Mikhail Nesterov, Philosophers Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov, 1917. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
I am reading the Straw Dogs, there is a chapter there named The Deception and true to the title John Gray sketches out the entire history of philosophy. It’s an emerald gem. This is not a review. I am just going to jot down some quotes for my own use.
“In the Middle Ages, philosophy gave an intellectual scaffolding to the Church; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it served a myth of progress. Today, serving neither religion nor a political faith, philosophy is a subject without a subject matter, scholasticism without the charm of dogma.”
John Gray’s creed:
“Formerly philosophers sought peace of mind while pretending to seek the truth. Perhaps we should set ourselves a different aim: to discover which illusions we can give up, and which we will never shake off. We will still be seekers after truth, more so than in the past; but we will renounce the hope of a life without illusion. Henceforth our aim will be to identify our invincible illusions. Which untruths might we be rid of, and which can we not do without? – that is the question, that is the experiment.”
John Gray on the Post Religious Philosophers
John Gray uses the term humanism as the most negative description. [Marx], Kant, Nietzsche, even Heidegger transferred God onto humanity, the belief that humans shape the fate of history, have the will that separates them from the animals. For John Gray these philosophers never had a clean break from the western religions. John Gray reject the meaning in history or looking at humans as different from the animals. He writes about Nietzsche:
“The circumstances of Nietzsche’s breakdown [January ,1889 - Nietzsche embraced a horse that was flogged by a coachman on Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin] suggest another irony. Unlike Nietzsche, Schopenhauer turned away from Christianity and never looked back, and one of the core Christian beliefs that he left behind was a belief in the significance of human history. For Christians, it is because they occur in history that the lives of humans have a meaning that the lives of other animals do not. What enables humans to have a history is that – unlike other animals – they can freely choose how to live their lives. They are given this freedom by God, who created them in his own image.
If we truly leave Christianity behind, we must give up the idea that human history has a meaning. Neither in the ancient pagan world nor in any other culture has human history ever been thought to have an overarching significance. In Greece and Rome, it was a series of natural cycles of growth and decline. In India, it was a collective dream, endlessly repeated. The idea that history must make sense is just a Christian prejudice.
If you believe that humans are animals, there can be no such thing as the history of humanity, only the lives of particular humans. If we speak of the history of the species at all, it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives. As with other animals, some lives are happy, others wretched. None has a meaning that lies beyond itself.
Looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in clouds. Nietzsche knew this; but he could not accept it. He was trapped in the chalk circle of Christian hopes. A believer to the end, he never gave up the absurd faith that something could be made of the human animal. He invented the ridiculous figure of the Superman to give history meaning it had not had before. He hoped that humankind would thereby be awakened from its long sleep. As could have been foreseen, he succeeded only in adding further nightmares to its confused dream.”
John Gray writes that only Schopenhauer could see through the “illusion”:
“Schopenhauer believed that philosophy was ruled by Christian prejudices. He devoted much of his life to dissecting the influence of these prejudices on Immanuel Kant, a thinker he admired more than any other, but whose philosophy he attacked relentlessly as a secular version of Christianity. Kant’s philosophy was one of the main strands in the Enlightenment – the movement of progressive thinkers that sprang up throughout much of Europe in the eighteenth century. The thinkers of the Enlightenment aimed to replace traditional religion by faith in humanity. But the upshot of Schopenhauer’s criticism of Kant is that the Enlightenment was only a secular version of Christianity’s central mistake.
For Christians, humans are created by God and possess free will, for humanists they are self-determining beings. Either way, they are quite different from all other animals. In contrast, for Schopenhauer we are at one with other animals in our innermost essence. We think we are separated from other humans and even more from other animals by the fact that we are distinct individuals. But that individuality is an illusion. Like other animals, we are embodiments of universal Will, the struggling, suffering energy that animates everything in the world.”
John Gary writes bout the dueling ideas of Schopenhauer and Kant:
“Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer was ready to follow his thoughts wherever they led. Kant argued that unless we accept that we are autonomous, freely choosing selves we cannot make sense of our moral experience. Schopenhauer responded that our actual experience is not of freely choosing the way we live but of being driven along by our bodily needs -by fear, hunger and, above all, sex. Sex, as Schopenhauer wrote in one of the many inimitably vivid passages that enliven his works, ‘is the ultimate goal of nearly all human effort. … It knows how to slip its love notes and ringlets into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts’. When we are in the grip of sexual love we tell ourselves we will be happy once it is satisfied; but this is only a mirage. Sexual passion enables the species to reproduce; it cares nothing for individual well-being or personal autonomy. It is not true that our experience compels us to think of ourselves as free agents. On the contrary, if we look at ourselves truthfully we know we are not.
Schopenhauer believed he had the definitive answer to the metaphysical questions that had plagued thinkers since philosophy began. Using his critique of Kant to batter down the ordinary view of time, space and cause and effect, he offered a different vision of the world – one in which there are no separate things at all, in which plurality and difference do not exist, and there is only the ceaseless striving he calls Will.
This is an arresting picture, but we need not take it as the ultimate truth about the nature of things. Instead we may take it as a metaphor for a truth about ourselves. We like to think reason guides our lives, but reason itself is only – as Schopenhauer puts it, echoing Hume – the hard-pressed servant of the will. Our intellects are not impartial observers of the world but active participants in it. They shape a view of it that helps us in our struggles. Among the imaginary constructions created by the intellect working in the service of the will, perhaps the most delusive is the view it gives us of ourselves – as continuing, unified individuals.
Kant tried to protect our most cherished notions – above all our ideas of personal identity, free will and moral autonomy – from the solvent of sceptical doubt. Putting them to the acid test of actual experience, Schopenhauer showed that they melt way. In doing so he destroyed Kant’s philosophy, and with it the idea of the human subject that underpins both Christianity and humanism.”
The Cult of Personality
John Gray writes:
“If humanists are to be believed, the Earth – with its vast wealth of ecosystems and life forms – had no value until humans came onto the scene. Value is only a shadow cast by humans desiring or choosing. Only persons have any kind of intrinsic worth. Among Christians the cult of personhood may be forgiven. For them, everything of value in the world emanates from a divine person, in whose image humans are made. But once we have relinquished Christianity the very idea of the person becomes suspect.
A person is someone who believes that she authors her own life through her choices. That is not the way most humans have ever lived. Nor is it how many of those with the best lives have seen themselves. Did the protagonists in the Odyssey or the Bhagavad-Gita think of themselves as persons? Did the characters in The Canterbury Tales? Are we to believe that bushido warriors in Edo Japan, princes and minstrels in medieval Europe, Renaissance courtesans and Mongol nomads were lacking because their lives failed to square with a modern ideal of personal autonomy?
Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only – as the word’s history suggests – one of its masks. Persons are only humans who have donned the mask that has been handed down in Europe over the past few generations, and taken it for their face.”
John Gray’s book is aphoristic:
- Plato’s legacy to European thought was a trio of capital letters – the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Wars have been fought and tyrannies established, cultures have been ravaged and peoples exterminated, in the service of these abstractions. Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet.
- The life of the mind is like that of the body. If it depended on conscious awareness or control it would fail entirely.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hello,
I’ve also been very interested to read John Gray’s “Straw Dogs” recently. (This comes at the end of a fairly circuitous journey through modern european philosophy starting with Kierkegaard). Straw Dogs is provocative. The notion of being “after” enlightenment, in its “wake”, is provocative. And it is very interesting (I’ve found) to trace some of Gray’s thinking through his engagement with Isaiah Berlin, particularly the latter’s contention of a human world of incommensurable values. (You may have read Gray’s short text on Berlin?)The main flavour of Straw Dogs, I found, was that after Darwin, man is (must be) seen as merely another species, with no special access to “truth”, either religious or philosophical. It’s what Simon Critchley has described as “passive nihilism”.
Well, I’ve just finished watching a youtube broadcast of Richard Feynman talking on the relationship between mathematics and physics. Feynman was very dismissive of philosophy and it is very refreshing and funny to see him illustrate the ways that philosophical preferences can bind individuals to “models” that may be unproductive in terms of generating advances in phyical theory. A couple of things made me connect Feynman to Gray. Firstly, Feynman stresses that there is no “method” for arriving at new physical theory. This agrees with the view of the Karl Popper, which has a Kantian origin, and Popper was a defender of Liberal society (like Berlin and Gray, though Gray is not “Popperian”). Secondly, Feynman concludes with a startling statement admonishing the non-mathematical side of CP Snow’s “two cultures”: “The horizons are limited which permit such people to imagine that the centre of the universe of interest is man” (implying that an appreciation of the mathematical character of physical law would counteract this).
..I think Feynman meant to say “..centre of interest in the universe is man”, but the thing which struck me was that this statement would fit into Gray’s “Straw Dogs”, indeed could be uttered by Gray, even though it is precisely the placing of man at the centre of the universe that happens in Kant’s philosophy, which subtends both Popper’s philosophy of science and Berlin’s reaction to Romanticism (and against utopianism).
I wonder if Feynman could have been drawn into philosophy if his concluding statement and his earlier statement (about absence of method) could have been shown to him to be connected with Kant’s “Copernican revolution”? (Probably not.) Or whether showing this connection would have persuaded Feynman (as I feel persuaded) that a philosophy of science like that of Popper could be valuable (something worth stating and meaningful) and at the same time link science with politics – i.e. the “humanities” side of CP Snow’s divide?
Alastair
{ 3 trackbacks }