Anne-Josèphe: An Introduction to Existentialism by William Wilczak.
Part 1
~ 1 Existential Philosophy ~
Existential philosophy is a wave of thought that emerged from the 19th and 20th centuries. As to how it relates to the 18th century’s Enlightenment French Revolution, one can find that all the primary existential writers refer to it explicitly. Just to name a few, Kierkegaard’s Two Ages, Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good And Evil and On The Genealogy Of Morality, Sartre’s Literature And Existentialism, and Camus’ The Rebel speak of it. As for Beauvoir, not only does Ethics Of Ambiguity also touch on the French Revolution, her magnum opus regarding the emancipation of women, The Second Sex, references Anne-Josèphe, Claire Lacombe, Marquis de Condorcet, and Olympe de Gouges by name. Existentialism altogether views 18th century Enlightenment critically, not positively. The French Revolution’s developments contributed to that in a large part and not in a way that can be abstracted from the rest of classically liberal Enlightenment.
To fast track your way to understanding Existentialism’s potential, real-world application as I see it, please read Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus and Cineas first, followed by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Invisible Man has an audiobook performed by the actor Joe Morton and it is amazing! If you want to tackle Existentialism the hard way, though, as I did in school, start with Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego, which is nonetheless praxis to me writing the play, as implied in Sartre’s title. Consciousness, like a pane of glass, has no content. It already, frequently, transcends one situation or one’s own person for the world or for another. Thus, negating the ego in my experience for those experiencing greater exclusion was required for this play. The I, the ego as male and here in the present, had to be transcended for Anne-Josèphe and others in the past.
Wanting to write about Anne-Josèphe isn’t enamoured idolatry so much as existential comradery. Her engaging presence in wide-brimmed hat and riding habit, wielding her pistol and sabre, implies spirit, or the existential authenticity of an individual in defiance of the norm. But what was existentially appealing in mere image (object) had to be in mind (subject) too! I tried to make my mind hers and it was possible because our experiences are somewhat similar. Born 1762 in the town of Marcourt, later raised in Liege, Belgium, she was carried off into the wider political, cultural, economic, gender, and generational strife of the age, as we ourselves have been. I think we can say that European civilization is having an existential crisis. Anne-Josèphe and I, in our privileged anonymity, are compelled to not have a part in it, yet we know, in our pondering depths, we already do. If one has also travelled across borders as much as Anne-Josèphe and I have in our youth (by the heaping generosity of others), one is more attuned to the inessentiality of social norms, the anxious inconstancy of identity, the passionate want for new experience, and the many contingencies – rather than one singular, necessary path – of existence.
We are all seeking transcendence from our alienated situation in modernity where all its information and social forces are so daunting. Beauvoir and Sartre interchange transcendence with the word freedom, which paradoxically entails its own finitude or responsibilities as it encounters the freedom of others. That said, I always knew I owed women due responsibility. The most plausible way to make that actual is to have them speak for themselves, which is why I have a lot of the historical figures of the revolution do so.
Another due responsibility is to make it accessible to you! I wrote the play to make it readable as a closet drama, the way Goethe’s Faust is, in the possibility it cannot be performed. Faust would have to take almost nine hours to perform, whereas I aimed for Anne-Josèphe to be the length of Hamlet in word count so that an intermission between part one and two extends the length to somewhere under four hours. The French Revolution demands no less.
Some might slander Existentialism, saying it has its use solely for angsty teenagers, but its use should extend further into adulthood as adults themselves too comfortably take their own subjectively sourced and sustained values as objective truth and impose them on themselves and others. That there is a rebellious attitude in the angsty teenager to begin with still proves the point for us. Namely, it is a subject (consciousness) newly emerging from the mere object (child) to doubt objectivity and orders as they are given. Edmund Husserl’s famed exercise, the phenomenological reduction, has two constituting moments: “epoché is the ‘moment’ in which we abandon the acceptedness of the world that holds us captive and the reduction proper indicates the ‘moment’ in which we come to the transcendental insight that the acceptedness of the world is an acceptedness and not an absolute”, John Cogan explains[1].
Invoking Husserl himself: “The attempt to doubt everything has its place in the realm of our perfect freedom: We can attempt to doubt anything whatever, no matter how firmly convinced of it in an adequate evidence we may be”[2]. In spite of my conscience telling me an introduction to a stage play should not escalate into the adult reader doubting their own existence and values, here we are! But I am not here saying there is no objective truth. Rather, the subjective expressions of objective truth can sometimes be proven false or hypocritical, and I encourage the reader to play spot-the-contradiction in the words and deeds of the characters in the play as they each relate themselves to the truth. The objective truth itself also changes, demonstrated by the French Revolution’s own character changing, not being static. It did not just be as a set of facts. It also became other facts that then contradicted its initial facts. Considering that Edmund Burke released eleven editions of his Reflections On The Revolution in France only in the first year of its publication, 1790, by no means are the facts easy to come by for anyone[3].
If something insisted on as objective truth is mere subjective insistence, then what is actually being expressed might be what continental philosophers frequently call dogma. Or it might also be to “reify” immediate consciousness, or surface-level thinking and empiricism, into reality itself, which is what Husserl criticized of philosophical/scientific naturalism. Specifically, naturalism makes claims that are presumably objective, or in nature, when they actually originate in subjective perceiving, constructing, measuring, qualifying, meaning-giving, or valuing. That is, they originate in an idea or in idealization, which contradicts naturalism’s own intention to provide “objective” facts independent of the subject, the subject’s ideas, and the subject’s errors. Nevertheless, among a community of subjects, these claims to objectivity still form perceptions, experiences, norms, traditional values, and habits.
As moral values, claims to objective certainty are also what Beauvoir terms the “serious” in Ethics Of Ambiguity: Value-seriousness is “to consider values as ready-made things” (35) completely ignorant of its creation and development through the activity of and exchange between human minds. Something morally claimed may prove true, may actually exist but, since we have not actually reached “the finished rationalization of the real” (129), it is possibly false. If an idea of the real is false, then someone is being deceived, while dogmatic rationalizing has historically neglected experience and human freedom. Beauvoir explained, “It is because man’s condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness to save his existence” (129). The subject, who is free, is possibly being trampled into a mere object by another subject’s mere idea of the world, a concept[4], not a real characteristic of the world. Adults have become more anxious than children to create, sing, draw, and dream. This is because they have objectified themselves to the value-seriousness of themselves and other adults. Alternatively, Maurice Merleau-Ponty said right in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, “When I return to myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science, I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to the world” (xxiv).
Diligent and radical doubting, even negation, is as old as west-centric pretensions to reasonableness. Reasonableness itself should be assessed by irony and doubt if one proclaims to even be reasonable. Otherwise, “facts” and “reason” can be buzzworded for lack of actually seeking facts and practising reasoning. Existentialists prioritize Socratic irony and Cartesian doubt in the face of dogmatic judgement as well as a sophist’s rhetoric. There may be logical certainties such as the law of identity, but applying “a=a”, “a woman is a woman”, to a particular existing individual ignores development and change in existence. Anne-Josèphe ceases to be “a”, frequently to the frustration of others. But Anne-Josèphe is not a static object “a” but also a subject behind the object who wills. She yearns for more than what the mere empirical past and present can provide. She yearns for the transcendental, creative, ingenious future as one is compelled to make it. We should all share this sentiment because we are not mere objects but also aspiring individuals and creators. However, anxiety, being “the dizziness of freedom” [5], is prone to discourage.
Now, rather than throw our hands in the air in defeatism in the face of likely never truly knowing the objective world, we already intuitively put our metaphysical worries on hold to endeavour to complete our projects. Our projects being whatever: working, loving, reading, driving, building, cleaning, having appetites and passions, and struggling. This intuition is the “Practical Attitude” in Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity or the “Natural Attitude” in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations as it relates to his criticism of naturalistic philosophy.
Philosophical or scientific naturalism is not to be confused with an Earth-oriented belief relating to appreciating the forests, oceans, and mountains. It consists, rather, of generalizing assumptions made about human nature and the world’s character in general as predicted, measured, or judged. Based on empirical experience and the assumed uniformity of nature, the naturalist presumptively strives for universal or objective laws of existence. Mind you, naturalism tries to abstract our own spirited aspect (that is, the subjective or the mind) from our own predicting, measuring, judging, and perceiving so as to acquire objectivity itself. In the manner of Galileo, Newton, and even Descartes, naturalism rides the wave of empiricist achievements in the measurement and prediction of things and objects under perception and simplified laws but it has far less accomplishment with people.
We easily pick up on naturalism, though, as children in modernity because we’re brought up with materialistic and scientific education. Indeed, we do empirically see that things seemingly cause or necessitate other things, which prompts us to think and live mechanistically to a great deal of success regarding our daily tasks. Yet Phenomenology reminds us that neither the Natural Attitude nor common sense should be a permanent state for a subject who can potentially be proven wrong, not just about the world of things, but about oneself and others. This is shown in this play simply in the prejudices volleyed against women of the French Revolution. Turned against human spirits who don’t actually accept it, stoical and Judeo-Christian “natural law” chimerically becomes moralization, neither fact nor “common sense”. A prompt criticism of the notion of “common sense” is given by Mary Wollstonecraft against Burke and probably rings true today more than at any point in history, especially regarding middle-class reactionary ideology:
throughout your letter you frequently advert to a sentimental jargon, which has long been current in conversation, and even in books of morals, though it never received the regal stamp of reason. A kind of mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul, that instantaneously discerns truth, without the tedious labour of ratiocination [judgement by a process of reasoning]. This instinct, for I know not what other name to give it, has been termed common sense, and more frequently sensibility.”
– A Vindication Of The Rights Of Men, 29.
Just as naturalistic prejudices were directed at women striving to break out of the domestic sphere back then (as quoted word-for-word at times in the Unreliable Narrator), allegedly scientific naturalism and “common sense” are the basis for biologically deterministic prejudices against trans people, homosexuality, and feminism today. Yet I have to remind everyone that Descartes ushered in modern philosophy with neither nature, nor commons sense, nor with science at the forefront, but with thought, which is still subjectivity. The singular, self-evident notion derived from Cartesian doubt is that one has always known that consciousness is occurring. That is, one has subjectivity, one’s own mind, or “res cogitans”[6], whether one is correct about nature or not.
One can promptly ask, though, if one’s own subjectivity is the self-evidence of existing, do others have subjectivity? One cannot be certain even of that, which is The Problem Of Other Minds. However, the Problem Of Other Minds is more of a metaphysical concern. Our phenomenological concern in mechanical modernity is the problem that we frequently don’t acknowledge other minds or even our own – not in history, natural science, politics, workplaces, nor even in our everyday. According to existential philosophy altogether, the mind is subjectivity (it is consciousness; soul; will; spirit; but also assertiveness, transcendence, and action) so it is important to have a lot of it in our lives, but we cannot wield this in an absolute certainty as to how to maneuver through the world or nature – not without imposing our subjective will so much as to ignore or trample over the wills of others.
John Locke’s Two Treatises On Government helped inaugurate liberty and individuality for this modern era, yet an excerpt of his might be commonly overlooked today: “The only way, whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another” (131). What Locke understood here, and what many individualists and libertarians today don’t, is the degree to which one’s freedom can be at odds with another’s and, therefore, cannot be absolutely favoured. Camus also wrote of rebellion as not only an expression of freedom, but is actually in opposition to another’s freedom that is so total, it reduces others to subjection[7]. Adventurers and Tyrants – psychological architypes to surpass in Beauvoir’s Ethics Of Ambiguity – insist on their assertive, authentic project but this could be Freedom-Over-Others, not Freedom-With. This means that many or all the people in the world are reduced to mere objects to dictate or devalue irrespective of the subjects (minds) underneath, their own possibilities, and their own say in their lives. A man expresses his freedom in not wearing a mask, in doubting the very existence of the disease, but those around him want to be free from contracting this disease. Are they not free as well? In this allegedly free world, is freedom exclusive to a privileged class of people who buzzword their freedom enough, or is it attainable for each and all?
In spite of existentialists tending to exasperate others, Existentialism is still about strengthening the thinking, deciding subject. A Master-Slave dispute arises where the masters insist that only they can be the masters of the slaves, not the slaves themselves. If Existentialism insists on the slaves mastering themselves in the face of the master’s antagonism, then Existentialism will be messy, but it is nonetheless the avenue to true democracy and freedom when such concepts have become mummified by time and other concepts. Granted, diligently applying Nietzsche’s “Mummified Concepts”[8] from Twilight of the Idols to concepts that can potentially succumb to hollow decadence, Nietzsche provided the tools to criticize Nietzsche. “Complaining never does any good”, he complains of others in The Antichrist. “It comes from weakness”[9]!
Edmund Burke – a British statesman and practically the founder of conservatism at the time of the French Revolution – despaired that “ten thousand swords” didn’t leap from their scabbards “to avenge even a look that threatened” the French Queen, Marie Antoinette, with insult[10]. “But the age of chivalry is gone”, he complained, and, “That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.” How prophetic, even of himself, but that’s exactly the manner of a system or an idea’s regression, the regression of the noble classes, towards contradiction, meaninglessness, or mummery when not animated by spirit[11], i.e., the exertion of authenticity or the individual mind. Since French knights were busying themselves abducting women and confining them in castles (as in Anne-Josèphe) rather than freeing them from castles (as in our fairy tales), it’s sometimes necessary to dissolve what’s contradictory rather than conserve it in overly-idealized – practically utopian – nostalgia.
On that note, Nietzsche’s Übermensch individualism and nostalgia for the classical age, and nobility, can just as well be taken up decadently, herd-like, while individual authenticity can emerge from the modern groups he disdained (socialists, anarchists, Christians, emancipated women, etc.) since they can still enact his life-revitalizing philosophy, as Lacombe, Kierkegaard, and Emma Goldman[12]do in their own ways. A mob, so-called, can still comprise of authentic individuals harnessing the “Will-to-Power”. Reminiscent of Anne-Josèphe’s own slanderers in the press regarding emancipated women, Nietzsche is frequently left with his own “will to persecute”[13]. He persecutes the Will-to-Power in others.
Here’s another spicy take: nihilism and cancelling can be immediate, chaotic means to creative and life-rejuvenating ends. Camus quotes Nietzsche in The Rebel, “My enemies are those who want to destroy without creating their own selves”, whereas Nietzsche, according to Camus, “destroys but in order to try and create” (9). This is opposed to passive nihilism as Nietzsche’s active nihilism, which I do respect as someone with a very hardliner stance on creativity and self-development. Yet I also believe Nietzsche wrote literature now weaponized by those who want to destroy in resentment, not with creation to follow as an end, but with the preservation of a paternalistic order and everyone within in it reduced to interchangeable sameness and acceptance.
Existentialism still labours through the problem of nihilism rather than flees from it too quickly into assumed universal values or seriousness. While Nietzsche himself wrote at one point in his journals that he had always been a nihilist, elsewhere he wrote:
I am describing what is coming: the rise of nihilism. I can describe it because something necessary is happening here — the signs of it are everywhere, the eyes only for these signs are still missing. I praise, I do not reproach, its arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength. It is possible. The modern man tentatively believes now in this, now in that value and then lets it fall: the circle of survived and dropped values becomes ever fuller; the emptiness and poverty of values come more and more to feeling; the movement is unstoppable - although delay is attempted on a large scale - Finally he dares to criticize values in general; he recognizes their origin; he knows enough not to believe in any worth; the pathos is there, this new shudder.... What I'm telling is the story of the next two centuries....
– Nachgelassene Fragmente November 1887-März 1888.
Camus’ The Rebel also talks of nihilism, explaining simply that, “Nihilism is not only despair and negation but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate” (57-8). Yet I believe the worst this toxically positive or tone-policing present age can do to individuals is prohibit them from their own desire to despair and negate. Camille’s being in Sharp Objects is nihilistic yet she isn’t reducible to self-serving and irresponsible victimhood, which is what Peterson assumed of one of his climate anxious patients[14]. Camille has the same feeling of the emptiness and poverty of surrounding values of which Nietzsche spoke of. In spite of living in a free, individualistic society, she intuits that the being imposed on her by others walks a thin line between a mediocre determinism of her whole life and her death. And she eventually submits to prove it. Anne-Josèphe, on the other hand, remains defiant to the end, which proves those two forces are upon her just the same.
Nietzsche said that ascetics, even a few philosophers, try to posit an imagined other world of changeless/universal/absolute/objective values to moralize factually upon others in spite of change and particular existence. This “hatred of a world that causes suffering expresses itself through the imagination of another world, one full of value”[15]. So it is with right-wing objectivists, even as they appropriate liberal values. So it perhaps is, too, with regards to stoic “natural law”, as in Seneca saying “Our motto, as everyone knows, is to live in conformity with nature”, with little elucidation of what this “nature” is. Today, even when they cite Nietzsche in the hopes of fighting the social construction of gender or society, right-wing objectivists, as in Stephen Hicks and Ben Shapiro, moralize against others developing their own individualistic values. Nietzsche’s Transvaluation Of All Values didn’t exclude economic values, naturalistic values, family values, religious values, or objectivist values. Right-wing Objectivists, or Beauvoir’s serious men, claim that they value individualism and freedom but also their own absolute truth to accept as herd, as serious men, contrary to individualism and freedom.
“Their morality is a summary of the various police posters,” Kierkegaard said of the middle-class minded in the mid-19th century, a few decades after the French Revolution[16]. Sartre provided further context later in Literature and Existentialism: “So long as the bourgeoisie had been struggling against the privileges of the nobility it had given assent to destructive negativity. But now that it had power, it passed on to construction and asked to be helped in constructing” (112), and who were to help were ill-read, psychologizing, naturalistic, self-satisfied writers sapped of the original, biting criticism and philosophy that made the middle-class a radical, free, creative, and inspiring class – the harbingers of change.
Today, they openly disdain subjectivity, as in Shapiro’s so-called The Right Side Of History, because they don’t accurately identify subjectivity to be one’s own mind: the very originator of free choice, individualism, thought, and observation. “Subjective perceptions have replaced objective observation”, Shapiro claims, and, “Facts have been buried to make way for feelings.” Additionally, the tribalist take from middle-class anti-intellectualism is to frame Foucault, Sartre, Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and those who study them, as academic snobs in ivory tower colleges – not engaged out in “the real world”, as if their own system wasn’t constructed by snobs in ivory towers who require college degrees to even remotely understand.
Mark Lilla’s The Once And Future Liberal deems itself an Enlightened mediator between the US Democratic Party and identity politics on college campuses. But there are fundamentally ill-conceived and slanderous arguments from his work, as well as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling Of The American Mind, which cites Lilla. Their arguments don’t make the “middle ground” reconciler at all conciliatory with the radical. This is absurd “mediation” as Kierkegaard wrote of it, which is discussed later in section “3Either/Or”. Lilla argues in an overgeneralizing way of college campuses that
Today the theoretically adept are likely to be taught, to the consternation of older feminists, that one cannot generalize about women since their experiences are radically different, depending on their race, sexual preference, class, physical abilities, life experiences, and so on. More generally, they will be taught that nothing about gender identity is fixed, that it is all infinitely malleable. This is either because, on the French view, the self is nothing, just the trace left by the interaction of invisible, tasteless, odorless forces of “power” that determine everything in the flux of life; or, on the all-American view, because the self is whatever we damn well say it is. (The most advanced thinkers hold both views at once.) A whole scholastic vocabulary has been developed to express these notions: fluidity, hybridity, intersectionality, performativity, transgressivity, and more. Anyone familiar with medieval scholastic disputes over the mystery of the Holy Trinity —the original identity problem—will feel right at home.
– The Once And Future Liberal, 86.
First problem is the prejudicial negative of labelling things as “French” or else “power”-obsessed in broad, anglo-centric strokes when one can’t bother to be more specific, as an academic professor, regarding which French thinkers. That is very on message where Peterson, Douglas Murray, and others are concerned where one fearmongers Foucault and various other academics’ interest in power dynamics. Yet, as one reads Burke’s Reflections On The Revolution In France closely as he fathered conservativism as ideology, one finds an unforgettable quote regarding the power accumulated by the liberal and urban middle-class: the bourgeoisie.
Where have you placed the real power over monied and landed circulation? Where have you placed the means of raising and falling the value of every man’s freehold?.... The whole of the power obtained by this revolution will settle in the towns among the burghers, and the monied directors who lead them.
– Reflections on the Revolution in France, 165.
There is a “British view” of power in Burke and Bentham, as well as a “German view” in Nietzsche. Lilla, however, is overly-general regarding the “French view” or else the US view. He is also overly-specific regarding either; overly-specific regarding gender fluidity, too, as the second problem. Neither France nor the US have had the concept of gender “fluidity” exclusively since other cultures have had two-spirited individuals. As for identity problems, one has to be overly-certain, or completely lacking in human self-awareness, self-consciousness, to belittle others for having identity problems. According to Socrates, the Oracle of Delphi’s inscription, “know thyself”, is a much harder project than is supposed, but it fundamentally amounts to a project of individual growth as a human being. Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments regarding Socrates’ own identity problem:
Although Socrates did his very best to gain knowledge of human nature and to know himself—yes, even though he has been eulogized for centuries as the person who certainly knew man best—he nevertheless admitted that the reason he was disinclined to ponder the nature of such creatures as Pegasus and the Gorgons was that he still was not quite clear about himself, whether he (a connoisseur of human nature) was a more curious monster than Typhon or a friendlier and simpler being, by nature sharing something divine (see Phaedrus, 2 229e). This seems to be a paradox. But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding…to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think. This passion of thought is fundamentally present everywhere in thought, also in the single individual’s thought insofar as he, thinking, is not merely himself. (37)
Given that Socrates’ doubtful inwardness regarding his identity in Phaedrus clearly predates the Christian Holy Trinity, it proves Lilla wrong about what “the original identity problem” is.
Ironically, as a liberal, Lilla doesn’t even value the individual, since the very notions of “fluidity, hybridity, intersectionality, performativity, transgressivity, and more” entail individual freedom and duties to one another as in intersectional solidarity. All such terms are the reasonable follow-throughs to actual, freedom-oriented US/French self-determination, democracy, human rights, and simply being liberal. Yet Lilla frames them as a “hyper individualizing” neglect of duties and a loss of votes. As an establishment Democrat, Lilla ignores persecution based on identity. This is with the explicit goal, not even to just reach across the aisle for the right’s vote, but “to sign a pact with the devil”, in his words, following Lyndon B. Johnson.
As suspected of middle-way centrists, Lilla forsakes his principles so as to win elections, which fosters its own institutional “power”. But attributing religion to college campuses is insulting, is its own divisiveness, and is akin to 18th century liberal Enlightenment’s own resentment towards scholastic institutions – universities, – but only as they were once religious; they are not so now, except in an incredibly antiquated, impressionable, and persecutory mindset. Lilla’s own Enlightenment liberal mindset may have brought about the French Revolution’s own “De-Christianization” campaign, which the radical Jacobin, Maximilien Robespierre, ironically, condemned for its excesses[17].
Even worse, Lilla’s liberalism actually unveils the sullied origins of US liberal Enlightenment altogether. According to Gregg L. Frazer’s God Against the Revolution, US Patriots, Commissions appointed by the Continental Congress, and the Sons of Liberty, were responsible for harassment campaigns towards Loyalist priests who were publishing and preaching against the revolution. “The Revolutionaries relied on terror – acts of violence and the threat of violence – to crush dissent”, says Holger Hoock[18]. Property was confiscated, publications were destroyed, and many were deported by force. Therefore, the concepts of “free speech”, “freedom of the press”, “freedom of opinion”, and rights to liberty and property have always been on shaky grounds in our liberal era, but the history of silencing liberal rights started long before a radical socialist “mob” ever existed.
Secularization separates religion from the state. The US patriots or Whigs could have had the liberal and Lockean intention of secularization, popular sovereignty, and a free society against Loyalist or Tory clergy – some of whom notably pledged allegiance to worldly authority (the King in England, as was expected of priests of the Church of England[19]). As such, the Loyalist clergy might not have sported a direct, spiritual God relation but worldly interest. Yet prohibition, censorship, and persecution on the Founding Fathers’ side were illiberal means to such a liberal end.
Whether the allegedly liberal patriots were motivated by secularization, actual liberty, or else a “will to persecute”, one should learn not to lie or be credulous of a sophist’s propagandistic narrative in our age, whether from a pulpit, a stage, a radio, or a screen. This is what Pascal’s The Provincial Letters demanded in favour of the Jansenist monastery of Port-Royal, and against casuistry. Analogous to that amount of slander and persecution is our higher education, our radical youth, contemporary feminism, and Gender Studies on campuses being slandered by rule-positing casuists: Peterson and Haidt/Lukianoff. Yet the religious element ends at Port-Royal and the 17th century in the analogy.
Radical, young activists could have genuine, educated grievances to voice against institutions, racism, sexism, and injustice out in the world, just as Anne-Josèphe had grievances to voice from her various confinements. While I believe the natural product of the ideological campaign against them all, happening in real-time, amounts to a slippery slope of closed-mindedness, un-Enlightenment, and resentment, which doesn’t bode well for civil society’s own civility today in this century.
Caught up now in the battle of many centuries between liberalism and conservatism, I wanted to approach their very origins so I could understand them. Liberals and conservatives refer to and operate upon the same principles as their origins in the French Revolution, yet ignorance of their context and history leads both sides to counter-sensical developments, as in conservatives conserving liberal economics and liberals dawdling on liberty and equality, as discussed in section 5 Classical Liberalism. Perhaps after weighing the risk of committing a Genetic Fallacy, Kierkegaard reasoned that, “Concepts, just like individuals, have their history and are no more able than they to resist the dominion of time, but in and through it all they nevertheless harbor a kind of homesickness for the place of their birth”[20]. Just as Kierkegaard wanted to seek out the birthplace of irony in Socrates, I wanted to seek out liberalism, conservatism, feminism, Enlightenment, ressentiment, extremism, moderantism, insanity, chauvinism, and ideology in the French Revolution. This is to find out whether there is rhetorical mummery or authenticity to be found in our own time. Indeed, I think that there is mummery as a result of confusion and ignorance.
This essay hopes to settle some of the score between the left and the right. It also hopes to provide insights regarding modern, western philosophy and history since the 18th century. These are complex fields, to be sure, while Existential philosophy has always tried to be a philosophy of concrete understanding and concrete acting.
[1] Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “The Phenomenological Reduction”.
[2] Ideas I, 58.
[3] An explanatory note in Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 372.
[4] On Truth And Lies In The Nonmoral Sense.
[5] The Concept of Anxiety, 75.
[6] Gallagher, Shaun, Phenomenology, 87.
[7] The Rebel, 284.
[8] The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight Of The Idols & Other Writings, 167.
[9] Ibid, 208.
[10] Reflections On The Revolution In France, 65.
[11] Sickness Unto Death, 43-5.
[12] See My Disillusionment In Russia because Goldman there calls for a Nietzschean “Transvaluation of All Values” as an anarchist, and against Soviet failures and party dogmatics.
[13] The Anti-Christ, 18.
[14] Beyond Order, 33.
[15] Nietzsche, quoted in, "Idealism" by Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann.
[16] Either/Or, Part 1.
[17] A New World Begins, 410.
[18] As quoted in God Against The Revolution, 26.
[19] God Against The Revolution, 5.
[20] The Concept of Irony, 9.
