by Simon Smith
Salutations, dear reader.
Salutations and sincerest apologies for the lengthy break in service here at
the British Personalist Forum blog. I can only imagine how empty your lives
must have seemed without us; how dismal, how gloomy, how very like the cold embrace
of eternity.
There is no
despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first
great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be
healed, to have despaired and recovered hope.[1]
Such is life without us, I know.
Just in case anyone, anyone at
all, was wondering, the reason for “radio silence” was an affliction common to
those of my accursed race. I’ve been doing it non-stop for the last month.
Marking exam scripts, I mean. Let joy be unconfined! Very nearly. It was a long
and difficult road, but I, along with my fellow examiners, I trod it and
finally reached our destination: the pay cheque at the end.
Believe it or
not, marking philosophy exams is not the most exciting way to spend a month,
but it is not without its interest. This year, for example, one of my examiners
demonstrated a deal of self-knowledge. It’s a surprisingly rare commodity among
the honourable fraternity of philosophers, especially given its supposedly
foundational place in all our thought and work. There is one, however, one
thinker out there who took the Delphic Oracle to heart: Gnothi Seauton, oh yes indeed.
Further
interest was aroused, for me at least, by the simple act of spending time with
some of the classic in philosophy, or at least the SparkNotes inspired versions
of them best known to the poor creatures being examined. The warm afternoons
drag on interminably and my eyes inevitably begin to burn and blur from roaming
the indecipherable hieroglyphs which pass for handwriting, so my thoughts turn
to the authors whose ideas are being mangled.
I am reminded
of what a tremendously boring old bugger John Stuart Mill is and how dismal his
attempts to reconcile individualism with utilitarianism really are. It occurs
to me also that these discussions of free speech and such like, scratched out
by panic-stricken students desperately honking down everything they can
possibly remember about On Liberty,
are as sophisticated as any I’ve heard in the media for ages. This is slightly
depressing. And then I come across a student which observes – I’m paraphrasing
here – that dear old J.S. may well have been entirely correct in his assertion
of the inviolability of free speech; but he failed to notice that this right
does not entail an obligation in others to listen to what is being said.
Naked bigotry
is far and away preferably to bigotry which garbs itself in moral and political
populism; but I don’t know if any of us want to actually see the Nick Griffins
of this world in the nude.
I feel a
little bit sick now.
With that,
rather revolting, thought in mind, it is no surprise that we come next upon
Plato and his pals sitting around with their ancient Greek junk hanging out:
that’s how philosophy is meant to be done.
Should
philosophers be kings? Not unless they put some underwear on, no. And should
they do so, not the philosophers I know. Even those who aren’t dipsomaniacs and
predatory sex-pests are decidedly not
the kind of people you would want in charge of your polis.
Then, of
course, there’s the critique of various political systems including, most
pertinently, the democratic model. Plato feared that democracy would end up
being a competition among interests so vested that, they would spend all their
time in the back garden, drinking lager, and throwing shrimp on the barbie, if
I may quote the great Australian philosopher, Paul Hogan. Cobber. That’s to
say, in a democracy, the power-hungry will say and do whatever they have to in
order to get what they want and then, once they’re elected, they can say and do
whatever they please. The end result, Plato argued, would be tyranny.
Of course,
nothing like that could ever really happen. Silly old Plato.
My favourite scripts
– in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way – are the ones which have opted to answer
the questions on Nietzsche. The set text is On
the Genealogy of Morality, a difficult work at the best of time. Given how
difficult, I’m always a little bit tempted to award the students extra marks
just for having a go. Not that I do, obviously and in case anyone is actually
reading this. Nevertheless, Nietzsche is hard work and can be very confusing,
especially for young minds which are coming up against him for the first time.
The students struggle, naturally, but many of them do their best to explain
ideas which, in essence, run counter to just about everything they’ve been told
by parents, teachers, and any other authority figure whose paths they may have
crossed. Every now and then, however, I’ll come across one who, whether by
accident or design, has manage to hit on the point, more or less, and that’s
always reassuring.
For me,
though, it’s a chance to remember how much I basically agree with our pal
Freddy. Wilfully oversimplifying the whole thing, I should say there are basically
four key ideas in the Genealogy.
1. Human beings, which is to say persons, are fundamentally social creatures.
We are who we are in relation to others and who we are is
dependent upon them. Sometimes these relationships are constructive and
creative, sometimes they are hostile and destructive. We all know where
Nietzsche put the emphasis, but in either case those relations are the essence
of our humanity or lack thereof.
2. Who and what we are depends to a considerable degree on our
mythologies, on the stories we tell about who we are.
Myths about good and bad, myths about where we come from and
where we’re going, myths about what it all means and, perhaps most importantly,
the wellspring of our humanity; all vital things these.
3. Morality is the essence our humanity or “personhood”. We
only become human when moral thinking sets foot on the stage. I would add
religion in here too, but morality will suffice for the time being.
Morality (and religion) is the internalising of the other:
their appropriation of us and ours of them; it’s inception of the inner life of
persons (which I think was Feuerbach’s phrase, more or less) and so the birth
of our humanity.
4. Humanity, “personhood”, is essentially aspirational,
upwardly oriented, self-transcending and whatnot.
Up we go, towards a higher
archetype, an analogy for our better selves, the mirror of our hearts: messiah,
superman, or post-human, AI-enhanced, super-cyborg, it all comes to the same
thing.
That’s an awful lot of essences,
I know, but in reality they all come together into one because myth, morality,
and self-transcendence are all functions or extensions of an essentially social
self.
Obviously, Nietzsche took a
rather dim view of all this and I can’t really blame him, given the state our
species has got itself into. And things seem to have got considerably worse
since the Genealogy was published in
1887. It is, perhaps, not a great surprise to find Nietzsche railing against
the emergence of the human conscience. Given everything that conscience has
achieved during the 20th Century and is still achieving now, it’s
difficult not to be just the tiniest bit pessimistic about our species. Yes,
it’s no wonder really that Nietzsche was
5. Not, as the saying goes, a happy bunny.
Still, at least the marking is
finished for another year.
[1] George
Eliot, Adam Bede. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth
Editions Ltd, 1997.
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