Aristocracy

Image (detail) from the front cover of  

The Economist (Jan 24-30, 2015)

 

I. 

 

If you were to ask me to name the thing that artists value most, I might say inspiration. Or a wealthy patron.

 

But, according to D. H. Lawrence, the prédilection d'artiste is for the singular individual who dares to become who they are. This fascination for those men and women who - as Zarathustra would say - give birth to the dancing star of themselves is rooted deeply in every creative soul [1].

 

Lawrence calls these rare individuals aristocrats, but is at pains to stress that he is speaking only of those with innate virtue and tremendous self-discipline, rather than members of an elite (but decadent and artificial) social class who have simply been born with proverbial silver spoons in their gobs.

 

 

II. 

 

It is, of course, a fantasy of the nineteenth-century philosophical imagination that there exist such natural aristocrats. 

 

Interestingly, however, whilst it's an idea usually associated with figures on either the reactionary or radical right - from Edmund Burke to Friedrich Nietzsche - it's one which also appealed to Thomas Jefferson, who developed the concept in a letter to John Adams:

 

"I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. Formerly bodily powers gave place among the aristoi. But since the invention of gunpowder has armed the weak as well as the strong [...] bodily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness and other accomplishments, has become but an auxiliary ground of distinction." 

 

"The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government?" 

 

In contrast, Jefferson condemns the artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth and without either virtue or talents, expressing his hope that within a democratic system their power will be curtailed: 

 

"The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent it's ascendancy. [...] I think that to give them power in order to prevent them from doing mischief, is arming them for it, and increasing instead of remedying the evil. [...] I think the best remedy is exactly that provided by all our constitutions, to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo-aristoi, of the wheat from the chaff. In general they will elect the real good and wise." [2]

 

Sadly, as we all know, the United States didn't become wisely governed by a natural aristocracy; it quickly grew, rather, into a rapacious plutocracy masquerading as a democracy (as discussed in a recent post: click here).   

 

 

III.

 

Maybe, we might conclude, Plato was right; those fittest to rule are invariably those who genuinely have no desire to do so. If, every now and then, one such person does drift into politics, it is usually with great reluctance and they feel under constant pressure to justify why they have done so [3].  

But we must also point out that this whole idea of a natural aristocracy is untenable. And it's disappointing that by continuing to subscribe to this idea Lawence failed to address the dominant realities of his age and betrayed the radicality of his own work with a series of theo-political speculations on the nature of power and society, etc. 

 

Ultimately, because Lawrence lacked the conceptual categories of analysis appropriate to the twentieth-century, he falls back on metaphors to do with nature and life; metaphors that conveniently (but illegitimately) provided him with justification for his illiberal political ideas, just as they did for Social Darwinists and National Socialists. 

 

Be wary of anyone who attempts to derive social and political values from Nature, or likes to attach the prefix eco- to their work. 

 

For not only is the attempt to disguise noble lie with natural law fraudulent, but, as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out, anyone who tries to draw ethical and intellectual values from the so-called laws of nature - even Nietzsche - is guilty of an anthropomorphic employment of reason that oversteps the bounds of philosophical good taste [4].         

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See chapter V of Lawrence's 'Study of Thomas Hardy', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 

      For Lawrence's fullest statement on his understanding of aristocracy (natural and otherwise), see the essay 'Aristocracy', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 365-376. 

      One might also like to see the Epilogue to Movements in European History, where Lawrence writes of natural nobility and chapter XVI of The Plumed Serpent, where Don Ramón presents his vision of a Natural Aristocracy ruling the entire world. 

[2] The three quotations I select here are all from Jefferson's letter to Adams, written on 28 October, 1813. See The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester J. Cappon, (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), Vol. 2, pp. 387-92. 

      The above letter can be read online in The Founders' Constitution, Vol. 1, Ch. 15, Document 61 (The University of Chicago Press): click here.   

 

[3] Nietzsche describes this as the bad conscience of commanders and argues that only when this has been overcome, will the best want to rule in good faith and happily accept their obligation to do so. See Beyond Good and Evil, V. 199.     

[4] See Keith Ansel-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997), pp. 28-29.  

The Biophilia Hypothesis and Notes on Nature-Deficit Disorder

Biophilia: 
Tree-Sky-Horse-Mud-Hay-Child Assemblage 

(SA/2019)

I. Opening Remarks

According to figures, only ten per cent of children in the UK still play regularly in natural areas and green spaces, whilst forty per cent never play outside at all. This not only shapes their attitudes to the environment and to wildlife in later life, but also has serious health implications ...

In the final chapter of her book Wilding (2018), Isabella Tree makes reference to the research evidence showing the links between natural play and wellbeing on the one hand, and between disconnection from nature and numerous physical, psychological and social ills on the other:

"Measurements of blood pressure, pulse rates and cortisol levels of young adults demonstrate a decrease in anger and an increase in positive mood when walking in a nature reserve, while the reverse is true walking in an urban environment. Low levels of self-discipline, impulsive behaviour, aggression, hyperactivity and inattention in young people all improve through contact with nature."

"For Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson the human connection with nature - something he calls 'biophilia', the 'rich, natural pleasure that comes from being surrounded by living organisms' - is rooted in our evolution. [...] The need to relate to the landscape and to other forms of life - whether one considers this urge aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, cognitive or even spiritual - is in our genes. Sever that connection and we are floating in a world where our deepest sense of ourselves is lost."

"Stephen and Rachel Kaplan take the psychological implications of this dislocation further. Their research [...] focuses on the burden that living outside the natural world imposes on the brain. Modern life, loaded with stimuli, multiple forms of communication and information requiring rapid processing and selection, demands what they call 'directed attention' from the right frontal cortex of the brain - the same part of the brain that appears to be affected in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This kind of focused attention is tiring and requires enormous effort to block out distractions, resulting in symptoms of impatience, planning impairment, indecision and irritability. The natural environment, on the other hand, holds our attention indirectly, providing what the Kaplan's call 'soft fascination', a broad absorption that demands little or no effort and provides plenty of space for reflection and mental recovery."


II. Nature-Deficit Disorder

I don't know if all (or any) of the above is true and it's worth pointing out that nature-deficit disorder - a term coined by the American author and journalist Richard Louv in 2005 is not officially recognised by the medical profession (indeed, Louv himself concedes that NDD is merely intended to serve as a convenient fiction via which we can describe certain conditions that we see manifested in contemporary society) - but one suspects that there's at least some truth in it; and certainly enough to justify further research in this area.     

Those who pooh-pooh the idea that it's beneficial for children to spend as much time as possible playing outdoors in a natural environment with grass, trees, insects and dogshit - who think such an environment is too dangerous for children unless accompanied by a supervising adult and are happier seeing little Johnny and Jane safely indoors surrounded by electronic media - seem to be in denial about what might be described as a crisis of childhood in our times; a crisis that includes everything from allergies and eating disorders to knife crime and substance abuse. 

Of course there are other (often very complex) reasons for these things. Arguably, we live in a dysfunctional culture, so a few hours spent playing in the park or fishing in a stream isn't going to provide a panacea. But I do believe that flowers and birdsong (and even just stroking next-door's cat) make happy and that happy children, as a rule, don't self-harm or want to stab other people. 


III. The Biophilia Hypothesis

Finally, I'd like to say a little more about E. O. Wilson's biophilia hypothesis, which, as we noted above, is the idea that human beings possess an innate tendency to seek out connections with nature and affiliate with other forms of life.* Romanticism and vitalism are, if you accept this, not just cultural and philosophical dispositions, but sensibilities encoded in our DNA. 

Again, I'm not entirely convinced of this: no one has yet identified a nature gene as such. Nevertheless, it's true, I suppose, that most people like flora and fauna; otherwise why would they buy indoor plants and voluntarily keep pets? The rich diversity of forms that compose the natural world is universally appreciated by artists, poets, and children who delight in colours, shapes, sounds, and other physical properties. And I suppose the spiritual reverence for animals and other natural phenomena in human cultures worldwide might also be cited as evidence for biophilia. 

However, what's also true is that modern humanity defines itself by its divergence and difference from nature and prides itself on its intimate relationship with machinery and technology and has spent the last 250 years or so (i.e. since the industrial revolution) wilfully exploiting natural resources, destroying habitats and exterminating species. **

Indeed, what is modern nihilism if not this ecocidal drive?  It might be suggested that the only thing more innate than our biophilia is our biophobia. People like to think they are defined by love, but actually it's fear, hate and cruelty that have shaped human history.

Notes:

* The term biophilia wasn't coined by Wilson: it was first used by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his 1973 work The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Fromm defined it as 'the passionate love of life and of all that is alive'. Whilst I share this love, I also understand (after Nietzsche) that being alive is just a very rare and unusual way of being dead, so don't make such an absolute binary distinction, nor do I disprivilege, disparage, or denigrate the non-living objects that make up the vast majority of things in the universe.  

** It's important to note that biophilia isn't always juxtaposed in opposition to technophilia; that some theorists insist that man's technological drive is itself an extension of human evolution (and is therefore perfectly natural). Heidegger famously writes of a more original revealing outside of technological enframing, that would allow man to experience the call of a more primal truth, but as Keith Ansell-Pearson points out this appears to underestimate "the extent of technology's invention of the human animal and the nature and extent of its investment in mankind". See Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994) and Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997), p. 153.        

See:

Isabella Tree, Wilding, (Picador, 2018), pp. 295, 297. 

Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin Books, 2005).

Richard Louv, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, (Algonquin Books, 2011)

Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, (Harvard University Press, 1984).

Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (eds.), The Biophilia Hypothesis, (Island Press, 1993). 


For a related post to this one on why the language that speaks us as children matters, click here.

Notes on Nietzsche's Philosophical Naturalism

Nietzsche (detail) by Robberto

from the personal collection of Naima Morelli

click here for more details 

I think it's fair to characterise Nietzsche's philosophy as a kind of augmented naturalism, that is to say, one that comes with some surprising additional features; or what my mother would describe as naturalism with knobs on.

This is why Nietzsche can never quite bring himself to fully endorse modern science or accept that there is an objective, mind-independent reality governed by natural laws, etc. Hard realism and mechanical materialism aren't quite frölich enough for his tastes.      

Nevertheless, Nietzsche does like to speak of translating man back into nature [BGE 230] and to conceive of culture in terms of physis. So he's basically a 19th-century naturalist and both his atheism and his monism (the world is will to power - and nothing besides) are rooted in this intellectual tradition. 

What's interesting, however, is how Nietzsche relates his naturalism to his wider project of revaluation. Arguing that morality is a method for exercising power over wild nature - including the animal man - he suggests that we can now use the same method to elevate and strengthen, rather than tame and make sickly.    

In other words, having gained mastery of the earth and produced the human being, we can now begin work on the creation of an enhanced nature and a transhumanity: Übernatur und Übermensch, with the latter conceived as a strange and exquisite plant.

In sum, Nietzsche's moral naturalism is an attempt to translate values that many philosophers like to think of as transcendent ideals back into the world as a monstrous phenomenon of will to power and to life in all its splendid immorality. It is preferable, he says, to live as a satyr rather than a saint - and homo natura comes with horns upon his head rather than a halo of light floating above it.

However, we should note that the breeding of such a figure would require cultural and social conditions that are entirely alien to our age, which is why Nietzsche's politics cannot easily be squared with liberal humanism and why to think beyond good and evil remains such a dangerous (and intriguing) proposition.

Note: I also discuss Nietzsche's concept of translating man back into nature (with reference to the work of contemporary artists Willy Verginer and Orly Fayer) in two other recent posts: click here and here.
  

This post is dedicated to Keith Ansell-Pearson for 25 years of Nietzschean inspiration, friendship and support.  

In My Secret Garden

Bust of Epicurus against a background of wild flowers 

One of the very few consolations of living in isolated exile here in Essex is having a small garden in which to sit, drink wine, and listen to the birds sing whilst the Little Greek tends to her plants and battles with the snails.

One suddenly feels a real sense of kinship with Epicurus, who, famously, established his school of philosophy in a beautiful garden on the outskirts of Athens, c.307 BC. This green oasis - not far from the site of Plato's Academy, but far enough and of such a contrasting character as to suggest it belonged to a very different world - symbolised the idyllic yet worldly nature of Epicureanism.

Inscribed above the garden gate was a sign that read: Welcome dear guest - please stay a while and discover for yourself that the highest good is happiness. Men - and women - came here to practise and cultivate an ethics immanent to existence that valued reason, pleasure, friendship, and flowers.  

Modern scholars are not quite sure of the exact location of the garden, but, given the fondness amongst early Christians for building churches upon ancient sites of learning and pagan temples - and considering the hostility that many medieval theologians exhibited towards all forms of material hedonism - it's very possible that the Byzantine Church of Haghios Georgios [St. George] was erected upon it.     

That's a shame. Because no matter how beautiful the church or magnificent the cathedral, the sky above and the earth below remain more beautiful and more magnificent. This is something that even the devoted Christian Will Brangwen is forced to accept in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow:

"He listened to the thrushes in the gardens and heard a note which the cathedrals did not include: something free and careless and joyous. He crossed a field that was all yellow with dandelions, on his way to work, and the bath of yellow glowing was something at once so sumptuous and so fresh, that he was glad he was away from his shadowy cathedral.

      There was life outside the Church. There was much that the Church did not include. He thought of God, and of the whole blue rotunda of the day. That was something great and free. He thought of the ruins of the Grecian worship, and it seemed, a temple was never perfectly a temple, till it was ruined and mixed up with the winds and the sky and the herbs." [Ch. 7] 

Epicurus would, I'm sure, thoroughly endorse this passage by Lawrence, which promotes belief in the ruins and affirms the joy of living amidst the natural world having seen through the false promise of the Absolute.

And Nietzsche too would approve. For, as Keith Ansell-Pearson reminds us, there was nothing Nietzsche loved more during his mid-period than the thought of strolling in a peaceful garden:

"He wants a new vita contemplativa to be cultivated in the midst of the speed and rapidity of modern life; we need to [...] go slowly and create the time needed to work through our experiences. Even we godless anti-metaphysicians need places for contemplation and in which we can reflect on ourselves and encounter ourselves. However, we are not to do this in the typical spiritual manner of transcendent loftiness, but rather take walks in botanical gardens [...] and look at ourselves 'translated', as Nietzsche memorably puts it, 'into stones and plants' (GS 280)."

Ansell-Pearson concludes, in an absolutely crucial passage for those who would understand Epicurus-Nietzsche-Lawrence and their non-idealistic (in fact, counter-idealistic) Naturphilosophie:

"We free spirits have more in common with phenomena of the natural world than we do with the heavenly projections of a religious humanity: we can be blissfully silent like stones and we have specific conditions of growth like plants, being nourished by the elements of the earth and by the light and heat of the sun."

Notes

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 141-42. Note that GS 280 refers, of course, to section 280 of Nietzsche's The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974).  

Epicurus, The Art of Living, ed. and trans. George K. Strodach, (Penguin Books, 2013).

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).  

For a sister post to this one on the notion of ataraxia, click here. 

Musical bonus: click here to play a much under-appreciated track by Madonna, from the album Erotica (Maverick Records, 1992), which supplied the title to this post. 

Morgenröthe: Nietzsche's Red Dawn

Alicia Dunn: Red Dawn No. 5 (2017)

aliciadunnart.com

I. If Passion Ends in Knowledge then Nietzsche is the Best-Read Man in Town

According to Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's 1881 work Morgenröthe - usually translated into English as Daybreak or Dawn - is the most neglected of all his texts.*

If that's true, then it's a real shame. For it's a brilliant and beautiful book which illustrates how philosophy is, first and foremost, a form of erotics. For what is the pursuit of knowledge if not a passion, suggests Nietzsche; an intense desire to shatter established patterns of thinking and abandon the fears and consoling fictions that have for the greater part of history reduced man to the status of a herd animal.

Nietzsche anticipates "a new dawn in human existence" in which individuals are free to "cultivate their lives in a manner that is conducive to themselves and beneficent to others" [44]. He proposes ways of becoming who one is that involve thinking differently and, just as importantly, thinking critically with regard to the self. It's philosophy as a playful and experimental practice; what he'll term in his next work die fröhliche Wissenschaft.


II. Say Yes to a Single Joy and You Say Yes to All Woe

Nietzsche completed Daybreak in the Italian city of Genoa. He had by this time retired from his professorship at Basel University due to ill health and was living on a very modest annual pension in an unheated garret. His diet was as restricted as his income and consisted mostly of porridge and risotto, followed by more porridge.

Not only did he have to endure extreme cold and isolation, but Nietzsche spent a lot of his time suffering with blinding headaches that lasted for days at a time and caused him to vomit. His only relief was provided by that solitary vice much favoured by Diogenes, but condemned by Kant as an unnatural form of self-abuse. "And yet", writes Ansell-Pearson, "it was under these harsh conditions that he wrote over the course of a year one of his 'sunniest' books" [65].

And this is why one loves Nietzsche: for the fact that he says Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions; affirms, in other words, life as an economy of the whole and gives even the most terrible aspects of existence his blessing. It takes an almost inhuman degree of courage to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm all eternity and every pain, every sadness, every evil.

In sum: Nietzsche constructs a harsh philosophical ethic not only beyond good and evil, but, as Ansell-Pearson argues, beyond solitude and compassion as well; one that rests upon endurance and cruelty. Free-thinking, as he conceives of it, "will, initially at least, plunge people into despair and grief" [111]. But it results at last in happiness and in greatness.

Obviously, this isn't a philosophy that everyone might choose to live by, or be capable of living by: 

"I think it is clear, both from hints he gives in Dawn and says in other texts, that Nietzsche thinks the tasks of free-spirited thinking are ones reserved, and perhaps best reserved, for a few individuals who will constitute what we might choose to call a moral (or 'immoral') avant-garde." [112]


*Note: Ansell-Pearson reminds us that the original German title literally means 'morning redness' and specifies "the precise but fleeting moment at which the sky is aflame with colour and before the red yields to the customary blue or grey. It suggests a time of possibility, invention, inspiration and renewal, in which the freshness of the day augurs a new way of life." [67] 

See: 

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018). All page numbers given in square brackets refer to this book. 

Nietzsche, Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality, trans. Brittain Smith, (Stanford University Press, 2011). 

Islamism: What Would Nietzsche Do?

I. If Islam Despises Christianity, It Has a Thousandfold Right to Do So

Whilst it's true that Nietzsche does praise Islamic civilisation - particularly the wonderful culture of the Moors - within The Anti-Christ (1888), you rather get the impression he's doing so in order to provoke his mostly Western readers who pride themselves on the superiority of their own Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian inheritance.

For Nietzsche surely knew that Islam - as part of the same moral-religious tradition as Judaism and Christianity - is as problematic in terms of his own critique of values as either of the latter. He might like to romanticise the Arabs as a noble and manly race in comparison to the modern European, but such orientalism was common in the 19th century and needn't detain us for too long.

Besides, Islamism - a militant form of fundamentalism - is very much a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries and so wouldn't have been something that Nietzsche would have been familiar with. He did, however, anticipate the rise of such murderous ideologies and he did directly address the question of revolutionary fanaticism in his mid-period writings.

It is, therefore, perfectly legitimate to speculate how Nietzsche might have responded to the question (and the threat) of Islamism ...       

II. Serenity Now

Firstly, it's important to point out that, despite what many of his adherents as well as opponents often claim, Nietzsche - for all his anti-humanism - remained pro-Enlightenment; that is to say, someone with a deep admiration for the faculty of reason. It was important to Nietzsche that he not be regarded as an irrationalist or fanatic; i.e., one who demands faith and obedience from his followers, whilst displaying all the irritable impatience and resentment of the invalid.  

As Keith Ansell-Pearson reminds us, Nietzsche conceived of philosophy as a method for curbing excessive forms of enthusiasm and tempering the emotional and mental hysteria that we encounter in the world's hot-spots. As so many of these hot-spots happen to be Muslim majority countries, one is tempted to characterise the entire Muslim world as one huge tropical zone full of absurdly violent passions and "the most savage energies in the form of long-buried horrors and excesses of the most distant ages" [HAH 463].

Ultimately, moderation is the key to Nietzsche's mid-period therapeutics. And the main aim is to counter all forms of religious and ideological stupidity. It is the duty of those he calls free spirits to cool things down in a world that is "visibly catching fire in more and more places" [HAH 38], via an analytical naturalism and a dose of eudaemonic asceticism.

Ansell-Pearson is keen to trace such a practice of philosophy back to the ancient Greek thinker Epicurus and he makes a very strong case for why it is instructive and legitimate to do so. Personally, however, I'm more interested in how Nietzsche's thinking resonates within contemporary popular culture; such as in the work of comic genius Larry David ...


III. Zügel deine Begeisterung

Like Nietzsche, Larry is driven by a stubborn and sceptical form of honesty that tolerates no bullshit or groundless idealism. And like Nietzsche, Larry encourages us also to find joy in the small things - in details and in the minutiae of daily existence (including our language). Ansell-Pearson writes:

"There remains a strong and firm desire for life but [...] this voluptuous appreciation and enjoyment of life [...] is modest in terms of the kinds of pleasures it wants [...] and in terms of its acknowledgement of the realities of a human existence." [43] 

Such a philosophy is clearly antithetical to any faith that claims absolute moral authority. And so, it's little surprise then that in the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry runs foul of the Islamists and has a death sentence placed upon him by the Iranian Ayatollah.

His crime: Mocking Muslim clerics on a TV talk-show whilst discussing his new project, Fatwa!, a musical-comedy based on the Salman Rushdie (Satanic Verses) affair.

His defence: Religion should be made fun of. It's ridiculous. If I believed that stuff, I'd keep my mouth shut lest somebody think I was out of my mind.

Notes

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Vol. I., trans. Gary Handwerk, (Stanford University Press,1995). 

To watch a clip from the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm season 9, featuring a rehearsal scene from Fatwa!, click here.  

On Warmheartedness (An Easter Message from the Anti-Christ)

The twin themes of tenderness and warmheartedness dominate in Lawrence's late work. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, challenged by Connie to say what he believes in, Mellors famously tells her: 

"'I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.'"

I don't know if that's true or not. But I do know that Nietzsche problematizes the notion of warm-heartedness in Human, All Too Human - particularly in relation to Christ, whom he regards during this mid-period of his writing as not only the noblest human being, but also he who possesses the warmest of hearts.

For Nietzsche, however, this warmth of heart led Christ into the fatal error of over-identifying with the poor and meek in spirit and thus ultimately promoting an enfeebled morality full of ressentiment and base stupidity.

And where did this unintelligent goodness get him? Nailed to a cross. For when warm-heartedness is made into an ideal, it ultimately results in self-sacrifice - an issue that Lawrence often discussed in his critique of Christianity (see for example the novel Aaron's Rod).

So we should be wary of the claim made by Oliver Mellors that warm-heartedness will eventually make everything come good; though, to be fair, he constructs a libidinal practice rather than a moral teaching upon his belief. Thus, whilst Christ beseeches us to love our neighbour, Mellors busies himself fucking a little flame into being between himself and Connie; just as the flowers are fucked into being between sun and earth.

And Nietzsche? Nietzsche teaches us the philosophical importance of coldness and cruelty and demonstrates how the highest intelligence and the warmest of hearts cannot coexist in the same individual.               

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Ch. 14. 

Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Sections 475 and 235. 

I am grateful to Keith Ansell-Pearson, whose new book on Nietzsche's mid-period writings - Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2018) - inspired this post. See Ch. 1 of this work in particular, 'Cooling Down the Human Mind', pp. 17-45. 

Peter Sloterdijk and the Question of Anthropotechnics

Polity Press (2013)

Anthropotechnics is a term widely used today across numerous fields of study and with many different meanings. For some, it simply concerns the close interaction of man and machine. For others, however, with more of a background in Nietzschean philosophy, it refers to the manner in which bios (i.e. the raw material of the flesh) is given shape by a combination of culture and cruelty, or what Peter Sloterdijk likes to think of as existential acrobatics.

That is to say, learning how best not only to live, but to achieve a level of physical and mental agility via extensive training techniques that enable one to perform extraordinary feats as a human being (to dance, to tumble, and to walk on tiptoe). 

If this poetics of being can be furthered via a little genetic tinkering here and there or some form of selective breeding, then Sloterdijk seems fairly relaxed about this. In Rules for the Human Zoo, for example, he suggests that in a transhuman era in which traditional methods of enhancing the self - such as reading the right books - are losing their power, then biomedical engineering might be embraced as an exciting new opportunity: Vorsprung durch Technik ...

Unfortunately, Sloterdijk's eugenic speculation was regarded by some - including the grand old man of German critical theory Jürgen Habermas - as politically and philosophically pernicious and Sloterdijk was accused of wilful provocation and crypto-fascism (the fact that the above text was written in response to Heidegger didn't help matters).

To his credit, however, Sloterdijk stuck to his anthropotechnical guns and a decade later published a book translated into English as You Must Change Your Life - a work in which he again takes up the idea of human being not as something one is born, or as a fixed essence, but as something one becomes; an ever-changing work-in-progress subject to individual and collective techniques of transformation.    

Ultimately, says Sloterdijk, human beings are self-creating, self-disciplining animals and the history of human evolution is a vertical history of anthropotechnics. Again, it's impossible not to hear echoes of Nietzsche and those who have written in his shadow, such as Michel Foucault, in all of this; indeed, one might ask why read Sloterdijk when one can read Nietzsche and Foucault, both of whom write more beautifully in my view. 

Perhaps Keith Ansell-Pearson provides an answer to this in the effusive opening paragraph of his review of Sloterdijk's work:

"Peter Sloterdijk must be the most erudite man currently dwelling on the planet. He has fresh and novel insights into whatever he’s discussing at any particular moment. His recently translated book You Must Change Your Life is a tour de force that engages the history of philosophy, religion, and thought, both Western and Eastern, in ways that make you think deeply about the evolution of the human being these past few thousand years. As if this weren’t already enough, Sloterdijk is also concerned with the future, and on a planetary scale. [...] Sloterdijk thinks there is a new global ecological and economic imperative facing us today, and to this we need to respond with a new sublime."

And so, if you want an ambitious, complex, rather sprawling but at times amusing 21st-century spin on the care of the self in terms of aesthetics, asceticism and athleticism, inspired by Nietzsche, but which also takes in the work of Rilke, Kafka, Wittgenstein, and L. Ron Hubbard along the way, then this may very well be the book for you.    

Personally, however, I continue to have reservations; not least with the text's grandness of narrative and Sloterdijk's authorial grandiosity. For me, a little modesty would have been nice - and, for the record, I really don't like to see the word mußt in a book title (even if it is a borrowing from a poet).   

See:

Peter Sloterdijk, 'Rules for the Human Zoo: a response to the Letter on Humanism', trans. Mary Varney Rorty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 27 (2009), pp. 12-28. Click here to read as a pdf online.

Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics, trans. Wieland Hoban (Polity Press, 2013).

Keith Ansell-Pearson, 'Philosophy of the Acrobat: On Peter Sloterdijk', Los Angeles Review of Books, (July 8, 2013): click here to read the online version from which I quote. 

On Nietzsche's Epicureanism

Edvard Munch: Friedrich Nietzsche 

(oil on canvas, 1906)

Whenever there's a lovely day like today - sunny and frost-bright, with blue skies and trees aflame with autumnal reds and golds - I think of Nietzsche in his cheerful mid-period writings gaily affirming the world and its eternal recurrence exactly as is.

That is to say, the Nietzsche who attempts to construct an ethos in the heroic-idyllic manner of Epicurus, delighting in modest pleasures and the cultivation of philosophical serenity [ἀταραξία].

As Keith Ansell-Pearson points out, Nietzsche's interest in Epicurus is, on the face of it, rather curious considering the plebeian aspects of the latter's thinking. And Nietzsche's relation to Epicurus is certainly ambiguous - increasingly so in his later work.

However, it's undeniably the case that during the late-1870s and early-1880s, Nietzsche was full of praise for this pleasure-loving ancient Greek and this is something that should be remembered by those who would portray Nietzsche as an austere philosopher who scorns all forms of hedonism as self-indulgence, or decadence. 

Ultimately, I agree with Ansell-Pearson that the essential thing is that, for Nietzsche, Epicurus's teaching demonstrates how best "to quieten our being and so help temper a human mind that is prone to neurosis". He helps us, as Larry David would say, curb our enthusiasm and not to care so much about great events, focusing instead on the little things that matter most (such as flowers, fresh figs, and friendship, for example).

There is an asceticism involved here. But it's an insouciant asceticism, or what one commentator describes as a eudaemonic asceticism, which is antithetical to those later Christian-moral practices of self-denial and world-negation.

When you add this together with the fact that Epicurus was one of the first Greek philosophers to reject superstitious worship of the gods based on fear, affirm the fact of life's mortality, and deny "any cosmic exceptionalism on the part of the human", and you begin to see why Nietzsche found him so attractive (and why, in turn, I find Nietzsche so congenial).


See: Keith Ansell-Pearson, 'Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing: Nietzsche and the Epicurean Tradition', Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, Vol. 74, (July 2014), pp. 237-63. This essay can be read online via The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP): click here.

Note: Ansell-Pearson's new book, Nietzsche's Search for Philosophy - which aims to provide a novel and thought-provoking examination of the mid-period writings - is published by Bloomsbury on 22 Feb 2018 and is available for pre-order on Amazon now: click here.

A Letter to Heide Hatry (Parts I and II)

Heide Hatry

I. The Sickness Unto Death

Dear Heide,

Many thanks for your fascinating five-part response to the posts on Torpedo the Ark that referred to your recent body of work, Icons in Ash. I'm touched that you kindly took the time to write not only at length, but with such good grace and critical intelligence. I will attempt to reply in the same manner and to each part in turn. However, I should point out that I'm unconvinced about the possibility (or desirability) of serious discussion: either two people agree - in which case there's not much to say; or they disagree - in which case there's nothing to say. This renders the attempt to exchange ideas narcissistic and futile; a vacuous academic game to be avoided at all costs.

Having said that, there's no need for absolute silence; we can surely keep company and converse without attempting to discuss things and break words apart. It's just a question of bearing in mind this idea of incommensurability and accepting that even speaking subjects who seem to share a language never truly understand one another; that there's always a pathos of distance between things, between people. It's not surprising, therefore, that you fail to "recognise" yourself in my words: for I don't know you. Indeed, if I might be permitted to paraphrase Nietzsche once more, we knowers are unknown even to ourselves ...

You ask if I have "really looked" at your work. Sadly, as I don't live in New York, I've not been afforded the opportunity to do so. I've had to make do with printed reproductions and images online. Perhaps this explains why I haven't "felt" it (though I'm not quite sure I know what you mean by this). Ultimately, it's fair to say that I'm more interested in what you (and others) say about the portraits, rather than the portraits themselves. As I'm neither a practicing visual artist, nor a qualified art critic, you'll have to forgive my insensitivity.   

I'm pretty much in agreement with your remarks on Deleuze and Guattai; certainly theirs was a project critical and clinical in nature and they regarded themselves as cultural physicians. But it should be noted that they have a very unusual understanding of what constitutes health and it doesn't coinicide with the dreary and functional good health which we've been given and which we're endlessly told we have to look after.

In fact, it's an irresistable and delicate form of health that the conventionally robust who eat their five-a-day and visit the gym after work might find feeble and sickly. The key thing is, whilst strength preserves, it's only sickness that advances. That's why we need our decadents, our convalescents, and those artists and philosophers who have returned from the Underworld with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums. You mention Artaud and Rimbaud. I might mention others - such as D. H. Lawrence, for example. Theirs may not have been "salutary examples of the good life", but they were vital figures nevertheless. 


II. On Death and Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence       

I'm very sorry if my suggestion that, in calling up the spirits of deceased loved ones, you were seeking to have the last word upset you. It might well be that such a remark displays all of the faults you ascribe to it (banality, reductiveness, wrong-headedness, tone-deafness, remarkable ungenerosity, and wilful misunderstanding). Nevertheless, it surely has to be admitted that the dead, being dead, have no right of reply and cannot give consent.

In fact, one of the irritating things about the dead is that no matter how loud you cry and scream at them, or or how fully you explain yourself to them, they never listen and they never respond. Again, it's not so much rudeness or indifference on their part - it's just how they are (dead).

Obviously, we disagree on this ... It might please you to know, however, that I like the idea of the souls of the dead investing the lives of the living. And of the dead who do not die, but look on and silently help. It might be noted too that I've written sympathetically and approvingly of necrophilia and spectrophilia. But still - with the possible exception of those posthumous individuals who, as Nietzsche says, only enter into life once they've died - I can't quite accept that the dead have a great deal to offer (although, to be fair, neither do the noisy majority of the living). 

Moving on ... I opened my eyes wide in astonishment when you referred to (human) life as the "most glorious phenomenon" - but decided you were only teasing. I mean, Heide, c'mon - you can't be serious! At best life is epiphenomenal - a rare and unusual way of being dead, as Nietzsche describes it. To privilege life over death is just prejudice. I'm all for living life joyfully, but it's only ever a practice of joy before death and the real festivity begins when we make a return to material actuality.

To be clear: I'm not championing that negative representation of death conceived as a form of judgement which comes at the end of a life upon which, as you say, it "exerts an oppressive and defeatist effect". Rather, I'm speaking of death as a form of becoming (a line of flight and a dissolution). You mention at this point in your comments Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence and, clearly, it speaks of both types of death which Keith Ansell-Pearson characterises as heat death and fire death. Please note, however, that there's never any attempt at reconciliation in Nietzsche's work.

I wouldn't say Nietzsche's eternal recurrence is a "life-affirming" teaching (even you put this phrase in scare quotes); what it affirms, rather, is repetition and the difference engendered by it (the Same - das Gleiche - is not a fixed essence and does not refer to a content in and of itself). Nor is it a cheerful teaching - it's a form of tragic pessimism; there's no promise of salvation or any hope of transcending existence precisely as is. The happiness it promises is forever tied to pain and suffering (as well as moonlight, spiders and demons).      


To read parts III-V of this letter to Heide Hatry, please click here. 

To read Heide Hatry's extensive series of comments please see the posts to which they are attached: Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash and On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry. 

O Wonderful Machine: Nihilism and the Question Concerning Technology (Part II)

"What is dangerous", writes Heidegger, "is not technology. ... The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger." Developing this crucial point, he writes:

"The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth."

In other words, the essence of technology - something that exists long  before the modern machine age - is a way of revealing so monolithically powerful and expansionist that it threatens to overwhelm man and prevent him from discovering any other possible becoming. Heidegger calls this revealing Ge-stell, a term commonly translated into English as ‘enframing’. He argues that this revealing that rules with technology doesn’t allow anything to come forth in its own right. Rather, it acts as a ‘challenging’ or ‘provocation’ [Herausfordern] “which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such”.

Thus, for example, a tract of land “is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district”. But, more than this, it also reduces man to the status of ‘human resource’ or ‘standing reserve’ [Bestand] in service to technological purposes.

Interestingly, Lawrence also illustrates his thinking on the question concerning technology with reference to the coal mining industry. In Women in Love, for example, Gerald Crich acknowledges his destiny as someone caught up in an ideal-material struggle “with the earth and the coal it enclosed ... to turn upon the inanimate matter of the underground, and reduce it to his will”.

Prior to this, in The Rainbow, we encountered Tom Brangwen, another coal boss of the view that men belong entirely to their jobs and that outside of the great social-industrial machine of work man had become “a meaningless lump – a standing machine”.

Ursula, fundamentally hostile to her uncle's thinking and keen to imagine a different human future, nevertheless understands the horrible fascination of lives subjected to technology and the power of money; aware that there is a perverse satisfaction  to be gained from such subjection. Even, it is suggested, via machinic servitude man achieves his consummation and immortality, Lawrence arguing not that technology makes us less human, but, on the contrary super-human. Thus it is that Gerald Crich is transformed into a modern Prometheus and fulfils the great promise of science; namely, that man too can attain infinite power (or, perhaps more accurately, infinite knowledge, which, for modern man, is one and the same thing).

The question becomes: what will man do with this unlimited power-knowledge? Will he use it to transform himself and his world, or destroy himself and the natural environment? On the level of utility and abstraction we have made ourselves into lords of production, but we have also arrived at the very edge of an abyss: “Present-day man is of the lowest rank", writes Blanchot, "but his power is that of a being who is already beyond man: how would this contradiction not harbour the greatest danger?”

It is for this reason that Nietzsche predicts that modern nihilism will result in great wars and violent upheaval on an unprecedented scale. However, oblivious or indifferent as men like Gerald Crich are to such dangers, they press on in their quest to see life entirely dominated by mind and a will that is negative in direction and composed of predominantly reactive forces seeking the ego’s triumph over all that lies external to it. By bringing everything into the realm of knowledge and reducing the world to information, Gerald is able to master and manipulate existence, determining its truth via reference to his own learning. Thus, in this manner, as George Steiner correctly notes, the self becomes “the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative way”. 

But no matter how much Gerald knows, still he feels strangely empty; “as if the very middle of him were a vacuum”. And as this feeling becomes increasingly acute, his voraciousness grows: “And to stop up this hollowness, he drags all things into himself”. Such rampant egoism and greed is condemned repeatedly in the writings of both Nietzsche and Lawrence and yet it remains almost definitional of modern man who, it seems, will not rest content until he has “killed the mysteries and devoured the secrets”.

Clearly, if a change is to be made to a new mode of living then modern man must find someway to overcome his conceit and what Keith Ansell-Pearson describes as his “paranoid and phobic anthropocentrism”. To do so will not be easy and will involve a self-overcoming and a confrontation with our deep-rooted idealism. And yet, to return to Heidegger’s text concerning the question of technology, we have already seen how hope lies precisely where and when we might least expect it; the hope of a radically different revealing to the one that presently holds sway.

Heidegger names this with the Greek term poiēsis and indicates by this a revealing that brings forth without provocation, having, as it does, an entirely different relation to matter. It is a revealing that may enable us to confront the essential unfolding of technology and survive our prolonged flirtation with nihilism.

However, to reiterate, it is the supreme danger of the above unfolding and flirtation which harbours the possible rise of the saving power. Thus instead of simply gaping at the technological as that in which we see our own diabolical genius reflected, we must attempt to glimpse that which is ambiguous and other contained in the essence of technology.

Of course, to simply catch sight of this does not mean we are thereby ‘saved’ - but we are “thereupon summoned to hope in the growing light of the saving power” and we are reminded that there was once a time and a place (i.e. ancient Greece) when poiēsis was also understood as belonging to technē and the fine arts, undifferentiated from any other technical ability, “soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them”.

For Heidegger, as for Nietzsche, it was the arts that uniquely allowed the Greeks to enter into a direct relationship with the world of being and not merely a world of knowledge and representation; the arts which allowed them to dwell poetically on the earth and not merely live prosaically.

Can they do so again, now, for us? Heidegger is uncertain.

But, despite his pessimism, he seems to remain hopeful that one day the arts may once again be granted this highest possibility. Providing, that is, that there are still profound thinkers who remain astounded by and before this other possibility and who, via their questioning, may be able to incite a new becoming.

And so there remains a vital task for philosophy. For whilst the latter cannot itself provide the new, it can prepare the conditions under which the new might emerge. And whilst philosophy is neither able to predict or guarantee the future, still it allows for the possibility “that the world civilization that is just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of man’s world sojourn”.

Bibliography

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Viroid Life, (Routledge, 1997). 

Maurice Blanchot, 'The Limits of Experience: Nihilism', essay in The New Nietzsche, ed. David B. Allison, (The MIT Press, 1992).

Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (Routledge, 1994).

Martin Heidegger, 'The End of Philosophy and the Task for Thinking', essay in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, (Routledge, 1994). 

D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', essay in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

George Steiner, Heidegger, (Fontana Press, 1989).

Note: Part one of this post can be read by clicking here.

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

I knew Nick Land, briefly and not very well, in the mid-1990s, whilst I was in the Philosophy Department at Warwick as a Ph. D. student. In fact, Land was assigned to monitor my progress and act as someone to whom I could turn for guidance other than my official supervisor, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

Unlike many others, however, I failed to fall under his evil spell. In fact, if I'm honest, I found him somewhat unsympathisch and don't recall anything he ever told me that particularly amused or struck a chord, apart from the fact that it was, in his view, preferable to sell burgers from the back of a van than to build a conventional academic career. 

Having said that, and to be fair to Land, his Thirst for Annihilation (1992) is a book to which I often return and that's not something you can say of many other (if any) theoretical studies of Bataille and for a long time I characterized my own work as a form of libidinal materialism.

But it's not this text from long ago that I wish to comment on here; rather, I'm interested in his more recent (neoreactionary) writings and his provocative notion of a Dark Enlightenment which seems to involve people waking up to the fact that democracy is incompatible with liberty, equality is a theological conceit, human biodiversity something to be affirmed and capitalism something to be accelerated.

Now, to me, this sounds simply like a form of post-Nietzschean anti-modernism; for others, including Jamie Bartlett, it's a sophisticated neo-fascism spread online by over-educated, often angry white men worried about a coming zombie apocalypse and looking for an emergency exit.

Bartlett describes Land as an eccentric philosopher, which, obviously, he is; but then all genuine thinkers are eccentric, are they not? To be a conventional individual who upholds orthodox opinion and subscribes to moral common sense is to be a bien pensant, but never a truly perverse lover of wisdom.   

Bartlett also complains that Land's thinking is difficult to pin down. But again, I might suggest that it's not usually a sign of lively philosophical intelligence when one's ideas have all the vitality of dead butterflies.

As to the charge that Land is a racist (the worst form of heresy to those who subscribe to and enforce a universal humanism), well, if he is, it's certainly not in the ordinary or banal sense. Indeed, Land is at pains to demonstrate how the latter rests on a grotesquely poor understanding of reality and utter incomprehension of the future that is unfolding (a future in which genomic manipulation will dissolve biological identity in an as yet inconceivably radical manner making the concern over miscegenation and skin-colour seem laughably old-fashioned).

So, without wishing to defend Land from his critics - something he is perfectly capable of doing for himself - I would nevertheless like to encourage readers of Torpedo the Ark to invest the time and accept the challenge of reading Land's work on Dark Enlightenment by clicking here.


Note: Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos (i.e. part of the Cathedral). He regularly writes about online extremism and the perils of the dark web. His blog post for the Telegraph on Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and the Dark Enlightenment can be read by clicking here.