The Concept of Irony

Some Reading Notes

Here is the first in what I hope will be a series of occasional posts presenting some of my notes from the work of thinkers of central importance to Weimar thought. These notes may be on texts by thinkers of the Weimar period itself (Carl Schmitt, say), or alternatively on texts by earlier philosophers, such as Hobbes and Kierkegaard, who significantly influenced Weimar era theorists.   

Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, is referred to substantively in Adorno’s second Habilitationsschrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). Page references here are keyed to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.

‘Socrates, in assigning to insight, to conviction, the determination of men’s actions, posited the Individual as capable of a final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to Customary Morality, and thus made himself an Oracle, in the Greek sense. He said that he had a daimon(ion) within him that counselled him what to do, and revealed to him what was advantageous to his friends.’ [Hegel, quoted on 161. Compare Hegel’s reference to self-knowing and freedom cited on 162; Kierkegaard (hereafter SK) on subjectivity versus ‘the established’ on 163 (cf. identity vs. the established on 126); & the remarks on heteronomy, subjectivity and decision in Hegel on 163-65 (cf. 263, 264).]

‘When we take into account that even in our countries, where the state, precisely because it has undergone a far deeper mediation, allows subjectivity a much greater latitude than that which the Greek state could allow, when we take into account, I say, that even in our countries someone living on private means is always a dubious person, we may infer from that how the Greek state must have regarded Socrates’ attempt to go his own way and live as a private person.’ [179. Cf. 447. Compare too the remark on Socrates’ ironic and ‘purely personal relation to individuals’ on 180-1. Compare also the remarks on the ironist, the Taugenichts (good-for-nothing) and a vocation of obscurity on 281 (& on Hamann: 434).]

‘True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed. In political life, true freedom naturally consists in being involved in the circumstances of life in such a way that they have an objective validity for one and through all this preserving the innermost, deepest personal life, which certainly can move and have its being under all these conditions but yet to a certain degree is incommensurate with them.’ [182-83]  

‘we do find [in Socrates] a most consistently sustained irony that lets the objective power of the state break up on the rock-firm negativity of irony. […] In this way he becomes alien to the whole world to which he belongs […] ; the contemporary consciousness has no predicate for him – nameless and indefinable, he belongs to another formation.’ [196. Cf. 447. Compare too the note on Socrates’ ‘negative relation to life’ on 39; & the remark on his inability to ‘contract any real relationship to the established order’ on 178. Cf. dissident consciousness: Schmitt-Luhmann-Konrad (etc.); & the category of the extraterritorial as in my ‘Vortex Out of German London’ (Kracauer: here)? See also the counterposition of ‘fear of the law’ to ‘conscious knowledge of why he acted’ on 228.]

‘In many ways, the Athens of this period calls to mind what Rome was at a later time. Intellectually, Athens was the heart of Greece. Thus when Greek culture approached its disintegration, all the blood rushed back violently into the chambers of the heart. Everything concentrated in Athens – wealth, luxury, opulence, art, science, recklessness, the enjoyment of life – in short, everything that, as the city hastened toward its ruin, could also help to glorify it and illuminate one of the most brilliant intellectual dramas conceivable. There was a restlessness in Athenian life; there was a palpitation of the heart intimating that the hour of disintegration was at hand. But from the other side, that which was the condition for the decline of the state proved to have immense significance for the new principle that was to appear, and the disintegration and decay became indeed the fertile soil of the new principle.’ [200-1. Compare the Weimar/ interwar period?]

‘It [‘the contemporary age’] does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone – this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community?’ [246-47. Community as a mere temporary alliance of the self-interested or combative: so that now, the phrase ‘care in the community’ means nothing at all. Cf. the comment on irony as ‘isolation according to its concept’ on 249.]

‘dissimulation denotes […] the objective act that carries out the discrepancy between essence and phenomenon; irony also denotes the subjective pleasure as the subject frees himself by means of irony from the restraint in which the continuity of life’s conditions holds him – […] Irony […] has no purpose; its purpose is immanent in itself and is a metaphysical purpose. […] irony, in which the subject has no purpose.’ [255-56. Irony as a freeing from contingency; beyond this, for SK, is the sort of acceptance of heteronomy commented on (in terms of assigned virtuous tasks) at 235. Compare the important remarks on a religious reconciliation with actuality on 297, 298 (on the latter page SK writes of ‘becoming clear and transparent to oneself, not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction but in one’s absolute and eternal validity’, anticipating Either/Or, part II (& cf. 445, 299 here)).]

‘Here, then, we have the idea […] as the infinite absolute negativity. Now, if this is to become something, the negative must assert itself again in a finitizing of the idea – that is, in making it concrete. [> existentialism?] The negative is the restlessness of thought, but this restlessness must manifest itself, must become visible; its desire must manifest itself as the desire that actuates the work, its pain as the pain it engenders. If this does not happen, then we have only the unreal actuality of contemplation, devotion, and pantheism.’ [312. Compare SK’s reference to infinite absolute negativity on 26, the sourcing Hegel quotation on 476, and 131. Cf. also 305 (‘In no way is the true ideal in the beyond’); 319 (‘The true actuality becomes what it is; the actuality of romanticism merely becomes.’) Cf. too 271.]

‘if our generation has any task at all, it must be to translate the achievement of scientific scholarship into personal life, to appropriate it personally. [On subjectivity as truth (cf. in Bergman, Dialogical Philosophy), compare the note on 219 and 552 n. 189 (>Postscript etc.).] […] Irony as a controlled element manifests itself in its truth precisely by teaching how to actualize actuality, by placing the appropriate emphasis on actuality. In no way can this be interpreted as wanting to deify actuality in good [socialist] St. Simon style or as denying that there is, or at least that there ought to be, a longing in every human being for something higher and more perfect. But this longing must not hollow out actuality; on the contrary, life’s content must become a genuine and meaningful element in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul craves. [Actualized actuality an element of transcendental(-ized) life: the quotation continues onto the next page.]’ [328]  

Behind the Mountains, part 2

Gass returns to the characteristically depersonalized and depersonalizing quality of Walser’s writing when he notes the ‘detached, desperate “inhumanity” of his work’. The narrator’s depersonalizing self-negation is foregrounded explicitly in ‘The Alphabet’: ‘I. I skip over, for this is I myself.’ Depersonalizing narratorial strategies are most evident in ‘Tobold (II)’ however, in numerous instances of self-negating narration such as this sentence:

‘Concerning a keg of the finest rye whiskey that, to the delight of the steward and that of a certain additional person – namely, to my very own, grinning, hand-rubbing delight – showed up only to be closely inspected and quite thoroughly investigated and examined by the two abovementioned important or insignificant personages, I shall take care not to waste another word.’

In ‘Tobold (II)’, the ‘certain additional person’ that is the modern self is brushed aside and reduced to the point where his very moods and their attendant whims are directed by an invisible heteronomy. The narrator’s investigation of his workplace is less a focussed product of individual agency, than a dissipated effect of being seduced by that which is more powerful: ‘The castle itself was an imposing edifice, and the many beautiful rooms and chambers I was permitted to glance into as the mood struck me naturally captured my attention and interest with their aristocratic appearance.’ Narration once more becomes a vehicle for expressing the narrator’s self-alienation and loss of personal agency, in the following presentation of vigilant attention directed by the formless authority which it tends:   

‘One of the choicest duties I had to perform was caring for the numerous lamps, an occupation that gave me great pleasure, for I developed quite a fondness for it. Each evening at nightfall I brought light, so to speak, into the dubious twilight that reigned on all sides, or if you prefer, into the darkness. As the count was a fancier of beautiful lamps and lampshades, these always had to be tended and treated with the greatest care. On beautiful evenings, as I crept about the rooms, all quiet as a mouse, a delicate mood in the air, the entire castle seemed bewitched. All the rooms were as if enchanted, the park an enchanted park, and with my soft, discreet, cautious lamplight, I seemed like Aladdin leaping one evening with his magic or miraculous lamp up the high, broad palace steps spread with splendid oriental rugs.’  

In this passage the radical modesty of the narrator – as he creeps about the rooms, ‘all quiet as a mouse’ – renders him indistinguishable from the narrated environment: the succeeding clause, ‘a delicate mood in the air’, could refer to him just as easily as to the castle. Then this submersion of the narrator’s identity within the described environment blends into a self-alienation in the form of a self-fictionalization: ‘I seemed like Aladdin’. The sense of narratorial self-alienation has already been generated by the recurrently self-qualifying, self-negating prose: ‘I brought light, so to speak, […] or if you prefer […]’. Here we are reminded of Walser’s foregrounding of the depersonalized quality of his writing in ‘The Green Spider’, where the narrator refers to ‘my mouth and its modest tool, my inherited language’, so divorcing a potential description enabled by such language from his human physicality ‘incapable of […] stammering it out’. By self-consciously stressing that this is writing removed from its writer, Walser emphasizes his own radical alienation from the reader. This is the effect of the final lines of ‘A Flaubert Prose Piece’ too, which once more draw attention to Walser’s writerly self-abnegation and the depersonalized quality of his prose. ‘Her report contained nothing that might have surprised him. They glided and passed among the people gliding and passing by, like a dream vision within the vision of a dream.’  

I want to draw out the radical implications of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation; of the radical modesty of being, as Gass puts it, ‘Lightly attached to people, to the formalities of society, to any work which lies beneath another’s will like a leg beneath a log’. To take a first example, Walser’s position of self-abnegation enables his writing to develop a powerful critique of self-interest. In her translator’s ‘Preface’ to the collection, Susan Bernofsky quotes Elias Canetti on Walser, in the former’s The Human Province : ‘His deep and instinctive distaste for everything “lofty”, for everything that has rank and privilege, makes him an essential writer of our time, which is choking on power.’ Walser’s fascination with power struggles – his typical focus on human relations in terms of conflict or war – is communicated, for instance, in the following passage in ‘Tobold (II)’. Here the narrator discerns two distinct forms of human conflict, low battles concerning self-interest and ‘noble’ battles concerning natural morality:

‘Intrigues show up in castles, the same as in all other major establishments and institutions. Now the cook wanted to incite me against the steward, now the steward against the cook, but all this factional bickering and class conflict left me cold, for I had no interest in it. Anywhere a noble, splendid, sensible struggle can be found, I’ll be glad, perhaps, to take part in it – why not? – for instance in the struggle of the good versus the wicked, the benevolent versus the malevolent, the open and flexible versus the hardened and insensitive, the quick-witted versus the unenlightened, the diligent and industrious versus those who do nothing yet always stay on top, the struggle of the guileless versus the crafty and sly. This could be a battle I might like to lend a hand in, it can rain blows and punches for all I care, the more the merrier.’     

Walser’s critique of modern, institutional self-interest relates to the way in which his writing – as I want to suggest – projects a similar opposition of modern purposive rationality to natural human life, to that proposed within Georg Simmel’s contemporaneous The Philosophy of Money. (Simmel’s text was published in 1907, whilst Walser’s ‘Aschinger’ and ‘The Battle of Sempach’ – to which we will refer soon – date from 1907 and 1908 respectively). In his German Political Philosophy, Chris Thornhill outlines how Simmel’s political and sociological theory involved ‘the first major step on the path towards a reconstruction of vitalist philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche’.

‘Like Nietzsche, […] Simmel saw the capitalist economy as marking the final triumph of the human being as a formally purposive agent, and he also saw the purposive rationality of capitalism as weakening or neutralizing the relation between people and the purposes or objects of their possession, and even between people and their own actions. Under the generalized rationality of capitalism, therefore, the purposes of economically constructed persons assume a heteronomous primacy over human life itself.’

Indeed, as Thornhill summarizes, because the formal purposiveness of modern monetary subjects involves an alienation of those subjects from their own true purposes, it generates – Simmel maintained in The Philosophy of Money – an experience of depersonalization, such as we have seen reflected throughout Walser’s prose pieces:

‘As an agent seeking purposes, he [Simmel] argued, the modern subject alienates itself from the experiential sources of genuine subjectivity, and it constructs itself as a thinly neutralized set of contents and objectives. The monetary alienation of the human subject from its purposes and actions, then, also leads to a weakening or dissipation of the relation between people and other people, and ultimately, to a weakening or dissipation of the person itself – to a lack of “definite substance in the centre of the soul” or to a diffuse experience of depersonalization.’

We can find Walser detailedly projecting an opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life within the following extraordinary description of war in ‘The Battle of Sempach’.

‘The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; you could have gone for a buggy ride across this bridge of lances, the knights were squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding – just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage. Just to put an end to this loathsome horror, one man after the other recklessly charged into a lance tip, maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage. Flung to the ground, that is, without even having struck the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel with his hand weapon, bleeding pitiably from his breast, tumbling head over heels, face down into the dusty excrement left behind by the noble steeds. This was the fate of all these almost naked men, while the lances, already red with blood, seemed to smile in scorn.’     

Walser’s tableau foregrounds two aspects of human experience. The ‘people half-covered with shirts’ represent passionate humanity. Their behaviour, their purposes, are self-directed: these are people simply ‘impetuous’ or ‘seized with helpless rage’, who are representatives of uncontrolled nature – ‘maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage’. On the other hand, there are the knights reified into their weapons: ‘an idiotic wall of spikes’, ‘the art of war, the most prejudiced there is’. On this side it is impossible to separate reified humans (‘Iron men’, ‘the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel’), from humanized lances which ‘seemed to smile in scorn’. These knights emblematize an alienated condition of formal purposiveness. Their behaviour is rigidly purposeful, to the point where they are themselves indistinguishable – ‘squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding’ – from the object-world of instrumentality and neutralization that they project. Walser obsessively delineates what he intuits to be the structuring conflict underlying modern life, and his forecast of the outcome is not utopian: as he writes in the preceding sentence, ‘Nature is always annihilated in a battle’. 

Thornhill shows how Simmel’s opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life was grounded in Nietzsche’s thinking about law, reason and nature. Nietzsche, Thornhill summarizes, thought that fear of nature stimulates the legislation of ‘rational or moral purposes for humans to pursue, so that they are distracted from their naturalness’. Laws are formed in order to differentiate human life from ‘the cyclical temporal processes of mere nature or from the chaotic temporal events of historical contingency’. ‘Laws and values produced in this manner serve to humanize the world’, Thornhill notes; ‘they allow human beings to live, at least, in an illusion of human justification and moral purpose’. But they also reflect ‘a fearful will to obtain power, a power that can only be secured through the extirpation of whatever is residually natural – including the residues of nature in reason itself’:

‘Whilst possessing the obvious psychological utility that they protect people from knowledge of their own naturalness, however, Nietzsche argued that the laws created by reason form highly coercive and dominatory intellectual structures, which, in seeking to suppress fear, fixate human reason on the acquisition of power.’ 

For Nietzsche, as Thornhill writes, this is ‘invariably the will to power of weak people’; it is ‘power resentfully desired by those who cannot contentedly tolerate the naturalness and spontaneous futility of life’. Those who cannot accept contingency, and remain trapped in nihilistic horror vacui, ‘produce sense for their lives only through the pursuit of obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’.  

We can argue that Walser’s writing articulates the perspective of those whom competitive capitalist society labels ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ – of the radically modest – in order to discern, with Nietzsche and Simmel, the true weakness of those who pursue ‘obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’. In Walser’s ‘Aschinger’, their rushed, non-accepting satisfaction of appetitive processes of mere nature is not enough for the competitive and power-seeking, who must then flee into ‘the commercial air’.

‘The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the commercial air, generally with a briefcase beneath their arm, a letter in their pocket, an assignment in their brain, firm plans in their skull, and in their open palm a watch that says the time has come.’   

Walser suggests that, slotted into their new, artificial time (of money, not of nature), the supposedly ‘firm’ purposes of economically constructed persons do not derive from their own natural brains – or from any ‘definite substance in the centre of the soul’ – but are instead plucked out, as if at random, from the empty, depersonalized skulls within which they float. A critique of the modern differentiation of ‘plans’ from naturalness or contingency may also be said to lie behind Walser’s ironization of the self-with-attainments in ‘Tobold (II)’: ‘Incidentally, it should also be mentioned that the secretary was an excellent pianist. Why shouldn’t we have a fondness for people who bring us pleasure with their skills, gifts, sciences, or knowledge?’ Walser proposes, in ‘Marie’, that the illusory plans and instrumentalized attainments which animate the capitalist city merely sustain a society in which both ‘work’ and ‘sophisticated pleasure’ are paratactically, and barbarically, inseparable from ‘privation’:

            ‘“Where are you going?” Frau Bandi asked.

            “I’m not quite sure yet. Well, to one of the centres of contemporary civilization, culture, work, privation, sophisticated pleasure, modern elegance and education, to one of the big, noisy cities where I’ll learn how to go about winning some respect and repute for myself among my fellow men.”’

Tbc.

The Spiritual Condition of the Age, part 2

In The Spiritual Condition of the Age, Jaspers maintained that ‘the problem of the mode of remembrance is the problem of such culture as still remains possible’. Rather than processing historical knowledge into discrete units of cognition which can then be bureaucratically distributed and assessed throughout the education system by means of ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘attainment’ league tables, as now, we could instead – Jaspers suggested – enable historical knowledge to become implicated with the self’s experience. This could rejuvenate culture, because we would have re-established a relationship between a person’s memory of culture and her own spiritual life – ‘a sincere historicity is a readiness to discover the sources which feed all life and therefore the life of the present as well’.

‘For remembrance as a mere knowledge of the past is nothing more than a collection of an infinite number of antiquarian details; remembrance as mere contemplation instinct with understanding realizes the pictures and the figures of the past only as a non-committal confrontation. It is not until remembrance takes the form of assimilation that there comes into being the reality of the selfhood of a contemporary human being in the form of veneration; subsequently as a standard for his own feeling and activity; and finally as participation in his own eternal being.’

The Spiritual Condition of the Age posits an awareness of temporal or historical continuity to be a mainstay of the formation of self-existence. For example, Jaspers sees that work can potentially consolidate selfhood, but ‘when the day’s work grew sufficient to itself and ceased to be built up into a constituent of the worker’s life – then man was, as it were, bereft of his world’. If the worker is ‘lacking all sense of historical continuity with past or future, man cannot remain man’. Jaspers opposes selfhood to the self which simply preserves itself: ‘if he craves for self-expression, there promptly arises a tension between his self-preservative impulse, on the one hand, and his real selfhood’. Tensions also arise with ‘the winners in the race’, who tend to ‘have qualities which disincline them to allow others to be their true selves’. Jaspers explains the familiar syndrome of the successful father and the failed son:  

‘Hence the winners tend to snub all those who aim at adequate self-expression, speaking of them as pretentious, eccentric, biased, unpractical, and measuring their achievements by insincere absolute standards; they are personally suspect, they are stigmatized as provocative, as disturbers of the peace […] Because he only “arrives” who has sacrificed his selfhood, the arrivist will not tolerate self-expression in subordinates.’  

In ‘Britain’s Liberal Riots’, Blond describes our contemporary society in which winners and losers alike have been brought to sacrifice their selfhood, and to be ruled by the instinct of self-preservation or self-interest alone. He notes that ‘the rule for the last thirty years is that one rules the many by persuading them that the values of the self-interested few ought to be their principles as well’. As a consequence of the UK’s general ‘moral and social collapse’ since Thatcher, the rioters were ‘merely acting out the values that now seem to govern and embody Britain – ruthless self-interest coupled to a rootless consumer nihilism’. Jaspers already saw how the totalizing of the principle of self-interest reveals self-interest to be not a real principle at all, but instead a valueless black hole which only creates rootlessness as it eats away at our sense of communal self-existence.

‘The crisis realizes itself as a lack of confidence. If people still cling to the coercion of the law, if they are still convinced by power, and by the rigidity of convention, it is only because of a calculus of material advantages, and not from any real confidence. When all has been reduced to the purposiveness of life-interests, the consciousness of the substantiality of the whole has been destroyed.’

Now that even career cliques based on competitive socializing, such as our dehumanizing humanities academia, are apparent to be no more than a source of income and status, we can see the relevance of Jaspers' argument that social confidence remains – can only be nurtured – within the sphere of personal ties or intersubjective communication.  ‘Every well-informed person is acquainted with the deceptions, the deviations, the untrustworthiness that prevail in his own familiar domain. Where confidence persists, it is only within very narrow circles, for it never extends to the totality.’ Quite probably, the more feral the operations of the professional club, the more emphasis is laid on what can be gained from interpersonal intimacy: so that this dialectic of communication (public suspicion/ private confidence), can be a harmful trap just as much as a life-enhancing opening.

Jaspers observes how we begin to view, and hence experience, social relations and interpersonal communication as a harmful trap when the principle of self-interest dominates. ‘It is, indeed, the tendency of the life-order to become absolute which arouses an uncontrollable dread of life.’ Because the self-preservative impulse is twinned with fear of self-destruction, the mental illness of anxiety is integral to modern society. ‘In the rationalization and universalization of the life-order there has grown contemporaneously with its fantastic success an awareness of imminent ruin tantamount to a dread of the approaching end of all that makes life worth living.’ With great insight, Jaspers notes the effects on the self’s communicative capacity of being ‘alarmed at the likelihood that he will in the near future become unable to obtain the vital necessaries’. Social exclusion becomes vulnerability’s self-fulfilling prophecy:

‘The sufferer from anxiety has confidence in no one; he will not enter into absolute ties with any other person. One who fails to participate in what others are doing is left alone. The threat of being sacrificed arouses the sense of having been utterly forsaken, and this drives the sufferer out of his frivolous ephemeralness into cynical hardness and then into anxiety. In general, life seems full of dread.’

Many many people, including myself, have lived like this, and it is possible to endure particularly if a person can come to terms with what Jaspers calls ‘a very different dread, namely that concerning his selfhood’, and the threat of losing it. Jaspers observes that psychiatry can never deal effectively with mental illness so long as it functions within an economy which threatens us all with social sacrifice. But psychiatry could genuinely help people, he argues, if it were to attend to the heady, spiritual formation of self-existence, in the face of the totalization of the principle of self-interest:

‘Doctors try and talk the sick or those who believe themselves sick out of the fear of death. But these institutions function effectively only when things are going well with the individual. The life-order cannot dispel the dread which is part of every individual’s lot. This anxiety can only be controlled by the more exalted dread felt by existence threatened with the loss of its selfhood, which induces an overriding religious or philosophical exaltation. When existence is paralysed, the dread of life cannot fail to grow. The all-embracing dominion of the life-order would destroy man as existence without ever being able to free him from the dread of life.’

Jaspers writes of how at crisis-points of the battle of life, mental illness can trigger physical sickness:

‘If a man comes to look upon his life as spiritually unacceptable, as intolerable were it merely because he can no longer understand its significance, he takes flight into illness, which envelops him like a visible protector. For in those limitary situations which (as mere life-experiences) crush him inwardly, man needs, either the selfhood of freedom, or else some objective point of support.’

The totalizing functionalism of the life-order, Jaspers argues, is threatened by its own limits as well as by ‘the selfhood of freedom’: ‘The unavoidability of the life-order finds its limit in the human being who refuses to be wholly absorbed into a function; and further in this, that no unique and perfected and definitive life-order is possible.’ Indeed, free refusal of technicizing objectivity by the vulnerable is enabled by the crisis-points – the ‘lacunæ’ – of technique itself. For example: when the labour market makes you unemployed, or when a university lecturer fails to arrange the placement that could help you back into work.

‘It is true that most us of us dread the freedom of selfhood. Still, it is possible that in the interconnexions of the titanic apparatus there are so many lacunæ that, for those who dare, it may remain possible, in some unexpected way, for them to realize their historicity out of their own sources. […] Pulling himself together on the border-line of destruction, the independent human being may arise, one who will take matters into his own hands and will enjoy true being.’

Seeing that ‘the basic problem of our time is whether an independent human being in his self-comprehended destiny is still possible’, Jaspers asserts that addressing the problem of contemporary freedom is a matter of the responsible self-development of personal existence: ‘this is a problem which, as clearly formulated and understood, tends to annul itself; for only he who is capable of being free can sincerely and comprehendingly moot the problem of freedom’. Hope for the possibility of a selfhood of freedom, Jaspers maintains, is dependent on an existentialist thinking which takes the risk of claiming freedom in itself, rather than arrogantly and presumptuously assuming that subjective freedom already exists, and is merely a means of planning objective freedom.

‘In objectifying thought, on the other hand, whereby the liberty of man is treated as an extant form of life and wherein the only question that arises is under what conditions liberty can be realized, it becomes conceivable that the whole history of mankind is a vain endeavour to be free.’ 

Anticipating contemporary academics’ focus on aspects of bureaucratic planning such as course designing, and their downplaying of sustained autonomous research in favour of cosy specialization, conference surfing and jumping on bandwagons, The Spiritual Condition of the Age comments on the degeneration of the university to its present state of being ‘no more than a school’. ‘An enforced curriculum relieves the individual from the risks attendant upon seeking a path for himself. But without the hazards of liberty, there can be no possibility of independent thought.’

Jaspers enables us to see that participation in the ‘hazards of liberty’ is an appropriate response to the flux of rootlessness, or to our condition of being ‘uprooted’ within the ‘historically determined and changing situation’ of modern secularism,  which – according to Blond’s analysis of last year’s rioting – we still inhabit. The development of a selfhood of freedom, for example through the practice of ‘independent thought’, is today no more than a ‘possibility’ precisely because now, as Jaspers writes, ‘existence is a mere possibility, not something possessed and guaranteed. All objectivity has become ambiguous: the true seems irrevocably lost; substance, perplexity: reality, a masquerade.’ The limit-point crises signified by mental illness, for example, are read by Jaspers as products and markers of our perplexifying modern existential state, which are also openings to the development of a selfhood of freedom:

‘He who wishes to find his way to the origin of the crisis must pass through the lost domain of truth, in order to revise it possessively; must traverse the domain of perplexity to reach decision concerning himself; must strip off the trappings of the masquerade, in order to disclose the genuine that lies beneath.’  

Jaspers suggests that risky intellectual work, precisely in its perilousness, is suited to developing its own freedom through the traversal of our critical spiritual condition; whereas ‘a new world cannot arise out of the crisis through the work of the rational life-order as such’.

‘What is needful is that the human being shall achieve something more than he brings to pass in the life-order, shall achieve it by way of the State as expressive of the will towards the whole, by the State to which the life-order has become nothing but a means – and also through mental creation, whereby he grows aware of his own being. Along both these roads he can regain consciousness of the origin and the aim of human existence in the nobility of free self-creation, cognizance of which has been lost in the life-order.’

Hence in this book Jaspers presents existentialism as a free and communicative thinking which exceeds the specialist cognition of the academic pseudo-community.

‘In fact, from the opening of the second half of the nineteenth century the traditional philosophy became everywhere an enterprise carried on by university schools which more and more seldom were communities of philosophic persons drawing from their own sources and communicating in the form of thought what had welled up in their own consciousness.’

Technical cognition of fragments of objectivity is to be exceeded by the visionary definition of self-existence, Jaspers argues, because only such meta-academic intellectual activity can hold the possibility of redeeming – or creating ‘a new world’ out of – the flux of rootlessness. We have already seen how, in Jaspers’ view, academic Marxism by contrast degrades the modern ‘dialectic of the extant being and consciousness’ by attaching being fixedly to its own simplistic historical analytic; when in fact the dialectic of modern secularism – like any historical dialectic – ‘cannot be properly understood on a purely intellectual plane, but can only be adequately grasped in the momentous fulfillment of that within us which, through its claim to selfhood, provides the spirit with its capacity for greatness’.       

‘Existence-philosophy is the way of thought by means of which man seeks to become himself; it makes use of expert knowledge while at the same time going beyond it. This way of thought does not cognize objects, but elucidates and makes actual the being of the thinker. Brought into a state of suspense by having transcended the cognitions of the world (as the adoption of a philosophical attitude towards the world) that fixate being, it appeals to its own freedom (as the elucidation of existence) and gains space for its own unconditioned activity through conjuring up Transcendence (as metaphysics).’

You could argue that, for Jaspers, the only way to think beyond modern rootlessness is by defining its flux. The communicative strand of Jaspers’ existentialism means that for him the dialectic of being and consciousness can only be adequately grasped – or defined in a sort of vision which draws on our originary transcendental impulses – through a dialectic of consciousness and consciousness. ‘This existence-philosophy cannot be rounded off in any particular work, nor can it acquire definitive perfectionment as the life of any particular thinker.’ For Jaspers ‘the study of the innermost springs of behaviour […] belongs to the domain of true communication’. Intersubjective communication enables existentialist thinking as a dialogue between originary transcendental capacities: such thinking cannot in itself redeem or bridge the dialectic of being and consciousness, but it can at least enable us to ‘regain consciousness of the origin and the aim of human existence’ – and so it holds the possibility of redeeming, or creating ‘a new world’ out of, the flux of rootlessness. ‘Existence-philosophy cannot discover any solution, but can only become real in the multiplicity of thought proceeding from extant origins in the communication from one to another.’ What the existentialist philosopher is really creating, in Jaspers’ view, is our various singular claims to transcendence, and a dialogue between them. ‘Not merged in the enterprise of the coming and going idols of the life-order, he works as self-existence on behalf of self-existence; for he creates life as a demand through influencing others out of their own sources.’ The flux of rootlessness can only be defined visionarily precisely through such a fulfilment of our originary transcendental impulses, through ‘influencing others out of their own sources’, or the dialectic of being and consciousness ‘adequately grasped in the momentous fulfillment of that within us which, through its claim to selfhood, provides the spirit with its capacity for greatness’.  

the flux of rootlessness is Bleak House in 2011, solitary spectator-consumers look on as the city spontaneously combusts in shame

The Spiritual Condition of the Age

In his article ‘Britain’s Liberal Riots’ [here], Phillip Blond – former theologian, contributor to Radical Orthodoxy and founder of the ResPublica think tank – offers a very useful account of the social significance of the eruption of civil disorder which tore through the urban parts of England last summer. Whilst commentators on the left tended to view the rioting merely as an embarrassing outbreak of mass consumer looting revelatory only of the weaknesses of discrete underfunded areas of public service provision, and so failed to go on to point to the problems at the core of our pseudo-democratic political status quo, Blond emphasizes the politicians’ fear that we will all wake up to the fact that the nationwide disorder was ‘a defining event that could make or break public trust’, and also the way in which the political and media élites have subsequently ‘desperately been trying to capture and represent the resulting public mood’. Blond’s reading enables us to focus on the broken consensus regarding the legitimacy of our political system today, just as the media narration after the event could in fact only show a fragmented society: watching the reports from Clapham Junction on the morning after the concluding police clampdown, it was clear that the back-to-normal shop-owner out with Boris and her broom, inhabits an entirely different world from the black father screaming out ‘your children don’t end up in the mental health system’. For those of us who live in fear and anxiety anyway because of the way this city functions, the riots were terrifying but there is no normal to go back to.

In order to try to develop the most valuable points of Blond’s analysis, I want to turn again to Jaspers’ 1931 work Die Geistige Situation der Zeit – which I will continue to refer to as Thornhill does, as The Spiritual Condition of the Age, rather than as Man in the Modern Age (which is the strangely masculinist title of Eden and Cedar’s Paul’s translation of the work). As Thornhill notes, though this book is ‘certainly by far his [Jaspers’] most conservative political pronouncement’, it ‘remains at one remove from expressly radical-conservative arguments’, so that – rather as with Blond’s article – ‘the critique of parliamentary democracy which it contains never subsides into an opposition to the democratic order per se’. In a review [here] for Negations 3 (Winter 1998) of the conference anthology edited by Kurt Salamun, Karl Jaspers: Zur Aktualität seines Denkens (Karl Jaspers: The Timeliness of his Thought), Sigrid Koepke noted that the 1989 conference speakers all agreed that Jaspers’ evaluation of the 1920s and 1930s in The Spiritual Condition of the Age, is still ‘relevant and helpful for today’s situation – even if they do not necessarily agree with Jaspers’ applications or conclusions’. Here I want to point to the continuing relevance of Jaspers’ insights to the dire condition of the UK now.       

In his essay Blond stresses how the rioters were ‘shamefully emblematic of modern Britain’, insofar as ‘their values have striking parallels with [those of] the UK’s current elite’. ‘In a savage manner they were […] merely acting out the values that now seem to govern and embody Britain – ruthless self-interest coupled to a rootless consumer nihilism.’  The Spiritual Condition of the Age enables us to understand contemporary rootlessness in a more general existential sense, of being ‘uprooted’ within the ‘historically determined and changing situation’ of modern secularism, when ‘it is as if the foundations of being had been shattered’. Now ‘the identity of thought and being (hitherto unchallenged) has ceased to exist for us’. ‘That is why we live in a movement, a flux, a process, in virtue of which changing knowledge enforces a change in life; and, in turn, changing life enforces a change in the consciousness of the knower.’ Jaspers’ model of historical process here – ‘being and consciousness of being were severed, and they must perpetually renew their severance in a changed form, passing from one to the other’ – is explicitly Hegelian, and he goes on to critique the materializing and depersonalizing of the dialectic in Marxist thought.

‘The dialectic of the extant being and consciousness (which cannot be properly understood on a purely intellectual plane, but can only be adequately grasped in the momentous fulfillment of that within us which, through its claim to selfhood, provides the spirit with its capacity for greatness) was degraded by the fixed attachment of being to an artificially simplified process of human history – to history conceived as exclusively determined by the material conditions of production. […] In this doctrine, dialectic sank to become nothing more than a method, devoid both of the content of historical human existence and of metaphysic.’

Insofar as it offers a social philosophy of rootlessness, therefore, Jaspers’ existentialist analytic in this book, unlike the Marxist dialectic, is itself rootless or ever-changeable: ‘The construction of the mental situation of the present [...] is a process that will not lapse into the solidity of a completed stereoscopic image’. The process draws on an ‘attitude of mind which regards itself as selfhood trying to achieve orientation; the object of clarifying the situation being to comprehend as clearly and decisively as possible one’s own development in the particular situation’. The book’s project of defining the spiritual condition of the age is thus itself related to the development of (an idea of) a free self’s destiny today – a process which runs counter to the ‘general sociological situation’.

‘The decisive factor is the developing possibility of a selfhood which is not yet objectively extant – of a selfhood in a particular realm which includes and overrides the general, instead of being included in or overridden by it. This selfhood does not yet exist for contemporary man, but looms as a realisable possibility if man deliberately and successfully intervenes as one of the factors of his own destiny.’

The alternative to such an assumption of historical responsibility, as foreseen by Jaspers, is the evolution of the general sociological situation of rootlessness and alienation, or of the contemporary labour market characterized by a growing precariat, portfolio careers and intermittent employment:

‘It has been said that in modern times men have been shuffled together like grains of sand. They are elements of an apparatus in which they occupy now one location, now another; not parts of a historical substance which they imbue with their selfhood. The number of those who lead this uprooted sort of life is continually on the increase. Driven from pillar to post, then perhaps out-of-work for a lengthy period with nothing more than bare subsistence, they no longer have a definite place or status in the whole. […] What a man can do nowadays can only be done by one who takes short views. He has occupation, indeed, but his life has no continuity.’

To embrace these conditions as signalling the growth of flexible labour or the feminization of working life is, it seems to me, to miss the point: for what both genders are in fact succumbing to now is the death of community – ‘the whole’ – or the phenomenon of what Blond calls ‘widespread social anonymity and fragmentation’. Jaspers notes how ‘the tendencies to disintegrate’ the traditional nucleus of community, the family, ‘increase proportionally with the trend to render a universal life-order absolute’. Yet still ‘people cling to this primitive world with invincible tenacity’. Indeed, Jaspers maintains, ‘amid the general social dissolution, man is thrust back into dependence upon these most primitive bonds out of which alone a new and trustworthy objectivity can be constructed.’ Indeed, as regards ‘the relations between one selfhood and another, there is no generalisable situation, but only the absolute historicity of those who encounter one another, the intimacy of their contact, the fidelity and irreplaceability of personal ties’. The emphasis on existentialist personal ties is the basis of Jaspers’ theory of solidarity. ‘What frees us from solitude is not the world, but the selfhood which enters into ties with others. Interlinkage of self-existent persons constitutes the invisible reality of the essential.’ Precisely this conception of the invisibility or non-objectivity of solidarity amongst genuinely existent selves, enables Jaspers’ theory of indirect social action, for instance as performed by the vulnerable:

‘Since there is no objective criterion of trustworthy selfhood, this could not be directly assembled to form influential groups. As has been well said: “There is no trust (no organized association) of the persons who are the salt of the earth.” That is their weakness, inasmuch as their strength can only inhere in their inconspicuousness. There is among them a tie which does not take the form of any formal contract, but is stronger than any national, political, partisan, or social community, and stronger than the bonds of race. Never direct and immediate, it first becomes manifest in its consequences.’  

The praxis of ‘the solidarity of the self-existent’ involves the activation of non-formal ties, alongside a mindful readiness for a similarly formless, intermittent mode of communication: digital relations, voluntary work...

‘True nobility is not found in an isolated being. It exists in the interlinkage of independent human beings. Such are aware of their duty to discover one another, to help one another onward wherever they encounter one another, and to be ever ready for communication, on the watch, but without importunacy. Though they have entered into no formal agreement, they hold together with a loyalty which is stronger than any formal agreement could give.’

The form of sociality projected by Jaspers here is of course necessarily faltering and vulnerable, being ‘rendered insecure in the world by the weakness due to the comparatively small number of such persons and to the uncertainty of their contacts’. But this is not so much a Facebook community, made up of those who ‘have dozens of men as friends who are not really friends’, as ‘the origin of the loftiest soaring movement which is as yet possible in the world’.

‘The unity of this dispersed élite is like the Invisible Church of a corpus mysticum in the anonymous chain of the friends from among whom […] one selfhood is revealed to another and perhaps distant selfhood. In this immaterial realm of mind there are, at any moment, a few indwellers who, entering into close proximity, strike flame out of one another by the intimacy of their communication.’

Jaspers here holds communication to be ‘the most fundamental problem of philosophy’. In some crucial statements, he views the communicative creation of social ties as a means of the spiritualization through which the self can claim self-existence, and resist assimilation to the modern technical order. Blogging or voluntary caring, for instance, can be conceived as turning the machine against itself.

‘He must either on his own initiative independently gain possession of the mechanism of his life, or else, himself degraded to become a machine, surrender to the apparatus. He must, through communication, establish the tie between self and self, in full awareness that here everything turns upon loyalty or disloyalty; and in default of this his life will be utterly despiritualized and become a mere function. He must either advance to the frontier where he can glimpse his Transcendence, or else must remain entangled in the disillusionment of a self that is wholly involved in the things of the world.’

Jaspers’ upholding of community, communing and communication in the face of a technicizing social order, is comparable to Blond’s critique of the disastrous practice of centrist ‘socialism’ in the form of atomizing social control – a perpetuation of the cruel white heat of Thatcherism – which has brought our cities to their long-term meltdown:

‘The attack upon structures that stabilize people and provide a necessary and secure footing has also been accompanied by a relentless assault on the principles that underpin these foundations be it those of faith, tradition or morality. A hostile technocratic amorality that removes culture, taboo and memory from public policy has been the hallmark of Labour’s years in power.’   

Jaspers’ understanding of technocracy is Weberian: ‘To-day it is taken as a matter of course that human life is the supply of mass-needs by rationalized production with the aid of technical advances.’ When the ‘mass-order’ creates such a ‘universal life-apparatus’, Jaspers argues, this technical apparatus ‘proves destructive to the world of a truly human life’; ‘tension between the universal life-apparatus and a truly human world is, therefore, inevitable.’ Educators, for example, dismiss ‘historical tradition, and will have education carried on as if it had no relationship with time at all, and consisted only of training for technical skill’ and ‘the acquisition of realist knowledge’. This means that ‘the growth of knowledge during the era of advanced technique in conjunction with the spreading dominion of apparatus seem to narrow man’s potentialities even while enriching him’. Like Blond, Jaspers emphasizes the importance of keeping cultural memory alive – so as to regenerate mental potentialities (‘substance’):

‘Whilst an enmity to culture is grinding to powder all that has hitherto existed (with an arrogant assumption that the world is now beginning entirely afresh), in the process of reconstitution the mental substance can only be preserved by a sort of historical remembrance which must be something more than a mere knowledge of the past and must take the form of a contemporary vital force.’

To be continued

Dickinson 724

Here is poem number 724 from the Reading Edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin.

Each Life converges to some Centre –

Expressed – or still –

Exists in every Human Nature

A Goal –

Embodied scarcely to itself – it may be –

Too fair

For Credibility’s presumption

To mar –

Adored with caution – as a Brittle Heaven –

To reach

Were hopeless, as the Rainbow’s Raiment

To touch –

Yet persevered toward – surer – for the Distance –

How high –

Unto the Saints’ slow diligence –

The Sky –

Ungained – it may be – by a Life’s low Venture –

But then –

Eternity enable the endeavouring

Again.

In The Spiritual Condition of the Age, Karl Jaspers raised the question of free will: ‘the basic problem of our time is whether an independent human being in his self-comprehended destiny is still possible’. In Dickinson’s poem, the freedom to know and claim a destiny is figured as a singular human’s progress towards her ‘Goal’: that is, as a project of perseverance towards an apprehension of her own transcendent nature. Yet this project, she understands, is a ‘low Venture’; our life on this earth is everything which is distant from the transcendental freedom suggested by the ‘Brittle Heaven’ and the ‘Rainbow’s Raiment’. In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe discusses this poem in the context of the Puritan understanding, which Dickinson shared with her spirit-mentor Emily Brontë, that ‘Humanity must obey mechanical and supernatural necessity’. Their imaginations perpetuate ‘LEAR’s world of monstrous necessity where union with Nature means living outside comfort with the forces of destruction’. The bitter, low, ‘Life’ or nature through which we move towards understanding of our transcendent human nature, is identified with (obedience to) what Howe calls ‘the dominant social system’, or ‘a phantom and desolate world where life is a void labour, and Death, Desire’s dream’: determinism, as laid down by religious fundamentalism and work ethic capitalism alike.

Dickinson’s poem encodes the dialectic of free will and determinism that still resonates in American culture today, in the superb film based on Philip K. Dick’s ‘Adjustment Team’, The Adjustment Bureau (in which the death of the romancing protagonists’ high-flying careers turns out to be desire’s dream, vanquishing the Bureau's career planning), and which appeared in Weimar times in Jaspers’ opposition of human freedom to Weberian modern ‘worldly order’, in The Spiritual Condition of the Age.

‘The interlinking of every aspect of human life into stable organisations is rapidly increasing. The transformation of human beings into functions of a titanic apparatus compels a general levelling-down; the apparatus has no use for human beings of high grade or for exceptional individuals, but requires only average specimens endowed with particular gifts. Nothing but the relative endures. The coercion of the life-order enforces an entry into the various associations, and interferes with freedom of individual activity in every possible way. […] The movement is towards the bringing to pass of a stable and definitive condition. But this ideal of a worldly order is intolerable to those who know their being to be established upon a claim to freedom.’

A wildly exceptional individual who propounded the democratic insight that there ‘Exists in every Human Nature/ A Goal’, Dickinson – like Jaspers – experienced the rift between a claim to apprehend transcendental freedom and the structuration of deterministic order, the purposeless everyday battle of life which makes the idea of heaven itself appear merely ‘Brittle’. No doubt this lived antinomy contributed to her agoraphobia. ‘Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, educated, reclusive, visionary women, rebels from a sin-obsessed Fundamentalist religion, felt God and Nature separating from each other’ (Howe). Perhaps precisely because it narrates her own existential condition, Dickinson’s poem is not content simply to diagnose the separation, and finally refuses to tolerate its weighting on the side of necessity – paradoxically, precisely when her writing admits that the ‘Sky’ is ‘Ungained’. In the final stanza, the grinding, everyday ‘low Venture’ through which we move towards an understanding of transcendence is flipped over, and its precedence stripped away, so that now the transcendental emerges as the enabling space within which the struggle of nature is held to be enacted. After death we can renew the Venture with faith, because ‘Eternity enable the endeavouring/ Again.’ Eternity, not the winners of the struggle, has been in control all along.

      

Next post: in the semantics hut with P. K. Dick