(SA/2025) [a]
I.
"We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves." [b]
That's a great line from Hazlitt: far more philosophically profound and liberating than the Christian idea of learning to love one's enemies and the Californian injunction to love the self.
Love binds: but it's hate that shall set you free; free from the expectation of those who think they know you best and oblige you to remain the person you've always been; free from ideas and viewpoints that have become fixed and congeal into forms of doxa or harden still further into dogma; free from a model of self born of internalised cruelty that some think of as an essential soul and others discuss in terms of subjective identity.
II.
Of course, it's difficult breaking from old friends and family members (unless they die or conveniently move far away). Nevertheless, it can be liberating to both parties to encounter one another once more as strangers (an acquaintance of mine once told me that he never loved his wife more than after their estrangement and subsequent divorce).
The fact is, times change and we change and whilst some old friendships can last a lifetime, other friendships become "cold, comfortless, and distasteful" [131] like a plate of cold meat served up over and over again and even if we would like to revive old feelings that's impossible: "The stomach turns against them." [131]
III.
Perhaps it's even more difficult breaking from the authors one has loved; even when fully aware that one rewards great teachers not with loyalty but infidelity and by reading them against themselves; giving them over, as Hazlitt says, to the dissecting-knife or opening them up to ridicule [c].
And great books must also be laid aside at some point and allowed to gather dust [d] - even become a little worm-eaten and mouldy. For as Nietzsche writes somewhere or other, it says nothing against the greatness of a spirit - or, in this case, a book - that it contains a few worms; corruption is a sign of maturity or ripeness and doesn't diminish overall value [e].
IV.
"As to my old opinions, I am heartily sick of them. I have reason, for they have deceived me sadly." [135]
Again, I know exactly what Hazlitt means: old ideas and old beliefs that I once subscribed to in all sincerity at the very least embarrass today; words I once used to identify myself - punk and pagan, for example - "are become to my ears a mockery and a dream" [135].
A true philosopher, says Nietzsche, cannot belong to any church or party that requires members to have moral convictions or political principles; for a philosopher is someone who burrows their way into a body, through it, and out the other side and never holds on to even their own ideas for too long, for this would imply that one could know oneself well enough to trust one's own thoughts and that simply isn't the case:
"We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers [...] We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity, we do not understand ourselves, we must confusedly mistake who we are [...]" [f]
Hazlitt appears to find this lack of self-knowledge good cause for self-contempt; "mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes [...] always disappointed where I placed most reliance [...] have I not reason to hate and to despise myself?" [136]
But then he adds an amusing final twist: "Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough." [136]
Notes
[a] The phrase hate shall set you free is obviously playing on the well-known biblical line: 'And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free' (John 8:32 KJV).
Ever quick to point out the bleeding obvious and display it's moral colours, the Google AI assistant was keen to inform me that the phrase 'hate shall set you free' is neither a universally recognised nor an accepted statement and that the original saying is emphasising the liberating power of truth, not hate:
"While some may interpret it to mean that rejecting societal norms or expectations (through hate or defiance) can lead to liberation, it's crucial to understand that this interpretation is not a standard or positive one."
If I were Tracey Emin, I may have been tempted to write the phrase 'hate shall set you free' in the form of a neon sign, but - as I'm not Tracey Emin - I've simply added it the text to William Blake's 'Albion Rose', which can be found in A Large Book of Designs (1793-96).
I'm sure he wouldn't object; for Blake acknowledges the vital importance of hate as well as love within human existence by arguing that: "Without contraries there is no progression." See the Argument that opens The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93).
[b] William Hazlitt, 'On the Pleasure of Hating', essay in The Plain Speaker: Opinions on Books, Men, and Things, originally published anonymously in two volumes, in 1826.
I am quoting from the text as it appears in Volume 7 of The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (J. M. Dent and Co., 1903), p. 130, which was published as an eBook by Project Gutenberg in 2018: click here. Future page references to Hazlitt's essay will be given directly in the text.
[c] Hazlitt is right to say that we are aided and abetted in this by the fact that sometimes our favourite writers suddenly become fashionable and subject to an outpouring of academic analysis:
"The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from
them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their
names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and
indiscriminate admirers they draw after them." [133]
[d] Even Hazlitt has some reservations about this; surely, he says, "there are some works, that, like nature, can
never grow old and that must always touch the imagination and passions
alike!"
Or, at the very least, there are books that contain passages "that seem as if we might brood over them
all our lives, and not exhaust the sentiments of love and admiration
they excite" [133].
Having said that, however, Hazlitt confesses that, for him at least, any passage - even the most beautiful or stirring - soon becomes vapid if we read or recite it too often (see p. 134).
[e] See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Vol. 2, Part 1, Section 353, p. 292.
[f] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3.
For a couple of other recent posts inspired by Hazlitt's essay 'On the Pleasure of Hating' - discussing topics including spiders, ghosts, and witches - please click here and/or here.
