Break-Out from the Crystal Palace

The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky

John Carroll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415562225
• eBook ISBN: 9781135175436
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

Before Marcuse and Laing, before Heidegger and Sartre, even before Freud, the way was prepared for the anarcho-psychological critique of economic man, of all codes of ideology or absolute morality, and of scientific habits of mind. First published in 1974, this title traces this philosophical tradition to its roots in the nineteenth century, to the figures of Stirner, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and to their psychological demolition of the two alternative axes of social theory and practice, a critique which today reads more pertinently than ever, and remains unanswered.

To understand this critique is crucial for an age which has shown a mounting revulsion at the consequences of the Crystal Palace, symbol at once of technologico-industrial progress and its rationalist-scientist ideology, an age whose imaginative preoccupations have telescoped onto the individual, and whose interest has switched from the social realm to that of anarchic, inner, 'psychological man'.

1
Introduction: liberal-rationalism and the progress model

1

This study stands primarily as an essay in morals. It is governed by Nietzsche’s contention that the moral intentions of every philosophy constitute the real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown. Hence, although the investigation broaches psychological, social, political, and economic, as well as philosophical, problems, its driving thrust is towards the question of ultimate values. At stake throughout the discussion is the question of how men conceive of whether what they do is good or evil, and what this means. Attention is focussed on the psychological role that their action, and in turn their evaluation of it, plays for them personally. An essay in morals concerns itself with the quality of what men do, with the metaphysical essence of human theories and practices. This study is at the same time an excursion in intellectual or cultural history.

Three different intellectual traditions, each of which developed fundamentally during the nineteenth century, have supplied contemporary Western civilization with its key social images of man. These traditions have exerted in their different ways a decisive and enduring influence on patterns of behaviour and social structure. First, there is the British, liberal, utilitarian, rationalist social philosophy which sprouted from the roots of the school of Political Economy, and provided the emerging industrial society with its guiding ideology. Second, there is the Marxist socialist tradition. Third, there is the tradition with which this study is centrally concerned, one whose principal interests are psychological and whose political orientation is anarchist. The first two traditions are well known; the third has been completely neglected by modern philosophers and intellectual historians alike.

This study will defend the proposition that what is referred to here as the ‘anarcho-psychological tradition’ developed in Europe between 1840 and 1890 as an original and coherent theory of human action. It prepared the way for Freud’s work, and for the subsequent modern interest in inner ‘psychological man’. It also provided a theoretical representation of the habits and values, although often unstated, of individualist types such as the artist, the bohemian, l’homme de lettres, and the student. Finally, it played a crucial role in the emergence of the existentialist tradition.¹

We are faced from the outset with the methodological problem of what constitutes an intellectual ‘tradition’. No problem would arise if it were possible to set down clearly and distinctly a list of characteristics which define anarcho-psychology. Cultural history, however, is amenable to such a strategy only at a futilely superficial level, an assertion which this study as a whole will substantiate. What has been called ‘tradition’ is more accurately termed ‘perspective’. The initial proposition states that a group of individual thinkers developed a new perspective on man’s estate; they posed, largely independently of each other, a series of questions which had not hitherto been considered; it is the radical nature of anarcho-psychological questions which stakes out the ground common to its theorists, and makes it worthy of investigation. These thinkers do not found a tradition in the sense of an elaborated canon of principles which is then handed down and developed by the next in line. (Moreover, this study is not especially concerned with questions of direct influence of one theorist on another, or with the particular social or economic background from which any of them came.)

A metaphor, allowing for generous poetic licence, illustrates the methodological strategy to be followed. It is as if there were three dominant mountains in a perpetually cloud-covered range. The task is to map one of them by climbing it, and hopefully thereby get a clearer impression of the range as a whole. In order to fix bearings it becomes necessary to take sightings of the other two mountains from different perspectives during the ascent. Most of the time, however, is absorbed in close examination of the terrain which is covered, aided by comparisons with corresponding areas which become visible on the slopes of the two alternative mountains.

Three organizing principles are employed in reconstructing the genesis and some of the consequences of the anarcho-psychological perspective. First, the claim is made that before Freud this perspective had three outstanding exponents: Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose written works form the primary data of this study. Second, as mentioned, anarcho-psychology is treated as one of three competing world-views. The latter section of this first chapter is devoted to sketching the leading characteristics of the first body of social theory, that which is termed ‘liberal-rationalism’ and identified with an assumption of linear social progress and the utilitarian model of homo economicus. This tradition has been referred to popularly in so many vague and indiscriminate ways that it was felt necessary to spell out with some precision how it is understood here. Discussion of the aspects of the Marxist socialist tradition which are germane to anarcho-psychology fits naturally into the second chapter on ideology, where one section treats Marx’s lengthy critique of Stirner. This section aims to clarify the issues which separate a radical anarchist psychology from a radical socialist sociology.

Third, the study is divided into three main chapters, reflecting the distinctive lines of critical anarcho-psychological argument which are levelled against existing patterns of social and economic morality and behaviour. The three organizing principles conjoin. The first anarcho-psychological argument, its critique of ideology, has as particular components a critique of liberalism and a critique of socialism. The second argument, the critique of knowledge, directs itself specifically against rationalist and empiricist assumptions. It also traces the nature and plausibility of an irrationalist epistemology. The third argument, the critique of homo economicus, sets itself in opposition to the materialism at the root of both utilitarian and Marxist traditions.

Although this work bears the formal structure of an historical investigation, it is not essentially concerned with the past for its own sake, for what really happened. It is history only in the sense of Hegel’s reflection: ‘We have, in traversing the past—however extensive its periods—only to do with what is present.’¹ What must be stressed is that the work that follows is the issue of a need to illuminate the present, to penetrate, and thereby gain some understanding of, a complex of social problems that are vitally contemporary. Although there will be little overt reference to the present, the argument is loosed from its primary context if one forgets that ultimately its thread unravels in an attempt, by the author, to clarify his own image of redemption. Implicit here is the contention of Walter Benjamin, in his theses on the philosophy of history, that our view of the past, which is the concern of history, is indissolubly bound up with our image of redemption, and thereby our personal image of happiness.²

There is no contradiction in writing an essay in morals in the form of an intellectual history. The past is the only terrain open to us when we are in search of clues to our present, for we are usually lost in our own time, being too absorbed in its infinite detail to gain much perspective. The more we understand about the aspects of the past which interest us the more adequately will they map the complexities of our own condition. Moreover, investigating the past is a means of discovering the path along which we have travelled, as a culture, as a society, and finally as individuals; this may help us to understand a little better where we have arrived, that is, where we are now.

This account of the investigation that follows raises at once the problem of objectivity, of what scientific status the work may claim. No historian can faithfully recreate the past. Every attempt at writing history is conditioned by what Max Weber called ‘value-relevance’: it cannot claim objectivity outside the bounds of the author’s specific cultural orientations and some of his specific psychic dispositions.¹ What this means is that the range of objectivity is governed by the degree of truth contained in the assumption that I, an intellectual historian, am forced to make, the assumption that I myself am so thoroughly coloured, in my interests and perceptions, both by problems common to all men and by my own time, that my driving concerns will be communicable and of general interest.

The investigation proceeds necessarily by simplifying and stylizing ‘reality’. Following Kant and later Weber, the human scientist selects out of an infinity of possible perceptions what is significant to him in a reality which is the effect of an infinity of determinant causes. He accepts that description can never be exhaustive. And, while there is an objective reality of verbally transmissible ideas, entities, and events, no study can be free of subjective factors. It would not be possible in 1973 to present the thought, for example, of Max Stirner with the precise inflexions that he intended in 1844. Indeed, what is presented is not Stirner himself, but my reading of Stirner, with its own coherencies and its own stresses.

Nevertheless, historical propositions do provide objective orientations in a sense other than that they are communicable at a certain time within a certain culture. For the historian of ideas, original texts and information about the situation in which they were written and received constitute a framework within which the propositions can be discussed. Some of the propositions tendered here are open to falsification by empirical historical evidence.

The study as a whole claims objectivity also in respecting the logical criteria of clarity, consistency, and coherency within its own terms of reference. The difficult question is what precisely are these terms of reference. The most an intellectual historian can achieve at this point, once he has stated what seem to him to be his goals and his method of approaching them, is to proceed self-critically, examining the presuppositions of his work as it evolves. To facilitate this operation one chapter is devoted here to the anarcho-psychological critique of knowledge; it attempts to clarify the terms of reference.

2

The progressive secularization of the religious quest for truth forms the mainstream which governs the flow of all intellectual currents in Europe over the last three centuries. The image of human redemption is recast so that traditional routes for spiritual pilgrimage are transformed into a single path leading towards the goal of rationality. Rationality in its most general terms simply signifies order, in the sense either of cognitive meaning or of technical control over the human and the natural environment. Reason is many-sided: the concept at the centre of Hegel’s philosophical system has little ostensibly in common with the rationality presupposed by the hypothetico-deductive...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: liberal-rationalism and the progress model
• 2 The critique of ideology
• 3 The critique of knowledge
• 4 The critique of homo economicus
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name index