Nietzsche is saying, I think, that this declaration by God of His unique omnipotence and omniscience makes a mockery of the whole notion of deity. It exposes the ambitions of deity and therefore exposes the worst ambitions of men. It is as if Nietzsche is saying: when I propose the ‘overcoming of the human’ – Nietzsche’s abiding preoccupation – I am not proposing that we should become in any way like our gods; in fact our gods, whom we have invented, should be our negative ideals when it comes to our ambitions for ourselves; when we forget ourselves – forget our best or preferred selves – we are likely to say things like ‘There is one God! Thou shalt have no other gods before ME!’ When we are autocratic, tyrannical and arrogant – when, that is to say, we are being a certain version of forbidding – we are actively attacking our better self; when we lay down the law as the only law, we have become lawless (the outlaw as psychopath). We have been corrupted (or misled, waylaid) in Nietzsche’s view, by the wrong vocabulary, the wrong picture of what it is to be fully alive (in Wilde’s terms we need to recover our best selfishness by redescribing the bad press selfishness has traditionally been given). The ‘exemplars’, to use Nietzsche’s word, that we seek are those people, not gods, who enable us to become who we are. God, in Nietzsche’s fabulation, forgot Himself, and even His own name; He thought He was God, THE God, when He was simply one among many others (inner superiority means we are on the wrong track, it means we are too intimidated). ‘With you,’ his Shadow says to Zarathustra,
‘I strove to enter everything forbidden, the worst, and farthest: and if there is anything of virtue in me, it is that I have feared no prohibition.
‘With you I shattered whatever my heart had revered …
‘With you I unlearned my belief in words and values and great names.’
It was the unlearning of the greatest name of all, God, that Zarathustra taught; and the torrent of unnaming that this unleashed. And this great unnaming, this shattering of whatever the heart had revered, would make people prone, as Nietzsche knew, to recovering themselves with new narrowings of the mind. ‘Beware that some narrow belief, a harsh, severe illusion, does not catch you in the end!’ Zarathustra warns his Shadow. ‘For you are now seduced and tempted by anything that is narrow and firm.’ If we give up one set of laws, Nietzsche warns us, we are likely to be tempted to pick up another similar set of laws, but to call them new. Our freedom may be merely a new version of our old confinement. And what we can’t give up or get over is our desire for the law, for something ‘narrow and firm’, to keep us in place; as though the laws never really change because our desire for particular kinds of laws remains the same. We can never quite get over our fear of ourselves. But we have been made unduly fearful of ourselves, Nietzsche suggests, by those very laws we have consented to. Or rather, more realistically, we don’t know how fearful we should be of ourselves, as we haven’t given ourselves the opportunity to find out. The law forbids being open to an open future; the open future of who we may be, and of who we may want to be.
VII
We have inherited the wrong picture, the wrong vocabulary, for authority, power, vitality, pleasure and language. Laying down this kind of law for ourselves and others is a betrayal of what Nietzsche wants human beings to be (Wilde’s God would say, why not develop your colour-sense? Nietzsche’s God would say, why are we all so obsessed by valuation, by all these old names? Freud’s God would say, only people who don’t want to grow up need gods). There are names we should start wanting to forget, or to unlearn (two different things that need not always be so different); Nietzsche urges us in the Preface to The Gay Science, the book that preceded Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘to learn as artists to forget well, to be good at not knowing!’ (which lets us wonder what the difference is between forgetting and unlearning). By forgetting a name we can come up with another one (Freud says, don’t think about gods, think about parents: and then, when you forget about parents, see what you come up with). The patient wanted to think of Jung but was lucky or unlucky enough to think of Wilde and Nietzsche instead. What do we need to forget to say something new? Well, we may need to do that forbidden thing, to forget about the forbidden, at least sometimes and in various different ways. To forget at least some versions of the forbidden and to come up with other names instead. ‘Those with originality,’ Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, ‘have usually been the name-givers’. That is, the name-changers.
The American philosopher James Conant, in his remarkable essay ‘Nietzsche’s Perfectionism’, having acknowledged, along with other contemporary philosophers, that Nietzsche’s philosophy is itself a kind of aestheticism – an attempt to find another language for traditional moralities, to find new names and new pleasures for an old ethics – suggests that Nietzsche’s ‘abiding preoccupation (and his evident desire to instil in the reader a similar preoccupation)’ is,
with questions concerning what one should value – questions such as, ‘What sort of person [or persons] should I admire (and what sort of response should such admiration elicit in me)?’ ‘How should I live (if I wish to be worthy of such admiration myself)?’ And, ‘In what ways (and by what means) should I endeavour to shape and change myself?’
We don’t, in the ordinary way of things, talk about remembering ourselves; we talk about forgetting ourselves, either in states of absorption or when we think of ourselves as having acted out of character. As though the self itself – the ‘self’ as an idea, as a word – could be forgotten but not remembered. And then, when ‘it’ is forgotten, new things begin to happen. Conant’s pertinent questions that he takes Nietzsche to be asking suggest something akin to a need to keep ourselves, or something about ourselves, in mind; and particularly to keep in mind the relationship between our self at the moment and our as yet unattained self, our always potentially better self that we are wanting to become. He doesn’t, we can’t help but notice, dispense with the idea of the self, but he does account for the self as wanting always to be something else, something better, something other than it is. It is as though ‘it’ exists only in its transitions; it exists only in a changing, in an aspiring, state. And in describing the self as being preoccupied in this way – in wanting, in Nietzsche’s language, to be ‘overcoming’ itself: to go further with itself but not to try to become something it isn’t – he leaves us wondering what law is being laid down here, what are the rules, so to speak, for becoming the as yet unattained self? ‘We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow,’ Wilde wrote in ‘The Critic as Artist’. The law is that which we must remember. What – or which names – do we need to be able to forget about in order to overcome ourselves, in order to grow? Or, to put it another way: what are we being when we are being obedient? And what are we doing to ourselves?
Tricks of Obedience
We cannot ask others to accept our history as their own.
Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place
I
If disobedience can be a forbidden pleasure, obedience can be an unforbidden one. Without forbidden pleasure, by definition, there can be no disobedience; without obedience it is not quite so clear what there can be. And so we need to wonder what kind of pleasure obedience might be, craved and courted as it often is, fought for and fought with. No one can be indifferent, no one can be nonchalant, about their own obedience, a gift for obedience and its refusal being where we start from, and what we start with. ‘Before nourishment there must be obedience,’ the poet Eduardo C. Corral writes in his poem ‘Slow Lightning’, suggesting that something we might be unwilling to describe as ‘obedience’ may even be the precondition for our survival, for our being able to take in what we need. So when it comes to obedience, in anyone’s life, there will be no slow lightening of the burdens and complications it entails. One’s personal history, whatever else it is, is a history of one’s obedience. For everyone, the retrospective question is always, what did I consent to, and what did I have to submit to, as a child, that I didn’t actually agree wit
h? Whether one wants to do what one is told to do – that is, whether one wants what one is told to want – and what we can do with and about this question, are the moral starting points. All moral questions are questions of obedience.
Whether it refers to ‘the action or practice of obeying’ in the reassuringly neutral initial definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, or to the at once more alarming and reassuring further definition of obedient as ‘submissive to the will of a superior; doing what one is bidden; subservient; dutiful’, it is clear what the word itself springs us into. Whom we obey and how we obey – and what we are doing when we obey – will be the defining factors in our lives, from the very beginning to the more or less bitter end. It is a question of who we take to be superior and why, and what this involves us in; and how we use the old-fashioned vocabulary of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’, and why these might be the terms we are tempted to use. What kinds of obedience are required of us to get what we need is as pressing a question in infancy as it will be in old age. What our obedience turns us into – the difference between self-betrayal and whatever we take to be its opposite – will be every bit as significant as what it takes out of us.
The word ‘obedience’ itself makes us think about legitimacy, about the pleasures of being agreeable, about what following a rule can lead you into: an unthinking compliance, say, or a desired state of intimidation; a delight in conformity; the pleasures of being part of a group; or a moral masochism; authenticity or self-travesty. When Edmund Burke wrote in 1757 that someone’s ‘idea even of liberty was not (if I may use the expression) perfectly free’ (‘An Essay Towards an Abridgement of the English History’), he was alerting the English-reading public to the inevitable compromises even in the idea of freedom. Who, Burke wants us to wonder, has ‘perfect liberty’, and what would that be like? What would it be to, as it were, take a perfect liberty?
An interesting history of morality, of self-fashioning and its discontents, could be traced through the fluctuating uses and connotations of the word ‘obedience’, and the thoughts of obligation and liberation it always brings in its wake (so it is of significance, for example, when the disobedient adolescent is secretly admired, though publicly discredited; or when obedience is a pejorative but being rule-abiding might not be). Obedience has its virtues and its vices; and a lot of cultural work goes into putting obedience in its place. Indeed, the ways in which the word is used are always a sign of the times. The obedient, as Samuel Johnson defines them in his 1755 dictionary – which is more or less contemporary with my quotation from Burke – are ‘submissive to authority; compliant with command or prohibition; obsequious’. If we are not submissive to authority, what can we be to it? Preferably not obsequious. And what can we be to it without it ceasing to be authority at all? Especially if, to take the obvious case, the authority is God? For Johnson, an eighteenth-century British Anglican Tory, ‘compliant’ can mean, in his dictionary, ‘civil’; and a ‘complier’ is ‘a man of an easy temper’. For the twentieth-century British paediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, a man of Dissenter stock, what is to be feared in early development is ‘that the infant shall give up spontaneity in favour of compliance with the needs of those who are caring for the infant’; and as he wrote in The Family and Individual Development, he is justly reassured when a five-month-old infant ‘did not pass over into a compliant state, which would have meant that she had given up hope’. The idea of passing over into a compliant state equates compliance with a kind of death; a death-in-life in which the child survives at the cost of living her own life. For Johnson, compliance can be a mark of appropriate sociability, of successful adaptation; for Winnicott, it is the opposite. For Johnson, the political and theological implications of the word are explicit; in Winnicott, they are implicit. For Johnson, accommodation is the order of the day; for Winnicott, the accommodating are unaccommodated, bereft of their own desire, all dressed up with nowhere to go (madness, Winnicott wrote, is the need to be believed). For Winnicott, compliance is a sign of what he calls the ‘False Self’; for Johnson, it can be a sign of what he doesn’t call the true self. To be obedient can mean being overcompliant (what Johnson calls ‘obsequious’). Or it can mean obeying the right master, the right rules, the right laws, the right God. The old names redescribed become new names; the same words are used to do quite different things. In these eighteenth-century usages, to ‘submit’ can be to acknowledge a true hierarchy, and in the twentieth century it can mean to be unduly intimidated. The same words, changing over time, encourage us to lead different kinds of lives. The histories of these particular words, ‘liberty’, ‘submission’, ‘compliance’, ‘obedience’, ask us who and what we should believe, and how we should do our believing. They ask us what our reasons might be for forbidding ourselves certain things, for consenting without ever quite knowing what we are consenting to.
The first person we believe – whether we believe her or not – is, in Winnicott’s view, the mother (or the unfortunately named ‘caretaker’). In the worst-case scenario, in the words of Frank Bidart’s poem ‘By These Waters’, ‘What begins in recognition, – … ends in obedience.’ The infant literally depends on the mother’s recognition of his need, and if the mother is, for her own good reasons, excessively unreceptive to the nature of his need, he will have to adapt to her limits, to her capacity for recognition; to try to become what she needs him to be. But, like all of us – and to varying degrees, and the degrees matter and are fateful – the infant will have to want what the mother wants him to want. What is recognized in him, what he is seen to be, he will have to become obedient to (unlike Wilde’s ‘Artist’). When the mother says to the child, ‘Do you want apple juice or orange juice?’, the compliant, obedient child will always choose one of the two; the non-compliant child faced with this choice will have the mental space to wonder what else, if anything, he would rather have to drink. The obedient child is too fearful of the mother to have more of a mind of his own than she can acknowledge. It is then effectively forbidden to think outside of the mother’s terms. The child becomes someone who when he is thirsty – or worse, when he is distressed – likes either apple juice or orange juice; he becomes that kind of person. Those are the names he remembers. What begins in recognition ends in obedience. The child tacitly consents to a life of being fobbed off. The child who is at first caught and held in the mother’s vocabulary can end up being trapped in it (leaving home means learning to talk differently from your parents). And in this sense obedience always takes the form of obedience to a specific vocabulary. It can be comforting to be trapped in other people’s descriptions of oneself – and the infant is more or less his parents’ descriptions of him – but it is also exceedingly frustrating. Or rather, it is exceedingly frustrating if you are brought up in a culture that also encourages self-definition and distrusts excessive adaptation; that promotes certain individualistic versions of the flourishing self; or that even talks about something called a ‘self’, that a person both is and can become even more of. In these cultures the individual is always left wondering, what are the pleasures I have been deprived of? How have I failed to develop? Have I lived by the wrong rules, the wrong picture of what a life ought to be? Who is having more or better pleasure than I am? How have they got it and how do they do it? What would my life have been like if I had been a different person with different parents? Or, to put it in Frank Bidart’s more curious terms, do all forms of recognition end up as forms of obedience? As if to be seen is always and only to have a picture of oneself to live up to. This is what psychoanalysis, following on from the more secular, liberal forms of nineteenth-century education and the more or less secular forms of aestheticism, was invented to talk about: what language makes possible for an animal (a self, a history, a project, chaos). Without language we wouldn’t even know that we existed, or that we had possibilities.
II
The overcompliant, obedient child that Winnicott describes has the pleasure of short-term s
afety; he is keeping the mother going by making demands that are well within what he takes to be the mother’s range (he is not being a difficult child; he is keeping the mother happy, not straining her). The non-compliant child is free to find out what the mother’s range might be, and, by the same token, what his range might be. The compliant child resigns himself; the non-compliant child risks himself: the compliant child consolidates; the non-compliant child experiments. Rebels keep the world the same so they can go on rebelling against it, Sartre says; revolutionaries change the world. The compliant child runs the risk of becoming a rebel; the non-compliant child runs the risk of wanting a permanent state of revolution, of more or less continual self-overcoming. The compliant child, in this very modern story, will crave ritual and routine; the non-compliant child will want nothing but the shock of the new (anger is hope: hope that things can be different; that frustration can be modified). The non-compliant child is always wanting to extend her repertoire; the compliant child is wanting more of the same.
And yet, of course, as we try to place ourselves on this list, it is abundantly clear that, where we would like there to be opposites and contraries, there are always blurrings and blendings. At its most banal we can say, we are probably always a bit of both; that these distinctions are satisfying in their simplifying clarity. That we all both complied with our mothers and protested (and are probably still doing so); and with our fathers also. We all wanted to help, cure and console our parents and we all wanted to ruin their lives if we needed to, and so on. But it is also true, I think, that the whole notion of obedience itself oversimplifies, and that that is its function: that when we talk about obedience – and all our cultural conversations have been, in one sense, about nothing else – we are drawn to make confoundingly sharp distinctions. And all in the name of clarity. God and Satan, Church and State, desire and duty, law and justice, private and public: obedience has meant having and wanting to choose, and not wanting to have to choose; having to declare allegiances without being free enough to think about them; the whole notion of obedience tending to reinforce the pleasures of mutual exclusion (to forbid something is to define it). Or rather, perhaps, obedience has been staged in a way that invites us to make impossible choices (in the view of Nietzsche and Wilde we have sacrificed our unknowable multiplicitly by serving such limited gods); choices that divide us against ourselves in unnecessarily self-mutilating ways, and are in that sense false choices (a false choice is one in which we must give up something we deem to be essential, and have to be impressed that we are able to do so). Obedience, that is to say, is the mother of tragedy; if obedience is what we need – at least in its absolutist forms, and you can’t really be a bit obedient, any more than you can be a bit pregnant – then tragedy is what we are going to get. Tragic heroes have an absolute, unarguable obedience to their own beliefs. All tragedies are tragedies of obedience.
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 4