Bruce Charlton's Notions

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Browsing through a book on the premier living German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, and then watching an online interview, I was struck by the pose of omniscience which is a characteristic of modern 'public intellectuals': they have something apparently complex and analytic to say on any socio-political topic that anybody cares to throw at them - the whole thing can be woven into some multi-coloured tapestry.

Sloterdijk, in particular, does this very well; with his shambolic-ex-Viking appearance, and slowly enunciated and sinuous sentences delivered with a twinkle of the eye and a pursing of the lips; as if to say "if this is the kind of thing you want, then here it is; and I can keep this up for as long as you care to listen..'


For much of my early adult life, there is nothing I would have liked better than to be a Sloterdijk-figure; essentially doing and writing pretty much as the spirit moved me, and my pronouncements tracked, reported and discussed in the 'serious' media; causing periodic 'scandals' but always somehow floating above them.

But, really, this kind of multi-valent faux-expertise cannot be good for the soul! Sloterdijk is a vast and wide-ranging consumer of the modern mass media, which he rapidly memorizes and swiftly reframes into arresting and shocking assemblages.

There is no possibility of assimilation - of deep processing - of meditative reflection, it is 99% second-hand reprocessed and unexperienced opinion, there is no over-arching 'project' or strategy, no moral, aesthetic or truth foundations - instead an endless, open-ended production of high-brow commentary and stimulation; ranging here and there and perhaps back again.

After not very long, it makes me hold me head in my hands, and start to beg for mercy. And Sloterdijk is the best of his kind, and far above the US or UK competition (if indeed there is any Anglosphere competition for this kind of thing... Chomsky, perhaps?).

But I wonder what goes on inside Sloterdijk's capacious cranium? Does he ever stop reading and pontificating and writing for long enough to take stock about his place in the nature of things; to reflect that he is merely whiling away his time and our time, in a pleasant and amusing fashion, until he dies and the rest of us die?

Does this, will this, ever seem like an urgent matter; something that requires not just attention, not just more theories and analogies - but an answer?
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The impossibility of being a modern Nietzschian ought to be obvious, but has been spelled out lucidly and irrefutably by Alasdair McIntyre (especially in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 1992) - but most clearly in the phony lives of the most famous/ notorious would-be Nietzschians such as Heidegger and Foucault.

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Another expose of the impossibility of modelling oneself on a nihilist is the leading modern German philosopher - Peter Sloterdijk. It was, indeed, the message of Sloterdijk's first book - Critique of Cynical Reason - which I read first in 1988 - that the only consistent way of taking on board the Nietzschian perspective was to become something like the Kynic Diogenes - in the aspect of supposedly living naked in a barrel, and indulging whatever urge comes into ones head: becoming, in effect, a non-conscious animal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

The idea of this same Diogenes as a kind of Holy Fool, who taught the citizens by stunts designed to expose their absurd pretensions, cannot be included in the Nietzschian ideal, since this is not nihilistic - it is merely a different means to the 'establishment' end of teaching Virtue.

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Thus, for a serious Nietzschian, there is no way of being both sincere and a Professor - and the twentieth century lineage of counter-cultural Professors (including Heidegger and Foucault and their countless tenured radical clones) is abundant evidence of this impossibility.

A person cannot regard Nietzsche as an authority, and believe his ideas; cannot unmask the pretensions of scholarship and write scholarly books on Nietzsche; that same person cannot set himself up as an authority in anti-authoritarian ideas (which must be correctly learned). All this is self-refuting, paradoxical nonsense of the most obvious in-your-face kind.

Such activities reduce to mere careerism, and nothing else whatsoever.

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Peter Sloterdijk has gone down this path himself, presumably with his eyes wide open - and has a successful career as a Professorial Nietzschian and a second string as a Germanic version of the ultra-highbrow TV pundit and culture critic.

All this he richly deserves since the man is vastly erudite, witty and highly creative - a firework box of flashing micro-insights.

Nonetheless, I suppose nobody is more aware than himself of the phony nature of his position and the fakery of his basic existential stance.

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In the end, Sloterdijk is an entertainer - and as such he provides what is good about entertainment, and also what is bad about entertainment - in the sense that his ideas are a vastly interconnected distraction from that fact that they do not and intrinsically cannot add up to anything substantive (which is, in fact, his main substantive thesis).

If someone is looking for meaning, purpose and personal engagement in life; they will not find it from Sloterdijk; they will instead, perhaps, be drawn into an endless conversation which they may enjoy enough to keep them there for a long time - perhaps until it is too late.

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The politically correct are people who do not believe in absolute truth.

Yet they insist that everyone should believe what they are telling them today.

Or else if you do not believe whatever they tell you today, you are evil.

Yet the politically correct do not believe in evil.

What they do believe in is culture - culture is the bottom line 'reality'.

And culture is consensus.

Yet the politically correct believe in the liberation of individual desire: that is, they believe in the overthrow of consensus.

So the bottom line reality for political correctness is... a continually changing, compulsory consensus.

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Is this to be what Richard Rorty described as a 'liberal ironist' - to live passionately by understandings one knows to be temporary and contingent?

Not really - political correctness is better characterized by Peter Sloterdijk's 'enlightened false consciousness' of the modern cynic.

Enlightened = realistic; false consciousness = self-serving illusion.

The combination is a clear eyed awareness of one's own self-manipulating fantasies; fantasies which one also believes absolutely.

To make reality and then to forget one has just made it, and then to remember, critique and re-make reality; and again to forget it - and so on and so forth...

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Neither ironical nor detached; enlightened false consciousness is a severe, rational, anger-fuelled stance which aims to impose meaning and purpose onto life via the continual bureaucratic and authoritarian process of creating and moulding culture - undoing and reversing the inequalities and miseries of the past, and chasing always after the flickering fashions in upper class status.

Culture is arbitrary, yet it is reality; culture is managed, yet it is contingent; culture us everything and irresistible, yet it is nothing and as insignificant as the life of a mayfly.

This enlightened false consciousness collapses into careerism, which collapses into parasitism (life as a permanent holiday, travel, good living), which collapses into the secret-guilty cult of the openly instinctual and unashamed psychopath: the invincible gangster, the irresistible and expert sexual predator, the envied permanently-stoned junkie.

This opposite to the disaffected cynic is what Sloterdijk (in his Critique of Cynical Reason) terms the kynic.

The kynic has (merely) discarded consciousness; has solved the problem of being a modern human in a modern society by becoming an animal and preying upon society.

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But in the cynic and the kynic, Sloterdijk has exhaustively described the possibilities for modern secular life - the bureaucrat who lives inside of culture OR the junkie who lives outside (and upon) culture.

Make your choice.

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Except that the normal, mainstream, generally accepted thing is to alternate between these states.

Hence PC is remarkably tolerant of the kynic; because (to parody Solzhenitsyn):

...the line separating cynic and kynic passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.

This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Even within hearts overwhelmed by kynicism, one small bridgehead of cynicism is retained; and even in the most cynical of all hearts, there remains a small corner of kynicism.



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Browsing the internet, as one does, I discovered a video of the most 'cynical' of my school teachers spouting meaningless management clichés at the end of several decades of a 'successful' career in educational management.

It made me think back to the cynical young men who I have known through my life - the cool, witty guys who tended, grudgingly, to be admired for their detachment.

And how, again and again, these are exactly the people who most comprehensively sell-out - who abandon all principle for expediency.  

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But that is what nearly all managers epitomize, what Peter Sloterdijk (in his Critique of Cynical Reason) named 'enlightened false consciousness': that is to say - managers are in a false position, they know they are in a false position, and they carry on, and do very well, operating from that false position.

What young men call cynicism is an ability to be an organization man in public, to be loyal, to be ruthless, to be a total conformist; but in private wittily to dissociate themselves from what they have implemented, to snigger behind the hand at the process and the policies, to wash their hands of responsibility.

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These cynical people are, in a sense, most of what is most wrong about most of the modern world - middle managers of evil: they 'manage' to feel good about themselves while doing bad.

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In desperate times, where moral inversion dominates discourse; could it be time to try and lead lives in which transcendental priorities are inverted?

Not, of course, to stop fighting the transcendental inversions (evil is good; lies are truth; ugliness is beauty); but to fight them on a different front, where they are less defended.

Not to fight with laws and rules, but with mysticism and authority?

Not to fight claims of status and power with an attempt at the same; but to fight them with failure...

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A particular horror of modernity is the legalism, its procedural quality - a pseudo-rational process of strict definition and algorithmic calculation...

Or, more precisely, its literalism.

How to combat literalism? Well, not (I would say) by an opposing literalism.

And not either by a 'post-modern' denial of reality - obviously not by that!

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This could, perhaps, be fought indirectly, by refusing to enter that arena; by a focus on the mystical aspects.

Not to fight democratic politics (politics without authority - with merely the fake-authority of votes and survey) with ideas of divinely-sanctioned politics, nor pseudo-logic with real logic, nor legalism with laws... that doesn't seem to work.

Indeed I wonder if these weapons have not been turned against us?

But to fight the actually corrupt processes with the non-rational (not irrational) certainties of mysticism - and not our own mysticism, but on authority of real mystics, those much further advanced on the path.

It would perhaps be the best possible approach, in such an era - to be an unsuccessful mystic

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What would it be to give the highest status to mysticism, to try to practice mysticism oneself - but to fail abjectly (of course! how could one succeed under modern conditions?).

(And, anyway, if one did succeed in walking the mystical path - how inevitably it would lead downhill: into the cut-off, self-perpetuating state of spiritual pride)

...to be a fully-acknowledged failed mystic; but not to give-up - to continue being just that!

A failed mystic as a way of life!

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One great advantage is the humour of the situation!

(Mysticism nowadays maybe needs humour, for most of us at least.)

Another could be its subversive effect - it eludes the worldliness and status seeking of modernity.

(To adapt Peter Sloterdijk's terminology) It is a Kynical stance, but not cynical - it fully honours the transcendent: more than that - it bases action on the transcendent.

Subversive of subversion.

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And w.r.t. to the transcendental Goods - how if we put virtue, morality, ethics (especially social ethics) as the lowest of them?

Not of course to deny or disregard the necessity of virtue, but simply to place it lower in current priorities than beauty, and lower also than truth.

Because on the one hand, virtue is corrupted by legalism - and seems always to descend to atomistic discussions of what makes people happy or suffer - while on the other hand, beauty is surely the most disregarded of transcendental Goods in modernity.

For modernity, virtue/ morality/ ethics is the bottom-line, be-all and end-all of the human condition (or rather, the project of subversion of traditional concepts of virtue is this, anyway).

Currently and for a couple of hundred years, beauty is the Good which (deep down, or not very deep down) we believe is not really as important as virtue or truth, beuaty is (to moderns) really just a matter of opinion (or fashion, or money) - because it has no acknowledged laws.

The problem is that beauty fails to be literalizable.

Let us acknowledge this failure, with no quibbling, no excuses.

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(Even when 'modern art' is accorded awards and prizes and government funding, and its practitioners are given status, money and honours - still the public refuse to recognize modern art as... beautiful! So it has given up even pretending to be beautiful. Beauty is apparently not assimilable by bureaucracy.)

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So not literalism, not a virtue focus - but of course strength is necessary. (Especially if we are operating apparently 'alone' in this world - albeit in a great company at the real transcendendal level).

We must be able to draw lines and to refuse to join and cooperate in the social project of soul-destruction (whether or not this involves actually 'saying no')

We must be able to say a firm yes to the Church - but not the corrupt actual Church (although we should be careful not to oppose or damage it) but yes to the mystically pure Church.

A mystical yes to the mystical Church - and not to defend this with logic or literalism.

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To refute wickedness and lies of course - but not with literalism and logic, instead with mystical beauty.

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To refute democracy (managed mob rule by voting); but not with some alternative system but instead with the mystery of authority.

To defend our submission to authority, but not with logic and literalism (not with facts about the deservedness of our authority: that to which we cleave) - but with statements of the mystical authority of authority.

Not to defend authority on the basis of its incorruptibility (especially not to devise systems that are supposed to prevent corruption) but on a mystical basis of providence.

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Unsuccessful mystics, focused on beauty, authority and transcendental values...

Hmmm...

Would it work?

What do we mean by 'work'?

Do we means would it work at a socio-political level validated by literalism and logic? Of course not.

But would it work at the level of the individual?

Maybe it could.

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Maybe, at least for a while, it would wrong-foot our enemies, and allow us a breathing space

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TS Eliot's first work in his first book, and the title piece of that book, was 'Prufrock' - i.e. The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

Full text of the poem: http://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html

It is a brilliant piece of work, extremely powerful, full of memorable lines (in that respect unlike almost any other example of modernist poetry) - it was also revolutionary in technique and attitude, and massively influential on later writers (and scholars).

Yet it is a horrible, fiendish production; that aims to induce - and successful succeeds in this task - a mood of world-weariness and despair; an attitude that it is not worth bothering with anything, because it will inevitably fail; a perspective that the good things of the world are illusion and the underlying solid reality is of ugliness, misery, lies, incoherence, ridiculous but self-aware vanity...

(The mainstream condition of modernity that Peter Sloterdijk terms 'enlightened false consciousness'.)

Prufrock is, in sum, the modern condition of alienation and hope-less-ness achieved perfectly in a single work at the first attempt and never surpassed.

Now I am not saying that TS Eliot was an evil genius when considered as a whole - of course he later became a very influential Christian of a traditionalist type; but the damage he did as a young man with Prufrock, and later The Waste Land, was never undone by anything he (or anybody else) subsequently achieved.

Prufrock fed an attitude of cynicism and - ultimately - hedonism and conformity (because all explicit cynics sell-out and become cogs of the system - at least all the many young cynics I have known have become middle managers or Establishment commissars).

Prufrock also led to the destruction of poetry - because it looked-like poetry, used various techniques of accepted poetry; but it was not poetry. It was 'poetry' minus the lyricism that made it poetry, 'poetry' without 'song'; 'poetry' with the essence of poetry extracted and replaced with subversion of lyricism.

Future generations followed suit, and the most 'respected' and influential 'poets' since Prufrock have not been poets. 

(This was not an accident. Unlike - say - Yeats and Frost, Eliot was not a poet; and never wrote poetry (as poetry would have been understood in the previous hundreds of years). He was, of course, a prose-writer and versifier of genius - and that is why his verse is so effective; but he was not a poet, and could only pastiche real poetry. Nor did Eliot 'get' poetry, he could not detect its 'presence' or absence - which was unfortunate in the major literary critic of his age.)

(But then, neither did FR Leavis understand real poetry, nor CS Lewis, nor Empson, nor bloom... indeed real poetry is much too simple and lucid and popular to be a suitable theme for the powerful and influential critic.) 

Prufrock, although easily appreciated by anyone, also triggered the cleavage between 'serious' writers aiming at an audience of critics, academics ad students on the one hand; and the spontaneously poetry-reading public on the other - and in a century this has grown ever wider.

Of course, all this would have happened anyway without Prufrock! - maybe half a decade later. So in that sense, the poem had zero influence. The culture had changed by a kind of mass embrace of the inversion of Good; Leftism was already pervasive among the intellectuals, the Great Apostasy from Christianity was too far advanced and celebrated; the sexual revolution already had the opinion-leaders in its grip; the mass media and the labilities of fashion were already a ruling addiction...

Hence Eliot's star, and Prufrock's fame' has faded and faded over the past decades. The brilliance of the decadent culture it inspired continued to glitter into the 1970s (Tom Stoppard - the best of recent playwrights - listed Prufrock as one of his major influences; Beckett was the other) - but has long since dimmed and extinguished.

Modern culture is Prufrock without the inspiration, without the sparkling wit, without the permanently memorable phrases.

We have lost or ditched the genius; and retained only the evil.

I remember reading The Outsider in the summer of 1978, and realising that all of the 'Great Men' surveyed in that book were - at least according to Colin Wilson's exacting criteria - A Failure. 

That is, Wilson argued that their lives - when viewed overall and by the highest standards - had failed to a greater or lesser degree. 

I vacillated about this matter, through the years. Sometimes I felt that most people had a successful life when judged by appropriate criteria, sometimes I felt that very few did; and nowadays I would say that hardly anybody does. 

In essence: everybody is a failure, every life is a failure. 

 

This has been perhaps more evident to me than to most people; since a pretty large number of people I have known or worked with have been very successful - by the usual, mainstream standards with which such things are measured. 

I, on the other hand, have not! - although I have been fairly-widely notorious from time to time, in my professional circles (which is, for example, presumably why I have a Wikipedia page). At times I too sought mainstream success, and got some way up the slippery pole; but I was always sabotaged either by my scruples or my defects, or both. Mostly I tried to plough my own unique furrow, sui generis; and again succeeded for periods of time.  

But I have seen success from both sides in my own life, and in the lives of friends and colleagues - and have felt compelled to make evaluations on the subject.

It has, in fact, been one of the most painful experiences of my life to observe the corruption of so many people I have known. (This has, indeed, accelerated in 2020.)

Sometimes people were like that from the beginning - and were strategic in their esteem-seeking; sometimes they sold-out at a specific point, over a specific issue -- But mostly the process seems to have occured smoothly and seamlessly (with no discernible struggle) as a consequence of doing what was needed for jobs, promotions, money, status etc - or just through hard-work combined with obedience to authority.

One of the most startling observations is that all, and I mean all, of the people who I knew as a young man that were notably cynical or radical (in a leftish way) about class, money, status, professionalism, croneyism, careerism, honours or The Establishment - have ended up as high-level bureaucrats: as managers. 

 

This seems an interesting and significant phenomenon; although I have not properly analysed it. 

The only reference to this I have come across was in a book (Critique of Cynical Reason, 1983) by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk; when he termed this mind-set enlightened false consciousness - which I take to mean something like being cynical about being cynical, in such a way as to retain self-esteem while selling-out.

Or perhaps it is adopting a false careerist persona while acknowledging its falseness, while also regarding the whole thing as somehow inevitable. This strikes me as typical of the most successful Establishment characters.

Certainly, once a person has got-into this mind-set, it is rare from them ever to get out from it; since he is cynical about anything that might disturb his selfish well being, while feeling morally superior for explicitly acknowledging his own selfishness. 

A wry smile and a shrug of the shoulders restores the sealed-off equilibrium in the face of any challenge.

 

When I was a young adult, it was my firm intention to buck the trend of Wilson's Outsiders; and to be one of the tiny minority who really succeeded in having a genuinely successful Life. 

I would have to regard this as a fundamental error. Because I now regard mortal human life as just not being designed to be 'a success' (whatever that might mean). Life is not aimed at some end-state of success. 

Especially since it seems very obvious that we as individual people, and the world itself, are not susceptible of perfection (whatever that might mean). For a start, once I get to know people, no two are alike - indeed no two people are genuinely similar! 

Similarity is an illusion of ignorance. 

So, if we are all one-off, then the concept of 'success' already seems dubious; since there seems no objective way of measuring it. Yet, we can objectively fail - and I regard corruption of the kind I described earlier as genuine failure. 

Corruption is a failure - not because of what is is, some much as because of where it leads-to. 

The real success or failure of life seems to be related to what happens after death, and to what we learn through living. 

1. Do we choose Heaven after death?

2. Do we learn from our experiences in ways that are relevant to eternal resurrected life? 

 

The corruption that has so dismayed me does so because, by my judgment, it is associated with a refusal to learn from living; and with what seems to be an anti-salvation attitude; an attitude of rooted and vehement hostility towards, and therefore rejection of, the possibility of resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

While I know that repentance is possible to anyone at any time, in the sense that it is allowed and effective; I cannot ignore that most people do not want repentance. 

In fact, 'not want' is misrepresenting a visceral and invincible opposition to the very idea of repentance and salvation.   

My conclusion is that every 'mortal life' is a failure, when judged by the standards of mortal life. 

But any life may potentially be a real success - in an eternal perspective. 

And that (as of recent decades) there has been an extreme, albeit not complete, opposition between the attempt to succeed in This Life, and the attempt to live well in context of the Life to Come.  

[Note: this was, I think, one of the best things I ever wrote about political correctness; but, for reasons I don't recall, it didn't get into Thought Prison, my book on PC,.]

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The politically correct are people who do not believe in absolute truth.

Yet they insist that everyone should believe what they are telling them today.

Or else if you do not believe whatever they tell you today, you are evil.

Yet the politically correct do not believe in evil.

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What they do believe in is culture - culture is the bottom line 'reality'.

And culture is consensus.

Yet the politically correct believe in the liberation of individual desire: that is, they believe in the overthrow of consensus.

So the bottom line reality for political correctness is... a continually changing, compulsory consensus.

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This leads to the 'enlightened false consciousness' of the modern cynic.

Enlightened = realistic; False consciousness = self-serving illusion.

The cynic combination is a clear-eyed awareness that one's own fundamental beliefs are self-manipulating fantasies: yet insistence on absolute belief in these acknowledged fantasies.

To make reality and then to forget one has just made it, and then to remember, critique and re-make reality; and again to forget it - and so on and so forth...

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Neither ironical nor detached; enlightened false consciousness is a severe, rational, anger-fuelled stance which aims to impose meaning and purpose onto life via the continual bureaucratic and authoritarian process of creating and moulding culture - undoing and reversing the inequalities and miseries of the past, and chasing always after the flickering fashions in upper class status.

Culture is arbitrary, yet it is reality; culture is managed, yet it is contingent; culture us everything and irresistible, yet it is nothing and as insignificant as the life of a mayfly.

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This enlightened false consciousness collapses into careerism, which collapses into parasitism (life as a permanent holiday, travel, good living), which collapses into the secret-guilty cult of the openly instinctual and unashamed psychopath: the invincible gangster, the irresistible and expert sexual predator, the envied permanently-stoned junkie.

This opposite to the disaffected cynic is what Sloterdijk (in his Critique of Cynical Reason) terms the kynic.

The kynic has (merely) discarded consciousness; has solved the problem of being a modern human in a modern society by becoming an animal and preying upon society.

(Trying, always, to obliterate the final, residual human awareness that this is what he is doing - trying to become wholly animal, wholly instinctual.)

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The cynic and the kynic exhaustively describes the possibilities for modern secular life - either the cynic bureaucrat who lives inside-of and builds a culture he knows to be meaningless and temporary; or the junkie who lives outside-of and eats that culture.

Most often, the characteristic modern elite are both cynic and kynic: public bureaucrat and private junkie - paid moralist, part-time amateur hedonist.

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/cynicism-and-kynicism-in-political.html