Cities phosphorescent,
on the river bank, industry’s
glowing piles waiting
beneath the smoke trails
like ocean giants for the siren’s
blare, the twitching lights,
of rail and motorways, the murmur
of the millionfold proliferating molluscs,
wood lice and leeches… 62
The molluscs, it would seem, are unstoppable. And they cling on for grim death.
But, though Sebald makes them seem disturbingly eerie, the molluscs are not exactly repulsive. There is no Swiftian conviction of the necessity of disgust in the passage. This brings me right back to the argument in Chapter 2. There I suggested that the most persuasive argument against misanthropy was the possibility of delight that, as organic, fleshly beings, humans always hold out. In one respect, that argument is right. But what exactly happens to it once the narratives of theological reassurance, providence and redemption have all disappeared? People remain beautiful – but then, so do certain parasites. It makes them no less destructive. Loveliness – and, in human beings, feeling for human loveliness – is part of the inward, organic logic of creatures, intrinsic to their blind self-persistence. That does not grant the creatures any certain value, particularly if, into the equation, we factor the anti-anthropocentric case, Rorty’s critique, now shared by many, of the ‘natural cut’, ‘the bad old metaphysical notion’ that the world is made up of two kinds of species, human and non-human.63 If we return to Gray’s imminent ‘era of solitude’ on the assumption that the idea of the ‘cut’ is no longer tenable, the question of whether, if they could communicate a view, other species could conceivably have much to say for man is not as inane as it might seem to some. Is it self-evident that the morality we might derive from the imagined vantage point of a species virtually extinct because of human activity is negligible alongside a human one? An impracticable and impotent morality, perhaps – but wrong?
‘To what serves mortal beauty – dangerous’, wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins.64 It is a memorable sentiment, articulating what may conceivably be a truth other than and beyond the one Hopkins intended. (He was a devout Catholic, and deeply troubled by his homosexuality). It may also supply a logic for misanthropy in the end more plausible than Swiftian disgust. That logic can only be countered by a convincing progress narrative of the kind we have now lost. Otherwise, nothing can quite dispel the fear that human beings can survive and flourish only by implacably destroying themselves, each other and their world. Equally, however, no case for misanthropy is provable. Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society Lord Rees thinks that the twenty-first century may very well be our last.65 The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford – no bunch of fools – has recently said more or less the same.66 Distinguished Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani argues that, without the emergence of a world republic – and what chance that – there will be more devastating world wars, to the point of annihilation.67 But Juvenal was similarly gloom-laden – a very long time ago. As Frank Kermode elegantly demonstrated some decades previously, the epochs repeatedly dream their own apocalypse.68 The Cold War era, in particular, seemed like the perfect occasion for Armageddon; never before had human beings had a better opportunity to bring it about. Instead, the very forces that might have led to catastrophe actually cancelled each other out. But in any case, even if some or all of the pessimists turned out to be right, and humanity faded from the scene, would that serve as an objective proof of misanthropy? It would merely mean that a phenomenon (in the neutral, scientific sense) was at an end, like the practically innumerable phenomena that scientists observe. In this respect, the question of misanthropy seems to leave us in absolute doubt. The most piquant irony of all is that it is only within the context of theological, providential or redemptive narratives, or logics of meaning that take us beyond what is immediately to hand, that the question of misanthropy really makes sense at all.
So we finally arrive at an aporia, it seems (an aporia that partly returns us to the premise from which we started, the incoherence or incompleteness of misanthropy). Intellectuals and scholars tend to like aporias. But if the question is the worth and indeed the future of the human project, should we just meekly subside into indecision? The misanthropic case cannot be proved; but it would be no bad thing right now if it were widely taken a little more seriously. What might be the ends of contemporary misanthropy? This chapter has tentatively broached the notion of approaching such questions from another angle. Intermittently, at least, it is just faintly possible, though one couldn’t have known it, that misanthropy has long been what Karl Wilhelm Goettling called cynicism and what I earlier called a democratic misanthropy, ‘the [actual, true] philosophy of the … people’.69 With the new forms of democracy that have recently appeared, might this by now be steadily emerging, articulating itself as such? This is not entirely impossible to credit, if what contemporary misanthropy betokens is a fitful bubbling over of a radical if commonly repressed dissatisfaction among ordinary people with what continues to be, as it always has been, their comprehensive economic, political and cultural disempowerment, the impotence of the majority, democratic or not (here I am at one with Land). Indeed, given, for example, the immense outpouring of loyalty that a basically quite humane, reputedly kind and generous if unrepentantly dissolute contemporary pop misanthropist like Ian Kilminster (Lemmy of Motörhead) generated before his recent death,70 one may wonder whether the people cannot be trusted to know themselves far better than do left-liberal or postmodern academics, Pelagians almost to a woman and man. (The Pelagianism of course may not necessarily go very far beneath the surface, but that is not the immediate point). Academics left, right and centre now more or less explicitly preach the people’s virtues, preen themselves on their solidarity with the people, self-defeatingly and unthinkingly identify with popular culture, sometimes in all its forms. Alas, they repeatedly fail to hear the people’s snarl, not least because it is directed as much at their kind as the powerful. Contemporary misanthropy, then, is perhaps most significant as a self-dissatisfaction within the people, and therefore, possibly, just possibly, an end to complaisance. That would make of it a first, very faint, tiny flicker of something that might, indeed, plausibly be called progress. If the flicker were ever to become a flame, it would necessarily take radical issue with toxic positivity, the notion of the imminence of the good society and their publicists, mules and vendors. It might dump them in the Sex Pistols’ dustbin, instead of the punks. Who knows, it might even represent the beginning of a historical dialectic.
NOTES
Introduction
1See A. Macc Armstrong, ‘Timon of Athens: A Legendary Figure?’, Greece & Rome, 2nd series, vol. 34, no. 1 (April 1987), pp. 7–11.
2William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. H.J. Oliver (London: Arden, 1959), hereafter cited in the text as TA; III.iv 82, p. 68.
3Specimens of the Table Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2 vols, London: John Murray, 1835), vol. 2, p. 301.
4Molière, Le misanthrope, ed. Jacques Chupeau (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as LM; I.i 96, p. 51.
5Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Bernard Gangebin and Marcel Raymond, pref. J.-B. Pontalis, notes by Catherine Kœnig (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 448, 450.
6Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 30.
7Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy, hereafter cited in the text as RT, in Five Revenge Tragedies: Kyd, Shakespeare, Marston, Chettle, Middleton, ed. with introd. Emma Smith (London: Penguin, 2012), V.iii 157, p. 415.
8Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne (London: Ernest Benn, 1970), hereafter cited in the text as ST; III.ii 3–4, 9–10, p. 53.
9Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. Patricia Thomson (London: Ernest Benn, 1970), hereafter cited in the text as TC; V.iii 163, 168–9, pp. 90–1.
10See John Webster, The White
Devil, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (London: Ernest Benn, 1970), hereafter cited in the text as WD; V.i–ii, pp. 99–106.
11Middleton, Women Beware Women, in Selected Plays, ed. David L. Frost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), I.ii 19–20, p. 198.
12John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. Bernard Harris (London: Ernest Benn, 1967), hereafter cited in the text as TM; I.iv 4–5, p. 24, I.vii 53, p. 37.
13Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Arden, 1979), V.v 49–50, p. 155.
14Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Elizabeth M. Brennan (London: Ernest Benn, 1977), hereafter cited in the text as DM; I.i 23–8, pp. 7–8.
15Plato, Dialogues, trans. Benjamin Jowett (5 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), vol. 1, pp. 445–6.
16Jonathan Swift, letter to Alexander Pope, 29 September 1725, Correspondence, ed. Harold Williams (5 vols, Oxford: Clarendon, 1963–5), vol. 3, p. 103.
17Erasmus, Apothegmes, trans. Antoine Macault (Paris: J. Dupins, 1556), 305a.
18Arsenius, Violetum, quoted Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists, trans. with an introd. and notes by Robin Hard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 209.
19The Cynic Philosophers from Diogenes to Julian, ed. and trans. Robert Dobbin (London: Penguin, 2012), hereafter cited in the text as CP; p. 69. ‘Supposed’ because the letters were probably written in Rome in the first century AD. However, they would have been the product of the faithful and a means of transmitting the tradition, and would therefore have been true ‘to the spirit of the original Cynics’ (p. 56; Dobbin’s comment).
20Quoted Derek Krueger, ‘The Bawdy and Society: The Shamelessness of Diogenes in Roman Imperial Culture’, in The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, ed. R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 222–39, p. 232. Krueger has ‘appearance’ not ‘opinion’. Both are at stake.
21George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, in Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: Nonpareil, 2000), pp. 413–60, p. 460. I have substituted ‘forever’ for Orwell’s ‘now’.
22See Bracht Branham and Goulet-Cazé, ‘Introduction’, Cynics, pp. 1–27, p. 19. My account of the Cynics is heavily indebted to this admirably scholarly volume.
23Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. 39.
24Diogenes Laertius, The Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (2 vols, London: Heinemann, 1925), 6.22, vol. 2, p. 25.
25See Laertius, Lives, 6.20-81, vol. 2, pp. 23–85, passim.
26Krueger, ‘Bawdy’, p. 239.
27Ibid., p. 236.
28A. A. Long, ‘The Socratic Tradition: Diogenes, Crates and Hellenistic Ethics’, in Bracht Branham and Goulet-Cazé (eds), Cynics, pp. 28–46, p. 42.
29See Bracht Branham and Goulet-Cazé, ‘Introduction’, Cynics, p. 5.
30Laertius, Lives, 6.64, vol. 2, p. 67.
31Ibid., 6.49, vol. 2, p. 51.
32Aelian, Historical Miscellany, quoted Diogenes the Cynic, p. 9.
33Bracht Branham and Goulet-Cazé (eds), ‘Introduction’, p. 13.
34But the poet was nonetheless prudently hedging his bets. In Satire XIII, he has earlier refused to be ‘lined up with the Cynics’. See Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. with an introd. and notes by Peter Green (rev. edn, London: Penguin, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as SS; xiii, 120–1, p. 100. Cf. xiv, 308–14, p. 114.
35Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley (3 vols, London: Penguin, 1994), vol. 1, p. 104.
36See for example Edward Champlin, Nero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Brian W. Jones, The Emperor Domitian (London: Routledge, 1993).
37W. H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’, in Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 87.
38Gibbon, History, vol. 1, p. 104.
39William J. Dominik and William T. Wehrle (eds), Roman Verse Satire – Lucilius to Juvenal: A Selection with an Introduction, Text, Translation and Notes (Mundelein, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2000), pp. 16, 17, 19.
40Horace, Satires and Epistles, and Persius, Satires, trans. with an introd. and notes by Niall Rudd (rev. edn, London: Penguin, 2005), hereafter cited in the text as S; i, 114–15, p. 141.
41See for example Susanna Morton Braund, The Roman Satirists and Their Masks (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2007), passim. This seems like an eminently postmodern response to a literature not obviously available to one, seeing aesthetic detachment and an abstracted cleverness as at a premium even in Imperial Rome, while doubting the power and searing intensity of both the moral imperative and the satirical vision. Such readings beg the question as to why Juvenal should have bothered at all, especially in so problematic an environment. For a very persuasive view similar to mine, see Peter Green, ‘Introduction’, Juvenal, SS, pp. lxvi–xvii and passim. See also Green’s notes, passim.
42G. Highet, Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 58.
43Green, notes, Juvenal, SS, p. 130.
44See Green, Juvenal, SS, introd. and notes, p. xliii and passim.
45See Harold Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics (2 vols, Studia Graeca et Latina Gotoburgensia, Gothenburg: Elanders, 1967), vol. 2, pp. 470–8.
46Cf. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. with introd. and notes by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), hereafter cited in the text as C; p. 15. I have taken the liberty (and it is one) of usually substituting quotations from the King James Bible for Chadwick’s translations of quotations from Augustine’s Latin Bible, in the interests of expressiveness.
47See Augustine, Against the Academicians, trans. with an introd. Sister Mary Patricia Garvey (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), p. 81; and G. R. Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 30.
48For an excellent collection, see Augustine, Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, rev. and introd. by Benjamin B. Warfield (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004).
49See for example Augustine, Treatise against Two Letters of the Pelagians, I.iii 7, in Anti-Pelagian Writings, pp. 373–434.
50Augustine, The Soliloquies, Being the Secret Discourses and Conferences of his Soul with God (Dublin: John Lamb, 1747), pp. 19–20 and passim.
51Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 362.
52Evans, Augustine on Evil, p. 184.
53Ibid., p. 130.
54Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin, 2012).
Chapter 1
1Nancy Mitford, The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles, introd. Stella Tillyard (1966; London: Vintage, 2011), p. 174.
2Jean de la Bruyère, Les Caractères de Thèophraste (Paris: Hochereau, 1765), hereafter cited in the text as CT; p. 307.
3Madame de Sévigné, Letters, 6 May 1671; quoted Thomas Pike Lathy, Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV, Comprising Biography and Anecdotes of the Most Celebrated Characters of that Period (London: Matthew Iley, 1819), p. 361.
4Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Régime: A History of France, 1610-1774, trans. Mark Greengrass (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 31.
5See R. J. Knecht, The Fronde (London: Historical Association, 1975), pp. 11–12.
6See ibid., p. 26.
7‘Préface’, La Rochefoucauld, Refléxions ou sentences et maximes morales, ed. Jean Lafond (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), hereafter cited in the text as R; p. 8.
8See Alain Mazère, La Rochefoucauld: Le duc rebelle, pref. Jean Mesnard (Paris: Le Croît vif, 2007), pp. 73–91.
9Quoted Morris Bishop, The Life and Adventures of La Rochefoucauld (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 144.
10Quoted Mazère, La Rochefoucauld, p. 7
6; and p. 119; Bishop, Life and Adventures, p. 100.
11Quoted Bishop, Life and Adventures, p. 241.
12Quoted ibid., p. 144; and p. 245.
13Lafond, ‘Préface’, La Rochefoucauld, Refléxions, p. 9.
14See for instance W. G. Moore, La Rochefoucauld: His Mind and Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), passim.
15Quoted Ladurie, Ancien Régime, p. 210.
16Relazioni degli ambasciatori Veneziani nel secolo XVII, III, 47; quoted Arthur Tilley, The Decline of the Age of Louis XIV, or, French Literature 1687-1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. 5.
17See Lathy, Memoirs, pp. 163–4.
18Madame de Sévigné, Letters, 24 April 1871; quoted Lathy, Memoirs, p. 355.
19Lathy, Memoirs, p. 23.
20Ladurie, Ancien Régime, p. 258.
21Quoted Mitford, Sun King, p. 69.
22See ibid. Mitford’s source, as for other of the details I have used, is Georges Mongrédien, La Vie quotidienne sous Louis XIV (Paris: Hachette, 1948).
23See Lathy, Memoirs, p. 185.
24Quoted Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, with Jean-François Fitou, Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 122.
25Ladurie, Saint-Simon, p. 189. See also passim.
26See ibid., p. 12.
27Ibid., p. 301.
28Mitford, Sun King, p. 126.
29Quoted Ladurie, Saint-Simon, p. 332.
30Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires, ed. Yves Coirault (8 vols., Paris: Gallimard/Pléiade, 1983–88), vol. 4, p. 1009.
31Though this had also been a neo-Stoic emphasis, as in Justus Lipsius’s De Constantia, which, in the immediately preceding era of the Wars of Religion, had argued for solitary retirement as a response to a dangerous and frightening world. I am grateful to Anthony Ossa-Richardson for this point.
Misanthropy Page 31