Meaninglessness: The Solutions of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty 0739105280, 9780739105283

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Culture and Meaning
1. Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness
2. Freud: The Therapeutic Solution to Meaninglessness
3. Rorty: The Post-Metaphysical Solution to Meaninglessness
Conclusion: Culture and Life
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Meaninglessness

RELIGION, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM Series Editors: Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute, and Brian C. Anderson, Manhattan Institute For nearly five centuries, it was widely believed that moral questions could be resolved through reason. The Enlightenment once gave us answers to these perennial questions, but the answers no longer seem adequate. It has become apparent that reason alone is not enough to answer the questions that define and shape our existence. Many now believe that we have come to the edge of the Enlightenment and are stepping forth into a new era, one that may be the most religious we have experienced in five hundred years. This series of books explores this new historical condition, publishing important works of scholarship in various disciplines that help us to understand the trends in thought and belief we have come from and to define the ones toward which we are heading. In the World, But Not ofthe World: Christian Social Teaching at the End of the Twentieth Century, by Andrew L. Fitz-Gibbon The Surprising Pope: Understanding the Thought ofJohn Paul IL by Maciej Zieba, O.P. A Free Society Reader: Principles for the New Millennium, edited by Michael Novak, William Brailsford, and Comelis Heesters Beyond Self Interest: A Personalist Approach to Human Action, Gregory It Beabout, et al. Human Nature and the Discipline ofEconomics: Personalist Anthropology and Economic Methodology, Patricia Donohue-White, et al. The Free Person and the Free Economy: A Personalist View ofMarket Economics, Anthony J. Santelli Jr., et al. Meaninglessness: The Solutions ofNietzsche, Freud, and Rorty, by M. A. Casey Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness, edited by Romanus Cessario, O.P. Don't Play Away Your Cards, Uncle Sam: The American Difference, by OlofMurelius, edited by Jana Novak Society as a Department Store: Critical Reflections on the Liberal State, by Ryszard Legutko

Meaninglessness The Solutions ofNietzsche, Freud, and Rorty M. A. Casey

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder· New York· Oxford

LEXINGTON BOOKS Published in the United States of America by Lexington Books 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Maryland 20706 12 Hid's Copse Road Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 911, England Copyright © 2002 by Lexington Books Cover design reproduced from the Australian paperback edition Freedom Publishing 582 Queensberry Street North Melbourne VIC 3051 Australia Cover design © Peter Bloomfield Bloomfield Advertising 24 Albert Road South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or' otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Casey, M. A., 1965Meaninglessness: the solutions ofNietzsche, Freud, and Rorty / M.A. Casey. p. cm. - (Religion, politics, and society in the new millennium) Includes bibliographical references and index. I. Meaninglessness (Philosophy) 2. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 3. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1930.4. Rorty, Richard. I. Title. II. Series. B825.2 .C38 2002 121-dc21

2001049959

ISBN 978-0-7391-0528-3 Printed in the United States of America

SDIThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSIINISO Z39.48-1992.

HAEC SCRIPTA HUMILITER OFFERIMUS IN LAUDEM DEI OPTIMI ET HONOREM VIRGINIS PULCHERRlMAE ADIUVANTE HIERONYMO DOCTISSIMO

Contents

Abbreviations

ix

Aclmowledgments

Xl

Introduction

Culture and Meaning

Chapter One

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

13

Chapter Two

Freud: The Therapeutic Solution to Meaninglessness

45

Chapter Three

Rorty: The Post-Metaphysical Solution to Meaninglessness

77

Conclusion

Culture and Life

115

Bibliography

131

Index

145

About the Author

151

vii

Abbreviations

BN

Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. WaIter Kaufmann, (New York: Modem Library, 1968).

PN

The Portable Nietzsche (1954), ed. and trans. WaIter Kaufmann, (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1976).

UM

Untimely Meditations (1873-76), trans. R. 1. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

SE

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols., ed. James Strachey, trans. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-75).

A GENERAL NOTE ON CITATIONS: When works referred to are reprints, the year of first publication is indicated in parentheses immediately after the title. With reprints of translated works, the year of first publication is indicated in parentheses immediately after the translator's name.

ix

Acknowledgments

For their assistance and comments at various stages in the long process of writing this book, I record my thanks to Professor Johann Amason, Dr Ken Baker, Peter Boyer, Dr John Carroll, Dr Philip Cassell, Andrew Dawson, Dr Paul R. Harrison, Or John Hirst, Andrew McIntyre, and Or Hayden Ramsay. For their patience and support along the way, I thank my parents and siblings, and Bob and Chris Browning. I am particularly grateful for the friendship of Professor Philip Ayres, Janet Farrow, Tim O'Leary, Fr John Walshe, and Ernest Zanatta. I owe a special debt to Or George Pell, not only for his great friendship, but also for his unfailing encouragement and generous practical support. My thanks to Professor Michael Novak for commissioning the book. I am grateful to Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain, Professor FeIipe FernendezArmesto, Professor Raimond Gaita, Professor Max Teichmann, and Professor George Weigel for their kind remarks on what it tries to do. Thanks also to Nick Marvin at Tabor Vision for his generous assistance in formatting the manuscript, and to Lexington Books for their efficiency and help in seeing the text to press. In the end, of course, any flaws or blunders are the responsibility of myself alone. I save to the last mention of those to whom I owe the most, my wife Ruth and our children, Rachel, Joseph, and Simeon. If the English language is to be taken as a guide then to be uxorious is undoubtedly a handicap, all the more so if one suffers from an excessive fondness of one's children into the bargain. In theory it is a condition that should make the writing of books impossible. It is, after all, much more agreeable to be with one's wife and children than to write a book. In my case, however, it was precisely this affliction that made the book possible. It was written for them and would not have been written without them. In this, as in everything else, if not for them there would be nothing. Sydney September 2001 xi

xii

Acknowledgments

For their kind permission to reprint, I would like to acknowledge the following: In the English language excluding the British Commonwealth, excerpts from The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, trans., Sophie Wilkins, copyright © 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, Inc. In the British Commonwealth, extract from The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil published by Secker & Warburg. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Excerpts from Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Waiter Kaufmann copyright © 1966, 1967, 1968 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from The Gay Science trans. Waiter Kaufmann copyright © 1974 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from The Will To Power trans. Waiter Kaufmann and RJ. Hollingdale copyright © 1967 by Waiter Kaufmann. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Waiter Kaufmann copyright © 1954 by The Viking Press, renewed © 1982 by Viking Penguin, Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. Excerpts from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard ~orty reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

HE WHO DESPAIRS OF EVENTS IS A COWARD, BUT HE WHO PUTS HIS HOPE IN THE HUMAN CONDITION IS A MADMAN. ALBERT CAMUS

Introduction

Culture and Meaning

This study is an attempt to comprehend an entirely new form of culture, a culture in which the question of meaning no longer occurs. "Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence.,,1 In sociology alone, with its almost innumerable conceptualisations of culture,2 the basic idea this proposition entails is inescapable. A people's way of life cannot be studied or analysed without addressing in some form or other how it makes existence meaningful for them. To conceive of a culture in which the question of meaning does not occur is to conceive of something utterly new: life lived without the experience of meaninglessness. Assuming such a thing is possible, would it be desirable? Answering this question is the purpose of this book. One of the features that characterises life in the modem West is a generally accessible material abundance produced and maintained as if by automatic-by seemingly autonomous structures which dwarf the individual and whatever role he may play within them. This is a relatively recent development and represents a radical break with history. Until the beginning of industrialisation in Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century, and for some considerable time afterwards, the material existence of human beings was characterised by scarcity. Suffering and necessity constantly reminded an individual of his limited power over the world and greatly circumscribed the possibilities of life. Material abundance, in contrast, conditions our understanding of the world and ourselves in a very different way, giving rise to an increasing experience of freedom and a greater awareness of possibility. As the process of economic growth unfolded, the brute labour that usually consumed almost everyone's life gradually began to yield something greater than mere subsistence. More and more, it could be attained by the indi-

2

Introduction

vidual self, unaided by village, guild, or extended family. The traditional communal supports were no longer essential to subsistence as they were in a world conditioned by scarcity, and could even prove an impediment to the acquisition of newly available plenty. But while the old bonds were broken they were not discarded. Instead, relationships between the individual and his family, class, and community were re-established on more fluid tenns, better suited to conditions of accelerating mobility. And with this, the establishment of individual identity also became more fluid. Freedom from the constraints of traditional social relations meant greater freedom for the individual to make or assume an identity of his own choosing: where one was born, the occupation or profession of one's father, the history and traditions of a family or a particular place were no longer the crucial detenninants of identity that they once were. The growing self-sufficiency of the individual was accompanied by increasing differentiation in society as a whole. Work first became separated from the home in the 1750s, heralding what would subsequently come to be understood as the breakup of life into separate and largely independent spheres of activity, which were also separate spheres of value. Human activity within these spheres was steadily rationalised and placed within the ambit of structures that soon took on an intricate life of their own. Knowledge in all areas expanded in an unprecedented way, not only in quantity but especially in complexity, defying the mastery of any one person and encouraging specialisation and the segmentation of disciplines and interests. Life became safer, healthier, more comfortable, and its pace seemed to become more hectic. Although forces other than scarcity and necessity now overshadowed his life, the individual's sense of control over himself and his destiny had never been greater. Freedom and autonomy became the markers of his self-understanding and his understanding of other people. As the process that brought us to this point unfolded over the last centuries of the second millennium, it became easier and simpler to think and live as if God did not exist. The old morality of restraint and sacrifice that was indispensable in a world of close communal ties, poverty, and shortage slowly took on the aspect of an anachronism. Man's new freedom meant above all else the freedom to live as he chose. The old beliefs became unbelievable, and the old values became worthless, both displaced by the selfsufficiency of the individual. Or so it seemed. Before any of this became apparent, acute observers in the nineteenth century could see how the logic of the process was

Introduction

3

working itself out and where it was tending. They pointed to the absurdity of existence without a higher purpose, the horrifying emptiness underlying life when it is reduced solely to the material level. They noticed that although faith was waning, guilt, dread, and the need for redemption remained, giving the new normality of life an unsuspected unsteadiness, making it prone to disturbing and sometimes dangerous eruptions of the irrational and the pathological. They spoke of a crisis of meaning, the relativity of values, and warned that without God it was impossible to tell the difference between a murder and a kiss. It was only in the twentieth century, with its unprecedented technological and economic advances as well as its unprecedented wars and exterminations, that these claims were brought home to people more widely. What was crucial in this was not the criticism of intellectuals but lived experience. Against the background of these enormous events, the freedom and autonomy of the individual are simultaneously great and puny things. Living in a social and cultural context marked by complexity, fragmentation, and dispersion means that even as he exploits the limitlessness of possibility the individual finds himself its victim. The breakup of community has extended to the breakup of the family and to the splintering of the individual himself. The different spheres of activity and value he is forced to live in, and the supplanting of truth by interpretation, make it immensely difficult to give life an interior unity. Often the individual is alone in the world, with loneliness compounded by a sense of being completely superfluous. The question "who needs me?" is met with indifference, closing off not only a basis for community but a starting point for solidarity.3 Modem societies and economies seem to need no one, leaving the individual isolated and vulnerable in a world of utility and instrumental reason, fearful and confined within his own immanence in "an ever deepening introversion.,,4 To describe the modem situation is one thing, but to explain it is quite another, and this is especially so with a problem like meaninglessness. Friedrich Nietzsche placed this problem at the centre of his work and offered an explanation for it that has been and continues to be deeply influential. In one short, brilliant passage (§262) of Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche in effect sets out his sociology of culture, providing in summary form the premises of both his anthropology and his approach to meaninglessness. Nietzsche is the pivotal figure in this book. He fixed the parameters within which Sigmund Freud and Richard Rorty-among many others throughout the twentieth century-would frame their solutions to this problem, and in considering these solutions and his own, it is

4

Introduction

obviously important to be clear on his underlying assumptions about culture and human nature. For Nietzsche culture is built on the imperative to survive, not on any particular revelation of transcendent truth. The struggle to prevail over constantly "unfavourable conditions" and to thrive in spite of them is the basis of human existence. Culture is one of the key aids to survival and initially develops as "an arrangement for breeding," cultivating to the exclusion of all other possibilities the particular character or "type" best suited to survival and predominance in the conditions of a given historical situation. Whatever the particularities of these conditions, survival always requires one thing: homogeneity. A people "needs itself as a species," as something that can prevail and make itself durable by virtue of its very hardness, uniformity, and simplicity of form, in a constant fight with its neighbours or with the oppressed who are rebellious or threaten rebellion. Manifold experience teaches them to which qualities above all they owe the fact that, despite the gods and men, they are still there and have always triumphed: these qualities they call virtues, these virtues alone they cultivate.

Homogeneity extends to every aspect of will, drive, and desire within the individual. It also imposes a "shared formula" for existence, requiring adherence to one truth, one meaning, and one hierarchy of value. It is only at this point that "eternal truths" emerge as a means of giving interdictory form and transcendent sanction to the practices and arrangements that have enabled a people to make a character type of themselves and to prevail over their enemies. The creation of a character type requires the cultivation of only a narrow range of qualities, but they must be cultivated deeply. It also requires the unrelenting "tension" of constant struggle over centuries to "fix and harden" within the individual "beyond the changing of generations." Once established, a character type does not easily pass away.s This creates a situation in which a character type can outlive not only the necessities that called it into being, but also the culture that created it. The case in point for Nietzsche is the culture of the West, which, with its origins in Judaism and Christianity, created a human type that "needs" transcendent meaning and absolute conceptions of value. With the decline of Christianity, the metaphysical presuppositions of Western culture were secularised so that the need for meaning continued to be met through the pursuit of "truth," "objective reality," and the "essence" of

Introduction

5

existence. By the late nineteenth century, the various surrogates for faith in the transcendent such as reason, history, and nature were themselves becoming unbelievable. The need for meaning persisted, but the culture that created this need was no longer able to meet it. The consequence was the crisis of meaninglessness, a crisis compounded by the tendency to confuse this peculiar trait of a particular character type and culture with what is inherent to human nature everywhere. The solution to this crisis in Nietzsche's judgment is to overcome the old character type of the West and create one that does not need meaning. Character types decay and break down as cultures do, and for the same reasons, although the lag between the two is great. The struggle to prevail over the unfavourable conditions that brought both into being eventually gives way to more fortunate conditions. Internal and external threats to survival give way to peace, and material scarcity gives way to a "superabundance" of the means of life. With survival assured, "the tremendous tension" created by the need to survive suddenly decreases. "The bond and constraint of the old discipline ... no longer seems necessary" and ceases to be "a condition of existence." Gradually, over the course of centuries, the culture falls into disarray, and the homogeneity of character cultivated to ensure survival slowly becomes susceptible to increasing variation. Change is limited at first, appearing as mere discrepancies within the order of things. But over time the "individual" appears and begins to supersede the culture's representative type, asserting his "difference" along the steadily expanding range between "deviation (to something higher, subtler, rarer) [and] degeneration and monstrosity." At these turning points of history we behold a splendid, manifold, junglelike growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow, and a tremendous ruination and self-ruination, as the savage egoisrns that have turned, almost exploded, against one another wrestle 'for sun and light' and can no longer derive any limit, restraint, or consideration from their previous morality.

Amidst this "calamitous simultaneity of spring and fall, full of [the] new charms and veils that characterise young, still unexhausted, still unwearied corruption," a "dangerous and uncanny point" is soon reached. There are "all sorts of new what-fors and wherewithals [and] no shared formulas any longer." The disappearance of common belief and values removes the basis for the mutual comprehension that once grounded relations between people and sees it replaced by "misunderstanding allied

6

Introduction

with disrespect." With the proliferation of ego and impulse that makes life "rich in marvels and monstrosities," a new apprehension ofimperiled survival arises-not from the threat posed by external enemies or circumstances, but from the people one lives with and the desires of one's own heart, all of which become increasingly strange and obscure. Danger is "transposed into the individual, into the neighbour and friend, into the alley, into one's own child, into one's own heart, into the most personal and secret recesses of wish and will. ,,6 What Nietzsche explains here is the current situation of Western culture. This culture has undergone a great shift from a context in which the possibilities of meaning, belief, valuation, character, experience, and will were narrowly constrained and subject to the strictest limitation, to one in which, gradually, all such constraints have become superfluous, and possibility-and the exploration of possibility-has become limitless. It is no longer a world where the various aspects of life are subject to one truth, one meaning, and one system of value, but one where they are differentiated and constitute autonomous and competing spheres of meaning and value in their own right, with no transcending principle to unify them. The old culture of the West valued "being" over "becoming," perceiving life, nature, and the human animal in terms of the absolute, and emphasising unity, limit, fixedness, and irreducible essence. In contrast, the emergent culture of today sees everything as flux, as an unfolding that never reaches or seeks a final state. 7 Life is not unity or essence but limitless possibility. The new challenges to survival that emerge when a culture decays, and the new struggles they necessitate, provide the conditions for the creation of a new culture and a new human type. For Nietzsche, the collapse of the traditional culture of the West presents an historic opportunity to embrace becoming, to embrace limitlessness, so that man can make of himself whatever he wills. It is only in this situation, rather than in the superseded culture of fixed character and absolute limit, that man's greatest work of artistry, the superman, can come into existence. The unlimited struggle of egoisms, the struggle to prevail despite the strangeness of the world and the strangeness of the self, provides (theoretically) the tension required to produce this new type, the type that is its own meaning. In Nietzsche's view, it was an accident of history that the culture of the West became Christian. This accident created another: a character type that needs meaning and seeks transcendence. The Christianmetaphysical culture has now broken down, and while its character type

Introduction

7

continues to exist in whole or in part among individuals, it too is giving way to the '~unglelike growth" of new possibilities. In short, Western man is overcoming the accident and legacy of his history and new prospects are opening before him. The danger from Nietzsche's perspective is that from fear of chaos and the longing for certainty and quiet within, the people of the West will abandon this overcoming and, in their old need for the absolute, return to the "morality of mediocrity," the morality of "measure and dignity and duty and neighbour love." Nietzsche saw that the old dispensation has been entirely "outlived," and that more than they realise, modem individuals increasingly live "beyond the old morality," providing their own laws and limits, and developing their "own arts and wiles for self-preservation, selfenhancement, [and] self-redemption." He welcomed this as a return of "polytheism"-"the wonderful art and gift of creating gods" out of men-a far greater and higher form of life than the "monotheism" of the old Christian culture.s The crisis of meaninglessness, when "'why?' finds no answer,,,9 is the crisis that makes this possible. For this reason, it is not the disaster it seems, but an opportunity to be embraced. The need for meaning becomes a problem because there is no transcendent meaning to be had. The solution is to create a form of culture that no longer deals in transcendent purpose and absolute value, leaving individuals to provide their own values and, to the extent that any residual need for it remains, their own meanings. There have been other conceptualisations of culture without transcendence, and the names given to it have varied: "consumer culture,"'O "post-culture,,,1I "anticulture,,,'2 "post-traditional culture,"13 "emotivist culture.,,14 However, most assume that, in some way or other, individuals at least will still find ways of making their lives meaningful. A "soft" interpretation ofNietzsche, Freud, and Rorty easily locates them in this tradition as well. But a "hard" interpretation sees this as their fall-back position. The three of them are in fact playing for much higher stakes. Their ideal and aspiration is a culture that has moved beyond meaning altogether. They want to realise a world where the experienc~ of meaninglessness never occurs because the need for meaning in life no longer exists at any level. Of course, the theories of these writers are subject to a great range of interpretation, something facilitated by the inconsistent and sometimes contradictory nature of the analyses they offer, which seem to point in different directions at different times and places. This is true especially of Nietzsche l5 but also of Freud and, to a lesser extent, Rorty. While it is

8

Introduction

very clear that this new form of culture is a central concern for Nietzsche and Rorty, it is perhaps not so clear in the case of Freud. But as commentators as diverse as Jiirgen Habermas and Phi lip Rieff have observed, Freud deals not simply with neurosis, but with the neurosis that emerges with the collapse of meaning. 16 Psychoanalytic therapy is intended not just to ameliorate the persistent sense of dread and "dis-ease,,17 that meaninglessness gives rise to---although amelioration is most often the result-but to overcome it altogether. Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty agree that overcoming the need for meaning can be done only by displacing the interior life or inwardness of man, the source of the complicated longings and responses that direct him to transcendence. They differ, however, in the accounts' they give of its origins. Rorty holds that even at this late stage in his development, there is nothing within man other than what is put there by the process of socialisation. Nietzsche and Freud agree with him that inwardness is created and not originally inherent, but see the process by which it was created as something more akin to evolution than socialisation, having its origins in prehistory and developing over thousands of years. What it has placed within man cannot therefore be easily overthrown, and the attempt to overcome the need for meaning will always be hindered, if not defeated, by it. It is for this reason, in part, that the solutions to meaninglessness offered by Nietzsche and Freud entail living "lightly," on the surface of existence, so as not to engage with what have become the ineradicable "depths." Rorty, in contrast, is altogether more optimistic and ambitious. Post-modernism also devalues inwardness in the hope of celebrating the advent of a new world, but its interest is more in the fragmentation of meaning than its complete overcoming. The influence of Nietzsche and Freud is important in post-modern theory, and Rorty draws on it significantly in the elaboration of his solution to meaninglessness. But in the end, the concerns of this book and post-modernism are quite distinct. While both are concerned with whether the present is a new era irrevocably sundered from the modern age-a decisive breach in time, thinking, and human sensibility-the approaches taken to this question are fundamentally different. Post-modernism tends to define modernity as a social and political "project," the "dominant paradigm" of which is a combination of reason, progress, and equality. The failure of this project is postmodernism's point of departure, and its ambition is to forestall the emergence of other, less germane, projects, operating out of very different paradigms. In this book, however, it is not the fate of modernity and its

Introduction

9

paradigms-or foreclosing on the future-that is the major concern. It is the fate of meaning. Like the post-modernists, Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty misunderstand the inwardness they seek to displace. They treat the unfolding of the individual's life as a "narrative," a story we tell ourselves, and their solutions to meaninglessness provide different ways of "appropriating" this narrative for the purposes of therapy or self-creation. In this view, narrative offers liberation from older, more troublesome concepts of personhood based on fixed and irreducible character. But in addition to the unfolding of an individual's life and personality, there is his essence, comprising the human in general and everything that is personal and particular to him. In short, there are two aspects to personhood, and in their solutions to meaninglessness, Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty focus on one only-the unfolding-in an attempt to deny or exclude the other-the essence. This is the most problematic aspect of their approach to meaninglessness, and also the most important. For if they are correct in asserting that there is only the unfolding-that there is in fact nothing inherent and inescapable within-then the worlds they envisage and desire will be realised in some form or other, with the sort of consequences touched on in the conclusion to this book. Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that "we have not yet fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.,,18 The theories of culture advanced by Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty have not been placed side by side before, a task that is long overdue. It has been undertaken in this book with close attention to the details, precisely so that "the social embodiment" of these theories can be clearly apprehended. For whatever else they are, the solutions to meaninglessness that Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty offer are also moral philosophies. They are concerned, and not just incidentally, with the question of how we should live. They take "the possibilities of action without limit" very seriously, and we have no choice but to do the same. "The predicate of sociological analyses of the moral should be that 'Man,' the most capacious of ideal types, is capable of everything." This predicate had traditionally led to insights and commandments that are "defensive"; 19 to cultures that uRhold and awaken a "truth of resistance" in the individual, "some intensity, some continuity of resistance being naturally of the essence of the subject," against "the assault of experience,,20 and the endlessness of its possibilities. We know the sort of world this resistance creates. A world based on its abolition, on openness to the sheer limitlessness of what we might do, will be very different.

10

Introduction

Such a world has been foreshadowed, of course. With the Holocaust and the other great extenninations of the twentieth century, "we have passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilisation,,21 and for the last half-century been suspended between a gravely compromised culture with uncertain powers of regeneration and an incipient successor which may be no culture at all. On the one hand, loneliness, uselessness, despair, and a powerful sense of the absurdity of it all are so prevalent that they constitute a part of everyday life. Indicators such as the rising suicide rates among young men in Western societies and the levels of drug abuse give only a partial indication of the problem, because they register only those whose tunnoil has reached the extreme. On the other hand, there is the supremacy of the individual, the factor that above all else seems to characterise late modernity. We find ourselves in a position in which we need not submit to any power or claim other than our own. Whenever submission is made, whether in personal morality or in social engagement, we bind ourselves only provisionally, on the more of less explicit understanding that each individual is the final arbiter of when he will and will not be obligated to others. The tension between these two facets of contemporary existence is intolerable. The traditional way of resolving it is to argue that the despair is a consequence of the supremacy. This points us back to the old culture and to the seemingly impossible task of its renewal. The other response is to assert that the supremacy is in fact the solution to the despair. In this direction lies a whole new world, and despite its absurdities and horrors, its promise in many respects is irresistible.

Notes 1. John Paul 11, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus (1991), §24. 2. Consider for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) (London: Heinemann, 1974); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) (London: Hutchinson, 1975); and Jiirgen Habennas, The Theory of Communicative Action 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984-87). Anthropology has its own approaches to culture, a classic treatment being Bronislaw Malinowski, The Dynamics of Culture Change (1946) (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961). So too does theology, the seminal document in recent decades being the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the World Gaudium et Spes (1965).

Introduction

11

3. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), chapter 8. 4. John Paul 11, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio (1998), §81. 5. The persistence of a character type after the culture which created it has collapsed or given way to another is an idea most famously developed by Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05), trans. Talcott Parsons (1930) (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 6. This is not as far-fetched as it may sound. It is a logical consequence of the "ever deepening introversion" mentioned earlier at n4. 7. Cr. John Paul 11 on nihilism: "Its adherents claim that the search is an end in itself, without any hope or possibility of ever attaining the goal of truth." Fides et Ratio §46. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882-87), ed. and trans. Waiter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 191-92. 9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901-06), ed. WaIter Kaufmann, trans. Waiter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1968},9. 10. Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, (London: Sage, 1991). 11. George Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (1971) (London: Faber & Faber, 1978). See also Steiner's later book Real Presences (London: Faber & Faber, 1989). 12. Philip Rieff, Fellow Teachers (1973), 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). See also Rieffs Epilogue in Freud: Mind of the Moralist (1959), 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); and his more recent article "Newer Noises of War in the Second Culture Camp," Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 3 (1991): 315-88. 13. Anthony Giddens, "Living in a Post-Traditional Society" in UIrich Beck et aI., Reflexive Modernisation (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995), 56-109. 14. Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue (1981), 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1984). 15. On the role contradiction plays in Nietzsche's philosophy, see Wolfgang MUller-Lauter, Nietzsche:· His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy (1974), trans. David J. Parent (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 16. JOrgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (1972) (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), chapter 10; and Rieff The Mind ofthe Moralist. 17. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1987), 3. 18. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 23. 19. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 21.

12

Introduction

20. Henry James, What Maisie Knew (1908) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 7. 21. Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, 48.

Chapter One

N ietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Mean inglessness Nietzsche's solution to the problem of meaninglessness is encapsulated in a famous phrase from his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872): "it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.") What he originally meant was that the individual could find redemption through the "transfiguring power" of art. For the ancient Greeks, this experience was provided by tragedy. Modem Europeans, Nietzsche thought, could find it in the operas of Richard Wagner. Both Greek tragedy and Wagner's "total work of art" (Gesamtkunstwerk) joined the individual with what Nietzsche at this stage in his thinking held to be the "truly existent" reality beneath the world of appearance: the Dionysian "primal unity" of all that exists. 2 Reflecting on The Birth of Tragedy in 1886, Nietzsche declared it "an impossible book,,3 and repudiated the wilder excesses of its "artists' metaphysics."4 But its central proposition, that the world as it is can only be justified aesthetically, continued to receive his endorsement, albeit with a different meaning. It was no longer art itself (and certainly not Wagner's music) that saved, but the exercise of "man's artists' will to power," in part on the world at large but first and foremost on himself, for "his own joy and glory."s Man needs to be saved, Nietzsche explains, because life in itself is either horrible or absurd. 6 "Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power.,,7 This applies not only to nature but to the cosmos as a whole. The individual is an absurdity before this indifference. The same indifference gives suffering its cruelty, but it is not suffering that primarily makes life horrible. When Joseph Conrad's Kurtz spoke of "the horror! the horror!" he was not contemplatl3

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Chapter One

ing suffering but the abysmal nothingness that underlies the thin and brittle surface on which we play out our lives. Nietzsche holds that every culture must respond to the horror and absurdity that constitute the fundamental reality of existence. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche used the Greeks to exemplify a response that "enhanced" the human animal. In his subsequent works he would use Christianity to illustrate how a different response led to the "impoverishment" of man.

Illusions of Meaning Hellenic culture, Nietzsche argues, provided redemption through tragedy. Greek tragedy brought together the forces of order and excess represented by the gods Apollo and Dionysus. From the Apollonian principle, it derived the power of generating "the most pleasurable and forceful illusions." It used the myths of Olympus as "a transfiguring mirror" to depict the absurdity and horror of life as part of a divine order. "The gods justify the life of man" by showing that "they themselves live itthe only satisfactory theodicy!"s From the Dionysian principle, tragedy derived the power to annihilate "the ordinary bounds of existence," enabling the individual to lose himself in "an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature.,,9 In bringing these two usually opposing forces together, tragedy was able to support the illusion of meaningfulness it created with a powerful emotional and religious experience. The illusion in its turn sustained the experience, providing the individual in ordinary life outside the theatre with "the metaphysical comfort" that "life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable." In this way, tragedy saved man from the "nausea" that afflicts him when confronted with the absurdity of his life and the horror of existence. lO Nietzsche makes it quite clear that the reality of existence is such that man should long only for death!l To live, we have to deceive ourselves about our state. 12 The Greeks made life "possible and worth living,,\3 by falsifying it, and every culture must do the same if man is to be "seduced to a continuation of life.,,14 "Untruth [is] the condition of life," and culture is the "constant falsification of the world. ,,15 In itself, the mendacity of culture is by no means an objection for Nietzsche. "Ultimately, it is a

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

15

matter of the end to which one lies.,,16 "The question is to what extent [the lie] is life-promoting, life-preserving.,,17 TIIusions or "lies" of meaning are necessary because they make it possible to will. The "will to power" is the "essence" of the world for Nietzsche. 18 "Life simply is will to power,,:19 there is no culture or society and no individual existence without it. But this great precondition for everything is itself contingent. Where man is "surrounded by a fearful void" and does not know "how to justify, to account for, to affirm himself'-where, in short, man suffers from "the problem of his meaning"the will to power is paralysed.20 The paralysis of the will to power caused by the absence of meaning eventually leads to the paralysis of all that is essential to survival and to culture. TIIusions of meaning typically take the form of myth. In the classical world, myth and religion did not belong to the order of reality as such. The gods were a creation of the state, instituted to sub serve culture, morals, and the political order. They were the deception and self-deception that made these other things possible. 21 The appearance of Christianity decisively changed this situation. From the beginning, Christianity based itself not on the poetry and presentiment that gave rise to myth but on philosophical rationality. It was not content to rely on a social or political justification and to worship in the absence of truth. Instead, it appealed to knowledge and to the rational analysis of reality, displacing myth "not by virtue of a type of religious imperialism but as the truth which renders the apparent superfluous. ,,22 Christianity's refusal to confine itself to the realm of myth, its refusal to offer merely one more illusion of meaning, its repudiation of what is false and its insistence on the truth, is precisely what makes it intolerable in Nietzsche's eyes. "Nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world ... than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies." In this it betrays "a furious, vengeful antipathy to life itself: for all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view and the necessity of perspectives and error.'.23 This falsification and heterogeneity can be accommodated in the polytheistic world of myth, but it has no place in the world of monotheistic religion and truth. Classical polytheism, Nietzsche argues, put before man "a plurality of norms; one god was not considered a denial of another god, nor blasphemy against him." Polytheism is not an order of truth but of freedom, and "the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other gods--one eventually granted oneself in relation to

16

Chapter One

laws, and customs, and neighbours." It permitted the individual "to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, joys, and rights" in the "purified" and "ennobled" form of his own gods. 24 Against this, monotheism posits "the doctrine of one normal human type," and "faith in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudogods.,,25 It subjects everything to one meaning, to one true way. While this is crucial to a culture's preponderance in the context of struggle (as outlined in the Introduction), the persistence of monotheism into more fortunate times when survival is assured leads to "stagnation." This is all the more true of Christianity which, having liquidated polytheism, imposed an "unconditional morality" upon the world that reprobated "the free-spiriting and many-spiriting" instincts of man,26 and in the name of "faith in 'another' or 'better' life," put this life, which it treated as "something essentially amoral," continually in the wrong. 27 In explaining how this was possible, Nietzsche refuses to countenance Christianity's "claim to reasonableness" and the way Christian revelation united itself with the natural philosophy of the classical world to bring it to completion and to provide itself with a basis in reason rather than myth. In Nietzsche's view the relationship of Christian revelation to reason does not extend beyond the accidental provision of a vehicle for perpetuating the errors of Socratic rationalism, right down to our own secularised age. Nietzsche makes much more of Christianity's moral seriousness and its focus on the poor and the weak, but in a famously idiosyncratic fashion. He fails to appreciate the way the twofold commandment to love God and others generated "a moral praxis" that converted the religious and philosophical perspective of Christians to real action. 28 In the squalor and poverty of Roman cities, Christians cared for all who suffered irrespective of rank or circumstances, and "promoted and sustained attractive, liberating and effective social relations and organizations." As a result, Christianity grew at an astonishing rate, and far from causing Rome's "stagnation," provided the Empire with a powerful "revitalization movement. ,,29 This is not how Nietzsche sees the matter at all.

The Slave Revolt in Morals Nietzsche acknowledges that Christianity's concern for moral renewal and for the welfare of the oppressed in society played an important part in its rise to dominance, but the love of God and neighbour served only

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

17

as an apparent motivation. Underlying this was the desire to deny and obliterate the fundamental difference between human beings, the difference between "the noble" and "the slave." "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker, suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation, and at least, at its mildest, exploitation.,,30 Depending on their "physiology" (a word Nietzsche uses to imply something more than mere physical strength), individuals will approach life on such terms either with confidence or fear. In this, nature "distinguishes the pre-eminently spiritual ones, [and] those who are pre-eminently strong in muscle and temperament" from those "who excel neither in one respect nor in the other, the mediocre ones-the last as the great majority, the first as the elite." This is not just a matter of interpretation. The difference between noble and slave expresses "a natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no 'modern idea' has any power.,,3) An important part of the fear with which slaves greet life is a fear of the instincts: in the first place those of others, especially those of the noble, but also their own. What is decisive in the physiology of the slave is not the absence of strong instinctual drives but weakness of will. The impulses of slaves can be every bit as deep and violent as those of the "blond beast.,,32 What the slave lacks is the strength of will either to act honestly-and with honest pleasure-()n these impulses, or to master them. "'Willing' is not 'desiring,' striving, demanding: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding. ,,33 "The essential feature" of the strong will which defines and distinguishes the physiologically strong "is precisely not to 'will' -to be able to suspend decision. All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse ... almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word 'vice' is merely this physiological inability not to react.,,34 As different human types, noble and slave require different moralities. Noble morality respects "all severity and hardness" and welcomes "the discipline of suffering, of great suffering," as the source of everything that "enhances" man. 35 In contrast, slave morality, "the morality of rancour,,,36 is based on fear of suffering. It is the morality of "the violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, who are uncertain of themselves and weary." "Essentially a morality of utility," it honours the qualities "which serve to ease existence for those who suffer" and which help the weak to endure life: "pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility and friendliness." For the same reason,

18

Chapter One

all qualities which cause suffering, in particular the ability to inspire fear or to engender a sense of inferiority, are censured.37 Confined to slaves this morality would do little harm. Christianity changed this, however, by applying it universally and absolutely to all times and places without differentiation. Nietzsche argues that, because of the differences between human types (and cultures), morality is not one but many, each being conditional on the circumstances from which it emerges and expressing the particular conditions that allow a people or a culture or a caste to survive and flourish. "Moralities are the expression of locally limited orders of rank,,,38 and there can never be one, universal morality applying to all peoples and periods. Nobles understand this and would never "degrade" their duties by making them "duties for everybody.,,39 But slaves want "the unconditional." Their morality must apply to all, "without nuance.'.40 For the weak, "refraining mutually from injury, violence and exploitation, and placing one's will on a par with that of someone else" may be "good manners," but to extend this principle to others different from them and to make it "the fundamental prinCiple of society" transforms it into "a principle of disintegration and decay.'.41 To believe "that the strong man is free to be weak," as the weak in their need for unconditional, universal morality maintain, is to demand "the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey. ,.42 This is precisely what Christianity sought. Its success and the source of its great appeal lay in its promise to compel the noble to account for himself to the slave-for being noble. By means of a "radical revaluation" of values, noble morality was inverted so that the good and God's favour were no longer identified with the strong, talented, and powerful, but with the poor, impotent, and deprived. The noble became the evil and damned, while slaves became the sons of God. Christianity brought "the slave revolt in morality" that had commenced with the Jews to total victory over the Western world. 43 This brings us to the heart of Nietzsche's objection to Christianity: not that it lies, but that it lies for a dishonest purpose.44 The impotence of slaves is "lied into something meritorious," and their weaknesses are "revalued" as virtues. Under Christianity's tutelage, slaves dishonestly disown their longing for revenge against all that is higher by claiming that they only seek "the triumph of justice." "They also speak of 'loving one's enemies' -and sweat as they do SO.'.45 For Nietzsche, the negation of the instincts in the ascetic morality of Christianity compounds this mendacity. Being incapable of selfcommand, slaves fear the instincts in both themselves and others. The

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

19

only alternative the slave has to surrendering to an impulse is to extirpate it, to "declare war" on it. This specious asceticism falsifies virtue, establishing it on a basis of compulsion and the removal of stimulus rather than one of mastery and freedom. This is why Nietzsche describes Christianity as "a principle of disintegration and decay." "To have to fight the instincts-that is the formula of decadence; for as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct.,,46 Noble morality accepts this as a premise and seeks human "enhancement" based on harnessing the instincts to bring about "a new greatness of man.,,47 Slave morality, however, pursues a concept of human "improvement" that attempts to make people "better" by taming and weakening the instincts that are the very source of life and energy.48 A culture built on the denial and subjugation of the instincts leads inevitably not only to enervation and paralysis, but to the domination of rancour ("ressentiment"t 9 in society at large and especially in questions of value and meaning. "The values of a human being betray something of the structure of his soul and where it finds its condition of life, its true need. ,,50 The slave is characterised by reactiveness and this is reflected in his morality. The noble individual "has absolutely no need to take a false and prejudiced view of the object before him in the way the reactive man does and is bound to do." His strength and nobility allow him "an ever more impersonal evaluation" of people and deeds, even when he has been injured by them. The slave, in contrast, can only consider things personally. His valuations are always prejudiced and interested, because as one who constantly suffers he is "fastened exclusively to the viewpoint of the person injured." He is incapable of assessing anything objectively51 and makes his judgments reactively. Noble morality is an impersonal valuation of reality, but "slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; ... its action is fundamentally reaction. ,,52 Nietzsche described rancour-"the psychology of the improvers of mankind"-as "the great, the uncanny problem which I have [pursued] the longest.,,53 The noble "lives in trust and openness with himself' and is "incapable of taking [his] enemies, [his] accidents, even [his] misdeeds seriously for long." As a consequence, rancour is generally unknown in him. Possessing a "strong, full nature," in which "there is an excess of power to form, to mould, to recuperate and to forget," he "shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others." If rancour should appear in the noble individual it "consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore does not poison." On the other

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Chapter One

hand, "it fails to appear at all on [the] countless occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and the impotent.,,54 It is different with the slave. In addition to fearfulness, mediocrity, and impotence, slaves are distinguished above all else by hatred, and their hatred takes two forms. Because they are "weak characters without power over themselves," self-hatred is their permanent condition. As Nietzsche says, "one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself ... only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.,,55 Self-hatred gives rise to rancour, the other form of hatred the slave suffers. At bottom, it is the hatred of difference: "difference engenders hatred.,,56 Its objects are those who are not fearful and weak, those with the self-possession to approach the world confidently and with the will to master their instinctual impulses rather than constantly react to them. It responds to distinction in character and ability with (to paraphrase Kierkegaard) "the unhappy love of envy, rather than the happy love of admiration. ,,57 It is hatred based on an unfailing recognition of human superiority and of one's own mediocrity before it. Rancour is the subterranean intelligence of Christianity, the underlying instinct that "secretly guide [s]" the stated goals and desires of the Christian. 58 Faith, hope, and love may be the professed intentions and the way Christian practice is understood, but this is both a deception and a self-deception. "We immoralists have the suspicion that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional in it, while everything about it that is intentional ... that can be seen, known, 'conscious,' still belongs to its surface and skin-which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even more.,,59 "Consciousness is a surface,,,60 although this does not mean it is "in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive." On the contrary: "by far the greater part of conscious thinking must still be included among instinctive activities," because in any individual, conscious thought is "forced into certain channels by his instincts" in ways that escape notice. 61 For this reason, no one, perhaps not even Nietzsche himself, can be taken at his word, and no philosophy can be taken at face value. 62 This applies especially to Christianity, in Nietzsche's view, because not every system of meaning and values is dominated by rancour, and not every philosophy or religion lies so malignantly about life and human nature.

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

21

The Moralisation of Meaninglessness The development of culture and the creation of character in the West have been distorted significantly by the dominance of rancour in Christianity. Nietzsche holds that every culture must give form to the human animal by mastering the instincts and generating depth within, a task that begins in the body, not the sou1. 63 The first (and prehistoric) means for doing this was the "morality of custom," which deployed brutal physical punishment to make the individual remember and obey the demands of the community.64 The savage punishment which attended the breach of these customs was a function of the weakness of human memory. "The main clause of the oldest psychology on earth" is "only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." In this way, man finally came to remember the "five or six 'I will nots'" that served as the conditions for his participation in the advantages of society.65 Fear, fear of pain, is "the mother of morals,,,66 and it was through "an increase in fear" that the mastery of instinctual desires first became possible. 67 Mastery of the instincts means turning them back on themselves. With this, the inwardness that makes man something more than an animal began to emerge. All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inwardthis is what I call the internalisation of man: thus it was that man flrst developed what was later called his 'soul.' The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. 68

Control of the instincts through internalisation created space between desire and satisfaction, so permitting the development of "all [the] prerogatives and showpieces of man": reason, seriousness, responsibility, and reflection; a sense of "power over oneself and over fate." But the price of this achievement was great, at first in terms of "blood and crueity,"69 and later, once the morality of custom had been left behind, in terms of "cruelty directed backward. ,,70 For the internalisation of man incarcerates all "the old instincts of freedom," the instincts "of wild, free, prowling man," and only permits them discharge against their possessor. It creates not only conscience, the individual's sense of himself as a "sovereign individual," but "bad conscience," the individual's sense of himself as guilty. In this lies the beginnings of "the gravest and uncanniest illness,

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Chapter One

from which humanity has not yet recovered," man's suffering of himself.71 Bad conscience is something Nietzsche regards with ambivalence. 72 It is at once a turning away from the instincts, which leads in the extreme to the desire to extirpate them, and also the first exercise of man's "artist's will to power" against himself, the first achievement of self-mastery upon which all further self-mastery is based. Control of the instincts is an inescapable condition of higher culture, and bad conscience is its price. Christianity makes this situation problematic by imposing a moral interpretation that demands control of the instincts as an end in itself (rather than as a means to enhancement) and treats guilt as a consequence of sin. Part of Nietzsche's own "revaluation of values" is directed precisely at this moral interpretation of bad conscience. "That someone feels 'guilty' or 'sinful' is no proof that he is right, any more than a man is healthy merely because he feels healthy." "Sinfulness" is not a fact, but an interpretation of a fact. 73 The fact in question, guilt, is in its origins and in itself simply "a piece of animal psychology, no more.,,74 The moralisation of guilt represents "the most dangerous and fateful artifice of religious interpretation. ,,75 Unable to accept that the suffering bad conscience engenders is meaningless, man sought a reason for it and inevitably encountered another question: what does suffering in general mean? Nietzsche claims this was not a question that occurred to "the naIve man of more ancient times, who understood all suffering in relation to the spectator of it or the causer of it." From this perspective, cruelty is a pleasure, part of the spectacle and festivity of life, that makes for happiness and enjoyment,16 But with the collapse of classical polytheism there was a change of perspective, and suffering came to be seen always from the sufferer's point of view. "The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself," now became "the curse that lay over mankind," and Christianity offered an answer.77 The world and human nature, blighted as a consequence of man's sin in the Garden of Eden, must be redeemed to be made bearable and redemption can only come transcendently, from God himself. We cannot redeem ourselves. Christianity moralised meaninglessness just as it moralised the sense of guilt. It then set about sinking these "solutions" to man's suffering of himself deep within him. With the aid of its ascetic morality and mode of life, it rendered a few ideas "inextinguishable, ever-present, unforgettable, 'fixed,' ... hypnotising the entire nervous and intellectual system with these 'fixed ideas.",78 "The means of ensuring authority for a truth ... are utterly different from the means needed to prove it." Every "holy

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

23

lie," every great illusion of meaning, aims "to push consciousness back from what has been recognised as the right life ... so as to attain the perfect automatism of instinct." For its main claims to acquire the force of an imperative, they "must be made unconscious. ,,79 They must become man's "dominating instinct," driving him to think and feel in their spirit alone. so In this way, Christianity created the character type of Western man, a creature that understands meaninglessness, guilt, and suffering as problems, requiring one absolute, universal, and transcendent solution, usually with strong moral implications. That Christianity came to be in a position to do this, Nietzsche argues, with consequences for millennia, was purely an accident of history. Its great advantage--or luck-was to appear "in an age of disintegration," when the will to power was enfeebled. sl The will to power serves not only as the source of human instinctual life, but as "an organising vitality of super- and sub-ordination.,,82 It upholds the order of castes in society, and in a similar way establishes a hierarchy ordering the conflicting drives within each individual. But as noted earlier, the will to power is paralysed by meaninglessness. Weakened in this way, the "order of rank,,83 it supports within a culture and within the individual begins to break down, giving rise to an unending war of values and drives. Longing for certainty abroad and quiet within, even the noble became susceptible to the unconditional revaluation of values and absolute interpretation of the world that Christianity offered the late classical world. To preserve itself and bring an end to the absurdity and horror, the will to power seized upon the Christian revaluation of noble values as the justification for existence. For Nietzsche, this demonstrates that "man would rather will nothingness than not will." In a time of decay, Christianity "was the only meaning offered [and] any meaning is better than none." It succeeded "faute de mieux."S4 However, the more important point to note concerning Nietzsche's own solution to meaninglessness is that if even prior to the deformations produced by Christianity man would rather "will nothingness than not will," then the will to power in its original disposition is also in some profound way the will to meaning.

Disenchantment and Paradise While Christianity was once the solution to disease of the will, it has now become the cause. For centuries the West has been dominated by its asceticism, and to the extent that it has "improved" and "cultivated" hu-

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Chapter One

man beings, it has done so by "weakening, splintering, and sicklying over the force of the will. ,,85 Morality has ceased to be "the expression of the conditions for the life and growth of a people, ... its most basic instinct of life," and become "abstract, become the antithesis of life.,,86 But the "general decrease in vitality,,87 produced by the long war on the instincts is only one indication of the threat posed to the will to power by the legacy of Christianity. The other, more important danger comes from the long training Christianity has provided the West in reason, truthfulness, and intolerance of illusions. "All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it ... After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself.,,88 Meaninglessness will follow, but this time taking the form of its predecessor-absolute, unconditional, unanswerablemaking the enervating and paralysing effects on the will to power greater than ever before. The dynamic that drives Christianity to this end is seen more clearly in the rationalism that so often since the eighteenth century has been considered religion's great opponent. The two are in fact one, Nietzsche argues, rationalism and the belief in secular learning or knowledge (Wissenschaft) being but "the latest and noblest form" of the asceticism underlying Christianity. Both claim to know the truth above and beyond human life by which the world can be corrected or improved. Both see mastery of the world as the product of reason rather than instinct, everything instinctual or unconscious being treated as an impediment to understanding and as a source of error or sin. And behind high beneficent ideals, both serve as hiding places for rancour. 89 In all of this, rationalism represents the asceticism of Christianity in its purest form, freed from theology but still unconditionally insistent on the universality and oneness of truth. Nietzsche uses Socrates as the emblematic personification of Western rationalism. 90 Tragedy, with its appeal to the unconscious and instinctual, was incomprehensible to Socrates. He held that to know something "by instinct" was to know nothing at all, for true knowledge, like true beauty and true virtue, must be intelligible. His optimistic belief in the power of self-consciousness and thought to penetrate illusion and lack of insight, and so "correct" existence, generated the "delusion of limitless power" which still attends the West's faith in knowledge. 91 The rancour that informs this faith is evident in the way the original desire to understand the mystery of the world ultimately became a drive to possess and contain it,

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to reduce it to a "fundamental reality" free of any residue of mystery or uncertainty. But inevitably reason came to limits it could not overcome. It pursued the ideal of truth which it inherited from Christianity until it had penetrated all illusions, including its own. Its search for the truth brought it in the end to the reality of horror and absurdity that first confronted the ancient Greeks, the reality of meaninglessness that can be neither corrected nor made intelligible. 92 Western rationalism leads to what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world,93 leaving man with no more than a "penetrating sense of his nothingness.,,94 With this, Nietzsche claims, the revenge of the slaves against the nobles, and against life itself, is complete .. "The ultimate, subtlest, most sublime triumph of revenge" for the weak was to conquer the strong by making them sick toO: 95 sick from bad conscience and meaninglessness, sick in the will and the instincts, sick of themselves. The application of Western knowledge and rationality has reduced suffering, making human existence easier, more comfortable, and less dangerous, and Christian morality has tamed the instincts of the noble, remaking him in the image of the slave. In place of the blond beast there is now "the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man" who considers himself "the goal and zenith, ... the meaning of history." "Thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent" than anything before him,96 he is the end-type· of the West. Nietzsche's Zarathustra calls him "the last man." In the world of the last man, the great goal of the slave revolt in morals, the eradication of all difference, has been achieved. "Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same," comfortably ~md happily impotent. The last man is a rational, knowing man: "one is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there' is no end of derision. ,,97 He is humane, righteous, and inoffensive, but more as a result of the weakness of his instincts rather than the strength of his virtue. 98 The last man's life, modem man's life, is an impoverished one: "the affects grown cool, the tempo of life slowed down, dialectics in place of instinct.,,99 There is little to fear other than indigestion. "We have invented happiness," say the last men, "and they blink."]OO Their happiness is the happiness of slaves. The world they live in is the world they would have all people live in: a paradise that only Western culture could make possible.]O] For Nietzsche, the challenge this situation poses is clear: "inexorably, hesitantly, terrible as fate, the great task and question is approaching: ... to what end shall 'man'· as a whole ... be raised and trained?" The dominion of the last man offers only the prospect of unending mediocrity

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and "a universal green-pasture happiness on earth." For humanity to rediscover greatness, the comfort and peace of the slaves' paradise must give way to circumstances of unrelenting danger. Human enhancement requires struggle: "severity, violence, danger in the street as well as in the heart, inequality of rights, concealment, stoicism, the art of experiment, devilry of all kinds, in short the opposite of all the herd thinks desirable."lo2 All these things will ensue when the homogeneity of the last man begins to give way to differentiation of type, as inescapably occurs in the final stages of a culture's course, but also for a more important reason. The last man comes to predominance in conditions of incipient meaninglessness, and despite the consolations of ease and abundance, he remains a creature in need of meaning. This is an unsustainable situation, and it foreshadows a crisis that threatens to liquidate his type and the last of the Christian legacy altogether, a prospect Nietzsche enthusiastically welcomes. He calls this crisis "the death of God."

The Death of God In Nietzsche's famous parable on the death of God, a lunatic enters 103 "I seek God! I seek the market-place one morning carrying a lantern. God!" he yells. Ridiculed by the unbelievers who hear him, he turns on them saying, "Where is God? ... I will tell you. We have killed himyou and I. All of us are his murderers." He then launches into a speech describing what the destruction of meaning signifies. 'Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? To where is it moving now? To where are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not continually plunging? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?'

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him," the madman concludes; and to be worthy of this deed we must become gods ourselves. The death of God abandons man to the void. It confronts him with the inherent meaninglessness of the earth, and the realisation that the transcendent order that makes human life meaningful is an illusion. The crucial concomitant to this is the collapse of absolute value. In revealing the higher order that redeems the world, Christianity established an absolute

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hierarchy of value or order of rank that is not merely one interpretation among many but part of an eternal and immutable truth. In the immanent world, high and low can only be relative and the death of God leaves man to a conflict of many interpretations, all of which, because of the disappearance of transcendent authority, are no more and no less than equally valid. 104 This makes any attempt to construct alternative sources of meaning and systems of value from within the human world absurd. \05 The relativity of values means the selection of one such system over another can only, in effect, be arbitrary. As the lunatic says, the obliteration of meaning not only leaves the earth without an anchor, but humanity without a horizon.)06 While the madman's godless listeners agree with him that "belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable,,,,o7 they have no understanding of what this means. Seeing the astonishment caused by his outburst, the madman says to himself, "this tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men." \08 Belief in God has "propped up" many things, Nietzsche argues, and "much must collapse" with the collapse of that belief.,o9 Amongst the madman's audience there would be those who, supposing that Christianity is no longer morality's guarantee, "have abandoned God [to] cling that much more firmly to morality."IIO But Christianity "is a system, a whole view of things thought out together." The destruction of its main concept destroys it entirely. Its morality "is by no means self-evident: ... it has truth only if God is the truth." The same applies to moralities premised on the supposition of a "natural order," a supposition which simply reflects the strength and depth of "the Christian value judgment" in European culture.))) The strength of this value judgment is also to be seen in those in the crowd around the madman who believe in "truth" and knowledge. Their faith in truth is "a metaphysical faith," ultimately deriving from Christianity, and still holding "that truth is divine.,,112 "Two thousand years of training in truthfulness ... finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God',)13 but continues to believe in "the absolute value of truth," refusing to permit truth "to be a problem.,,114 This, however, is merely a matter of time. Inevitably, not only truth and morality but life itself will become problems. The death of God comprises a "monstrous logic ofterror,,,115 and in its wake everything becomes problematic. As the meaning of the death of God gradually comes to be understood, man is plunged into the condition Nietzsche calls nihilism. Nihilism is the experience and conviction of meaninglessness, the conse-

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quence of "the end of the moral interpretation of the world,,,1I6 the conclusion drawn upon its failure to answer the question "why?,,117 The death of God puts before it the terrifying question "Has existence any meaning at all? " and its negative answer constitutes its final valuation of existence. I 18 The way forward from nihilism for Nietzsche lies in coming to see the "metaphysical" interpretation of the world-a term that can be used to encompass both Christianity and its secularised successors in Western culture-as but one interpretation: as no more than one meaning in a world where countless meanings are possible. 119 It is only because the metaphysical interpretation of the world "was considered the interpretation" that "it now seems ... as if everything were in vain."12O New interpretations remain to be made. With this insight the death of God ceases to be a catastrophe and begins to assume the form of a new opportunity for reinterpreting and remaking human life. The death of God means different things to different human types. The metaphysical interpretation of the world is the slave's interpretation. All its valuations are unconditional and this remains true of its last valuation, "meaningless," whereby all meaning is denied simply because slavish meaning has failed. For the slave, the death of God means debilitation, enervation and paralysis, and an existence of nothingness. For the noble, the death of God means liberation from the world of the last man and the opportunity of once again placing a noble valuation on life. With the destruction of the transcendent "true" world there are suddenly "no eternal facts" and "no eternal horizons and perspectives.,,12\ Man becomes "the as yet undetermined animai,,,122 a creature who can make of himself and the world what he will. The death of God is a disaster for the slave, but "a new dawn" for the noble,123 one which puts before him the task of a new Creation to make humanity worthy of the greatness that the "murder" of God entails. As humanity first begins to comprehend what the death of God signifies, however, none of this is apparent. Both slave and noble are sickened by nihilism. The world seems "weary, stale, flat.,,124 But while the slave lapses into paralysis, for the noble nihilism serves as an intermediate rather than a final condition, lasting only while there is not "yet present the strength" to create a new valuation of existence. 125 The deepest meaning of the death of God is freedom of the most unlimited kind, and as awareness of this opportunity grows, so does the strength necessary for responding to it. The aim and goal of Nietzsche's own revaluations is to hasten this process. Revaluation is crucial to the creation of a noble justification of the world, and "by applying the knife vivisectionally to the

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chest of the very virtues" of his time, the noble can escape both nihilism and the morality of the improvers of mankind to find "a new untrodden way to his enhancement.,,126

The Superman and Self-Creation In opposition to making man "better" by weakening the instincts, Nietzsche proposes to make him stronger, which above all else means restoring him to the instincts in their full wild-animal vitality. This instinctual restoration is not primarily a matter of "de-repression" but of ceasing the war Western culture has waged against instinctual life. It requires the rediscovery of "the strength to withstand [the] tension" of conflicting instinctual demands and to choose freely amongst them without recourse to the ascetic "virtue" that seeks instead their extirpation. 127 Enhancement means the increase of man in power and entails not only greater power to will and to act, but greater power over oneself. The enhanced man is at once more powerful in instinct and over instinct. In every sense of the word he is master, and it is in the constant growth in mastery-that is, in strength and in power-that Nietzsche founds his noble justification of existence. The enhanced man is a higher type of being, a "full, rich, great, whole human being" whose mere existence is sufficient to justify "whole millennia.,,128 He alone can bear the great responsibility the death of God imposes on humanity "and not collapse under it.,,129 Nietzsche gives this human type the name "superman," and finds in him not only "a new greatness of man" but "the meaning of the earth. ,,130 Nietzsche describes the superman as "a species of man that does not yet exist.,,131 He is prefigured in certain exemplars of the human individual such as Napoleon, but imperfectly: despite all their greatness the exemplars remain men, whereas the superman is a god. Man is merely "a rope, tied between beast and superman-a rope over an abyss," and to the superman even the greatest of men is as the ape is to man, "a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.,,132 The superman is the god that man makes of himself through the will, but to will the superman, man must first discover again his ancient longing to be God. 133 It is for this reason, ultimately, that the death of God is to be welcomed in Nietzsche's view. With it the superman becomes possible. "Precisely this is godlike: that there are gods, but no God.,,134 To make the superman a reality however, the death of man is also required. This "painful embar-

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rassment" must be "overcome"-that is, destroyed-so that he can be created anew. In this, will is decisive, for both overcoming and selfcreation are heroic acts of will and it is through such greatness of will that humanity as a whole is made "worthier oflife.,,13s Although Nietzsche generally speaks of the superman in the singular, it is clear he intends there to be not one god but many. It is also apparent that the divine nature of these gods is not simply a matter of rarefied spirituality. The power they are to assume is quite real and as near to godlike as power on earth can be. Nietzsche speaks of the supermen as "the future 'masters of the earth': ... philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants,,136 who alone can force "the will of millennia upon new tracks.,,137 As "commanders and legislators," they will "determine the Whither and For What of man." 138 The order that they create will indeed be a spiritual order of meaning and value, but it will also be an aristocratic temporal order, as befits "an elite humanity.,,139 The "natural order" of caste and rank will be restored, and through "absolute commands" and "terrible means of compulsion" an attempt will be made to make even the last man fruitful. I40 Nietzsche's aesthetic culture will be an order without pity, for pity "preserves what is ripe for destruction," keeping alive "an abundance of failures of all kinds" who give life "a gloomy and questionable aspect.,,141 "The weak and the failures," those who are incapable of selfovercoming and self-creation, "shall perish: ... And they shall even be given every possible assistance.,,142 Only through "the relentless destruction" of everything "degenerating and parasitical" will an "excess of life" again be possible on earth. 143 The scenario Nietzsche describes is one of total power, and it is towards the realisation of this scenario that the unending enhancement of man is directed. In describing the noble justification of the world in these terms, Nietzsche locates all meaning in will and power. It is will and power, human will transformed into the power of gods, that ultimately justify life and make it desirable in man's eyes. The concept of the superman represents an important change in Nietzsche's concept of the aesthetic justification of the world as it was first outlined in The Birth of Tragedy. In a draft fragment of a preface for the 1886 edition of the book, art is still spoken of as the great deception necessary for life, but the explanation of the "cheerfulness" this deception engenders is quite different. Whereas in 1872 it was attributed to the illusion that life is lived within and under an eternal and sacred order that transcends it, in 1886 it is attributed to the sense of power and mastery that the creation of illusion enables man to enjoy.

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In those moments in which man was deceived, in which he duped himself, in which he believes in life: oh how emaptured he feels! What delight! What a feeling of power!-Man has once again become master of "material "-master of truth!-And whenever man rejoices he is always the same in his rejoicing: he rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, he enjoys the lie as his form of power. 144

While the illusions are false there can be no doubting the reality of man's enjoyment of "himself as power." Power is real, non-illusory, "true." It is through the lies of art that man first discovers the godlike power within himself, the power of his creative will, the exercise of which gives the entire cosmos meaning. This important point requires elaboration. All meaning ·is created meaning, a value created by man and placed on life as a means of selfpreservation. Every act of valuation is an act of creation, 145 and it is in art that the phenomenon of creation/valuation takes its highest form. But just as there are two human types, slave and master, so are there two types of art, two types of value and creation, and two types of suffering which art redeems. Slaves suffer from "the impoverishment of life" and seek in the values they create "redemption from themselves." It is found in the art of religious and metaphysical illusions. Nobles in contrast suffer from "the over-fullness of life" and from this create "a Dionysian art and . . . a tragic view of life," through which even what is "evil, absurd and ugly" can serve as an inducement to life. 146 For both noble and slave, therefore, the world is justified aesthetically. With the death of God the world continues to require justification through artistic creation, but in the noble-Dionysian aesthetic the illusions of meaning and value created through art can now be dispensed with. In their place stands the power of the artist, his creative ~ill, and its focus is man himself, on his own self-creation, rather than any illusory higher world. For if art is to justify man, man must become a work of art, and it is in his significance as a work of art that his "highest dignity" lies. 147 The superman is this work of art, the work of art that man the artist makes of himself, his "best creation.,,148 For this reason Nietzsche claims that "as an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable for us:" through art we find "the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.,,149 With the superman, art irrevocably turns from the creation of illusions to the deification of the creative will and the human power of which it is the highest expression. The world is justified aesthetically, but the meaning of this justification is the illimit-

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able dominion of man's "artist's will to power" and the veneration not of truth, but of the force that creates it. ISO

Eternal Recu rrence Meaninglessness is the enormous and potentially disastrous legacy of Christianity, and the concept of the superman is the basis of the solution Nietzsche offers to it. But if the apotheosis of human will and power is to truly provide the world with its ultimate meaning, rather than a mere illusion of it, it must overcome meaninglessness once and forever. Meaninglessness is the problem of "duration 'in vain,' without end or aim," and its importance in Nietzsche's philosophy requires that he conceive it "in its most terrible form." This requirement is fulfilled in "the eternal recurrence," a vision of meaninglessness postulating "existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness." It is a formulation of meaninglessness as the "in vain" without end, without even the consolation of final oblivion, of "the nothing (the 'meaningless') eternally.,,151 Nietzsche considered the eternal recurrence to be the fundamental truth of existence and sought to elicit proofs for it in his notebooks. ls2 As such, he considered it the crucial test for the superman, a means for his "breeding and selection.,,153 "For me," Nietzsche writes, "the real standard of value" is "How much truth can a spirit endure, how much truth does a spirit dare?"ls4 If the idea of the eternal recurrence gains possession of an individual and does not crush him, it will decisively change him. He will come to understand this thought not as the most terrible form of meaninglessness but as "the eternal confirmation and seal" of human existence, something to be "fervently craved." Only those who are "well disposed" to themselves and to life can attain such an understanding. 1s5 The superman is the model and master for all such "well disposed" ones. In the eternal recurrence he can contemplate "the most fundamental nihilism" as the deepest truth of existence and yet "not halt at a negation; a No." Instead he crosses over to the opposite of this, to a great affirmation "of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection": an affirmation of the world not in spite of, but because of, its meaninglessness. This is "the highest state" that can be attained by man and it is attained in the superman. It calls for "a Dionysian relationship to existence," Nietzsche's formula for which is "am or!ati.,,156

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Amor fati (love of fate) must be understood in the light of Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian. 157 In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche speaks of "the Dionysian phenomenon" as "again and again" revealing to man "the playful construction and destruction of the individual world as the overflow of a primordial delight. Thus the dark Heraclitus compares the world-building force to a playing child that places stones here and there and builds sand hills only to overthrow them again.,,158 Dionysus is both the creator and destroyer of worlds, and in both creation and destruction he takes great joy. The "overflow" of "primordial delight" that leads him to create also leads him to destroy, not for the sake of destruction, but for the purpose of further creation. The created object inevitably constrains the possibilities of creation. Its destruction is not the result of "the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, who must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them," but "an expression of overflowing energy that is pregnant with a future.,,159 This Dionysian cycle of destruction and creation Nietzsche calls "overcoming." In itself, Nietzsche claims, overcoming is only a particular expression of the "eternal becoming" that is life. As noted earlier, man must overcome-that is, destroy-himself, to create himself anew as the superman. Life for Nietzsche is not a state of being but an endlessly unfolding process. Within it things come to be and pass away, but unlike these things life never knows stasis. It is always "becoming": it never "is." The horror and absurdity that so contradicts human life must be seen in this light. It is not the essence of existence but a part of the perpetual Dionysian becoming that both destroys and creates and that must destroy so that there can be creation. This process is neither good nor bad. Rather, it is "innocent," completely without any moral implications. An important consequence of overcoming the need for meaning is the restoration of "the innocence of becoming." Freed from a metaphysical and moral interpretation, life and man himself are restored to the innocence of childhood. Because life is no longer something of utmost seriousness and meaning, it becomes a game in which man can "play" and experiment with self-creation without the burden of responsibility, without having to answer for himself and his existence. The individual who stands in a "Dionysian relationship to existence" understands this and shares in the "delight" that enables one to respond to everything in life, including most particularly suffering, with a joy "beyond all terror and pity.,,160 Such an individual loves his fate, and even (or especially) in the instance of a life of unrelieved suffering,

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"wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.,,161 His Dionysianjoy leads him to long for the eternal recurrence as the ultimate confirmation and seal of his life, for "joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same." 162 Through amor fati, therefore, "the most extreme form of nihilism,,163 becomes some~ing "divine.,,164 Joy in life ceases to find its negation in mortality because amor fati enables man to say to death: "Was that life? ... Well then! Once more!,,165 It will be apparent that the joy which the superman takes in life's becoming is joy in a meaningless process. But this is exactly what Nietzsche intends in proposing amor fati, that man love his fate even though it is meaningless. Strictly speaking, it is not fate at all that the superman loves, in the sense of a preordained or transcendent order of things, but meaningless necessity. Nietzsche himself acknowledges this in writing that the central point of amor fati is "not merely [to] bear what is necessary, still less [to] conceal it ... but [to] love it.,,166 Life and the eternal becoming are inherently meaningless. But this is not in itself the problem for Nietzsche. The problem in "the problem of meaning" is man. It is he alone of all created things who requires and demands meaning of existence. To begin with, man overcame meaninglessness through the creation of illusions of meaning, a self-deception that was necessary for his growth and enhancement and that yielded Christianity and a metaphysical interpretation of the world. But he has now reached the point at which self-deception has been overcome. He finds himself paralysed, sickened by life "in vain." Meaninglessness must be overcome again, but this time it must be overcome by overcoming the need for meaning. This is the true purport of the Nietzschean refrain "Man is something that must be overcome.,,167 The logic at work is that of the eternal becoming. The fundamental truth of existence, which will no longer be denied, has brought creation in man to an end. For creation to continue he must be destroyed, and because of the nature of becoming, this destruction can never be brought to an end. With the self-overcoming that is man's selfdestruction, the problematic "need for meaning" disappears from the universe. For the superman who emerges from the overcoming of man the joy of becoming is all the "meaning" he needs. When Nietzsche speaks of the superman as "the meaning of the earth," he speaks as one forced to use the inadequate language of old experiences to convey something altogether beyond the possibilities conceivable within it. 168

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The meaning ofthe supennan is that meaninglessness has forever ceased to be a problem.

The Endlessness of Power Nietzsche's work is dominated by meaninglessness and the attempt to find a solution for it. An important part of his solution takes the fonn of an argument against the very concept of meaninglessness: meaninglessness is an idea inseparable from Christianity and the slave's interpretation of existence. This argument represents an attempt to deny that meaninglessness has any objective reality as a continuing and ineradicable part of the human condition, in spite ofNietzsche's own conclusions concerning meaning as the precondition for the will to power. But though no more than a matter of "interpretation," meaninglessness did not thereby lose the reality it had for Nietzsche personally. This ambivalence, the tension between meaninglessness as interpretation and meaninglessness as fundamental reality, persists throughout his work without being finally resolved. Thus overcoming is intended at once to abolish the problem of meaninglessness and to open the way to true meaning; it is to create a world where meaning is no longer necessary, but where life is nevertheless genuinely meaningful; and it is to make possible the supennan, who is both the man who does not need meaning and the man who is his own meaning. It would seem that in the end, meaninglessness for Nietzsche was not simply a matter of perspective but the fundamental truth of existence. The task he sets himself is that of making life worth living in spite of this fact. Meaninglessness is Nietzsche's first premise, and the emphasis he places on the will and on power flows directly from it. Transcendent, universal meaning always expresses itself in tenns of absolute truth and derives from it an absolute hierarchy of value. But if there is no such thing as absolute truth, all such hierarchies of value are relative and the different interpretations of the world that support them are no more and no less than equally valid. In these circumstances power is the only criterion. Only through the exercise of superior force, in whatever fonn that may take, can the inevitable conflict between values and interpretations be resolved. Nietzsche understands this well. Where there is no longer the compelling authority of truth there is the coercive force of power, arbitrarily detennining what shall and shall not be "true." Strength and will become everything.

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Nietzsche also understands that where "nothing is true, everything is permitted.,,169 Of its nature, truth prohibits and forbids certain actions as it commends and encourages others, at once narrowing the realm of possible experience and constraining the exercise of human will and power. In declaring that everything is permitted with the end of truth, Nietzsche proclaims the limitlessness of possibility, a condition which makes for 170 the endlessness of power and of will. If life is meaningless-that is, if nothing is true-then will and power cannot be constrained, and it is in this that reason to live can be found in spite of life's meaninglessness. Accordingly, Nietzsche places the endlessness of power at the heart of the aesthetic solution to it. Of course in a meaningless world power must also be in vain, but for Nietzsche this is not so. Because of the eternal recurrence power never passes away. One can only will in the present moment, but Nietzsche does not see the moment simply as the point from which the future stretches in one direction and the past in another. For the individual who possesses amor fati, to will the moment is to will everything that follows it, which because of "the eternal return of the same" includes everything that preceded it and the return of the moment itself. Past and future are so inseparable from the present moment that mastery over any moment results in mastery over eternity itself. This is "the supreme expression of the will to power." Power always returns, and in doing so extends to eternity. 171 What the endlessness of power means for man is apotheosis: the superman. As the man who at once does not need meaning and is his own meaning, the superman is the personification of Nietzsche's aesthetic solution to meaninglessness. Significantly, he is also a "higher" type of being. Nietzsche repeatedly rails against philosophies that purport to "solve" the problem of meaninglessness by insisting that meaning can only be found in a higher realm as "slanders" against both humanity and life. Yet Nietzsche's own solution encompasses a human type who is not only higher than man, but divine. Man by himself and as he is, is not enough even for Nietzsche. Nietzsche describes the superman as "a type of supreme achievement," more like Cesare Borgia than the "half 'saint,' half' genius '" Parsifal. 172 But more than Cesare Borgia he is Zarathustra. With Zarathustra "the concept of the 'superman'" has become "the greatest reality." Although Zarathustra's megalomania, monologues, and delusions suggest clinical paranoia, Nietzsche describes him "as the supreme type of all beings." This at least is how he "experiences himself.,,173 Zarathustra's deification takes place with him cast as a bizarre parody of Jerome or Francis of Assisi: surrounded by animals, attended

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by a lion, sage-like if not wise or holy, at once his own god and saint. 174 In portraying Zarathustra as a psychopathic god Nietzsche reveals an understanding of the practical meaning of the superman concept quite different to that which he intended to convey, and superior to it. For the higher realm which the superman opens before the world is the realm of madness. This conclusion is supported by the other major components of Nietzsche's solution to meaninglessness. The ideas of becoming and overcoming have as their purpose the infinite increase of man in power, power to create and so justify himself aesthetically, but also power to destroy. For all that Nietzsche says about the use of this power to create, it is the utilisation of it to destroy that increasingly commands his interest. He speaks of the ability to destroy, and to destroy ''joyfully,'' as "decisive" to the "Dionysian task" that lies before man, for this task, the great overcoming of "the lies of millennia,,,175 is above all one of destruction. The revaluation of all values, "philosophising with a hammer," is an essential part of this work of destruction, but the joy of the hammer is to extend far beyond the realm of values. It seems that almost everything is to be destroyed to make possible Nietzsche's new creation ("I like to make a clean sweep ofthings," he declares I76), including humanity.177 The perpetual self-overcoming that is to produce the superman means man's perpetual self-destruction. That there can be no end to the destruction, either of man or of the world, is an inherent part of the logic of Nietzsche's aesthetic justification of the world. It is the act of creation, rather than anything created, which makes this meaningless life worth living, and for creation to continue without end what has been created must inevitably be destroyed. "The affirmation of passing away and destroying [is] the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy.,,178 The overcoming through which man's eternal becoming is realised is thus to be understood as a cycle of destruction and creation without end, in which destruction is not merely creation's necessary condition, but its ultimate conclusion. When Nietzsche speaks of the individual in Dionysian relation to existence loving "fate," therefore, he speaks of one who loves the eternal cycle that begins and ends in annihilation. Nietzsche's "order" of eternally recurring annihilation is far removed from the eternal order of meaning which the Greeks in Nietzsche's first book discovered and gave expression to in tragedy. In The Birth ofTragedy "tragic insight" allowed the Greeks to see through life's horror and absurdity to the abiding meaningfulness of everything. With the concept of amor fati, however, tragic insight becomes the open-eyed embrace of

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the void as the "reality" of existence. 179 Tragic insight was for the Greeks the beginnings of "great life," and this is what Nietzsche seeks also. But by seeking it in the void180 he calls forth everything that must work against his purpose: limitless possibility, endless power, perpetual destruction, and madness. Nietzsche's solution to meaninglessness means man's eternal return to Year Zero, an unending descent into psychosis. His attempt at the deification of man ends in the deification of nothingness.

Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth o/Tragedy (1872), BN 52. 2. Ibid. 48-52. For a discussion of Nietzsche's apparent belief in the primal unity at this early stage in his work and his movement away from it, see Peter Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics 0/ an Immoralist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chapter 2; and Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics 0/ Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chapter 7. 3. See Nietzsche's 1886 preface to The Birth o/Tragedy BN 18-19. 4. Ibid. 22. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 60. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), BN 205. 8. The Birth o/Tragedy BN 43. 9. Ibid. 59. 10. Ibid. 59-60. 11. This is "the wisdom of Silenus." Ibid. 42. 12. The Gay Science 170. 13. The Birth o/Tragedy BN 35-36. 14. Ibid. 43. 15. Beyond Good and Evil BN 202. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895), PN 642. 17. Beyond Good and Evil BN 201. 18. Ibid. 289; and Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy 0/ Morals (1887), BN 515. . 19. Beyond Good and Evil BN 393. 20. On the Genealogy 0/ Morals BN 598. 21. For Nietzsche on myth, see especially The Birth o/Tragedy BN 135-39. 22. Joseph Ratzinger, "Christianity: The Victory of Intelligence over the World of Religions," 30 Days 1 (2000): 35-36. 23. The Birth o/Tragedy BN 23-24.

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

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24. The Gay Science 191-92. 25. Ibid. 192. 26. Ibid. 27. The Birth of Tragedy BN 23. 28. Ratzinger, 39-40. 29. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 211. 30. Beyond Good and Evil BN 393. 31. The Antichrist PN 644-45. 32. On the blond beast, see On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 475-78. 33. The Will to Power 353. 34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight ofthe Idols (1889), PN 511-12. 35. Ibid. 344. 36. The Antichrist PN 593. 37. Beyond Good and Evil BN 397. 38. The Will to Power 507. 39. Beyond Good and Evil BN 411. 40. Ibid. 251. 41. Ibid. 393. 42. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 481. 43. Ibid. 470. At 488-90 Nietzsche summarises the "history" of the victorious slave revolt in morals as it progressed from the Jews to Christianity, through to the French Revolution (itself described in Beyond Good and Evil BN 251 as "the last great slave rebellion") and his own day. 44. The Antichrist PN 642-43. 45. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 483-84. 46. Twilight of the Idols PN 479. 47. Beyond Good and EvilBN 327. 48. TWilight ofthe Idols PN 502. 49. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 511. 50. Beyond Good and Evil BN 407. 51. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 511-12. 52. Ibid. 473. 53. TWilight of the Idols PN 505. 54. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 474-75. 55. The Gay Science 232-33. 56. Beyond Good and Evil BN 403. Nietzsche takes this phrase, "Difference engendre haine," from Stendhal's novel Le Rouge et le Noir (1830). 57. Saren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (1846), trans. Alexander Dru (London: Collins, 1962),53. 58. Beyond Good and Evil BN 201. 59. Ibid. 234. 60. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1908), BN 710.

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Chapter One

61. Beyond Good and Evil BN 201. 62. Ibid. 419: "Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hideout, every word a mask." 63. Twilight of the Idols PN 552. 64. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (1881), ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 10-12. Among "barbarous peoples," Nietzsche alleges, in whom the capacity for self-restraint and obedience is weakest of all, apparently excessive penalties attach to "minute and fundamentally superfluous stipulations"-"as for example those among the Kamshadales [that is, the Kamchadal or Itelmen people of far eastern Siberia] forbidding the scraping of snow from the shoes with a knife, the impaling of a coal on a knife, the placing of an iron in the fire-and he who contravenes them meets death." The extreme punishment, Nietzsche argues, serves to "keep continually in the consciousness the constant proximity of custom ... so as to strengthen the mighty proposition with which civilisation begins: any custom is better than no custom." Ibid. 16. 65. Ibid. 497-98. 66. Beyond Good and Evil BN 303. 67. On the Genealogy of Morals BN 519. 68. Ibid. 520. 69. lbid. 494-96, 498. 70. Ibid. 576. 71. Ibid. 495-96, 520-24. 72. Berkowitz, 88-89. 73. On the Genealogy of Morals BN 565. 74. Ibid. 576. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 504-05. 77. Ibid. 598. 78. Ibid. 497. 79. The Antichrist PN 643-44. 80. Beyond Good and Evil BN 203-04. 81. Ibid. 301. 82. Philip Rieff, "Authority and Culture." Transcript of a lecture given at the Conference on the Sociology of Culture at La Trobe University, Melbourne, August 18-21, 1980. 83. Beyond Good and Evil BN 203-04. 84. On the Genealogy of Morals BN 589-99. See also The Gay Science 289290, where Nietzsche attributes the rise of both Christianity and Buddhism to "a tremendous collapse and disease of the will .... Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing."

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

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85. Beyond Good and Evil BN. 359. See also On the Genealogy of Morals BN 578. 86. The Antichrist PN 594. 87. Twilight of the Idols PN 539. 88. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 597. 89. Ibid. 583. 90. Nietzsche's case against Socrates as the "murderer" of tragedy and exemplar of the spirit of Western rationalism is set out in The Birth of Tragedy BN 81-98. Over the course of his work Nietzsche's attitude to Socrates became more complicated (see for example Twilight of the Idols PN 473-79), a development set out in detail in Paul R. Harrison, The Disenchantment of Reason (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 1994). 91. The Birth of Tragedy BN 80-81, 84-87,95, Ill. 92. Ibid. 94-98. 93. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation" (1919), in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds. and trans.), From Max Weber (1948) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 1970), 155. 94. On the Genealogy of Morals BN 591. 95. Ibid. 560. 96. Ibid. 479-80. 97. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1882-85), PN 129-30. 98. The Gay Science 338-39. 99. On the Genealogy of Morals BN 590. 100. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 130. 101. On modernity as the slave's paradise, see also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), chapter 3 and 320-25. 102. The Will to Power 501-02. 103. The Gay Science 181-82. The phrase "God is dead" is first used at the start of Book Three, 167. 104. On the conflict of interpretations, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (1965), trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970). 105. For a summary of Nietzsche's rejection of various substitutes for God, see Detwiler, 77-83. 106. The Gay Science 181-82. 107. Ibid. 279. 108. Ibid. 182. 109. Ibid. 279. 110. The Will to Power 16. Ill. Twilight ofthe Idols PN 515-16. 112. The Gay Science 283. 113. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 596.

Chapter One

42 114. Ibid. 587-89.

115. The Gay Science 279. 116. The Will to Power 7. 117. Ibid. 9.

118. The Gay Science 308. 119. On the distinction between "active" and ''passive'' nihilism that this response implies, see Gi1es Deleuze Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Athlone Press, 1983), chapter 5.

120. The Will to Power 35. 121. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human. All Too Human (1878-79) trans. R. 1. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13. See also The Gay

Science 192. 122. Beyond Good and Evil BN 264. 123. The Gay Science 280. 124. Hamlet I, ii, 132-34. 125. The Will 10 Power 319. See also the note titled "Decline of Cosmological Values" and the note on nihilism as "a pathological transitional stage" at 1214. 126. Beyond Good and Evil BN 327. 127. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 540.

128. The Will to Power 518. 129. Ibid. 511.

130. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 125. Kaufrnann translates Obermensch as "overman," outlining his reasons for doing so at PN 115-16. But in this book it is always rendered as "superman." For a discussion of this matter see Detwiler, 48-49. The interpretation of the superman and its place in Nietzsche's solution to the problem of meaning that follows is greatly at odds with the reading Berkowitz gives. One aspect of Berkowitz's argument in particular that should be noted is his claim that Nietzsche "tests" the possibility of becoming a god in Thus Spoke Zaralhuslra, only to conclude it is impossible. He then offers the concept of "the higher man" (also called "the free spirit" and "the philosopher of the future") as a more workable alternative, still requiring overcoming but not self-deification. See Berkowitz, chapters 5-9. 131. The Will 10 Power 503. 132. Thus Spoke Zaralhustra PN 124-26. 133. The Will to Power 503. 134. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 315 (and 294). 135. The Antichrist PN 570. 136. The Will 10 Power 504. 137. Beyond Good and Evil BN 307. 138. Ibid. 326.

139. The Will to Power 397. 140. Ibid. 399

Nietzsche: The Aesthetic Solution to Meaninglessness

43

141. The Antichrist PN 573. 142. Ibid. 570. 143. Ecce Homo BN 730. 144. The Will to Power 451-52: "We have need of lies . .. in order to live," and "metaphysics, morality, religion, science" are merely "various forms oflies" which enable man to "have faith in life." 145. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 171. 146. The Gay Science 328. 147. The Birth of Tragedy BN 52. 148. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 198. 149. The Gay Science 163-64. 150. The Will to Power 326. 151. Ibid. 35-36. 152. Ibid. 548-49. For a discussion of Nietzsche's proofs, see WaIter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950), 3rd. ed. (princeton, N.1.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 327. On the eternal recurrence in Nietzsche's work, see Karl Lowith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (1935), trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley, University of Chicago Press: 1997). 153. The Will to Power 255. 154. Ibid. 536. See also Ecce Homo BN 674. 155. The Gay Science 273-74. We might wonder, as Heidegger first did, to what extent Nietzsche himself was motivated by rancour and the desire for revenge against life in proposing the "most terrible form of meaninglessness" (eternal recurrence) as "the confirmation and seal" of existence. See Keith Ansell-Pearson, Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapter 5; and Berkowitz, chapter 7. 156. The Will to Power 536-37. See also Ecce Homo BN 714. 157. For various interpretations of the Dionysian as it is developed through Nietzsche's work see for example, Kaufinann, 211-83; Detwiler, 144-86; and Berkowitz, chapter 2. 158. The Birth of Tragedy BN 141-42. 159. The Gay Science BN 783. 160. Twilight ofthe Idols PN 563. 161. EcceHomo BN 714. 162. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 434. 163. The Will to Power 36. 164. The Gay Science 273. 165. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 430 (and 269). 166. Ecce Homo BN 714. Cr. Hollingdale's translation of this passage: "Not merely to endure that which happens of necessity, still less to dissemble it . . . but to love it ... " (emphasis added). Ecce Homo, trans. R. 1. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1982),68.

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167. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 149. 168. On Nietzsche's "language for a new series of experiences," see Ecce Homo BN 717. 169. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 586. 170. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 20, 53. 171. Berkowitz, 197-99 and Detwiler, 168. 172. Ecce Homo BN 717. 173. Ibid. 761. Scholarly opinion on whether or not Zarathustra exemplifies overcoming and self-deification is divided. Berkowitz's argument about Zarathustra and the superman has already been noted. Ansell-Pearson draws attention to the "ironising" and parodic elements in Thus Spoke Zarathustra's treatment of the need for meaning and self-overcoming, and suggests that Zarathustra should be understood as a means for Nietzsche to "work through" his own sickness at meaninglessness (see chapter 5). Tanner observes that the eternal recurrence and the superman are barely mentioned in the important works that follow Thus Spoke Zarathustra, until Ecce Homo, in which all that follows Zarathustra is described as nothing more than a commentary on it (see Michael Tanner, Nietzsche, Past Masters Series [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 48-59). Of course, relying solely on Ecce Homo to resolve this question is problematic, given its closeness in time to Nietzsche's final collapse. 174. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 436-39. 175. Ecce Homo BN 783. 176. Ibid. 778. 177. Ibid. 783, where Nietzsche promises "wars the like of which have never yet been seen on earth" in his wake. 178. Ibid. 729. 179. Ibid. 728-29. On tragic insight, see also The Birth of Tragedy BN 97~98, and The Gay Science 346-47. Nietzsche speaks of the dawning of tragic insight on humanity in general as "the great noon." See Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 387-90; TWilight ofthe Idols PN 486; and Ecce Homo BN 747. 180. The void in which tragic insight is sought is represented by a number of images. The sky is described as "an abyss of light" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (PN 277), and Zarathustra urges his followers to fly into it: "Behold! There is no above, no below! Throw yourself around, out, back, you who are light! Sing!" (Ibid. 343). This image is also used in Ecce Homo (BN 719). The sea provides another image of the void (also used, incidentally, by Joseph Conrad in his novel The Shadowline [1917]), representing "infinity" (The Gay Science 180-81). Zarathustra describes the world without God as "an abysmal, rich s~a" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 350). One sails into it "with a seafarer's delight." '''The coast has vanished, now the last chain has fallen from me; the boundless roars around me, far out glisten space and time; be of good cheer, old heart! ", (Ibid. 342.)

Chapter Two

Freud: The Therapeutic Solution to Meaninglessness Not all people are destined to be gods. Few human beings are artists, and most, in Nietzsche's view, are slaves and "last men" for whom overcoming and self-creation are impossible. For these, the great majority of humanity, the aesthetic solution to the problem of meaning does not apply. Unable to overcome their need for meaning in a meaningless world, they will always feel sick and must be treated as such. Nietzsche does not address the prace of these people in his aesthetic culture except to invoke an end to pity and the extermination of "weaklings and failures." Certainly, it is not art that will help them. Theirs is not an artist's will to power: it is that of a patient. Their desire to punish the noble for not being sick produced Christianity and the moral interpretation of the world, and while its time is now over, it remains important "to render the sick to a certain degree harmless." The solution in this case is therapy. Although it "cannot possibly bring about a real cure of sickness in the physiological sense," it pacifies the sick and may bring about an improvement in their condition. I The therapeutic solution to the problem of meaninglessness is provided by Freud, and needless to say he does not see his work and the role of psychoanalysis quite in the way Nietzsche might. Freud is not generally thought to be interested in the problem of meaninglessness. His main interest is in the consequences of the West's historically repressive morality. Although far more elaborately developed, his analysis at this level is fundamentally the same as Nietzsche's. The renunciation of the instincts is the necessary condition for any sort of civilised life, but it has now reached the point at which it actually threatens this achievement. Without repression there can be no culture, but when repression becomes too great "culture is in danger of perishing through the means of cul-

45

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ture.,,2 Unlike Nietzsche, Freud is concerned that this may mean civilisation's continuing physical existence can no longer be taken for granted. To the extent that Freud touches on the problem of meaninglessness, it would seem he does so only incidentally to this main consideration. He takes a strong interest in religion-which for Freud always means not just Christianity but Judaism-and a significant part of his work is directed to providing a psychoanalytic explanation for it. He overstates the role it plays in maintaining social stability, and reads Dostoyevsky's dictum, "if there is no God, then everything is permissible," too narrowly, so that although no friend of belief he fears its disappearance will have grave repercussions for law and order. But his awareness of the problem of meaninglessness and its implications goes much deeper than this. Freud understood the time he was living in, and the disorders he examined in a narrow section of the European middle class of the day, together with his interest in generalising his findings and explanations, inevitably led him back to this problem at one level or another. Freud also knew Nietzsche's work, possibly very well. For fear of appearing less original he disingenuously denies this,3 which naturally leads one to suspect that Nietzsche was, after all, important among the many influences on his work. There is no doubt that Freud knew Nietzsche well enough to offer a learned aside on one of Zarathustra's hymns in the Schreber case-study,4 and to recognise that Groddeck's use of "das Es," which Freud adapted for his own purposes in the concept of the id, ultimately derived from Nietzsche.s The reader of the previous chapter will find many echoes of Nietzsche in the summary of Freud's theory that follows. Freud did not use the phrase "the death of God," and he did not attempt to treat meaninglessness in any systematic way. But at its deepest level he understood his work as a response to it, and an important one. Like Nietzsche, he believes the provision of meaning has become "questionable," something no longer possible or desirable. The strong will resign themselves to this and to the meaninglessness of the cosmos. For those unable to do so there is therapy, which ideally seeks to "cure" the individual of the need for meaning, but failing this, to make him feel less ill in a meaningless world. The context for Freud's response to meaninglessness, however, is his theory of repression and his explanation of the relation of the instincts to culture and the formation of human nature.

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Culture and Repression Freud holds that all human desires and impulses are ultimately reducible to two primal instincts, the sexual instinct (also called Eros) and the destructive instinct (also called the death instinct). The primal instincts are innate and ineradicable, and every instinctual impulse is an alloy of the two in different proportions. The impulses the instincts give rise to are "needs," and "what does away with a need is 'satisfaction.",6 But the unrestricted satisfaction of instinctual needs may place the individual in a situation of danger. The classic example is the infant confronted with the desire to murder his father so as to take exclusive possession of his mother. Utterly dependent on his parents for survival, the infant apprehends that his desire imperils his existence and represses it. In doing this, he exchanges "a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security," and this exchange is inescapable for anyone who wishes to enjoy the protection and assistance that life in common entails. 7 The instinctual impulses are in conflict not only with the individual's dependence upon others, but also within himself. His love of those closest to him coexists with feelings of hatred and jealousy. 8 The infant at the crisis of the Oedipus complex not only hates and fears his father as a rival, but loves him. This ambivalence powerfully contributes to the trauma he undergoes, but it also assists him in undertaking the repressions necessary to resolve it. The Oedipus complex is "dissolved" in the formation of the super-ego, and the two key factors in this process are "the frustration of instinct, which unleashes aggressiveness, and the experience of being loved, which turns the aggressiveness inwards.'>9 The infant's father frustrates his desire for his mother, but he turns the aggression this frustration evokes in on himself when he represses the desire as a threat to his existence. To undertake this repression, he intensifies his identification with his father, taking his authority into himself and putting the internalised aggression at its disposal to serve as its coercive power. lO The instincts and the ambivalence that arises from them are permanently subsisting features of human life, and the trauma of the Oedipus complex and its resolution through repression is a universal experience which no one escapes. II Repression is not only an inescapable feature of human existence but serves as the necessary condition for culture (or "civilisation").12 It does this in several important ways. Firstly, repression displaces the psychical energy attached to an instinctual impulse, denying it direct satisfaction and forcing it to find outlet by indirect means. The displacement of psychical energy by repression generates the symptoms of neurosis, but the avenues

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of indirect release need not be pathological. The most important example is sublimation, which "places extraordinarily large amounts of force at the disposal of civilised activity.,,13 The sublimation of the sexual instinct and the reaction-formations that arise from the repression and displacement of the destructive instinct are crucial to the formation and maintenance of communal life. 14 Secondly, repression creates distance between impulse and action, allowing for the interposition of thought and calculation "between the demand made by an instinct and the action that satisfies it."IS In doing this, repression not only gives the individual greater control over his instincts but creates room for reflection in human existence, making possible the "advance in intellectuality" which is such a conspicuous feature of human history and development. 16 Thirdly, repression brings about a gradual shift within human groups from external coercion to internalised control of the self. The level of repression-the extent to which coercion has been internalised-is for Freud "a measure of the level of civilisation" attained by a people. 17 The first instinctual renunciations were instituted and enforced externally in the aftermath of, and as restitution for, "the primal crime," the murder of the father of the primeval human "horde" by his subjugated sons. IS The prohibitions establishing these renunciations "are to be seen [as] the first beginnings of a moral and social order."19 The levels of instinctual control they achieved were passed on, consolidated and extended by each generation, and slowly internalised. 20 This accrual of instinctual renunciation forms the "archaic heritage" of mankind and is a fundamental part of the human "constitution.'>2i The assumption of "the inheritance of psychical dispositions" is the basis of Freud's claim for rising levels of repression. 22 It also implies that the repressions acquired by a people in the course of its development cannot be abolished. This last supposition is central to the way Freud conceives cultural decline. Psychoanalysis specifically addresses the problem created for modern people by levels of repression that have become too high. The consequences of this situation are high levels of guilt; too greater distance between impulse and action, making people over-reflective and afraid and incapable of spontaneity; and at the pathological extreme, increasing susceptibility to neurosis. 23 In the shift from external to internalised control of the self the "threatened external unhappiness" of physical punishment is "exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness," the state of tension generated by guilt. 24 Guilt springs from the repression of the destructive instinct and is a manifestation of its being turned in on the self. "An increase in the sense of guilt" is "inextricably bound up" with the develop-

Freud: The Therapeutic Solution to Meaninglessness

49

ment of culture because of the increase in instinctual frustration it brings about. 25 The development of a culture is accompanied by the extension and detailed elaboration of ethical demands, both as the product of instinctual renunciation and as a cause of further renunciations. The internalisation of coercion gradually sees these demands enforced by the super-ego, which takes into itself both the authority of the culture as a whole and the energy of repressed aggression, and grows with them. The super-ego--"the conscience at work in the ego,,26-uses the aggression at its disposal to punish both acts and desires. 27 In describing this process, Freud distinguishes between guilt and remorse. For the most part guilt "remains completely unconscious" and is properly described as "the unconscious sense of guilt," in contrast to "the common case of remorse, which we regard as normal," where the feeling of guilt "makes itself clearly enough perceptible to consciousness" and is attached to a particular action. With the unconscious sense of guilt, the individual does not know what he has done wrong, or that he has even done something wrong, but nevertheless he feels "a tormenting uneasiness, a kind of anxiety," and a sense of foreboding, all of which he is unable to account for. Freud cautions against overestimating the unconscious sense of guilt's "connection with a particular form of neurosis." It is present in all neuroses, but also in the vast majority of people who are not neurotic. Because it is unconscious, "the sense of guilt produced by civilisation is not perceived as such" but "appears as a sort of malaise, a dissatisfaction, for which people seek other motivations."28 The unconscious sense of guilt often "expresses itself as a need for punishment" and attempts to attract it. 29 An example is the individual "wrecked by success," who "fall[s] ill precisely when a deeply rooted and long-cherished wish has come to fulfillment.,,3o Physical illness or neurosis can also serve to satisfy this need, and in the case of neurosis, the super-ego will resist the lifting of repressions and the recovery of the individual's health in an attempt to preserve and prolong punishment. It seizes upon "being ill, with all its sufferings and impediments [as] just what is wanted." Freud considered the need for punishment "the worst enemy of our therapeutic endeavours.'>3\ But the super-ego's particular "resistance to recovery,,32 is only one of several resistances the ego avails itself of to protect its repressions, the other two most important being the use of "the critical faculty" and argument, rationalisation, and denial to oppose the therapist's attempts to overcome a repression;33 and the assumption and reinforcement of the emotional attitude "which is the opposite of the instinctual trend" that has been repressed. 34 The object of psychoanalytic

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therapy is to overcome these resistances and the repressions they protect so as to free the patient of his neurosis, but also of the unconscious sense of guilt and need for punishment that sustain it. This clinical task is only the particular and special form of the wider project of psychoanalysis, which is to ease the burden of guilt and repression that culture entails for all people, not just for the sick. "A person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him in the service of its cultural ideals."3s Neurotics succumb first to the instinctual renunciations imposed by culture because they are weaker than other people. 36 A certain level ofneurosis is unavoidable in civilised life, but where the levels of guilt and repression are such that they bring about "an increase in nervous illness," culture "cannot claim to have purchased a gain at the price of sacrifices; it cannot claim a gain at all." Even where it does not destroy the patient's capacity for existence, neurosis "represents a severe handicap in his life, of the same order, perhaps, as tuberculosis or a cardiac defect."37 Neurotic symptoms involve a great deal of mental energy, both in themselves and in the efforts the ego makes to combat them as "substitutive satisfactions" of the repressed instinctual impulse. In the struggle between symptoms and repression, the expenditure of psychical energy constantly increases, to the level where the patient is paralysed "for all the important tasks oflife."38 Because the rest of the population is also subject to the "cultural demands" for renunciation and the high levels of repression and guilt to which neurotics succumb, the danger of becoming "inwardly inhibited and outwardly paralysed" is one that threatens all civilised people to a greater or lesser degree. 39 Unlike the neurotic patient who was "overcome by a paralysing fatigue which lasted for one or more days whenever something occurred which should obviously have thrown him into a rage,,,40 the paralysis of those who are not ill is more diffuse. A culture of high levels of repression and guilt produces "well-behaved weaklings,,41 and generates "an increase of anxiety about life" which "interferes with the individual's capacity for enjoyment" and vigorous action.42 It creates "anaesthetic men" and "frigid women," who are unable to enjoy sex though capable of performing it,43 and leads to "a diminished inclination to beget children" and ap increased fear of death.44 In this context, hysteria and neurosis are simply pathological manifestations of the generalised condition of inhibition and paralysis, of lassitude and enervation, which Freud sees as characteristic of modem life.

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Freud's Treatment of Meaninglessness Freud's two main works on culture, The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), demonstrate that for him, as for Nietzsche, culture has become "questionable," even to the point at which its continuing physical existence may be doubted. He understands acutely that the death of God means the disappearance of a foundation for morality and, unlike Nietzsche, worries about what this will mean for civil obedience and social stability. Freud's most immediate concern, therefore, is not meaninglessness but anarchy.4s Culture is always the work of a "civilising minority" which forcibly imposes great instinctual renunciations upon a people to bring a culture into being. The sacrifices in instinctual satisfaction these renunciations entail, Freud claims, are deeply resented by the mass of the population and are accepted only through coercion. As a consequence, the masses are deeply hostile to culture and the social order it supports. They are rebellious and long to give free rein to their "mania for destruction," and so perpetually threaten culture with disintegration. In defending culture against this, the enlightened minority that comprises a culture's elite must devise ways of "reconciling" the hostile masses to the civilising process and "compensating" them for their renunciations. 46 For this reason, Freud argues, religion comes to play a role of "incomparable importance in the maintenance of human society."47 It justifies the coercive prohibitions of morality imposed upon the individual by culture as "the law of God," and compensates him for the renunciations they exact with God's protection and "consolation" in his "helplessness" before suffering and death.48 Freud agrees with Nietzsche that a culture must create illusions of meaning, but their first purpose for Freud is to reconcile the individual to the burdens of life in society, not to life itself. It is not hostility to life that troubles Freud, but "hostility to culture.,,49 The death of God puts a horrifying prospect before him. While the "dangerous masses," the "enemies" of culture, remain in ignorance of it, "all is well." But they will inevitably discover that the God who prohibits and punishes murder no longer exists, and when they do they will kill "without hesitation. ,,50 This identification of culture with social cohesion does not exclude the deeper dimensions of the death of God from Freud's considerations. He accepts that life without "consolation" or meaning is "intolerable"sl and leaves the individual "helplessly paralysed."s2 There is, however, no meaning to be had. The cosmos is meaningless. "The idea of life having

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a purpose stands and falls" with religion,s3 and religion is "a lost cause.,,54 Existence and its sufferings are senseless and there is only death to deliver us from them. 55 The problem in this is not meaninglessness in itself, but man's historic childishness. Meaning is the fulfillment of a wish. It was created as a defence against the necessity that so menaces the human being's infantile narcissism. 56 "Man's judgements of value follow directly his wishes for happiness,,,57 and "it is a very striking fact" that the "discovery" of meaning in life "is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. ,,58 Meaninglessness signifies nothing more than the failure of this wish to find fulfillment. The solution to meaninglessness lies in the renunciation of the wish for meaning. As a remnant of humanity's evolutionary (and individual) childhood,59 it will disappear when the species finally comes to the "maturity" that is characterised by the renunciation of all wishes. 60 The individual will then "acquiesce" to necessity (which Freud, like Nietzsche, calls "Fate"61) and, in doing so place culture on a sounder basis than that of illusion. The requirement for a sounder basis for culture stems not from the role the illusion of transcendent order plays in providing meaning, but from its role in preserving stability. The need for meaning explains the origin of religion for Freud, but it is the need for social cohesion that explains its importance to culture. The collapse of religion and, specifically in the West, the collapse of Christianity, undermines the compulsive power of the prohibitions it justifies, and confronts modern man with the threat of a war of all against all. To avoid this, Freud argues, "the solemn transfiguration of cultural precepts" by religion must be abandoned in favour of their "rational explanation." By means of reason, the "truth" of such prohibitions, otherwise distorted by religion, is made clear to everybody's self-interest. Individuals should be urged to refrain from murder not because it is a violation of God's law, but simply to minimise the possibility of falling foul of it themselves. Justifying a culture's laws and duties on the basis of reason (or utility) rather than faith also permits them to be revised. The more irrational amongst them, those which apply to sexual conduct for example, can be eased or dispensed with altogether. The masses will then come to see morality as something that serves rather than rules and "adopt a more friendly attitude" towards it and towards culture as a whole. 62 While reason may be better able than religion to preserve civilised existence in the modern world it can provide no consolation for the meaningless necessity of human life. In the form of science it provides a source of constantly increasing power to reduce suffering and to conquer

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nature,63 but for the suffering it cannot affect and for its purposelessness, reason can only demand that we learn to endure "with resignation." In place of transcendent consolation Freud seeks "unconditional submission" to meaningless necessity.64 Anything beyond this the individual must find for himself. As Freud says in a different context, "every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved." Whatever may give the individual who lacks the strength for unconditional submission the consolation or meaning or purpose he needs for his sense of "well-being" is good. "There is no golden rule that applies to everyone. ,,65 Meaning becomes as a consequence a matter of therapy for those weak enough--childish enough-to require it. In this way Freud reveals the ultimate purpose of therapy: to ameliorate the individual's experience of meaninglessness. As will be discussed in what follows, cure rather than amelioration is the ideal goal of therapy, but because of certain "constitutional factors" in the individual and in human nature generally, amelioration is very frequently the best outcome that can be obtained. Freud's concern with anarchy as the consequence of meaninglessness sits oddly with his theory of repression. As culture develops, coercion is internalised through the super-ego. The strength of the super-ego is cumulative, being inherited and further strengthened by each generation. Cultural collapse should therefore meafl enervation rather than anarchy. But for Freud levels of repression are not constant across classes. Amongst the modem elites of the West levels of repression are very high, but amongst the masses they are very low, and it is for this reason that the illusion of a transcendent order remains important so "late" in the history of human development. The West faces the twofold problem of an elite plagued by neurosis and its concomitant paralysis, and a population on the verge of anarchic rebellion. In Freud's analysis of the two aspects of this problem (in Civilisation and its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion respectively), neurosis emerges as the greater part of it because of the decisive role "civilising minorities" play for him in creating and preserving culture. A synthesis is attempted in the final chapter of Civilisation and its Discontents. The human being's constitutional inclination to aggression is "the greatest hindrance to civilisation.,,66 The problem ft poses makes itself felt in the individual in the form of an anxious malaise that is at once a product of too-greater "control" of aggression and a presentiment of how precarious other controls of it have become. 67 This malaise is deepened by the awareness modem people have of their power over the

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forces of nature which enables them, if they choose, to "exterminate one another to the last man" without difficulty.68 But the recently acquired capacity for extermination is not as important as the knowledge that there is so little to prevent humanity from exercising it. The elites have neither the strength nor the vitality to oppose the barbaric masses' craving for destruction, and the masses themselves have discovered that there is no longer a God to restrain them. The question "why not?" no longer finds an answer. Here Freud approaches the deepest implications of the death of God, for in a meaningless world the absolute difference between life and death disappears. Life ceases to be an absolute good and becomes the interchangeable equivalent of death. The question "why not live?" cannot be finally answered, and is met instead with another question, "why not die?" Freud understood this, remarking sardonically in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, "Why live, if you can be buried for ten dollars?,>69 With the death of God, possibility becomes limitless. Life, like extermination, becomes just another equally valid option.

Psychoanalysis as a Total Solution At first glance, the problem of meaning would seem to be a secondary matter to Freud's main concerns, the interest he then takes in it being apparently limited to its social consequences. But while its deepest dimensions are treated without the completeness of Nietzsche, they so powerfully inform Freud's work that they may be said to comprise its "latent content.,,70 The solution he proposes also works at two levels. At one level Freud argues that in the wake of the death of God, culture's function should be nothing more than the rational management of the instincts, with the pursuit of "utility and a yield of pleasure" as its "two confluent goals.'>7l By educating the masses to their self-interest and by easing the repressions of the elites, a new therapeutic culture can at once rebridle the instincts and restore vitality to desiccated human life. At another level and of greater significance, his solution seeks to address the lingering presence of a meaning felt only as meaninglessness that persists from humanity's historic upbringing. Through therapy, this lingering presence is to be abolished. To realise this goal, Freud employs reason, which variously takes the form of science, rationalism, and therapy in his work. Freud intends science to increase man's power over himself and nature, rationalism to modify and partly displace repression, and therapy to enable the individual to overcome his need for meaning.

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Throughout his work Freud insists that psychoanalysis is an empirical science "like any other.,,72 Unlike a system of philosophy, which it "was always careful to avoid becoming,,,73 it does not seek "to grasp the whole universe" with the aid of "a few sharply defined basic concepts" which leave "no room for fresh discoveries or better understanding." Its procedure is that of science, keeping "close to the facts," groping "its way forward by the help of experience" and observation, and "always ready to correct or modify" the theories that it provisionally formulates. 74 The limitations that it has are also those of science: its findings do not always mean an immediate increase in power over nature; 75 it can describe the course run by its object of study (neurosis), but can never predict it; 76 and it can offer man nothing in the way of a "world-view" (Weltanschauung).77 Notwithstanding this modest enumeration of the limitations of psychoanalysis as a science, its object nevertheless is to explain everything. "The total explanatory ambitions of psychoanalysis,,78 were signaled as early as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). They were elaborated in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and reached their apogee in the fifth chapter of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in which Freud puts forward his "scientific" explanation of death. The corollary of this ambition, of course, is the acquisition of greater and greater power over the world. Psychoanalysis seeks what "all scientific work" seeks, the understanding of phenomena that permits an increase in "power over them.,,79 With false humility, Freud claims that psychoanalysis merely contributes to and "supplements" a scientific understanding of the mind;80 but no power over the mind can be had without it. 81 The applied understanding or power specific to psychoanalysis is that of "a transformative technology of the inner life," the purpose of which is "to destroy the tension between the inner and outer life. ,,82 In its methodology (as Freud would have it), scope and ambition, and most particularly, in the power it seeks, psychoanalysis is intended to be the ultimate science. Underlying this aspiration for psychoanalysis as a science is Freud's rationalist belief in reason as the greatest good, and in knowledge as the power that gives man "hope for the future."83 "The psychological ideal" as Freud defines it is "the primacy of the intelligence,"84 the subordination of human instinctual life to "the dictatorship of reason. ,,85 The possibility of ever realising this ideal would seem to be precluded by Freud's own theory, for it would require the displacement of "the quantitative factor of instinctual strength" that determines the outcome of all therapeutic endeavours,86 which effectively means displacing the pleasure

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principle. In spite of this, Freud harboured hopes for the eventual triumph of reason, and although the pessimism of his latter years is conspicuous, overcoming the pleasure principle and realising "the psychological ideal" remained a possibility for him to the end of his life. 8? Although he understood the limits of "reform,,,88 Freud was not induced to abandon the goal of intellectual primacy over instinct. His treatment of this hope is unusually naIve. The Future of an Illusion, for example, begins with the remark that "arguments are of no avail against [the] passions," and concludes with a frankly sentimental description of how "the soft voice of intellect" comes to prevail through simple persistence over the instinctual life that is otherwise so powerful. Because of this, "one may be optimistic about the future of mankind." In a time to come that is distant but not infinitely SO,89 the primacy of the intelligence will bring about a world where greater allowance is made for the satisfaction of instinctual impulses, where people are more "completely and tenaciously" united than ever before,90 where the infantilism of religion, which so inhibits man's development as a rational being, has withered away,91 and where mature, conscious judgment has largely (but not entirely) replaced the operations of repression. Though the instincts are powerful, "intellect is a power too,,,92 and "in the long run nothing can withstand reason.,,93 Conceived as a science and as a project in the rationalist tradition, psychoanalysis is intended to be at once a means and an end, a total solution to the problems created by meaninglessness in Western culture. Science for Freud is power,94 and reason is the good it serves, the purpose that justifies its application. Power and purpose converge in psychoanalytic therapy. As power, therapy is the "transformative technology of the inner life." As purpose, it is the realisation or at least the pursuit of the psychological ideal. The problem of meaning is the problem of continuing attachment to the failed and failing belief in an illusory transcendent order. In proposing reason as the solution to this problem Freud has no intention of establishing a new object of faith. The problem of belief is resolved not in counter-belief but in unbelief,95 a condition in which, for the sake of the human well-being made otherwise impossible by meaninglessness, all the deep attachments that belief entails are eschewed and life is lived entirely on the surface. 96 It is not a utopia of reason that Freud seeks, but a peculiar type of reasonableness, a reasonableness about meaning and life, a reasonableness for the sake of health. It is to this end that the theory and practice of psychoanalytic therapy are directed.

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The Therapeutic Cure The aim of therapy as Freud describes it is "psychical maturity.,,97 Repression is an infantile phenomenon, the child's way of ending a conflict its ego is as yet unable to resolve. Therapy revives this conflict and places it before the mature individual for revision, enabling him, if he chooses-because "analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or the other,,98-to bring it to a different outcome, one that makes for health rather than sickness. But before the patient can be brought to this, the theoretical end-point of analysis, the repressions installed in childhood and the years following must be lifted and the resistances defending them must be overcome. This task constitutes the greater part of every analysis and no cure is possible without its successful completion. Repression makes the patient ignorant of the conflict that is the cause of his symptoms, a condition he seeks to preserve in resistance. This ignorance is more precisely a matter of forgetfulness, and for this reason analysis often takes the form of filling gaps in memory. The repressed is the forgotten, that which is known, but not to consciousness. Lifting the repressions permits "the translation of what is unconscious into what is conscious," making the forgotten knowable. "All that [therapy] bring[s] about in the patient is this single psychical change," but its consequence is to "transform the pathogenic conflict into a normal one for which it must be possible somehow to find a solution."99 What makes such a solution possible is the elevation of the conflict "to the highest psychical level," that of consciousness. 100 The conflict becomes susceptible to reason, an object for thought and deliberation. There can be no cure without making "the repressed" conscious and subjecting it to the decision of reason. Cure by means of consciousness and reason emphasises the rationalist underpinnings of therapy. Through consciousness, Freud claims, the individual "obtain[ s] a mastery" over his instinctual life: 101 impulses are weaker and easier to control,I02 neurotic symptoms cannot be formed,I03 and repression is supplanted by "condemning judgement[s] " carried out along the best lines.104 Consciousness means "maturity," for only children and primitives are ruled by the instinctual desires of the unconscious. But consciousness also entails self-knowledge, and it is here that the rationalist presuppositions governing the theory and practice of analysis become most apparent. Self-knowledge means increased "selfcontrol,"105 growth in power over oneself. Only those who lack this

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power fall ill, and they do so out of "ignorance,,106 and "stupidity,,107 about themselves. Their want of self-knowledge makes them "permanently unfit for existence'''108 The resistance the analyst encounters in attempting to reverse this situation expresses not only the patient's resistance to recovery but his opposition to the extension of what little selfknowledge he has.109 There is in this a type of hypocrisy, for the patient's resistance betrays a depth of unconscious self-knowledge denied by his conscious ignorance. This peculiar kind of dissimulation is the true source of neurosis, representing a choice made for "hypocritical" ignorance over personal honesty. It must be replaced in the patient by a greater "truthfulness" about himself, a greater self-consciousness. 11O "Learn to know yourself' consciously: I11 in providing this counsel to all who seek health Freud casts psychoanalysis in the guise of a Socratic "work of enlightenment." 112 But despite the nature of its assumptions and aspirations psychoanalytic therapy cannot properly be characterised in this way. The essential thing the individual must learn about himself is "that the ego is not master in its own house.,,1I3 This lesson immediately circumscribes what consciousness offers as cure, the mastery of thought over instinct. But of greater significance is the nature of the process that effects the cure. On first appearances, the analytic session readily invites comparison with the method of Socrates, consisting as it does of a dialogue undertaken in pursuit of self-knowledge and clarity."4 In reality however Freud's "talking cure" IIS is nothing like a Socratic disputation. The psychoanalytic method of free association makes demands of both patient and analyst that are entirely its own. The patient is instructed "to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation" and to honestly and promiscuously report everything that occurs to him in response to the analyst's questions,"6 while the analyst turns his unconscious mind "like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient,"1I7 "surrender[ing] himself to his own unconscious mental activity, in a state of evenly suspended attention.,,1I8 With this the search for knowledge commences. It is a search, however, that is undertaken by the analyst alone. He guides the patient's associations, interprets the material they yield, and "constructs" from them "the forgotten history" that is the source of the patient's malaise." 9 These constructions and interpretations are inevitably disputed by the patient as his resistance is worked through, making a dialectical exchange of one sort or another, sometimes of great ferocity,120 a part of every analysis, but this sort of discussion is to be avoided

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wherever possible. In any case, the arguments made against the analyst's interpretations are to be taken seriously only for what they reveal about the patient's condition. In all of this there is very little to support the comparison made between the analytic session and the Socratic dialogue. From the beginning the patient is assigned a passive role. He is questioned, prompted, and provoked, required only to react without inhibition. In this way the analyst gains the knowledge of the sick self before him that makes cure possible. For it is the analyst's knowledge that cures. "Our knowledge" makes up for "his ignorance .... This pact constitutes the analytic situation.,,12l Although the knowledge the patient thus acquires is ostensibly nothing but the translation into consciousness of what he himself has always unconsciously known, it remains decisively the analyst's knowledge. 122 Far from being a Socratic figure, the analyst might with greater justice be compared to Oedipus, as Freud himself was. m He seeks not to teach a pupil but to answer a riddle. Answering the riddle presents no particular difficulty to the analyst, but the communication of the answer to the patient is another matter. Herein lies a further qualification of the apparent rationalism of psychoanalytic cure. "Knowledge is not always the same as knowledge," Freud observes. "There are different sorts of knowledge which are far from equivalent psychologically," and if the analyst simply "transfers his knowledge to the patient as a piece of information, it has no result.,,124 "The patient hears our message, but there is no response. He may think to himself: 'This is very interesting, but I feel no trace of it.' We have increased his knowledge, but altered nothing else in him.,,12s The decisive factor is the resistance that maintains the patient's ignorance. Only when this is overcome can the knowledge he has gained from the analyst establish a connection with the repressed and exercise an influence over it. 126 This comprises the first condition of communication. The second is the formation of "a strong transference." All communication is withheld until this has occurred. 127 "Technically and theoretically" the transference is "of the first importance.,,128 It consists of the patient unconsciously identifying the analyst (who in reality is no more than a paid "helper and adviser"129) with "some important figure out of his childhood or past," and transferring to him the "feelings and reactions which undoubtedly applied to his prototype.,,130 In short, the transference renders the patient suggestible, and analysis makes use of this suggestibility to cure him.

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The transference is a type of resistance. The repressed attempts to thwart the treatment by containing it within familiar parameters. If the analysis can be made to conform to the model provided by the patient's relationship with his father, for example, the repressions will not be disturbed. 131 Because of the way it recreates an important relationship from the past, a relationship with one greatly loved, the transference is characterised by ambivalence. Accordingly, it takes both a positive (affectionate) and negative (hostile) form, love of one kind or another quickly giving way to hatred and defiance. 132 But in the hands of the skilful analyst, who carefully manages the positive transference and prevents the negative transference from developing too far,133 the resistance is turned to the purpose of cure. By clothing the analyst with the authority of a loved one, the transference inclines the patient to open the deepest level of his psyche to the knowledge he has to give. This is crucial. Knowledge in itself, and in particular the knowledge that makes for self-understanding, carries little weight. Its mere intellectual acceptance will effect nothing. Unless the patient has been brought to a suggestible state by the transference it is useless. But when supported by the patient's strong emotional attachment to the analyst it acquires the greatest power of conviction. 134 The patient only makes use of the knowledge he receives from the analyst "in so far as he is induced to do so by the transference."l3s If knowledge cures, it is only because "the cure is effected by love.,,136

The Limits of Cure The limits of the psychoanalytic cure derive in part from its method, in part from the character of the individual patient, and in part from the nature of the mind. It can have no effect in cases of schizophrenia 137 or psychosisl38 because of the impossibility of transference. 139 At best psychoanalysis can only offer incomplete explanations of these disorders, although Freud hoped for more than this in time. 140 In cases of neurosis the critical factor is instinctual strength, relative to the strength of the ego. It is primarily because of this that "the ego is not master in its own house." To a significant extent cure is circumscribed by the individual's "psychical constitution," by the inherent strength of his instincts or weakness of his ego. 141 But accidental and biological considerations are also important. Illness or exhaustion may weaken a previously strong

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ego, and otherwise weak instinctual impulses may be "reinforced" in the course of bodily growth and decline. 142 The quantitative factor limits the efficacy of analysis. In some cases the patient's native feebleness may be such that no improvement can be made, and the analyst must be content with neurosis as the least worst outcome. 143 It also means that neurosis may develop not only in those who have never suffered from it, but also in those who have been successfully treated. Cure may be only temporary. Successful analysis offers no guarantee against either the return of the conflict or its replacement with a new conflict. Nor for practical and theoretical reasons can analysis work prophylacticaIly,144 although it may be possible to "inoculate" children against neurosis, either by means of compulsory analysis or through the work of a psychoanalytically informed education system. 145 Freud's intention of course is that cure should be both general and permanent,146 and the factors that "inevitably" frustrate this intention do not constitute grounds in his view for discarding psychoanalysis as a method of treatment. 147 The failures and limitations of therapy are of no definitive importance to Freud. "I have never been a therapeutic enthusiast," he wrote in 1932. 148 The enduring significance of psychoanalysis for Freud lies in the truths it has revealed about human nature. 149 It is first and foremost a science, and therapeutic success, Freud claims, is not required to prove it as a theory.15o It was in any case through the work of psychoanalysis that the death instinct, the most important factor working against cure, came to be postulated. The death instinct was "the first instinct [to come] into being,,,'51 and as the animating power at the heart of the aggressive instinct it is the source of human destructiveness. Part of this destructiveness is always directed against the self,152 but most particularly in neurosis, where it is subsumed within the quantitative factor as the "force" behind the resistances, opposing recovery "by every possible means" and "absolutely resolved to hold on to illness and suffering.,,153 Whether or not these resistances are overcome in the course of analysis, the death instinct persists. Man's more-or-Iess latent desire for self-destruction is ineradicable, and as such represents his intrinsic internal opposition to ever being cured. The death instinct is not only Freud's most important "scientific discovery" in regard to therapy but also his most important concept in dealing with the problem of meaninglessness. The interior experience of the destructiveness turned against the self by the death instinct takes three forms of particular significance to this problem. The first of these is the unconscious sense of guilt. The second is depression ("melancholia"), in

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which the ego, wasted by hatred of itself, becomes capable of suicide. The third (although Freud nowhere uses the word in this sense) is dread, the malaise that follows the apprehension of meaninglessness and makes life itself hateful. These three conditions have the common relation of being products of the super-ego which "can become diseased on its own account.,,154 As such they are themselves disorders. With guilt, the death instinct seizes upon aggressive impulses refused outward expression and redirects them, through the agency of the superego, against the ego. 155 It creates for the individual a state of "permanent internal unhappiness" in which he is beset with feelings of uneasiness and anxiety that have no explanation. Tense, dissatisfied, and fearful, 156 "he does not feel guilty, he feels ill. ,,157 Depression in its turn brings about "an extraordinary diminution in [the individual's] self-regard." He loses all interest in the outside world and becomes deeply and painfully dejected. The capacity for love is lost, the ability to act is inhibited, and "a delusional expectation of punishment" develops. Above all else, the patient is consumed by a self-hatred so profound and powerful that it can overcome "the instinct which compels every living thing to cling to life.,,158 "A pure culture of the death instinct" takes possession of the super-ego, employing the whole sadism of the id against the ego to kill it if it can. 159 "There can be no doubt" that if anyone hates himself in this way "he is ill. ,,160 Dread is the fear that takes hold of an individual in the face of the meaninglessness that for Freud is nothing more than disappointed human narcissism. The various sources of meaning humanity has constructed for itself have their origins in the dissolution of the Oedipus complex. In the course of this process the super-ego succeeds not only to the authority of the parents but also to the loving protection they extend to the child. At a later point, by means of a projection onto the empty cosmos, both the authority and the protection are attributed to God or Providence. By these means the ego seeks to guarantee the continuance throughout life of the love it first knew in infancy and which is so gratifying to its narcissism. For the ego, "living means the same as being loved." When it is confronted with the emptiness of its illusions of meaning, therefore, the ego becomes fearful. It feels itself abandoned and helpless in the world, and "deserted by all protecting forces" before a phenomenon overwhelmingly superior to it: death. Its fear is sickening, making for the condition Nietzsche called nausea. It enables the death instinct to assume ascendancy over life, plunging the ego either into depression and the self-

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hatred that can lead to suicide, or into passivity and a paralysis such that in the extreme the ego "lets itself die.,,161 Freud treats each of the conditions described here as an illness, and his fundamental reason for doing so lies in their relationship to the death instinct. Guilt, depression, and dread give powerful expression to the human longing for death, and lend themselves to the pursuit of selfdestruction. Freud obliquely recognises them as negative expressions of the individual's desire for meaning, and treats them as an ineluctable part of the human condition. But the meaning so desired is illusory. The absurd truth is that man is possessed of an innate desire for a meaning that cannot be had. For Freud then, as for Nietzsche, the problem in the problem of meaning is man. He is a creature so constituted that he must always be at least partly ill, and his remaking is severely constrained by the nature of the instincts and human infancy. Given this, the counsel of therapy is reasonableness, but the death instinct means that no more than limited reasonableness, and therefore limited health, can be hoped for. Man's nature is such that he would rather die than be reasonable. Holding to this explanation, the limits of therapy were not the disappointment that they might have been to Freud. The malady that psychoanalysis is ultimately concerned with is the problem of meaning, and for this there is no cure. There is only treatment which either continues interminably, or is terminated "asymptotically.,,162 While meaninglessness makes "the whole human race" Freud's patient,163 it is primarily the weak who require his treatment. The strong resign themselves to their experiences of guilt, dread, and depression and accept them for what they are, meaningless longings for a non-existent meaning. But the weak insist on making more of them, and for this reason fall ill. Recovery is a matter of seeing guilt and dread in their proper perspective. On the one hand, this means tracing them to their origins in the commonplace traumas of childhood; on the other, it means teaching the patient to relinquish the past (both his own and that greater past of nowfailed meanings) so as to live presently, in the immediacy of the moment. 164 The first renders the experiences and feelings that seem to be most significant in human life trivial. The second makes life itself trivial, requiring the individual to live superficially, "reasonably," with no insistence on anything,165 avoiding dread by living as far from it as possible. Even then, "consolation" may still be required by many. They are to find it wherever they can, an injunction that makes anything which serves to ease the pain of meaninglessness a matter of therapy. Early in his work Freud emphasised amelioration over cure, giving the object of therapy as

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the transfonnation of "hysterical misery into common unhappiness. ,,166 In the end, this is all that amelioration without cure can provide. Success even to this limited extent would require a generalisation of the therapeutic attitude to the world at large. Freud himself suggests little more than the broadest outlines of the new type of culture this would bring into being: psychoanalytically based education to immunise children against neurosis; 167 free out-patient clinics for the lower classes, complete with a specially modified fonn of therapy for their "weaker intelligences"; 168 the destruction of the secrecy that surrounds the instinctuallife of the individual;169 and an analyst for every family.l7O These and other measures would be administered by a psychoanalytic elite modelled on the elite of Plato's Republic. m It is not quite the way it has turned out, although it is close. In any case, it would be wrong to see the author of these proposals as "a fanatic for therapy.,,172 Freud thought "human society ha[ d] no more use for the [madness for healing] than for any other fanaticism.,,173 The object of therapy is to teach man to be reasonable in the demands he makes of himself and the world and to free him of his fanaticisms, most particularly his fanaticism for meaning. In a therapeutic culture, the world is transfonned into a hospital to bring man to the condition of unbelief that constitutes "well-being" without meaning.

The Convergence of the Aesthetic and the Therapeutic In putting the solutions to meaninglessness offered by Nietzsche and Freud side by side, the immediate expectation is that they will be the antithesis of each other. Nothing would appear to be more at odds with the world of the supennan and his perpetual overcoming than the world of therapy and intenninable analysis. But in fact the two solutions have a great deal in common. Although they provide for two quite different constituencies, they are for this reason complementary and would nonnally be expected to work together as one solution rather than two. The assumptions they proceed from are identical. Both Nietzsche and Freud assume that existence is meaningless, that meaninglessness itself is no more than the legacy of failed illusions of meaning, and that its solution lies in the remaking of culture and human nature. Their common object is to bring humanity to the condition of unbelief. The problem of meaning arises from the insistence on believing and disbelieving uncondition-

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ally. At first, man believes that life is absolutely meaningful, but when he is persuaded to disbelief in meaning, he then believes that life is absolutely meaningless. Human greatness (for Nietzsche) and human health (for Freud) require unbelief, ideally as second nature-"unbelief as an instinct."174 In unbelief, man is freed from his compulsion to believe and disbelieve, and freed from meaninglessness. The individual may still have "convictions," as Nietzsche observes, but no longer "succumb[s] to them." They are possible but only "as means," as things to be taken up and discarded at will, either for a particular purpose or simply for the gratification of one's broadly defined sense of well-being. 175 In such a condition meaning and meaninglessness become little more than words to play with. As concepts they lose all depth and cannot be thought beyond a certain superficial level. As experiences of any significance to human life they become unimaginable. In its deeper dimensions meaning becomes unthinkable, a possibility that the mind in unbelief cannot comprise. A condition such as this cannot be attained without emptying the individual of his interior world, which means in fact creating a new human type. Dread and guilt pose the greatest obstacles to this course. Freud and Nietzsche would abolish them if they could, and to this end an attempt is made to deny their content. The moralisation of guilt and dread is assailed, and they are revalued so that guilt becomes "a piece of animal psychology" and dread the product of failed illusions. Understood in this way they can be overcome or treated. But because there is no cure, because human inwardness can never be finally eradicated, overcoming and therapy can have no end. In the absence of cure, the process of cure becomes everything. It is for this reason that Nietzsche emphasises eternal becoming over being. Man will never be the superman, nor will he ever be well. But the process of attempting to become so should not for this reason be underestimated. As processes, overcoming and therapy work powerfully against inwardness. Both profess to take the individual deeper into himself, but destroy the self-concealment and reserve without which inwardness must be displaced. 176 It will be immediately apparent how therapy works to this end. Nietzsche for his part recognises the importance of concealment and reserve, observing that every "profound" human being conceals himself and what is "precious and vulnerable" within him behind masks.177 But in self-overcoming the individual must give up concealment and spare nothing within himself, most particularly anything "precious and vulnerable." Everything that comes into being, including

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what is most treasured, impedes the eternal becoming and must be destroyed ruthlessly. The new "spirit" profound in unbeliefwill still require masks, not to conceal his depths, but to conceal the abysmal emptiness this assault upon inwardness must create. Having revalued meaning and truth as the death of man, Nietzsche and Freud propose emptiness as the source of new life. Freed from meaning and from the inwardness that compels him towards it, man lives lightly, "contemporaneously"; 178 on the surface of existence and wholly in the present. The failed meanings of the past no longer bind him and the illusory consolations of the future no longer urge him on. No longer compelled, he is no longer crippled. He can become anything, and everything is at the service of this process of becoming. All options are open, any role can be played, and all are equally advisable or inadvisable, depending upon the individual's constantly changing circumstances. 179 For Freud, this is a matter of therapeutic well-being. For Nietzsche, it is part of the aesthetic justification of the world. Man justifies the world as he pleases through the exercise-primarily against himself-of his artist's will to power. What is important in the unending self-creation that is self-overcoming is not what an individual was or may yet be, but what he wills. Neither the past nor the future can be allowed to constrain the possibilities of the present. Overcoming, therefore, is at once therapeutic and aesthetic, displacing inwardness for "the infinite plasticity" emptiness makes possible. 180 In the absence of transcendent authority all things become means to therapeutic well-being and aesthetic self-justification. Everything is an experience, and every experience is licit. This is perhaps more evident for Nietzsche than it is for Freud, who qualified therapeutic possibility by emphasising moderation and reasonableness. But the logic of therapy is such that incest, for example, and even murder, can be justified therapeutically.lsl If overcoming and therapy were no more than concepts for educated people to play with, this would not be of any particular significance. But they are much more than this. Freud and Nietzsche are fundamentally concerned with a problem that is universal in the West, and the solutions they put forward, irrespective of their personal application, are intended to be general and total. Both Nietzsche and Freud seek the extirpation of all that is left of the concept of the transcendent in Western culture. The freedom the success of this venture implies and promises is unprecedented, and none greater can be imagined: freedom from the gravity of being, from the past, from transcendent authority, from all limitation upon action. It is a vision of

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man as a beast, without guilt or dread, living lightly, with his instincts as his only depths. This is why for Nietzsche and, in a different way, for Freud, the death of God is such a wonderful opportunity: "error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?,,182 But truth of course is a matter of perspective, and from the perspective of an older truth the freedom the aesthetic and therapeutic solutions to meaninglessness offer is the freedom of nothingness. The differences between the two solutions are not of the same significance as their similarities. Nietzsche's nihilism is far more apparent than Freud's: the basis of his solution to the problem of meaninglessness, for example, is self-destruction, although he denies this by representing it as part of self-creation. He also lacks Freud's moderation. This is perhaps the most important difference. The therapeutic solution with its reasonableness and self-consciousness is for Nietzsche the world of the last man, a hospital where the sick tend the sick,183 and where all who feel differently go "voluntarily into a madhouse.,,184 It normalises decadence and consolidates it, but does not solve it. The aesthetic solution of the superman and self-creation is proposed in apparent opposition to this solution, but its relentless assault on inwardness and being and its insistence on an endless cycle of self-destruction must drive man into the purest state of becoming: psychosis.185 In its immoderation it too would make the world a hospital although one of a different order, an asylum, in which the sick heal themselves by "acting out" their psychotic overcomings. The convergence of the aesthetic and therapeutic solutions to the problem of meaninglessness suggests a new form of culture dominated by the hospital. 186 At best it would be the world ofre1atively benign paranoia depicted by Bulgakov in The Master and Margarita (1938). At worst it would be the world in which Bulgakov wrote his novel, the world of Stalin's terror, a world given over to "total health."18?

Notes 1. On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 564. 2. Human, All Too Human 182. 3. Sigmund Freud, "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement" (1914), SE 14: 15-16; and Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study (1925), SE 20: 60. 4. Sigmund Freud, Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of Paranoia (1911), SE 12: 54.

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20. 7. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), SE 21: 115. S. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), SE IS: 101. 9. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 130n. 10. The Ego and the Id SE 19: 34-35. On the fonnation of the super-ego see chapter 3. See also Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), SE 22: 60-6S, IOS-11; and Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: chapter 7, in which the origin of the super-ego is discussed in relation to the primal murder. On identification see Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), SE IS: chapter 7. 11. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), SE 23: IS4-S5. 12. As a matter of tenninology, Freud prefers civilisation to culture but, claiming to make no distinction between the two words, uses them interchangeably. See Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), SE 21: 6. 13. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 122; and Sigmund Freud, '''Civilised' Sexual Morality and Modem Nervous Illness" (190S), SE 9: 187. 14. On the role of sublimation and reaction-fonnation in the development of civilisation and of human groups, see Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21 and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego SE IS. 15. An Outline of Psychoanalysis SE 23: 199. 16. On the relation between repression and thought, see Sigmund Freud, "Negation" (1925), SE 19. On "the advance in intellectuality," see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1939), SE 23: Ill-IS. 17. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1912-13), SE 13: 97. IS. On the primal crime, see Totem and Taboo SE 13: 141-50; and Group Psychology SE IS: 135-37. 19. Moses and Monotheism SE 23: 119. 20. Sigmund Freud, "The Claims of Psychoanalysis to Scientific Interest" (1913), SE 13: IS8-89. 21. On "the archaic heritage," see Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17), SE 15-16: lecture 13; and Moses and Monotheism SE 23: 97-102. 22. Totem and Taboo SE 13: 157-58. 23. '''Civilised' Sexual Morality and Modem Nervous Illness" SE 9: 182. 24. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 128. 25. Ibid. 133. 26. Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924), SE 19: 167. 27. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 331. 2S. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 134-37. 29. Ibid. 124.

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30. On those "wrecked by success," see Sigmund Freud, "Some CharacterTypes Met With in Psychoanalytic Work" (1916), SE 14. 31. New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 108-10. 32. On the resistance to recovery, see Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), SE 20: 157-160. 33. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 293. 34. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety SE 20: 157-60. 35. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 87. 36. "'Civilised' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" SE 9: 190. 37. Ibid. 202. 38. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 358. 39. '''Civilised' Sexual Morality and Modem Nervous Illness" SE 9: 190. 40. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety SE 20: 90. 41. "'Civilised' Sexual Morality and Modem Nervous Illness" SE 9: 197. 42. Ibid. 203-04. 43. On the "psychical impotence" that characterises the sexual behaviour of civilised people, see Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1912), SE 11: 179-90. For a discussion of the great change in mores which has occurred since Freud made these observations, and its effect on their validity, see Rieff, Mind of the Moralist, 337-45. For an examination of the way the problem of guilt and repression persists in a society with permissive mores, see Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1978). 44. '''Civilised' Sexual Morality and Modem Nervous Illness" SE 9: 20304. On the "cultural and conventional attitude towards death" and the way it "impoverishes" life, see Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915), SE 14: 289-91. 45. The Future of an Illusion SE 21: 34-35. This book is cast in the form of a dialogue between Freud and an imaginary religious opponent, who raises the threat of anarchy. But it is clearly Freud's own concern. See also 38-39. 46. Ibid. 6-10. 47. Ibid. 28-29. 48. Ibid. 17-18. 49. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 87. 50. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 38-39. 51. Ibid. 20. 52. Ibid. 17. But see also Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 86, in which Freud denies that meaninglessness is paralysing. 53. Ibid. 53. 54. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 76. 55. Ibid. 88. 56. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 16-17. 57. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 145.

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58. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 33. 59. Ibid. 17-19. 60. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 85. 61. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 36. 62. Ibid. 40-41,44-45. 63. Ibid. 50; and Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 77-78. 64. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 50. 65. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 83-85. The immediate context of this statement is a discussion of "the economics of the individual's libido" and his ability for "happiness"; that is, for gaining pleasure and avoiding "unpleasure." 66. Ibid. 142. 67. Ibid. 135. 68. Ibid. 145. 69. Ernest L. Freud (ed.), Letters ofSigmund Freud 1873-1939, trans. Tania and James Stem (London: Hogarth, 1961),432. Letter dated August 13, 1937. 70. This is the argument Rieffmakes at length in Mind ofthe Moralist. 71. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 94. 72. An Autobiographical Study SE 20: 58. Needless to say, psychoanalysis is no longer thought of as a science. Frederick Crews has restated the case against psychoanalysis as a science (and as therapy) most famously of late. See The Memory Wars (New York: New York Review of Books, 1995). 73. "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement" SE 14: 52. 74. Sigmund Freud, "Two Encyclopaedia Articles" (1923). SE 18: 253-54. See also New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis SE 22: 174. 75. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 255. 76. Sigmund Freud, "The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman" (1920), SE 18: 168. 77. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety SE 20: 96. This is a claim often made by Freud, and is outlined at length in the last of the New Introductory Lectures. 78. Rieff, Mind ofthe Moralist, 117. 79. Introductory Lectures SE 15: 100. 80. "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement" SE 14: 50. 81. New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 145. 82. Rieff, The Triumph ofthe Therapeutic, 93, 258. 83. New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 171. "The belief in scientific knowledge as the prime solvent of the world's ills" was retained by Freud "to the end." Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols. (1953-57) (London: Hogarth Press, 1972-74), 1: 37-38. 84. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 48. 85. Sigmund Freud, "Why War?" (1933), SE 22: 213. 86. Sigmund Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937), SE 23: 230. 87. An Outline ofPsychoanalysis SE 23: 198.

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88. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 115. 89. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 8,53. 90. "Why War?" SE 22: 213. See also New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 171. 91. On religion's deleterious effect on the development of man as a rational creature, see The Future of an Illusion SE 21: 47-49. Compare this with the vital role ascribed to religion in man's continuing "advance in intellectuality" in Moses and Monotheism SE 23: 111-18. 92. Sigmund Freud, "The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy" (1910), SE 11: 147. 93. The Future ofan Illusion SE 21: 54. 94. Ibid. 55. 95. Rieff, Mind of the Moralist, 95-96, 305-06. 96. Ibid. 44; and Rieff, Triumph ofthe Therapeutic, 60. 97. Sigmund Freud, "Constructions in Analysis" (1937), SE 23: 257. 98. The Ego and the Id SE 19: 50n. 99. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 435-38. Cr. Rieff, Mind of the Moralist, 377. 100. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 454. 101. "Two Encyclopaedia Articles" SE 18: 252. 102. Sigmund Freud, "On Psychotherapy" (1905), SE 7: 266: "The somatic and emotional effect of an impulse that has become conscious can never be as powerful as that of an unconscious one." 103. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 279. "Symptoms are never constructed from conscious processes." 104. Sigmund Freud, "Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (1910), SE 11: 53. 105. Sigmund Freud, "Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis" (1912), SE 12: 117. See also An Outline ofPsychoanalYSiS SE 23: 177. 106. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 280-81. 107. SigmundFreud, "On Beginning the Treatment" (1913), SE 12: 133. 108. "On Psychotherapy" SE 7: 263. 109. Sigmund Freud, "Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy" (1919), SE 17: 159. 110. Sigmund Freud, "The Resistances to Psychoanalysis" (1925), SE 19: 219-20. Ill. Sigmund Freud, "A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis" (1917), SE 17: 143. 112. "The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy" SE 11: 150. 113. "A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis" SE 17: 143. 114. Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic Movement (London: Paladin, 1985), 148-49. Gellner argues that Freud inverts "the specific Socratic method of question and answer" with the device of free association but employs it to the same end; namely, ~owledge of the self. 115. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895), SE 2: 30; and "Five Lectures" SE 11: 13.

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116. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 286-89. 117. "Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis" SE 12: 115. 118. "Two Encyclopaedia Articles" SE 18: 239. 119. On the difference between interpretation and construction see "Constructions in Analysis" SE 23: 260-61. 120. For examples of this from Freud's own cases, see Rieff, Mind of the Moralist, 82-83, 86-87. 121. An Outline ofPsychoanalysis SE 23: 173. 122. The "primal scene" in the "Wolf Man" case, for example, remains Freud's knowledge to this day. In the theory of analysis the communication of a construction (when the conditions of communication have been met) eventually produces a corroborating memory from the patient. In later years the Wolf Man patient, Sergei Pankeyev, reported that despite the improbability of the construction, "I always thought the memory would come. But it never did." The primal scene is the hub of the entire analysis, and the case was long regarded as Freud's most important clinical success, before Pankeyev's subsequent history became known. On the primal scene, see Sigmund Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918), SE 17: chapter 4. On Pankeyev, see Karin Obholzer, The Wolf-Man Sixty Years Later, trans. Michael Shaw (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1982). His statement above is taken from page 36. 123. On Freud's view ofhirnselfas Oedipus, see Jones 2: 14-15. 124. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 281. 125. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" SE 23: 233. 126. "On Beginning the Treatment" SE 12: 142. In this regard the timing of communication is all important. The treatment may be brought "to an untimely end" by premature communication. 127. Ibid. 144. See also Sigmund Freud, '''Wild' Psychoanalysis" (1910), SE 11: 225-26. 128. An Autobiographical Study SE 20: 42. 129. On the importance of the analyst taking a fee for his work, see "On Beginning the Treatment" SE 12: 131-33. 130. An Outline of Psychoanalysis SE 23: 174-75. See also Introductory Lectures SE 16: 442. A technical explanation of this process is to be found in Sigmund Freud, ''The Dynamics of Transference" (1912), SE 12: 99-101. 131. Sigmund Freud, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" (1914), SE 12: 150-51: The figure from the patient's past who is transposed onto the analyst is usually the one central to his neurosis. By means of the transference, the patient's conflict with this figure is "repeated" and "acted out," although not remembered. 132. On the nature of the love elicited by the transference, and on the way it is used by the resistance to defeat the treatment, see Sigmund Freud, "Observations on Transference Love" (1915), SE 12: 162-63, 165-68.

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133. For a description of how the skilful analyst manages the transference, see Ibid. 163, 168. On the dangers attending the positive transference, see "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" SE 12: 151. 134. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 442-46. 135. "On Beginning the Treatment" SE 12: 144. 136. William McGuire (ed.), The Freud-Jung Letters, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (London: Hogarth and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 13. Letter to Jung dated December 6, 1906. 137. Ibid. 124. Freud employs the term "paraphrenia." 138. "On Psychotherapy" SE 7: 264. 139. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 447. See also New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 155. 140. "Constructions in Analysis" SE 23: 267-68. 141. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 84. 142. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" SE 23: 224-26. 143. "The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy" SE 11: 150. See also "Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis" SE 12: 118-19. 144. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" SE 23: 230-34. 145. New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 148-50. 146. An Outline ofPsychoanalysis SE 23: 179. Successful analysis brings about an "advantageous alteration of the ego" which "will hold good in life." See also Introductory Lectures SE 16: 444-45, 451; and "On Psychotherapy" SE 7: 263. 147. New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 156-57. 148. Ibid. 151. 149. Ibid. 156-57. 150. Introductory Lectures SE 16: 255. 151. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE 18: 38. 152. "Why War?" SE 22: 211. See also An Outline of Psychoanalysis SE 23: 150. 153. "Analysis Terminable and Interminable" SE 23: 242. 154. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), SE 14: 247. 155. The Ego and the Id SE 19: 53-54. 156. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 128, 135-36. 157. The Ego and the Id SE 19: 50. 158. "Mourning and Melancholia" SE 14: 244-47. Freud identifies Hamlet as an example of depressive self-hatred. 159. 11!e Ego and the Id SE 19: 53. 160. "Mourning and Melancholia" SE 14: 246. 161. It should be emphasised that the analysis offered here of dread is extrapolated from the explanations Freud offers for guilt, depression, and the fear of death. I have drawn particularly on The Ego and the Id SE 19: 57-59; Inhibitions. Symptoms and Anxiety SE 20: 128-31; and "Mourning and Melancholia." On the ego

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"letting itself die," see Beyond the Pleasure Principle SE 18: 38: "It is a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons." 162. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985),409. Letter dated April 16, 1895. 163. "The Resistances to Psychoanalysis" SE 19: 221. 164. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 60. 165. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 45, 49. 166. Studies on Hysteria SE 2: 305. 167. New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 156-57. 168. "Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy" SE 17: 167-68; and ''Two Encyclopaedia Articles" SE 18: 250. 169. "The Future Prospects of Psychoanalysis" SE 11: 148-50. The symptoms of "sick people" conceal their secret instinctual desires. With the broad dissemination of psychoanalytic ideas these symptoms-the "anxious over-tenderness which is meant to conceal hatred, [the] agoraphobia which tells of disappointed ambition, [the] obsessive actions which represent self-reproaches for evil intentions and precautions against them"-would be "instantly interpreted" by friends, relatives, and strangers alike. With the neurotic "flight into illness" barred by "the indiscreet revelations of psychoanalysis," people "will have to be honest" and confess to their instinctual desires, which puts before them the (conscious) choice to either "fight for what they want, or go without it." 170. Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, The Development of Psychoanalysis (1923), trans. Caroline Newton (1925) (Madison, Conn., International Universities Press: 1986),64-65. The suggestions made in the last chapter of this work in regard to the future are very much in the spirit of the proposals Freud put forward in his 1918 paper "Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy" (SE 17), and take them as their starting point. 171. Eva Brabant et al. (eds.), The Correspondence ofSigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi 3 vols., trans. P. T. Hoffer (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 19932000), 1: 130-33. In a letter to Freud dated February 5, 1910, speculating on the "hitherto completely unimaginable possibilities for social· and political life" that must open up if psychoanalysis can take society "beyond the infantile," Ferenczi states: "I do not think that the [psychoanalytic] world view leads to democratic egalitarianism; the intellectual elite of humanity should maintain its hegemony; I believe Plato desired something similar." In his reply of February 8, Freud indicates his acceptance of this view, remarking, "1 myself ... have surely made the analogy with the Platonic rule of philosophers." Jones mentions this correspondence, but claims it was concerned with the organisation of an international association of analysts (Jones 2: 76). 172. "The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy" SE 11: 150. 173. "Observations on Transference Love" SE 12: 171. 174. The Will to Power 505-06.

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175. The Antichrist PN 638-39. 176. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 84-86. 177. Beyond Good and EvilBN 240-41. 178. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 39. 179. Rieff, Triumph ofthe Therapeutic, 50. 180. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 127. For Rieff, "a radical aestheticising of life" is "the anti-creed of therapeutic action" (135). 181. Ibid. 150-55. 182. Human, All Too Human 182. 183. "Analysis Tenninable and Interminable" SE 23: 235; and "The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy" SE 11: 145. Health for Freud is relative, and the analyst is only relatively more healthy than the patient, his power to heal being constrained by his own complexes and inhibitions. 184. Thus Spoke Zarathustra PN 130. Nietzsche insists that "it cannot be the task of the healthy to nurse the sick and make them well." The sick require "doctors and nurses who are themselves sick." This discussion is directed at the "positive" role played by "the ascetic priest" in Christianity, but it might easily be adapted to the modern-day therapist, if not quite to Freud himself. See On the Genealogy ofMorals BN 560-65. 185. Nietzsche argues that both forgetfulness and memory are necessary "in equal measure" for health. While it is possible "to live almost without memory, and to live happily, moreover, as the animal demonstrates," it is "altogether impossible to live without forgetting." Man is differentiated from the beasts by his capacity to live "historically," to recollect and relive the past. But sanity requires that this be relieved by constant forgetfulness. The individual who only lived historically, who at every moment was aware of everything he had ever experienced, felt, or thought, "would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep." (See Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life" [1874], UM 60-67, especially 62-63.) The eternal becoming takes this even further. "Living presently" in the joy of eternal recurrence is to live and relive past, present, and future constantly and without relief in the radical immediacy of the moment. The concepts of remembering and forgetting no longer make sense to the individual who is lost to any firm or fixed self in this way. Following this logic, the only thing to which we can compare becoming in its purest form is psychosis. 186. Rieff argues that "the normative institutions of the next culture" will be the hospital and the theatre. See Triumph of the Therapeutic, 24 and n, and more generally, Fellow Teachers. He notes this use of the metaphor of the hospital being anticipated by Goethe in 1787 ("I too believe that humanity will win in the long run; I am only afraid that at the same time the world will have turned into one huge hospital where everybody is everybody else's humane nurse." Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer [London: Coil ins, 1962], 312); and by Coleridge in 1833 (who proposes ironically the establishment ofa

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"Hospital" for the "higher class of Will-Maniacs or Impotents" such as himself, as a "charitable institution." Collected Letters, 6 vols., ed. Earl Leslie Griggs [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959-71], 6: 934). To this list might also be added Kierkegaard in 1844 (who criticises the way modem culture treats "the demonic" in man "medically-therapeutically." The Concept of Anxiety (1844), ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert A. Anderson [Princeton, N.1: Princeton University Press, 1980], 121-22); Nietzsche himself in 1888 (who compares Wagner to "the little decadents of Paris" who are "always five steps from the hospital." The Case ofWagner BN 632); and Baudelaire (who in "Anywhere out of the world," part of the prose poem Le Spleen de Paris published posthumously in 1869, described life as "a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change beds"). 187. The Gay Science 35.

Chapter Th ree

Rorty: The Post-Metaphysical Solution to Mean inglessness The importance of Richard Rorty's work lies in the way it develops the project undertaken by Nietzsche and Freud to free Western culture from the legacy of the "metaphysical interpretation of the world." Drawing on their solutions to meaninglessness, and deeply influenced by the pragmatism of John Dewey and the politics of the anti-communist progressive tradition in the United States, Rorty seeks to create a new "postmetaphysical culture."t In furthering the realisation of this goal, his pragmatic liberalism is a great advantage. He lacks entirely Nietzsche's immoderation, and although he values reason and rational dialogue he does not share Freud's faith in reason. He works from a realistic appraisal of conditions in modernity at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and is especially mindful of the great extenninations that secular ideologies in pursuit of total meaning and the total remaking of man have brought about. His post-metaphysical culture is based on the here and now rather than a future to come, and represents for him the highpoint of human "moral progress. ,,2 In describing it, Rorty describes the emergent culture of the present, a world that is recognisably what our own may be in the process of becoming. Rorty makes the case for his post-metaphysical culture in his book Contingency. Irony. and Solidarity (1989), and his subsequent publications, predominantly collections of essays (the latest being Philosophy and Social Hope [1999]) add nothing new to the argument he sets out there. Free and prosperous, humane and apparently "nonnal," Rorty's post-metaphysical culture is frankly described as "a liberal utopia.,,3 Its basis, however, is the aesthetic and therapeutic cultures of Nietzsche and Freud. Rorty acknowledges his debt to his predecessors, but criticises them for not going far enough, for being too constrained by metaphysical presuppositions to provide a truly post-metaphysical solution to meaninglessness. Rorty primarily criticises Nietzsche for this "relapse 77

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inglessness. Rorty primarily criticises Nietzsche for this "relapse into metaphysics," although it would seem that Freud never escaped it to begin with, a point Rorty himself does not explore. In considering both the influence and the critique, it is instructive to examine how much "further" Rorty actually goes and whether his post-metaphysical culture is thereby any more viable, or indeed desirable, than the solutions of Nietzsche and Freud.

Rorty's Solution to Meaninglessness For Rorty, as for Nietzsche and Freud, what makes the old "metaphysical culture" problematic is the premises from which it works. It assumes that human life and history are part of a greater reality; that unlike human life and history this reality is unconditioned, non-contingent, and eternal; that the foundations of meaning and value, and therefore of right conduct, are to be derived from it; and that in the absence of such a reality, not only are meaning, value, and right conduct impossible, but life itself becomes "a problem." While Rorty addresses each of these assumptions, he is not so concerned with the first of them. He takes it to be an established fact that there is no greater reality beyond human life. In this sense, late modernity is a "postreligious" culture,4 convinced of the non-existence of any sort of absolute reality, be it called God, truth, or history. His prime concern is with the way the three remaining assumptions continue to inform contemporary moral reflection. Rorty criticises philosophers and social theorists who continue to seek some sort of unconditioned and non-contingent reality to resolve questions of meaning and value. They assume there can be no meaning and value without some such foundation, whether in this world or in another. The problem with this quest for Rorty is that there simply are no unconditioned and non-contingent realities. Everything is completely conditioned by the contingent circumstances under which it comes into being, and this includes man himself. There is no "essence" or inherent nature to anything, and what we think of as "the nature of the world," "the nature of culture," "the nature of community," or "the nature of man," is nothing other than what chance has produced. s Just as there are no noncontingent realities, there are no non-contingent meanings or values. Absolute meaning and value is impossible, and what meaning and value there is has been created by chance and socialisation. The pursuit of the transcendent, therefore, is "pointless and sterile.,,6 It should be aban-

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doned, and its abandonment would be an enormous step to bringing a new world into being. The idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature constitutes the last redoubt of the metaphysical world-view. Rorty describes it as "a remnant of the idea that the world is a divine creation," and by adhering to it in any way we continue to uphold and "worship" a reality greater than our own. He emphasises the totality of "sheer contingency" as a way of "de-divinising" the world, of bringing man "to the point where [he] no longer worship[s] anything." There is nothing, either in the world or in human "nature," that is not entirely the "product of time and chance.,,7 This is only a problem if viewed metaphysically, whereupon it becomes a matter of meaninglessness. Instead, Rorty argues, we should look at it "ironically," acknowledging the contingency of everything about ourselves and our beliefs, abandoning the idea that some sort of ultimate reality stands behind them, and accepting not only that our lives and beliefs are ungroundable, but that grounds are not necessary for either life or belief. Rorty claims belief does not need to be grounded in an absolute reality to be treated as unconditional by the individual holding it. It can "still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for," even among people "who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance."g Rorty's most important belief-and the one central to his ideal character type, "the liberal ironist,,9-is that cruelty is the worst thing we dO.,,10 He accepts that this belief is nothing more than "an emotional preference,,,1t a prejudice, perhaps only an expression of prudence,12 but insists that none of this prevents him from treating it as "an unconditional commandment.,,13 To look upon contingency ironically, therefore, is to accept meaninglessness as the fundamental condition of existence, to acknowledge and even celebrate the relativism it gives rise to, and at the same time to disregard both as irrelevant to life and belief. For Rorty, this is a simple matter of human "maturity. ,,14 Meaninglessness in Rorty's view is irrelevant not only to the life of the individual, but also to the life of society. Meaning is no more necessary for the health and stability of society than it is for that of the individual. The ultimate goal of Rorty's ironism is "to understand the metaphysical urge ... so well that one becomes entirely free of it.,,15 To the extent that an individual still feels the need for meaning he can create it for himself, ironically acknowledging as he does so that it is contingent and cannot be anything more than his own personal meaning. Because

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there are no general meanings available, meaning becomes a matter of "private self-creation." To attempt to reconcile these private meanings so as to form some sort of meaning common to society as a whole will obviously be impossible. This becomes a problem if we persist in the assumption that the basis for social life is common belief or purpose. Rorty argues that real human "solidarity" springs not from common belief but from an "imaginative identification" with those around us, and a common sense of the suffering to which we are all susceptible. "A sense of common danger," not of common purpose, "is the only social bond that is needed.,,16 Attempts to provide democratic societies with foundations in a non-contingent reality (such as the Universal Rights of Man, for example) are therefore superfluous. Liberal democracy, like any other political arrangement, is a product of contingency and cannot claim "a morally privileged status," even over National Socialism. 17 Rorty claims the two systems cannot in fact be compared because there is no noncontingent criterion on which to base a comparison, and no neutral "standpoint" from which they can be considered. The social bond Rorty favours finds positive expression in the "consensus that the point of social organisation is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation," a goal which is difficult to realise without the peace and wealth, and the protections, typical of "bourgeois democracy." It is on this consensus that "the ideal liberal society-Rorty's postmetaphysical culture-would be based. ls Such a consensus would create certain obligations but would not in itself constitute a common meaning, and this is an important part of Rorty's purpose. Western moral philosophy has hitherto been concerned with the effort to "fuse" the public and private domains of life or, as Rorty puts it, to reconcile the realm of selfcreation and "private autonomy" with the realm of "human solidarity" and justice. 19 Such a reconciliation is possible only in a metaphysical culture in which both realms are subordinate to and subsumed within an absolute reality. In a post-metaphysical culture this cannot be done, and instead of being reconciled the two domains should be strictly delineated. Rorty argues for a rigid separation of public and private, the one domain intruding on the other only when private self-creations cause "harm to others and [use] resources needed by those less advantaged. ,,20 Most importantly, the separation of the two must extend to the life of the individual. For in private he is to be Nietzsche (or de Sade21 ), but in public he is to be J. S. Mill?2 The realisation of a post-metaphysical culture, characterised by "contingency, irony, and solidarity," requires "the disenchantment of the

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world," and Rorty openly states this as the goal of his work. He conceives it as "a moral purpose," for the process of disenchantment "makes the world's inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.,,23 It removes the constraints placed on the imagination by "enchanted" cultures-with the deep but narrow attachment to a particular place, a particular people, and a particular set of values they engender-and so better enables people to see others not as strangers or outsiders, but as fellow sufferers. At the same time, it makes for a world in which there is "no room for the notion that there are non-human forces to which human beings should be responsible,,,24 and which, by confronting us with the absence of any ultimate reality, necessitates the "mature renunciation" of the needs instilled in us by a "metaphysical upbringing.,,25 At the very least disenchantment demands that individuals "privatise" the way they deal with the sense of "finitude" that constitutes the experience of meaninglessness,26 and refrain from generalising whatever personal solutions they come to. For to mistake one's intuitions as an expression of "a deep sense of how things are,'.27 and to attempt to provide them with "ahistorical authority" by generalising them to the universe at large,28 is "to relapse into metaphysics.,,29 This is not only "selfdefeating,',30 Rorty argues, but "reactionary.,,31 It keeps alive "the moral dogmatism" that is the bane of metaphysical culture, the moral certainty about our meanings that excludes others and makes them aliens.32 The danger this poses to greater human solidarity attends every generalisation of meaning. Rorty calls it ''the danger of re-enchanting the world,,,33 and the privatisation of meaning serves as a precaution against it. Whether man will ever be freed of this danger depends upon the realisation of a truly post-metaphysical culture in which, if it is at all possible, we might finally be "cured" of our apparently incurable metaphysical needs. 34 Taking a disenchanted world as his foundation, Rorty hopes to build a "liberal utopia" where the search for truth has been superseded by "an endless, proliferating realisation of Freedom,,,35 where "lightness" and "play" have replaced "seriousness,,,36 and where irony has become universal. 37 It would be a world where "the enlightened, liberated self'"the self that has finally succeeded in shaping itself'-has become a reality,38 and where conce~ts such as meaninglessness and relativism have become "unintelligible"; 9 one where a highly developed sensitivity "to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other[ s]" has deepened human solidarity in a way almost unimaginable, and brought man to the highpoint of his moral progress.40 Rorty can still speak of

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freedom and progress as human goals because he uses them not as noncontingent "metanarratives," but as simple, retrospective, "historical narratives." Contingent narratives such as these remain important, both to help us identify with "communal movements," and to give our "existential sense of contingency ... a Romantic sense of grandeur.,,41 In so far as it simultaneously abolishes its metaphysical components and realises its humanitarian ambitions, Rorty's solution represents nothing less in his view than "the self-cancelling and self-fulfilling triumph of the Enlightenment. ,,42

Rorty's Debt to Nietzsche and Freud Nietzsche and Freud provide Rorty with the two fundamental propositions of his work, and their solutions to meaninglessness serve as the basis of his own. He draws on Nietzsche to demonstrate the impossibility of absolute truth-how it is always no more than an interpretation conditioned by the contingency of language-and the necessity of meaninglessness. He draws on Freud to demonstrate the impossibility of a human essence, and the contingency of the self and conscience. He accepts the basic principle of their solutions-that the need for meaning must be "overcome" or "cured"-and marries their components by using the device of the therapeutic dialogue to generalise aesthetic self-creation. In doing this he reveals an implicit understanding of the way the two solutions tend to converge in the hospital, a fate his own solution does not escape. For Rorty, the key text from Nietzsche is this passage from the fragment "Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense," written in 1873 and published posthumously: What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisrns, a sum, in short, of human relationships which, rhetorically and poetically intensified, ornamented and transformed, come to be thought of, after long usage by a people, as fixed, binding, and canonical. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, worn-out metaphors now impotent to stir the senses, coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than currency.43

Truth is a product of language, and the history of man's pursuit of it is a history of "increasingly useful metaphors, rather than ... increasing understanding of how things really are.,,44 Following Donald Davidson,

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Rorty argues that language is shaped contingently and is incapable of expressing or representing how the world "really" is. Language is not an absolute reality mediating the absolute realities of self and truth. It is no more than a "tool" for communication between contingently existing human beings, and serves the sole purpose of making them approximately intelligible to each other. 45 This is not, of course, to be understood as an absolute claim about the nature of language. Rorty is not saying "language really is just" a tool for communication, that this is the "real" truth about language. Statements such as this can no longer be made. All that can be said is that the idea of language as a tool for communication is a "useful truth" for understanding it, and one of many. 46 To call something true, Rorty argues, is to employ a descriptive metaphor which implies that its reality is "out there," something discovered rather than created. But what are taken to be discoveries are simply "redescriptions" of the world which gradually produce new metaphors and new descriptive "vocabularies." It is a process which occurs not through the application of a criterion so that "better" (that is, "truer") descriptions of the world are recognised and accepted over what went before them, but through a gradual change of "habits." Man and the world are changed through changes in language,47 and the differences between communities, cultures, and historical epochs, properly understood, are not differences of principle and belief, but differences of vocabulary.48 What are thought of as changed conditions of belief are really changed conditions of language. One might go further and say there are never any beliefs, as that word is usually understood, only vocabularies, some of which describe themselves in terms of belief and some of which do not. 49 Rorty's elaboration of Nietzsche's declaration that "truth is a mobile army of metaphors" provides the philosophical basis from which he attempts to overthrow the "worn-out metaphors" of metaphysics-"the illusions which we have forgotten are illusions"-that still comprise our personal and intellectual presuppositions. This cannot be achieved by argument, Rorty claims, for an argument against metaphysics made from within its own vocabulary cannot be conclusive. Instead, the world as described by metaphysics must be "radically redescribed." Nietzsche's claim allows Rorty to see metaphysics not as the one true vocabulary but as one among a great many, and one that can be supplanted by an entirely new way of looking at the world. Doing this is a matter of persuading people to accept a new set of questions, rather than a new set of convictions. 50 "What matters in the end are changes in the vocabulary rather than changes in belief, changes

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in truth-value candidates rather than assignments of truth value." The aim is to substitute a new "set of agreements about what is possible and important" for the old metaphysical set. 51 It is by this means that Rorty hopes to make the concept of meaninglessness unintelligible. The redescription of the world he puts forward with the concepts of contingency, irony, and solidarity carries a vocabulary which substitutes for the old question "what is there that makes life meaningful?" new questions such as "what shall I make of myself at this particular moment?" The shift in thinking here envisaged is comparable to the shift from Ptolemy to Copernicus in cosmology. Just as today we consider the idea of the earth as the fixed centre of the universe something absurd or quaint, something to be puzzled over perhaps if we are sufficiently interested, so will the idea that life is meaningful (or meaningless) appear to the individual in the post-metaphysical culture of tomorrow. Nietzsche's account of truth as a metaphor, and its inherent perspectivism, asserts the impossibility "of finding a single context for all human lives.,,52 Freud powerfully reiterates and reinforces this conclusion by removing the last possibility for such a context, the idea of a common human nature. Rorty argues that Freud made the concept of a human essence impossible by "populating inner space" with several incompatible and "internally coherent clusters of belief and desire" with no order of precedence among them. 53 Id, ego, and super-ego are "analogues of persons" in continual "conversation" within the self. No one has automatic priority over the others, and each may claim with equal plausibility to represent what is essentially human. Each is a self just as sophisticated as the conscious self. The "transactions" between them produce much of what is most unique and inventive about an individual-his jokes, metaphors, slips, and dreams-and the way "repressive" transactions are undertaken and maintained indicates an unconscious ability for complexity and complication usually quite beyond the capacity of most conscious selves. Freud thus renders the traditional distinction of reason and passion untenable. The inner life is not a struggle between "one 'intellect'" and "a mob of 'irrational' brutes," but a conversation between conscious and unconscious selves, each of which is an intellect in its own right. 54 In Rorty's view, the idea that there is a common interior life of discrete "faculties" in a system "at least potentially well-ordered" through the mediation of reason or consciousness cannot be sustained after psychoanalysis. ss The absence of a common human nature is underscored by the contingency of the individual personality. Each of us, Rorty claims, is the

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outcome of our idiosyncratic adaptations to contingent circumstance. The individual's psychical development is determined by responses to chance encounters and traumas, "repressions which are the product of countless contingencies that never enter experience." Whether someone is kind or cruel, conscientious or slovenly, intellectual or paranoid, a scientist, a poet, a genius, or a psychotic, depends entirely on chance and the response he makes to it. This makes the individual conscience contingent, and highly idiosyncratic as well. Because an individual's case history and repressions are so particular and personal, so too are the causes of guilt. A crime which one person finds unbearable another will look upon with equanimity, depending on their respective "past reactions to particular authority figures.,,56 Conscience and the experience of guilt cannot therefore be made to serve as the basis of a human "core" or essence. Freud not only "humanised" what was once thought of as the animal in man, but also what was held to be divine in origin. Conscience is simply another participant in the interior dialogue that constitutes an individual's personality, and it has no particular priority over the other "selves" involved. 57 For this reason self-knowledge for Rorty's Freud cannot be directed towards the knowledge of a true self (for there is no one such thing) or towards an understanding of a common human nature. "Far from being of what we share with other members of our species, self-knowledge is precisely of what divides us from them: our accidental idiosyncrasies, the 'irrational' components in our selves, the ones that split us up into incompatible sets of beliefs and desires." To study "'the nature of the mind' ... for [the] purposes of moral reflection" is "pointless.,,58 It can reveal nothing about the order of ~hings other than that there is no such order within the human being. Rorty emphasises this by departing from Freud and adding to this analysis his own claim that "there is nothing to people except what has been socialised into them.,,59 "Moral consciousness" is contingent and "historically conditioned,,,60 so much so that people can even be socialised to regard the torture and humiliation of others as something noble and good. Socialisation "goes all the way down.,,61 "Centreless" and contingent, man is not a "natural kind" but a type of "machine," and "a machine's purpose is not built in.,,62 We have to invent our own purposes and because we are centreless and contingent the possibilities of what we can be and do are unlimited. Freud "made it far more difficult than it was before" to speak of human nature and a true self, and in doing so, Rorty argues, he made it easier to make ourselves into anything. 63

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Therapeutic Self-Creation As noted at the conclusion of the last chapter, taken together, Nietzsche and Freud propose a culture of therapeutic self-creation as the solution to meaninglessness. Rorty understands what this means. Nietzsche demands that we abandon the search for meaning and an ultimate reality, and embrace the senseless contingency that is the "cause" of our being in a way that makes it our own. Nietzsche's concept of overcoming, as Rorty interprets it, entails a radical change of perspective,64 a reinterpretation of our lives, so that instead of seeing ourselves as the products of time and chance we see ourselves as products of our own creation. While acknowledging and accepting contingency, we are to redescribe it "in a new language" as "a story" of our individual becomings. By "sheer strength" we are to break out "of one perspective, one metaphoric, into another," and so re-create "all 'it was' into a 'thus I willed it. ",65 The "fully-fledged human being" that self-overcoming and self-creation make possible is one who has made his life into a work of art. Freud, in Rorty's view, "helps us accept" this idea and "put [it] to work" both by bringing home to us the utter contingency of everything about our individuality and by revealing the artistic genius of the unconscious that informs the conscious existence of everyone. 66 "Freud's account of unconscious fantasy shows us how to see every life as a poem. ,,67 It makes every life a work of art. Freud also "enriches the vocabulary" available to us for telling our stories. "All the actions one performs in the course of one's life, even the silly, cruel and self-destructive actions," are available for inclusion in our "narratives,,,68 for "something which seems pointless or ridiculous or vile to society" may be "the crucial element" in an individual's sense of who he is, the central metaphor in the story of his self-creation. 69 The realisation of the contingency of everything allows us to look upon our lives "playfully" and ironically rather than seriously and moralistically. Placing life under chance frees it from the bondage of purpose, and restores "the innocence of becoming.,,70 Entering into this fully requires an artist's sensibility, and for this reason Nietzsche expected and intended "the fully-fledged human being" to be the preserve of the noble caste. Freud provides a basis on which this elite type might be realised universally.71 Although it is a criterion for which liberal ironists are meant to have scant regard, Rorty feels compelled to test his solution to the problem of meaninglessness against the fact of death. He claims that insofar as it is

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construed as the "fear of inexistence," "there is no such thing" as the fear of death, and he dismisses "death" and "nothingness" as "empty terms," words which are too abstract to convey anything specific. What we fear of death is not our individual effacement but the "extinction" of our own particular story of becoming, with its own particular answer "to the question of what is possible and important.,,72 The story of our self-creation is what consoles us at the moment of death, and for ourselves nothing more is required. But as something we narcissistically hold to be intrinsically valuable, we are naturally anxious that this story's existence should not cease with our own. This anxiety, Rorty argues, directs us to dependence on "the good will of those who live other lives and write other poems" after we have gone. To trust in "the good will" of other story-tellers is to trust that they might listen to our own story and keep it alive by "reweaving" (that is, retelling and reinterpreting) it into their own stories, and through them into the great "web of human relations" that is rewoven and lengthened "every day.'m What Rorty envisages here is the world transformed into an artists' colony. But because of his insistence on the absolute contingency of everything about the individual and his life, including his capacity for "free will," the world transformed in this way is much more likely to resemble an enormous encounter group. Each person tells his case history in the form of a story or poem, representing his contingency as his own creation. The good will of the other people in the group gives this story, and all others, a significance that transcends the life-span of the teller, and ensures it will be rewoven into other stories, not least the story of the group as a whole. But redescribing the contingency that made you who you are as the process of how you made yourself does not make chance creation self-creation. It is in effect a lie deployed for the therapeutic purpose of consoling the individual story-teller and his listeners for their utter powerlessness before contingency, and to distract them from it. The triumphant proclamation of all who "overcome" themselves, "thus I willed it," becomes effectively indistinguishable therefore from the tedious iteration of the analysed patient, "thus I adapted." For Nietzsche, self-creation justifies life aesthetically and this is the course Rorty wishes to pursue. But by using Freud and the art-work of the individual case history to generalise aesthetic self-creation in a context of absolute contingency, he ends instead by justifying the world therapeutically. The claim that Rorty's post-metaphysical culture transforms the world into an encounter group is in one respect uncontroversial, for while Rorty wants everybody to make a "poem" of their lives, "true" self-

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creation in his assessment will only ever be available to the rare artistic few. 74 The self-creation of the inartistic remainder of the population can only be a therapeutic imitation. But the question remaining concerns the self-creation of the rare few. Can there be genuinely aesthetic-that is, non-therapeutic-self-creation? Can the convergence of the aesthetic and the therapeutic be avoided? It was argued in the last chapter that Nietzsche's concept of self-creation-self-deification through the destruction of being and utter abandonment of self to eternal becomingconverges with the therapeutic in making the world a hospital, because it would seemingly require a descent into psychosis to be realised. Rorty, however, understands self-creation not as self-deification but as a matter of making one's life a work of art. If self-creation in this sense is to be anything more than a higher form of therapy, "making one's life a work of art" must be taken more or less literally. To make one's self, one's very existence, a work of art requires the absolute transcendence of the mundane. Every lived detail must be more than merely human. Selfcreation here means that "all nature ceases and becomes art.,,75 This is not in fact what Rorty offers. What is fundamental to selfcreation in his view is a change of perspective. The reality of human life for Rorty is that we are all the products of contingency, of meaningless necessity. This is the reality, but through a change of perspective we can pretend or even believe that we are instead our own creations. We give this belief or pretence form by telling stories about how we became who are we. Very few of these stories, it is important to note, will be works of art. Rorty is no radical democrat on this question. He holds an elitist and individualist view of art and "the great artist," and offers Proust as an exemplar to decisively distinguish self-creation from therapy.76 But making the story of one's life, as opposed to one's very existence, a work of art is not sufficient to give the concept of self-creation a meaning independent of therapy. True self-creation, as Nietzsche conceives it, demands radical immediacy, the obliteration of the past and the future so as to live completely in the present. It means making each moment a masterpiece. Turning one's back on the present so as to tell the story of one's past may well produce a great work of art, but it does not constitute genuine self-creation. If all that is required to make one's life a work of art is to write a book about it, then self-creation can only mean therapy, even if the book that is written is A la recherche du temps perdu. And while one must indeed distinguish between Proust and the participants of an encounter group, the distinction serves only to establish that there are different or-

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ders of therapeutic achievement. None of this is to say that art is only therapy, or that an individual's life cannot be the subject of a work of art. But to the extent self-creation has any meaning at all it means therapeutic self-creation: telling stories about ourselves, and playing with different roles and personae, with greater or lesser skill, as a consolation for the inability to truly make ourselves anything we will. There is never selfcreation as such, even for the artistic few: only the semblance of it. Nevertheless, that Rorty's aesthetic solution to meaninglessness becomes in the end a therapeutic solution need not be a problem for him. As he himself observes, the therapeutic solution to meaninglessness should not be underestimated, for the possibilities of "what we might become" in a therapeutic world are almost without limit or end. 77

Rorty's Critique of Nietzsche and Freud While Rorty makes the solutions Nietzsche and Freud offer to meaninglessness the basis of his own, he does so arguing that their approach has not been taken far enough. He makes this claim explicitly of Nietzsche, describing him as a great "anti-metaphysician" who "relapsed into metaphysics." Although Rorty compares him favourably to Nietzsche on this point, Freud too is (in Nietzsche's phrase) "still piOUS,,,78 and much more so than Nietzsche. With Freud it is not so much a matter of relapsing into metaphysics as of never escaping its grasp, something Rorty does not seem to appreciate fully. Rorty's boast of going further than his predecessors makes the continuing influence of metaphysical presuppositions in Nietzsche and Freud an interesting line of enquiry, and important to pursue. 79 The relapse into metaphysics is a continual danger for an "ironist theorist," for he "relativises" and "historicises" the world so well that he is inclined to claim for his work something more than the status of a mere interpretation. Having found a perspective from which to discern a "pattern" in "some little, contingent actualities" of the past, he is tempted to assert that what can be no more than "a redescription of a series of temporal encounters" is in fact the discovery of a pattern for "the entire realm of possibility." It is to this temptation, Rorty argues, that Nietzsche succumbs. Nietzsche "betrays" his perspectivism by claiming "to see deeper rather than differently." He uses it to show that everything is "transitory, relational, reactive [and] finite," but at the same time attempts to go "beyond all perspective," by "discovering" the will to power

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as the "one big reality" underlying all appearance. 80 As "the first to discover truth,,,81 Nietzsche cannot be redescribed. What he did to others cannot be done to him. He is "a destiny," and as a consequence his work is not so much a "genealogical account of the filiation of final vocabularies" as a "description of eternal relations between eternal objects."s2 It is true that while claiming that "there are no eternal facts ... no absolute truths," "only interpretations," and that man is not "an aeterna veritas ... [a] constant in the midst of all flux,,,s3 Nietzsche also speaks of "universal laws,,,84 "eternal demands" inscribed "in the hearts of humanity,,,8s "the primeval law of things,',86 and "the eternal basic text of homo natura.,,87 But to describe these contradictions as the consequence of Nietzsche's "unfaithfulness" to perspectivism, which Rorty apparently takes to be his "true" philosophy,88 is to misprise the personal ambivalence about meaning that is the central dynamic of Nietzsche's work. He holds at once that "there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing,,,,89 and that there are conditions for culture as "great health,,90 which are not a matter of perspective and which are always and everywhere valid. He denies that truth exists, and claims to be the first to discover it. These two strains in his thought coexist without being reconciled, and it could be said that, properly understood, they cannot be reconciled. A reconciliation may be attempted by arguing that "the denial" is his true philosophy and "the discovery" a relapse from it. Alternatively, it may be argued that the discovery is the true philosophy and the denial simply a heuristic device in its service. But the two strains do not exist in a relation of super- and sub-ordination. They exist side by side in Nietzsche's thought, in conflict and contradiction and, as it were, with equal justification. They are products not so much of incoherence as of ambivalence. 91 What Nietzsche discovers in his search for the truth is the law of selfovercoming and the necessity of eternal recurrence. Conforming himself to the reality of what is lawful and necessary in the world, he teaches that the noble must create themselves as gods, and must give themselves the Dionysian law of am or fati. Life itself, whose essence is will to power, points to this end, strives for it, demands it. It is at once the justification of existence and the solution to the problem of value. With this, all the contradictions that spring from Nietzsche's ambivalence come to the fore. Meaninglessness and the need for meaning are overcome, while the source of true meaning is revealed. The "slander" of man and nature by metaphysics is brought to an end, while man and nature are transcended by the superman. Redemption and salvation are renounced, while the

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eternal recurrence redeems and saves. Perspective renders absolute value impossible, while a true perspective discovers the eternal order of rank. Man is denied an essence, while his essence is restored to him. Every system of meaning falsifies the world, while Nietzsche's system of meaning discloses the world's truth. All this simply highlights the obvious: that Nietzsche was haunted by meaninglessness and could not overcome the need for meaning in his own life. Freud, too, is "still pious," although in a different way to Nietzsche, and in a way that Rorty does not acknowledge. In part this is because he approaches psychoanalytic theory without scepticism. Freud's "explanations work," he writes. "They give us a handle on things we want to manipulate and change. ,,92 Rorty praises Freud for providing "a useable way of thinking of ourselves as machines to be tinkered with," and for refusing to insist that psychoanalysis is "the only tool needed" for such "tinkering. ,,93 "The crucial point" about Freud is that he does not "absolutise" the claims his theory makes. He does not tell us that art is really sublimation or philosophical system-building merely paranoia, or religion merely a confused memory of a fierce father. He is not saying that human life is merely a continuous rechannelling oflibidinal energy.... He just wants to give us one more redescription of things to be filed alongside all the others. Freud does not attempt to discover the essence of life or the reality of human nature, Rorty claims. All he seeks is to enrich the world with another vocabulary, another "set of metaphors," which we might find useful for the purposes of intellectual play.94 The problem with this for Rorty is that Freud does not go quite as far as he thinks he does in renouncing metaphysical presuppositions. Freud conceived psychoanalysis as a project in the traditions of both the Enlightenment and Western science. As a project of the Enlightenment, psychoanalysis has at its centre a metaphysical assumption about the transformative power of reason and truth. It was supported in this by the scientific project, which sought to discover the truth about man and the world. Truth for Freud is not a matter of perspective or interpretation, nor is it a matter of degree. Like death, it is absolute. 95 What it reveals is an innate and irreducible human essence, in stark contradiction to Rorty's own claim that there is only socialisation and it "goes all the way down.,,96 For Freud, the two primal instincts, together with "the archaic heritage" of instinctual repressions that is passed on from generation to gen-

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eration, comprise "the core of our being.'.97 They are also the source of the parricidal and incestuous "primal wishes" of the infant and the trauma of the Oedipus complex. "No human individual is spared such traumatic experiences; none escapes the repressions to which they give rise. ,,98 The origins of everything in civilisation spring from the Oedipus complex, which Freud intended to be a universal theory of human nature. Rorty evades this fundamental point by emphasising a mechanistic reading of Freud which allows him to reduce the claims of psychoanalysis to matters of physiology, and to argue that the universality of the instincts and repression possesses the same status as the universality of hunger and digestion. 99 Rorty is adamant on this point and even goes so far as to argue that any interpretation of Freud other than a strictly mechanistic interpretation is more or less illegitimate. 100 But as a theory of human nature with love, guilt, and dread as its main subject matter, it is ridiculous to assert that psychoanalysis must only be read in mechanistic terms. In doing so, Rorty betrays an oblique recognition of Freud's failure to renounce metaphysical presuppositions. Just how far this failure goes is surprising. At its most comprehensive, Freud's theory of the instincts represents an attempt "to solve the riddle oflife."lol The sexual instinct, in the guise of Eros, works to preserve existence and serves as "the true life instinct."J02 The death instinct, on the other hand, seeks the destruction of the self and attempts to return all "living substance" to its earlier inanimate state. 103 The two instincts share "world-dominion" and the struggle between them produces all the phenomena of existence,I04 but finally it is the death instinct that prevails. "The aim of all life is death," and the most Eros can achieve is "a lengthening of the road" to that end. l05 Although denying that life has either purpose or meaning, Freud nevertheless provides it with what is in effect a teleology. He frequently describes it as speculative and hypothetical, but insists nevertheless that it is supported by natural science. 106 He acknowledges it is "a kind of mythology," but claims that every science, including physics, comes to this "in the end."J07 To speak of life having an "aim" may take one beyond the strict limits of science, but the justification for this, Freud implies, is in science itself. Of its nature, it can never be content with the simple discovery of facts. Its narcissism, as it were, requires that facts be given an end. Nietzsche's "relapse into metaphysics" has been attributed above to his personal ambivalence about meaning. In Freud's case, talk of a "relapse" into metaphysics is misplaced, for he never renounces the concept of truth, either in the form of science or reason, and insists that although

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life is meaningless, truth is unproblematic. There is nevertheless a discernible ambivalence about meaning I 08 and indications that, like Nietzsche, Freud found meaninglessness personally troubling. While he holds that meaninglessness does not make truth "a problem," he thinks it makes morality, social order, and even continued human existence problems of great urgency, and contemplates this with horror. He considers meaninglessness, rightly understood, as nothing more than the disappointment that follows the realisation that a fundamentally infantile wish (for meaning) must remain unfulfilled. But towards the end of his life he implied he was sickened by the question of "the meaning and value of life," because "objectively neither has any existence.,,109 He argues that meaning, and in particular religion, is an illusion that consoles man for the burden of existence, and claims that in its place he can offer "no consolation,,,IIO only science, which is at least "no illusion.,,1I1 It is clear, however, that in the tradition of nineteenth-century secularism, science is revelation for Freud, and that his particular science, psychoanalysis, constitutes a substitute religion. 1l2 Moreover, science does offer consolation for Freud. The truth it reveals, ultimately, is the truth of the void. For most, this is an unbearable truth, but for love of the truth "real, rare, true scientific minds" can endure it. l13 The truth is its own consolation, and this is the consolation of science, the consolation of having the strength and "maturity" to behold the abyss without quailing. The ambivalence Nietzsche and Freud betray towards meaninglessness is important not least for the solutions they propose. Their attempts to overcome meaning are complicated by a need to create a substitute meaning. As a result, meaninglessness is at once embraced and rejected. This inability to hold fast to meaninglessness free from the need for meaning is the basis for the charge that Nietzsche and Freud are "still pious," that they have not "gone far enough" in overcoming the legacy of metaphysical culture within themselves. Rorty, in contrast, is not complicated in this way. His approach to a post-metaphysical culture is unambivalent. There is no indication he finds meaninglessness personally troubling, and his capacity for understanding those who do seems to be limited. Rorty treats meaninglessness as synonymous with the fear of death, which for him is nothing more than the anxiety that our particular "story" will cease to be told once we cease to exist. As an account of what the full experience of meaninglessness comprises for the individual, this leave much to be desired. 114 Rorty has gone beyond the need for meaning in a way Nietzsche and Freud never could. For them, the capacity to accept and welcome mean-

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inglessness is difficult and requires a strength few people have. For Rorty, however, it is not difficult at all. It requires nothing more than a particular kind of superficiality or "lightness," a simple interest in the immediate possibilities of the present and a commonplace indifference about "deep" questions of meaning and purpose. That Nietzsche and Freud think the acceptance of meaninglessness requires strength, that it cannot be something easy, underscores how far they still have to go in overcoming metaphysical presuppositions. Free from the ambivalence they experienced, completely untouched by meaninglessness, wishing to salvage nothing from the old world, and unlike Nietzsche and Freud, holding that there is nothing inside us to get in the way, Rorty offers a solution to meaninglessness that is sunny, pleasant, and almost effortless. Rorty bases his post-metaphysical culture on the dynamics of modem society's political, economic, and social arrangements, in a way that Nietzsche and Freud do not. His purpose in doing this is to increase both the possibility and the probability of making it a reality. In the end, this is something that must always elude the aesthetic and therapeutic cultures of Nietzsche and Freud, at least in so far as they describe a total vision rather than certain tendencies or trends. A world totally governed by the superman and eternal recurrence is no more probable than a world totally governed by an all-powerful psychoanalytic elite. Rorty's "liberal utopia" may in turn prove just as unlikely as these, but it bears a much greater relation to the reality of modernity and to what is realisable and desirable within it in the wake of the totalitarian experiment. Implicitly, the claim Rorty makes against Nietzsche and Freud is that he has "gone further" than either of them could go. This is true, and it is in this that his importance lies. He develops the concept of a culture undisturbed by the ruins of metaphysics with the purpose of making it a reality. His work crystallises a crucial dimension of the thought of Nietzsche and Freud and brings it to its culmination.

Imaginary Solidarity As we have seen, the solutions of Nietzsche and Freud converge in the hospital. Rorty underscores this convergence by deploying the therapeutic dialogue to generalise aesthetic self-creation, and in doing so he puts forward a hospital culture of his own, the post-metaphysical culture of the encounter group in which therapy and self-creation become indistinguishable. He differs from Nietzsche and Freud however in attempting

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to give hospital life a communal aspect, which he does by introducing the concept of solidarity. Here Rorty goes much further than his predecessors, both of whom treat community as a question of incidental importance. Solidarity for Rorty is both groundless and ungroundable. There is nothing in the universe that justifies or requires or compels us to it. It does not occur "naturally" as the corollary of a common human essence because there is no common human essence from which it follows as a logical consequence. Nor is there any reality beyond the individual, such as God or history, which might serve as a basis for it. IIS If solidarity exists at all, it exists because we "create" it, and we create it through "the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. ,,116 Rorty argues that to insist on grounds for human solidarity is to continue in the thrall of metaphysical presuppositions. There are no universally valid reasons to be had for why we should live peaceably with other people and treat them decently rather than cruelly, and to persist in asking for such reasons is to "leave ourselves open to Nietzsche's insinuation that the end of religion and metaphysics should mean the end of our attempts not to be cruel.,,117 Instead, we should seek to increase "our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people," and make this the basis for a community that excludes no one. llS Every community, Rorty argues, is based on a sense of mutual identification, on the "parochial contingencies" which lead us to see the person next door not as a Jew or a black or a Catholic, but as a fellow parent or fellow worker or fellow sportsman. \19 In a liberal utopia, however, the idea of community should encompass not just those nearby but the entire population of the globe. Identifications based on locale and neighbourhood must be subordinated, if not completely displaced,120 by identifications based on the common human susceptibility to suffering and humiliation. 121 Local identifications exclude those outside the locale, but identifications based on an individual recognising his own vulnerability to suffering, his own fear of being subject to pain and cruelty, in everyone else, exclude no one. Sympathetic imaginative identification makes solidarity between all people, be they familiar or foreign, a reality. Rorty generally defines the identification on which solidarity is based negatively as a shared fear or "common danger.,,122 Its positive expression takes the form of a shared hope, not just that suffering and cruelty may be diminished, but "that life will eventually be freer, ... more leisured, [and] richer in goods and experiences" for everyone. Every indi-

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vidual hopes for a better future for his immediate descendants. The task is to extend this hope to include not only one's own descendants but everybody's descendants, and again the mechanism for doing this is imaginative identification, identifying one's own hopes with the hopes of others. 123 Mutual identification on the basis of common fear and common aspiration provides Rorty with what he calls "social glue" and "social hope.,,124 Social glue is in fact "social fear," the use of the word "glue" serving to emphasise the importance of fear over the hope that is, in effect, merely its obverse. Social hope is not so important to solidarity, although Rorty values it highly. Solidarity's key constituent, its necessary condition, is common fear. Fear, not of each other but of the possibility of suffering and pain, "is the only social bond that is needed" (Rorty's emphasis).125 The fear of being subject to cruelty, mutually recognised through imaginative identification, leads us to renounce it, to involve ourselves sympathetically in the lives of others, and to treat all people decently. For Rorty, no grounds are needed to justify this. Solidarity is created and sustained by imaginative identification, and any reasons "discovered" or given for it are really nothing more than a part of a narrative, a device in the story a community tells about itself. In explaining why they treat each other decently the members of a community may invoke ideas of moral obligation or common humanity or shared belief or abstract ideas of reason and rights, but the true animating and binding force is sympathetic imaginative identification, and this for the simple reason that the high principles invoked as an explanation are too remote from an individual's everyday life to serve as the effective motivation. 126 The "vocabularies" of principles and ideals used here are subsequent to the imaginative identification that creates the community, and exist in "parasitic" relation to the common fears and hopes recognised through it. 127 The member of Rorty's global community, understanding this and understanding "the metaphysical urge" so well that he has become "entirely free of it,,,128 will still use these vocabularies, but only as ''foci imaginarii," as "handy bits of rhetoric" to use for play and "inspirational" story-telling. 129 He will understand not only that human solidarity is ungroundable, but that this is of no consequence. For imaginative identification makes the need for grounds superfluous and is a far more powerful motivation for treating people decently than any mere "reason" can ever be.

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Based on this concept of solidarity, community in Rorty's postmetaphysical culture has no need for truth or salvation, although the vocabularies of both may still be of use for therapeutic and aesthetic purposes. Far from being the source of meaning and value it is sometimes expected to be,I3O community for Rorty will be the practical everyday embodiment of a world where morality, the individual, and community itself are commonly understood as products of contingency in which neither meaning nor value inhere. 131 Its members willingly "live in plurality," and no longer feel the need to represent their way of life in the form of principles purporting to be universally valid.132 It is common unbelief, rather than common belief, that characterises their existence, and the values and meanings which may inadvertently arise in community are accordingly of no more than local significance. Community's primary and all but exclusive function is the preservation of social cohesion, and social cohesion requires solidarity, not belief. In the context of the latemodem West, social cohesion entails preserving and extending the conditions that make a liberal political order, and with it the conditions for generalised self-creation, possible.133 But above all else, it means "creating" solidarity. It is solidarity that guarantees social cohesion, and it is solidarity, not transcendence, that is crucial to democracy.134 A critical question for Rorty is the relation between solidarity or politics, and therapeutic self-creation. This is a question that Nietzsche and Freud did not address directly, for the simple reason that they did not intend self-creation and therapy to be confined to either the public or the private domain. For the purposes of therapy and self-creation the distinction does not exist. 135 For Rorty, however, private life is the realm of autonomy and "perfection," while public life is the realm of solidarity and justice, and "there is no way ... at the level of theory" to bring these realms together. It is impossible to "hold" them in "a single vision,,,136 and all attempts to do so must be abandoned. 137 A sharp distinction must be drawn between public and private, without granting either priority,138 and the two realms must "compete." In deciding in any given situation whether the demands of justice or the demands of self-creation will prevail, moral considerations should be treated as just another factor rather than as something decisive. Public obligations have "no automatic priority" over private desires. 139 This extreme formulation of the separation of the two realms does not represent Rorty's true position, however, and should be regarded perhaps as an instance of rhetorical play. His more typical statements make it clear that the private realm is subordinate to the public realm in every in-

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stance in which the two come into conflict. Whenever private selfcreation denies "resources" to those in need it must yield to the public demand for justice. 140 The same applies when the private pursuit of autonomy leads to demands for revolution and a total rebuilding of society so that all may be autonomous, 141 or when the private creation of meaning leads to efforts to "re-enchant" the world so that all may have meaning. 142 In both instances, "democracy takes precedence over philosophy." 143 In keeping with a world where the telling of stories has supplanted the search for truth, the sages of Rorty's liberal utopia are not philosophers but poets. 144 The subordination of private to public even extends to the pursuit of personal "perfection," which for Rorty is not the traditional ascetic notion of "self-purification," but a matter of attaining aesthetic "self-enlargement" through the exploration of every possibility. Rorty names de Sade as an exemplar of this type of perfection, and as a model of "the life of unending curiosity.,,145 But he remains so only for as long as he confines his particular pursuit of "perfection" to fantasy. Once fantasies of cruelty become acts of cruelty, the self-enlarging exploration of possibility is abruptly terminated. It is unclear whether Rorty is aware of the extent to which his subordination of private to public thus circumscribes the supposedly limitless possibilities of therapeutic self-creation. But whatever his intention, his ungrounded, ungroundable, and unargued assumption "that there is [no] social goal more important than avoiding cruelty,,146 closes what Nietzsche and Freud left open, by placing rigid limits on what can and cannot be done in the name of therapy and selfcreation. Taken together, the concept of solidarity and the confinement of autonomy, self-creation, and meaning to a strictly delineated private realm make the post-metaphysical culture Rorty postulates both safer than the cultures of Nietzsche and Freud, and more viable. The fellowfeeling created by the mutual fear of cruelty and the exclusion of selfcreation and therapy from the public realm automatically rule out the sort of radical social and political transformation of the world that Nietzsche and even Freud desired, and all the dangers to individual and collective safety which attend it. The transformation of the world Rorty seeks to bring about is no less radical, but effecting it is fundamentally a matter of exchanging one set of presuppositions for another and so thoroughly overcoming the "needs" instilled by "a metaphysical upbringing" that they cease to exist. It does not require social or political change, since the social and political realities of an increasingly disenchanted world pro-

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vide ideal conditions for it. The impossibility of belief and meaning at once forces us to overcome our need for them, and allows us to make a shared susceptibility to suffering, rather than a shared revelation of the truth, the basis for human community. Far from posing a danger to democracy,147 the end of transcendence enables it to come into its own and without upheaval. As Rorty sees it, this is a process already well under way. Post-metaphysical culture is not a prospect of the distant future but the reality of an emerging present.

Making Man Safe for Freedom Solidarity and the privatisation of therapeutic self-creation seem to guarantee both the plausibility and the humane promise of a postmetaphysical culture. Together, sympathetic imaginative identification based on the fear of cruelty and a rigid demarcation of the realms of desire and obligation are intended to be the controlling principles under which Rorty's other key concepts of contingency and irony operate, limiting their application and preventing them being taken too far. In. this way, it might be said, Rorty appropriates the death of God, and the limitlessness of freedom and possibility that follow from it, within a framework that turns it to the exclusive advantage of liberal politics. But what he offers as the guarantee of this is no guarantee at all. Solidarity and the privatisation of therapeutic self-creation cannot constrain the operation of contingency and irony because they are subject to it themselves. Rorty is well aware of this, at least in regard to contingency. The capacity for sympathetic imaginative identification on which solidarity depends is no "more real or central or 'essentially human '" than any other attribute of man. It is the product of contingency, the result of the particular sequence of historical accidents that constitute "socialisation" in the West. By means of this contingency, the ability to sympathise with others who are suffering has become common, but it is not a necessary or permanent feature of human existence. 148 A different sort of socialisation could just as well make us view cruelty from the perspective of the perpetrator rather than that of the sufferer and treat it as an experience to be enjoyed rather than feared, and whether we are socialised in this way or another is entirely a matter of accident. 149 The same applies to the ability to separate our private and public lives, which is crucial to the containment of therapeutic self-creation. Moreover, the socialisation that has made solidarity and the privatisation

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of desire possible is not something that can be taken for granted. There is always "the possibility that the world may swerve" and bring into reality what we now find unimaginable. How we are socialised depends on who we are ruled by, and while "it just happened that rule in Europe passed into the hands of people who pitied the humiliated and dreamed of equality," it may also ''just happen that the world will end up being ruled by people who lack any such sentiments or ideas."lso Socialisation under these conditions would do away with human sympathy altogether. None of this, Rorty claims, means in the present dispensation that solidarity and the privatisation of therapeutic self-creation cannot constrain the implications of contingency for moral and political conduct. But they do so being themselves utterly dependent on what they constrain. Rorty emphasises the problem contingency poses for his postmetaphysical culture, but in doing so he overlooks the problem posed by irony, which is the greater of the two. Rorty sees irony as "inherently a private matter," a tool used in private self-creation IS I which is "of little public use.,,152 When it enters the public realm, it does so destructively. Typically, irony is the preserve of the modem intellectual and arises from an "awareness of the power of redescription." In public discourse irony may be used against "nonintellectuals'; to redescribe settled beliefs and common assumptions as contingent and historically conditioned, and adherence to them as something ridiculous. In this, it has an enormous capacity for cruelty and humiliation. The ironist intellectual is as a consequence an especially resented figure, Rorty claims, but this has less to do with his use of redescription, something used by every philosophy, than with his inability to provide new certainties to replace those he destroYS.IS3 It is this inability to replace what it has destroyed that gives irony common ground with liberalism. Neither implies the other-one may be a liberal without being an ironist, and an ironist without being a liberal ls4-but brought together they resolve what is problematic in each other. Irony allows liberalism to abandon its hopeless search for transcendent grounds and to accept itself without self-doubt as something contingent and historically conditioned;lss and liberalism redeems irony from cruelty and nihilism by subordinating it to solidarity and excluding it from the public domain. This is a very tidy solution, but it is inherently unstable. Irony and liberalism can certainly complement each other, but only if one is of a liberal disposition. In itself, an ironic appreciation of the contingency of human sympathy and the fear of cruelty does not give rise to a necessity for aligning oneself and one's ironising with them. A different course

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might just as well be detennined on. A decision might be taken to wage war on these values as "slave morality." At the very least, one might no longer feel constrained by them in pursuit of self-creation. Rorty well understands that irony does not necessarily lead to liberalism, but he seems to assume that where irony arises in a liberal milieu it will confonn itself to liberal presuppositions. He offers the character of 0 'Brien, the torturer in Orwell's novel 1984, as an instance of an ironist of a "qualified" sort, describing him as "a curious, perceptive intellectual" socialised under different circumstances. 156 His self-enlargement consists of exploring all the possibilities of torture, and as an intellectual torturer he has an acute appreciation of contingency. Because he uses irony and his intellectual abilities in the service of torture and totalitarian control, Rorty considers him "the last ironist in Europe-someone who is employed in the only way in which the end of liberal hope permits irony to be employed." O'Brien can also be considered "the last therapist in Europe," employed in the only way pennitted by his time, and determined to "cure" Winston of "insanity.,,157 Rorty clearly believes that where "liberal hope" subsists, irony will generally, if not always, be employed in ways consistent with it. This is an untenable supposition, not least because of irony's relation to socialisation. Irony depends on the contrast between the system of values or vocabulary an individual inherits through socialisation, and the one he attempts to create for himself. "Ironists have to have something to have doubts about, something from which to be alienated." Socialised to human sympathy, a hatred of cruelty, and the privatisation of therapeutic self-creation, the vocabulary an individual will ironise in Rorty's postmetaphysical culture will be the vocabulary on which it depends. It is inevitable, on Rorty's own account, that far from being constrained by solidarity and privatised therapeutic self-creation, irony must undennine both. "Irony is, if not intrinsically resentful, at least reactive," and it reacts against the values and assumptions individuals are socialised to.158 Because solidarity and the privatisation of therapeutic self-creation cannot constrain the implications of contingency and irony, the humane promise of Rorty's post-metaphysical culture cannot be assured. There is nothing that can prevent the logic of each being taken beyond the bounds of liberal hope. As conceptual commodities, contingency and irony belong to the intellectual class. To "nonintellectuals" the meaning of the words, let alone their implications, would be unclear. But Rorty refuses to see this as a guarantee of safe usage. He demonstrates at length that intellectual ability and artistic sensitivity have no "special connection

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with pity and kindness" or with liberal aspirations, and rejects the notion that an idea confined to a small elite will always be used wisely.159 Confining ideas to a particular class is in any case impossible, and recollecting that "atheism, too, was [once] the exclusive property of intellectuals," Rorty anticipates growing familiarity and acceptance of these ideas by the majority of people. 160 All he can do, in the end, is "ask" that solidarity and the privatisation of therapeutic self-creation be accepted as the principles beyond which contingency and irony are not to be taken. This "request" to subordinate the radical autonomy bequeathed by the death of God to "the desire to avoid pain and cruelty" is simply that: a request. "There is nothing to back up such a request," no greater reality that can be invoked in support of "the liberal's claim that cruelty is the worst thing we dO.,,161 It is not, and cannot be, an imperative. Even so, the situation this creates is not quite what Rorty suggests it to be. There is indeed a reality greater than the individual which can be invoked "to back up" this request, and that is the power of the state. In addition to "equalising life-chances" and "decreasing cruelty," one of the major "common purposes" of Rorty's post-metaphysical culture is the "prediction and control" of human behaviour. This purpose is something Rorty expects to be freely agreed as a result of unconstrained dialogue,162 and it is presumably this free agreement that legitimises the exercise of state power to enforce the privatisation of therapeutic selfcreation. Free agreement on the need to predict and control human behaviour would also warrant the use of state power to support solidarity, not only through laws against crimes of cruelty, but through far-reaching programs of socialisation. Rorty makes it quite clear that socialisation depends on "who rules," that is, on who wields state power. 163 The only way of ensuring that contingency and irony are not employed in ways inimical to liberal hope is to have the state enforce the constraints placed upon them. It is at this juncture that Rorty's post-metaphysical culture is confronted with a contradiction. "The point" of Rorty's liberal utopia "is not to invent or create anything, but simply to make it as easy as possible for people to achieve their wildly different private needs without harming each other.,,164 To achieve this end in the way Rorty wants it achieved, however, is to "invent" an entirely new world. This world is to be brought into being through a deep shift in our philosophical presuppositions and through an increase in our capacity for imaginative identification. For this to be sustained the extensive intervention of the state will be necessary at almost every point. To ensure solidarity, the state must

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socialise man to an enlarged human sympathy. But the socialisation required to create "a world in which tenderness and kindness are the human norm," a world where everyone pays "a curious and tender regard" to the details of everybody's life such that no suffering goes unnoticed,165 demands a remaking of man at least as extensive as that pursued in the lJ .• 166 maki ng 0 f nomo Sov,et,cus. To ensure that privatised therapeutic self-creation does not cause cruelty, the state will have to supervise private life. But the supervision required to prevent the sort of cruelty private therapy/self-creation entails in Nabokov's Lolita (an example Rorty discusses at length) demands the virtual destruction of the distinction upon which Rorty's argument for a post-metaphysical world is based, the distinction between public and private domains. 167 Rorty seeks to bring man into the limitless freedom that is his inheritance with the death of God. For this to occur, man must be made safe for freedom, and it falls to the state to make him so. In Rorty's post-metaphysical culture, accordingly, there will be (to use Rieff's words) "nothing that once would have been understood as morality," but there will be "discipline on a massive scale.,,168 It is on this that the humane promise of a post-metaphysical world as "an endless, proliferating realisation of Freedom,,169 depends, and it is by this that it is cancelled.

From Metaphysics to Power and Necessity Whether or not Rorty succeeds in going further than Nietzsche and Freud depends on his success in going beyond metaphysics, in finally overcoming what Nietzsche and Freud were unable to overcome. In the end, his success in this must be considered doubtful. How are we to deny there is truth without making the absolute truth claim "there is no truth,,?170 How are we "to overcome authority without claiming authority,,?171 Rorty quite rightly identifies these questions as the key to escaping the transcendent. His response is to argue for a shift to a different vocabulary, one in which questions about the foundations of truth, authority, good, and evil no longer occur, one in which the need for meaning has become unintelligible, or at the very least, a "quaint" aspect of a long superseded past. 172 This shift in vocabulary is intended as a "cure" both for the "deep metaphysical need" for grounds and reasons and meaning, and for the "pathos of infinitude" it springs from, although the latter at least is "probably ineliminable.,,173 It entails a "drastic reinterpretation" of language so as to deprive the need for transcendent meaning and

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grounds of the very words required to conceive of itself and to give itself expression. 174 The word truth, for example, would be reinterpreted along the lines suggested by Nietzsche, so that we would regard as "true" anything which "increases our power.,,175 To the extent it retains any meaning at all in a post-metaphysical world, truth will be synonymous with power and have no other meaning. Consistent with this, Rorty sees discussion as the matrix of truth (so defined) in his post-metaphysical culture, not because the truth will always emerge from "a free and open encounter" between individuals, but because whatever view prevails in such an encounter will be considered "true." Here it is important to note that free and open discussion does not require an equality of ability to participate. Whoever talks best, if not loudest, wins. 176 In this way, redescription allows Rorty to make truth claims and to claim authority for them while foreclosing further discussion of truth and authority. Rorty's "truth" may not be the truth at all, but in the world he seeks to bring into being it would be impossible, ideally at least, even to make such a suggestion. This is central to Rorty's postmetaphysical culture. Certain questions must be made impossible, or at the very least absurd, to ask. A particularly urgent instance for Rorty is the question "why not be cruel?" It is a question that cannot be answered, and for this reason it must be made inconceivable. In a post-metaphysical world, the question simply will not occur, allowing the absolute prohibition against cruelty to stand as unproblematic. In arguing for a shift in language, Rorty also argues for a shift in culture, a shift from a culture based on truth to a culture based on meaningless contingency, a shift from necessity to freedom. Nietzsche's destruction of the idea of a transcendent, absolute truth is completed by Freud, who by "abjur[ing] the notion of the 'truly human'" rids us "of the last citadel of necessity, the last attempt to see us as all confronting the same imperatives, the same unconditional claims.,,177 The displacement of necessity by contingency makes self-creation possible, allows us to be and do and make of ourselves anything we will. But it also deprives us of the ability to "appropriate and transform" contingency within a system of meaning. Recognising that there is no meaning, we can no longer make the contingencies which impress themselves upon us, particularly those which impress themselves upon us as suffering, meaningful. All we can do is "recognise contingency and pain" as the fundamental nature of existence. Our acceptance of this is also our submission to it.178 This is Rorty's equivalent of Nietzsche's am or fati, and in urging us to submit ourselves

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to contingency and suffering as the absolute and non-contingent reality of life, he shackles us to a new form of necessity, a necessity of meaninglessness (as opposed to one of meaning) like that of Nietzsche' s eternal recurrence. The freedom this acceptance brings depends entirely on power, the power an individual is subject to and the power he can wield. Left to individuals, this potentially limitless power would not favour liberal aspirations. Rorty therefore assigns it to the state, the only thing greater than the individual in a post-metaphysical world that can be invoked to constrain him. As the agency through which the socialisation of man to solidarity and privatised therapeutic self-creation is realised, anything that increases its power to further this end must be considered "true," and presumably "good." As the greatest power, the state becomes "truth" itself. Like the post-metaphysical cultures of Nietzsche and Freud, Rorty's post-metaphysical culture thus ends in a scenario of limitless power and meaningless freedom. The escape from metaphysics fails because there is no escape from the consequences of its collapse. Against the submission to contingency-the submission to meaningless necessity-that Rorty encourages us to make, self-creation can only be therapeutic, even for those rare few who can "make their lives works of art"; 179 and because of it, unending talk in the form of story-telling and "conversation" assumes the enormous importance it has in Rorty's postmetaphysical culture. Post-metaphysical culture's ideal type, the liberal ironist, is the individual who fully understands what submission to contingency entails, and it is only talking which enables him "to keep himself together, to keep his web of beliefs and desires coherent enough to enable him to act.,,180 The void, it seems, is inescapable, and talk alone offers any consolation. It allows post-metaphysical man to stave off personal dissolution, and brings him comfort for his inability to stand before the gates of Auschwitz and say that what happened within them was truly evil. 181

Notes 1. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xvi. 2. Ibid. 9. 3. Ibid. 22. 4. Ibid. xvi. 5. On the "contingency of the self," see Ibid. chapter 1.

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6. Richard Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in Objectivity, Truth and Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 193. 7. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 21-22. 8. Ibid. 189. 9. On the liberal ironist, see Ibid. chapter 4. 10. Ibid. xv. 11. Richard Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," in Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 159-60. 12. Rorty argues that morality is best understood as no more than "a set of contingent practices" within which there is no real or substantial distinction between "the moral" and "the prudent." Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,58-60. 13. Ibid. 37. 14. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 152. 15. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 96-97. 16. Ibid. 91-93,190-92. 17. Ibid 50. 18. Ibid. 84-85. 19. Ibid. xiii-xiv. 20. Ibid. xiv. 21. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 154. 22. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 85ff. 23. Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," 193. 24. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 45. 25. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 162; and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 94. 26. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 40. 27. Ibid. 21. 28. Ibid. 163. 29. Ibid. 107. The phrase is Heidegger's. 30. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 163. 31. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 21. 32. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 163. 33. Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," 195. 34. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 46. Cf. 40. 35. Ibid. xv-xvi. 36. Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," 193-94; and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 39-40. 37. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv. 38. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 152. 39. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 190. 40. Ibid. 192. 41. Ibid. 54-55; and "Freud and Moral Reflection," 163-64.

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42. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 57. 43. Ibid. 27; and Rorty, "Pragmatism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy," in Essays on Heidegger and Others, 3. The translation cited in the text is Alasdair MacIntyre's and is taken from his book Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame, Ind.: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1990),35. Kaufmann translates the relevant part of the fragment in PN 46-47. For the entire fragment, see Daniel Breazeale (ed. and trans.), Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press, 1979), 79-97. The passage cited will be found at 84. Also related to Rorty's argument about "the contingency of language" is Nietzsche's remark that "man really [thinks] that in language he possess[es] knowledge of the world" (as opposed to a mere description of it). See Human, All Too Human 16. 44. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 9. 45. Ibid. 10-20. 46. Rorty, "Pragmatism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy," 4-5. 47. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 7-10. 48. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 155. 49. Cf. Rorty's discussion of Horkheimer and Adomo in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 56-57. 50. Ibid. 8-9. 51. Ibid. 47-48. 52. Ibid. 27. 53. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 147. 54. Ibid. 148-50. 55. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 32-33. 56. Ibid. 30-33. 57. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 150-51. 58. Ibid. 147. 59. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 177. 60. Ibid. 30. 61. Ibid. 184-85. 62. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 144. 63. Ibid. 158. 64. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 103. 65. Ibid. 27-29. 66. Ibid. 30 and 36. 67. Ibid. 35. 68. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 161. 69. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 37. 70. Twilight of the Idols PN 50 I: "That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a causa prima, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as 'spirit'-that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored."

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71. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 39-40. 72. Ibid. 23-24. 73. Ibid. 42-43. 74. Ibid. 65. 75. The Gay Science 302-03. This section of The Gay Science is titled "How things will become ever more 'artistic' in Europe" and anticipates the shift from a culture in which individuals' occupations or "roles" are "confounded" with their characters, to the extent that the role "actually become[sJ character"; to one in which "The individual becomes convinced that he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role, and everybody experiments with himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and becomes art." Although apparently possessed of "an artist's faith" in self-creation, people who live in such a culture are not so much artists as "actors." Their self-creation is in fact a form of role-playing. 76. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 98-99. 77. Rorty, "Pragmatism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy," 6. 78. The Gay Science 280, 283. 79. What is not pursued here is whether Rorty himself has escaped the thrall of metaphysics completely. For a discussion of this question, and RortY's response, see James Conant, "Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell," in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell,2000). 80. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 105-08. 81. Ecce Homo BN 782. The emphasis is Nietzsche's. 82. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 107-08. It has often been observed that Nietzsche's perspectivism coexists with the discovery of a new "truth." See for example Arthur C. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Berkowitz. 83. Human, All Too Human 12-13; and The Will to Power 267. 84. On the Uses and Disadvantages ofHistory for Life UM 63. 85. Beyond Good and Evil BN 193. 86. Ibid. 330. 87. Ibid. 351. 88. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 107. 89. On the Genealogy of Morals BN 555. 90. Ecce Homo BN 754. 91. Cf. Freud, for whom the typical "conflict due to ambivalence" comprised "a well-grounded love and a no less justifiable hatred directed towards one and the same person" or object. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety SE 20: 102. 92. Richard Rorty, "Freud, Morality, and Hermeneutics," New Literary Review 12 (1980): 183. 93. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 158.

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94. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 38-39. 95. New Introductory Lectures SE 22: 172. 96. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 185. 97. An Outline o/Psychoanalysis SE 23: 197. 98. Ibid. 184-85. 99. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 161. 100. That at least seems to be the implication of Rorty's argument that psychoanalysis must be "used rather than transcended." It must not be redescribed, as it were, through recourse "to another, less specific, loftier vocabulary." To do this is to lose what makes "Freud both so useful and so important-his dehumanisation of the springs of action, and especially of love." Rorty, "Freud, Morality, and Hermeneutics," 181-82. Freud uses the methodology of the positivist scientist and the methodology of hermeneutics, which creates an important tension in his work. Rorty does not appreciate this tension. On Freud's methodological discrepancies, see Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests. 101. Beyond the Pleasure Principle SE 18: 61n. 102. Ibid. 40-43. 103. Ibid. 36-39. 104. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 122; and An Outline 0/ Psychoanalysis SE 23: 197. 105. Beyond the Pleasure Principle SE 18: 38-40. 106. See The Ego and the Id SE 19: 40, "On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put forward the hypothesis of a death instinct." The biological evidence in favour of the death instinct is outlined and discussed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle SE 18: 44-49. 107. "Why War?" SE 22: 211. 108. Freud's ambivalence on the question of meaning, and specifically on the question of religion, has been extensively explored. See for example Richard Webster, Why Freud Was Wrong (London: Fontana, 1996), chapter 14; Paul Vitz, Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious (1988) (Leominister: Gracewing, 1993); Emmanuel Rice, Freud and Moses (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 1990); and Rieff, Mind o/the Moralist, Epilogue (see also chapter 8 for a more general discussion of Freud's attitude to religion). 109. Jones 3: 465. See also Letters 432 for Freud's letter to Marie Bonaparte dated August 13, 1937. 110. Civilisation and its Discontents SE 21: 145. Ill. The Future 0/ an Illusion SE 21: 56. 112. This is a point that has often been made. See for example Gellner; and more recently Webster, part 2. 113. Freud quoted in Jones 2: 466. 114. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, chapter 2. 115. Ibid. 195-96. 116. Ibid. xvi.

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117. Ibid. 196. 118. Ibid. xvi. 119. Ibid. 190-91. 120. Ibid. xvi. 121. Ibid. 91. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 86. 124. Ibid. 85-87. 125. Ibid. 91. 126. Ibid. 189-92. 127. Ibid. 86. 128. Ibid. 96-97. 129. Ibid. 195. 130. See for example MacIntyre; and Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (London: Mandarin, 1996), especially chapter 31. 131. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 6l. 132. Ibid. 67. 133. Ibid. 84-85. 134. Ibid. 86-86. 135. Rorty, himself sees this as a problem only for Nietzsche, who is "magnificent" as a theorist of self-creation, but "at best vapid, and at worst sadistic" when he joins self-creation to politics (Ibid. 120). Freud, in contrast, has "no contribution to make to social theory" ("Freud and Moral Reflection," 154), and Rorty invokes him as an authority for the proposition that public and private must be clearly distinguished and treated as incommensurable (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 34-35). 136. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xiv. 137. Ibid. 120. 138. Ibid. 33-34. On this see Richard J. Bemstein, The New Constellation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991),286-87. 139. Ibid. 197. 140. Ibid. xiv. 141. Ibid. 65. 142. Ibid. 67-68. 143. Rorty, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," 189-94. In Rorty's post-metaphysical culture philosophy no longer has a public dimension. It is "not relevant" to politics and is something one pursues privately, according to "taste," for one's own therapeutic and aesthetic purposes. 144. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 60-61. 145. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," 154. Ascetic self-perfection is expressed in "the desire to purify oneself ... to slim down, to peel away everything that is accidental, to will one thing, to intensify, to become a simpler and more transparent being." Aesthetic self-perfection, in contrast, is expressed in

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"the desire to enlarge oneself . . . to embrace more and more possibilities, to be constantly learning, to give oneself over entirely to curiosity, to end by having envisaged all the possibilities of the past and of the future." Rorty also names Byron and Hegel as exemplars of this form of perfection, the one seeking selfenlargement through "political engagement," the other through "the enrichment of language." He claims that "for those who decline the options offered by de Sade and Byron . . . the principal technique of self-enlargement will be Hegel's." 146. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 65. 147. Rorty denies that the "absence of metaphysics is politically dangerous" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 82-88) and argues that "the collapse of liberal democracies would not, in itself," prove the contrary ("The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," 194-96). What would prove the absence of metaphysics "politically dangerous" he does not say. 148. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 92-93. 149. Ibid. 177. 150. Ibid. 184-85. 151. Ibid. 87-88. 152. Ibid. 93-95, 120. 153. Ibid. 89-91. 154. Ibid. chapter 4. 155. Ibid. 87. Liberal ironists "see themselves as contingent through and through, without feeling any particular doubts about the contingencies they [happen] to be." 156. Ibid. 176-77, 183. On O'Brien, see the passage ofOrwell's novel cited by Rorty at 186. O'Brien is an ironist in a "qualified sense" because he "has mastered doublethink, and is not troubled by doubts about himself or the Party" (Ibid. 187). On Rorty's own terms, this is a questionable claim. Irony is characterised in part by "radical and continuing doubts" about the vocabulary one uses at any given time. But in combination with a public vocabulary such as that of liberalism, it leads to an acceptance of the contingent nature of all vocabularies without the need for constant doubt about the vocabulary embraced (Ibid. 73, 87). O'Brien follows this pattern in marrying irony with the vocabulary oftotalitarianism, and absence of doubt about the Party, therefore, does not qualify the sense in which he is to be understood as an ironist. Nor does his mastery of doublethink. It might be argued that the ability to hold two contradictory propositions in mind as true simultaneously is also required in Rorty's postmetaphysical culture, in which the individual is at once to hold that "nothing is true and everything permitted" (that everything is contingent and historically conditioned), and "that cruelty is the worst thing we do" (that, contingent or not, there is a truth and some things are prohibited). 157. Ibid. 187. 158. Ibid. 87-88.

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159. Ibid. 168. See also 187-88: "Intellectual gifts-intelligence ... a taste for beauty-~re as malleable as the sexual instinct. They are as capable of as many diverse employments as the human hand," and have no more connection with "a 'natural' self which prefers kindness to torture, or torture to kindness" than do the muscles and limbs of the body. Rorty elaborates this point in chapters 7 and 8 of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 160. Ibid. 87. 161. Ibid. 197. 162. Ibid. 67. 163. Ibid. 184-85. 164. Richard Rorty, "Moral Identity and Private Autonomy," in Essays on Heidegger and Others, 196. 165. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 160, 163-64. 166. On what the remaking of man entailed in the unsuccessful instance of Homo sovieticus, see Mikhail Helier, Cogs in the Soviet Wheel (198S), trans. David Floyd (London: Collins Harvill, 1988). 167. The destruction of this distinction, for the purposes of eradicating incest and child abuse for example, is already well under way. See Kenneth Anderson, "Children Going West." Times Literary Supplement, July 19, 1996, 3. As Anderson remarks, "Liberalism's wall between public and private is a waning paradigm. " 168. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 127. This is a point also made by Giddens, although in a different way. Giddens argues that as metaphysical culture wanes and disappears, the internal controls of conscience and guilt will cease to be as effective as they once were in maintaining social order, and will be increasingly replaced by resort to external measures such as shaming. See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991). 169. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xvi. 170. Ibid. 7-8. 171. Ibid. 104-0S. 172. Ibid. 45. 173. Ibid. 40, 46. 174. Ibid. 4S. 17S. Ibid. IIS-16. 176. Ibid. SI-S2. 177. Ibid. 3S. 178. Ibid. 40. 179. Rorty, "Freud and Moral Reflection," IS4. 180. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 186. 181. Ibid. 189-90. Rorty is here arguing that the concept of the "inhuman" is not a concept he can invoke before the gates of Auschwitz and other such places because what a decent human being is will always be contingent on historical circumstances. He undoubtedly holds the Holocaust to be a great evil, and would

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describe it as such with all the force of passion and conviction. But there is nothing beyond human life and history which enables us to say that what happened at Auschwitz was absolutely and truly evil: that is, of such a nature and essence that it would always and everywhere be an act of evil, irrespective of how it might be redescribed and interpreted by people socialised under different conditions. Rorty's point, of course, is that this does not matter. We do not need transcendent grounds to hold that something is evil and to oppose it with all our might. But if the Nazis had won the Second World War and decided to describe what was done at Auschwitz as "good," few people would be satisfied if all we could offer in opposition was an equally valid interpretation that it was not so.

Conclusion

Culture and life

As a solution to the problem of meaninglessness, the cultures of Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty are themselves deeply problematic. The analysis of the modem condition informing Freud's therapeutic culture and Nietzsche's aesthetic culture is fundamentally the same: man's need for meaning makes him sick. In the face of invincible meaninglessness Freud counsels resignation for the strong and therapy for the weak. Nietzsche urges a more radical solution: the overcoming of the Christianmetaphysical interpretation, which imposes the category "meaningless" upon the world, and the overcoming of man, the creature who needs meaning, by the superman, the god who embraces meaninglessness as meaning itself. To Nietzsche, Freud's solution would make the world a hospital and give it over in its entirety to the last man; whereas for Freud, Nietzsche's solution offers at best a retreat into delusion, and at worst a headlong flight into madness and self-destruction. Because the human individual cannot truly make himself a god or a work of art, except in psychosis, the two solutions converge and the aesthetic inevitably loses itself in the therapeutic. Rorty attempts to go further than Nietzsche and Freud, not least by establishing a clear distinction between self-creation and therapy and asserting the superiority of the aesthetic over the therapeutic. But the attempt fails, and contrary to his intentions Rorty ends by underscoring this convergence. Assuming the need for meaning can be overcome, the key problem facing these solutions is the limitlessness of possibility and the endlessness of power. There is no limit to what may serve the purposes of therapy and self-creation, no limit on the exercise of power in their service. Nietzsche explicitly poses this problem as his solution. Freud envisages a world ruled by therapists to make all people moderate and reasonable, but it is precisely in this sort of world that anything which might have a 115

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positive therapeutic "yield" would be permitted. Aware of these problems, Rorty attempts to constrain therapeutic self-creation by effectively subordinating it to the governing principles of solidarity and irony. However, these principles cannot compel this subordination by themselves. They must be enforced, and to be enforced in the way Rorty desires in a world where there are no grounds for moral compulsion would require the massive exercise of state power. The solutions of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty represent three powerful and influential attempts to theorise a culture that overcomes the need for meaning. Each of these attempts, considered on its own terms, fails and must fail. None succeed in achieving the main objective they set themselves-surmounting meaninglessness-and all conclude in a scenario oflimitless power. In analysing these three theories, an attempt has been made to envisage the type of society each one would produce, and to consider how viable or sustainable it would be. The question is whether these imagined societies are at all possible, whether they could ever, even briefly, come into being. For Rorty, this question has been answered: his postmetaphysical culture is the emergent culture of the present. In his view all indications are that post-metaphysical culture is not only viable and possible, but the shape of the future in the West. Rorty's solution undoubtedly has the best prospects of becoming reality, and his argument for it is perfectly pitched to the modem sensibility, which tends to favour fragmentation over coherence, pragmatic moderation over ideology, ana celebrity over seriousness. The promise of a culture in which the need for redemption has disappeared, in which life is organised around generalised unbelief and therapeutic self-creation, and in which the interior life has ceased "to press its sickening claim to authority,,1 has great appeal, and Rorty exploits this by affirming the moral and epistemological confusion in which most people are content to live. He asks nothing more of them than the repudiation of a few historical hang-ups and a bigger effort to be nice to others. From this point of view a post-metaphysical culture may seem inevitable. But nothing is certain when it comes to predicting how the concatenation of dynamics in Western society will play itself out. 2 As this book has attempted to show, there are important theoretical objections to the realisation of a culture of therapeutic self-creation, but reality does not always pay much respect to theory. If, paying no heed to these objections, a therapeutic-aesthetic culture should come into being, "what then?,,3 Then, a different question presents itself, the question of value. Considering the therapeutic-aesthetic solution not as a matter of

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theory but as a possible future reality inescapably raises the question of what it would mean for human life and individual existence. This requires an ethical evaluation, something that will no longer be possible within the confines of the new culture itself. The most direct approach is to take the ideal of therapeutic-aesthetic culture and ask: what is wrong with it? Is there anything inherent in such a culture, considered exclusively in terms of its promise, which is morally problematic or unacceptable? For this purpose a description of the promise of this culture in its generic form-as an ideal type-is required. This can be found in Robert MusH's novel The Man Without Qualities (1952). The ideal citizen of a culture of therapeutic self-creation as Musil understands it is "potential man," man conceived not as a character but as "the quintessence of his possibilities." The world in which he lives is one where it is commonly understood that nothing is "as solid as it pretends to be; no thing, no self, no form, no principle, is safe, everything is undergoing an invisible but ceaseless transformation, the unsettled holds more of the future than the settled, and the present is nothing but a hypothesis that has not yet been surmounted." This is a world where the endlessness of possibility is the focus of life, and where in order to maximise the experience of it the individual lives "hypothetically." Detached from all he does, lest he be tempted to "premature conclusions" about who he is or the nature of the world, he refuses to "make something of himself; a character, a profession, a fixed mode of being, are for him concepts that already show forth the outlines of the skeleton, which is all that will be left of him in the end." He seeks instead to understand himself differently, as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or intellectually taboo; he feels like a stride, free to move in any direction, from equilibrium to equilibrium, but always forward. And when he sometimes thinks he has found the right idea, he perceives that a drop of indescribable incandescence has fallen into the world, with a glow that makes the whole earth look different. 4

The culture Musil evokes is one in which man has at last been freed from, or at last let go of, his "gruesome" moral seriousness and his "dogmatic" need for one truth, for one reality,s not just in regard to life but also in regard to his very self. Man gives himself over to the exploration of what he can be in a spirit of lightness and play, and the language Musil uses well conveys the promise of life lived in this spirit: inward

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enrichment, expansive freedom and movement, grace and poise in the midst of constantly changing equilibriums, and the "indescribable incandescence" new experiences bring to the world. Both the therapeutic and the aesthetic dimensions of the new culture are subsumed in this promise, their convergent meanings being nicely captured in the phrase "living hypothetically." But above all else the promise of this culture is a promise of new life, and freedom from the burden of a culture that is dead. It means the reclamation of "the innocence of becoming." An age in which the innocence of becoming has been reclaimed is one in which "the crude approximations" used to explain and govern human life and conduct in "simpler times" are no longer adequate. Living hypothetically necessitates exchanging "a moral order that over two thousand years has adjusted only piece-meal to evolving tastes" for "a new morality capable of fitting more closely with the mobility of the facts.,,6 But in a world where becoming has utterly supplanted being, what sort of morality can there be? The spirit of lightness characteristic of life in a culture of therapeutic self-creation represents the final overcoming of the seriousness that generates the need to distinguish right action from wrong. It is not intended as a new basis on which it might be reintroduced. Post-metaphysical culture, unlike metaphysical culture, does not moralise. It is precisely this which makes it possible to live hypotheticaIIy and to reclaim the innocence of becoming. Having gone beyond the need to moralise, the new culture makes the world a playground of unlimited therapeutic and aesthetic possibilities to be explored and experimented with heedlessly in the restored freedom and openness of childhood. Therapeutic-aesthetic culture is a world of play, and to intrude notions of right and wrong into play is to put an end to it. For as "the dark Heraclitus" reminds us, it is in the nature of things that children play wantonly. 7 How then might something like murder be regarded in this culture? Until now, murder has been inextricably bound to a moral interpretation of the world that treats it as a matter of utmost gravity. But in a world where such an interpretation and the seriousness it requires have been superseded, this will no longer be possible or desirable. The individual who will live in the new culture "understands himself differently" to his ancestors, "as someone inclined and open to everything that may enrich him inwardly, even if it should be morally or intellectually taboo." Living hypothetically demands that even murder be approached lightly and in the spirit of play, for who is to say it may not "enrich one inwardly?" To shy from treating murder lightly, or to argue that murder can never be

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an enriching experience, is to remain in servitude to "the crude approximations" of earlier times and to gravely misunderstand the nature of this culture, reducing its promise to little more than a pose to be immediately abandoned when demanded by the seriousness of the moment. The presuppositions at work here are a radical denial of meaning and a diagnosis of the human condition that identifies man's insistence on treating life seriously, treating it as if it meant something, as the cause of his being amongst all other creatures "the sick animal."g The solution to this-the solution to meaninglessness-is to overcome seriousness and, in doing so, to bring man to a higher stage of development. It is important to note that the first of these presuppositions by itself is not sufficient to realise this goal. If life means nothing, if nothing in life possesses intrinsic significance, then human actions are only as significant or insignificant as man wills. This still leaves scope for according life a significance of a sort, albeit arbitrarily, and so for taking it seriously. The identification of seriousness as a disease, however, takes the culture of therapeutic self-creation decisively beyond this. Nothing is to be treated seriously, which means that nothing is to be accorded even man-made significance. Nothing is to be treated even "as if' it is of real and abiding importance. The logic of this would seem to mean that, appropriately redescribed, murder, and even mass murder, can be regarded in the spirit of lightness and play, and serve as another possible avenue of experience and inward enrichment. There can be no post-metaphysical culture in which anything is regarded with the seriousness typifying metaphysical culture, for the overcoming-the elimination--of moral-metaphysical seriousness is this new culture's constitutive condition. Even in a world drained of all significance, real and arbitrary, it seems implausible, to say the least, that murder could ever be treated as a matter of play. But as Rorty emphasises, in a world where no action or object possesses an essence, redescription is everything. If there is no inherent nature or reality to something by which it can be defined and accorded its appropriate significance, then it can never be anything more than what it is described or interpreted to be. Human life can never be sacred. If it has no status or nature independent of description, then a description of life as sacred does not and cannot make it so. It provides only an interpretation, one among many possible, which redescription may at any time make redundant. Making murder a thing of play is all a matter of how it is described, especially when the concept of the human ceases to be attached to anything intrinsic and becomes a label to be conferred or withdrawn as the need arises. The history of the last century

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yields abundant evidence of how this has enabled man to murder lightly. Tenns such as kulak and Jew have been used by the great totalitarian isms to redescribe whole populations as less than human,9 allowing them to be killed-at least in some places-with "boyish, openjoy."lO These examples only show how redescription can facilitate murder in a metaphysical culture, in pursuit of some sort of spurious supreme "truth." But if murder can be undertaken so lightly and cheerfully in a metaphysical culture, how much more so might this be in a culture that has dispensed with all metaphysical premises? In the Christianmetaphysical culture of the West, the totalitarian projects and redescriptions that consigned certain lives to extennination still had to contend with the patrimony they repudiated and which insists on the truth that human life has a sacred value demanding unconditional respect. In therapeutic-aesthetic culture however, even to conceive of such an absolute truth will no longer be possible, the ability to do so having long since been lost or overcome. Murderous redescriptions will no longer be met by "resistant truth."" Nor will they need to be justified anymore by reference to a "supreme fiction" such as race purity or class struggle. '2 It is important to elaborate this point, for it is sometimes suggested that the great extenninations of the past century are the direct or indirect consequence of the demand generated by Western culture for transcendent meaning. 13 To take only one fonn of this argument, very simply described, it is claimed that, because it is conceived as an absolute truth with origins in a realm higher than the merely human, meaning totalises existence. It posits a moral code or a scheme of redemption that applies universally to all times and places and that is realised not simply in the life of the individual but collectively. The combination of revealed truth and collective salvation gives rise to a dichotomy that makes possible the description and redescription of all humanity in tenns of the saved and the damned: those who belong to the truth and those who do not. It is in this that the dynamic of millenarianism is found, a dynamic that tends powerfully to the dehumanisation of vast numbers of people upon which mass murder depends.'4 The point of this line of reasoning is not that millenarianism and mass murder are an excrescence of the pursuit of transcendent meaning, but that they are inherent in it. When meaning is taken too seriously, when it is conceived as a revelation from on high, as the final explanation of human life and purpose, and as something which pertains not only to the individual but to the collective, it becomes murderous.

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From this perspective, a culture that has freed itself from transcendence will not be a cause of mass murder and barbarism but the solution to them, an attempt to ensure that they will not occur again. It is a view which, holding that absolute values, universal meaning, and collective salvation are impossible, regards the need for them not only as something pathological in its own right, but as the pathogen of human extermination. In a century in which various developments enabled man to undertake mass murder on a scale hitherto unimaginable, overcoming the need for meaning became for some much more than the precondition of "great health" that Nietzsche and Freud regarded it to be. It became an absolute imperative, the last of its kind in human history. To the extent that the need for meaning persists in the transition from the old culture to the new and beyond, it is to be dealt with through therapeutic self-creation. Purpose, values, and means of redemption are to be understood exclusively as matters particular and personal to the individual, privately created and insusceptible to universalisation. It is in this-in the assertion that common meaning, value, and redemption are impossible-that the success of this attempt to ensure against mass murder lies. It makes the pursuit of salvation an option rather than a necessity, one that cannot be undertaken collectively because the only salvation to be had is that which the individual creates for himself. In supplanting salvation with self-creation, in "overcoming the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives,,,15 the culture of therapeutic self-creation is intended to ensure that the horrors of the twentieth century are not repeated in another. Greatly simplified though the account of this argument is, its two major claims-that the search for transcendent meaning and collective salvation leads to Auschwitz, and that the abandonment of this search will not cause human extermination but help ensure it becomes less likelyrequire careful consideration. It would seem that if a therapeuticaesthetic culture were to be realised in its ideal form, so that the idea of meaning and the concept of collective redemption had generally become unintelligible, all that could be ensured in regard to human extermination is that it would not be undertaken salvifically. People would no longer be murdered en masse to bring about heaven on earth, but for more mundane purposes-the purposes of therapeutic self-creation, for examplehuman extermination would continue to be a very real possibility. For example: therapeutic self-creation depends on good physical health, and there is really no scope within it for illness, or for caring for those who suffer physically. It is obvious that euthanasia would be avail-

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able in such a culture, both as the final act of overcoming and as the means of bringing the cflse history that is one's "life story" to a close at the moment of one's own choosing. But beyond this particular situation, that is, beyond the sufferer, there are also those who care for him. For some of these at least the burden such care entails must frustrate or defeat their own attempts at self-creation. More generally, as Nietzsche noted, illness in others is ugly, and "the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gI00my.,,16 It hinders playfulness and intrudes in an unwelcome fashion on the attempt to live lightly. It is more than probable, therefore, that in a therapeutic-aesthetic culture, those who foil the self-creation of others through unsightly illness or physical or mental disability will be "granted a mercy death." What this means, of course, is extermination, but redescribed appropriately it would not be thought of as such. Instead, it would be treated as a compassionate way of overcoming the "sordid necessity of living for others" which characterised life in the old Christian-metaphysical culture. I? Another illustration of what the logic of therapeutic self-creation entails, and how this logic, rather than removing us from the possibility of institutionalised extermination, would seem to bring us closer to it, is abortion. The most recent figures available show there were 1,184,758 abortions in the United States in 1997. This is the lowest number recorded since 1978. 18 Even if this "low" number represented the number of abortions for each year of that twenty-year period, the total number of procedures in this one country would still be numbered in the tens of millions. One really does not know how to describe this other than as an extermination, although it is of course completely unacceptable to do so; and that is the point. Through redescription, abortion is treated and understood not as human destruction but as a matter of autonomy and freedom. Against this redescription, any suggestion that abortion entails killing or equates with murder casts very real doubts on both the decency and reasonableness of those who make it. Although the argument around abortion is always cast in the moral language of rights, being successfully redescribed as a matter of freedom and "life-style choice"19 has meant that a large number of people in Western societies do not see it as a moral issue at all. Ultimately, the power of this redescription may become less secure, especially now it is becoming acceptable for women to speak of the guilt and denial that has played such an important part in sustaining it. 20 Its strength continues to be enormous, however, as the failure of recent efforts in the United States to prohibit partial birth abortion shows. The truly alarming thing

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about this is that while the humanity of the child in the womb is no longer seriously disputed by anyone, it still counts for nothing even in the very last weeks of pregnancy. Abortion today and euthanasia in the future serve as uncomfortable and very disturbing examples of the nature of a culture of therapeutic self-creation, and what it will mean for human existence. There will no longer be moral issues in this culture. It will be impossible to debate a matter in moral terms. Discussion will focus exclusively on whether or not something enhances the opportunities for self-creation, and objections based on moral grounds, where they are not simply regarded as incomprehensible, will be unacceptable. It also means that if extermination can ever be normalised, it is much more likely to be achieved in this new sort of culture. Its exterminations will not be carried out behind barbedwire as a police operation. They will take place in a hospital or clinical setting under medical supervision, facilitated and protected by the state, but not conducted by it. For what the limitless freedom of therapeuticaesthetic culture means here is the freedom of the individual to conduct-m at least, initiate-his own exterminations, although most importantly of all, they would not be thought of as exterminations. Appropriately redescribed, they would cease to be anything out of the ordinary, being understood solely as humane and necessary therapeutic measures to preserve self-creation and, serving as such, as a hallmark of a decent society. If the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century could have attained such a thoroughgoing redescription of their exterminations on behalf of the health of the race and the triumph of oppressed classes, their death camps would have been placed in the centre of cities and lit up at night-as the abortion clinic in Huxley's Brave New World is lit up21-as monuments to the greatness of their culture and its achievements. The totalitarian attempts at redescription in the service of extermination foundered on the fact that the old moralising culture had been insufficiently overcome. But in a culture of therapeutic self-creation, in which the old culture has been so completely overcome that its "crude approximations" of good and evil are no longer intelligible, redescription will not be defeated in this way. The claim that Auschwitz is the inevitable consequence of the pursuit of transcendent meaning and collective salvation assumes there is no "true" or transcendent meaning to be had: there are only the relative meanings which people create for themselves and universalise to their peril. No distinction is made in this between true meaning and false meaning, because all meaning is false-an illusion and a deception-denying as it does the fundamental truth that existence

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is meaningless. This is a completely inadequate response to Auschwitz and all it represents, for in understanding the evil of totalitarianism, the distinction between truth and lies, between meaning and what in the instance of totalitarianism can quite properly be called anti-meaning, is crucial. It is possible to make absolute truth claims for lies. In doing this, and in opposing it, re description is indispensable. So, for example, Stalin's apologists described the society he created as a workers' paradise, while opponents such as Orwell and Solzhenitsyn described it as a tyranny supported and sustained by terror, torture, and slavery. Holding there is no truth outside our descriptions of it, Rorty argues that the conflict between these redescriptions cannot be resolved. They can only be compared with each other as an exercise in intellectual play. Deciding between the redescriptions of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn and those of communism's apologists "is not a matter of confronting or refusing to confront hard, unpleasant facts .... It is a matter of playing off scenarios against contrasting scenarios, projects against alternative projects, descriptions against redescriptions.'>22 This is to ignore the fact that in this particular battle of redescriptions, one party was lying and the other was telling the truth. To accept, as Rorty asks us to, that there is no such thing as truth is also to accept that there is no such thing as a lie. It is therefore legitimate and valid to describe the extermination of a people as a matter of hygiene, or as an expression of childlike playfulness, if one so chooses. The supremacy of redescription, the acceptance of the proposition that there is only redescription, makes for the supremacy of sheer power. If everything-language, morality, custom, culture, and human life itself-is nothing more than what it is described to be from time to time, then everything is subordinate to and forever in the service of power, to be made and remade at whim. Those who survived the torture chambers and concentration camps that totalitarianism built as institutions for the overcoming of man understood this acutely. As victims of total power and total redescription, they were not content merely to assert a rival redescription. Rather, they invoked the vocabulary of truth, insisting that a human being is always a human being, that extermination is always extermination, and that these things can never be anything other than what they are, irrespective of how they may be described and redescribed. 23 Truth resists and inhibits "the endlessness ofpower, ..24 even when it is spoken into the abyss of totalitarian redescription.

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The vocabulary of resistant truth is the one vocabulary which no project-liberal or totalitarian--can control. As a consequence, it is the guarantor of human dignity and freedom, especially in the gas chambers and gulags which are the total negation of both. In the light of this, to argue that it is the pursuit of transcendent meaning--of the truth-which leads to Auschwitz, 'and that the abandonment of this pursuit will protect against its recurrence, would seem to be putting the matter exactly the wrong way around. The denial that there is any basis on which to distinguish good from evil, and truth from lies, made Auschwitz possible, and the argument that this denial will now assist to prevent what it caused is absurd. To the extent that the recurrence of Auschwitz can be guarded against, it can be done only by attempting to rediscover the basis for distinguishing truth from lies. To this end, it is the attempt to overcome meaning, not the search for it, that should be abandoned. How then is a culture of therapeutic self-creation to be evaluated? How is the question of value it raises to be answered? In passing judgment on the Christian-metaphysical culture of Europe, Nietzsche formulated a test to apply to every culture in every time and place, the test of human enhancement. True culture for Nietzsche increases man's strength and greatness. Its antithesis "improves" man, making him mild and moderate, weak and agreeable. Given Nietzsche's importance to the concept of therapeutic-aesthetic culture, it is appropriate to judge it by his standards. In curing man of what so fatally weakens him-his need for meaning-this new culture is certainly intended to enhance rather than improve, and this is how Nietzsche himself understood it. But to effect this cure it must destroy or displace the inwardness that is the origin not only of guilt, dread, and the need for redemption, but of everything that makes us what we are; not least our ability, through love, to make a gift of ourselves to other people. If man is to live lightly, his inwardness must be overcome. This done, he can make of himself what he will. Man will be as a god. 2s But because this apotheosis requires the destruction of inwardness, it paradoxically depends on man being made less than what he is. 26 This is true in another sense as well. To live lightly, to be capable of murdering in the spirit of play, to find in taking the life of another that "drop of indescribable incandescence ... which makes the whole earth look different": this is not to enhance man but to fatally diminish him. What the overcoming of man produces is not Obermensch but "Obertod." as H. G. Adler testified from his own experience of Auschwitz. 27 It is here, finally, that the answer to

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the question of value in a culture of therapeutic self-creation is to be found. All culture after Auschwitz is "garbage," Adorno declared. The only hope is that nothing exists. 28 To foreclose on culture in this way is also to foreclose on life, to yield to the despairing thought that perhaps, after all, existence is a dream, a nightmare, which we endure only in the hope of waking eventually to the blessed release of nothingness. Adorno's extreme response was and remains atypical in the secular thought of the second half of the twentieth century. But the premise in common is the denial of man's transcendent nature. It is a premise shared by Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty-and by the ideology that made Auschwitz possible, although a common premise does not, of course, make a common identity. It is only on the basis of this premise that it makes sense to dismiss meaninglessness as an accident of history and to treat the search for meaning as a dangerous pursuit of illusions. But far from being a solution to anything, the elimination of the question of meaning is a cause of corruption and decay in culture. The answer the individual gives to that question "is the gauge of the depth of his engagement with his own existence," and to stop at meaninglessness, to refuse to go any further, is to reduce the human person to a one-dimensional being of no inherent significance, with no defence against the limitlessness of power and the endlessness of possibility.29 To accept a culture of therapeutic selfcreation is to accept radical human diminishment. To refuse to accept it, to insist on transcendence, is to insist on nothing less than the fully human.

Notes 1. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 239. 2. For a range of views of the social forces at work, and where they might lead, see for example: Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity, and The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action; and Rieff, Mind of the Mora/ist, 356-57. 3. Beyond Good and Evil BN 192. 4. Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (1952), trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 269-71. 5. Beyond Good and Evil BN 192-93. 6. Musil, 272.

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7. The Birth of Tragedy 142. 8. The Gay Science 211: "Animals as critics-I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the miserable animal." 9. Writing of the great redescription that befell the Russian and Ukrainian peasantry in the 1930s, Vasily Grossman observed that being designated a "kulak" immediately exposed an individual and his family to slavery, torture, and murder. "There was no pity for them. They were not human beings, one had a hard time making out what they were-vermin evidently." Quoted in Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1991), 159. 10. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 219-220. Goldhagen argues a significant proportion of those who executed the Endlosung followed their orders not with the grim determination and disguised despair one might expect, but with enjoyment and genuine satisfaction. These were not psychopaths, but ordinary, "decent" men and women (see in general part 3). This is, needless to say, a highly controversial claim, especially when the depravity of the executioners (for which, at least, there seems to be some evidence) is attributed to an underlying "eliminationist anti-Semitism" in the popUlation as a whole, with the implication that many others, if given the opportunity, would have approached this "work" in the same way. Evidence of more complicated and humane attitudes among the civilian population of Germany can be found in the diaries of Victor Klemperer, which meticulously record not only the sufferings of the Jewish community in wartime Dresden, but the small acts of help and kindness provided by non-Jews, even from early on. See The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933-45 (1995), 2 vols., trans. and ed. Martin Chalmers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 19992000). 11. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 67. 12. Rieff, "The Newer Noises of War in the Second Culture Camp," 32022,328. 13. The argument that meaning is the cause of the fanaticism and hatred that lead to extermination, and that its passing will cause this and other savageries to gradually disappear, originated with V 0 ltaire in the 1760s. For important modem variations which specifically address the Holocaust, see Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, 38-42; Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); and Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972). Even Rieff concedes that the argument may have some merit: "The Germans recently manipulated all corporate identities and communal purposes with a thoroughness against which the analytic attitude [the "secret" of which "is not to attach oneself exclusively or too passionately to anyone particular meaning,

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or object"] may be our surest protection" (Triumph of the Therapeutic, 24, 59). John Paul 11 takes a different perspective: "To believe it is possible to know a universally valid truth is in no way to encourage intolerance; on the contrary, it is the essential condition for sincere and authentic dialogue between persons. On this basis alone is it possible to overcome divisions and to journey towards the full truth" (Fides et Ratio, §92). 14. The classic text on this point is Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) (London: Random House, 1993). 15. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 59. 16. The Gay Science 231. Nietzsche welcomed physical suffering (Ibid. 237) and criticised modern culture and science precisely on the grounds that they sought to abolish it, while Freud counselled, and personally exemplified, stoical resignation in response to it. But neither, 1 think, would be opposed to euthanasia in the case of irremediable physical illness. 17. Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891), in De Profundis and Other Writings (Harrnondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), 19. Wilde's vision of "socialism" is actually one of a realised aesthetic culture, in which freed from poverty (and the possession of property), disease, and menial labour everyone will be able to become an artist of their own individuality. Crucial to the realisation of this vision is the abolition of all authority, which Wilde understands as something entirely external to man. The importance of the piece lies in its anticipation of the development of personality as the work of art every individual can take up and make his own. 18. Centers for Disease Control, "Abortion Surveillance: Preliminary Analysis-United States, 1997," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (January 7,2000) 48 (51): 1171-74,1191. 19. A 1995 Australian survey of 2,249 women found that only 5 percent had abortions for reasons of health, and 7 percent had abortions because of problems affecting the health of the child. Thirty-eight percent cited change of lifestyle as a reason, but many other reasons given (for example, "I feel I should establish my career before having a child"-22 percent) are also "life-style considerations." Sixty percent cited financial reasons, part of which at least should also be read as a life-style factor rather than as the danger of poverty or serious financial strain. See Pamela L. Adelson, Michael S. Frommer, and Edith Weisberg, "A Survey of Women Seeking Termination of Pregnancy in New South Wales," Medical Journal of Australia 163 (1995): 419-22. Note that percentages do not total 100 percent because more than one reason could be given for seeking the procedure. 20. On this, see Melinda Tankard-Reist, Giving Sorrow Words (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000). 21. '" ... but all the same it happened; and of course there wasn't anything like an Abortion Centre here. Is it still down in Chelsea, by the way?' she asked. Lenina nodded. 'And still flood-lighted on Tuesdays and Fridays?' Lenina nod-

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ded again. 'That lovely pink glass tower!' Poor Linda lifted her face and with closed eyes ecstatically contemplated the bright remembered image." Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1976), 99. 22. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 173-74. 23. Needless to say, invoking the vocabulary of truth in the camps did not take the form of a statement of principle. It was expressed practically and symbolically in a myriad of ways. See Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme (1991), trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 59-118; and Michael Ignatieff, "Whispers from the Abyss," New York Review of Books, October 3, 1996, 4-6. 24. Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 20. 25. Cf. Genesis 3:5. 26. Huxley's vision in Brave New World is precisely this: human "happiness" can be obtained only by freeing man of inwardness, which inevitably means making him something considerably less than what he is. See also Beyond Good and Evil BN 351, in which Nietzsche rebukes the "old metaphysical bird catchers" who have piped at man for far too long the siren song "you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!" The song of Nietzsche, Freud, Rorty-bird catchers in their own right, but of a different sort-is "you are less, you are lower!" 27. Jeremy Adler, "The One That Got Away," Times Literary Supplement October 4, 1996, p. 18. 28. Theodor W. Adomo, Negative Dialectics (1966), trans. E. B. Ashton (1973) (London: Routledge, 1996),361-81. 29. John Paul 11, Fides et Ratio, n28 and §81. See also Centesimus Annus, §§24 and 44.

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Index

Adler, Hans Giinther, 125 Adorno, Theodor W., 126 aesthetic culture, 30, 36, 45, 94, 115; as asylum, 77; as theatre, 75n 186; and therapeutic culture, 64-67 amor fati. See eternal recurrence

culture: and abundance, 2; break down of, 5-6; concepts of, 1, 7, lOn2; and "falsification of the world," 14; Freud's theory of, 51-54; and homogeneity, 4-5, 26; and the instincts, 19, 20; and meaning, 4, 51, 116; and neurosis, 50; Nietzsche's sociology of, 3-7; and possibility, 1, 3, 6; and remaking of, 64; and repression, 45-46, 47-48,53, 54,91-92; and scarcity, 1-2. See also aesthetic culture; freedom, and culture; metaphysical culture; postmetaphysical culture; therapeutic culture; therapeutic self-creation, culture of

becoming, 65-66; innocence of, 33, 86, 118; meaninglessness of, 34; and psychosis, 36-37, 38,67,75n185,88 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 67 character type: breakdown of, 56; creation of 4-5,21,22-23. See also socialisation Christianity,4, 15-16,21-24; and redemption, 22, 26-27. See also Freud, Sigmund, and religion; morality; Nietzsche, Friedrich, and Christianity; truth, and Christianity community, 2, 3, 95-97. See also the individual; solidarity Conrad, Joseph, 13-14, 44n 180 contingency, 78, 84, 87,97; as basis of post-metaphysical culture, 104; as danger to post-metaphysical culture, 99-100. See also human nature, and contingency; necessity; solidarity

Davidson, Donald, 82 death of God, 2, 3, 26-29, 46, 51, 67, 102; and Freud, 46, 54; and Rorty, 99 Dewey, John, 77 disenchantment, 25, 80-81; and danger of re-enchantment, 81,98 Dostoyevsky, Fydor, 46 Enlightenment, 81-82, 91 eternal recurrence, 32-35, 90,

145

146

94; and amor fati, 32-33, 34, 37, 90, 104-05. See also power, endlessness of evolution, 8 freedom, 28, 66-67, 99; autonomy and, 2-3, 80, 9798, 102, 122; and culture, 1; limitlessness of, 81, 103, 123; and power, 105 Freud, Sigmund: and authority, 60; and the death instinct, 55,61-62,92; and dread, 6263, 65, 92; and fear of anarchy, 46,51,53,93; knowledge ofNietzsche, 46; and neurosis, 48, 49,53,6061; and "relapse into metaphysics," 78, 89, 91-94; and religion, 46, 51-52, 62, 91,93; and science, 52, 5556,91,92-93,109nl00;and self-hatred, 62-63; and therapeutic well-being, 66. See also culture, Freud's theory of, and repression; instincts; meaninglessness, and Freud guilt: Freud on, 48-49,61-62, 65; Nietzsche on, 21-23, 25; Rorty on, 85 Habermas, Jilrgen, 8 Heraclitus, 33, 118 human nature, 4; and contingency, 84; and Freud, 91-92; and metaphysical culture, 79; and socialisation, 85. See also inwardness

Index

human types, 17; new, 65; noble and slave 19-20, 28, 45, 86, 90. See also morality; Nietzsche, Friedrich, and the last man, and the "order of rank" Huxley, Aldous, 123 the individual: self-sufficiency of, 2, 6, 7, 10 inner life. See inwardness instincts, 47-50, 63, 67, 91-92; and consciousness, 20, 23, 56, 57-58, 84; negation of 18, 19, 24; and restoration of, 29, 54. See also culture, and the instincts, and repression; Freud, Sigmund, and the death instinct; inwardness; rancour; will to power inwardness (inner life), 9; creation of, 8, 21, 48; denial of, 84-84; displacement of, 8,54,55,66, 116, 129n26; and emptiness, 66; ineradicable, 65; and transcendence, 8, 125-26 irony, 79, 84, I11n156; as danger to post-metaphysical culture, 100-102. See also solidarity love, 59-60, 62, 92, 125 Maclntyre, Alasdair, 9 meaning: and "anti-meaning," 123-24; as deception, 14,27, 31, 34; denial of, 119; fanaticism for, 64;

Index

fragmentation of, 6, 8; freedom from, 65, 66; as fulfilment of a wish, 52; illusions of, 14, 15,23,51, 63,93, 126; and millenarianism, 120-21; need for, 4-5, 46,54,63,81,103,115; privatisation of, 80, 121; and social stability, 78; as therapy, 53; transcendent, 4, 6, 121, 125. See also culture, and meaning; power, as meaning; will to power, as "will to meaning" meaninglessness: to be made unintelligible, 81, 84; crisis of, 7, 24, 28; and Freud, 8, 46,93; as fundamental reality of existence, 13-14, 25, 26; as legacy of illusions, 64; and limitlessness, 6, 9, 28, 36, 38,89, 99; and Nietzsche, 3, 7, 23, 35, 9091,93; "privatisation" of, 81, 98; and Rorty, 86-87, 93-94; solutions to, 7, 8,45,64,6667,78-82,86,115,119;and suffering, 22, 121-22. See also contingency; eternal recurrence metaphysical culture (metaphysical interpretation of the world), 4-7, 28, 34, 80; overcoming, 83-84, 93-94; and seriousness, 118-20 modernity, 10; as "postreligious" culture, 78 monotheism, 3-7, 16 morality, 9, 27; ascetic, 18,2324,29; and Christianity, 16,

147 18; in culture of therapeutic self-creation, 118-120, 123; of custom, 21, 40n64; Freud on, 51-52, 93; Nietzsche on, 18, 19, 22; noble, 17; in post-metaphysical culture, 103, 112nI68; slave, 17-18; "slave revolt" in, 16-20, 25. See also rancour; transcendence, and morality Musil, Robert, 117-18 Nabokov, Vladimir, 103 necessity, 2, 34, 52, 53; and contingency, 88, 104-05 Nietzsche, Friedrich: and aesthetic justification of existence, 13,30-31,37,66; and Christianity, 15, 18, 1920, 22-23, 40n84; and the Dionysian,14, 31-34,37; and human enhancement, 26, 30,34, 125,129n26;andthe last man, 25-26, 45; and nausea, 14,25,62; and nihilism, 27 -28, 32, 34; and the "order of rank," 17, 18, 23,90-91; and overcoming, 24, 30,33-34,65-66,90; and "relapse into metaphysics," 77, 89-91; and "revaluation of values," 18,22,23,28-29, 37; and the superman, 6, 2932, 33-36,64-67, 90; on therapeutic culture, 67, 75n184. See also culture; death of God; eternal recurrence; meaninglessness, and Nietzsche; polytheism; truth; will to power

148

Orwell, George, Illnl56, 124 Plato, 64 polytheism, 7, 15-16,22 possibility: limitlessness of, 36, 54,85,115-16,117-18,126. See also culture, and possibility; truth, possibility post-metaphysical culture: as artists' colony, 87; as "cure" for the need for meaning, 81; and democracy, 97-99, 10203, Illnl47; as encounter group, 87; as hospital, 94; as "liberal utopia," 77, 80,95, 102; and modem society, 9394,98-99. See also contingency; irony; power; solidarity post-modernism, 8-9 power: endlessness of, 35-38, 115-16, 124, 126; as meaning, 30-32; and postmetaphysical culture, 102, 103-05; science as, 55-56; therapy as, 57-58. See also freedom, and power Proust, Marcel, 88 psychoanalysis, 45,93; as total solution to meaninglessness, 56,91. See also Freud, Sigmund, and science; rationalism; therapy rancour, 19-20, 43n155; and morality, 17. See also rationalism rationalism: and Christianity, 16,24-25; and psychoanalysis, 54, 55-56, 59-60; and Socrates, 16, 24

Index

reason, 25, 52-53, 56, 84, 91; and Christianity, 15,24. See also instincts, and consciousness redescription, 83, 91, 100, 104, 119-20, 122-24. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich, and "revaluation of values" repression. See culture, and repression ressentiment. See rancour Rieff, Philip, 8, 103 Rorty, Richard: compared to Nietzsche and Freud, 77, 103; debt to Freud, 84-85, 109n 100; debt to Nietzsche, 82-84, 1l0n135; and denial of transcendence, 78; and "fear of cruelty," 79, 95-96, 98, 99-104; and "liberal ironist," 78, 89; and "relapse into metaphysics," 108n79; and vocabulary, 83-84, 86, 96,101,103,111n156.See also contingency; irony; meaninglessness, and Rorty; solidarity; socialisation self-creation, 9, 33, 45, 66-67; and character, 108n75; and euthanasia, 121-22; generalisation of, 80, 82, 87, 94, 101-02; as self-destruction, 34, 67; as "selfenlargement," 98, 110I11nI45; as story, 86-87,96, 105. See also therapeutic self-creation socialisation, 8, 91, 99-100, 101-03

Index

Socrates. See rationalism solidarity, 3, 10,80,94-99; and contingency and irony, 99103 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 124 Stalin, Josef, 67, 124 therapeutic-aesthetic culture. See therapeutic self creation, culture of therapeutic culture, 54, 64, 74nI69,94, 115; and aesthetic culture, 64-67, 77; as a hospital, 67, 75-76nI86, 88, and the last man, 67 therapeutic self-creation, 86-89, 97-99, 110-11nI45; culture of, 86, 116-20, 122-23, 12526; and play, 81, 86, 91, 96, 117-25; privatisation of, 99, 101-03, 105 therapy, 9, 45, 86-89, 97; and cure, 57-60; endlessness of, 65; limits of, 60-64; and reasonableness, 56, 63, 64, 66; as Socratic dialogue, 59; and the transference, 59-60. See also inwardness, displacement of totalitarianism, 94, 101, 11213nI81, 120, 123-25 tragedy, 14,24 transcendence: escape from,

149

103, 121; and the fully human, 126; and morality, 27, 66. See also meaning, transcendent; truth truth: and Christianity, 15,2425, 27; and the eternal recurrence, 32; and lies, 124; as metaphor, 82-84; and perspective, 22, 84, 86, 8991; and possibility, 36; as power, 103-04; resistant, 9, 120, 124-25

Ubertod, 125 unbelief, 56, 64, 97; and emptiness, 66; generalised, 116; as instinct, 65; and living lightly, 8, 63, 64, 6667,94, 118-20, 125. See also therapeutic self-creation, and play Wagner, Richard, 13 Weber, Max, 25 will,6, 14,24, 30, 35 will to power: as "essence of the world," 15,89; and hierarchy, 23; as "will to meaning," 15,23, 40n84. See also culture; Nietzsche, Friedrich, and aesthetic justification of existence

About the Author

Michael Casey is a sociologist on the staff of the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Australia. He holds degrees in arts and law from Monash University, Melbourne, and a doctorate from La Trobe University, Melbourne. He has taught sociology and political theory at La Trobe University and at Catholic Theological College, Melbourne. In 2000, he was appointed Permanent Fellow in Sociology and Politics at the Australian Session of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family, and is a member of the institute's governing council.