Authenticity, Power, and Hobbits
Thoughts on Two Prominent Frenchman, and Bilbo Baggins
This odd set of musings is based on some side reading I have been doing on the subject of some prominent French left-wing philosophers guided by the critical essays of Sir Roger Scruton. The latter is a British philosopher, whose works I highly recommend, in the tradition of British Burkean conservatism. He is a brilliant analyst of the moderns and an excellent literary critic, with his main concerns being Kant, conservative ethics, and aesthetics. He is not typical in that he is not simply a laissez-fair capitalist and Christian moralizer, but rather he is concerned with the conservation of functional institutions which preserve the liberties and benefits which have made what can generally be called the West a generally good place to live. He has the air common to many of the great twentieth century British writers, a strong sense of home, a love of rustic living, and a keen aesthetic sense. His critique of the thinkers of what he calls the "New Left" is very thoughtful, and he is very keen both to give his intellectual opponents the benefit of the doubt concerning any planned malice,and to acknowledge their merits where they lie.
With this in mind, it has been interesting to read his critique of the twentieth century French giants Sartre1 and Foucault2. I personally have only a slight experience with the former and none with the latter, so my comments here are largely a reflection on the ideas exposed by Scruton.
In describing these two thinkers it has been interesting to see how Scruton intertwines their works with their lives. This important aspect of a thinker, his own behavior, relationships, and deeds, is not often enough discussed when dealing with the merits and origins of their ideas. Sartre, for instance, enamoured as he was by the French decadents like Baudelaire3 and Flaubert4, lived out many of their ideas, but to a new peak of expression because of his philosophical leanings. He lived a life of sexual extravagance, and won fame and notoriety in Parisian high society out of keeping with his professed and doggedly maintained Marxism. Likewise Foucault, a homosexual who frequented sado-masochist clubs, lived a life of licentiousness while also conceiving of his work as a great stand for liberty from oppression. These ideas and life-styles ought to seem familiar to anyone who has contact with current academia and the so-called "millenial" generation, and I presume a similar feeling exists in the now maturing generation.
A large part of the appeal of Sartre, Foucault, and their school is the way in which they adopted and individualized the Marxist class struggle. They were able to transmute this struggle against the "bourgeoisie" into a struggle against "bourgeois" morals and the structures of authority. Sartre in particular seems to have built up a notion of "authenticity" which centers on the liberation of the self from the other. This other is defined in the terms of conformity. Obviously in context of a Marxist system of thought this produces contradictory notions. Identification with the proletariat as class while also seeking to be authentic as identified against a "totalizing" moral and societal are inherently opposed notions. Scruton significantly notes that this is above all, in his estimation, a fiction made for the self, an internal almost mystical conviction being set up against the conventional. There is in the background a longing for truth, but the desire to arrive at a personal and entirely unique and unconditioned notion of reality and the truth thwarts its real pursuit: if it is enduring and external it looks too much like the much hated "other". This leads someone like Sartre to a constantly negative appraisal of the world. The French intellectual sneer is by now a caricature, but it is much involved in this attitude. Scruton puts it well when he notes, "since he has no values, [the gauchiste or leftist]'s thought and action can be given only a negative guarantee. He must fortify his position by unmasking the deceptions of others.5" This "unmasking" takes the form of the constant withering critique, the continual prying for the "real" motives, the "catch" in every deal.
Foucault follows up on this tendency. His contribution to the history of philosophy is his dubious contention that all human relations and the very language that enshrines those relations are relations of power. He has difficultly perceiving any reality beyond power, and that power itself is apparently ill defined. His history books are scathing condemnations of asylums, hospitals, and prisons, all of which impose the power structures of the so-called "classical", or pre-French revolution, and bourgeois social orders. He views the madman as someone with a truth which cannot be captured in speech, and therefore beyond the reach of bourgeois reason. This particular notion has begun showing itself in the current (2018) debates surrounding mental illness, physical health, and law. There is almost hanging in the air the threat, because of the fear of offense, of the repudiation of diagnosis, treatment, and the functioning of justice. It is from Foucault these, and all relativist modern notions, draw at least a portion of their origin. This suspicion all human structures as being somehow the support structures of tyranny corrupt much of our modern discourse, and indeed Scruton notes that, "paranoia is no more than localized relativism- a specific and focused manifestation of the desire that reality be subservient to thought, that the other have an identity entirely determined by one's own response to him." It is the authentic self's response to what Foucault calls the "gaze" of the other. One senses perhaps a repressed feeling of shame or conscience, but that may perhaps be going too far. Regardless the other is certainly a condemnatory and oppressive figure in this framework to anyone cultivating a sense of authenticity as defined by Sartre and further added to by Foucault.
In the lifestyle and thought of both these figures, the notions of authenticity in distinction with the other and the hidden relations of oppressive power at work in all human institutions, we sense also in their lifestyle and sentiments a love for the transgressive. This love has deep roots in French thoughts, but we shall concern ourselves here only with the decadents. The poetry of Baudelaire and the novels of Flaubert present a love for the real, but it is tainted by the movement towards pleasure and a certain sardonic cynicism towards convention. This is certainly true of the work of our two philosophers. Their work is in many ways the systematization of the "poetic" or image based insights of the decadent writers of the 19th century. The identification of someone like Foucault with the madman, the diseased, the criminal, identifying them as the victims of oppression and a system in which they don't fit, seems airily unreal, the musing of someone far removed from the realities of disease and crime. Similarly Sartre's identification with the poor, despite the poor's general lack of identification with him and their suffering under the former's cherished Marxist ideals, is especially odd considering his popularity in Paris's social high life and his constant presence in the cafes and salons of the Paris elite. It is symptomatic of what the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho calls cognitive parallax; their manner of living contradicts their ideas and their very assumptions render their theories untenable.6
These thinkers, my intuition tells me, deep down wanted a great adventure out of their lives, a heroic struggle against evil and oppression, to be fighting for the freedom of the masses. They found themselves in our own disenchanted age with no dragons to fight or evil kings to cast down. They were faced with the much more banal enemy of the bourgeois businessman and bureaucrat, who funnily enough was often happy enough to support his own critics. Scruton notes that the middle and upper classes of modernity "extol the gauchiste as the absolver of his corrupted conscience. The gauchiste therefore becomes the redeemer of the class whose illusions he has been appointed to unmask." By his transgressions, his attempted courageous stand against the world, he has come to be "born aloft on the shoulders of the bourgeoisie whose habits he tramples, and to enjoy again the aristocrat's place in the sun." He has not achieved what he desired and his transgression becomes bitter to him. Sartre ended his life, contrary to his own perception of himself, as a French institution. Foucault died of AIDS, receiving hospital care, ironically in a former asylum he had critiqued. Scruton notes that at the end of Foucault's life, he had begun, while writing his history of sexuality starting from the ancient world, to be changed by his studies and his illness. He discovered no ancients believed pleasure to be the most important element of sexual relations, and he began to see the importance of the family. Scruton ends his chapter on these two intellectuals by saying, "I was constantly drawn to the thought that Foucault's belligerent leftism was not a criticism of reality, but a defence against it, a refusal to recognize that, for all its defects, normality is all the we have."
This last insight, in addition to a familiarity with the Marxist project, leads me to my own principle thoughts on this subject. The longing for adventure amidst the disenchanted world is deep. We have a lack of the transcendent in our modern western societies, a lack of that which makes a simple spring of water a holy well, or a ring of toadstools into a fairy ring. These are small superstitious examples, but they are emblematic of a worldview that accepts the entrance of the light of eternity into modern life, of something that gives the deeds of each man or woman an eternal significance. What we have instead is our view of progress, of either advancing or regressing humanity. This is a wearying task, because one is constantly being buffeted by the winds of time, and inevitably your own work becomes the dross to be purified by a later generation. Veneration for you and your deeds is conditional to its continued utility toward forward movement. And the vast mechanization, the great isolation of the modern city and the great invisible expanse of the internet, makes one feel lost. These French intellectuals show the struggle in modernity for heroism, but their notion of the hero rejects all that is small and familiar for the vague and undefined future, for the ever delayed day of fulfillment in full authenticity when the intellectual will finally be reunited with the renewed and authentic humanity and cease his lonely wandering.
In the last moments of this post I would like to integrate the small figure of Bilbo Baggins, and his similarly unprepossessing creator J.R.R. Tolkien. I mentioned earlier that the English writers of the twentieth century have had a talent for bringing out simple pleasures and the rustic life. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins's story is the story of someone swept into the extraordinary and the uncomfortable. His only thought during the dangers? Bacon and eggs, and the kettle singing! His horizons are opened in the course of his travel, such that in the later novels he can desire mountains and travel, yet it is his grounding in the ordinary joys that makes him appreciate his experiences. Bilbo's travels help him gain an appreciation for the normal that he took for granted in his former life, they made him, as we see in the Fellowship of the Ring more generous and hospitable. His encounter with the world, with want and terror, gave him a part in the final end of physical evil in Middle-Earth, by his finding of the Ring of power. Tolkien's love of the homely is fascinating in parallel with his equally strong sense of adventure and romance. It is perhaps unsurprising in a man who had really known want and terror in the trenches of the First World War. But perhaps more important, he was bequeathed by his Catholic faith with the knowledge of all classical Christians; that ordinary things are the vehicle for the extraordinary. The transcendent works through what looks meager. Bread becomes the bread of angels, a virgin's womb is made wider than heaven, the Son of Man slays death and reveals Himself to be the Son of God. Bilbo is an example of this, one of the smallest and least remarkable persons who becomes the instrument of victory over evil. The adventure of this life is not to be found in the trangressive authenticity and Utopian dreams of the melancholy French philosophers. It is to be found in being small, loving the normal things which are constantly under threat, and being ready when called upon to defend them.
1. Jean-Paul Sartre is a well known philosopher often associated with existentialism and Marxism, his most well know work is probably Being and Nothing, and many have heard his terse maxim, "Hell is other people."
2. Michel Foucault is famous for his theories of power and he is immensely influential in the modern social sciences.
3. Charles Baudelaire is famous for his poetry, especially the book Fleurs de Mal. I also highly recommend this First Things article on the decadent poets, "The Cursed Poets and their Gods"
4. Gustave Flaubert was a novelist, particularly famous for subverting the moralizing and activist trend of French literature, his most famous works being a Sentimental Education and Madame Bovarie
5. All quotations in this text are from chapter four of Scruton's Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. I have the kindle version and so cannot supply page numbers.
6. Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher, particularly critical of Marxist thought. In this instance I'm referencing one of his ideas, an explanation of which may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y_SQBdVHQk&t=6s
With this in mind, it has been interesting to read his critique of the twentieth century French giants Sartre1 and Foucault2. I personally have only a slight experience with the former and none with the latter, so my comments here are largely a reflection on the ideas exposed by Scruton.
In describing these two thinkers it has been interesting to see how Scruton intertwines their works with their lives. This important aspect of a thinker, his own behavior, relationships, and deeds, is not often enough discussed when dealing with the merits and origins of their ideas. Sartre, for instance, enamoured as he was by the French decadents like Baudelaire3 and Flaubert4, lived out many of their ideas, but to a new peak of expression because of his philosophical leanings. He lived a life of sexual extravagance, and won fame and notoriety in Parisian high society out of keeping with his professed and doggedly maintained Marxism. Likewise Foucault, a homosexual who frequented sado-masochist clubs, lived a life of licentiousness while also conceiving of his work as a great stand for liberty from oppression. These ideas and life-styles ought to seem familiar to anyone who has contact with current academia and the so-called "millenial" generation, and I presume a similar feeling exists in the now maturing generation.
A large part of the appeal of Sartre, Foucault, and their school is the way in which they adopted and individualized the Marxist class struggle. They were able to transmute this struggle against the "bourgeoisie" into a struggle against "bourgeois" morals and the structures of authority. Sartre in particular seems to have built up a notion of "authenticity" which centers on the liberation of the self from the other. This other is defined in the terms of conformity. Obviously in context of a Marxist system of thought this produces contradictory notions. Identification with the proletariat as class while also seeking to be authentic as identified against a "totalizing" moral and societal are inherently opposed notions. Scruton significantly notes that this is above all, in his estimation, a fiction made for the self, an internal almost mystical conviction being set up against the conventional. There is in the background a longing for truth, but the desire to arrive at a personal and entirely unique and unconditioned notion of reality and the truth thwarts its real pursuit: if it is enduring and external it looks too much like the much hated "other". This leads someone like Sartre to a constantly negative appraisal of the world. The French intellectual sneer is by now a caricature, but it is much involved in this attitude. Scruton puts it well when he notes, "since he has no values, [the gauchiste or leftist]'s thought and action can be given only a negative guarantee. He must fortify his position by unmasking the deceptions of others.5" This "unmasking" takes the form of the constant withering critique, the continual prying for the "real" motives, the "catch" in every deal.
Foucault follows up on this tendency. His contribution to the history of philosophy is his dubious contention that all human relations and the very language that enshrines those relations are relations of power. He has difficultly perceiving any reality beyond power, and that power itself is apparently ill defined. His history books are scathing condemnations of asylums, hospitals, and prisons, all of which impose the power structures of the so-called "classical", or pre-French revolution, and bourgeois social orders. He views the madman as someone with a truth which cannot be captured in speech, and therefore beyond the reach of bourgeois reason. This particular notion has begun showing itself in the current (2018) debates surrounding mental illness, physical health, and law. There is almost hanging in the air the threat, because of the fear of offense, of the repudiation of diagnosis, treatment, and the functioning of justice. It is from Foucault these, and all relativist modern notions, draw at least a portion of their origin. This suspicion all human structures as being somehow the support structures of tyranny corrupt much of our modern discourse, and indeed Scruton notes that, "paranoia is no more than localized relativism- a specific and focused manifestation of the desire that reality be subservient to thought, that the other have an identity entirely determined by one's own response to him." It is the authentic self's response to what Foucault calls the "gaze" of the other. One senses perhaps a repressed feeling of shame or conscience, but that may perhaps be going too far. Regardless the other is certainly a condemnatory and oppressive figure in this framework to anyone cultivating a sense of authenticity as defined by Sartre and further added to by Foucault.
In the lifestyle and thought of both these figures, the notions of authenticity in distinction with the other and the hidden relations of oppressive power at work in all human institutions, we sense also in their lifestyle and sentiments a love for the transgressive. This love has deep roots in French thoughts, but we shall concern ourselves here only with the decadents. The poetry of Baudelaire and the novels of Flaubert present a love for the real, but it is tainted by the movement towards pleasure and a certain sardonic cynicism towards convention. This is certainly true of the work of our two philosophers. Their work is in many ways the systematization of the "poetic" or image based insights of the decadent writers of the 19th century. The identification of someone like Foucault with the madman, the diseased, the criminal, identifying them as the victims of oppression and a system in which they don't fit, seems airily unreal, the musing of someone far removed from the realities of disease and crime. Similarly Sartre's identification with the poor, despite the poor's general lack of identification with him and their suffering under the former's cherished Marxist ideals, is especially odd considering his popularity in Paris's social high life and his constant presence in the cafes and salons of the Paris elite. It is symptomatic of what the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho calls cognitive parallax; their manner of living contradicts their ideas and their very assumptions render their theories untenable.6
These thinkers, my intuition tells me, deep down wanted a great adventure out of their lives, a heroic struggle against evil and oppression, to be fighting for the freedom of the masses. They found themselves in our own disenchanted age with no dragons to fight or evil kings to cast down. They were faced with the much more banal enemy of the bourgeois businessman and bureaucrat, who funnily enough was often happy enough to support his own critics. Scruton notes that the middle and upper classes of modernity "extol the gauchiste as the absolver of his corrupted conscience. The gauchiste therefore becomes the redeemer of the class whose illusions he has been appointed to unmask." By his transgressions, his attempted courageous stand against the world, he has come to be "born aloft on the shoulders of the bourgeoisie whose habits he tramples, and to enjoy again the aristocrat's place in the sun." He has not achieved what he desired and his transgression becomes bitter to him. Sartre ended his life, contrary to his own perception of himself, as a French institution. Foucault died of AIDS, receiving hospital care, ironically in a former asylum he had critiqued. Scruton notes that at the end of Foucault's life, he had begun, while writing his history of sexuality starting from the ancient world, to be changed by his studies and his illness. He discovered no ancients believed pleasure to be the most important element of sexual relations, and he began to see the importance of the family. Scruton ends his chapter on these two intellectuals by saying, "I was constantly drawn to the thought that Foucault's belligerent leftism was not a criticism of reality, but a defence against it, a refusal to recognize that, for all its defects, normality is all the we have."
This last insight, in addition to a familiarity with the Marxist project, leads me to my own principle thoughts on this subject. The longing for adventure amidst the disenchanted world is deep. We have a lack of the transcendent in our modern western societies, a lack of that which makes a simple spring of water a holy well, or a ring of toadstools into a fairy ring. These are small superstitious examples, but they are emblematic of a worldview that accepts the entrance of the light of eternity into modern life, of something that gives the deeds of each man or woman an eternal significance. What we have instead is our view of progress, of either advancing or regressing humanity. This is a wearying task, because one is constantly being buffeted by the winds of time, and inevitably your own work becomes the dross to be purified by a later generation. Veneration for you and your deeds is conditional to its continued utility toward forward movement. And the vast mechanization, the great isolation of the modern city and the great invisible expanse of the internet, makes one feel lost. These French intellectuals show the struggle in modernity for heroism, but their notion of the hero rejects all that is small and familiar for the vague and undefined future, for the ever delayed day of fulfillment in full authenticity when the intellectual will finally be reunited with the renewed and authentic humanity and cease his lonely wandering.
In the last moments of this post I would like to integrate the small figure of Bilbo Baggins, and his similarly unprepossessing creator J.R.R. Tolkien. I mentioned earlier that the English writers of the twentieth century have had a talent for bringing out simple pleasures and the rustic life. Nowhere is this more evident than in The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins's story is the story of someone swept into the extraordinary and the uncomfortable. His only thought during the dangers? Bacon and eggs, and the kettle singing! His horizons are opened in the course of his travel, such that in the later novels he can desire mountains and travel, yet it is his grounding in the ordinary joys that makes him appreciate his experiences. Bilbo's travels help him gain an appreciation for the normal that he took for granted in his former life, they made him, as we see in the Fellowship of the Ring more generous and hospitable. His encounter with the world, with want and terror, gave him a part in the final end of physical evil in Middle-Earth, by his finding of the Ring of power. Tolkien's love of the homely is fascinating in parallel with his equally strong sense of adventure and romance. It is perhaps unsurprising in a man who had really known want and terror in the trenches of the First World War. But perhaps more important, he was bequeathed by his Catholic faith with the knowledge of all classical Christians; that ordinary things are the vehicle for the extraordinary. The transcendent works through what looks meager. Bread becomes the bread of angels, a virgin's womb is made wider than heaven, the Son of Man slays death and reveals Himself to be the Son of God. Bilbo is an example of this, one of the smallest and least remarkable persons who becomes the instrument of victory over evil. The adventure of this life is not to be found in the trangressive authenticity and Utopian dreams of the melancholy French philosophers. It is to be found in being small, loving the normal things which are constantly under threat, and being ready when called upon to defend them.
1. Jean-Paul Sartre is a well known philosopher often associated with existentialism and Marxism, his most well know work is probably Being and Nothing, and many have heard his terse maxim, "Hell is other people."
2. Michel Foucault is famous for his theories of power and he is immensely influential in the modern social sciences.
3. Charles Baudelaire is famous for his poetry, especially the book Fleurs de Mal. I also highly recommend this First Things article on the decadent poets, "The Cursed Poets and their Gods"
4. Gustave Flaubert was a novelist, particularly famous for subverting the moralizing and activist trend of French literature, his most famous works being a Sentimental Education and Madame Bovarie
5. All quotations in this text are from chapter four of Scruton's Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. I have the kindle version and so cannot supply page numbers.
6. Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher, particularly critical of Marxist thought. In this instance I'm referencing one of his ideas, an explanation of which may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y_SQBdVHQk&t=6s
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