Part 2
~ 7 Reason/Unreason ~
Dostoevsky has been lauded for deep psychological insights from an authoritative psychologist today yet his sensible societies in The Idiot and The Possessed doubt the sanities of ‘most everyone to absurdity – the exuberant women in particular. Dialogue from The Idiot between Aglya and Prince Myschkin regarding Nastasya:
... And do you know what she writes to me in those letters?”
“Nothing would surprise me; she’s insane.”
“Here are the letters” (Aglaya took from her pocket three letters in three envelopes and threw them down in front of the prince). “For a whole week now she’s been imploring, persuading, luring me into marrying you. She ... ah, yes, she’s intelligent, though she’s insane, and you say rightly that she’s much more intelligent than I am ... she writes to me that she’s in love with me, that every day she looks for a chance of seeing me at least from afar. She writes that you love me, that she knows it, that she noticed it long ago, and that you spoke with her about me there. She wants to see you happy; she’s sure that only I can make you happy ... She writes so wildly ... strangely ... I haven’t shown anyone these letters, I was waiting for you. Do you know what it means? Can you guess anything?”
“It’s madness; it’s proof that she’s insane,” said the prince, and his lips trembled.
“You’re not crying, are you?”
“No, Aglaya, no, I’m not crying”.
That being said, however, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on “Mental Disorder (Illness)” explains the origins of our modern conception of insanity.
As a characteristic attributed to mental disorder, irrationality or “unreason” has been linked to emphasis on order and logic during the “Age of Reason”, which (together with the emergence of empirical science), is seen to have laid the foundation for our contemporary psychiatric categories and theories. In the present day, cultural norms and intuitive folk psychology assign the boundaries of mental disorder, and these intuitions conflict about some particular conditions (addictions, and disorders of “character” or personality, for example).
– Jennifer Radden, Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy.
The problem of assuming and mythologizing the “Age of Reason” is its hollowing out in practical development (its “naiveté” as Husserl deemed it) or its own absence of reason, as it gives over far more often to willed agreement/determinations; changes in scientific/medical paradigms; Nietzschean perspectivism; even to historical relativism. Yet today’s assumptions of possessing universality and absolute truth based on mere objectivist belief in them doesn’t suffice. John Stuart Mill even affirms the creation and passing of norms in On Liberty: “many opinions now general will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present” (20). This defies the notion of the “insanity” of a transformative age such as ours (alleged so often in today’s reactionary and nostalgic comment sections). Where historical development, norms, and social disputes are noted by historicism, beliefs are contradicted and outmoded, just as Pinel’s “Moral Treatment” from a social-historical standpoint went from praiseworthy and humane to contemptable and inhumane – judged by the families of patients and ethics.
~ 7 Reason/Unreason ~
Dostoevsky has been lauded for deep psychological insights from an authoritative psychologist today yet his sensible societies in The Idiot and The Possessed doubt the sanities of ‘most everyone to absurdity – the exuberant women in particular. Dialogue from The Idiot between Aglya and Prince Myschkin regarding Nastasya:
... And do you know what she writes to me in those letters?”
“Nothing would surprise me; she’s insane.”
“Here are the letters” (Aglaya took from her pocket three letters in three envelopes and threw them down in front of the prince). “For a whole week now she’s been imploring, persuading, luring me into marrying you. She ... ah, yes, she’s intelligent, though she’s insane, and you say rightly that she’s much more intelligent than I am ... she writes to me that she’s in love with me, that every day she looks for a chance of seeing me at least from afar. She writes that you love me, that she knows it, that she noticed it long ago, and that you spoke with her about me there. She wants to see you happy; she’s sure that only I can make you happy ... She writes so wildly ... strangely ... I haven’t shown anyone these letters, I was waiting for you. Do you know what it means? Can you guess anything?”
“It’s madness; it’s proof that she’s insane,” said the prince, and his lips trembled.
“You’re not crying, are you?”
“No, Aglaya, no, I’m not crying”.
That being said, however, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on “Mental Disorder (Illness)” explains the origins of our modern conception of insanity.
As a characteristic attributed to mental disorder, irrationality or “unreason” has been linked to emphasis on order and logic during the “Age of Reason”, which (together with the emergence of empirical science), is seen to have laid the foundation for our contemporary psychiatric categories and theories. In the present day, cultural norms and intuitive folk psychology assign the boundaries of mental disorder, and these intuitions conflict about some particular conditions (addictions, and disorders of “character” or personality, for example).
– Jennifer Radden, Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy.
The problem of assuming and mythologizing the “Age of Reason” is its hollowing out in practical development (its “naiveté” as Husserl deemed it) or its own absence of reason, as it gives over far more often to willed agreement/determinations; changes in scientific/medical paradigms; Nietzschean perspectivism; even to historical relativism. Yet today’s assumptions of possessing universality and absolute truth based on mere objectivist belief in them doesn’t suffice. John Stuart Mill even affirms the creation and passing of norms in On Liberty: “many opinions now general will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present” (20). This defies the notion of the “insanity” of a transformative age such as ours (alleged so often in today’s reactionary and nostalgic comment sections). Where historical development, norms, and social disputes are noted by historicism, beliefs are contradicted and outmoded, just as Pinel’s “Moral Treatment” from a social-historical standpoint went from praiseworthy and humane to contemptable and inhumane – judged by the families of patients and ethics.
Conclusions are still reached too quickly about the mental states of others, which gives psychology over to irrationality, as Husserl theorized and intuited, if not to tyrannical, gendered, and even political justification for institutionalization. And there really have been political justifications for institutionalization in the interest of political reaction. Despite modern progress leading up to the 1970s, African-American Civil Rights activists Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams were diagnosed by armchair psychologists[1]. They were deemed “paranoid schizophrenics” – when such a diagnosis has frequently been too vague in its arbitrary application, just as it possibly is with Anne-Josèphe. In the wake of – and perhaps inspired by – Rush and Pinel, pathologizing radicals also became an incessant pathological trend of its own so as to justify persecution and incarceration. Roudinesco explains in the context of Anne-Josèphe’s historiography:
When…Doctors Cabanès, Nass and Guillois began to study revolutionary pathology, much as Descuret, Trélat and Taine had done before them, they too relied upon ‘scientific discourse’ to reflect upon the Revolution in terms of the categories of madness. This time, however, their writings were dominated by terms such as neurosis, hysteria and paranoia…. In reviving the hypothesis that every revolution is a source of madness, these psychiatrists no longer knew how to distinguish the genuinely mad from ordinary neurotics, nor how to theorize the clinical form of each individual madness.
– Théroigne de Méricourt: A Melancholic Woman during the French Revolution, 229.
From the 20th century US, Szasz himself noted in The Second Sin that the psychiatrist hardly ever distinguishes society’s so-called “unfit” from its “unwilling”, which has severe psychiatric consequences for such a free society as the US.
Among persons categorized as mentally ill, there are two radically different types which are systematically undifferentiated by psychiatrists and hence confused by them. One is composed of the inadequate, unskilled, lazy, or stupid; in short, the unfit (however relative this term might be). The other of the protestors, the revolutionaries, those on strike against their relatives or society; in short, the unwilling.
Because they do not differentiate between these two groups, psychiatrists often attribute unfitness to unwillingness, and unwillingness to unfitness. (89)
Radden’s own explanation of mental disorder continues to the point where the reasonableness of our reasonable society in general is doubtful: “construing mental disorder as a want of rationality has been weakened in the face of evidence from behavioral economics showing that holding and acting on well-grounded and reasons-responsive beliefs occurs rarely in the general population, and common prejudices and superstitions seem to be indistinguishable from clinical delusions with respect not only to their prevalence but to the way they are adopted and maintained”. Being misdiagnosed and unjustly institutionalized as mentally ill is also acknowledged by Radden as being just as mentally anguishing to individuals as if they really were ill (under the partial gaze of a “medicalizing” and “pathologizing” authority). This allegedly internal illness, then, has its source problematically located in the external world, in judgement by others, in an over-psychologizing, dysfunctional, and perhaps overly-resentful society.
By stoicism’s own contemporary writing, stoic psychology distinguishes “the passions” from more “rational emotions”, as in Robertson’s The Philosophy Of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or else between “emotion” and “feeling” as in Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic. But I find it evident all around that the border between one and the other is defined too arbitrarily and abusively, as stoics and folk psychology decide, not reason itself deciding. Worse still, the Roman politician Cicero, contributing to stoicism, proposed to translate the Greek word passion, pathos, to the Latin word morbus, which means “disease”[2]. Instead it became the latin word pati“to suffer”. From pati our words for “patient” and “passive” is derived. This is all following Robertson’s own The Philosophy Of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Yet biologically, “pati” is also where “pathogen”, as in disease pathogen, comes from. As such, the nefarious, political, and prejudicial trend these days of pathologizing the spread of 1) radical ideas, 2) subjectivity, and 3) emotional sensitivity on college campuses has conflated the three to the spread of disease, as in the psychologist Gad Saad’s horrendous book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Saad is quick to make the analogy of COVID-19’s biological pathogens to so-called “idea pathogens” in higher education in spite of COVID having an actual death toll to it. Saad adds to an incessant, mindless noise being made today against liberal education, which altogether expresses that too many students are diseased with feelings and madness.
Yet to be passive is to be objective as object, not subjectively-active in the mind. Surprisingly, Hume, Condorcet, and Smith were confident that commercial society could bear anxiety and uncertainty, even to weigh the idea of a “fatherless world”. Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments notes that liberal Enlightenment, open society as imagined by above mentioned 18th century philosophers, is a social arrangement confirming fear to be a “natural condition of human life”, not an unnatural pathos as stoics consider all passion. She says
For Hume, it is a passion associated with probability, or with a “wavering and unconstant method” of surveying the world. It influences the way individuals think, for Condorcet: “We believe what we hope or what we fear, more forcefully than something which is indifferent.” It is even enticing, or at least interesting. We are interested in hope and fear and distress, Smith says. We are charmed by the Phèdre of Racine because of, and not in spite of, its “extravagance and guilt”; “her fear, her shame, her remorse, her horror, her despair, become thereby more natural and interesting.” (12)
But then this was obscured by the more cold, apathetic, ordering, and objective pretensions of 19th century Europe and its Conservative Order. Antiquated stoicism is nevertheless hellbent to pathologize and eliminate anxiety where it exists today. They fixate on anxiety and depression levels increasing on campuses – blindsiding themselves, then, to their own anxieties and that of market society as a whole. Just as Nietzsche said ascetic priests seek a culprit, a guilty culprit, for their own internal sufferings, these descendants of stoicism attribute high passions on campuses to leftist and female “insanity”, and so actual freedom and personal responsibility must be eliminated on the basis of paternal ordering, doctoring, and inoculating of the mind.
Foucault prefaced his Madness and Civilization with saying, “We have yet to write the history of that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbors, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non-madness” (ix). It may be contradictory to attribute madness to those who deem others mad, but Szasz also wrote of “sane” people’s impetus to control the mental states of others as therapeutic on its own: “When I use the term therapeutic state, I use it ironically; it’s therapeutic for the people who are doing the locking up, who are doing the therapy, it’s not therapeutic for the victims, for the patients.” Indeed, when Seneca elaborated on how to maintain a tranquil mind, he not only stigmatized those with strong desires (or passions), he was one of the earliest to fraudulently equate what he deemed adverse behaviour, or mental disposition, to physical disease, which might have prompted modern and psychiatric confinement centuries later.
We should choose for our friends men who are, as far as possible, free from strong desires: for vices are contagious, and pass from a man to his neighbour, and injure those who touch them. As, therefore, in times of pestilence we have to be careful not to sit near people who are infected and in whom the disease is raging, because by so doing, we shall run into danger and catch the plague from their very breath; so, too, in choosing our friends' dispositions, we must take care to select those who are as far as may be unspotted by the world; for the way to breed disease is to mix what is sound with what is rotten.
– On Peace Of Mind, Section VII.
While Foucault elaborated on “the passions” as a chapter in his Madness And Civilization, he didn’t implicate stoic philosophy. Pinel focused his work on ordering the patient’s “passions” towards right reason. He also recommended Seneca as moral writing to instruct the physician, which implies that Pinel followed Seneca’s philosophy of quarantining “strong desires”:
The physician would find much to interest him, said Pinel, in the moral works of the ancients, especially Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus, Celsus, Cicero, and Seneca. In discussing this subject Pinel regretted that "moral" remedies for mental disease had been neglected for many centuries.
– Kathleen E. Grange, Pinel and Eighteenth-Century Psychiatry, 447.
The standard influences of ancient philosophy on classical liberal Enlightenment also informed its psychiatry, as in the psychiatry of Pinel and Rush. Yet following Grange’s argument that Pinel disciplined the passions of his patients, Nietzsche’s understanding of ascetic priests – in On The Genealogy Of Morality’s third essay – is important here where they castrate the intellect by turning off emotion.
“I was urged on…to be reminded not to go and become a Sophist, making a success in the world by preaching that it is blessed to suffer”, Kierkegaard told himself in his journal[3]. A particular absurdity of ascetic priests in psychology is to affirm suffering in the in-group. As in Peterson drawing from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning or Yes To Life, an ascetic psychology suffers so much that it actually views suffering and discipline as the higher, the more beneficial, to the human being than either happiness or pleasure. Yet suffering and discipline can only be valued in their ultimate, cathartic release through happiness and pleasure. Respectfully regarding Frankl, his suffering as meaning could have been truly meaningful had he been reunited with the family members he lost during the Holocaust – whereby his suffering would’ve been transvaluated into happiness and pleasure. The ascetic, on the other hand, inverts suffering and discipline as good, happiness and pleasure as bad, on account of his personal suffering.
Confusingly, psychology’s ascetic priests, as in Peterson and Saad, weaponize suffering as “pathology” or “pathogen” in their opposed out-group. It is meaningful for us but the same is euphemistically a medical illness for you. For this out-group, capitalism’s mechanical drudgery as suffering – prompting emotional judgments against it – must still be accepted and necessary. But for the in-group, the ascetic’s role is mere redirection, not the turning off, of emotion by a performatively passion-less observer, priest, doctor, or inflated personality. Just as Christianity lambasts “passions” in non-believers only to exalt their own suffering grounded in the cathartic Passion story of Jesus, it’s actually an ideological, particularly-interested withholding of sympathy and empathy until the beliefs of others are completely in conformity with their own.
Apathy, too, has its origins in apatheia or else in the stoic notion of being “a-“ (without) “pathos” (suffering or passion), which possibly castrates one’s capacity for sympathy or empathy as a stoic apparently eliminates contagious disease. But it’s all too frequent that stoics neglect their own despair, their own pathos, by moralizing against it in others. There may be a distinction of difference between apathy and stoic “apatheia”, as stoics commonly argue, but where stoicism persists in saying it’s not the world that upsets you but your mere opinion of the world that upsets you, then stoicism doesn’t care about your opinion whatsoever as it directs you to change it. It shouldn’t even care about its own. This apatheia as “serenity”, or else “indifference”, collapses into apathy about opinion so there might be a Distinction Without Difference after all, as a logical fallacy. Meric Casaubon’s translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations says in Book 12, XIX that “all things are but opinion” (107). If that is true, and in the same section Aurelius teaches to “cast away from thee all opinion” (107), then one casts away “all”. That is to say, become apathetic, or else “indifferent”, to all in existence. If nihilism’s act of repudiating is to cast away, then stoicism is also nihilistic towards all in existence.
What Haidt, Ellis, and Howard happen to have in common is how they trivially overcame their anxieties as stoics typically do – by busying themselves with work, as Seneca advises in On Peace Of Mind, section III. Yet in On Truth And Lies In The Nonmoral Sense,Nietzsche describes stoicism’s indifference metaphorically and ironically as their “masterpiece of deception”: “When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.”
Just as in the Hellenistic era for crisis-coping stoicism, France’s post-revolutionary era for Pinel’s asylum, Howard’s despair at an unaccomplished life and his own son’s psychotic break, and the US’ post-WW2 suburban malaise, so too in today’s post-Cold War paradigm wherein self-styled experts (busy-bodies evading their own subjectivities) intervene in other people’s lives with their passionate hatred of the passions and their false cures. Is it possible, following Plato’s successful polemic against sophistry, that sophistry didn’t convert to stoicism?
Seneca himself wrote that the “stoic sage” is the “wise man”[4]. But the Ancient Greek for “wise man” is sophos. Following “The Sophists” Stanford Encyclopedia entry, “The Greek word for sophistēs, formed from the noun sophia, ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning’ has the general sense ‘one who exercises wisdom or learning’” and “the word originally meant ‘sage’ or ‘expert’”[5]. To be fair, “philosophy” as a practice of acquiring, or else the “friend” or “love” (philos) of, wisdom (“sophia”) is also linguistically prey to sophistry in the negative, error-prone, and chattering sense. This was infamously depicted in Plato’s writings through Socrates and against the rhetoric-peddling sophists. The stoic Epictetus, who lived after Plato, condemned sophists and sophistry in favor of the “sage” in his Discourses. But isn’t this still sophistry from stoics? Indeed, Robertson, Farnsworth, Ryan Holiday, and other stoic scholars today seem unaware of this contradiction.
The stoic “wise man” could collapse into sophism, not just linguistically but functionally. More so when stoicism’s metaphysics is originally based on Natural Law as Hippias of Elis, an arrogant sophist and a contemporary of Socrates, conceived it[6]. Today, stoicism possibly stands as the self-help bestseller among all western philosophies, as well as a big contributor to the Bible. Socrates was the great foil of sophists, according to Kierkegaard’s first published work and Master’s thesis, On The Concept Of Irony With Continual Reference To Socrates. Kierkegaard’s understanding of sophistry traced it to his own materialistic, commercial, Enlightenment, naturalistic, apathetic, objectivistic, aphoristic, and advice-giving age. A lot of this was derived from stoicism. If stoicism collapses back into the sophist’s tradition of normative, surface-level, relativistic rhetoric, and not universal reality, then we’re all in trouble with Socrates.
But with the equating of human emotions to pathogens, to disease, we can also understand today’s frantic herd organization of our stoics, our celebrity scientists, as well as our ascetic priests, against college campuses. As if to treat so-called “idea pathogens”, i.e., to have feelings and ideas contrary to commercial and objectivist norms, is apparently more important than COVID! “Has your common sense been thoroughly assaulted?” Peterson asks in a headliner review of The Parasitic Mind. “Read this book, strengthen your resolve, and help us all return to reason.” These performative intellectuals – (some of them stoically-inspired to will and ought against the willing ought – who passionately attack the passionate way of being), they don’t think enough, reason enough, to actually consult Nietzsche for he asked regarding ascetic priestliness, “to eliminate the will completely and turn off all the emotions without exception, assuming we could: well, would that not mean to castrate the intellect?”[7] In fact, Farnsworth himself concedes that the early stoics were hardliners against emotion but to such an extent that “every emotion amounts to a judgement. A person experiencing an emotion is agreeing to a proposition (such as “this is something to be enraged about”) and the agreement is a mistake, because it involves an attachment to an external.”[8] But if the will, as in one’s thought and mind, is not allowed to judge, not allowed to attach to externals, then it resides in nothingness.
No, stoics and ascetics find a scapegoat, a patient, a convert, as a means to unload their own bottled-up passions, especially their anxieties, in hypocritical, catastrophizing, and unhelpful echo chambers. By their hands, wider social and political solutions are neglected for mere psychological, moralistic, naturalistic, and physicalist solutions. Their exaltation of free speech and civil discourse, as in Madame Roland, Shapiro, and Peterson, is absurdly one-sided and elitist. It is freedom pitted against freedom, just as Nietzsche said of ascetic objectivity being “life against life”. But this can also speak to the moral panic, the virtue signalling, the “victimology”, of the liberal middle-class in defense of its extorted property and power. In the process, however, community relations are reduced to a desert, to nihilism. Such is the commonplace deficiency of the field of psychology, so Gertz’s book, Nihilism, argues, citing Arendt’s An Introduction Into Politics. Both A Just Measure of Pain and Pathological Family also note this distinctly middle-class pitfall through “personal responsibility” as a contradictory denial of personal responsibility through the pretext of medical psychopathology.
Contra the stoic conceits that one cannot change externals, Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, wrote of our neoliberal era, which is coloured by British PM Margaret Thatcher, or else the “stiff upper lip” of British stoicism:
Of course, it’s possible to change a society and to drag it into the global economic monoculture. Mrs. Thatcher showed how: Break up collectives and make people feel a little bit more alone in the world. Cut a few holes in the social safety net. Raise the status of money-making, and lower the status of every other activity. Stop giving knighthoods to artists and start giving them to department-store moguls. Stop listening to intellectuals and start listening to entrepreneurs and financiers.[9]
Just as the atomized individual decline of late-stage capitalism manifests itself hypocritically in the passions expressed in Peterson’s Youtube channel population towards radicals and feminists, so too in the Industrial Revolution’s ideal usefulness of solitary confinement in prisons. Both maintain the relevance of ascetic priests. That is, a dependency that insures the worldly income of a false healer of the soul.
a few months in the solitary cell renders a prisoner strangely impressible. The chaplain can then make the brawny navvy cry like a child; he can work on his feelings in almost any way he pleases; he can, so to speak, photograph his thoughts, wishes and opinions on his patient's mind, and fill his mouth with his own phrases and language.
– Reverend Clay, Prison Chaplain, as quoted in A Just Measure Of Pain, 197-8.
Stoicism, too, a major philosophical contributor to Christianity, expresses its own passions in secret, permissible, and even unnatural spaces such as the prison cell above. But then it’s a matter of their belief system, their ideology, being gratified. In the commonplace use stoics make of Moving The Goalposts regarding their own tenets, Robertson’s “rational emotion”[10] or Farnsworth’s “feelings”[11] are validated by rationality or nature, i.e, stoical God. Then at once stoics can express passions and the soul can sing. Yet, for stoicism, as for Christianity, this can naively assume its own success at elevating the souls of others, influencing externals, through worldly chattering and compulsory upbringing, not inward thinking nor passionate feeling. Epictetus plainly said one cannot change externals, cannot control the body, but the self-contradiction, the absurdity, is that saying so is an attempt to influence externals. Worse still, it’s being written and said so as to influence the internal states of others as in what is not our own.
Stoicism’s aphorisms, peddled stock phrases, are possibly the basis for casuistry in that Kierkegaard said, “The casuist is secure and calm; he feels that he not only is able to help himself but is able to help others as well”, but the inward-deepening of actual reasoning knows how unhelpful positive advice-giving, sophistry, can be as it peddles to middling minds how to live the life of virtue and excellence. Of the moral trade-offs between the spirited, reasonable, and universal “good” and the practical and earthly “useful”, Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin’s book, The Abuse Of Casuistry, actually lays out the history of casuistry. In it, they argue that casuistry was first invented by stoics, and systematized by the Roman lawyer Cicero (76-8).
All stoics also hypocritically express their own passions in secret, idealized places, especially when they claim stoicism, or else CBT, helped them overcome their past depression as a trivial matter of course – as in Lukianoff corresponding with Peterson or else Ellis overcoming his social anxiety while reading stoics and developing his “Rational Therapy”. “In spiritlessness there is no anxiety. It is too happy for that, too content, and too spiritless”, Kierkegaard wrote in On The Concept Of Anxiety. Contrariwise, Kierkegaard described of Thomasine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd’s pseudonymously-written character, Claudine:
Her decision is stamped by the impetus of passion, but this again supports her. Her [fullness of pathos] makes her fall, but it also strengthens her again. Thus an age that is very reflective cannot for that reason be summarily accused of being powerless, for it perhaps has great power, but it goes to waste in the fruitlessness of reflection.
– Two Ages, 66.
In a history of philosophy lecture, Arthur F. Holmes explains that stoics believe the soul is merely material; they “reject any notion of immaterial, transcendental forms”, and they also contributed to modern biology or what could have been the pure physicalism of natural science and the mechanical philosophy of 18th century Enlightenment. So they could have reduced the mind, the soul, to un-Christian worldliness – malleable to Materialist Psychology in prisons. Where nature is merely passive and God is the active and rational orderer – the one mind and logos – to the stoic, what existence and active capacities are left to the human mind if none at all? Where is the inward and transcending internality that Epictetus says is exclusively within our power?
Where the mind and nature are at odds, nature is favored every time by stoics to the extent that they are incredibly spiritless, passionless, uncreative mediocrities, or else they are perpetually evading their own passions. This is particularly so to the degree that Haidt/Lukianoff didn’t elucidate how much “emotional reasoning” or “cognitive distortions” Peterson himself exchanged with them during their online discussion as he demonized his ever-elusive, post-modern neo-marxists on college campuses. This is a matter of their own “us vs. them” tribalism as they decry “us vs. them” tribalism in others. If Haidt/Lukianoff cared to deconstruct “us vs. them” worldviews, then they would have deconstructed Peterson’s “Abel vs. Cain” outlook that vilifies Antifa and others to this day. Following Carl Jung’s mythological interpretation, in fact, the passionate hatred of the race of Cain ends up being just as Cain-like as what the race of Abel, Peterson’s implied race, aims to destroy, which amounts to hypocrisy. Jung, perhaps Peterson’s favourite psychologist, interpreting Byron’s Heaven And Earth:
The power of God is threatened by the seduction of passion; a second fall of angels menaces heaven. Let us translate this mythological projection back into the psychological sphere, from whence it originated. Then it would read: the power of the good and reasonable ruling the world wisely is threatened by the chaotic primitive power of passion; therefore passion must be exterminated; that is to say, projected into mythology. The race of Cain and the whole sinful world must be destroyed from the roots by the deluge. It is the inevitable result of that sinful passion which has broken through all barriers.
– Psychology Of The Unconscious, 120.
Taking in Haidt/Lukianoff’s warnings of coddling, of overprotective “safetyism” regarding children, their own ideas are merely another reiteration of the post-WW2 “overprotective” momism fad. This is documented in Weinstein’s The Pathological Family as well as Harrington’s Mind Fixers. It is a “nature” favoring in the “nature vs. nurture” dispute that also has some masculine vs. feminine prejudices in favor of patriarchal households. But the masculine “nature” favoring can nevertheless be “nurturing” whereby doctors and parents pathologize and control within patriarchal homes all the same. Haidt/Lukianoff’s arguments ironically become a matter of the ascetic doctor’s own safetyism whereby their parent readers are conditioned to catastrophize sending their kids to schools and universities unsupervised, uncontrolled, and susceptible to scary leftist thought. As Nietzsche said of ascetic priests, the direction of ressentiment is changed. So could it be with parental anxiety towards college. Such passion isn’t actually eliminated, but actual freedom for the child is, especially when Haidt/Lukianoff patronize that “iGen”, or Generation Z, is “growing up more slowly” in their words[12]. It is a pretext to extend parental control past 18 years; to extend infantilization; to invoke safetyism against campuses, when their project is supposedly to temper safetyism.
For Haidt’s part, he partnered with Twenge as psychologists to judge this “iGen” generation, as the millennial generation before it, to be an entitled “me generation”. But this is with zero introspection or originality on the basis of Baby Boomers themselves once being called the “me generation” – as “narcissistic” in the trendy psychology fashion – and through the use of charts and averages, but not based on what’s true or individualistic in getting to really know a young person as a human being. 1987’s The Closing Of The American Mind, as the obvious originator of the title The Coddling Of The American Mind, received criticism from Noam Chomsky on its grounds that “education ought to be set up like some sort of variant of the Marine Corps, in which you just march the students through a canon of 'great thoughts' that are picked out for everybody” and "the effect of that is that students will end up knowing and understanding virtually nothing"[13]. Aimed at Haidt/Lukianoff 21st century rehash, the criticism remains the same.
Ironically, Socrates was criminally tried in Athens for 1) not honoring the traditional Gods, instead abiding his own inward, negative daimonion and 2) corrupting Athenian youth. It was of absolute value in Athens that children follow through in their fatalistic roles as in Anytus, the tanner, demanding of his son. In Søren Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity, Jon Stewart said of tradition, norm, and sophist valuing Athens that, “Obedience to one’s parents was among the highest of values. Socrates, on the contrary, had undermined this by encouraging Anytus’ son in the idea that he, in his role as an individual with specific gifts and talents, was more important than in his role as a son with clearly defined obligations and duties”. Analogous to that is Peterson erring on the side of “responsibility” and obligatory hierarchy more often than actual, individualistic freedom where Existentialism is concerned.
While Epictetus’ Discourses said, “our body and every part of it are not in our power, and likewise our possessions, parents, brothers and sisters, children, country, and, in short, everyone with whom we associate”, he also demanded of sons regarding their fathers to “obey him in all things” in the same Discourses, which is contradictorily placing sons within the absolute power of their fathers. Epictetus didn’t actually abide by Socrates who could be analogous to the post-modernist, post-structuralist, and critical theorist of today, giving so many parents, traditionalists, reactionaries, and sophists so much grief as they question traditions, norms, and absolutes. Yet Socrates was historic because, contra the pre-Socratic studying of nature, he turned thought away from nature and towards man’s preestablished ideas. He went as far as to doubt his own nature, whether he really was a man or a Typhon – “a fabulous multiform beast with a hundred heads resembling many different animal species” – who in our day would have been gaslit and resented by trolls for his freedom of thought.
I am still unable, as the Delphic inscription orders, to know myself; and it really seems to me ridiculous to look into other things before I have understood that. This is why I do not concern myself with them. I accept what is generally believed, and, as I was just saying, I look not into them but into my own self: Am I a beast more complicated and savage than Typhon, or am I a tamer, simpler animal with a share in a divine and gentle nature?
–Socrates in Plato’s “Phaedrus”, Complete Works, 510.
For all the complaints made of college campuses engendering too much “emotional reasoning”, one should question whether that isn’t also guided by emotional reasoning. Saad himself quotes Hume saying, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”, yet Saad doesn’t elaborate on whether it could be true or false. It’s only an ominous header to his chapter “Thinking versus Feeling, Truth versus Hurt Feelings” wherein his ideological antagonists are deemed hysterical. Where Saad, the typical male Trump supporter, mocks the fragility – the hurt feelings – in college leftists throughout his own book, The Parasitic Mind, he nevertheless complains that, “Building a society where the primary objective is to protect one’s fragile self-esteem from the dangers of competition will only lead to a society of weakness, entitlement, and apathy. Life is necessarily competitive; society is necessarily hierarchical” (190). But this stoic concept, apathy as a lack of passion, is what he seems to also value? That’s contradiction, or else it’s a matter of being apathetic to your feelings, not my feelings as in my judgements.
As the actual promoters of apatheia, stoicism is consistently the philosophy of emotional repression, which essentially represses passion, just as Kierkegaard said he could hear Epictetus’ own passion, “a slave sighing in chains”, while discovering the pride of stoicism[14]. But this priestly psychology’s ideality betrays the fact that it didn’t actually work for Madame Roland, a committed stoic during the French Revolution, nor for Pinel’s asylums. Nor did Christian ascetic moralizing help to decrease crime rates or else social deviancy in 1790s Britain as it was intended through liberally-reformed penitentiaries. The reformed prison, says Ignatieff, “exerted a hold on men's imaginations because it represented in microcosm the hierarchical, obedient, and godly social order, which they felt was coming apart around them” (84). Further still and utopianly,
The reformative ideal had deep appeal for an anxious middle-class because it implied that the punisher and the punished could be brought back together in a shared moral universe. As a hopeful allegory for class relations in general, it proved capable of surviving the repeated frustrations of reality because it spoke to a heart-felt middle-class desire for a social order based on deferential reconciliation.
– A Just Measure Of Pain, 213.
It's been said that CBT is helpful for countless people’s depression and anxiety yet where freedom implies passion contra nature, stoicism is consistently the philosophy of its original writers, i.e., that of slaveowners or else of slaves who patronize what must be accepted as natural – as necessary. Laertius’ anecdote of Zeno, the founder of the stoic school, illustrates the point of stoic fatalism: “He was once punishing a slave whom had been caught stealing, when the culprit objected ‘It was fated that I should steal’, to which Zeno reputedly rejoined, ‘Yes, and that you should be beaten!’”[15] As such an ironic rejoinder, however, this speaks only to the unnecessariness of the whole matter. Possibilities aren’t actually explored so that things could be otherwise.
Adam Smith’s middle-class values also promoted stoical virtues, yet not even on account of freeing the mind by grasping the world by what is within its own power – nor to render “wealth and the blessings associated with luxury and fame” as indifferent things following Aurelius’ Meditations. No, it is to usefully subordinate others into one’s own power.
The causes or circumstances which naturally introduce subordination, or which naturally, and antecedent to any civil institution, give some men some superiority over the greater part of their brethren, seem to be four in number. The first of those causes or circumstances is the superiority of personal qualifications, of strength, beauty, and agility of body; of wisdom and virtue, of prudence, justice, fortitude, and moderation of mind.
– Wealth Of Nations, Book 5, Part 2: Of The Expense Of Justice, 947-8.
Many stoics and Christians agree on living the ascetic life, to live by “moderation” philosophy. Resentment, anxiety, and hatred are all “passions” to them to be moderated. Possibly harboring these passions in themselves, however, makes them fall prey to Nietzsche’s assault of the ascetic ideals, which maintain false virtue. In Mitchell Mueller’s paper, The Stoic Roots of Christian Asceticism and Modern Psychotherapy, he explains,
For the stoics, the passions (roughly synonymous with the modern concept of emotion) were forms of judgement. Without judgement, there is no passion. A person who feels the passions of desire, fear, sadness, or elation is making subtle judgement about themselves and the world which give rise to these feelings. But for stoics, being so influenced by one’s emotions was believed to be a form of slavery. True freedom could only come as the result of apatheia. (37)
But Existentialists altogether would agree, contra this aspect of stoicism, that it is a matter of true and active freedom to be able to judge for oneself, to have opinion, as well as to live passionately, which runs counter to reserving the right to judge and have an opinion only to the stoic, the Christian ascetic priest, or the psychotherapist. Pierre Hadot wrote that stoic psychotherapy
consists in refusing to add subjective value-judgements – such as “this object is unpleasant”, “that one is good”, “this one is bad”, “that one is beautiful”, “this is ugly” – to the “objective” representation of things which do not depend on us, and therefore have no moral value. The Stoics’ notorious phantasia kateleptike – which we have translated as “objective representation” – takes place precisely when we refrain from adding any judgement value to naked reality. In the words of Epictetus: “we shall never give our assent to anything but that of which we have an objective representation.”
– quoted in The Philosophy Of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, 2nd edition, 155.
Particular absurdities arise by way of this act of “refusing” as a subjective act, as well as the act of “having” where “objective representation” is concerned, as in the subjective “having” of a mere representation (so still not the objective thing-in-itself but only its representation), which is still not “naked reality” but is a subjective value-judgement just the same. What decides what is the “objective representation” other than one’s subjective value-judgement? “Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation”, said Nietzsche, so it is a phenomenological relation, not an objective one. And by acknowledging phenomenological relations, one can wryly point out the representational error of Robertson’s The Philosophy Of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy correctly citing Ellis’ equation as A x B = C in his 1stedition and then incorrectly as A + B = C in his 2nd edition.
The skeptic school of philosophy emerged at the same time as stoicism in Ancient Greece. Both actually derive their origins from Socrates’ legacy as the stoically-inclined author, Farnsworth, details in The Socratic Method. Yet the skeptics immediately became the rivals of the stoics and precisely on the grounds of stoic conceits to knowledge. Epictetus, in particular, doesn’t just repeat the Socratic dictum of knowing nothing of reality. He claims to know nothing, then goes further in knowing by proclaiming the edicts of nature and necessity. Indeed, Epictetus is so inconsistent in his Discourses that if Socrates had been alive to discuss with him, it’s likely Epictetus would have been angered, i.e., impassioned, by Socratic questioning, since it regularly led to a negative, anxious aporia; an inconclusion.
In The Christianization of Pyrrhonism, it is argued that the skeptics led by Pyrrho informed Pascal as well as Kierkegaard, while the skeptics’ “epoché” informed Husserl’s highly-skeptical phenomenology as well as Sartre’s Existentialism. Therefore, taking in prior arguments from Nietzsche and Beauvoir, existential philosophy is profoundly skeptical, especially of objectivist pretensions of divesting oneself of subjectivity or of passions. Yet where Husserl’s epoché is something of a suspension of judgement as stoics themselves favor, he at least understood subjectivity as something coloring all life and that objective truth is an infinite project of analysis for subjectivity as “Objective Uncertainty”, in Kierkegaard’s words. Husserl directed judgement at judgement itself when he demanded an exhaustive study of consciousness and a skepticism against naturalism. And where stoicism ventures into the fields of psychiatry and psychology, Existential philosophy as skepticism emerges there also, in opposition.
One has to question whether stoics and Christians are true to their word of withholding judgement, as well as their own passions, especially regarding the judgement and passions of others. This could be questioned of the behavioral example of Haidt/Lukianoff, Saad, Shapiro, Murray, as well as Peterson. Haidt/Lukianoff themselves say, “Virtue signaling refers to the things people say and do to advertise that they are virtuous. This helps them stay within the good graces of their team”. Coincidentally, the age of Founding Fathers – as well as Jacobin “blood drinkers” – happens to rhetorically invoke “virtue” even more than “liberty”, as Ricks’ First Principles points out. John Adams wrote that “America was designed by Providence for the theatre on which man was to make his true figure, on which science, virtue, liberty, happiness, and glory were to exist in peace”, yet according to Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution regarding Adams’ sentiments, “The effort to comprehend, to communicate, and to fulfill this destiny was continuous through the entire Revolutionary generation”, but “it did not cease, in fact, until in the nineteenth century its creative achievements became dogma” (20-1).
Adams, cynical of his scandalized presidency and aging classicism, wrote, “The Virtue and good Sense of Americans, which I own I once had some dependence on, and which have been trumpeted with more extravagance by others, are become a byword.”[16] Virtue ethics, one should note here, has its origins in Socrates, Plato, as well as stoics, but they manifest themselves even more practically in Adams, George Washington, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robespierre, and Madame Roland as revolutionary figures who read and wrote stoically. On Roland’s upbringing, Ida M. Tarbell wrote that “Each system she examined, fascinated her. In turn she was Jansenist, stoic, deist, materialist, idealist” (30). You get a concise sense of Enlightenment rhetoric as stoic rhetoric here, when the early debates of the National Assembly were too slow in progress for her virtue, according to Tarbell:
She had absolutely no sympathy with delays, with compromises, with tentative measures, and she was as aggressively suspicious of the patriotism of the members as she was of the sincerity of the aristocrats. The condition of the finances troubled her. She could see no excuse for a delay in giving the country an exact statement of the public accounts. The press had not enough liberty to please her. "A people is not free," she declared, "and cannot become so, unless each one has the means of uncovering perfidious designs, of revealing the abuses of talent as well as of authority, of exposing the opinions of everybody, of weighing the laws in the scales of universal reason. What does it matter if one is abused, providing one is innocent and always ready to prove it? This kind of war on virtue seems to me excellent; perhaps custom and security do nothing for virtue but take away its energy. It must be attacked to be strong, and it is danger which renders it sublime.
– Madame Roland: A Biographical Study, 139.
To, then, undermined “custom and security” for her virtue actually meant to court suffering for France in a very Spartan ascetic direction: Namely, by courting aggressive wars of liberation and through Girondins liberality. Upon returning to the capital, Tarbell explains,
she had no hesitation in deciding what should be done by the Gironde. She had been too firmly convinced since the fall of the Bastille of the benefits of anarchy to fear it now. The lack of it had long been her despair. She was too suspicious of all persons of aristocratic origin to tolerate any union with the conservative party. She was too firmly convinced of the value of war as a "great school of public virtue" to hesitate about offensive operations. (177)
She kept to the stoic virtues of self-sacrifice, moderation, and military discipline. Nostalgically, Madame Roland wanted to, “do and dare like a Roman” (148), explains J. Mills Whitham in Men And Women Of The French Revolution, yet when it came to political rivalry with the Montagnards, “her theory of Girondin rebellion was a dramatic gesture rather than a maturely considered move”, “She sacrificed herself; she sacrificed Roland, Buzot, all the lovers and friends who were disposed to share her stage as principles”, and “her dictations helped to promote the ensuing Terror” against her own party, the Girondins (149-50). Since “she believed in the superiority of men” (15), not in the equality of stoic cosmopolitanism, she also sacrificed women to her own vanity and the vanity of stoicism, even though stoics altogether decry vanity:
We are all born with the unfortunate seed of passion. Budding reason finds itself assailed by it before arriving at a degree of maturity that protects it against passion's pernicious attacks; the sex is inclined particularly to vanity; all women eventually feel its malignant impressions: it is a vice inherent to their nature; wisdom consists of continually resisting it.
– Engendering the Republic of Letters, 117-8.
A lot of virtuosity could indeed be rhetorical and performative in the liberal, but it doesn’t solely exist in the progressive young activist of today. The attackers of “virtue-signalers”, or of SJWs, could have their own virtue-signaling via their own appeals to reason, “inherent” nature, moderation, or passion-lessness. If today’s stoics rhetorically uphold these commonly stoic virtues, but are not withholding their judgement, their passions, their vanity, and unreason at all times, then they are hypocritically also virtue-signalers.
For instance, Haidt/Lukianoff virtue-signal that they are enlightened centrists. For Haidt’s part, as a US Democrat, he virtue-signals his broad open-mindedness by reading conservatives from Burke through to Thomas Sowell. Yet right-wingers probably color his judgement as much as not reading or citing left-wingers for too long. At the start of “The Power of Common Humanity Today” section, The Coddling Of The American Mind acknowledges Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow but only in passing – only as a single paragraph – only to have it then be crowded out by Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop, Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies A Day, and Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal (74). This is its own virtue-signaling appeal to mediation with right-wingers since Haidt/Lukianoff patronize that “For activists seeking reform, the lesson is to find common ground”, also to foster broad appeal to “win elections” for lasting change (74). So it goes with establishment Democrats forsaking progressive principles for votes. Their argument plainly becomes a digression away from Alexander’s radical critique of the US justice system, and back to a critique of liberal identity politics, which nevertheless accounts for individual and group differences of persecution – and over the anonymous sameness of merely being a US citizen and a potential vote. So it is still a matter for Haidt/Lukianoff to not actually mediate, to not achieve a Both/And, but to cancel by cancelling identity politics and the radical left especially.
Haidt/Lukianoff also say that, “From our conversations with students, we believe that most high school and college students despise call-out culture”[17], yet this “despise” happens to be a passion, and stoics aren’t supposed to capitalize on the passions for political aims and judgements, but to temper the passions. Their book is possibly a long-winded expression of their own despising, then, even their own witch hunting, which is typical of ascetic priests in actual history. Contra Haidt/Lukianoff’s appropriation of the term in “Chapter 5: Witch Hunt” as hypocritical witch-hunters, Silvia Federici’s Caliban And The Witch accounts for the actual history of witch-hunts as they became useful for today’s commercial and patriarchal order, which Haidt/Lukianoff have a vested interest in defending through sophistical digressions and objectivistic ignorance. Nietzsche on the virtue-signaling of ascetic priests specifically, which nevertheless speaks to the “objective” observer and “emotionless” mediator or centrist:
And what dishonesty not to acknowledge this hatred as hatred? What an extravagance of large words and postures, what an art of ‘decent’ slander! These failures: what noble eloquence streams from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble resignation swims in their eyes! What do they really want? At least to make a show of justice, love, wisdom, superiority, that’s the ambition of these ‘lowest people’, these invalids! And how clever such an ambition makes people! For let’s admire the skillful counterfeiting with which people here imitate the trademarks of virtue, the resounding tinkle.
– “Third essay: what do ascetic ideals mean?”, On The Genealogy Of Morality, translated by Ian Johnston.
Perhaps stoics contributed too much to psychology, as Pinel exemplified. Just as Rush did in the US, Pinel in France conceived of excess “passions”, i.e. excess emotions, as being diametrically opposed to sanity. That entailed the severe and disciplinary agenda of his “moral treatment”[18]. Contra stoic ideals of disciplined (non-)reaction to external trauma – or a disordered environment in general, one could be rationally and ethically expressing judgement, yes, emotion, towards a tyrannical, unjust, mundane, or simply undesirable existence, just as Anne-Josèphe historically did and many of Dostoevsky’s women characters do.
Regarding the historical-psychological case of Anne-Josèphe in this play, it must be clarified that the socio-political tumult surrounding her confinement and impassioned outcries speak to more than her mere “lypemania”, or melancholia, diagnosis back then. It might even transcend Roudinesco’s Freudian angle more recently of implying she was schizophrenic or else suffered a “sad madness” at the loss of the desired object, the revolution. Analogously, in the contemporary matter of the stoical Haidt/Lukianoff’s The Coddling Of The American Mind, the smallest possibility of human emotions corresponding to reality itself on campuses is slyly rendered “cognitive distortions”, “emotional reasoning”, “fragility”, “us vs. them” and are discredited. Elitist ideals and passions are nevertheless expressed as such, and the dialogue between the “reasoner” and the “unreasonable”, or else the doctor and the patient, is one-sided and un-enlightened.
“Insanity” as a concept has a malicious intentionality behind it in our modern age, as in Shapiro deeming all undesired leftist behavior as “insane” on his YouTube channel. Our age often irresponsibly deems “insane” those whose behavior doesn’t align with the perceiver’s own orderliness, just as Tenducci actually wrote to Anne-Josèphe, “You wish to take leave of me and win fame and fortune yourself? You must be out of your mind!” Dostoevsky’s own use of insanity accusation in his characters surely highlights just how commonplace it was for the Russian upper classes to gaslight the slightest deviations from social etiquette. Yet Dostoevsky doesn’t show enough criticism or even self-awareness of this tendency. Or else this modern stigmatization of the allegedly insane is contrasted with the valorization of the insane through the “holy fool” or “holy Russia” (Prince Myshkin in The Idiot or Marya in The Possessed) as a mere trope. Either way, Foucault accounts for this dichotomy of the mentally anguished (or else deviant) in Madness And Civilization. I don’t think this dichotomy of stigmatization-valorization towards the mentally anguished is helpful to them, just as Foucault probably didn’t. My historical takeaway is nevertheless that, as they spread to Russia, modern, European ideas about reasoning (and mentally conforming) society possibly outpaced some of the other negative ideas manifested in this, the French Revolution. This is because the double-edged result of Enlightenment Europe’s ideas of “reason” and asylum isolation spread to Russia and clashed with Dostoevsky’s Slavophile “holy Russia” idealism in his writing.
Following the French revolution and despite the Reign of Terror, the 19th century experienced its own successive waves of revolutionary fervor, which stretched as far as Dostoyevsky’s Russia, and influenced even the Lower and Upper Canadian rebellions. Liberal reformers of the era shaped Canada’s own present-day federal Liberal Party. Dostoevsky himself was arrested and sentenced to labor in Siberia for associating with the radical Petrashevsky Circle who were reading socialist literature as well as liberal. Let it be known, this was instigated by Russia’s own right-wing, Tsarist reaction. Solitary confinement probably made an impression on his political views, as it ideally was supposed to for reaction’s sake[19]. The French Revolution nevertheless lent various ideologies to the development of nihilism as a dangerous movement in Russia, discussed in “6 Nihilism and the Division of Labour”.
That said, placing Dostoevsky and his reader, Nietzsche, back in their actual political context in a Europe of political turmoil between liberal and conservative, one can say that they were aligned with an aristocratic, feudal, and illiberal group (and order of things) that was fighting for its resentful, declining life. Just as in France and Britain, so too in Russia. This isn’t so far off a characterization of Dostoevsky, since Joseph Frank said of one of Dostoevsky’s unpublished works, Netotchka Nezvanova, as he wrote it between his earlier, progressive works and later, “mature” works,
Dostoevsky’s horizon embraces the higher social sphere of the enlightened, cultivated aristocracy, and his people are now complex individuals grasped primarily in terms of their own quality of personality and in the light of Dostoevsky’s fully elaborated and original psychology of sadomasochism. The significance of Netotchka Nezvanova is that it enables us to pinpoint this pivotal moment in Dostoevsky’s literary career.
– Dostoevsky: A Writer In His Time, 116.
Perhaps aristocracy was idealized in Nietzsche more through Dostoevsky’s published work, The Possessed. There, you find a tangible, aristocratic, Russian reaction to the spreading liberal Enlightenment ideas of Europe, which was an anti-aristocratic movement in part. Concerning Scheler or Nietzsche’s concepts of the “strong”, “competent”, and “noble” traits residing in the master class, then, they could be the mummified concepts of that class, too, maintained with mere rhetoric as in La Valette in this play and Dostoevsky’s “enlightened, cultivated aristocracy” so-called.
However, regarding Dostoevsky’s more “mature” works after his Siberian imprisonment, and this is important, his last diary entries appropriated “Russian Socialism” for his own resurrected, radical aims in the final stage of his life. He even went so far as to entertain co-operative ownership, similar to Chernyshevsky’s favoring of them in What Is To Be Done?. Frank explains:
In daring to apply the phrase “Russian Socialism” to his own messianic hope, he employs a term first coined by Herzen to predict that the peasant-based cooperative social institutions of Russia, such as the obshchina [communal ownership of land] and the artel [worker’s wage-sharing cooperative], would take the lead over Europe in creating the Socialist world of the future. Dostoevsky thus stresses, as he had already done with Alyosha Karamazov, the similarity between his own ultimate aims and those of the Russian radicals. (919)
This actually muddles what Peterson argues of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in his Beyond Order, as well as Dostoevsky’s own aristocratic arch, since co-operative ownership is the most collectivistic arrangement of the workplace, even more than left authoritarianism through party and state. Where workers, at long last, own the means of production, co-operatives happen to also be the communistic ideal. Peterson nevertheless writes in Beyond Order that “Nietzsche and Dostoevsky both foresaw that communism would appear dreadfully attractive—an apparently rational, coherent, and moral alternative to religion or nihilism—and that the consequences would be lethal” (163). Peterson cites Nietzsche’s Will To Power, which happens to be a largely-discredited, posthumous compilation of Nietzsche’s writing by Nazis. Nietzsche’s attitude in it said “Life denies itself” in socialism and that an “expenditure of lives” would result, ad absurdum. Peterson again: “Whether we have truly learned the ‘practical lesson’—the demonstration of the absurdity of the [socialist] doctrine—as a consequence of Nietzsche’s predicted “vast expenditure of lives” remains to be seen” (163). The contrary is true of socialism, however, going by Peterson’s own statements. Peterson concedes, in the same paragraph, that socialism’s “relatively mild version later popular in Britain, Scandinavia, and Canada” provided “genuine” improvement of working-class lives. Then Peterson confuses himself as to what is “mild” and what is actually “radical” socialism. Dostoevsky variously supported the latter, the radical kind, in the early and last stage of his life, while the Russian right-wing always loomed over him as censor to such ideas[20].
In 17th century France, Pascal warned the Catholic Church of “excessive credulity” regarding casuist doctors, as Jesuits, spreading falsehoods about morally unreproachable institutions, as in Port Royal. So too should we not fall for the same excess credulity – that is, impressionability to lies. They might actually have its roots in aristocratic or reactionary interests. Specifically, we should not take the casuist Peterson’s alarmism regarding today’s academic or radical socialism or feminism too seriously. It’s possibly more a matter of the moral panic[21] of reactionary groups on the right, not an impending totalitarian or “Orwellian” regime from the left. Being patronized by Haidt/Lukianoff to avoid “us vs. them” politics, or else by Murray against “crowd madness”, could hypocritically be trying to pit “us vs. them” and foment “crowd madness” just the same – towards the radical left.
Murray has a chapter in Madness Of Crowds called “women”, which has cursed energy since it’s loaded at the start with use of “delusion” and “deranged” contra the biologically naturalistic “fact” claims of experts such as Steven Pinker. Worse then that, Murray’s book contains a patronizing summary of feminism’s various waves, concluding that it’s history is over, that successive waves after the first two suffer symptoms of Murray’s self-styled “St George in retirement syndrome”. His passing mention of Wollstonecraft neglects just how much Wollstonecraft held gaslighting conservative men like Murray in absolute contempt, if the conservative judge at the end of Maria, or the Wrongs Of Women, is anything to go by (149-50). Murray being gay doesn’t necessarily make him an ally of women.
Women expressing their grievances; cutting their hair short; wearing pants; participating in politics; yelling from the Convention galleries; arming themselves; asserting themselves individualistically or in solidarity: these were altogether much too much for reactionaries such as Burke, Taine, and even the allegedly radical Andre Amar. And it seems that Nietzsche, in turn, followed Taine “socially”, as in Nietzsche’s admitted understanding of the herd[22], in spite of each of their own existential or skeptical individualism concretely tied to the acknowledgement – not persecution or ignorance – of the individualism of women:
There was a time when a society composed of men questioned whether women had a soul. In truth, this society consisted of those two-faced men, priests, who have always pretended to curse women in order to seem not to love them.... If our forefathers had so dim a view of women, it was because they were not free. You have just heard one of the first Amazons of liberty.
– Pierre Manuel, Attorney for the City Commune of Paris commenting after Anne-Josèphe's speech in 1792.
Where Nietzsche’s male chauvinism in opposition to “emancipated women” is concerned, he perhaps didn’t know the sheer scale of poisonous opposition and negation women have to contend with – especially from ascetic priests – to become free spirits. Who is Nietzsche or anyone to say that the nihilist, anarchist, socialist, or emancipated woman “fail to create their own selves” in their initially destructive or accusatory outlook? Their future isn’t known. Positivity is projected into the transcendental future if we altogether listen and help each other intersubjectively in our projects[23]. These aren’t “dangerous” “pie in the sky” projects; they are the tangible human needs of each and all, not just oneself. Arendt actually noted of Nietzsche that he was the first to identify the value “desert” of approaching nihilism yet he also became “the victim of its most terrible illusion”[24]. Namely, that one overcomes the desert of nihilism only individualistically, or only psychologically, by privileging one’s own active nihilism – or active spirit – over and against the spirit of others. This is a falsehood and all writing/language is likely an appeal to the other and to community, as Nietzsche himself admitted in On Truth And Lies In a Nonmoral Sense.
[1] Harrington, Anne, Mind Fixers, 165.
[2] Robertson, The Philosophy Of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, 75-6.
[3] The Journals of Kierkegaard, 1834-1854, 224.
[4] As quoted in The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy by Donald Robertson, 2nd edition, 91.
[5] Taylor, C.C.W. and Mi-Kyoung Lee, "The Sophists", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/sophists/>.
[6] Kainz, Howard P., Natural Law: An Introduction and Re-Examination, 2-3. Also, Koterski S.J., Father Joseph, “Lecture 5: Greek Ideas of Nature and Justice”, Natural Law and Human Nature.
[7] On The Genealogy Of Morality, 87.
[8] Ward Farnsworth, The Practicing Stoic, 187.
[9] As quoted in The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 301.
[10] Robertson, Donald, The Philosophy Of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, 2nd edition, 71 and 76.
[11] Farnsworth, Ward, “Emotion”, The Practicing Stoic, 161-188. Also 245-50.
[12] The Coddling Of The American Mind, 160.
[13] Understanding Power, 234-5.
[14] The Journals Of Kierkegaard – 1834-1954, 202.
[15] Robertson, The Philosophy Of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, 202
[16] Ricks, First Principles.
[17] The Coddling Of The American Mind, 268.
[18] Roudinesco, Elisabeth. Théroigne de Méricourt, 157-8.
[19] Frank, Dostoevsky, xv-vii.
[20] Frank, Joseph, Dostoevsky, 918-9.
[21] Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue should be credited for my use of this term.
[22] Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies In A Nonmoral Sense.
[23] Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, 135.
[24] Arendt, Hannah, Introduction Into Politics, quoted in Nihilism by Nolan Gertz, 154-5.