Will Morrisey Reviews

“Who would have imagined that these sons of a materialistic generation would have greeted death with such ardor?”
—Ernst Jünger

“Our writers used to do their utmost to expose the humbug, deceitfulness, fraudulence, and even the secret crimes of outwardly decent, genteel, and smiling people, but it is a lucky society in which despicable behavior at least has to be disguised.”
—Nadezhda Mandelstam

 

A few years before Jünger’s essay appeared, Winston Churchill described the Great War as a combination of pre-Christian ruthlessness with modern national and technological power. “When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific Christian States had been unable to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility” (The World Crisis). The nineteenth century culminated in something unforeseen: thumotic utilitarianism. The Great Society produced the Great War, as progress in education, science, and the political economies of the nations provided the riches possible materials for conflagration: “When all the trumpets sounded, every class and rank had something to give to the need of the State.” “Far more than their vices, the virtues of nations ill-directed or misdirected by their rulers, became the cause of their own undoing and of the general catastrophe.” But such misrule calls into question the character of the Machiavellian/Baconian enterprise, the conquest of Fortuna: “One rises from the study of the causes of the Great War with a prevailing sense of the defective control of individuals”—even the most powerful individuals—”upon world fortunes.” Or, as John Keegan puts it, the generals were gripped in “a spirit not of providing for eventualities, but rather of attempting to preordain the future,” a spirit that led the old regimes to military and political self-destruction.

Churchill diagnosed the debacle as the result of the substitution of “national passions” for religious ones. “Almost one might think the world wished to suffer. Certainly men were everywhere eager to dare.” Having hectored themselves for more than a century concerning their insipid materialism and narrow individualism, segments of the bourgeoisie tried heroism. The war may be partly ascribed to moral uplift gone mad. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche—along with such lesser lights as Carlyle, Ruskin, Barrès, and Wagner—all attempted in various ways either to elevate the bourgeois lump or to explode it. They nearly succeeded.

Most commercial republicans learned the lesson, and spent subsequent years attempting to promote peace, however ineptly. Wilson had seen the Kantian apocalypse, and readied the Kantian solution—the League of Nations. Lloyd George and Clemenceau were not ready, but their mild-mannered successors were. The Germans—those poets, philosophers, and musicians had played more lovingly with thumotic fires—needed more convincing. So did the Russians, who had never been bourgeois in the first place, and were now in the ideological grasp of a ‘German.’

America won the Great War, Ernst Jünger claims. In a triumph of the only real commercial-republican art form, advertising, Americans cloaked self-interest in the regnant ideology of constitutionalism and humanitarianism. But—what might have been! Had Germans not been European-all-too-European, had they been uninhibited by vestigial ‘old-regime’ habits, that “mixture of false romanticism and inadequate liberalism”—habits “at heart… not Prussian”: then the youth of Germany, “glowing, enraptured, hungering after death,” nobly despising bourgeois self-preservation, joyfully would have made themselves instruments of the most glorious triumph. Had there only been leaders ready to give German youth “direction, awareness, and form,” then the spirit of the nation would have fused with the spirit of the age, “heroic spirit” with “severe necessity.”

Jünger senses that the ‘dialectically’ progressivist historicism of the nineteenth century amounts to a thumotic appeal to the human soul, and a critique of the commercial-republican solution to religious strife. ‘Germanism’ (so to speak) has “cultic” dimensions, “the force of faith”;  “the great popular church” of the nineteenth century combines utilitarian ‘realism’ with the absolutism utilitarians dislike. As the near-culmination of this synthesis, the Great War destroyed the old monarchies, the last regimes that respected limits, by means of “Total Mobilization,” i.e., democracy plus bureaucracy, the disciplined participation of all elements in society for a single unifying purpose. The bourgeois social contract is demolished by the revival of the Hobbesian war of all against all—with the crucial difference that “all” now means societies, not weak individuals who are ready to fall into each others’ arms in a new ‘contract.’ Wilson was betting that the national societies, too, would do exactly that, but Jünger matches that bet and raises it.

The social bonds of these new societies will be far more powerful than the rational calculations of individuals. The ‘inner logic’ of ‘History’ may be seen in the unintended participation even of the soi-disant critics of the State: pacifists on the battlefield; Marxian socialists abandoning their economic determinism for the trenches; nihilists cheering for the Fatherland. The victory of Americanism can be reversed, the true end of ‘History’ achieved, if Germans will only listen to their Prussian soul, realize themselves, bring out “the new race” of the “deep Germany,” author of “a new form of domination.” Even now, bourgeois esteem for equality—prosperity and votes—gives way to the thumotic passions of national socialism. “Behind every exit, marked with the symbols of happiness, lurk pain and death. Happy is he alone who steps armed into these spaces.”

Walter Benjamin sees that historical materialism is surreptitious theology, a way of reviving many of the passions commercial republicanism sought to redirect, but with the added danger of asserting that in this world might makes right. “[P]oliticians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis,’ and, finally, their servile integration into an uncontrollable apparatus [cf. Churchill] have been three aspects of the same thing,” and it is sobering to see that Benjamin here criticizes the relatively benign social democrats, not the Stalins or Hitlers. “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current.” This Whiggish tale of corruption, which John Adams rightly insisted could be told of classes high and low, recurs with added vehemence when ‘History’ inflates material ambitions with unstable ‘spiritual’ gases.

Once victorious, modern tyranny reconstitutes the original version of the Hobbesian state of nature, as may be seen (in different ways) in Mandelstam and Jean Améry. In Mandelstam’s telling, “self-government” under Stalin meant control by mutual surveillance—gossip armed with a truncheon. The real Absolute Spirit turns out to be the Terror democratized, made pervasive, atomizing all social relations by making them impossible to rely on. (It took Stalin for twentieth-century intellectuals to relearn what Tocqueville had to say about despotism.) Mandelstam shows that social relations require taking things for granted—such things as decent habits and hypocrisies, reasonable expectations, ordinariness. The inclination to lay bare social relations, subjecting them to unsparing analysis, destroying bourgeois decadence in preparation for some vast, envisioned new creation: all of this unfailingly results in thumos turning in on itself, making life in the anti-society solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and (often decidedly) short.

Améry unforgettably describes the ultimate anti-society, the concentration camp. He missteps in arguing that Hitlerism was even worse than Stalinism; Nazism most assuredly did have an “idea of man,” namely, the Aryan conqueror, and it likely would have suffered the same welcome ossification as its proletarian counterpart on the ‘Left,’ had it survived. But if this is an error, it is an understandable one; to each his own Hell. Amery’s testimony concerning the impotence of intellect in Auschwitz illustrates not only the obvious point—you can’t think your way out of a well-organized death camp—but also the not-at-all obvious point that in late modernity intellect has lost its primary object, a point well made by Benda, years before the Second World War.

To say that, in Auschwitz, “intellect had to capitulate unconditionally in the face of reality” means that there was no intellectually respectable ‘court of appeal’ from this concentration of social antimatter. Améry courageously rejects the claim that unassisted human intellect can discover God or ‘History,’ even when the prospect of torture and death concentrate the mind wonderfully. Contra religious and secular-historicist prophecy, the intellect cannot grasp the future, much less shape it. There is a terrible dilemma here: Because the late-modern intellectual’s own intellectual moorings are predominantly social, with a special emphasis on “respect for power”—a mild form of historicism—he cannot adapt even in a limited, ‘merely intellectual’ way to the supreme, ‘totalizing’ historicism, the supreme power-worship, of the death camp. The philosopher’s unassisted intellect, unhinged from its object, nature, by historicist doctrines or secularist ‘religions,’ short-circuits’ in the camp, which, being socially ‘total,’ seems the most real of realities to him. Had Augustine been sent to a death camp, he would have been as miserable physically as anyone else, but he would have faced the brutal fact without intellectual or spiritual disorientation.

This anti-society has its “antiman,” the torturer, a would-be anti-god who would transform his enemy into nothing but body, then into nothing at all. More, the torturer wants to torture the whole world, “realize his own total sovereignty,” become “master over flesh and spirit, life and death.” This is much more than “the total inversion of the social world,” as Amery calls it. It is the inversion of natural right, that supposedly naïve and superficial doctrine that profound ‘historical thinkers’ rejected. Amery’s experience is the most powerful ‘negative’ argument in support of the existence of natural right. “Amazed,” the tortured person “experiences that in this world there can be the other as absolute sovereign, and sovereignty revealed itself as the power to inflict suffering and to destroy. The dominion of the torturer over his victim has nothing in common with the power of social contracts.” Precisely: it is the purpose of social contracts to prevent such dominion. Those boring, bourgeois, Lockean impediments to tyranny have their modest place, after all.

In Homer, the heroism on which Jünger and his epigoni keen has its limit: death, the response to which is the fraternity of enemies, Achilles and Priam breaking bread. In Plato, the apparently irreconcilable conflict between thumos and eros is limited by logos and the nature it discovers. The tragic demi-gods of the epics and tragedies and the comic demi-god, the philosophe, of the Platonic dialogues are just that: demi-gods, part god, part mortal human. In Christianity, there is again the man-God who finds—indeed sets—limits. Machiavelli’s centaur, who counsels princes to conquer Fortuna, is the half-man, half-beast who will rule all ‘gods’ and (in the Baconian version) nature too. His limits are only circumstantial; in principle they can be overcome. Nietzsche radicalizes Machiavelli: The philosopher now is neither man-god nor beast-man, but a beast-god, a being of unlimited appetite or eros an unlimited power, the apotheosis of libido dominandi. Nietzsche prudently sees that only the few should aspire to such being, but his vulgarizers, ‘Left’ and ‘Right,” are predictably less cautious and additionally possessed of Wagnerian—no, more, Jüngerian—hubris.

The course of Western thought since Rousseau has shown how the thumotic critique of the ‘bourgeois’ or self-limiting, self-governing form of modernity became progressively wilder and self-entrapped: a concentration camp in theory leading to concentration camps in practice. Rousseau’s critique retains the limit of nature, although human nature conceived as more or less infinitely malleable provides modest limits, indeed. Hegel’s critique eschews natural right altogether, but sets itself the limit of the ‘end of history,’ which, immodestly but safely, happens to occur in the mind of the sane bureaucrat, Hegel. But in Marx the end of history is material, and in the future; there are no limits or conceptual constraints on how to get there, only an infinitely malleable ‘dialectic.’ In Nietzsche there is not even the vague limit of the end of history; the limit is rather in the conflict of wills, the most powerful and (so he hopes) refined subordinating all the others. ‘Postmodernism’ merely exaggerates the defects of all these later systems.

The task for political theory is to discover or rediscover conceptual constraints that can be translated into practice. In the meantime, the ‘bourgeois’ solution is the best available—to be criticized, but with equanimity and an occasional dose of modesty. There is some substantial good in much-despised ‘banality.’

If Fortuna is a woman, what then? Beat her into submission, Machiavelli urges. Sweep aside all effeminacy (that is, Christianity), and conquer.

Machiavellian spiritedness did not so much conquer the Christian spirit as amalgamate with it, yielding the wars that wracked Europe in the 17th century. Then a saner modernism emerged, one that channeled manly spiritedness into the peaceful bays of commerce and republicanism.

There was a problem with the commercial republican solution. It could not satisfy the most spirited men and women, whom such glory as parliamentarism conferred could never satisfy, for whom business was a bore. Beginning with Rousseau, who revives Machiavelli’s founder in the person of the Legislator, moderns seek a vaster scope for their ambitions than bourgeois waters afford.

The tribe of the lion and the eagle: Stalin was such a predator. The Foundations of Leninism introduces readers to a distinctly modern tyrant, one who justifies his actions according to a comprehensive doctrine reducible to a partisan ‘platform.’ The Party, like the Machiavellian prophet, must not go forth “completely unarmed” (102). The Party must be both “bold” and “flexible,” leonine and vulpine (102-103). The Party’s very doctrine is a weapon; “the Party must be armed with revolutionary doctrine” (103). The Party determines the content of its prophecy in accordance with “a knowledge of the laws of revolution”—laws of kinesis, unlike the laws of yesterday, which do not stabilize human societies but heat and reshape them. The Party does not merely govern; it guides. The head of the Party is no statesman; he is the leader of the Party even as the Party “must lead the proletariat” (103-104), which leads all humanity. The Americans had compared Washington to the leader, Moses, during war, then to Cincinnatus in peacetime. So long as there is the Party, there will be no peace. The Party consists of “the General Staff” (104) of the proletarian army, conquering Fortune—the fluctuating, circulating, up-and-down stock market life of the bourgeoisie. Like Machiavelli’s army in The Art of War, the Party replaces virtue with virtù, piety with discipline. ‘Civic life’ be damned; the proletarian dictatorship has a world to win, and no time for the chattering slackers of parliament buildings and newspaper offices.

“The Party is the embodiment of unity of will, unity incompatible with the existence of factions” (113). James Madison need not enlist; his are the devices of the commercial-republican halfway-house, a drafty structure of rickety architecture, to be demolished by a new, more scientific Corps of Engineers adept at gaining the masses’ “conscious and voluntary submission,” which Stalin (ever the ex-seminarian) rightly sees as the only “truly iron discipline” (114). These incorruptible disciplinarians shall purge their ranks of petty-bourgeois opportunistic polluters, whose dispirited “spirit of demoralization and uncertainty” accords ill with the new spiritedness, the new scientific faith or dialectical prophecy of the bringers of the new order. And what could be more certain than death? Charles de Gaulle told André Malraux that “Stalin said only one serious thing to me: ‘In the end, death is the only winner.'” Genocidal terror gets ‘History’ on your side, with no back-talk. What could be more unifying than a mass grave”

Stalin, straightforwardly a tyrant, needs smart sycophants willing to trick himout in attractive finery. Georg Luckács does the honors, doing himself no honor thereby. His apologia for Stalin is a contemptible performance, and one of the most valuable any young ‘intellectual’—to say nothing of “the young generation of the Communist Party”—could read. It shows how not to be an intellectual, how an intelligent person can ‘dialecticize’ his way into a sacrificio d’intellectio that excuses mass murder, emitting polysyllabic sonorities and gesturing nobly all the while.

Lukács correctly sees that Marx transforms transcendence into immanence, divinizing the course of human events and above—no, wrong metaphor: beyond—all else exalts the Party and its Leader. There are no conceptual constraints on the Leader’s tactics; they are, in Lukács’s fine phrase, “conceptually indeterminable.” They sure are—with a vengeance. “The sense of world history” (which is no rigid concept) alone determines the Leader’s tactics.

This yields a new super-imperative, ‘super’ because it is no longer categorical but supremely spirited: Act as if your action or inaction will change the destiny of the world, All is partisan; the only right consciousness is class-consciousness; you are either with us or against us.

So far, this is standard Marxist fare. But the special Lukácsian signature comes at the end. Ardent but sensitive young comrades, our consciences must not be allowed to make cowards of us all. Prince-of-Denmark vacillation can never be allowed to persist in a young captain of the world-historical revolution. Virtue must become a noble tragic sacrifice of the priests of virtù, inspirited by the historical Law—rather as Christians are adjured to allow the Holy Spirit to think and act through them, martyrs if they must be. So, as I advance upon my class enemy, truncheon in hand, intending to break his kidneys, I shall assure him, ‘This is going to hurt me even more than it will hurt you. I am no Sadist, taking pleasure in your pain. I do more than feel your pain; I feel my own far more exquisite and tragical agony.’

By contrast, Rosa Luxemburg shows distinct signs of sanity and decency. She does not lack a certain old-Whig charm, with her insistence that the proletarian democratic-dictatorship replacing the bourgeois democratic-dictatorship retain the proven forms of republican civic life. She truly sees that rule by terror ultimately will demoralize and not re-inspirit the too-spirited terrorizers. In partly excusing the Leninists by arguing C’est la guerre, she exhibits (calculatedly, perhaps) that winning if foolish generosity her enemies despised.

Her mistake is obvious and comes early. In 1917 Russia, “The democratic republic was the complete, internally ripened product of the first onset of the revolution.” Wrong metaphor: in Russia the democratic republic was the weak infant of the revolution. It needed the most patient nurture, this child of a people who, unlike the Americans of 1776, had little if any experience in self-government. She compounds her error by endorsing the vast project of nationalizing agriculture under large, state-run farms. If done Leninistically, this will bring bureaucratic centralism, injuring civic involvement. If done democratically (as Luxemburg wishes it were) it will load the backs of infant democrats with adult complications unsolved by the most mature republicans. Never fear, she assures us, predicting that “living history,” especially in its scientific-socialist phase, “has the fine habit of always producing with any real social need the means to its satisfaction, along with the task simultaneously the solution.” Caught you, you Emersonian. Would that it were so.

Like his countryman Machiavelli, Filippo Tomasso Marinetti is a founder. Like Machiavelli’s founders, Marinetti’s are men alone. (Even Machiavelli’s Centaur makes an appearance in The Futurist Manifesto, Machiavelli’s educator of founders.) Marinetti’s founders, like Machiavelli’s, distrust the deceiving senses of sight (classical philosophy) and hearing (Biblical prophecy), but while the politic Machiavelli commends the sense of touch—caressing or annihilating, as circumstances dictate—the artist Marinetti cries, “The scent, the scent alone is enough for our beasts,” our “young lions.” Surely taste will not be the sense preferred, smacking as it does of bourgeois proprieties and genteel refinement.

As in Machiavelli, the castles-in-the-air of old philosophies and faiths must be brought to earth. Away, pachyderms of “pensive immobility”: “There is no more beauty.” Masterpieces must be spirited, “aggressive.” Sing, goddess, of “the man at the wheel”—not on the wheel—of Fortune. “Time and Space died yesterday,” conquered by the speeding vanguard. Like modernity itself up to his time, Marinetti begins with Machiavelli and ends with Nietzsche. Pitliess, ‘unjust’ action and creativity constitute the only real art, which is the best of life, which is superior to truth.

André Breton shares this ‘life-over-conscience’ view, which he associates with freedom, “the only word that still excites me.” His freedom is freedom of imagination, which “alone offers me some intimation of what can be.” In The Surrealist Manifesto, he does not explain why imagination does not equally and perhaps more likely offer me intimations of what cannot be, except in dreams. Realism be damned; it is mediocre, hateful, boring, the stuff of novels.

Breton criticizes logic, meaning analytical logic; he wants do delimit analysis not by noēsis but by imagination. Looking for noēsis, he finds fantasia. The dream is an isle of unlimited, self-satisfying spiritedness or thumos in a vast sea of bourgeois/analytical-rational banality. Like any thumotic personality, he longs for certainty. In this sense he is a Cartesian who rejects Cartesian method, Cartesian rationalism. He drams of a synthesis of dream and reality, surreality, which alone will have the absolute properties of Hegel’s end-of-history with none of the latter’s constricting finality. Surreality is reminiscent of the thumotic Carlyle’s “Natural Supernaturalism.” Surrealism is the dream of Machiavelli’s lion untampered by the shrewdness of Machiavelli’s fox: “Isn’t what matters that we be masters of ourselves, the masters of women and of love too”? To love is to love some thing or some one; love implies the noetic limits imposed by the nature of the object or person loved. but the thumotic man wants to master love, experience pure freedom. Surrealism will make praxis poetic, in acts of Nietzschean fortitude and endurance: having borne, camel-like, the burdens of bourgeois life, having rebelled leoninely, the new artist will be as a dreaming child.

It turns out that Breton too has a method. Thumos must be freed, but only indirectly (and paradoxically) by an act of passivity. This act is ‘automatic writing’ or ‘stream-of-consciousness,’ whereby ‘Freudian’ subconscious forces are tapped without the unfree, scientistic, analytical trappings of Herr Doktor’s couch. This exercise could happen no more in the ancient world, with its sense of limits and balance, than in Christendom, with its fears that such spiritual exercises could call up real demons. (Surrealism is a modest curlicue on the line of Satanists and mock-Satanists of Romanticism and the later ‘Decadence,’ the line that runs, in different ways, from Sade and Blake through Les Fleurs du Mal and such ‘spiritualist’ doctrines as Theosophy. Hence Breton: “We cross what the occultists call dangerous territory.”

Surrealist freedom does necessarily not end in anarchy. Breton quotes Baudelaire on the spontaneous and despotic coming of Surrealist images. ‘Sovereignal freedom’ is the result of unlimited freedom. It is as if Rousseau’s solitary walker also wanted to be Rousseau’s Legislator. A “new morality” will be imposed, but, like many a founder, Surrealist man writes books and denies authorship of them. Like Machiavelli’s and Marinetti’s founders, he too will be a man alone with a godlike power or “invisible ray” that will enable him to triumph. (Tristan Tzara rehearses these and other Nietzschean tropes more playfully; his attack on the characteristic question of philosophy—What is?—is especially amusing, albeit sophistical.)

In art and in politics, the type of soul Plato calls the guardian no longer wants to guard but to rule. In order to rule thumotically, however, it cannot stand still. It must endlessly assert and reassert its freedom. In politics, the triumph over the limits of nature, of the human body, ends in tyranny and death: a stack of dead bodies. In art, the triumph over life—the free, undefinable future of Futurism, the above-it-all freedom of Sur-realism, the comic freedom of the undefinable (thus free, beyond the whatness of nature Dada—all end in another sort of nothingness, the walls of museums and office builders and rich collectors.