Ping Pong 35: Resistance in the Minor Key
The impact of industrialization came, at least for philosophy, in two main waves. In the first wave the problem of a world reduced to the machine, with all the mechanization and predictability that that implied was considered. How, the question was asked, might one save the idea of Freedom as the philosophers had forged it over the preceding century, from the harsh reality of the idea of industrialization? The second wave abandoned freedom, and attempted to understand the nature of the machine, and with it, the new kind of society which industrialization brought with it. Was it possible, they asked, to discover in the world of the machine a new type or kind of freedom? And if so what would it look like? And how would it reflect the new deal for society? The first of these problems, was arguably codified by Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, and the second was clearly begun by Marx. In this Rant the first of these two reactions will be considered, the re-finding of freedom in a world that looks like losing it, while the second reflection will be the topic of next Rant.
Central to both Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer is the problem of what exactly could elude the seemingly all-powerful world of production. The deep problem is of course, that if the world can be revolutionized by machines, then that revolution must surely be a conceptual one. It must include all individuality within it. My body becomes then a mere machine for manufacturing sense or pleasure. My individuality and my sense of my own freedom are then mere epi-phenomena of a machine that has dissolved or perhaps better, included my very humanity within it. The world of industrialization was, and still is, the world where we endlessly (and rather pointlessly) claim to be products of the gene or meme ‘machine’. Or else the mere embodiment of knowable brain chemistry.
We are forever tumbling into something else, something external and known. All the agonies and pleasures and even uncertainties of humanity are then dissolved into a handful of certainties and a series of programmes for actions. The effect of such a move is always to risk turning the hard world of chemistry into a God substitute. God had after all traditionally been the external force whose nature we reflected (we and he had souls, even if nothing else did), and which we petitioned to have an effect and somehow change the world. Chemistry likewise is an external force, whose nature we participate in, and which we look to, to interfere dramatically in our lives. God and the Gene run together (and are at times, in the mouths of people such as Dawkins mere reflection of each other: Their only difference being that Dawkins and his ilk accept one and reject the other).
The problem therefore of how and what can be saved of the original philosophical formulation of freedom becomes bound up with a deeper problem of how to stop industrialization and the ideas which it spawned, merely taking the place of religion. How can one stop machines being as a new God? A God which strictly defines or predestines the world. This is a problem which both Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer tackle in very different ways. Schopenhauer wants to answer this problem by creating a universal ’science’ of the exceptions. That is, a science of that which cannot be allowed for within the predictable world of machines (and yet also that which those machines need to assume). Kierkegaard, by contrast wants to create an artistry in the individual, an artistry that is capable of resisting the world of the machine. Both these moves deserve to be considered in a little detail. I will here consider Schopenhauer first and then Kierkegaard.
The key problem of Schopenhauer, was in a sense a problem of geography. He wanted to locate exactly where, in the corpus of human thought, that our understanding of the world in terms of machines deserved to be put. Was it a fundamental breakthough, as its supporters claimed? Or was it merely the refinement of an existing stream of thought? If this latter move was the case, then how does this stream fit within the wider world of thought? Schopenhauer’s basic claim was that mechanization was merely an elaborate and refined expression of our wider use of understanding. As such, it was as a thought typified by the need to survive. That is, our entire understanding of the world was at every point fixed by the needs of survival. We learnt what was good to help us as an individual but even more, a species to thrive. Understanding therefore never revealed the truth, it merely revealed the world as it was good for us. This second remark of course opened the way for Schopenhauer’s other move. We wanted to define the nature of this ‘being good for us’ in terms of everything that understanding could fix: That is, in terms of the blind forces of the Will. This Will was what infused all of reality with blind and active being. It drove the magnet to seek the North Pole, just as much as it drove individual passions. The Will was therefore a world of all blind forces, and all attempts on the behalf of the material world to alter or change its initial circumstances were doomed. The philosophical legitimacy of such an inclusive notion is of course highly problematic. However it has a value in that it allowed Schopenhauer to navigate what he felt that science and the intellect ignored. Science could predict how forces operated, and where they would go, but did not provide either an explanation for those forces themselves, or yet a reason why they would act. This failure, Schopenhauer thought, he could make good in the idea of the Will.
In doing so, Schopenhauer of course abandoned (very deliberately) the idea of philosophical freedom as Kant and Hegel had defined it. However he is careful to save one aspect of that idea from the wreckage: The idea that freedom is somehow caught up with a dimension of individuality that cannot be simply comprehended within mechanical thought. Freedom was always the science of what eluded the minds of man. That is, we might be predictable in our actions, and yet we have something of freedom, and something of individuality in our desires. The world of feeling becomes then set up against the world of mechanization. It is somehow, at this point at least, seen to resist science and resist the power of understanding. Feeling becomes a power in its own right.
This move has of course been one that has bedevilled both the inhabitants of our industrialized societies but also those who might seek to resist, in differing ways, industrialization. It troubles our former lives, in the sense that right at the heart of industrialization lies a deep double-think. Individuals are held in their specific actions to be free, as they are allowed to follow their feelings, but these feelings have a high degree of predictability when taken en mass. This impasse of the free individual, but the predictability of the collective, is of course the loophole which allows advertising to at once claim to be effective, (and so genuinely to manipulate the minds of humans), but also to necessarily be a part in a free society. Each individual is after all free as they feel (no matter how those feelings are created). Each individual might then always react differently (some will loathe a campaign or be bored by it). Or at least they might feel themselves to be so. Each individual is therefore ostensibly pitched into the world of freedom, and the claim can be made that an advert does not manipulate people. And this can be claimed to be the case even though in the hard world of the intellect an advert produces a predictable statistical effect.
Perhaps even more problematically, Schopenhauer’s equation of freedom and feeling has populated the resistance movements to capitalism. It is all too easy to lose one’s desire to change the world within the enticing world of feelings, and they are defined within a thousand alternative therapies and beliefs. If all one had to do to change the world was to feel, then the world would of course have been changed a long time ago (Dicken’s ‘Hard Times’ ought to have been enough to do it). And yet such is the power of the Schopenhauerian claim that this single hard fact is lost on all those who confuse resisting with feeling.
Kierkegaard’s alternative model sought to look for resistance in belief. But here he was very careful about the kind of belief he meant. What typified belief he said, was not the everyday kind of beliefs, such as that the Sun would rise tomorrow or even that the Good are rewarded in Heaven. Rather ‘a belief’ was, in its purest form when it stood out against the rational order of the world. In believing the incredible, and holding that as dear, the minds of humans felt their own power and their own individuality. Abraham was therefore the father of a faith because he was prepared to go the whole hog, and murder his child Isaac in the name of a God, who was known only to him. The true ‘knight of faith’ was the individual who embraced the idiocy and complexity of belief, and through it and its many and sometimes dark mazes, affirmed what appeared to make no sense (and yet which founded the nature of religion).
Religion became then a question of belief, and centred around the notion that what one’s intellect told one was nonsense. Moreover it was in this belief that every individual felt their own true independence. That is, Kierkegaard claimed, as I believe something incredible, I genuinely feel myself to be at odds with the world, and so know myself to be a true individual. In the work of Kierkegaard this claim is innocent enough. He has the humility and originality to feel the oddity of what he is saying. Deep and complex problems arise when this notion of belief was taken out of the context of Kierkegaard’s work and used as a new maxim for religion. Three problems immediately arose. Firstly the equation of individuality and belief is a very dangerous one, if it is carried beyond the world of philosophical speculation. For example if one hears Tony Bair defend his actions in Iraq, one is immediately struck by the fact that he is at each point confusing his own individuality with his own ability to believe. Because he once believed in the weapons of mass destruction (and thought of himself as a believer), he claims that this somehow should justify his subsequent actions. Moreover he cites this genuine belief as a reason why we should not condemn him too quickly, or even at all. Belief therefore turns everything into an individual choice, where all choices might be justified. Blair never seems to want to ask (or answer the question) as to whether it was reasonable to believe what he did, he merely says that he did, and that that is it. A rather dangerous precedent as any idiot or tyrant could claim as much.
Secondly, if belief is to be pitched against modernity in some sense, it is clear that the odder or darker the belief, the more it might be taken to confer on the believer a special status. The belief that America (taken as the modern name for industrialization) is ‘big Satan’ (or that Muslim fundamentalism is), is then merely one such very ‘special’ belief. To believe and to open oneself up to the improbable and to what one’s sense revolts at, is to enter a very dark world. Thirdly Kierkegaard, who often felt his own deep loneliness never considers what happens when the belief in the improbable becomes itself an accepted orthodoxy. Take as an example creationism or intelligent design. A ‘theory’ that is not worth the name. It is merely a rubric of an idiotic and discredited belief (and this is of course the point). However, as long as many do believe in it, and re-enforce one another in that belief, then it is felt to be true (and confused with individuality). More importantly it has political power, and others must pretend that it is true or at least possible. A lone Dane (Kierkegaard) feeling his bitter sense of isolation, and pouring it out in beautiful books is one thing, but when that feeling becomes an orthodoxy and millions of Americans (and people all round the world) blindly endorse it, and enforce it, the same feeling become frankly terrifying.
The lesson then of these thinkers is not that the world of industrialization is difficult to resist. On the contrary it is rather easy to resist. The world fizzles with alternative ideas. The problem is though, that when these ideas are taken en mass, they can be easily transformed by capitalism (and not industrialization), and turned into either doctrines to fright or delight the would be rebel. Any attempt to resist industrialization (which is all too frequently confused with capitalism) becomes then bound back and merely enforces in new (and often rather dark ways) capitalism itself (and does so even as it struggles against industrialization). So that by encouraging minds to confuse the two things - capitalism and industrialism, resistance is very effectively poleaxed, as the latter is delightfully easy to attack, while the former is very adept at binding any such attack into its own fabric. Belief might save one from the horrors of the industrial but it does not prevent one’s feeling and beliefs being another marketing ploy. Only the very darkest beliefs (Bin Laden) perhaps might claim to be too extreme for capitalism. And yet even here it is clear that while Bin Laden and his ilk reject most of Western industrialization and the values it supports, they remain good capitalists (they are after all opium and oil producers). All of which takes one back to the second problem mentioned at the start of this Rant. Is it possible to reformulate the idea of freedom such that one might genuinely resist capitalism, and do so from a world other than belief or feeling. This was the hope and message of Marx, and will form the topic of the next Rant.
