Misanthropy Read online

  But the polarity on which Schopenhauer’s thought depends at this point – the static permanence of the will versus historicism and progressivism together – is not self-evident. As Michel Foucault understood, historicism need not imply faith in progress. Given this, it is worth asking, again, what in Schopenhauer’s own historical context might have led to his philosophy taking on the complexion that it did. Schopenhauer was born in 1788, in Danzig, which from the fourteenth century had been a member of the Hanseatic League. It had been a free city, was proud of its commercial independence, and its Volk shared a robust sense of being leidensgeprüft, much `tried by suffering’, not least because Danzig had long been surrounded by menacing, powerful neighbours. As an ‘aspiring and self-confident Rechtstadt’, it was conscious of sharing in a Baltic tradition of cosmopolitan, mercantile life and culture.23 Schopenhauer’s merchant father possessed many of these qualities, and the city shaped the character of young Arthur (or so he thought). But in 1793, when Schopenhauer was only five, his family were forced to flee. Russia and Prussia were starting to carve up Polish territory, and Danzig was a mere pawn in the game. Prussia abruptly grabbed it. (The aldermen laid aside their official costume and dressed in Schopenhauerian black, in mourning for centuries of history).24 After this particular experience of the ferocity of the will, Danzig’s illusion of sturdy autonomy was abruptly snuffed out. As for its greatest philosopher, in his own words, he ‘never acquired a new home’.25

  The family moved to Hamburg, another city conscious of its Hanseatic past, where, again, they joined the mercantile elite, only further reinforcing Schopenhauer’s rooted sense of Hanseatic superiority to most Germans. Then Russia and Prussia formed an alliance against Napoleon and, in 1806, Prussia declared war on France. Schopenhauer left Hamburg in 1807, after his mother had gone to Weimar, where, having joined forces with Prussia, Karl August of Saxony assembled an army. But Napoleon routed the Prussian and Saxon troops at Jena and Auerstedt, and Schopenhauer was left alternately dodging the fighting and reading his mother’s stories (in letters) of French depradations in Weimar: sacking, rape, looting, soldiers running amok.

  Napoleon’s 1806–7 campaign took him north and eastwards, to the most noteworthy sites of the young Schopenhauer’s biography: Danzig, Gotha, Weimar, Jena, Berlin, Göttingen, Dresden. The features of the world in which the philosopher scrabbled for survival were comprehensively determined by invasion, devastation and humiliation. That he was not only close to this world but much troubled by it was partly what pitted him so violently against Hegel. Hegel saw the Napoleon triumphantly entering Jena in 1806 as a world-historical figure doing the bidding of spirit and furthering the ends of historical progress. For Schopenhauer, by contrast, plausibly enough, he represented the two faces of the will, malice and misery, as they appeared fresh from the killing fields. If the Hegelian refuge in progressivism was trivial and derisory, that was because Hegel took sides, singled out what he decided was a justified cause according to a logic of sufficient reason, and then committed himself to a system of representation, in wilful indifference to the will that governed it.

  The two faces of the will that were abundantly evident in northern Germany in 1806–7 were still more gruesomely present in 1812–13. In 1811–12, Napoleon assembled a new version of his Grand Armée, around half a million men. It massed in northern and eastern Germany and Poland. Prussia had no alternative but meekly to submit to ‘being ground under the wheels of great-power politics’.26 As a good revolutionary army, Napoleon’s men despised non-revolutionary Germany, and therefore looted and extorted freely throughout the country.27 Napoleon drove his victorious troops as far as Moscow, but then was forced to retreat as the fearsome Russian winter set in. The soldiers of the Grand Armée died pathetically, like flies, often in ways and circumstances that defied belief. Schopenhauer’s northern Germany witnessed the funeral procession of the will in defeat, as the surviving stragglers came back ragged, maddened, famished, frostbitten, purulent, gangrenous, thick with vermin, typhus- and fever-ridden. The men had crossed an ‘empire of death’ where all manner of horrors had been possible.28 If the French had formerly ransacked Prussia, the Prussians and other Germans now had their turn, gleefully setting upon, dispatching and on occasions massacring the wretched remnants of Napoleon’s vast military machine.29 Russia duly succeeded France as the great continental power in Europe.

  Just a few months before the Grand Armée passed through Berlin on its way to war, Schopenhauer had gone to the University of Berlin to study philosophy. He was still there when the ruined ghosts of men started appearing.30 The University had hardly remained untouched by events. Students had gone to fight and, while Schopenhauer was listening disapprovingly to Fichte’s lectures, Fichte’s wife was nursing wounded soldiers. It was during this period that Schopenhauer came up with his first sketches of the three great cornerstones of his philosophical system. According to Cartwright’s biography, it was in 1812 that Schopenhauer alighted on the idea of the ‘better consciousness’, a mind that holds itself at an ‘ultimate distance from the world’, as in art and asceticism.31 He did this precisely when he was ducking and diving to avoid ‘the troops of Hegel’s horse-riding world-spirit’, and the general mayhem that followed in their wake.32 In order to grasp ‘better consciousness’ more clearly, however, it was important to know the law that governed ordinary consciousness. Thus as Napoleon was seeking desperately to save himself from total defeat, Schopenhauer was beginning his On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Furthermore, as early as his Notebooks of 1813, he was already toying with an avatar of the will, the idea of a universal power that runs eternally through all things, is within oneself as it is in the world, and is not to be set aside or vanquished.33 Exception, sufficient reason, will – all three came to mind in 1812–13. True, Schopenhauer would reorder them in The World as Will and Representation, in that there we understand the logic of sufficient reason in order to understand the limits of particular historical worlds, grasp the elemental thing that lies behind all and then seek a consolatory ethics of the exception. There is nonetheless a degree to which The World as Will and Representation, though published some years afterwards in a much developed form and later revised, is a text of 1812–13.

  Indeed, within it, there is a sombre philosophical poem on the Napoleonic Wars. More than at any time before the twentieth century, the world had become ‘a battlefield of all the phenomena’ (WW1, p. 265), absorbed in a will-driven ‘war of extermination’ (WW1, p. 161). In 1812–13, northern Europe seemed an objective demonstration of the inner self-variance of the will and the truth of ‘homo homini lupus’ (WW1, p. 147; Schopenhauer himself quotes Hobbes). The strife of the will, and the suffering it causes, were apparent everywhere. Equally, the Napoleonic Wars provided eloquent testimony to the structure of need, satisfaction and need revived that Schopenhauer thought the will imposed. Nor did he have to look very far to suppose that the will to live constantly ‘objectifies itself’ in ‘scenes of horror’, or that men are led by the nose, ‘today by one braggart tomorrow by another’ (WW1, p. 173, WW2, p. 35). In the mundus phaenomenon of 1812–13, to a Hanseatic snob and hater of Prussian weakness like Schopenhauer, the canaille were all too likely to seem brain-dead machines. His dream of a ‘better consciousness’ is comprehensible in this light. So, too, a philosopher on the run from armies, and stubbornly avoiding all summons whether military or maternal, might seem more likely to write of a ‘desire for non-relation’ than some others.

  So historicism appears to have the edge on misanthropy again, casting doubt on its plausibility if not its power. Rousseau is another intriguing case, not least because his successors have more often conceived of him as one of the great sources of revolutionary, romantic and progressive strains in modern thought than as a man-hater. Like Hobbes’s, Rousseau’s thought hinges on a structure that opposes a ‘state of Nature’ to civil society.34 But he also inverts that structure, asserting that civil society tends to
corrupt all that is best in ‘natural man’. Such a belief may seem dismissive of a rather awesome range of human activity. It is not for all that misanthropic. Indeed, Rousseau explicitly enjoins us not to ‘dishonour man’ (E, p. 510).

  Yet during his lifetime, as he himself repeatedly underlines,35 others often called him a misanthropist, and his justification for seeming one – that ‘a disposition apparently so sombre and misanthropic’ in fact arose ‘from my too affectionate, too loving, too tender heart’, which found ‘no living creatures resembling it’36 – hardly changes the point. Rousseau became ‘a solitary’, ‘living little among men’ and preferring plants (E, p. 348, RPS, pp. 1066ff.). He hated men for ‘the miseries into which they have plunged me’, believing that he alone qualified as ‘wise and enlightened among mortals’ (RPS, pp. 1011, 1020). In an obviously misanthropic work, the late Reveries of a Solitary Walker, he tells us that he was happiest living in almost total isolation on an island in the middle of a lake.

  So Rousseau, it would seem, is an anti-misanthropic misanthropist. We can make quite a lot of this contradiction. For Rousseau, everything is good in nature. One of his best-known creations, the Savoyard Vicar in Emile, presents the ‘order of beings’ as a ‘picture of nature’ in which, universally, there is ‘only harmony and proportion’. However, it turns out that this picture does not include man at all: indeed, in stark contrast to it, ‘Mankind presents me with only confusion, disorder’, says the Vicar, ‘evil on earth’ (E, p. 583). Everything ‘is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things. Everything degenerates in the hands of man’ (E, p. 246). If man would respond ‘only to what nature demands of him’, then he would ‘do nothing but good’ (E, p. 322). But he is, ‘from the first steps’, outside nature (E, p. 259). He is in thrall to ‘prejudices, authority, necessity, example’, and spinelessly conforms to social institutions (E, p. 246). He therefore mixes and deforms things, produces confusion and monstrosity, and surrenders to the perversities and vices.

  Institutions corrupt: Rousseau’s Confessions is perhaps the first great modern tale of the growth to adulthood as a process of corruption. Rousseau promotes the supreme value of natural simplicity over civilized complexity, and this determines the character of his thought as a great structure of antitheses. He lauds the peasantry over city folk and the senses over the intellect. He treasures sincerity, spontaneity, impetuosity, enthusiasm, honesty, frankness, sensitivity, heart and ardour, all of which are works of nature and associated with integrity, honour and disinterest, over moderation, forethought, circumspection, concealment, diplomacy, dissimulation, wit, superficiality, affectation and style, all of which are soiled by worldliness. He seems himself to have been temperamentally incapable of cautious speech or the politic view. He hates luxuries, thinking of them as ‘useless and pernicious affectations’ (E, p. 292): according to the Confessions, he sold his watch, and gave up gold lace, white stockings and his sword. He distrusts fables, myths, histories and even books (the ‘instruments’ of ‘the greatest misery’ of childhood, E, p. 357). Like Hobbes, he is suspicious of language. There is, he feels, far too much talk and chatter in the world. Like Hobbes, again, he hates ‘ténèbres’, ambiguities, mysteries and uncertainties (RPS, p. 1007), finding it impossible to distinguish between them and duplicity and prevarication. It was for him an ‘inviolable maxim, with my friends, to show myself to their eyes exactly as I am’ (CO, p. 663): there is no reason, he thinks, why one should not be perfectly candid at all times. He is perhaps the great inaugurator of modern earnestness.

  Rousseau’s logic leads to his famous declaration: ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’.37 Many have heard this as a great liberal apopthegm or a revolutionary call to arms. But matters are not quite so clear. First, there was a side to Rousseau that felt that the chains were unbreakable. It is always too easy for that which ‘favours the malignity of man’ to ‘establish itself’ (CO, p. 588), as law, for example, ‘will always favour the strong against the weak’. Justice and ‘subordination’ are mere ‘specious names’ for the ‘arms of iniquity’ and ‘will always serve as instruments of violence’ (E, p. 524). Secondly, the chains are not necessarily those of gross inequalities in wealth and power, though Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality might lead one to think so. They are partly the twining fetters of sheer complication, with which Rousseau was impatient. Thus, while Emile begins with a version of the familiar case regarding nature, in Book II, a more startling argument appears. Rousseau asserts that man is good by nature but bad by association, that social involvement of any kind is dangerous; or, as he puts it himself, more pungently, ‘Man’s breath is deadly to his kind’ (E, p. 277). It is not just mediocre societies that breed evil, but the social instinct itself. ‘The precept of never hurting another’ therefore ‘carries with it that of being attached to human society as little as possible, for in the social state the good of the one necessarily constitutes the harm of the other’ (E, p. 340n). In such circumstances, the solitary will necessarily be he who comes out best. Rousseau is the forerunner of Joseph Conrad’s Axel Heyst: ‘I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul’.38

  Again, Rousseau is both with Hobbes and against him. According to Emile, above all an educational tract, the ideal education is solitary and asocial. But this means that, given the binding power of social life, paradoxically, what is natural can only be sustained and protected by a form of artifice. Yet in Hobbes, in a sense, artifice is necessary to overcome the effects of solitude. Nonetheless, the more one reads Rousseau, the more the praiser par excellence of the state of nature seems also a great advocate of human making – above all, when it involves humans making themselves other than they have been and are. Take for example The Social Contract. This, if any text of Rousseau’s, is ostensibly quite unmisanthropic. Rousseau argues that the social contract is founded on ‘the supreme direction of the general will’, which is ‘a moral and collective body’ (CO, p. 361). What price the collective, one might ask, if true virtue is possible only in the state of nature, and human society odious? But the point is that the civil state constituted by the contract changes mankind, giving their actions ‘the morality they had formerly lacked’ (CO, p. 364). Alas, however, if the people wills the good of the contract, it often does not see that good itself, as it no longer exists in a state of nature. The people must therefore ‘be shown the good road it is searching for’ (CS, p. 380). It must be taught to know what it wills. This is the function of ‘the Legislator’, an extremely rare figure who tends to the maintenance of what is otherwise ‘an impractical, speculative chimaera’ bearing ‘no relation to our nature’, and is therefore capable of changing it, of transforming each individual (CO, pp. 381, 392). Through him, the future human – what ought to be – becomes the present one.

  Rousseau is scathing about the ‘specious maxim’ that states that there is no sense in teaching others ‘the idea of an imaginary order which is quite contrary to the one they will find and according to which they will have to govern themselves’ (E, pp. 457–8). Thus in The Social Contract he pursues what he sees as a superior logic, reasoning ‘from the existent to the possible’ (CO, p. 426). Man is a creature who can infinitely exceed his own boundaries, and no philosopher can say, ‘This is the limit of what man can attain and which he cannot surpass’ (E, p. 281). Rousseau struggles to think about actual and historical man from the point of view of this infinite excess. Hence what he fears others take to be his ‘imaginary and fantastic beings’ (E, p. 549) – Emile, the Legislator, the Savoyard Vicar – whom he invents as a challenge to those who dare ‘to assign precise limits to Nature and say: here is as far as Man can go, and not beyond it’.39

  It is Julie that provides the great example of this tendency in Rousseau. With their moral elevation, their sensibility ratcheted up to the nth power, their transports that ‘elevate’ them ‘above [them]selves’ and ‘hearts warmed by a celestial fire’, all the main characters qualif
y as Rousseauian ‘beautiful souls’ (J, pp. 169, 199, 221). The novel is correspondingly founded on a belief in an exquisite language that exists apart from trivial actuality, risks itself if it manifests itself publicly, and can therefore appear only in private and intimate documents, confessions, diaries and, above all, letters (hence the fact that Julie is an epistolary novel). This, the language of the few, the initiates, is the only true language, and the one Rousseau and his characters pit against ‘the rest of mankind’ (J, p. 316). From the beginning of Part IV, the beautiful souls effectively close ranks, forming an exemplary moral clique, isolating themselves from the world and incessantly congratulating each other on their virtue, delicacy, wisdom, high moral standards and emotional generosity. This is Julie’s ‘adorable and powerful empire of beneficent beauty’ (J, p. 427). But Rousseau has systematically pruned it of all dark undergrowth. No eruption of nastiness, however faint or fleeting – no envy, spite, jealousy, rancour, hostility, scheming, machination, injustice, calumny, self-interest, deceit, covetousness, pettiness or vanity – can trouble the characters’ ‘felicity’, their ‘close and sweet benevolence’ (J, pp. 423, 541). Above all, there is no manifestation of the furtiveness or indirection that Rousseau so detested. Indeed, if one categorical imperative especially prevails in Julie’s Clarens, it is openness, confession. Even at breakfast, writes Saint-Preux, ‘We say everything we think, we reveal all our secrets, we constrain none of our sentiments’ (J, p. 471).

  Julie’s Elysium, then, a garden in which those who tend it take ‘great care’ to ‘efface human footprints’, would seem not only to be Rousseau’s horticultural ideal, but a figure for the novel as a whole (J, p. 461). In the second Preface, ‘N’, a man of letters, protests that a work of imagination ‘must possess traits common to mankind’. But a Julie there has never been. Rousseau’s characters ‘are people from the other world’. The editor and Rousseau-figure ‘R’ merely replies, ‘Then I am sorry for this one’ (J, p. 738). This is scarcely even to reason from the actual to the possible: it is peremptorily to excise the actual. Rousseau is the origin of a modern type of private self-enclosure which encourages the self to nourish its illusions at the expense of the rest of the world. But he also remains the inheritor of Hobbes. What matters in human beings is their capacity to transform themselves or be transformed, a virtual humanity within the real one. Some may feel, as Isaiah Berlin did,40 that they hear in this a certain moment in the history of an ambivalent form of modern misanthropy that runs from Hobbes to Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, its apogee in art being the epic, dauntless, grandiose figures of socialist realist statuary, in which the new utopian man recreates the human world through force.