I’ve started Hazony’s most recent book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery, and find it a better book than the one on nationalism. There is much in it I agree with because when push comes to shove, I am a small ‘c’ conservative. The problem for me is that in the condition of Postmodernity, there’s nothing left to conserve. My beef with most conservatives is that they try to hold onto the forms, even thought the forms no longer hold any life. They are zombie conservatives.
So the task is to return to the roots, to the originary energies that gave shape to the forms in the first place. And the difference between Hazony and me lies in that he blames what he calls the Neo-Marxists, and I blame late Capitalism. If by Neo-Marxists he means people like Deleuze and Guatarri, ok, but they’re not really Marxists, even if they think of themselves as such. Marx was a much better thinker and better human being than they.1 And the real question is why their “doctrine” was so eagerly absorbed by the culture’s elite? It couldn’t have happened in a culture not shot through with the ethos of consumer capitalism in the post WWII era.
But I don’t want to get sidetracked in discussing my differences with Hazony now. I’ll come back to that another time. I’m more interested in understanding his Counter-Enlightenment roots, with which I do have sympathies.
I’ve been using the Scopes Trial as a metaphor to get at the underlying structure of this conflict. It’s easy for educated late-moderns to feel superior to these undereducated rural folk who don’t believe that “science is real”. But most people who put that slogan on their bumper or tee shirt, or who mock the Christian icthys symbol that evangelicals often put on their cars are equally naive, equally ideological, equally dogmatic.
Most late moderns have a very unhealthy relationship with the irrational. Some try to deal with it in therapy, but therapy can’t work if its main objective is to get you well adjusted to life in the TCM. Life in the TCM is 90% of what makes us sick, but the more maladjusted you are to it, the more likely you have a chance at real human flourishing. As we’ll see, this was Hamann’s doctrine.
This clash dates back at least to the mid- 1700s when in Central Europe anti-enlightenment sentiment first emerged. This was a movement that, while considerably more intellectually sophisticated than Bryan and his populist cohort, was very similar in what it hated. And its spirit is something very important for us to understand because it’s animating the populist Right now—both its rank and file and its intellectuals like Hazony. It’s important to understand what’s right about it, how it counterbalances what’s wrong with rationalist universalism. But it’s also important to understand what’s wrong about it, and how when left undisciplined it leads to Donald Trump.
So what are the Counter-Enlightenment figures reacting to? Berlin says this in the first chapter of his The Roots of Romanticism:
This notion that there is somewhere a perfect vision, and that it needs only a certain kind of severe discipline, or a certain kind of method, to attain to this truth, which is analogous, at any rate, to the cold and isolated truths of mathematics – this notion then affects a great many other thinkers in the post-Platonic2 age: certainly the Renaissance, which had similar ideas, certainly thinkers like Spinoza, thinkers in the eighteenth century, thinkers in the nineteenth century too, who believed it possible to attain to some kind of, if not absolute, at any rate nearly absolute knowledge, and in terms of this to tidy the world up, to create some kind of rational order, in which tragedy, vice and stupidity, which have caused so much destruction in the past, can at last be avoided by the use of carefully acquired information and the application to it of universally intelligible reason. This is one kind of model – I offer it simply as an example. These models invariably begin by liberating people from error, from confusion, from some kind of unintelligible world which they seek to explain to themselves by means of a model; but they almost invariably end by enslaving those very same people, by failing to explain the whole of experience. They begin as liberators and end in some sort of despotism.
The Roots of Romanticism, p. 3
This is what the German Romantics rejected, and it’s what Nationalists like Hazony reject as well insofar as they see this mindset as the animating force behind the formation of the European Union, the WTO, the World Bank, etc. It’s the bureaucracy, the top-downism, the we-know-better-ism of Enlightenment elites then—and Globalist Neoliberal elites now. They’re both cut from the same cloth. This antipathy toward the technocratic rule of the ‘best and the brightest was at the heart of what animated the counterculture in the 60s on the Left. But those anti-establishment energies have migrated to the Right now since the cultural Left (not the economic, non-identitarian Left, i.e., the Bernie Sanders Left) has for the most part become the establishment, the enforcer of its ‘enlightened’, tradition-rejecting taboos and disciplines.3
So let’s dig into these 18th Century Germans. It starts with J. G. Hamann. Here’s Berlin’s summary about what he hated and loved:
The sciences, if they were applied to human society, would lead to a kind of fearful bureaucratisation,[Hamann] thought. He was against scientists, bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen, deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes…for Hamann, of course, creation was a most ineffable, indescribable, unanalyzable personal act, by which a human being laid his stamp on nature, allowed his will to soar, spoke his word, uttered that which was within him and which would not brook any kind of obstacle.
Therefore the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of the senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which people wither and die.
It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no stress on that, that the human being as painted by Enlightenment thinkers was, if not ‘economic man’, at any rate some kind of artificial toy, some kind of lifeless model, which had no relation to the kind of human beings whom Hamann met and wished to associate with every day of his life. Goethe says much the same thing about Moses Mendelssohn. He says Mendelssohn treats beauty as entomologists treat butterflies. He catches the poor animal, he pins it down, and as its exquisite colours drop off, there it lies, a lifeless corpse under the pin.
The Roots of Romanticism, pp. 50-51.
The conflict between J. G. Hamann and the Enlightenment was a conflict between the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the universal, the living and the dead. We can see that his concerns back then are the concerns of both the anti-establishment Left and Right now.
Hamann was a bigger-than-life character, a force of nature, something of a Holy Fool, but someone who impressed almost everyone who knew him, including Goethe and Kant. He is in many ways a forerunner of Kierkegaard, who also admired him, Dostoyevski, and of what later became the existentialist movement. I think that if Nietzsche were born a hundred years earlier, he would have been a lot like Hamann. Hamann was no atheist, but was very much animated by chaotic energies that Nietzsche was later to call the Dionysian or the will to power.4 And his idea about God was very different from conventional ways of thinking about him—
…Hamann’s view that God is closer to the abnormal than he is to the normal, which he openly says: the normal do not really understand what goes on. This is an original moment at which the whole Dostoevsky complex comes into existence. In a certain sense, of course, it is an application of Christianity, but a rather new one, because so sincere and so deeply intended. On this view God is closer to the thieves and the prostitutes, the sinners and the publicans, than he is (Hamann says) to the smooth philosophers of Paris, or the smooth clergymen in Berlin who are trying to reconcile religion with reason, which is degradation and humiliation of everything that man cares for. All the great masters who excel in human endeavour, says Hamann, were sick men in one way or another, had wounds – Hercules, Ajax, Socrates, St Paul, Solon, the Hebrew prophets, Bacchantes, demonic figures – none of these were men of good sense. That, I think, lies at the heart of the whole violent doctrine of personal self-assertion which is the core of the German ‘Storm and Stress’.
The Roots of Romanticism, pp. 65-66.
No human being, according to Hamann, achieved true greatness if he was well adjusted to the consensus reality of his day. Hamann rejected at root the whole idea that being reasonable had anything to do with sanity:
If you asked yourself what were men after, what did men really want, you would see that what they wanted was not at all what Voltaire supposed they wanted. Voltaire thought that they wanted happiness, contentment, peace, but this was not true. What men wanted was for all their faculties to play in the richest and most violent possible fashion. What men wanted was to create, what men wanted was to make, and if this making led to clashes, if it led to wars, if it led to struggles, then this was part of the human lot. A man who had been put in a Voltairean garden, pared and pruned, who had been brought up by some wise philosophe in knowledge of physics and chemistry and mathematics, and in knowledge of all the sciences which the Encyclopedists had recommended – such a man would be a form of death in life.
The Roots of Romanticism, p. 50
Can you see how this relates to the energies on the Right in this moment? Why it’s so appealing, and why it’s the opposite of everything that the Left represents?
In any event, this is not one’s stereotypical idea of the “German” type, right? Kant fits that type much better. But this hatred of the conventional, this deep feel for chaos, for radical human freedom, for the irrational is a very German thing that we see in Hamann. It finds its roots in the Rhineland Mystics of the late medieval period for which Meister Eckhart is exemplary, it’s there in Luther and in figures like Jakob Boehme, and it looks forward to the Herder, the Schlegels, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud/Jung, and Heidegger.
Where does this irrationalism come from? Well, German Pietism. When we think of the word ‘pious’, we usually associate it with meek church ladies, but this is not what it meant in Germany. Berlin again—
Pietism was a branch of Lutheranism, and consisted in careful study of the Bible and profound respect for the personal relationship of man to God. There was therefore an emphasis upon spiritual life, contempt for learning, contempt for ritual and for form, contempt for pomp and ceremony, and a tremendous stress upon the individual relationship of the individual suffering human soul with her maker. …
This is the mood in which the German pietists operated. The result was an intense inner life, a great deal of very moving and very interesting but highly personal and violently emotional literature, hatred of the intellect, and above all, of course, violent hatred of France, of wigs, of silk stockings, of salons, of corruption, of generals, of emperors, of all the great and magnificent figures of this world, who are simply incarnations of wealth, wickedness and the devil.
The Roots of Romanticismpp, pp. 43-45
In other words, think Ingmar Bergman; think deeply authentic, eccentric—and irrational.
Ok. So what’s the point here? Haven’t I been arguing for reasonableness in my most recent posts? Haven’t I been critical of the Lutheran/Calvinist rejection of Aristotle and Greek rationality? Haven’t I been an advocate of the classical tradition and its Neoplatonic metaphysics? What has all that got to do with this celebration of irrationality?
Well irrationality is just part of the human deal. We cannot make it fit into our little cubbies. We cannot kill it; we cannot control it; we cannot repress it without it coming back to severely bite us. And yet we cannot just surrender to it. We need to develop a healthy relationship with it. Is this the work of therapy? Well, it depends on the therapy, but I’d argue it’s more the work of spiritual practice for most people—the work of virtue, if virtue is understood correctly; it’s a work of integration of that which is below with that which is above.
I realize that my ‘utopia’ diagram5 probably only makes sense to me, but I’ve been living with it for some time now, and it really holds up and summarizes pretty much the entire argument that I want to make, and illustrates the the point I’m trying to make here now.
The vertical axis is the axis of psychic and spiritual vitality. The northern axis represents supra-rational vitality; the southern axis sub-rational vitality—the above and below. We live in a society in which the northern axis has been amputated, and so, as a society, our primary source of vitality is the southern axis, the axis of the chaotic energies that these Romantics so aggressively asserted against Voltairean/Kantian reasonableness. It’s the axis that Anti-Oedipuslives on undisciplined.
What happens to human rationality in a society in which the northern axis has been amputated? It becomes alienated rationality, what Hegel called the ‘unhappy consciousness’. This is what Hamann revolted against and the Romantic movement that followed him revolted against.
And the ‘unhappy consciousness’ is our condition now. What does the alienated, buffered, unhappy consciousness do to keep itself occupied in modernity? Its educated elites write plays like Beckett’s or novels like Sartre’s or David Foster Wallace’s or writes philosophy books like Anti-Oedipus. Its non-elites are not interested in such austerity. They look for relief in ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll.’ Or they join a cult like Qanon or a militia like the Proud Boys, and they heed coded calls to storm the capitol as they did on J6. It works as sweet surrender to the forces of chaos so that one can be a happy consciousness, if only for a few moments, rather than an alienated one. The unhappy consciousness is just another symptom for what I’ve been calling ‘ontological dizziness’.
Neither Nietzsche nor Hamann would approve of such adaptations of their thinking, but they opened the door, and when people walk in, they see what they want to see, and they take what they think they need. The same thing, I would argue, is true for Nationalism. Hazony has opened the door, and when people walk in they see what they want to see and take what they think they need.
Hazony might protest that that’s not what he meant for them to do, but he’s willingly associated himself with Trump and MAGA, and like everyone who has, he will learn that none of these folks care what he thinks except as it provides them with a cover story to justify their powerlust, and to achieve their resentment-driven agenda to impose their will on everyone who disagrees with them.6
Next, we’ll move on from how Hamann sets the stage for Herder, the first multiculturalist, and how German ideas about Nationalism flow from Herder through Fichte, Carl Schmitt toward fascism.
Notes
1. If you haven’t studied or read Marx, you’ve probably bought into the way he’s been demonized by capitalist propaganda. The best intro to him that I would recommend is Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right (2018). He wasn’t right about everything, certainly not about dialectical materialism or the inevitability of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but as a social theorist he was right about a lot more than most people give him credit for.
2. Berlin, like most of the 20th Century intelligentsia, misreads Plato as a pure rationalist. I don’t want to litigate it here, but he’s just not. I addressed this issue in an essay entitled “Plato: Habitus as Heuristic”. Besides, I’m not defending Plato so much as I am the classical tradition as it integrated Plato and Aristotle with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam through the medieval period.
3. There is a lot in the critique of the Liberal Order in Hazony and in a guy like Steve Bannon that sounds like the New Left in the 60s. What’s different is that the Left is forward looking and the Right backward looking. Hazony would probably object that that isn’t how he sees himself, since he’s such a good capitalist and is all for the prosperity and technological advancement that it generates. But, as I’ve written here about Buckley and Burke, their embrace of capitalism contradicts everything else they want to ‘conserve’ as conservatives.
4. Nietzsche had many faces depending on the mood he was in, but most people don’t understand what he meant by the Will to Power. Here’s what he said about it in Thus Spake Zarathustra:
This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming which knows no satiety, no disgust no weariness: this my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil”, without goal, unless the joy of the circle itself is a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power— and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power— and nothing besides!
The will to power as it’s most frequently used today means the will to dominate. This was not Nietzsche’s meaning. For him its meaning is closer to ‘will to life’. Indeed, he thought of the strutting bully as among the lowest sort of human being. I haven’t been consistent about this, but in future I will not use ‘will to power’ when I’m talking about the will to dominate, but rather the term ‘powerlust’.
5. I don’t believe that ‘utopia’ is achiveable. I think of it as an ideal toward which one strives even if never achieved. A healthy society needs a healthy archeticture, and this is what I think that architecture should look like. It’s not something that would ever be achieved because the vertical and horizontal axes are infinite. (Tap on this a couple of time to make it more readable.)
6. Maybe he sees his role as trying to ‘discipline’ these populist forces. Is that even possible at this point? Not sure, but we’ll come back to this question another time.
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