Misanthropy Read online

  This is a version of a founding philosophical procedure that goes back as far as Parmenides. In asserting that the world of appearances was deceitful, Parmenides made a singularly audacious claim. The world is not really what it looks like. That conviction powered another, both Platonic and Aristotelian, that philosophy ‘begins in wonder’,7 in a profound estrangement from the familiar. It repeatedly sets out by bracketing the world off. Thus, in his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes postulates a malin génie, the evil demon who presents the illusion of the existence of an external and bodily world, who must be kept at bay if philosophy is to proceed. So, too, in Husserlian phenomenology, the speculative moment of the epoché suspends the world of prior consciousness, ideas, images, a man-made world, in the interest of a direct, naive encounter with materiality itself.

  Philosophers never tire of repeating that philosophy begins with a wondering question. But the intense, even rapt perplexity of the founding philosophical attitude, the sheer surprise at the fact that the world exists at all, or is as it is, can also from time to time translate into bafflement at men being as they are. Schopenhauer, too, declares that ‘philosophy has the peculiarity of presupposing absolutely nothing as known; everything to it is equally strange and a problem’.8 As we shall amply see, however, by this point in the history of philosophy, the implications of the philosophical procedure have become apparent: it is precisely humanity itself that is in some measure ‘problematic’. If philosophy repeatedly sets out by bracketing the world off, then, in doing so, it brackets off human beings as they exist outside the door, in the next room, round every corner. See for example Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, in which he explicitly demands that all human particulars be left to one side. In The Philosopher and his Poor, Rancière shows us how far, in screening out the familiar world, philosophers also screened out the world of the people; this was deeply inscribed within the philosophical tradition. The Marx so contemptuous of the French peasantry is in fact resorting to an ancient philosophical trope, the people as ‘the motley crowd of the Platonic polloi’.9 The philosophical tradition is not misanthropic in itself, but the possibility of misanthropy is rooted in it.

  It is therefore logical enough that at least a few philosophers should sound explicitly misanthropically inclined. I shall look at three, not in chronological order, again. For the Thomas Hobbes of De Cive (On the Citizen, 1642) and Leviathan (1651), homo homini lupus est, man is a wolf to man. The state of nature is a bellum omnium contra omnes, ‘a perpetual war’ in which ‘every man to every man … is an enemy’.10 For Hobbes, what lies at the root of this war is equality, which is a law of nature. Nature grants ‘a full and absolute liberty in every particular man’; in nature, ‘every man has right to every thing’ (L, p. 163). But that means that, in nature, there is no property, ‘no mine and thine distinct, but only that to be every man’s, that he can get: and for so long, as he can keep it’ (L, p. 101). Under these conditions, there can be ‘no security to any man’ except insofar as he retains ‘the natural and necessary appetite of his own conservation, the right of protecting himself by his own private strength’ (L, pp. 103, 138).

  The consequences of living by natural law must therefore be lawless disorder, internecine violence, ‘horrible calamities’ (L, p. 140). The bellum omnium contra omnes suspends all notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. There is no common power, and therefore men hold no values in common save force and fraud. Man’s life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, and he ‘lives in continual fear, and danger of violent death’ (L, p. 100). Fear is the great motive force in Hobbes’s philosophy. He was born in 1588, just a few months before the defeat of the Spanish Armada, at a time when England was running scared of Spain. His mother bore twins, he wrote, ‘me and together with me fear’.11 Hobbesian fear is above all fear of other people. Most men, he writes, ‘are of evil character, bent on securing their own interest by fair means or foul’,12 and one should distrust them accordingly.

  However, Hobbes does not merely think of the state of nature as a savage universal anarchy. All human passions have to do with power, but power may stem from different sources and manifest itself in different forms. The one that most preoccupies Hobbes is inanis gloria, vainglory, the pleasure that individual persons take in contemplating their own ‘virtue, force, knowledge, beauty, friends, wealth’, intellect, or any other quality that flatters them with a sense of their own eminence (OC, p. 177). This is what men most treasure, ‘their own glory’, not society. For ‘all the heart’s joy lies in being able to compare oneself favourably with others and form a high opinion of oneself’ (OC, pp. 22, 26). Human beings are insatiably bent on self-advancement, self-promotion and self-justification and are determined to maintain their own authority, be it political or intellectual. For they inveterately want ‘to believe themselves wise and appear so to others’, and find ‘culpable evil’ in others’ achievements (OC, pp. 81, 162). They do not naturally value other men, but tend ‘to exasperate each other’ (OC, p. 29), from which hatred and contempt naturally spring.

  But there is worse to follow. Because men invest so massively in their self-image, they also invest massively in their own ideas, and deplore or are incredulous about those of others. Hence they fall into interminable disputes over ‘what is conformable, or disagreeable to reason’ (L, p. 123). The passions – those ‘notable multiplying glasses’ – make ideological differences heated, which in turn leads inexorably to violence (L, p. 141). It is not selfishness or aggression in themselves, nor even the will to defend oneself and one’s property against others, that most drives men to fight each other. They fight above all when inanis gloria turns beliefs into causes for quarrels.

  Where present-day culture at least claims to value difference, for Hobbes it is a nightmare from the state of nature, and not to be allowed free rein. The mere act of disagreement is offensive, and differences in ideas, judgements, tastes, opinions, temperaments and habits all result in conflict. Intellectuals are among the worst, for they not only pride themselves on their clever ideas, but have clever ideas about change, which clash. Furthermore, they have a way with words. Hobbes is singularly afraid of the power of language. Intellectuals are troublesome because they use words to heighten their own and others’ passions, often with disastrous effects: it is intellectual dissension that ‘causes the worst conflicts’ and the ‘bitterest wars’ (OC, p. 26). If Hobbes distrusts the power of rhetoric, however, he equally distrusts the slipperiness of language. People’s judgements are shifting and unreliable, and what they call good and evil are ‘nothing simply and absolutely so’ (L, p. 48). This leads to the creation of absurd ambiguities and to senseless disputes over true meaning. So, too, words are always coloured by ‘the nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker’. One man ‘calleth wisdom, what another calleth fear; and one cruelty, what another justice; one prodigality, what another magnanimity; and one gravity, what another stupidity, &c’ (L, p. 40). By the same token, language is perfidiously disposed to accommodate paradox and evasion, which means that men routinely use words like ‘rapacity’ of others but refuse to apply them to themselves, though they are up to exactly the same kind of business. They see ‘their own actions reflected in others as in a mirror’ (OC, p. 4), but do not see those actions as they are.

  Hobbes’s violence- and fear-soaked but grippingly cerebral and astringent vision of the state of nature might indeed seem misanthropic. However, the label only stretches so far, for human beings are not compelled to remain within the world of natural law: they are also intent on transcending it. Indeed, ‘as soon as they recognize [the] misery’ of the hateful state of nature, they want to escape it (OC, p. 12). We should not ignore the strain of pure thought or idealism in humans. Here fear again is ‘the passion to be reckoned upon’ (L, p. 111). So, too, another fear, fear of death, inclines people to search for peace. Unfortunately, while they willingly accept that ‘man is a wolf to man’, they do so as though they themselves were
exempt from the general ferocity. But if they cannot bear to look straight at their own implication in the universal madness, at the obnoxiousness of their own ‘impetuous desires’ (L, p. 256), they may at least grow more aware of how far those desires drive them to hurt, not only each other, but themselves. This also takes them beyond natural law, and encourages them to pay attention to the question of order.

  Humankind can rescue itself from itself through its capacity for particular forms of social organization, the origin of which lies not in mutual benevolence but, again, in a fear of an instability that only authority can finally resist. Hobbes resolves the war of all against all via a theory of civil contracts, which he calls covenants. To create an order beyond the disorder of natural law, a democratic act is first required in which the people contracts itself off the scene, agreeing to the sway of a superior power, necessarily so, because otherwise we remain in the world of equality, which is always anarchic. Each man ‘obligates himself, by an Agreement with each of the rest, not to resist the will of the man or Assembly to which he has submitted himself’ (OC, p. 72); that is, he transfers his own force and power to an authority and its jus imperandi, thereby giving up his right to resist.

  The covenant is the means whereby the people decides to surrender its own anarchic world to government or sovereign power, whether monarchical, aristocratic or democratic – Hobbes preferred the monarchical – the power that will be eminent among the people and rule it for the good of the commonwealth. When mere private men claim authority for themselves, ‘they are aspiring to be as Kings’ (ibid.). When by contrast they covenant among themselves to establish their sovereign, they surrender their will and their natural right to rule, and sovereign power supervenes upon natural law, regulating difference in coming up ‘with rules or measures that will be common to all’, and publishing them openly (OC, p. 79). Indeed, sovereign power can ‘decide which opinions and doctrines are inimical to peace … and forbid them being taught’ (OC, p. 80). This, too, is necessary to the security of the commonwealth, in which ‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’ (OC, p. 143).

  Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty may sound severe, autocratic and even dismal, but it might nonetheless seem to protect him from any charge of misanthropy. Yet so philosophical is the concept that one must wonder whether it really involves man as such. If for example one reads Hobbes on the myriad variety of religious beliefs – human beings can worship ‘an onion, a leek … their own privy member’ (L, p. 91) – one can hardly doubt that he thought people were dolts. If human beings can redeem themselves, it is by virtue of a philosophical disposition or power of abstraction. Hobbes identifies this power with mathematics. In 1630, he underwent a conversion to geometry, aiming thereafter to transfer the form of geometrical demonstration to the natural and moral sciences. This aspiration is abundantly evident in his political philosophy. For Hobbes, ‘whatever distinguishes the modern world from the barbarity of the past, is almost wholly the gift of Geometry’ (OC, p. 4). The final aim of a commonwealth is ‘a geometer’s peace’.13

  The capacity for abstraction is for Hobbes a power of artifice. Man is the animal that saves itself insofar as it is afraid of itself, and consequently ‘abridges’ and ‘restrains’ its own humanity (L, p. 200), making something other of itself through artifice. For ‘the attaining of peace, and conservation of themselves’, human beings make ‘artificial chains, called civil laws’ (L, p. 160). This produces ‘the great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE’, a kind of ‘artificial man’, as the persona civitatis is the artificial person of the Commonwealth (L, pp. 19, 160). The thesis, however, leaves the Hobbes so wary of paradox in a paradoxical position himself, a position that looks more or less misanthropic depending on which way we turn the glass. Man releases himself from his own dreadful nature only by becoming more, or other, than human. Yet the capacity for that transformation of human being is itself human. The position becomes even more equivocal once we consider just how precarious Hobbes took Leviathan to be. The establishment of a commonwealth, he states, is a rarity, an event (OC, p. 22). But even this rare event is imperilled, since without the help of sublime political architects, the people are likely to end up with a ‘crazy building’ that is all too likely to collapse, not least on the heads of posterity (L, p. 237; an observation, we might think, repeatedly borne out by history, and that some fear will be borne out yet again later this century). In any case, most men secretly hate sovereign authority and are wilfully inclined to desire novelty, so they are all too likely to upend their own best and stablest constructions. Moreover, as Bertrand Russell smartly pointed out, the Hobbesian Aufhebung via civil law has the paradoxical effect of merely re-establishing the state of nature at a different level, since its logical consequence is an ‘international anarchy’ in which the war of all against all is translated into that of States.14 Hobbes himself knew this, envisaging commonwealths as perpetually ‘upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed, and cannons planted against their neighbours round about’ (L, p. 162). This hardly seems like the ideal antidote to fear.

  In truth, Hobbes’s conception of the State under civil law was finally only a speculative venture, a ‘thought experiment’.15 It could hardly have been more than that, since he was distinctly sceptical about the strength and durability of such a State: ‘No great popular commonwealth’, he writes, ‘was ever kept up, but either by a foreign enemy that united them; or by the reputation of some eminent man amongst them; or by the secret counsel of a few; or by the mutual fear of eminent factions’. As for ‘very little commonwealths’, there is ‘no human wisdom can uphold them, longer than the jealousy lasteth of their more potent neighbours’ (L, p. 197). The Hobbesian State, so intent on security, cannot be securely founded. Men may always be laying ‘the foundations of their houses on the sand’. All Hobbes can add, by way of reassurance, is that ‘it could not thence be inferred, that so it ought to be’ (L, p. 158).

  Thus Hobbes’s arguments might appear finally to bend back towards misanthropy. But as misanthropic arguments, they are obviously produced in a specific set of circumstances. Scholars once tended to ignore this. Hobbes was a philosopher. To see him as addressing his own historical context was to risk treating philosophy in all its extra-historical grandeur as ideology, and the philosopher as having a parti pris.16 Increasingly, however, others have argued that it is only by historicizing Hobbes that we can properly understand him.17 He was born in 1588, died in 1679, and lived in the midst of a peculiarly turbulent, indeed catastrophic, age in Europe, the period of the Wars of Religion consequent upon the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In particular, between 1618 and 1648, the years of Hobbes’s intellectual development, Europe was overtaken by the unprecedented anarchy and havoc of the Thirty Years’ War. Hobbes passed a lot of time in places arterially linked to the war and with people concerned with it, and knew a great deal about the European disaster.18 He translated a work of Austrian propaganda, Altera secretissimus instructio, which helped steep him in the contemporary European war of political ideas.19 Here, in what was going on around him, he witnessed the very proliferation of intellectual differences and their translation into violent disputes that he so feared, taking place on a continental scale.

  But above all, Hobbes’s major writings are overwhelmingly conditioned by an England increasingly riven by political divisions and religious schisms so ferocious that they ended in a collapse of social order, and eventually civil war and regicide. In a late work, Behemoth, Or an Epitome of the Civil Wars of England, from 1640 to 1660, he asserted of the period that ‘he that should have … observed the Actions of Men, especially in England, might have had a prospect of all kinds of Injustice, and of all kinds of Folly that the world could afford, and how they were produced by their Hypocrisy and Self-conceit’.20 No doubt the times did indeed give good reason for a dim view of human beings, but for the Hobbes of Behemoth, the reasons were immediate. Charles I had not exercised his sovereign power appropriat
ely, and had had to confront ‘Perfidy upon Perfidy’ in his opponents, the ‘corruption’ of the people and the anarchic influence of a ‘great number of Sects’ that the feebleness of sovereign authority had allowed to flourish.21 Behemoth says what Leviathan says, but within a historical narrative, not a philosophical disquisition, thus laying bare the historical roots of Hobbesian philosophy itself. Hobbes lived in a foundering world that only extreme authority, he felt, could successfully resist. His philosophical position everywhere reflects this. Insofar as his conclusions are misanthropic, he reaches them by generalizing out of a particular historical experience that might have seemed to justify them at the time, but hardly amounted to the ‘state of nature’ in itself.

  One might say something rather similar of Schopenhauer, though his philosophy is less immediately readable as a commentary on a historical world. Some preliminary basics first: for Schopenhauer, there is the Kantian mundus phaenomenon, a world of appearances structured by forms, those of space, time and cause and effect. Certain laws determine these forms (causality, succession, position). The laws are those of the empirical world, and are governed by the principle of sufficient reason, which provides a ‘ground’ for phenomena (WW1, p. 163). The ‘ground’ founds explanation, will always answer the question why. However, the laws of the phenomenal world apply only in consciousness (WW2, p. 46). They possess no unconditional validity or ‘veritas aeterna’ (WW1, p. 32).