Nietzsche, Kant, and Trump

I don’t get the fascination with Nietzsche. I just read Beyond Good and Evil, and it is entertaining for the over-the-top bravado, but it seems all attitude and no substance. Or what substance there is comes in a kind of rambling teenage blog – this and that about philosophy, a dozen or so pages devoted to witty but dubious generalizations about race and nationality, occasional 2- or 3-page romps into witty but dubious generalizations about women, a sudden chapter on music. If you enjoy the bullying wit of a Simon Cowell or a Gordon Ramsay (or Trump for that matter), Nietzsche is your guy. But I can’t figure out how to take him seriously as a philosopher.

When he does venture into critiquing previous philosophers, it again seems all attitude and no substance. In sweeping dismissals, he attacks Kant, Plato, et al., not with argument but with attitude – as if being critical with enough attitude, enough wit and passion, will, in the absence of any real argument, bully people into agreeing with you for fear of your ferocious wit – your ill-natured “will to power” (if you will). It’s like Trump mowing over his opponents by name-calling and verbal bullying.

This approach might partly be explained by one of Nietzsche’s well-taken points – that psychology is the hidden key to philosophy and other quests for knowledge. “Every great philosophy up to now has consisted of … unconscious autobiography,” in which the philosopher “creates the world in [his] own image” (Chap. 1).

When Nietzsche turns this shrewd analytical model on his favorite nemesis, “old Kant” as Nietzsche flippantly likes saying, some elements of Beyond Good and Evil become clear to me. Regarding Kant’s categorical imperative, Nietzsche says: ”Apart from the value of such assertions as ‘there is a categorical imperative in us,’ one can always ask: What does such an assertion indicate about him who makes it?” (Chap. 5)

Two things here. First is Nietzsche’s dismissal of the cornerstone of Kant’s ethics, the “categorical imperative” – not because he has any argument against it, but merely because a universal ground of ethics is anathema to Nietzsche’s pet theory of one morality for the master class and a different morality for the slave class. Kant’s universal ground of ethics – basically behaving in a way that is universalizable – the way that you would wish all people to behave in similar circumstances, irrespective of any ‘interest’ you may have in the situation – this might lead one, in Nietzsche’s words, to treat “public spirit, kindness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, indulgence, sympathy … as the peculiarly human virtues” (Chap. 5). Of course, for Nietzsche these are NOT human virtues generally but virtues that apply to the slave-morality, to we everyday sufferers who would value sympathetic relations with our fellow sufferers. For those “destined to command,” a different morality applies, a morality that values “certain strong and dangerous instincts, such as the love of enterprise … revengefulness … rapacity, and love of power” (Chap. 5). These qualities, which were considered good in the old heroic age and are now considered “evil” in our debauched age of democracy and mediocrity, need to be restored as applicable for the “higher orders of men” (Chap. 3) while the great mediocre majority sticks to their slave morality of compassion and so forth. On this issue, I’ll take Kant over Nietzsche  – not only because Kant at least takes the time to make a logical argument for his case, but also because a Kantian world where people treat each other as they would like to be treated just sounds better than a Nietzschean aristocracy equipped “to accept with good conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments”; i.e., an aristocracy whose “fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves” (Chap. 9). It sounds a little bit like roaming gangs in the service of strongmen plundering the rest of society at will. It seems this has been tried, e.g., in medieval times before the great monarchies rose to establish widespread law and order, albeit through absolutist rule, or in more modern times, the battling warlords of Somalia, each following his own “will to power,” believing in “rank and NOT in equality” (Chap. 1) and rising above the “shallow-mindedness” of “equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations” (Chap. 7). I am as amused as the next reader at Nietzsche’s bracing bravado, but forgive me if it all sounds a little dystopic if taken seriously.

The second takeaway from Nietzsche’s dismissal of the categorical imperative arises from his psychological focus. “Every great philosophy …[is] unconscious autobiography” indeed. Nietzsche’s rejection of the categorical imperative, though no argument against it, reveals Nietzsche’s own attachment to his double morality for master and slave classes, just as his grounding of human nature to the “will to power” says more about him than about human nature generally. (Might not others be driven by a will to love or will to harmony or Nietzsche’s much-maligned will to truth?) One suspects that as a child he was chastised to obey the rules of good behavior and not throw tantrums to put his own will above the rights and well-being of others. Consequently, he devoted his life’s work to justifying his own impetuous will to power. Good for him. But don’t drag the rest of us into the same dark and narcissistic space. (One similarly imagines Ayn Rand being told as a child not to be so selfish and hence devoting her life’s work to a justification of selfishness.)

Nietzsche’s autobiographical/psychoanalytical caveat may further explain his appeal. Most kids want to be “in” with the bully who exhibits the most bravado in the schoolyard. And most do not outgrow this with age (witness Trump’s popularity). The masses have no interest in systematic argument. They prefer an autocrat’s withering derision of “the idiot masses,” as it (1) makes them feel aligned with the autocrat’s power, and (2) makes them feel that they themselves are superior to “the masses.” #1 might at first seem to support of Nietzsche’s view of the primacy of “will to power,” but — sadly for “old Nietzsche” — it is specifically the “lower order of human beings,” not his “higher order,” who get suckered in on #1. D. H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse, a death-bed plea for a spiritual and cultural rejuvenation, shares much of Nietzsche’s world view, but Lawrence is much clearer about this latter point — that the “will to power” crowd are not the cream of the crop, as Nietzsche presumes.

Let me pause to say that there are parts of the book I appreciate. The willingness to defy convention and carve your own path – e.g., the push to liberate sensuality from conventional moralities – is certainly admirable to me. Some of the historical looks at morality are good. The emphasis on the psychology behind philosophical systems is indeed enlightening and still underworked as far as I can see in my limited view of modern philosophy. Some of his critical points about religion and the soul seem well-taken, though they don’t require much heavy lifting intellectually. But even the solid points suffer from the megalomaniacal side of his thought. E.g., that untruth (as well as truth, one might say) is a condition of life (Chap. 1) is an interesting and solid point, but that “a philosophy which ventures to” base itself on that proposition “place[s] itself beyond good and evil” is a huge leap in logic, although Nietzsche treats it as if the one follows seamlessly from the other – a willingness to play sloppy with logic that you would never find in Plato or Kant.

Along these lines, the emphasized “will to power” seems all too often to simply mean that bluster is sufficient, without logic or evidence. And indeed, his critique of other philosophers is largely just that – bluster without argument. It’s like Trump giving second-grade name tags to his opponents – fallacious at best, but a good way to hook the masses. Most Trumpian/Orwellian of all, Nietzsche reviles Kant’s pride – here, in the midst of a book that opens with a breathtaking dismissal of all Platonists, Stoics, Kantians, etc., as idiots who stand to be corrected in this volume!

When he does seem to make an argument against Kant (though not mentioning Kant in this passage), his argument seems an almost childlike misunderstanding of Kant. “Others say even that the external world is the work of our organs. But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs … reductio ad absurdum” (Chap. 1). One would have to misunderstand the relation between noumenal and phenomenal worlds in a very fundamental way to think this is a critique of Kant.

The same with cogito ergo sum. He mocks those who say “I think” presupposes an “I” (Chap. 1). His point that too much, post-Descartes, has been presumed about this subjective ‘I’ doing the thinking and doubting may be well-taken and yet his adolescent need for bluster takes the reins, and here too he lets what could have been a good argument devolve into an exercise in attitude. To give Nietzsche his due, bluster gets ratings with the masses, whether it’s the bluster of Simon Cowell, Chef Gordon Ramsay, or Donald Trump. These public figures may have bits of good as well as bad to offer, but it’s the bluster that gets the ratings. In the case of Nietzsche and Descartes, the idea that even if I deny reality exists, I cannot dispute that ‘I’ am denying it – in terms of reasoned argument, this idea seems more convincing than Nietzsche’s mockery of it.

A common defense of Nietzsche on this issue is that he is deliberately unsystematic and should not be judged by the terms of systematic philosophers like Plato or Kant. I am unconvinced. This is like a student in an academic writing class saying, “I don’t believe in systematic reasoning so you can’t judge me on whether I actually support my claims with logic or evidence.” I suspect that would not fly, even in Nietzsche’s own courses in classical philology. So why do people tolerate it in Nietzsche’s philosophy? Because people tend to give a wide berth to the schoolyard bully. And then they find a rationalization.

It may be that how we choose to define philosophy is what’s at stake here, so let me be clear. To me, philosophy is (1) partly defined by the kind questions you ask — not what is the speed of light but questions about the nature of reality, of human experience, of ethics, knowledge, values, etc.; and (2) partly defined by the process you follow. Even if we grant there’s no absolute truth, philosophy should be reasoning things forward, drawing upon logic and evidence to get closer and closer to a more accurate or useful endpoint. So, yes, for me, Plato and Kant are definitive philosophers; Nietzsche is just a blogger before his time. (Nothing against bloggers — I am a blogger myself — but if you want to disregard systematically supporting your claims, just admit you are a blogger and not a philosopher — you cannot compete with Plato and Kant on their own turf.)

Returning to Nietzsche’s caveat, “Every great philosophy …[is] unconscious autobiography,” I believe that is indeed the keynote of the book. Nietzsche is perhaps more of a psychoanalyst of philosophy than a philosopher himself. And when one turns the psychoanalysis back upon Nietzsche, the rest of the book does make more sense. It is by using himself as a standard that he concludes that the “will to power” is the cardinal instinct of humankind (Chap. 5), that as one of “the higher class of men,” he has a RIGHT to ramble through generalizations about nationalities, women, music, whatever, and no need to justify any of it to the mediocre masses of the slave morality (presumably, us).

It is demagoguery in the manner of Trump. For the noble man, “morality equals self-glorification” (Chap. 9). “Egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul, I mean the unalterable belief that to a being such as ‘we’, other beings must naturally be in subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves” (Chap. 9). You can’t find a better definition of Trump narcissism than that.

And if the bravado of these quotes seems over the top, there are plenty more.

“A man who has depth of spirit … can only think of women as orientals do; he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinable property, as a being predestined to service ….[The problem today is] she is unlearning to fear man: but the woman who ‘unlearns to fear’ sacrifices her most womanly instincts … she is daily being made more hysterical and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last function, that of bearing robust children” (Chap. 7).

“Resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression … exploitation” (Chap. 9).

These passages sound an awful lot like what we would today call social media trolling.

I suppose the clearest counterpoint to the ethical base of Beyond Good and Evil is the Dalai Lama:

“If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.”

Ah, compassion! The bete noire of Beyond Good and Evil, the lynchpin to the democratic forces “threaten[ing] a new Buddhism” in Europe, with their belief “in the herd … in their religion of sympathy, in their compassion for all that feels, lives, and suffers” (Chap. 5). Sorry, but as with Kant above, I’ll take the Dalai Lama over Nietzsche on this one.

And at the end, a curiosity. The final passage of the book throws in a disarming bit of humility. “I, the last disciple and initiate of the God Dionysus: and perhaps I might at last begin to give to you, my friends, as far as I am allowed, a little taste of this philosophy? In a hushed voice, as is but seemly…” (Chap. 9). After a text of breathtaking arrogance in its dismissal of all previous philosophers and of equal rights for all but the master class, it is hard to tell if this humble bit is tongue-in-cheek or a revelation that the real Nietzsche is not the pompous bully who just delivered the book-length harangue but a companionate fellow traveler who was just bantering us the whole time. I tend to favor the “pompous bully” theory, but the trolling nature of the outlandish rhetoric gives me second thoughts. Maybe he was just trolling, bantering. Maybe the whole thing was ironic. I don’t know. For one thing, I haven’t read other bits and books by Nietzsche in many years, so I’m just giving my own bemused reactions to this one. Some of you Nietzsche supporters and scholars can reply with chuckles, clarifications, or merciless attacks. Anything to liberate my readers from the now-public quagmire of my own thoughts.

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The real problem in the body politic

(Trigger warning: equivalence alert!)

No, I don’t think the Democratic and Republican platforms are equivalent. Ideologically, I’m with the Dems maybe 50% of the time and the Repubs maybe 10%. No equivalence there. But the partisan tone has become equivalent on both sides. If a Dem or Repub leader says anything at all, the other side must consider it a priori wrong (and indeed evil) or risk being kicked out of the club. Perhaps social media is the worst for trapping people into such silos, but with many friends posting political comments daily, I can’t remember the last time any of them on either side deviated from the preset party line when an oppostion leader spoke.

So yes, I favor the Dem platform (or at least find it less bad), but there are three beasts in the cage, and the Republicans are not the most destructive of the three. There are the two major parties, and then there is the “us vs. them” paradigm of politics and social relations, shared equally by denizens of both parties. With my old hippie vision of moving toward a more ideal union, where people still disagree but with the understanding that we are all on spaceship Earth together, it is the paradigm itself that is the most destructive beast of the three. As long as we are locked into the zero-sum, “us vs. them” paradigm, we can move laterally to fix this or that local issue, but there can be no forward movement. We can get short-term ideological gains from our party – e.g., as I favor the Dem platform, I can hope the Dems seize the reins from Trump for at least the short-term benefits I think they would bring. But I cannot hope that Dems any more than Repubs will fix the long-term, and possible fatal, disease in the body politic. Neither party has the slightest motivation to correct the “us vs. them” model that is killing us.

Our only long-term hope is for someone to emerge outside the current political spectrum, an MLK-type voice. Politics per se is dead, killed by the two parties and the army of idiot activists on both sides. I don’t mean the government won’t continue its administrative function, but I mean something more along the lines of Nietzsche’s “God is dead” proclamation. Nietzsche knew that religious structures were not about to disappear, but he also could see that God was no longer a credible anchor of human belief structures. In the same way, for those who would step back from the everyday administration of government and re-envision a better society, politics is no longer a credible tool.  Best to throw it away.

The good news is that underneath the veneer of us vs. them activism, I find that many people are quietly hungry for a unifying voice. I thought Obama was potentially such voice, but his failure to unify the country was pre-ordained by the fact that he emerged within one of the two major parties. Half the country will never listen to any unifying voice that emerges from the opposition party. Thus, my statement that the voice must come from outside the current political structure is a kind of logical tautology. Logic permits no other way. Of course, such a voice, on such terms, may never come, and we may disintegrate slowly or quickly, depending on which of the two parties is in power. But those people I meet hungering for some voice to restore a sense of shared humanness, those people still give me hope. We just need to take all this activist energy invested in one side or the other of the us vs. them paradigm and turn it against the paradigm itself. I would especially ask my friends on the left who consider themselves radical: How radical can you be if you are still hauling around the old albatross of the “left vs right” paradigm? If you want to be radical, break the paradigm.

Can we really get a critical mass of people to shed the dead snakeskin of politics as we know it and start over with a blank slate, a social vision stripped of politics with nowhere to turn but to heart and imagination? Probably not, but it’s worth a try.

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Evil bastards

What do we do with evil bastards in literature? Not every work of literature includes them, but those that do seem to gain a particular purchase on the reader’s attention. Writers love to dream up evil bastards, and we love to enter the dream. But why are we drawn to representations of evil? Maybe because consciousness evolved as a practical adaptation, a problem-solving mechanism. If there’s a small flaw on a large canvas, we tend to zero in on the flaw. If twenty kids are playing nicely in a playground and one is misbehaving, all attention turns to the miscreant. Where there is no problem, consciousness relaxes; where there is a problem, consciousness engages in an urge to explain, to determine, to get our arms around the problem for future reference.

Whether you buy that intro or not, you might find it interesting to explore how fictional evil occurs as a problem we urgently want to explain, to learn from, to pin down for further reference. Below are a few templates for how to explain evil in its fictional deployments.

Social conditions

I might also call this the “materialist template”, and it is big in the age of realism. Evil is a result of historical conditions. Dickens novels might best exemplify this on the literary side, Marx on the philosophy side – human nature is neither good nor evil, but social conditions make it so.

Metaphysical/religious

Evil is part of the great cosmic struggle that is larger than any human life, an absolute that must be faced on its own terms. This model dominates not only overtly religious stories like Paradise Lost, but also heavily symbolic ones like Melville’s Billy Budd, where the human struggle of good and evil seems a shadow cast by some larger eternal archetypal or cosmic struggle.

Psychoanalytic/Freudian

Evil results from a deformation in the individual psyche, some repressed psychological trauma from the personal past that emerges in a destructive form. Poe’s psychopaths, for example: Montresor’s evil in “The Cask of Amontillado” is that of a mentally ill individual. There are no signs of poor social conditions or interventions of spiritual entities from some religious outer frame. There is just the nameless “injury” in Montresor’s personal past that rearranged his mind into that of a monster. (Note: If I were to separate a Psychoanalytic/Jungian version, I would fold it back into the metaphysical/religious. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, e.g., is essentially a  Jungian/archteypal quest, and any good and evil Milkman encounters along the way are not just realistic details in the life of a man but plot points in an archetypal struggle. Again, the Jungian/archetypal model is my metaphysical/religious model recast into the language of psychoanalysis.)

Existentialist

Here, evil is irreducibly inexplicable, absurd, too arbitrary to be explained via any diagnostic metric. When Meursault kills the Arab in Camus’s The Stranger, we might call this evil in its existentialist aspect. Indeed, it is so inexplicable that we can hardly call it evil. It may be that the existentialist world view, following Nietzsche, is better relegated to the territory “beyond good and evil.” Let’s try Shakespeare’s Iago. He seems to represent a version of evil that is unmotivated, unexplained by a bad childhood or poor social conditions or metaphysical/religious interference or any other rational explanation. He just expresses evil as a random and fundamental force. Of course, his evil is recontained in Shakespeare’s world – not before harm is done, but the moral framing in Othello is not existentialist in tone. There is a moral order to the universe that we can glean from the tragedy. So perhaps Iago shows evil in its absurd or irrational aspect as something that can be recontained in a moral universe, whereas Meursault shows evil in the same aspect but with little or no moral framing.

I could probably think of more, but that is enough to chew on for one day. Feedback welcome.

The End of All Politics

In The End of Racial Politics, I talked about how imagining racial harmony and racial equality today means shedding racial politics in all its forms – liberal, conservative, or other.  I’d like to extend that as far as it will go: Politics is dead. I don’t mean the government won’t continue its administrative function, but I mean something more along the lines of Nietzsche’s “God is dead” proclamation. Nietzsche knew that religious structures were not about to disappear, but he also could see that God was no longer a credible anchor of human belief structures. In the same way, for those who would step back from the everyday administration of government and re-envision a better society, politics is no longer a credible tool.  Best to throw it away.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1960s and 70s, the hippie-based anti-Establishment movement was arguably more about leveraging lifestyle choices than political choices – “dropping out” of the Establishment culture of war, money, and machines, and testing new creative freedoms through sexuality, drugs, what to think, say, and wear, how to set up alternative living arrangements – but it was still able to use a liberal politics to advance things like racial and gender harmony and to open up things that had been closed. But sometime during the 1980s, “identity politics” reached critical mass in liberal academia, and the long slow death of politics as a tool of social liberation set in. We have now reached a point where politics on the left and right are equally about defining and defending your demographic turf and not about bringing people together. Whether Jon Stewart (whom I generally agree with) on the left or Rush Limbaugh (whom I don’t) on the right, it’s about proving how right you are and how wrong the other side is: us versus them. And the whole vocabulary of racial and gender politics, left and right, has taken on that us versus them mentality. Both sides have become expert at drawing lines in the sand, both now put an equal premium on stifling dissent, and both have long given up the mission of getting people to celebrate each other across the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and political preferences. It’s suddenly a long way back to the revolutionary sentiment of 1969, captured by Jeffrey Shurtleff’s stage suggestion to the crowd at Woodstock that the hippie revolution was different from other revolutions “in that we have no enemies.”

Without politics, all we have is the human heart and human imagination. We need a movement outside the scope of the political spectrum that starts with those two capacities. We need to “drop out” of politics, “turn on” the heart and imagination, and “tune in” to each other. When you go out into the street today, forget everything you learned about politics, especially if you went to college. Forget about how you’ve been trained into this or that posture of political belligerence. Start relating to each other, regardless of racial, gender, and other divides, with just the human heart and human imagination. Without politics, we might just rediscover the redemptive power of imagining ourselves into the other’s shoes. We might find that it was just those political superstructures, left and right, that each in their own way had us insisting upon differences that prevented us from doing so. Maybe the Age of Aquarius is still dawning. But we have to cast off the entire political spectrum like a snakeskin to get there.

Camus’s Stranger: Hero or Sociopath

Probably the most important hurdle of reading Albert Camus’s The Stranger is to resist the temptation to see Meursault as hero or villain. We’re not “supposed” to identify with him or against him. He just demonstrates in every thought and action the absurdity of the world. The trial puts this in perspective. The prosecutor creates one narrative about Meursault’s murder of the Arab. The defense attorney creates an entirely different narrative about Meursault’s murder. Both create logical narratives, but both are completely wrong – there is no logical narrative that explains any of Meursault’s actions (not his homicidal outburst, nor his passive agreement to marry Marie even though love explicitly “meant nothing” to him [52], nor his passive agreement to help Raymond lure his girlfriend back for another beating after he’d already bloodied her once [38]). The oft-noted comment that he is absolutely honest is strikingly true at times, as in his discussions of his mother’s death and of marriage and of his case, but oddly untrue at other times, as in the totally motiveless deceits he perpetrates with Raymond (luring the girlfriend back for another beating and then attesting to Raymond’s blameless behavior at the police station [60]). Another oft-noted comment is that he comes to terms with his life once he fully realizes the absolute indifference of the universe. This one seems true enough at the end. But I detect a misguided inclination among readers to treat him as a role model or absurd hero, an admirable rebel against society and its phony ways. This, I think, is a mistake. He did, after all, randomly kill “an Arab” without the slightest thought before or after to the human consequences of that deed, he did quite nonchalantly agree to help Raymond brutalize a woman he’d never met, he admittedly feels little or no emotion for his mother or for the woman he sleeps with, etc., etc. Even if intellectually you are the most hardened existentialist, this is not the kind of “hero” you want your daughter to bring home for dinner.

If you want an absurd hero, you might start with the existentialist dilemma. Recognize that the universe is irrational, amoral, and utterly indifferent to human life. Your own life is meaningless and your death will not ruffle the cosmic indifference. Now what do you do? Meursault brings us to the question but he gives us no model for how to respond. The Fool in King Lear might be an absurd hero in that he does seem to recognize the irremediable indifference of the universe and yet tries to inject some clarity and empathy into Lear’s world, not because this will make the universe more meaningful or morally intelligible, but merely because of the local comfort it may give to Lear. Or the Dalai Lama might illustrate the path of the absurd hero in his injunction to act with compassion even though our actions will never alter the fact that suffering is built into the human condition. Although Meursault’s character is a perfect vehicle for bringing the absurd (existentialist) world view into focus, his utter lack of compassion, his complete indifference to suffering caused by his own actions, may illustrate a kind of human predicament but cannot seriously be called a “heroic” response to the existential dilemma. At least the Fool makes the absurd choice to behave morally in a world where moral behavior makes no sense. Meursault’s indifference is, if anything, a logical response to the indifferent world, and does not warrant the badge of absurd hero.

Perhaps then Meursault is the exemplar of life after the age of God. Nietzsche pronounced God dead, opined that this placed at least the most thoughtful of us beyond good and evil, and found this to be a liberation of the human spirit. Dostoevsky and more recent Christians agree that the absence of God places us beyond good and evil, but they are far less upbeat about it, fearing a dystopia where we can do anything at all to our fellow human beings without scruple. The humanist stakes out a third position by denying the shared premise of Nietzsche and the Christians (the premise that without God we are beyond good and evil and all things are permissible). The humanist finds great moral value in human actions even in, or especially in, the absence of God. Treating people kindly and attending to the human consequences of one’s actions have their own intrinsic values irrespective of divine rewards or punishment. In this tripolar scheme, I’d say that Camus’s personal philosophy tends toward the Nietzchean and his personal actions in life tended toward the humanistic, but, ironically, The Stranger seems to best illustrate the Christian point of view – that without a belief in God or any traditional morality, we, like Meursault, become detached from our own lives and indifferent to others, incapable of compassion but quite capable of brutalizing women and killing others on a whim without any sense of wrong-doing. It is easy to see Meursault in this sense as an exemplar not of the human predicament en masse but merely of the sociopathic mindset (not deliberately evil but just wholly indifferent to the human consequences of one’s actions – more a descendant of Dickens’s Harthouse than of Shakespeare’s Iago).  And what better theme for the contemporary Christian than the sociopathic dystopia of life without God?

A Defense of Plato

Dear MT,

Per your comparisons, I don’t think Plato is as eager as Nietzsche or Kierkegaard (or perhaps MT) to separate men into two groups and condemn the ignorant masses. Plato’s myth of the cave is more about PROCESS than about passing judgment on the ignorant. It’s sort of like a rational correlative to the Buddhist process of enlightenment. We ALL resist the truth when it first dazzles us and we’re used to shadows. Plato’s myth is about the process we ALL have to go through if we want to achieve enlightenment. And yes, some are not strong enough, some have to turn back. But for Plato I think all rational beings have the capacity if they can find the fortitude. And he quite explicitly says that the enlightened ones should go back and help those who are still in the cave. In this sense he’s more Buddhist and less condescending than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (especially Nietzsche in my estimation). In this process-orientation, Plato is actually not far from Aristotle’s notion of entelechy, where all things strive unconsciously toward their ideal destination, like the acorn strives toward becoming the oak. In fact, the wedge between Plato and Aristotle is somewhat forced. They have different emphases, yes, but they share a lot of fundamentals. Aristotle learned his Plato well.

In metaphysics, I think your resistance to Plato is a resistance to a straw man version of Plato – as if his formal world is like the Christian God with the beard who sits somewhere in physical space. I find it hard to believe Plato would be so naïve. He is just saying, in the cave and elsewhere, that there is an intellectual reality, a kind of Jungian collective unconscious, which is a hidden prerequisite to all the contingent truths we find in our everyday (transitory) reality. Whether we realize it or not (and most of us don’t), the contingent truths we structure our daily lives by would not be intelligible were they not undergirded by that collective unconsciousness, that conceptual substrate of deeper truths. And the deeper we dig, the closer we get to eternal truths and the more deeply we understand the prerequisites of our surface knowledge.

So you’re right that your idea of a perfect car may not match my idea of a perfect car, but were it not for some abstract concept of perfection implicitly acknowledged by both of us, neither of us could have ANY idea of a perfect car. The concept of perfection is a presupposed premise of your idea and my idea. So now we can talk about a concept of perfection that, albeit abstract, is a necessary prerequisite to our contingent and various concrete ideas. Now we can ponder things at a deeper level, and delve dialectically deeper into the roots of our own consciousness. That’s what Plato is all about.

Re politics, of course Plato’s politics does sort men, but the sorting is not as damning as in Nietzsche. He just says that few men will find their way out of the cave and stay out, and those should be our leaders. And he is undemocratic in the sense that he seems to believe that order requires hierarchy – a practical consideration more than an existential judgment about master and slave races a la Nietzsche. We moderns tend to dismiss hierarchy as a prerequisite to political order, but go back just to the late 18^th-century Enlightenment and you will still find strong and intelligent voices (e.g., Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson) arguing that without hierarchy is chaos. So I don’t agree with Plato here, but I’ll give him a pass on politics. (From what I hear, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, Plato at the Googleplex, presses Plato harder on the human implications of his politics, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.) Anyway, as I’ve said, I don’t think politics is the most compelling branch of his philosophy, but I still agree with Bertrand Russell’s mentor, Alfred North Whitehead, that “Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato.”

And with due respect to Nietzsche’s wit, I think Plato would be the more amiable drinking companion.

 

Without God

Without God, all things are permissible.

This is a recurring idea in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and it gets a lot of airplay today in social media and popular culture. The problem with this supposed argument for Christianity is that it seems uniquely designed to make the humanist look better than the Christian. If you tell me that without God we would have no reason to behave morally, aren’t you telling me that in your heart you would just as soon screw me but refrain only out of fear of God? Doesn’t this make the humanist — who is nice to others because of a heartfelt recognition of the intrinsic value of being nice — more admirable, more noble, more trustworthy in a pinch? (This is not an attack on Christianity en masse, just on a troubling line of reasoning employed by some Christians.)

Interestingly, Nietzsche may make an equal and opposite mistake. (Perhaps my readers who are more up on Nietzsche can affirm or deny or elaborate.) Nietzsche also suggests that God’s demise puts us “beyond good and evil,” but unlike our Christian interlocutor, he sees this as a good thing, a liberation of the human spirit from dogmatic ethical constraints (at least for those who are strong enough to handle the implications). The problem is that Nietzsche’s conclusion, like the Christian’s, rests on the premise that morality (or systems of good and evil) founder, or devolve into purely personal prejudices, in the absence of God.

Our humanist combatant of the first paragraph disputes this premise, arguing that rational principles and intuitive sympathies can provide a basis for ethics equal or stronger than any God-based ethic. I can’t say for sure that our humanist is correct, but I can say that in times of moral crisis I’d rather have her at my side than Nietzsche or the Christian of our example (although I might opt for Nietzsche when a crisis of wit is at hand).