mills

Karl Popper in “What is Dialectic?” quoted by Velvet Robots. Kierkegaard obviously would have agreed, but it was Nietzsche -an aphorist more than a philosopher- who put it most concisely: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

It is the immediate urge of every thinker, professional or casual, to extend his or her conclusions outward, to apply opinions to one subject and instance after another as though stamping envelopes, to build out of any impressions a world-sized worldview.

But the mind is not the world, though it may come close to containing it; and reason is not isomorphic to the laws of the universe, though almost everyone believes it is. Thus the will to a system is a lack of integrity in two senses: (1) it falsifies the nature of thought and exaggerates the power of cognition, creation, and analysis, and (2) it subordinates to reason all other categories of experience, and even the subject who experiences: this is the Existential critique of Hegel, that he crushes the human beneath the system (a critique that came long before Sartre, particularly in literature).

I love that Nietzsche considered giving in to the systematizing temptation a “lack of integrity” and that Popper wanted philosophers to be “much more modest in their claims.” Both display heroic honesty about the limits of their field, a rarity among intellectuals.

Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre. I am not fond of Sartre, who defended Stalin long past the point when it was forgivable and whose language –as George Orwell noted- reflected his willingness to deliberately obfuscate the truth to arrive at fashionable ends. Making a show of his deeds after the occupation, Sartre “pretended to be brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price. Sartre…lied in his teeth about the most elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense.”

Reading that sentence, I am closer now to understanding why James is a persona non grata in academic settings. Unafraid to suggest that Sartre was less a philosopher than a writer, and less a hero than someone living in terribly bad faith -to borrow Sartre’s language- James alienates those whose professional lives are invested in the exegetical treatment of the texts of the West (and who themselves may resent moral judgments of cowardice). Although he marshals substantial evidence to support his claim that because “Sartre’s autobiography was the last thing he wanted us to know…his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose,” it remains hard to believe. Even when we read that Orwell and Revel considered him a fraud and his work devoid of meaning, we recoil: he is part of the canon!

I struggle in the same way with James’ dismissal of Benjamin, Derrida, and their ilk, and Noam Chomsky’s famous claim that these “theorists” were all empty charlatans creates a similar sense in me: simultaneous satisfaction that perhaps what seems to be nonsense, language tricks, gimmickry, regurgitation, and outright fraud might be just that after all (and not the sacred writing it is considered in academia) and a fear that maybe, Chomsky and James and I just aren’t smart enough to get what’s being said.

And this is a key point: no one who admits to thinking such writing is nonsensical will be taken seriously by those who maintain that we simply don’t understand it. But few who take expression seriously will claim that cultural ideas require such complexity of writing to communicate! I remain suspicious, despite Jace Cook’s excellent argument, that if something is obfuscatory, it is either through incompetence in craft or deliberate intent; and if the latter, something is being hidden (or perhaps it is that nothing is being hidden).

From Iris Murdoch’s encapsulation of modern philosophy in “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.” The full quote:

In the philosophy of Sartre we find the same solitary moral agent [as in Ordinary Language philosophy], and the same emphasis on the moment of choice, but displayed in terms of a dramatic Hegelian psychology. One might say that whereas Ordinary Language Man represents the surrender to convention, the Totalitarian Man of Sartre represents the surrender to neurosis: convention and neurosis, the two enemies of understanding, one might say the enemies of love; and how difficult it is in the modern world to escape from one without invoking the help of the other.

She is taking here of the tension between reductive philosophical thought such as Ordinary Language philosophy, which amounts to a ratification of convention and tradition, first linguistically then conceptually, and is thoroughly conservative (but has the enormous value of making total sense and not being vague, dramatic bullshit), and more expansive metaphysical work like that of Sarte and the Existentialists. Their work is progressive, liberating, anti-convention; it tears apart the old and promises to usher in new, vibrant, experientialist attitudes; the downside is that it leads to neurosis, crippling self-obsessions, alienation, and near-nihilism.

Even if you’re not into philosophy, the art you love reflects this dialectic, the central aesthetic-ethical-philosophical dialectic of the 20th Century. Convention and neurosis. Convention and neurosis.

Think of your friends and your parents; your teachers and your neighbors; of Rockwell and Pollock; of artists and writers and politicians: convention and neurosis. Murdoch’s genius is in this observation: we want to escape both, and it is hard to get away from one without relying on the other.

To avoid the neurotic, obsessive, narcissistic worldview of the young, we become adults: emotional deadened, more conservative (I don’t here mean in an American political sense); to escape the derangement of too much self-indulgent freedom, we accede to constraints we would have howled against a decade before.

This works both ways: to avoid the stifling convention of settled, claustrophobic married life, we have neurotic sexual habits, affairs and indiscretions; to escape the crushing mundanity of working life, we gamble or speed or blow our money on toys.

But what makes her more than merely smart is not just that, but that she sees something else: convention and neurosis aren’t just intellectual problems or lifestyle constraints, they are the enemies of understanding and of love, related concepts in Murdoch’s view.  It’s as profound as almost anything I’ve read, and I think about it often as I bounce between convention and neurosis, control and decay, values and whims, morals and freedom.