alceste might just be right. His most famous admirer was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau took him to be a lover of virtue whose principled intransigence was bound to sound bitter and quarrelsome, because he was pitting himself against a general complaisance itself reflected in Molière’s own willingness to pander to the crowd. In Le Philinte de Molière, ou La Suite du Misanthrope (1788), Philippe François Nazaire Fabre d’Eglantine even had a much more Timon-like Alceste, one cleansed of erotic attachments, make it to the wilderness after all, whence he graciously returns to save Philinte from the consequences of his worldliness. The persistence of serious responses to Alceste is indicative. Misanthropy turns out, for all its absurdity to some, to be oddly, wirily durable. Nonetheless, Molière clearly captured something almost irreducible about the misanthropic position, the fact that it seldom if ever quite adds up or makes sense.

  There are thus several points to make about misanthropy from the outset. First, though there have certainly been more and less misanthropic philosophers, and indeed Philinte associates Alceste with a ‘chagrin philosophe’ (LM, I.i 97, p. 52), obviously enough, misanthropy is not a philosophy. If misanthropy is a form of thought, it is not a rigorous but an inconsistent one – inconsistent, that is, or incomplete, always trammelled in the world it pretends to escape. Indeed, in one respect, even Shakespeare’s Timon finds this. So successfully does he run from the world that the world runs after him, bringing him the ‘plague of company’ (TA, IV.iii 353–4, p. 110). He becomes an object of fascination. Alcibiades, Apemantus, the poet and painter, others, all arrive to contemplate a man who dares to pour rude scorn on what they unreflectively assume to be the only life. The misanthropist, it would seem, sets his or her face against the truth that life is irredeemably social. So, too, Rousseau tells the story in his Confessions of how, the more he gained a ‘reputation for misanthropy’, the more he became an object of almost insatiable curiosity. (‘My room was never empty of people’).5 Humanity has an uncanny way of roping one back into the fold, willy-nilly. The earliest Syriac anchorites who fled to the isolation of the Quadisha valley (in Lebanon) in the first centuries after Christ, for example, did so only to unleash a copycat phenomenon. They became sufficiently numerous to end up chatting to each other after early morning worship, and eventually forming communities. So, too, the Vietnam veterans hiding out in the wilderness as profiled in the CBS Special Report The Wall Within (1988) found themselves chased down by camera crews. Once again, the world they rejected refused to let go, turning the misanthropist into an object of study. Most recently of all, in November 2015, in the Maremma, mushroom pickers discovered Carlos Sanchez Ortiz de Salazar, a doctor from Seville. Ortiz had disappeared in 1995 and finally been declared dead in 2010. Though he told his benefactors he had no wish to live among people, and promptly disappeared again, his condition was soon appropriately diagnosed (‘severe long-term depression’) and he quickly became the subject of what, incongruously enough, was both a global media feeding frenzy and a search-and-retrieve-for-us mission. The ancient misanthropic drive has a remarkable tenacity, but so, too, does the desire to bring the dog sage to heel. The misanthropist everywhere runs up against the impossibility of a final separation from human life. Bardamu, the protagonist in Voyage au bout de la nuit, by one of the great twentieth-century misanthropists, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, may seem to invert what Shakespeare is telling us about Timon when he ironically observes: ‘As long as you wanted to remain alive, you’d have to have the air of someone looking for the regiment’.6 In fact, the point from a certain angle is very much the same.

  However, paradoxically, the incoherence of misanthropy by no means disqualifies it from serious attention or makes it less seductive in its appeal or formidable as an object of critique, because it thrives on its very contradictions. Misanthropy is a kind of proto-philosophy or sub-philosophy, a strange form of adulterate but vital thought that may actually have a more stubborn and indomitable life and a broader hold on minds than many philosophies themselves. Hence the range of what I will include under the heading may raise a few eyebrows. Certai
nly, anyone who comes to this book expecting no more than a gallery of rabid, spitting oddballs will be disappointed. As an incomplete form of thought, misanthropy appears in discrete and fleeting manifestations. It can occur quite randomly and unpredictably, and individual names attach themselves to it. But misanthropy is often not comprehensively identifiable with individuals. It courses through people, cultures, societies in errant flows and fluxes, emerging here and there, rather than being, in the philosophical sense, essential to them. It is an insistence, at once an unstable theoretical formation, a fluid disposition of feeling and a construction in words. As an insistence, it may exhibit certain specific features, be determined in certain specific ways, occur in certain historical, cultural, psychosocial or psychological conditions, appear at certain times and for certain reasons and find its articulation or expression particularly in certain kinds of society or individual and not others. There are certain logics of misanthropy, even if they are partial and fitful.

  Whether in people and societies, then, or in works of art and thought, misanthropy occurs as instances, in fits and starts. It may crop up quite pervasively; it seldom does so comprehensively or as the last word. It coexists with other intellectual positions, is interwoven with other emotional attitudes. This, again, is part of Molière’s point about Alceste. So, too, if Shakespeare’s Timon is a rare imaginative embodiment of misanthropic integrity, Shakespeare himself does not give us misanthropy in a pure form, since Timon himself is a dramatic and poetic representation, if not exactly of an idea, of a structural position within the play, and therefore within a particular configuration of thought in which Timon’s misanthropy, though a powerful force, does not seem and cannot be final, since it has to be estimated alongside other positions (Apemantus’s rather different kind of misanthropy, the steward’s concern and compassion, Alcibiades’s righteous ‘spleen and fury’, TA, III.v 114, p. 76). This indeed is precisely evident in the play, which concludes with Alcibiades reading out Timon’s epitaph – and then, in a final brief commentary on it, refusing its implications, or in some sense ‘going beyond’ it.