The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  When we realize this, Nietzsche predicted, a new dawn will break for mankind. We will find ourselves in a world “beyond good and evil,” as the title of one of his books states. It will be an immeasurably new experience, but also immensely old. Men§ will find themselves once more at the point at which Heraclitus had begun the great Western adventure. This came as no surprise to Nietzsche. All history turns out to be an endless repetitive cycle, in which every event and every thing—“this bird, this sun, this snake,” as Zarathustra says—is played out the same way again and again.14

  Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a parable of the end of modern civilization. The main character, the prophet Zarathustra, has entirely reconciled himself to this bleak reality and the fact that in a world of eternal recurrence, the only choices that matter are the ones we make for ourselves. This realization transforms him into a new kind of human being, the new man, the Übermensch, or Overman. He is a being beyond good and evil, because “the greatest evil is necessary for the Overman.”15 He is a being freed at last from Plato and Aristotle and the chains of Western rationalism. He is a being suffused with the will to power.

  “My hour is come,” he tells the sun, “this is my morning, my day is breaking; rise now, rise, thou great noon!”

  Thus spake Zarathustra, and he left his cave, glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.16

  By the time the fourth and last part of Zarathustra was published in 1892, Nietzsche had gone hopelessly insane. The prophet of the overthrow of reason had gotten his wish. Two years earlier, a book published in Paris, Time and Free Will, had launched an attack on the temple of rationality from a very different direction.

  Nietzsche’s turn back to the pre-Socratics ends in a cave. Henri Bergson’s begins with a race.

  It’s the most famous imaginary race in history, between the great Greek hero Achilles and a tortoise. The pre-Socratic thinker Zeno, a follower of Parmenides, dreamed it up as a way to prove that motion, and change, is impossible.

  Achilles and the tortoise are set to run a race around a stadium track. Achilles generously gives the tortoise a head start. The starter says, “Go!” and the race is on. However, Achilles is doomed to lose even before he leaves the starting block.

  Why? Because, Zeno says, by the time Achilles gets to point A, where the tortoise started, the tortoise will have already moved ahead to point B. When Achilles reaches B, the tortoise has crawled to C; when Achilles finally reaches C, the tortoise is already at point D.

  And so on. Common sense says Achilles must win the race. However, reason and the diagram show that no matter what Achilles does to catch up, he can’t reach the point where the tortoise was before the tortoise will have moved to a point ahead of him. The race is over before it begins.

  Zeno’s race is a famous example of a logical paradox. Zeno used it to show that there was no such thing as a state of motion; change isn’t something that happens to objects (like Achilles running on the track or an arrow in flight) because all we can know are objects in the moment, here and now. It is being there that counts, while the journey itself—like the race—is meaningless.

  Aristotle in Book VI of the Physics replied to Zeno’s paradox by pointing out that while space may be theoretically divisible into infinitesimally small segments, time and motion are not. In real life, motion takes place over finite distances in finite amounts of time. Achilles will win because he is running from A to B at a faster speed than the tortoise; the points don’t enter the picture unless he happens to stop at one of them. “Everything that is in motion is in motion [over] a period of time,” Aristotle sniffed, unless it is at rest—and vice versa.17

  Aristotle dismissed Zeno’s paradox without answering it. Although philosophers over the centuries pondered the problem Zeno raised, few considered it important enough to overturn our commonsense understanding of how time, distance, and space interact. No one, that is, until a young teacher in the French town of Clermont-Ferrand decided Zeno might have had a point.

  The year was 1886, and Henri Bergson was out for his customary afternoon walk after teaching his students at the high school about the pre-Socratics and Zeno’s race.‖ Suddenly, he tells us, it occurred to him that Aristotle and all thinkers after him had approached the entire question of time from the wrong end. In trying to refute Zeno, they had always treated time as a measure of motion, especially over physical distance, as in a race or with the speed of light. They had failed to see time as Zeno and the pre-Socratics had, Bergson believed, as a dimension of human consciousness.18

  This aspect Bergson dubbed duration. The experience of duration forms the backbone of what Bergson asserted had to be an entirely new way of thinking about human existence. This experience has nothing to do with our ordinary consciousness or the intellect. It is a feeling grasped in an introspective, imaginative leap of intuition—like a diver plunging over a waterfall.

  Bergson’s rational mind, the intellect, sees life only like a movie on reel-to-reel tape. It watches a series of discrete episodes that roll along like a film of Zeno’s race and are then tossed into a box titled “My Life as My Mind Saw It.” Intuition works like a compact disc in which the digital bits instantly assemble and form one continuous whole. “Intuition is knowledge at a distance,” meaning it contains both past and present and simultaneously looks ahead to the future.19

  That whole constitutes memory, for Bergson an entirely separate level of human consciousness from that of reason.20 Instead of slicing things up as the Aristotelian intellect does, memory pulls them together into a meaningful pattern. Sometimes by mistake, as when we remember meeting the love of our life in Boston when it was actually Paris. In every case, however, it is the larger significance of an event or place or person that shines through the clouds of memory. At that moment, Bergson averred, we experience time at its most fully and intuitively real, at “the intersection of mind and matter.”21

  Intuition returns us to our original starting point as living beings, what Bergson dubbed the élan vital (vital force). It is the trace of our animal instincts that have persisted through the evolutionary winnowing. Bergson was a committed Darwinian. His work is unimaginable without Origin of Species or Heraclitus, whose philosophy of ceaseless change fascinated Bergson as much as it enthralled Nietzsche. At the same time, the Frenchman saw evolution as a spiritual as well as material process. He evoked an image of evolution as the upward march of the élan vital, “gushing out unceasingly … from an immense reservoir of life” until it evolved into human consciousness.

  “The life of the body,” Bergson says, “[is] on the road that leads to the life of the spirit.” These are words Ficino might have written, or Plotinus.22 Except that in Bergson, the Great Chain of Being has become modernized and personalized. It is more of a Great Escalator of Consciousness, like the ascenseur in the Eiffel Tower. Whatever leads our intellect toward the contemplation of matter, including the physical sciences, pushes us back down toward the ground where we started. Whatever presses the button of our intuition, however, steadily lifts us up to survey and experience the whole of life—including our lives with others. Ultimately it leads us to our Creator.

  Even though the Church put Bergson’s books on the Index, it is easy to see why French neo-Thomists and Catholics like Charles Péguy found in Bergson a line of reasoning that would reconcile modern science, including Darwin, with traditional religious belief. (At the end of his life, Bergson became a Catholic in all but name.)23 They would also turn Bergson’s vitalist philosophy into a formula for national regeneration, La Réveille Nationale, that galvanized France’s conservative youth on the eve of World War I—and probably saved France from ultimate defeat.

  It’s more amazing that some readers found a similar parallel between Bergson and Marxism, yet that is exactly what Bergson’s fellow Frenchman Georges Sorel did. It was Sorel, one of the twentieth century’s most original (if perverse) minds and the intellectual master not only of Lenin but of Benito Mussolin
i, who would turn Bergson’s élan vital into the hammer of totalitarianism.

  Sorel was born in Cherbourg in 1847, and was an avowed Marxist when he attended Bergson’s classes at the École Polytechnique. There he realized that the transformation of consciousness Bergson was proposing described the true goal of Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat and classless society. Marxism aimed to establish more than just an egalitarian version of capitalism, Sorel realized. It was to be a kingdom of freedom, as Marx had said, a great spiritual unburdening that would lift humanity to a new level of conscious experience.a

  But how to get there? To put it crudely, Sorel threw Bergson and Marx together in the test tube, and out came a Gallic version of Nietzsche. Before the new egalitarian society can be built, Sorel decided, the old one must be torn down—destroyed utterly. That meant more than just overthrowing the bourgeoisie. It meant crushing out the false scientific rationality of the Enlightenment, which (Sorel agreed with Nietzsche) were actually an invitation to decadence.24 True revolution meant reviving the bold heroic spirit in the age of engineers and machines. True revolution meant above all unleashing a cleansing, leveling violence, a violence “without hatred and without the spirit of revenge,” which will tap into the deep resources of man’s élan vital and sweep everything before it.

  Sorel admired Darwin; so did Karl Marx. They were bound to admire a science that reduced everything to a struggle for material existence. Some Victorians were shocked by Darwin’s less than sunny picture of nature as “red in tooth and claw,” as the poet Tennyson put it. Sorel reveled in it and tied his politics of violence to an existential Darwinian process that would crush out the weak and unfit and leave the future to the strong.

  For Nietzsche, that vehicle for creative destruction had been his barbarians suffused with will to power, the “blond beasts.”25 For Sorel, it was the proletariat, working men and women who, when turned loose on the street by a general strike, would with their calloused hands pull down the bourgeoisie from their pampered perch. One of his favorite fantasies is of workers using their hammers and crowbars to batter down the walls of the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the French government—and crushing the corrupt ministers inside it.

  By Sorel’s reckoning, the mistake conventional Marxists made was to assume that this proletarian revolution could be set off by appeals to the working class’s reason: “You will control the means of production,” “You have nothing to lose but your chains,” and so on. What was really needed, Sorel said, was something closer “to the fluid nature of reality”: a direct appeal to their most basic instincts, which are the real mainsprings of human action.

  “It has been stated that the Socialist war could not be decided in one single battle,” Sorel wrote.26 However, history had shown that a great belief or expectation of liberation in the future—however irrational—can inspire men to flights of heroism even in the face of impossible odds. Three hundred Spartans held off a Persian army in the hundreds of thousands at Thermopylae in order to save Greece from foreign tyranny. Early Christians believed that the return of Christ would cast the pagan world into oblivion, and they gladly fed themselves to the lions to make it happen. Martin Luther summoned the German people to crush the Antichrist and the Catholic Church and set off the Reformation. So why couldn’t mobilizing a similar vision of impending apocalypse that will create a new world order set the working masses at the throats of the bourgeoisie?

  Sorel’s term for this kind of vision is myth, with all that word’s Platonic associations. Plato had made it clear in the Republic that no society, no matter how just its laws, can keep the majority of its citizens honest without resorting to some salutary beliefs or myths, which, even if they are literally false, encourage social solidarity and obedience to the rulers. Plato called these myths the noble lie. Josef Goebbels coined a more cynical term, the big lie. It will be the essence of mass politics in the ideological age. “It is not necessary that men move mountains,” Sorel’s disciple Benito Mussolini liked to put it, “only that other men believe they moved them.”

  Indeed, without realizing it, Georges Sorel had defined the contours of totalitarian politics in the twentieth century. Violence equals élan vital in action. Myth equals the power to shape reality through mass propaganda. Apocalypse, including the massacre of millions, becomes a cleansing social vision. In the Romantic era, the translation of vision and instinct into action had produced great works of art. In the twentieth century, Sorel believed, it will produce great works of violence.

  All that was needed was a crisis to set it off. It came in August 1914, as Europe was plunged into its first general war in one hundred years. Heraclitus had made war the father of all things.27 Nietzsche added that war makes sacred every cause. Bergson had talked about the élan vital as a great cavalry charge: “one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.”28 A generation of French disciples of Bergson, including Charles Péguy, went off in 1914 to fight and die by the millions. A generation of German disciples of Nietzsche went into battle with copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in their backpacks, with the same result. It was left to Sorel’s disciples, and Marx’s, to finish what they had started.

  World War I killed off nations, empires including Russia’s, and fifteen million people. It left in its wake an intellectual climate that celebrated the forces of unreason, violence, and primitive myth—in books, novels, art, music, and politics. In fact, a postwar generation would teach Europe to think about politics as an art in which great leaders of genius, like great artists, could weld men together and magically create new, higher forms of community, akin to the imagined utopias of earlier ages.

  Plato’s Republic would at last be realized—not through the power of reason or virtue but by propaganda and violence.

  It was after midnight. The train pulled into the rather shabby pink-granite-and-stucco station and sat sighing beside the platform after its long journey—nearly three thousand miles from the Swiss frontier. A short man wearing a goatee and a fur hat disembarked. Two other men followed him. One, rather heavyset, also wore a goatee; the other, also large and burly, had a thick mustache and dark, watching eyes. A small crowd had gathered to salute them. Many had tears running down their cheeks.29

  The trio said nothing. They made their way under a newly painted sign that read: PETROGRAD. They passed without speaking into the station and turned toward a set of double doors. It was a large, gilt-ceilinged room filled with other comrades, some they hadn’t seen for years; others wore military uniforms. At their head stood a demure bearded man with eager, watery eyes and carrying an enormous bouquet of roses.

  He began to speak in a quavering voice. “Comrade Lenin,” he said, “in the name of the Petrograd Soviet and of the whole revolution, I welcome you to Russia.”

  As the man spoke, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin paid no attention—just as he ignored the bundle of roses that was thrust into his arms. He glanced impatiently around the room. He was returning to Russia after nearly a decade and a half in exile. It was April 16, 1917. His moment had come to complete the mission he had set for himself more than twenty years before. Together with the two men behind him, Lev Kamenev and Josef Stalin, he did not intend to fail.

  Lenin waited until Nikoloz Chkheidze, the Menshevik head of the Petrograd Soviet, finished his short speech. Then he pulled off his fur cap, glanced with gleaming eyes around the room, and spoke:

  “Dear comrades, soldiers, sailors, and workers, I am happy to greet in you the victorious Russian revolution.… Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian evolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch.… Long live the International Socialist Revoluion!”30

  Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station signaled the start of the Communist revolution in Russia, one of the great catastrophic events in history. L
enin’s list of class enemies did not consist just of the czar and the Orthodox Church and Russia’s aristocracy and bourgeoisie.b It also included the exponents of Logical Positivism, all who cast doubt on the idea that the only genuine science was Marxism. Lenin had written an entire book on the subject titled Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.

  Marxism, Lenin said, was “a solid block of steel” from which you cannot change a single component without “abandoning objective truth, without falling into the arms of the bourgeois-reactionary falsehood.” If the followers of Ernst Mach, including Albert Einstein, weren’t willing to see that the solution to the world’s perplexities was applying the laws of dialectical materialism, then they should be on notice that they were part of the problem.31

  Europe had seen revolutions come and go. But with Lenin something new had come to roost. The price of revolution was now ideological, as well as political, conformity. The French Revolution had seen its enemies as aristocrat and the Church. The Russian Revolution extended that standard to include intellectuals, teachers, writers, artists—anyone who refused to comply with what would come to be called “the party line”—the official Communist Party credo on any subject from politics and education to art and architecture.

  It was Lenin’s declaration of a new front in the class war: a war on free intellectual inquiry. It was a chilling foretaste of what was to come, not just in Soviet Russia but across Europe over the next decades.

  What is striking about the politics of both left and right in the interwar years is how unabashed they were about their own extremism. They despised middle-class democracy as much as they did capitalism; they blamed both for the catastrophe of 1914–18. Christianity, the Enlightenment, liberalism, Victorian values and mores—all were to be swept away. A new vitalist elite would generate what Sorel called an “artificial world of order” made up of avant-garde books, music, films, and paintings on the one side and heroes, mass rallies, and war machines on the other. Mussolini himself would find eager allies among Italy’s Futurists, while Hitler would recruit many of the figures of avant-garde German cinema, including Leni Riefenstahl and the wife of Metropolis’s Fritz Lang.