Title: Break-out from the Crystal Palace, The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky
Author/Artist: John Carroll
Publisher: Routledge
Media: Book
Reviewer: Alex Trotter
This book, probably out of print, is an intriguing comparative study of these three important thinkers that also discusses how their ideas influenced and clashed with those of other titans such as Marx and Freud. Marx's famous attack on Stirner in The German Ideology, which occupies center stage in Carroll's study, is analyzed at length. The most important aspect of Break-out... is its recognition of the psychological dimension of anarchism beyond its more familiar appearance as political ideology.
Carroll starts by presenting what he calls "anarcho-psychology" as one of three principal intellectual traditions inherited from the nineteenth century, the other two being liberal-rationalism (British utilitarianism) and marxist socialism. The collectivist forms of political anarchism (e.g., Proudhon, Kropotkin) are viewed here as part of the socialist or "social-liberal" tradition. Fascism and conservatism are generally excluded from this study but are mentioned here and there en passant, mainly in relation to the Nazis' appropriation of Nietzsche.
Forerunners and influences, acknowledged or not, of Stirner, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky include Goethe, Fourier, William Blake, Hegel, Feuerbach, and (in Nietzsche's case) Schopenhauer.
The anarcho-psychological critique is divided into three elements: the critique of ideology; the critique of positivism, empiricism, and even knowledge itself (ontological anarchism); and the critique of economic man.
Stirner, even before Nietzsche, proclaimed the death of God. The attack on Christianity is the primary target of his critique of ideology in The Ego and His Own. God is the supreme "fixed idea," but the abstraction of humanism as a substitute for God serves just as ill for independent thought and liberated emotions. Feuerbach, the principal theorist of the Young Hegelians, wrote in The Essence of Christianity (1841) that Man, in a crisis of identity, seeks an alter ego in God, which is but the alienated (the term alienation coming from Rousseau by way of Hegel) universal essence of Man. In this way theology becomes anthropology, a kind of religion of Humanity, in Feuerbach's philosophy. This metaphysical concept came under attack from two critics, both also from the milieu of the Young Hegelians Marx (historical materialism) and Stirner (egoism/individualist psychology).
Stirner was not satisfied with the rationalist Voltairean critique of religion. He wanted to discover the psychological underpinnings of religious belief and the individual's subordination to its dictates. Not content with recognizing that there is no "reason" to believe in God, he asks, Why is God necessary? What hidden needs are served by religion? Stirner's effort to pierce the veils of ideology, with the self-deception it entails, and discover the authentic self started the piecing together of a theory of human behavior.
Carroll sees Stirner as having anticipated Adorno's notion of the "authoritarian personality" with his own analysis of internalized authority, summed up in his statement about every Prussian carrying a gendarme in his own breast. It is also an anticipation of Freud's description of the superego as the imago of parental (paternal) authority and of W. Reich's concept of the "emotional plague." The materialist view of authority as a strictly external force of coercion (e.g., Engels' "bodies of armed men" who enforce the will of the state as executive arm of the bourgeois class) is inadequate.
Marx and Stirner probably never met. Marx's German Ideology, the greater part of which was written as a polemic against Stirner, was completed in 1846, though it was not published as a whole until 1932. Stirner criticized socialist and communist ideals in general; Marx, on the other hand, targeted Stirner directly and personally. What is interesting to note is that Stirner served as a major formative, albeit negative, influence on Marx. Marx's attack on Stirner finds a twentieth-century echo in Lukacs' critique of Nietzsche.
Marx's criticisms of Stirner can be summarized as follows: 1) Stirner offers a history of ideas without reference to actual events and the social environment in which they take place. 2) The individual is an abstract concept without meaning in the context of society. 3) Stirner's position is ideological because it doesn't understand the determining role of material forces in history. Individualism is seen as an ideology of the petty bourgeoisie.
Although some aspects of these objections are not without merit, Marx mistakenly saw Stirner as an idealist philosopher in the sense represented by Hegel (i.e., one who strives speculatively to understand the nature of Man and the whole of history). In Stirner's view, there are ideas and subjective desires that do not merely reflect the social environment and the action of groups. Engels (who initially thought favorably of The Ego and His Own) and Marx didn't know, in a sense, how to respond to the irrationalist core of Stirner's outlook except by labeling it religious. Marx put it thus: "In revolutionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances." He thought that with Stirner, rebellion takes place only in the mind, that ideas alone can change property relations and make history. Can the state, money, and private property be simply willed out of existence? Marx and Engels decide that individual interests undergo no alienation through identification with the revolutionary class, and that an egoist's insurrection achieves little against the organized power of the capitalist system. Stirner does not deny that humans are conditioned by their environment. But he points out that only when a person goes beyond social identity and roles does uniqueness and creativity begin. Stirner does not pretend to expound a total social theory. He charges that socialism and communism represent new abstract goals to which real individuals and their desires will be sacrificed.
Egoism or mutual aid - is there an irreconcilable antagonism between the two? There is, says Carroll, if each is taken as an Absolute or a categorical imperative. Carroll touches on, but does not tackle, the attempted synthesis of Marx and Stirner in what has been called "communist egoism." Unlike marxist scholar Paul Thomas, who in Karl Marx and the Anarchists clearly sided with the Grand Old Man, he allows that Herr S. and Herr M. both scored points in the encounter. He says in Stirner's favor that the debate should not be seen as a simple question of the isolated individual versus society. Here Carroll makes a parallel with the distinction made by sociologist Ferdinand Touml between Gesellschaft (commercial society at large) and Gemeinschaft (community). Stirner's concept of the Union of Egoists, conceived as coming under the latter category, embraces, according to the ethic of friendship, only small groups where real face-to-face relationships are possible while rejecting the imperative to sacrifice one's own interests for an abstract social totality, such as nation, race, or class.
In modern times, the egoist ubermensch has found an embodiment in the lives of certain artists; one in particular, German-born dadaist and surrealist Max Ernst, felt a special affinity with Stirner. Both Stirner and Nietzsche praised creativity and play. The early Marx would have largely agreed. But after 1844, Marx turned his attention increasingly toward the descriptive analysis of political economy, and away from questions of the poetic, ludic realization of human liberty, and the alienating quality of labor itself. He started thinking of his project as a scientific one and believed, in utilitarian fashion, that a rational social order could be achieved. Carroll speculates that the obsessive character of the Stirner section of the German Ideology indicated a great unresolved inner conflict within Marx, who used Stirner as the external object or scapegoat to cover up his own bad conscience for not taking up the cause of Homo ludens as seriously as he could have.
If Stirner was the early pioneer of psychology, Carroll believes that Nietzsche was a more mature thinker who "superseded" him. Carroll compares Stirner's ideal of self-realization with that of the Bildungsroman. Education, conceived as the exploration and understanding of one's own feelings, is a ceaseless process of becoming that is not beholden to ready-made responses. Nietzsche's and Freud's advances consisted in a greater appreciation of the complexity of the individual psyche. In Freud's metaphor, it is an iceberg, with the conscious part making up only the visible summit. Nietzsche likened the I to a bridge on which traffic is constantly in motion. The unconscious self Freud, following Groddeck, called the It (usually and perhaps inadequately translated as the Id). The ego grows in the matrix of instinctual needs that make up the It. The drive to form relationships is, in Freud's view, secondary, and love has an inherently narcissistic foundation.
The superego is the other element of Freud's tripartite model of the psyche. Here is the repository of ideology, of civilization and its demands. The egoist in Stirner's sense is a hedonist who believes that everything is possible and does not recognize the limits of what Freud called the reality-principle. Carroll believes that Stirner had a naive optimism concerning the compatibility of individual maturity and gratified desire. In Freud's view, self-understanding is achieved through a series of traumatic life-events. Maturity is defined as becoming one's own center of gravity. Nietzsche also held that psychological constraints are inherent in the human condition. He (and Kierkegaard) took up a theme that had appeared in Hegel - that anxiety lies at the root of consciousness and is not, as Stirner tended to see it, identified solely with repression and morality. Goethe was the prototype of the ubermensch that Nietzsche had in mind; it was Goethe's great discipline and self-mastery that Nietzsche admired, his Apollonian control of strong (Dionysian) passions.
On the other hand, Stirner's egoist is more democratic than Nietzsche's elitist ubermensch (who is more stoic, even ascetical). For Stirner, everyman has the resources to achieve greatness. Enjoyment is conceived as refined hedonism and is linked to aestheticism (Stirner favors craftsmanship over industrial manufacture). The individualist rebel is at odds with civilization, but is inextricably part of it; the individual is a cultural-historical phenomenon, not a purely instinctual, natural being. Freud, like Marx, had a scientific rationalist for a superego, which was the source of much of his conservative side (e.g., his justification of the necessity for instinctual repression to make civilization function).
Stirner's time was the early Romantic period, before the Industrial Revolution had hit the German-speaking world, but he knew English and, through his acquaintance with Adam Smith's writings, which he translated into German, he was aware of industrialism's conquering power in Britain. Nietzsche and Freud lived in a world where science and technology were much more visibly triumphant but whose very discoveries (e.g., the law of thermodynamic entropy) started to undermine rationalist and positivist certainties and probably helped provoke the mood of late Romantic pessimism.
The anarcho-psychologists rejected one of the greatest assumptions of the nineteenth century, Progress, and were very skeptical about scientific materialism. Of the three, Dostoyevsky staked out the most extreme criticism of science and technology. He accused empirical natural science of withering human instincts and retarding human creative powers. Can the emotions be calculated and quantified? he asks. What makes us human is not how useful we are, but how superfluous. In his novels, characters find themselves in situations where they are overwhelmed by elemental passions and do not have occasion to be self-reflective or analytical.
In 1862 Dostoyevsky visited London during an exhibition that featured a structure called the Crystal Palace, which was built as a showcase of all the latest machinery, technology, and emblems of progress. The Russian writer saw the Crystal Palace as a symbol of the bourgeois utilitarian paradise that the Western world had become - a world where the passions were pacified, risk and the tragic sense of life eliminated, and the human being reduced to a domesticated automaton consumer. The killing boredom of this sleep of Reason produces monsters of nihilism and cruelty. The denizen, or inmate, of the Crystal Palace is what Nietzsche called "the last man," the bourgeois (and the bourgeoisified worker) who pays for comfort with boredom, adopts a herd mentality, and is hostile to spontaneous curiosity and imagination.
Dostoyevsky was only a briefly an anarchist. His critique of modernity reached the point of extreme conservatism, slavophilism, and the hope for a renewed Christianity. In The Possessed he bitterly criticized anarchism of all varieties. His mysticism puts him at odds with Stirner and Nietzsche. Dostoyevsky's worldview is distilled into the "Grand Inquisitor" section of The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor is a consummate politician, a paternalistic scientific materialist and social engineer, shepherd of a human herd to whom he metes out the calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number by dispensing bread and circuses. On the other side is Christ, who responds, inexplicably, to the Grand Inquisitor's indictments with a kiss (the anarchrist?).
The section dealing with anarcho-psychology's critique of knowledge is the most difficult part of the book. Individualist psychology repudiates the notion of absolute truth (Truth is another oppressive abstraction like God or Man). The attack on truth, though, also attacks the very process of critical reflection. Nietzsche upholds paradoxical over formal logic. The Will is seen as more important than Reason. Knowledge is primarily subjective and has limits; it annihilates itself on one plane even as it establishes itself on another. In other words, the only certain knowledge is that there is no certainty. Things can be known only as they are conditioned by the cognitive process. His theory of knowledge is perspectivist; it rejects monism and holds room for plural and competing cosmologies. Nietzsche saw far, perhaps too far, into the schizophrenic condition of a life torn between competing, and incompatible, principles. Such a condition can reach the point, as it did for Nietzsche, where reason as the mediator of personal experiences breaks down.
Dostoyevsky also felt that the individual life is unknowable by objective, positivist science. He could grant that the knowledge of mathematics and natural science is true in a sense, but he wanted to know what the psychological, existential effects of such truths were. He feared that rationalist empiricism was robbing the world of all enchantment, and that passions were threatened by the attempt to pin them down by scientific laws. The tree of knowledge and the tree of life seem to grow apart; Goethe's Faust laments his long years of academic study because he feels they have taught him nothing about life and its enjoyment.
Carroll speaks of the importance of placing intellectuals and their works in historical context. "We have, in traversing the past, only to do with what is present" (Hegel). Stirner in 1844, he says, does not mean the same thing as Stirner in 1972 (the year of this book's writing), and we could add, for that matter, Stirner in 1997. As Stirner himself put it, how his readers (who are historical subjects in their unique individuality) decide to apply his thoughts to their own lives is their own affair. Carroll's verdict on Stirner's brand of here-and-now egoism is that it is suited primarily to a marginal or bohemian life outside the mainstream of society, in part because of its rejection of organized politics, and that's pretty accurate. Stirner was not a nihilist, because he had personal, if not social, values. And although Nietzsche is also often associated with nihilism, he was engaged in a constant search for the "revaluation of values."
Carroll mentions the failures of Marxism, but not those of psychoanalysis. He seems to make too much of the three protagonists as forerunners of mid-twentieth-century existentialism. And what about the revolutionary passions of the 1960s so recent at the time Carroll wrote this book? He mentions Adorno, Marcuse, and other luminaries of the Frankfurt School; Wilhelm Reich; and Norman O. Brown. The more radical currents of that time (e.g., the Situationists and the Dutch Provos) are not considered; Carroll merely makes a reference or two to the insurgent French students of 1968. Here again "yet another effort" toward the synthesis of social revolution and individualist insurrection is necessary. The concept of the egoist as artistic creator can be augmented by the surrealist notion of the "communism of genius" or the situationist slogan "art made by all or not at all": an aesthetic that is realized not in artworks but in a life of passion and rebellion.
Break-out from the Crystal Palace is excessively academic and sociological. The social, or "soft," sciences no less than the physical, or "hard," sciences, can be criticized from the positions elaborated by the subjects of this book. Were Stirner, Nietzsche, or Dostoyevsky alive today, it seems likely they would not be particularly pleased with contemporary sociology and psychology any more than they would be with all the other fragmented specialisms that make up the knowledge of modern civilization, which has moved with baneful and painful absurdity even further along precisely the lines they so presciently critiqued.
The question of fascism is touched on only lightly. Early fascism certainly tapped in to the Lebensphilosophie prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century, with which the anarcho-psychological critique was associated, and bent it to its own purposes (i.e., the Victorian British commercial utilitarianism lambasted by Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky was now contrasted unfavorably with the supposedly more vital and naturalistic Teutonic culture). Stirner, who, like Sorel, had considered prevailing society senile and in need of fresh, invigorating passions, appealed to the young Mussolini and to the French intellectual aesthete fascist Robert Brasillach (see William Tucker's The Fascist Ego). Carroll rightly exonerates Nietzsche of the charge of protofascist tendencies (he and Stirner both unambiguously denounced German and pan-Germanic nationalism), but the quite real Nazi connections of Nietzsche's dubious intellectual heir Heidegger are not examined.
And, as the book was published in 1974, it says nothing about the phenomenon of postmodernism, which has also laid claim to the mantle of Nietzsche's legacy.
But Break-out... provides much to ponder and wrestle with. It's an important book and definitely worth examining. In it Stirner, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky are presented as difficult, inspiring, and flawed champions of rebellion and the unceasing quest for self-understanding, self-realization, and new values. If it is true, as Carroll claims, that the critique of rationalist Homo economicus exploded into the open and into mass attitudes only after World War II, then the ideas of the "anarcho-psychologists" are, in some sense, in everyone's head, fueling the ongoing revolution of everyday life.
This review first appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #44 (Fall/Winter 9'7-98, C.A.L. Press, POB 1446, Columbia, MO 65205 1446, USA)