Misanthropy Page 12

  Therefore let no man talk to me of other Expedients [than eating children]: Of taxing our Absentees at five Shillings a Pound: Of using neither Cloaths, nor Household Furniture, except what is of our own Growth and Manufacture: Of utterly rejecting the Materials and Instruments that promote Foreign Luxury: Of curing the Expensiveness of Pride, Vanity, Idleness, and Gaming in our Women: of introducing a Vein of Parsimony, Prudence and Temperance … Of being a little cautious not to sell our Country or our Consciences for nothing: of teaching Landlords to have at least one Degree of Mercy towards their Tenants. (MP, pp. 29–30)

  ‘Expedients’, or children’s lives? The Ireland of the time was never going to take even a selected few of such policies on board. The passage was (and is) characteristic of a certain political realism, one that insists on political impossibility. Nowhere in this book will a certain defining condition of misanthropy be more evident. Swift’s whole enterprise is to exhibit to us what he takes to be the true meaning of political ‘realism’, rather than the meaning we would like and commonly believe it to have, but without suggesting that we can get beyond it. In effect, too, he dares us to defy him, whatever our historical situation. For Swift, contemporary ‘ethical’, philanthropic and humanitarian voices that present us with clever, ‘creative’, ‘innovative’ but ‘economically realistic’ plans to address the consequences of the colossal imbalances in wealth and power in a globalizing world, to harmonize a seemingly insatiable drive to enjoyment on the one side and immense panoramas of global desolation on the other, would no doubt seem to work chiefly to erase an insupportable truth. The tone in which they do so bears quite a close family resemblance to that of Swift’s projectors, who are often benevolists.

  A Modest Proposal might seem more concerned with a misanthropic logic than with misanthropy itself. But fleeting touches make it clear that Swift thought that the logic in question might equally be found among the Chinese, Americans, Jews, English and other Europeans – in effect, generally. This is certainly the case with Gulliver’s Travels, even if the focus (hardly surprising at that time) is European. The tiny Lilliputians in Part I in some degree function as a scathingly parodic reductio ad absurdum of the vainglory of the imperial European powers, the rhetoric by which they keep it inflated, the irrationality, self-serving pettiness and arbitrary authoritarianism of their rulers, the trivial quarrels (‘intestine Disquiets’) of their parties or factions.43 The deliberately silly names throughout Part I make Swift’s point clear: considered from an exterior perspective, whether historical or geographical, any political or social system looks similarly footling. But, typically, Swift also turns the structure round. He fancifully endows the Lilliputians with certain enlightened, democratic and indeed morally admirable political and judicial practices. Once again, however, the main point to Gulliver’s describing them is to put their real counterparts to shame.

  In Part II, Swift reverses his structure in a different way. Gulliver himself now becomes the representative of ordinary humanity. The giant Brobdingnagians are at best genially, humorously incredulous at what Gulliver tells them about human life, its ‘Manners, Religion, Laws, Government’. To them, however indulgently they view him, Gulliver appears chiefly to be an ardent defender of ridiculous folly. The king particularly observes ‘how contemptible a thing was human grandeur. … And yet, said he, I dare engage, these Creatures have their Titles and Distinctions of Honour; they contrive their little Nests and Burrows, that they call Houses and Cities; they make a figure in Dress and Equipage; they love, they fight, they dispute, they cheat, they betray’ (GT, p. 100). Finally, however, when Gulliver gives him a ‘historical account … of our Affairs during the last Century’, the king protests that ‘it was only a heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce’. ‘I cannot but conclude’, he adds, ‘the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth’ (GT, p. 123). The irony in the chapter works very much in the king’s favour and against Gulliver. Above all, when Gulliver offers some routine defences of the human appetite for destruction (‘in so familiar a manner as to appear wholly unmoved’, GT, p. 125), the king is left merely aghast. Far from being the very pinnacle of nature, humankind begins to look like a lusus naturae, a freak in nature, a trick played by nature – at nature’s own expense.

  What underlies all this? Perhaps, as much as anything else, what Swift takes to be the human penchant for ‘vapouring’,44 (coming up with vain or pretentious notions, though sometimes it seems as if he just means thinking). Swiftian misanthropy is the very opposite of the contemporary notion that the more opinions on any subject there are flying about, the better. He thought people got bees in their bonnets whose often disturbing if not shattering consequences were proportional to their lack of any truth-value. His satirical treatment of this theme appears, for instance, in his descriptions of the inventors and projectors who feature in Gulliver’s Travels Part III. His truly extraordinary treatment of ‘vapouring’, however, comes in his most extravagantly, dizzyingly ironical work, A Tale of a Tub.

  A Tale of a Tub is ostensibly a satirical history of the Christian church which promotes Anglicanism as the true faith. It is also an assault on the ‘moderns’ (Richard Bentley, William Wotton), who asserted that the modern age had by now progressed beyond the confined thought of the classical world. Swift takes the side of the ‘ancients’, like William Temple, who stoutly maintained its pre-eminence. Such a bald little summary suggests what some might think of as a double commitment to fuddy-duddy orthodoxy. But this is to ignore the actual writing of A Tale of a Tub, its elaborate digressions (including a digression on digression), its reversals and non-sequiturs, the variety and ambiguity of the voices we hear in it, our persistent uncertainty as to where they are coming from, where Swift is really coming from. Again and again, he seems dangerously close to identifying with the objects of his attacks, with modernity itself. All this turns the Tale into a vertiginous work whose orthodoxy seems constantly thrown into question. This is not, however, to make of Swift a ‘radical’ or a postmodernist avant la lettre: Swift’s vital concerns are not fundamentally epistemological but ontological and misanthropic together, a dissection of ‘the Carcass of Humane Nature’ to the point where ‘it smelt so strong, I could preserve it no longer’ (TT, p. 123). His targets are legion: alchemists, occultists, gnostics and many others. But what underlies his scepticism regarding them all is not just his war on absurd credulity, but his persuasion that the ‘Forma informans of Man’ itself, which others dignify as ‘Spiritus, Animus, Afflatus or Anima’, may be just Wind (TT, p. 151). For it is clear enough that, while Humanity as a whole is fond of ‘bright Ideas’, it is also given ‘to furnishing every bright Idea with its reverse’ (TT, p. 158). Swift is superbly, brilliantly ready, as very few are, to confront something that the form and discourse of A Tale of a Tub themselves reflect, the infinite recession of all thought, the fact that it has no final purchase anywhere at all. Hence the great Digression on Madness tells us that reason and madness may be indissociable. How can we not fear so, when the world regards the lunatic terrorism of Louis XIV so placidly? Reason may very well turn out to be mad. When Swift sedulously matches forms of human behaviour in the great, sane world to the forms of madness in Bedlam, his point is clear.

  The crumbling of the base, the founding instability repeatedly evident in much of Swift’s greatest writing, prevents his misanthropy from seeming either simply conservative in tendency or a product of ego. This fits with friends’ and cronies’ awareness that, during his time as a member of and an important influence on the inner circle of Tory government under Harley and Bolingbroke, he promoted others’ careers and interests but notably failed to promote his own. Swift poses as the man who sees through the man he is posing as. He uses
rules to confute rules. Those he defends become those he attacks. He hates the mob and appeals to a shared common sense. The Irish patriot dwells on his contempt for the Irish. In a way, we might accept Richard Steele’s presentation of Swift as ‘nothing but an Irish clown’. But we should only do so if we also accept that Swift’s willingness to sink himself in profound contradiction is the very measure of his incalculable superiority to the worldly nimbleness of mind, the political skill with which the English Steele hangs him out to dry, thereby achieving his little victory.45 Swift disdained the pointless, unreasonable use of mere reason against insanity. He was incessantly blown about by great gusts of rage at men and women not so much for their evil as for their moral shallowness, a rage that his sublime irony seeks to manage. The misanthropic self swirls into a black hole at the centre of his turbulent discourse. Self-deprecation, self-annihilation, self-evacuation – le mot juste – are integral to Swift’s misanthropy.

  No misanthropist has ever been more strangely, more stunningly inventive than Swift. Yet for all that, it is hard not to harbour a major reservation about the sources of his loathing, and this has to do, again, with the body. Swift suffers from a compulsive hatred of the body and bodily functions, what he takes to be the manifold deformities and blemishes of bodies. He nurses a dark, demented, if highly imaginative fixation on the repulsiveness of organic human life which keeps on exploding into his writings, sometimes in the weirdest and most unexpected ways. He is creatively gripped by excretion and excrements, physical punishments, mutilation and other forms of physical cruelty. He is obsessed with bodily stains and discolorations, physical dirt, ‘nastiness’ and its corollary, the imperative of ‘cleanliness’.46 Also diseases, not least venereal ones, and unpleasant smells: it would not be too extreme to suggest that, at the most fundamental level, man, for Swift, is the animal that both reasons and stinks. There is little or no countervailing sense in his work of the possibility of physical rapture. In effect, he seems to have been dead to it. His Pascalian resolve, as a young man, ‘not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly’, seems to reflect that.47

  The objective demonstration of the point lies in the extent to which satire allows Swift to launch himself into mephitic fancies that he cannot finally altogether haul back and harness to merely satirical purposes. In this he resembles Smollett. But Swift has a scatological imagination far more richly filthy than Smollett’s, and produces flesh-hating extravaganzas that quite outstrip the Scotsman’s. This is most conspicuously the case in his treatment of women. Swift was capable of his own peculiar forms of attachment to women, notably in the famous cases of ‘Stella’ (Esther Johnson), whom he may well have secretly married, and ‘Vanessa’ (Esther Vanhomrigh), with whom he partly simultaneously maintained a queasily playful intimacy. But he seems never to have had a sexual relation with either of them, or with any other woman – not surprisingly, since he was troubled almost to paroxysm by women’s flesh. It is in the case of women that the excess of Swift’s physical horror over and above his moral disgust is most obvious. In A Modest Proposal, for example, he abruptly extends the projector’s notion that the bodies of the young might serve as ‘prime dainties’:

  Neither indeed can I deny, that if the same Use were made of several plump young Girls in this Town, who, without one single Groat to their Fortunes, cannot stir abroad without a Chair, and appear at a Play-house, and Assemblies in Foreign fineries, which they never will pay for; the Kingdom would not be the worse. (MP, p. 26)

  These groatless adolescent girls are not infants. Nor is their supposedly culpable vanity the innocence of babes and sucklings. The passage is strictly beyond the satirical and ironic remit of the Proposal. In suggesting that there might be a warped aspect to its imaginative mode, it threatens to unbalance it.

  The poem ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ seems similarly peculiarly twisted. Young swain Strephon discovers that, beneath her cosmetic exterior, Celia is in fact a dirty, sweaty, scabby, snotty, spitting, spewing, malodorous, ‘begummed, besmattered and beslimed’ creature. She even has worms in her nose.48 Can we really take this catalogue of physical evils as the basis for any insight into womanhood, as Swift appears to want us to? We might object, too, that, if Celia is so deplorably ugly, it seems not only mean but perverse to fasten on her ugliness, rather than the skill with which she disguises it, and the resulting ‘goddess’ who, at length, issues forth to greet the world. But Swift and Strephon drive forward inexorably towards their notorious conclusion:

  Thus finishing his grand survey,

  Disgusted Strephon stole away

  Repeating in his amorous fits,

  Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!49

  Yes, we respond, but she presumably does other things too. If you happen to find her shitting distasteful, why not dwell on them instead?

  The same issue keeps on cropping up when we read Swift’s works. In Part II of Gulliver’s Travels, for example, Gulliver has a ‘near sight’ of a giant, naked breast, remarking that ‘the Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous’. As a piece of ‘fantastic realism’, this is powerful writing. But when Gulliver also tells us that it made him ‘reflect on the Skins of our English Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a Magnifying Glass’ (GT, p. 87), he sounds deranged. Who would seriously argue the moral imperative of assuming that the truth about women’s bodies, human bodies, emerges from this kind of microscopic inspection? Outside a scientific or medical context, the perspective is unnatural. But Gulliver’s Travels as a whole does not correct it. There is no counterbalancing sense of human beauty, especially women’s beauty, in the book.

  No one has better insisted than Swift that human beings do not know what they do and do not want to know what they do, with morally disastrous consequences, while himself floating quite free of the charge of undue self-regard. The trouble is that he is also quite immune to the reasons for others’ being unmisanthropic. He has no antennae for the commonplace but absorbing, indeed irresistible, human seductions that make them so. This turns out to be often the case with misanthropists: they seem, in more senses than one, to have taken leave of their senses, producing a diseased phantasmagoria of the body. Alongside them, and particularly alongside Swift, we might place Wilhelm, in Chapter 15 of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in love enough to be placidly at ease with Mariana’s cast-off towels and her lavatory habits. This kind of relaxed acceptance of the flesh in all its aspects seems intrinsic both to Wilhelm’s doctrine of cheerfulness and to Goethe’s robustness. It also just seems sane. By contrast, whether pathological or not, misanthropy seems to have missed a trick, one not the less but rather the more valuable insofar as it is very much a part of ordinary, mundane experience.

  3

  MISANTHROPY AND HISTORY: A FEW PHILOSOPHERS

  This chapter is about the vulnerability of grandly misanthropic attitudes to historical explanation – and where better to demonstrate it than in the case of philosophical abstraction. Initially, however, there are difficulties with this: as we have seen, misanthropy is not a philosophy as such, nor a tradition within philosophy. Its philosophical manifestations are too diffuse, variegated and compromised for that. But there is another reason, too, why we should not think of misanthropy as philosophical: the positivity of philosophy itself. As Nietzsche ‘philosophizes with [his] hammer’, for example, he may seem to be not only the prophet of modern nihilism – ‘Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?’1 – but its representative. Yet both the Nietzschean work of destruction and his confrontation with nihilism are preludes to a possible Umwertung alle Werte, the ‘transvaluation of all values’, which for Nietzsche would mean salvation. Indeed, Nietzsche turns out to be ‘the ultimate yes-sayer’.2 As Alain Badiou puts matters, for Nietzsche, philosophy can only be �
��integrally affirmative’.3

  Nietzsche, however, is just one peculiarly vivid instance. The affirmative tendency is deeply written into philosophy itself, and is unlikely to shade into misanthropic negativity. In its very abstraction, its turning away from grubby, footling particulars, from mere observation, philosophy inclines to the affirmative mode. Take the Kantian concept of the categorical imperative. It clearly involves an affirmation. As opposed to a crafty, worldly little hypothetical imperative, which always includes an ‘if’ – if I want to be rewarded with A, then I must B – the categorical imperative unconditionally, absolutely, thunderously asserts that I must do A whatever the circumstances, that A, the good, is an end in itself. The idea that we can think like this is clearly, in principle, inspiring – and yet it does not take much for the concept of the categorical imperative to begin to slide in a misanthropic direction. Sceptics have wondered exactly what reality it addresses, Guy Lardreau even suggesting that there is no significant Kantian morality, that Kant himself thought that ‘Kantianism … was of no use’ and that ‘a truly moral act could not be found’.4 For Kant, any serious morality always fails to understand this world; indeed, ‘not understanding’ is the very condition of morality.5 Thus the Kantian affirmation of the categorical imperative requires a prior gesture that brackets the world off. The question of what it might mean for ordinary people who are not philosophers need have no bearing on it. The Idea is its own raison d’être.

  This holds true for a practically unlimited number of philosophical concepts and systems, whether or not they are as immediately affirmative as Kant’s and Nietzsche’s. It does not matter if they do not apply: that is even their splendour. Of course, not every philosopher has accepted that philosophical affirmation need break with the human world. This is notably the case with Marx. But if Marx wants to bridge the gap, as Jacques Rancière has shown, in the very struggle to do so, he ends up falling straight back into it. Marx famously affirms the proletariat while setting actual workers at naught. For the proletarian is not a worker, but a subject of a new historical science. Real workers in Marx appear as the brute, recidivist, troglodytic French peasantry of The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France, or the unredeemed and unregenerate vulgus, ‘the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass’ that Marx thinks of as the lumpenproletariat.6 Thus Marx at once affirms the proletariat and rejects the people, people at large. Under Marxist bullishness, there is a strain of misanthropy. Marx imagines his ideal proletariat in contradistinction to working people, who are not only not good enough, but not really much good at all.