Ross Abbinnett: Politics of Happiness: Connecting the Philosophical Ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida to the Political Ideas of Happiness. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

 

Aristotle understands happiness as the exercise of the distinctively human virtues, not as a mood or a feeling. The small polis, where fellow-citizens knew one another, might be conducive to the cultivation of character. The large, modern state, with its impersonality and the mass-life that lends itself to fleeting satisfaction of their conjuring by entrepreneurs public and private, makes Abbinnett long for a less atomized, more “collective pursuit of the good life.” Yet how can such a collective pursuit succeed if conducted within the framework of the modern state? Abbinnett sensibly rejects the modern ideologies that promise happiness wrongly understood, but nonetheless stays entirely within the philosophic parameters set by those who substituted ‘History’ for natural right and the God of the Bible for its moral standard. He concludes by eschewing the grander promises of modern utopianism while remaining hopeful for some other, more modest socialist proposals.

He begins by objecting to defining happiness in exclusively individualist terms. “The experience of happiness… is essentially related to ideas of the good society and to the forms of individual life that are appropriate to it.” He defines such ideas not as discoveries about human nature—an idea he rejects—but as the products of historical formation; indeed, the ‘individual’ itself is such a product. Availing himself of the jargon of neo-Marxist thinker Theodor Adorno, he describes the modern individual “cut off from the satisfactions of God and ethical life, and subjected to a regime in which work and desire have been synthesized into modalities of the commodity form.” That is, the Enlightenment valorization of rationality, especially of instrumental rationality, has been combined by the modern regimes with a ‘work ethic’; this strategy alienates human beings from their own natural sense of happiness in order to “maximiz[e] the efficiency of production.” Under capitalism, “The original ethos of Enlightenment philosophy, which was the emancipation of humanity from its subjection to the gods and to nature, is transformed into a regime of control in which every aspect of human particularity is expressed as a quantum of productive potential.” Our ‘happiness’ now consists of effects “controlled by the standardized aesthetics of the culture industry”—Hollywood films, music, and so on.

Abbinnett, however, would ‘complexify’ Adorno’s analysis. The “politics of happiness” that has emerged under the thought-regime of Enlightenment and the political-economic regime of capitalism derives from “three different, opposed, but essentially related versions of what Enlightenment is, and what its moral, ethical, and political consequences have been.” These versions are stated by Hegel, with his ethics of ‘recognition’; Nietzsche, with his “critique of metaphysics”; and Derrida, “the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘other’ that has arisen from Enlightenment ideals of transparency and calculability,” including the Hegelian Enlightenment.

The sensible side of Abbinnett’s project may be seen in his insistence that “political ideologies are attempts to realize impossible regimes of happiness” because there remains “an essential difference between practical and philosophic politics.” Such ideologies as utilitarian liberalism, Marxism, and fascism fail to see and accept this difference, which consists in the distinction between “a reflective consideration of the questions of freedom, solidarity, and well being posed by the contestation of ideologies”—that is, the contradictions among political opinions—and “the attempt to solicit the support of the masses through representational techniques”—rhetoric, broadly defined. Abbinnett’s own commitment to a form of ‘postmodernism’ in philosophy wedded to a form of socialism in practice may be seen in his preference for ideologies capable of opening themselves “to the experience of difference as a possible source of education or desire”; for example, he prefers ‘multiculturalism’ to more strictly defined understandings of what an ethically sound ethos is.

He begins with liberalism—not the natural-rights liberalism of Hobbes or Locke but the utilitarian liberalism of Bentham. Bentham grounds happiness in a human nature that does not itself have moral content, but simply must be accommodated because its core, pleasure and pain, is ineluctable. For Bentham, “any practical, theoretical, or moral principle that violates the capacity of human beings for the enjoyment of pleasure is, by definition, perverse and sophistic.” By his account, moral obligation arises not from duty but from a sentiment, sympathy—itself pleasurable. “The sheer immediacy of the physical sensation of pleasure… is the one true source of human happiness,” the “ultimate good for which all human beings exist.” Rejecting the moral claim of the ‘ancients,’ who integrated “enjoyment into the economy of sacrifice and deferral that is proper to the moral community of the Polis,” Bentham subordinates all political and social institutions to the pleasure of individuals. His successor, John Stuart Mill demurs to the extent that he insists that “not all pleasures are equal” (famously, in Mill’s words, “it is better to be a human being satisfied than a pig satisfied”); nonetheless, Mills also subordinates the modern state to the happiness of individuals, thus redefined and ranked. But this, Abbinnett argues (following Mill, as it happens) undermines the legitimacy of unbridled capitalism, leading at very least to welfare-state liberalism or to democratic socialism.

Hegel moves in for the kill, rejecting utilitarian individualism for the social-political concept of ‘recognition.’ For Abbinnett, the crux of Hegel’s refutation points to the inadequacy of any notion of happiness that refers only to the individual and its physical satisfaction; human satisfaction filters through our social relations, how we understand ourselves in large measure by our exposure to the opinions of others, very much including their opinions of ourselves. For his part, Nietzsche attacks even this wider conception of happiness or satisfaction, although he shares with Hegel a disdain for “the proliferation of desires that takes place through the modern market economy,” whose ‘consumerism’ collides with the inevitable fact of death. Famously, Nietzsche analyzes human life not in terms of the dialectics of recognition but in terms of the will to power, which Hegelian ‘recognition’ merely exemplifies. Hegel’s rational, administrative state is only another example of the modern state itself, that “cold monster,” as Nietzsche calls it.

To counter the modern dilemma, Nietzsche proposes self-overcoming, including the rejection of the terms of utilitarian pleasure seeking and of Hegelian (and Marxist) sociality. Overcoming physical appetites and aversions and also social ambitions and worries requires fearlessness, risk, living dangerously. Abbinnett contends that liberalism under Nietzsche’s influence becomes the ‘neoliberalism’ or libertarianism of Friedrich von Hayek (unjustly, he should rather have said Ayn Rand), with its esteem for entrepreneurial risk-taking and innovation, a “quasi-Nietzschean vitalism.” But this only returns us to capitalism’s “constant expansion of desire” in the individual, again subject to the ultimate limitation of death, and of the fear of death. Abbinnett implausibly attempts to tie this form of neoliberalism to Francis Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History, at the price of ignoring the Platonic dimension of Fukuyama’s argument, which grounds his thought in an understanding of human nature well beyond utilitarian pleasure and pain, and also beyond Nietzschean spiritedness, and not simply in ‘History.’ He goes on to charge Fukuyama with “conceal[ing] the modes of violence and subjection through which global-technological capitalism operates.” Abbinnett needs to do so because he rejects the idea of human nature as a ‘constant,’ whether so conceived as an existing ‘constant’ (as in natural-rights and also utilitarian thinkers) or as a future one (as in the Hegelian-Marxist ‘end of History’).

Abbinnett charges liberalism and its capitalism (or, as he might say, capitalism and its liberalism) with a self-contradictory “demand for the constant expansion of the market” “completely uncoupled from the moral economy of collective wellbeing,” and thus with “the ethical questions that are implicit in the concept of happiness.” Can ‘postmodernism’ help?

No, at least not in its aestheticist forms. There can be no escape from modernity into, for example, music, as Schopenhauer urges. Here Abbinnett has recourse to Marx, for whom “the ‘happiness’ produced by the ideals of heroism, romantic love, freedom, and redemption that have come to dominate the artistic imagination can be no more than an illusion imposed upon the experience of alienation,” an experience produced by capitalism. Once again, however, Abbinnett wants to complicate matters, regarding Marxian materialism insufficient and recalling the seriousness with which Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida treat “the aesthetic dimension of modernity.” Hegel recalls “the aesthetic unity of the Polis,” which Romanticism, for all its irrationalism, nonetheless sought to recover for the modern world. True, the “beautiful soul” of Romanticism can never suffice by itself, but it forms a necessary part of Hegel’s dialectical synthesis. The “crude utility” of bourgeois life seeks escape into “Romantic fantasies,” but both utility and aesthetic satisfaction may be found in the craft and trade guilds that give modern civil society—otherwise restless and atomistic under conditions of capitalism—the stability human beings would otherwise lack under those conditions. Abbinnett takes the point, while deploring the “conservatism” of such “corporate” structures.

Nietzsche is no ‘conservative.’ He takes Schopenhauer’s analysis of music and removes its merely contemplative component, contending that “the choral accompaniment to the [Greek tragic] drama provokes feelings of ecstatic unity with those tragic individuals who have tested the authority of the gods.” The “transformative power of the tragic arises from a feeling of sublime unity with the primordial force of creation.” Such force never rests. Therefore, “the truth cannot be presented in a form that is free from stylistic configuration,” from the current but not lasting state of reality or ‘Being.’ ‘Being’ “has no objective existence that can be expressed independently of the mythological powers of Dionysus and Apollo,” that is, of irrational energy and rational form, both in constant flux. Modern ‘culture’ fails to cultivate; “the means of cultural dissemination”—serving the ‘many,’ the ‘masses,’ the demos—has “all but stripped the aesthetic of its relationship to the tragedy of ethical life, and transformed it into the medium of homogenous desire,” of egalitarianism. Democracy, socialism make “the highest end of humanity” nothing better than “the alleviation of all contingency in the mode of production,” the “alleviation of suffering” which simultaneously would amount to “the end of the possibility of happiness.” Without tragedy, no possibility of joy can survive. Socialism is only another power-relation, deriving from and not really overcoming “bourgeois culture.” Against this, Abbinnett recurs to “the cautious precision of Adorno’s negative dialectics,” which “remains suspicious of such solicitations of individual will and creative conflict” as theoretical invitations to fascism in practice.

Derrida to the rescue. At least partially. Derrida questions the “Socratic hegemony,” by which he means “the claim that the fundamental concepts deployed by philosophy as such are unaffected by the languages in which they are expressed.” But according to him, language is both conventional and to some considerable degree untranslatable; he offers a new and more sophisticated form of classical conventionalism, itself a form of pre-Socratic philosophy. Even Heidegger’s attempt to recover pre-Socratic thought is “contaminated by the abstract categories through which it is presented”; it gives insufficient weight to the vagaries of language, of convention. The vast quantity of conventions, of ‘differences,’ results in “constant transformation,” whereby (for example) “fascism re-emerges as the good defender of the homeland against immigration” and “socialism becomes the reactionary voice of the white working class,” all attempts at “conjur[ing] an experience of unity from an illimitable play of difference.” It is enough to make Abbinnett turn to Marx, as he does in his central chapter.

As is well known, Marx came to reject Hegel’s Absolute Spirit in favor of dialectical materialism. “Bourgeois ideals” have no existence independence of their economic base, that is, the means of production. Marxism persists, Abbinnett maintains, because it offers a “critique of the economics of waste”; it promises “the overthrow of the bourgeois state”; it proposes a “theory of the immanent purpose of human history” in the classless or egalitarian society; it provides a “theory of radical democracy and distributive justice” based upon that egalitarianism; and it offers “a theory of human flourishing.” But Derrida observes that Marxism, too, remains vulnerable to a “plurality of contestations” or contradictory opinions “through which the fate of Marxism is constantly redetermined.” As technology redefines our social world it also redefines Marxist categories; for example, the bourgeois-proletarian relations Marx saw no longer exist, at least not in anything resembling the modern societies of the mid-nineteenth century. Accordingly, there is always, and must always be, a ‘New’ Left, absent the ever-receding ‘end of history.’ Marx’s central ‘moral’ doctrine, the “labor theory of value,” comes into question under the very socio-economic change that Marx himself considered the energy and stuff of ‘History.’ Abbinnett nonetheless concedes to Marx that “any neo-Hegelian politics of happiness must… begin with Marx’s characterization of the bourgeois epoch as ‘everlasting agitation'” or dialectic. But it must not end there, given the violence of Marxian practice, which is “bound up with a mythology of natural happiness” or “species-being” (emphasis added), despite Marx’s historicist ambitions. “The programmatic liquidation of classes deemed to be reactionary elements of the old order makes no sense unless it is understood as an attempt to purify society of everything that could be considered acquisitive, individualistic, or bourgeois”; under such an ethic, ‘freedom’ “becomes utterly idealized and utterly destructive.” Given this grim fact, is it “possible to be a happy socialist”? Evidently not, inasmuch as “there is a tension between the ultimate satisfaction of man’s species-being under the conditions of socialized production and the power of capital constantly to transform the intellect, sensibility, and desire of human beings.” Accordingly, Abbinnett rejects Marxian “historical teleology” altogether.

Nietzsche, then? Abbinnett rightly observes that Nietzsche would regard Marxism as a result of democracy or egalitarianism and of embourgeoisement, and assuredly not of their overcoming. To Nietzsche, Marxism would offer only another “unitary regime of calculative materialism.” Marxism offers “the constant vacillation of workers’ movements between the utopian promise of universal creativity and the Sisyphean labor of equalizing the of all in the means of subsistence.” This notwithstanding, Abbinnett tries to redeem socialism in Nietzschean terms—a characteristic move of the ‘postmodern’ Left. He attempts to reconcile socialism with Nietzsche’s will to power. This, he sees, would entail “a total transformation of what ‘socialism’ means.” This will require “the power of those who have disciplined the chaos of their own organic nature to impose order on the formlessness of ‘the herd,'” the actions of “those ‘free spirits’ who are capable of enacting their desires.” “Can this Nietzschean genealogy of socialism be mapped onto the ethical, political, and epistemic assemblage of Marxism?” Abbinnett bravely asks. Yes, he answers (against those of us who would say, ‘Not really’): Marxism offers “the possibility of a radical transvaluation of the social covenant that comes with each new generation”; Marxian Nietzscheism would jettison Marx’s teleological scientism, Marx’s proud claim to have formulated the first scientific socialism. “New categories are required to understand both the experiences of suffering and exploitation that arise from the global networks of capitalism, and the technological integration of mind, organism, body, and life into the expanded regime commodification” seen in those networks. Abbinnett makes lemonade of the bitter lemon of the pursuit of happiness: Socialism’s “pursuit of universal happiness can neither be realized nor, as an inherently ethical demand, given up.” But if so, why does this not simply reproduce the Platonic and Aristotelian insight that theory is not practice, albeit at the service of a dogmatic egalitarianism?

Abbinnett devotes his final two chapters to disposing of two rivals to this highly attenuated Marxism, a Marxism in which the ‘neo’ overbalances the Marxism. In the first, fascism, he finds its “appeal” in an “aesthetic solicitation of suprahuman powers which exceed the commonality of human suffering,” an amoral and “destructive” culture which, in its purest form, Nazism, broke with the Christian Church and the regime of monarchy by determining “to colonize the feelings of sacred devotion that were inspired by the church” in a form of “volkish militancy” expressed by “the mass aesthetics of broadcast technologies” deployed in the service of “a politically transformative power.” On Nazism or national socialism, Abbinnett suddenly becomes much more concrete and political in his analysis, much less ‘spiritual’/philosophic than he was on neo-Marxian socialism. He can then claim, with Adorno, that “Nazism is essentially a politics of scapegoating” (emphasis added—an attack on Jews and other ‘others’—even though in practice Marxism has been no less ‘essentially’ that, with the target being socio-economic classes instead of ‘races.’ Although fascism in its Nazi form obviously derives from modern ‘race science,’ he describes it as “an ideology that promises happiness through the complete rejection of modernity, and the return to an archaic community of ‘blood and soil.'” But the Nazi community of ‘blood and soil’ would have nothing archaic about it. Aryan blood will extend throughout the soil of the earth, availing itself of modern technology as its legitimate tool of ruling those ‘inferior’ races Nazis choose not to exterminate.

Abbinnett offers this critique of fascism because he needs to turn Nietzsche into an egalitarian channel, a move that can only be pushed behind a very heavy plow. Nietzsche, he remarks, anticipates fascism with his hierarchy of the strong over the weak and his ‘biologist’ materialism. His valorization of “overcoming” “inevitably and necessarily lends itself to the intensification of life through the spectacle of violence,” which it would indeed, if Nietzsche were the straightforward materialist Abbinnett takes him to be. But Nietzsche despises anti-Semitism, biological or other, and his materialism entails a far more refined life of the mind than anything offered by the crudities of Marxism, ‘neo’ or Karlite. This is not to endorse Nietzscheism; it is to defend it against the likes of Adorno, Derrida, and other apostles of an uncritical egalitarianism.

Fascist pseudo-religiosity puts Abbinnett in mind of the real thing, to which he devotes his final chapter. Except he doesn’t write about the real thing, focusing instead on religion as conceived by Hegel and Nietzsche. For Hegel, he rightly observes, “revealed religion should act as an allegorical expression of spirit”—that is, the Absolute Spirit—”within the relations of civil society.” The separateness of the Holy Spirit from all created things, including man, distinguishes the Holy Spirit from Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, but the Christian teaching that God took human form, along with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit upon conversion, brings Christianity closer to Hegel’s doctrine than any other major religion. Abbinnett’s “principal concern” here “is the return of religion to the increasingly abstract, disenchanted, and antagonistic relations of modernity” after Nietzsche’s radical challenge to Hegelian rationalism. If the Enlightenment project has failed, then why would religion not return, as registered in (for example) Gilles Kepel’s The Revenge of God? Indeed, “as the world becomes increasingly abstract and technocratic, so the yearning for the experience of the sacred grows stronger.” Heaven forfend, Abbinnett in effect exclaims. “We must ask if the happiness of humanity will always depend on the power of sacrificial violence” (including the Crucifixion) “and the hope of transcendental unity with the divine” (which isn’t exactly what Christians hope for, but Hegelianized ex-Christians do). Abbinnett wants the answer to be ‘No.’

“From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, Nietzschean materialism is nihilistic because pure will, freed from its responsibilities to a transcendent God, has no concrete relation either to other human beings or to its own essence as a created form. From a Nietzschean perspective, on the other hand, Christianity is nihilistic because of its denial of the creative forces that brought form and vitality to human civilization.” Abbinnett declines to adjudicate the matter, preferring to address the sociopolitical consequences of Nietzsche’s challenge to Christianity and to the Enlightenment. “First, we are forced to reckon with the necessary involvement of religion with the secular forces that have formed the regime of domination that is peculiar to each different culture.” Second, “the death of religion that Nietzsche envisages” will end in its resurrection, a “reversion to orthodoxy” “within the globalized relations of modernity.” Third, the return of religion presages a return to the religious wars the Enlightenment hoped to end. Abbinnett hopes to turn this return to a more narrowly moral path: a politics of compassion, of “alleviat[ing] the suffering of the Other.” The political ramification of this morality is, of course, socialism.

For this purpose, he again appeals to Derrida, who “argues that there are two sources of the word religion, both of which are irreducible, and each of which is contaminated by the other”: religiere, derived from legere or harvest, gathering; and religare, derived from ligare, meaning to tie or bind. The ‘binding’ element consists of “blind faith in the sacred”; the ‘harvest’ element consists of a “discursive community of the book” which discloses the sacred. Abbinnett knows that fascism’s symbol, the Roman fasces, denotes binding, and that Hitler’s Mein Kampf amounts to an attempted Bible-substitute. This enables him to assert that fascism and religion bear resemblance to one another, issuing in similar calls for confessional purity and “holy war.” He ignores that Marxism operates exactly the same way; the modern tyrannies of the Right and the Left gather men together in bonds requiring self-sacrifice in violent struggle. He prefers a kinder, gentler Marxism, but one might as well prefer a kinder, gentler ‘authoritarianism’ of the Right. In this he follows Derrida, who finds “the essence of all religious faith” in “the original promise of religiere,” that the faithful “should seek the truth of God in whatever, or whomever, confronts the sacred community.” This reinvents Enlightenment religious toleration (while avoiding Enlightenment rationalism) under the rubric of ‘diversity.’

Abbinnett concludes with an inconclusiveness that follows from his argument. While “each of us experiences our own particular moments of joy, love, and ecstasy,” “contingent and unsustainable,” a politics of happiness cannot exist because political life, for all its turbulence, requires some degree of stability and sustainability—as suggested by the quintessential political term, ‘regime.’ The radical historicism Abbinnett shares with Heidegger and Derrida prevents  him from endorsing any real political order. His socialism is exactly that: a course of social relations, fluid and ever-changing, resistant to structure and duration, a thing founded (if that is the word) on egalitarian “mutual recognition.” In this it resembles the commercial capitalism he deplores. Like it, it would require defenders in order to survive those who are not egalitarians, but that would spoil it. “We must recognize that happiness is a moral experience that can only be approached through the presence of others, both familiar and unfamiliar, to whom we must respond without the expectation of requital.” But what if those others requite us the wrong way? Christianity says, Turn the other cheek. But Christianity has God as the final requite. Abbinnett’s endless ‘History’ does not.