The 'Introducing Series' and Philosophy
Between 1965 and 1975, there was a series called
'The Bluffers Guide to ...' This provided short light-hearted
introductions designed to get the middle classes through their dinner
parties. Today we have the far more serious Oxford 'Very Short
Introductions to ..." which started in 1995. Inbetween came
instant graphic guides to intellectuals and ideas - the 'Introducing
..." series published by Icon which was an expanded British version of
an American series 'For Beginners' that went back to the 1970s. These
dominated the instant knowledge market in the 1990s.
The series included graphic
accounts of significant modern philosophers and ideas. The original idea
behind the series was that you could educate through a combination of
image and crisp short summaries of the life and history of complicated
people and concepts. This is both absurd and helpful. None of
these books (largely produced in the post-modern fervour of the 1990s)
can do more than skim the surface of a subject. Ideas can be so
foreshortened that they are meaningless to the uneducated subject. The
graphics are often crude although they serve their purpose, only rarely
adding to the obscurities instead of enlightening us.
On the
other hand, they offer two hours (approximately) of comic book summary
of the main tenets of a thinker or movement with valuable pointers to
further reading or study. They are useful and entertaining in that
context. To a great extent, this sort of popular education have been superseded by the
internet. Wikipedia. A basic Google search can deliver similar short
reliable summaries with links at the click of a mouse and now GPT-4 and its successors can take you further and faster than either but they still
have their role in opening up the minds of many people who would never
otherwise come up against these ideas.
Introducing Eastern of Philosophy is one of these graphic
introductions to a difficult subject. In this case, Osborne and graphic
artist Van Loon have probably taken on a bit too much - the whole of
Eastern philosophy. Nevertheless, this 176-page picture book provides a
sufficient overview of Indian, Buddhist and Chinese philosophy that it
will act as a useful guide to those aspects of these traditions that you
might want to explore further. It provides a basic primer on the
underlying cultural attitudes of an East that is likely to become much
more obviously equal to the West in economic terms over the next
century. At the risk of gross over-simplification, we can see
that these three traditions are all going to inform Eastern attitudes
for many decades and centuries to come - and perhaps, as they grow and
prosper, influence us in the West as much as we have influenced them
during the Western-hegemonic Imperial Age.
India is, in my view, a tough nut for
the Western mind to crack. The Westernisation implicit in the British
Imperial project seems to have proved much less embedded than we might have
thought. The rise of an Indian nationalism of the Right is a
commitment to a particular vision of Vedanta that is unlikely to want
too much radical reform of the caste system or the role of women. The whole
'karma' thing might appeal to the Western New Age but it is essentially a
conservative model of the universe that is unlikely to appeal to anyone
angered by the unresponsiveness or incompetence of their elected
Governments. The conservatism of the New Indian Right may come to prove
very problematic for Western liberals and especially for British
liberals who have to cater for these elements in their own Hindu
communities and coalitions.Indeed, we see South Asians in the UK being very conservative players in British politics (unlike Muslims) exemplified by an instinctive support for Israel in the recent Gaza War.
Osborne tries to show that the
Eastern traditions have more in common with each other than any do with
the West. However, I, for one, am not entirely persuaded that they are not
distinct. The irruption of Buddhism into China was an alien graft from
South Asia that, by the time it reached Tibet and Japan, eventually
transmuted into something very different in Tibetan Tantra and Zen with
their very different philosophical stances. What they do have in
common is the lack of any notion of revelation outside the person and
the use of texts as learning tools and advisories rather than as the
basis for Truth. Much of the dynamism of the West comes from its revolt
against the sclerotic belief in single texts (Bible or Koran) being
repositories of Truth and so against limitations being put on
philosophical investigation, much as small competing states in the West energised
technological innovation through near-perpetual warfare.
Any
Western Right that wants a primordialist return to tradition is asking for a return to
text-based sclerosis and does not fully understand that Indian, Chinese
and European pagan models may not have been very dynamic (based as they
were on agrarian societies) but they were more culturally dynamic
than the book-obsessed over-intellectualised learning of the Christian,
Jewish and Islamic Middle Ages. In the end, a lot of Western and
Eastern philosophy is just dancing around the unknowability of raw
existence and around the relationship between things and minds
perceiving things in that context. One value of this book is in showing
that there is not much that has been thought of in the West that has not
appeared in the East - and vice versa.
Nevertheless, there are
significant differences in 'mentality'. The West has tended to separate
out 'science' from 'faith' and to see them in challenging opposition.
The West loves struggle because it is creative - its culture is based on
intellectual war and on crowing victory from the rooftops before
falling to the next challenger. The quintessential Western philosophy is
Hegelianism with its thesis facing off an anti-thesis to create a
synthesis that becomes a thesis. The Chinese approach is to see things
in terms of opposites that must be recognised as being engaged in a
permanent struggle.
Yes, there is a similarity to Hegelianism there (which may explain why Marxism and Confucianism can co-eexisr in China) but the Western approach seems to emphasise progressive transition from one state to another through struggle whereas the Eastern tradition seems to emphasise a single state of Being in which struggle exists in order to re-calibrate back towards a fixed state, an essentially conservative vision. In the midst of flux, neing in the world is thus an actively engagement
in calibrating forces into a middle way. This is presented as the natural way,
the flow of a stream around boulders to the sea. The water finds its own level and, of course, is recirculated to create the stream once again.
The Chinese,
despite the incursion of Buddhism, which eventually beaches in two
cultures wary of their great neighbour (Tibet and Japan), have their own
internal philosophical yin and yang in the competing but also mutually
accommodating traditions of Confucius and the Tao. There is something
deeply humane about the original Chinese solution to the problem of
organising and living in an agrarian society - family life and the State
are ordered in ritual and duty while the individual flows through the
vicissitudes of life with an attitude of withdrawal and
self-development.
The Indians have a similar model but treat, in a
more essentialist and less natural way, the individual as preparing
himself to be first a functioning part of society and, then, passing on
to what may be called a form of living death - contemplation - in the
hope that the next reincarnation will raise the thinker's status in life. Both are
philosophies of hopelessness about radical reform or change except
towards some kingly or monkish ideal but the Chinese does permit the
existence of a private life alongside the public from beginning to end, whereas Indian
philosophy (in its ideal form) turns a man into simply the body for a
travelling soul. In that sense, to return to the Nietzschean analyses on
which we so often fall back, the Chinese way is essentially
life-affirming and the Indian way life-negating, with the challenge and
irruption of Buddhism being an attempt to moderate negation in one
culture only to import it into the other.
Fortunately, East
Asian cultures, like Western cultures, have proved
surprisingly resilient in the long run. Tibetan Buddhism, Zen and
Neo-Tantra are far removed from Vedanta. But even Vedanta is far from
fixed in its thinking. Yet, within its basic framework, its many strands
generally remain coherently Indian and different from the West. Yes,
there has been some influence from Western methodologies but these have
been absorbed and are perhaps now being reversed as Indian nationalism
makes it increasingly less difficult to not be overly-submissive to
British-inspired modernisation and 'reform'.
The Chinese
similarly have not allowed the West to decide how they are to think with
one major exception for which the ground was prepared by the
regrettable but possibly necessary introduction of Neo-Confucian ideas.
The cultural strength of China lay in the calibration of Confucian and
Taoist thinking but it assumed an agrarian Middle Earth that was not
overly disrupted by international trade, by more innovative invaders and by
massive population pressures. The political and economic situation of
China was often far from stable. The constant calibration was painful
and increasingly ineffective. The arrival of 'foreign' Buddhism in
itself is perhaps a sign of stress with Buddhist reincarnation have the
same effect on the suffering poor or relatively deprived as Christian
Salvation had on a flailing Roman Empire.
Neo-Confucianism and
Imperial Paganism in the West have much in common functionally but the
latter fell before demotic Christianity (being absorbed rather than destroyed, of course) in a way that Neo-Confucian
Order did not before Buddhism. In Europe and the Mediterranean,
Christianity and Islam and their texts triumphed but the Chinese
traditional order fought back with an assertion of hard-line
quasi-textual Confucianism over Taoist withdrawal. On top of this, the
second serious collapse of the old order under Western Imperial pressure
saw Marxism-Leninism arrive as a useful appropriation by Mao of the
nearest invader philosophy available to the traditional Yin-Yang model
that was normal to Chinese thought processes - bringing us back (as we noted above) to the
essentialism of Hegel by the back door.
Today, China is two steps
away from its traditional and relatively humane model of balancing
individualism and nature (the Tao) and public order and duty
(Confucius). It has shifted sharply to the Right (authoritarian
neo-Confucianism) and then to the 'Left' (a form of social or
collectivist Anti-Taoism derived ultimately from Hegel) and it has now
settled into a form of Socialist Confucianism that represents a major
intellectual, philosophical, cultural and now military and economic
challenge to the rest of the world.This leaves us with the
question of the effects on the West of all these traditions that have
evolved over thousands of years - with Buddhism the relative parvenu
alongside the religions of the book.
The best of Eastern thought
has made an immeasurable contribution to the revival of serious thinking
about the West's own inheritance. With the possible exception of the
remarkable emergence of Zen in Japan (and the Kyoto School) and some aspects of Tantra (at a
pinch), none of these traditions of the East can be called
existentialist as such: they all, at the end of the day, have some
essence of man or society to which they look. However, the sophisticated
approaches to Being, Man and Society of Hindu and Tao thinkers in
particular have allowed new ways of looking at the world that have
worked to build understanding of the possibility of an actually lived
existentialism as well as to explore the links between the mind and the
body - and with social reality and 'things in the world' - with new philosophical
data.
The Western rebellion against the text became fully
radicalised only within the last hundred years and has converged with
what might be called the 'religious common sense' findings of the Indian
and Chinese sages. It is not that European thinkers are likely to adopt
Eastern ways (that is for mystics and New Age types) but that the
investigations and techniques of the sages add serious value to the
post-modern philosophical questionings of the West - even if the
research needs to be mindful that we are looking for diamonds and
nuggets of gold in vast masses of ore made up of Sanskrit obscurity and
gnomic Chinese sayings that may mean nothing or everything.
At
the other extreme of sophistication is the convergence of the creation
of the 'new religions', often trying to emulate a pre-text paganism
whose records have mostly been destroyed, with the discovery of the
pagan reality of modern India and (underneath the modernisation) Tibet,
China and Japan. We might add to this the rediscovery of indigenous
shamanistic cultures and of African and Latin American folk religions.
In a sometimes desperate search to find the true nature of lost Western
paganisms - a frenetic process that is scarcely a century old and
parallels the very separate process of the discovery of existentialism -
the East is a fertile ground for uncovering 'data' that might suggest how
we should be thinking if we are to rediscover our 'natural' roots.
The
first ports of call tend to be tantra, tao and zen because each of
these can connect to pre-existing Western concerns. Tantra appeals to
the transgressive and rebellious in a highly individualist and
non-traditional society (despite being traditionalist par excellence in
its own territory). It has developed a role in the 'dark arts' Magickal
community, in the benign but shallow waters of New Age sexuality as
Neo-Tantra and in the growth of more mainstream Buddhism, with its
increasing 'Tibetan' bias, as a middle class response to the need for
meaning in a world filled with ennui, powerlessness and anxiety despite
apparent prosperity.
The Tao has emerged as the basis for new age
thinking on health and the environment but has also become an influence
by analogy in attempts to reconstruct the Neo-Pagan Heathen Way of Wyrd
espoused by Brian Bates, a world in which the cultures of the North
Europeans share dragons and shamanistic origins with its Eurasian
Chinese brothers. Zen is where new popular thinking merges with the high
thought of existentialism and phenomenology. Japanese culture intrigues
many Westerners as being both one of the most modern and one of the
most culturally coherent in itself. There may even be envy in some
quarters at its dynamic purity - Zen is where the East meets the new
existentialist concerns of the thinking Westerner who wishes to detach
himself from politics and from the frenetic pace of modern media
culture, often while working within it.
As for the future,
Westernised derivatives from the East are unlikely to be of interest to
the East itself - the flow is largely from there to here and the flow in
the other direction is not 'spiritual' or intellectual but material and
technological and where there is a flow it is because Heideggerian thought can be bent into shape in a Japanese context. They are revolutions within the West for the West that
merely intensify its dynamic and innovative individualism and bring
yet more creative chaos, much to the despair of increasingly
discredited ruling elites who would dearly like to introduce Augustan
order to their crumbling empires.
However, Indian Nationalism
and Chinese Socialist Confucianism are still relatively sclerotic
intellectually. They are still way behind the West in terms of
innovation and flexibility so that the real challenge here is whether
East or West can live with each other under these conditions of
difference. There will be Easterners who want Western freedoms and
Westerners who will want to turn the West into a disciplined
Enlightenment Fortress analogous to Neo-Confucianist solutions to
disorder. There are Easterners who want more Western technology than the
West is prepared to hand over and Westerners with a post-imperialist
determination to export values into these rising giants. The room for
misunderstanding and conflict is large and this little book is a useful
primer on why West and East think about things differently. That this
matters should not be a matter for debate.
The point of
the Introducing/For Beginners series was that they purported to
introduce difficult ideas by explaining them in pictorial terms.
Sometimes it worked and sometimes it did not. Introducing Baudrillard
sadly does not. This particular introduction was an attempt to
pack twenty years of dense French intellectualism into 170 or so pages
with perhaps a 100 or less words on a page with the pictures adding very
little. 15,000-20,000 words is an article of 30 or 40 pages at most, an
hour's read. Half the book is taken up with Baudrillard's
struggle to add something meaningful to the rapid decline of Marxist
thought. Half the book is thus turgidly incomprehensible. This leaves
only half available for when Baudrillard becomes potentially
interesting.
Baudrillard likes simile and metaphors from
cosmology and physics so the best and kindest way to describe what is
happening to his thought is that he is being dragged into a
philosophical black hole as Marxism implodes and then decides that it is
the black hole itself that is interesting. The result is a form
of object-oriented nihilism that seems at times little more than a form
of patrician intellectual despair at the masses who Marxism was supposed
to liberate, a bit like Hitler's railing against the German people as
the Russian shells burst overhead in his Berlin bunker. Think of
it like this. For decades, intellectuals sat on a pile of dung claiming
that it was not dung but the world. It gives way and they are forced to
accept that it is dung because they are now suffocating in it as they
sink downwards.
As the world collapses around them and all the
structures of meaning that they have created to explain that world prove
meaningless, they drift, if not into cynical public intellectual
careerism to enrich themselves, into assuming that the dung is the world
and the world is dung. Meanwhile the rest of the world outside
the pile of dung continues to do what it always has done without benefit
of clerics and intellectuals - live, struggle, survive, die, create
personal and social meaning and generally exist regardless of theory. From
this perspective, one wonders why anyone would think the post-Marxist
intellectual to be in the least interesting but Baudrillard, in his
dead-end nihilistic way, still captures something worth considering -
the elusive and increasingly absurd nature of social reality.
I
would tend to ignore his negativity about the mass of the population
(and its undoubted impotence at changing what matters to Baudrillard)
and think instead of his analysis as often being correct but from which
he draws the wrong conclusions. The world he describes when he
casts doubt on its reality is not the world of most of us most of the
time, it is the evanescent and unstable world of elites (of which he is
an unstable part). This is crumbling before our eyes while we duck and
dive to deal with the consequences of the collapse. There is a
good example at the moment where the real world continues to trade along
inflationary lines despite all the efforts of the central bank
technocrats to control the process according to 'theory' while
governments contribute to the chaos through wasteful potlach
expenditures.
We have a war in the East whose actual operations
work to one side's timetable (the attritional war economy-based long
game of the Russians) while the public in the West saw a simulacrum
made up of aspiration, agit-prop, hope and moral fervour much as
Baudrillard might have pointed out. Nothing Western elites hoped
to achieve from February 2022 in terms of economic war has turned out
the way that theory predicted. The Russian and Chinese counterparts do
not have a theory in the same way - they just have a set of actions
based on values and struggle. Baudrillard's critique of society
is actually a critique of Western society alone and of the utter failure of
liberal democracy to be anything more than dysfunctional over the long
term. We can merge Chomsky's Propaganda Model with Baudrillard's
simulacrum here.
What we see is a massively complex and unruly
system of social and political control that is, indeed, plunging into
its own black hole. The 'masses' withdrawal into their own world is a
rational response to the absurdity of a distant world that they see
humming with self-importance far from them. There is still a real
world out there. It is still based on economics and competition for
resources as well as on brute power and technology. The Marxism of
simple faith rather than scholastic interpretation stands up, at least
in part, surprising well in comparison. Layered over this real world of markets
and techno-innovation, of personal struggles and movements, of brute
military force that can mostly not be deployed, of weather and crops,
lies a magical world of intellectuals, managers, activists, politicians
and technocrats that sucks this real world dry.
As the latter
loses control over reality, the formally impotent masses enjoy
themselves by treating their world as an elaborate game or as theatre
with the fall-back position of taking to the streets as they have done
in France or Dublin. The frustration of
those intellectuals, managers and technocrats who still understand the
link of everything to reality is compounded as careerism and the
structures of power and media communications intensify the air of
fantasy that allowed Baudrillard to speak of wars as illusions. So,
Baudrillard ends up both wrong and right. Wrong in that he did not have
a correct description of all social reality. Right in that he had a
correct description of the collapse of elites into their own black hole
of illusion and ineptitude, out of control and taking the illusion for
reality.
To answer a question posed by the book, Baudrillard is a
symptom of what he writes about. Although this particular book is not
useful in that respect, he should be read in order to diagnose the
symptoms of the disease of Western civilisation from within. If
he is right (in this interpretation), the process of implosion will
continue remorselessly. This will please political accelerationists but
whether the implosion will even be noticed by most of suffering humanity
is entirely another matter. They are living in another world entirely.
As to Introducing Nietzsche, personally I am a great
admirer of Nietzsche who, though not flawless, provided us with some
very fundamental insights into human psychology and engaged deeply with
some of the toughest metaphysical and other philosophical problems
encountered in Western philosophy. We have long since left Marx
and Freud behind, largely because of the excesses of their followers,
but we have scarcely touched the surface of Nietzsche's contribution to
thought even if his analyses may never be fully acceptable in 'polite
society'. He is the most inconvenient of philosophers.
There is
no point in summarising a summary account of his life and thinking. I
have my own theory of his 'madness' (about which, of course, doubts have
been raised) so if you are not interested in this, do not read on and
just make a judgement on the book on the basis of your need. The
probability is of a serious nervous breakdown and mental instability
but it strikes me that it is not accidental that it was triggered by a
horse being beaten by a man in public. Nietzsche's thought
derived in part from his absolute refusal to compromise in trying to
understand the reality of 'herd' behaviour (in effect, social
psychology) and in communicating his findings about that behaviour to a
world that, by his own analysis, had too much at stake in seeing the
bones beneath the skin.
It was not a truly free society - an
intellectual elite acted as a thin veneer of public morality and of
ideology within a system that remained fundamentally brutal in its
demands for service from its members. The masters, indeed, had become
slaves to their slaves in order to maintain order, both social and
cultural. Nietzsche was the liberationist of the individual
against this system but was quite definitely one without much of an
understanding of the components of the 'herd' outside his class. He
thought that a man of the elite (he is ambiguous about women) could
liberate himself from the obligations imposed by the collective from
below without perhaps understanding that the elite had a great deal of
material interest in creating this system of self-policing in a complex
industrial society. Unlike Marx, Nietzsche clearly did not understand
how industrial society was different from the pagan world of the past.
Within
such a bourgeois culture, faced with a threat from within their own
community, people like Nietzsche are handled not through attack but
through a policy of isolation - as inconvenient and 'not to the point'. This
how the intelligentsia operates in any case, through systematic
exclusion of those who do not accept the prevailing ideology. I am sure
that many fine minds, with perhaps similar if much less developed ideas,
have languished in obscurity unable, without leisure, to record their
thinking, even in the lower ranks of bourgeois Germany. Nietzsche
was both lucky and unlucky in living at the cusp of a new age. On the
one hand, there was sufficient freedom from cultural authority to enable
free expression. On the other, there was an insufficient plurality of
cultural communications for that free expression, at least in his life
time, that might counter the dead weight of the existing German elite.
Part
of Nietzsche's famous breach with Wagner derived from anger at the
great artist's slow and steady absorption into this dominant culture
rather than challenge it with a new 'pagan' affirmation of life. Wagner
abandoned the Nibelungenlied for Parzifal. Nietzsche can
occasionally sound as if he is pessimistic in this context (which is
certainly the view of most persons faced with the grim Doctrine of the
Eternal Return) but, in fact, his entire work cannot be understood
except as an attempt to affirm life in the face of the much grimmer
pessimism of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer's miserabilism might be regarded
as the natural thinking response to the flummery of Christian duty but
one that, as in Wagner's case, equally permitted submission to its
demands. Amongst the elaborate lies we weave to keep ourselves 'sane',
Wagner appeared to choose Schopenhauerian negation and Nietzsche never
forgave him for this.
Nietzsche used up vasts amount of psychic
energy in seeking out his own 'truth' (he never accepted that there
could be a 'Truth') and his 'truth', which was based on a rigorous
stripping away of layers of social illusion and convenient
irrationalities (including the illusion of rationality itself), could
only have value either to someone in a similar position to him (a
bourgeois mind with a mission) or to a society that felt itself free to
experiment with freedom. Nietzsche took his vision, often writing his
books in a matter of days after months of cogitation, and laid it out
remorselessly to his (then) non-readers in a drive for self-exploration
that a critic might consider as neurotic in itself.
His thinking
was a necessity, not a desire, and the resultant body of work, obscure
though it may be in places, is one of the greatest creative uses of the
mind in human history. It proved a revolution in thinking that spread
first amongst intellectuals overseas, then returned to Germany in a
bastardised form (irrelevant to all those truly interested in the
thought). Once purged of its more absurd followers, it became a central
source for nearly all modern continental philosophy and for a critique
of power that (in my view) has now become truly salient in the social
conditions arising from rapid change in the technology of
communications. The point is that Nietzsche described the social
world more accurately than any preceding philosopher and placed it in a
metaphysical context. His observations now seem in closest accord with
the dark findings of the cognitive scientists and the social
psychologists about how we humans actually operate and command the
world.
Many Enlightenment-trained intellectuals will run around
like frightened rabbits and then sink into a gloom at Milgram's
experiments or the Holocaust as if their thinking will change anything
about these things. Nietzsche would not have been surprised in either
case for it is just how he saw that the 'herd' operates and the educated
elite responds. Even now, Western liberal thinking has still not come
to terms with the death of Reason as substitute for Revelation and has been
turning to 'nudge' and psychological manipulation as its last desperate fling at dealing with
inconvenient truths. Where he was lucky in his legacy is
precisely in not being acceptable too soon.
Marx would have seen Marxism boom and
bust as it seized power, perverted power and then died because Marx's
undoubted insights were hobbled by Engels' scientific materialism. (And we say this despite believing that a form of Neo-Marxism is on the cusp of recovery as a purely socio-political philosophy shorn of its Hegelianism and anti-ethics). Freud
was to have a similar problem with Freudians who became sucked, like
Marxists, into complex and fixed ideologies of mind that soon came
unstuck, in a perverse reversal of what happened to Marxism, by not
being scientific enough!
Nietzche, on the other hand, was
followed initially by maniacs who seriously perverted his message (the
malign racial nationalism of his sister and of German radical
nationalists) but who did this to such a ridiculous degree that his work
not merely survived but emerged strengthened. 'For what does not kill,
strengthens' in his often quoted aphorism. Nietzsche's approach to life
survives precisely because it is individualistic and anti-ideological.
It cannot be systematised like Marxism yet it embodies its critique of
Reason in the terms of reasoning itself. It out-reasons Reason and
brilliantly and entertainingly at that.
This will soon bring us
back to the flogged horse, so be patient. Because the flaw in
Nietzsche's thinking arises from the conditions in which he did his
thinking. You must imagine a man isolated but following the logic of his
own thought in a way that others might have considered 'mad' well
before his diagnosed 'madness'. Yet the brilliance and power of
reasoning and determination could not permit such a judgement reasonably
while he still thought and wrote. However, this man may have been hard
on the human race's capacity for illusion but he was also hard on
himself.
He knew the logic of the situation. He was seeing into
the heart of the human condition. Evolution must eventually see humanity
negate itself completely in its illusions (as many post-modern French
thinkers seem to suggest is happening) or 'become' something else. This
latter is the real 'trans-human' message behind the 'ubermensch', an
individual transformation that evolves into a species-transformation or
else sees humanity as an evolutionary dead end for humanity as a whole.
Some may now expect the 'ubermensch' to be found in the world of
artificial intelligence, raising the interesting conundrum of which sort
of negation we might choose in the long run - spiritual or physical.
Whether
he saw himself as an 'ubermensch' is unclear. It is unlikely. He was a
prophet of the new type like his Zarathustra, a man crying 'God is dead'
in a world that thought him 'mad'. And so we come to his fundamental
flaw. He rightly castigated 'compassion'. He was right to do so in two
senses. First, as the psychic vampirism of the liberal or Christian or
progressive with power in hand whose 'compassion' is a form of power
relation, denying the rights of the victim to be anything other than a
victim. Second, in the Buddhist sense, of a distanced 'compassion' for
the world, a 'compassion' which is the negation of existence, a refusal
to engage in life.
In his determination to call the tune on the
'slave mentality' and the life-negating aspects of these two types of
compassion, which are really forms of self-centred victimisation of
others and of oneself respectively, he hardened himself and he forgot a
third form of compassion. There was no energy left for this compassion
and no insight into the self to see its necessity. This is the third
form of compassion, one that arises from the Will to Power where another
or others becomes existentially chosen, without illusion, to become
part of oneself yet with respect for their own autonomy. It is, in
short, 'love'. Poor Nietzsche never seems to have had the chance to
experience this sense of worlds entwined and of the interconnection
between equals that goes far beyond the nonsense of modern romanticism.
In
his one big blind spot, he did not understand just how much his Will to
Power was bound up with the libido (where we are indebted to Freud in
raising its presence as unconscious drive). This is the energy designed
to acquire 'more' and make oneself whole - being social animals, this
includes relations with others. All relations with others are relations
of power but, at a certain point, we can decide ourselves whether they
are relations of power that are inherited, especially inherited by our
slavish internal needs created by society for society (as in Christian
cultural repression), or they are relations of power that we create and
in which our true nature is best expressed by having relations of power
that are calibrated to be as equal as possible. Why? Because that is how
we get our greatest pleasure, conversing within an aristocracy of
equals (not materially but existentially).
By the time of his
madness, Nietzsche will have been very isolated and lonely. There was no
love in his life. No interconnection. Certainly no aristocracy of
existential equals. Nor could he expect such an aristocracy to emerge in
his life time - indeed, one may be emerging only now and very tentatively with new forms of
communication. When he saw that horse beaten (I surmise), he saw not
merely himself beaten but the raw misery of a world in which one man may
speak the truth of what is to come and yet know that no-one will
understand until he is long dead (if at all). Worse, by the doctrine of
the eternal return, his life would be an eternal round of such
existential lonelinesses. This does not negate his affirmation of life
but his surge of compassion for that horse is a rising up of compassion
for a humanity that does not 'get it' and for himself as the person who
does and is before his time. Given everything that had gone
before, his only 'choice' is an assumed or actual madness. In a parody
of the Christian message which he excoriated mercilessly, Nietzsche is
'crucified' on the cross of his own humanity.
Introducing Lacan is written by Darian Leader who is generally worth reading in his own right. However, the graphic format should not be confused with simplicity - this is a difficult liitle book because Lacan is very difficult. You may need to read it more than once to 'get' it. Lacan is worth the effort but perhaps with a critical eye towards the Freudian framework within which he was writing. Perhaps he might best be thought of as someone struggling to find the language for what it is to be a human being and contributing significant insights without, in the end, succeeding. A useful introduction but only the first step on a very long journey which you may not want to take - if only because life is short and there is no guarantee that the train will end up where you want to be.
Introducing Existentialism is surprisingly good, surprisingly so
because it is a short graphic rather than lengthy text-based description
of one of the most difficult 'schools' of Western philosophy which I am
reluctant to label 'existentialism' following Appignanesi's own
scepticism about the term. Let's start by saying that it is not
really introductory at all. If you want a cogent introduction I would
start with one of the many other general textual introductions - I began
with Mary Warnock's many years ago but Appignanensi has delivered one
of his own quite recently. Nevertheless, Appignanesi compromises little in his
limited space in trying to reach deep into the thought of the
'existentialists'. Many readers are going to find it very obscure and
difficult without a grounding in the history and ideas on which the text
is based - but I think you might like to persevere.
If you have
read already in the subject, he has insights that make the difficulty
worthwhile. What I like is his avoidance of the tum-ti-tum standard
narrative that takes us from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche via Dostoevsky
through Heidegger to Sartre and Camus. He restores the often
forgotten core of the school, Husserl's phenomenological turn, and then
sets the very different yet dialectially challenging Heideggerian and
Sartrean world views in the context of the critical business of choice
and survival in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Occasional
digressions into the broader literary culture and into the politics of
the era are suggestive and apposite. The book is the philosophical
equivalent of a haiku - many deep thoughts compressed into surprisingly
small space. The images entertain but do not distract.
I would
argue that this school of thinkers still provides the greatest challenge
to the liberal group-think of our age. The logic of their thinking
towards intensive introspection and liberal science (Husserl), Nazism
(Heidegger) and Marxism (Sartre) remains thought-provoking. Attempts
to moralise the last two out of their decisions and choices would be
seen as futile by any decent 'existentialist'. The silences and refusals
to apologise epitomise not the worst but the best of humanity faced
with our technologisation and simplistic expectations. The
post-existentialists have contributed important criticisms of the
existential turn. Foucault in particular has helped us to understand the
nature of power relations and Derrida the role of the text but the turn
has been taken too far - there is a cultural evasion here with
political effects.
The point here is that the 'existential' turn is terribly terribly
dangerous to modern liberal society. Yet it is true to our relationship
with Being. The challenge of this critique has scarcely been explored by any but scholars
The result is that modern liberal society has been taken by surprise as
the new populism emerges. Elite liberalism has been in denial for
far too long about that relationship to Being and our personal choices
in a world of roles and material things. The panopticon approach, the
attempt to create social hegemony, could never succeed against the raw
resistance of those who think apart. Somewhere and somehow
radical thought will reappear to take this problem that existence
precedes essence and the phenomenological anaysis of our situation and
so create the humanism that is required before transhumanism is possible - and
offer a 'poetic' attitude to being in the world.
Personally,
poetry bores me. If something needs to be said, let it be said, and, if
not, let it be experienced in direct relation to Being. The text is the
very source of our alienation. Yet Heidegger's stance suggests that that
which is poetic or spiritual links to the human core. Husserlian
'scientific' investigation of the mind's relationship to itself,
Sartrean concern with our performance in the world and Heideggerian
investigation of our relationship to Being provide (in this book) the
start of an inquiry into a sufficient rebellion to preserve us against
new intelligences that are merging far faster than most of us think. Penrose's theory of the retroactivity of consciousness may even re-introduce us to the importance of Time in the disquisition about Being and Time.
We are in the midst of a cognitive revolution in which
the post-moderns and the academics appear increasingly surplus to
requirements much as monks became in the age of printing. A philosophy
to cope with this exists already in the formative work of this school if
only we knew it. This introduction may be simple and no substitute for thinking or serious textual analysis but it is still a sound if difficult and challenging guide to a
difficult and challenging way of thinking. Grasp it correctly and you
will never be the same. Its assertion of mind against 'science' is
life-affirming, The reading list at the back, though not all there is to
say on the matter, will be useful.