Catastrophe Practice

by Nicholas Mosley

  In the last century efforts were made to embrace contradictions by fusing them into systems — a process known, but seldom with much clarity portrayed, as dialectics. Hegel suggested that the contradictions attendant upon consciousness could be merged into a higher truth: but in trying to describe what sort of thing this truth might be (‘the objective world process’) he either became aggressively simplistic (the deification of the state) or almost unintelligible. Marx took on Hegel’s style: but in his writing, the contradictions and his efforts to deal with them assumed an apocalyptic potency — science and humanitarianism were to join forces for some final struggle, after which there would be peace. Marx’s driving energy was a straight materialistic humanitarianism — an outrage that one class of men should be treated like animals by another, and that fantasies of otherwordliness should be used to perpetuate this misery. But in the nineteenth century pleas for humanitarianism had to be backed up by appeals to science: it was thought that men were so rooted in self-interest that appeals to ethics were no use: it could even be held that self-interest was ethical: so fighters against outrage had to call upon ‘science’ not just because ‘science’ was the presiding deity of the age, but because only thus could the fighters be given weapons. And so a science had to be made up that had little to do with observation or experiment; but which was, simply, of use in the war against outrage. But such science was no real science. The justifications and the prophesies of Marxism have the same quality, in words, as those of religion — the words can be held to mean different things at different times according to the needs of writers and speakers: there is an impossibility in trying to bring such abstractions or such predictions to the test. It is not clear how much Marx himself believed what came to be seen as the dogmas of Marxism — but this is a common predicament of founders of religions. What seems to have been important for Marx is that he remained a fighter: he could use his ‘scientific’ reasoning as a weapon for vituperation: but his faith seemed to be less that there should finally emerge a triumphant and rational working class, as that there should be always someone, somewhere, fighting. But although it was the dream of there being a scientific basis for their hopes against outrage that gave Marxists their potency and their victories, it also gave them their curse: for it is in Marxism that the splits and fusions and confusions between scientific and ethical attitudes have become, nowadays, often most observable and ludicrous: words and what they refer to cease to have any connection: the drive for equality is manifested by elitism; the liberation of the working class, to make it work, is paralleled by imprisonment. But in this it is hardly the drive towards humanitarianism or towards science that is at fault: the fault is in the attempt to force them into effect in one logical social system. For if scientific attitudes and ethical convictions are to be brought together this cannot be done, simply, socially: it is just this that has been learned by painful trial and error. What can be done is that such apparently contradictory attitudes can be held in the mind — separately, but together from some further point of vantage — and then, but only then, can they work in harmony socially. The unit, that is, in which such complexities can be held and neither fused nor confused is not a society nor even a person but that which is in interaction between the two: that part of a person which is free, but which survives through society: which enables a society to survive: which, in its lively endurance, both is in the form of ideas and is like the genetic material of the outside world: and thus, indeed, is somewhat god-like.

  It was Nietzsche who announced that god was dead: who saw all religions (as Marx said he saw them) as shrouds by which truth was obscured: truth being nothing to do with dogmas nor with systems but with a style, an attitude, a process, an activity. Nietzsche’s attack was against Christianity: but his enemy would also have been Marxism if he had known of it — Marxism having taken over dreams of simplicity and peace. By dreaming of any perfection — of a future world either in heaven or on earth — Nietzsche saw that men were in fact depriving themselves of chances of coming into working harmony with things as they are — of changing them, through such contact, for the better. Dreams might once have been weapons in the struggle for existence and evolution: dreams were perhaps moves in a general game of what Nietzsche called will to power’ by which everyone in order to survive had to try to do down everyone else: but in fact those who seemed to ‘succeed’ in this game were as much trapped within its limited and inhuman processes as anyone else: and in any case such a game, in the modern world and with modern knowledge, was becoming suicidal. The one true chance of human improvement, even evolution, Nietzsche thought, was not for one human being to come out on top of another: not for one set or class of humans to come out on top of another: not to dream, impossibly, of such a struggle one day ceasing through ultimate victory (for then what would be the driving force of life? and what would be improvement?) but for individuals with part of themselves to step out of the continuing trapped and trapping process altogether — it would be to do this that there would be the struggle and this would be the improvement — to reach some point within themselves from which they could observe themselves and those other parts of themselves as well as of others within the predicament: and by this to be truly human — even god-like — being free of the predicament Also, of course, to be human (and not un-god-like?) and for the predicament to remain. What was necessary was for a man to come into this sort of relationship with himself: to ‘overcome’ himself not in the sense of dominating, or condescending to himself or indeed others (thus has Nietzsche been traduced): but just in the sense of being able to stand back from the animal-like stimulus-and-response levels of his nature and by understanding them and being kind to them to have a chance to do something about them — and about those of others. This was possible, observably, within an individual: there was little sense in the idea of its being possible — except through the interlocking activities of individuals — in the mass. But it was in this common area of’standing back’ that men could in fact meet since they would have a chance here of separating themselves and others from their projections, and it would in this sense be that such efforts would be social. Nietzsche saw that a contemporary evolutionary gulf was not so much the one between men and animals, as between men-and-animals on the one hand and some different kind of man on the other — between those, that is, who remain trapped within stimulus-and-response patterns of behaviour and who use only dreams to imagine that they are not; and those who, by virtue of being able to distance themselves within themselves and to look upon such patterns, in some sense and in some part of themselves become free of them — and thus become of a different kind. And such an activity would be open to everyone, however difficult it might be to talk about — too much verbalising being likely to land one back in dreams. Nietzsche’s ‘other’ or ‘super’ type of man has nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with power (except insofar as such a man has what might be called the power to overcome drives to power — or at least realise that this way of thinking gives a different use to the exercise of power): it is to do with a man’s ability to observe, to question, to test — himself just as much (he is nearer at hand) as others — a tentativeness, a key, a mode, a way of living; not a domination. Nietzsche’s language is elusive, allusive, poetic: it is a way of talking about truth by at the same time listening to, judging, what itself is saying: it is a way of defending itself against the comforts of dogma: it is a presentation by which people can, if they keep up in it, find their own truth. Nietzsche’s enemies (indeed his so-called friends) were able to make out that he was saying something quite different from what he was because he did sometimes talk as if he were playing in one of their games of cut-throat musical chairs. But perhaps he catered even for this: he saw a function for such friends-enemies. One of the characteristics of his way of thinking was that there can be a function for those who are of a different kind to oneself: enemies can be used: they can be the working parts, perhaps of the grid, the riddle, of personal (
social) history: they can supply the shaking from the abrasive action of which there can come sifting and change. Marx, violently, said he wanted to change history: perhaps he did change it: but not (it is still violent) with the result that he had dreamed. Nietzsche tried to see the way that history in fact worked: and by this to look in the sifting for diamonds, as well as for cleaned gravel.

  One reason why Nietzsche has made people anxious even when he has not been made out to say the opposite of what he did say (his work was for a time taken up by power-politicians) is that any suggestion that one type of man might be thought different or possibly more suited to evolution than another seems to imply the existence of an elite — and of all the taboo words of the second half of the twentieth century this (perhaps with reason) is one of the most abhorred. ‘Elite’ has come, historically, to suggest some inborn superiority of class, of race, of intelligence, of aesthetic sensibility: a conjunction between those who have these qualities and those who have power. But in Nietzsche’s use of the idea (he did not use the word) there was nothing of this: in fact there was much, precisely, of its opposite. Nietzsche’s implication was that there was some special form of activity open to almost anyone who chose; but this was a solitary, not a group, activity; and that on the whole people who liked power did not choose this form of activity simply because their own form of group carry-on seemed more attractive. It was the ‘privileged’ in the conventional sense, obsessed with power, who found it difficult to stand back from the ensnaring mechanisms of power and see themselves: but it was this standing-back that was the mark of a true elite: so that the members of a true elite were almost necessarily non-privileged. Nietzsche saw as his enemies those who were entrenched in the established worlds of politics and of society and of academic distinction: these were the non-elite. Nietzsche’s ‘higher’ type of man might be bold, intelligent, imaginative; but even in these qualities he would be out of line with powerful society: his one undeniable ‘superiority’ would be his freedom from other people’s slavery-to-power. In this respect other men might envy him and try to do him down, but of this they would be almost unconscious: consciously, they would be able to ignore the standpoint from which he was different. So such a man would find himself working alone, almost in secret: and this was right, because what he knew would be difficult to put into words. Nietzsche saw the raw material of experience going round and round as it were in eternally recurring patterns (there being a finite amount of material energy and possibly an infinity of time for the energy to ring changes) this vision being as if of a treadmill; a hell. But some people, with the part of themselves that saw this, could choose to get out — even if they had to watch other parts of themselves on the treadmill. But what on earth could be said by these people when they saw other people’s so powerful preference to stay wholly in? About this, it was true, there seemed to be something of a taboo.

  There is enough evidence nowadays, goodness knows, that it is the conventionally powerful people who seem slavish — those politicians, pundits, leaders of the fashionable world who in their uniformity of livery and adherence to strict routines and in their inability to behave as they might like on the spur of any moment not only look like servants and behave like servants but (don’t be taken in by this!) actually are public servants — those bewigged and bewildered figures caught sleepless on the steps of aeroplanes; their bags under their eyes like suitcases; always ready to jump to the call of a microphone or a bell; on the trot from dawn to long after dusk; hardly any time to see their loved ones; their engagement books filled for months and even years; and always liable, like soldiers emerging from a wood, to be taken hostage or shot — such vulnerabilities extending to their children and children’s children. These are the people who are honoured socially now; who have power; who choose to live like this — this is the point — no one makes them. And the people who choose to try to be able to do as they like, to look for what it is that they like, who discover diat this often involves them in difficult (but pleasurable?) rejections of that to which they have been accustomed — these are people held with little social honour in the modern world; who perhaps on some level are envied, but not always enough to stop them making themselves and others happy. For the ability to be in relationship with oneself is the ability to be happy — in this sense to have an area in common with others who are happy — but still, to be often solitary, which is a hard happiness and takes courage. And it is a common misery that is the bond, the reassurance, the comfort, the security, of people who are no more than the parts of themselves in the treadmill that is social. This craving to be a powerful albeit complaining slave to a conventional system — to be as it were a dominant domestic — is due to a fear of freedom: it is within the fellowship of common complaint that resentment, the desire not to let anyone be one up, can be effective: no one, if all are trapped, need feel inferior. Such a fear of a happy relationship within oneself seems to be what a person is born into: a baby is dependent and perhaps confused about what is of other people and what is of itself: and so perhaps a person finds it easier to try to continue to project his own inadequacies and responsibilities on to others rather than to try to grow up, which is the taking of responsibilities within oneself What has hitherto been objectionable about ‘elites’ has just been the assumption that such people should have power. But if the word is taken away from the concept of power — if it is recognised that now it is powerful people who seem slavish and who choose to be slavish and the only true concept of an elite would be that of people who are in this sense specifically non-privileged — then, what would be the harm? For everyone — both the non-privileged and the privileged — pays at least lip service to the idea of the overriding value of freedom: and what could be objectionable about an elite which most people who have the choice could not bear to be part of?

  Such a picture may seem a bit of a dream, and perhaps it is, if it is imagined that such differentiations between privileged and non-privileged can be seen simply in terms of differing individuals in the outside world. But such patterning is in the mind; and such differentiation takes place, is played with, more (this is the point) within an individual — between parts of him — than outside. In practice most people have one foot at least trapped as it were within the treadmills of routine and power — they have to to stay alive — and most people retain some spark within them by the light of which, at moments at least, they can glimpse a part of themselves that might be able to stand back — until, perhaps, they are too old. Certainly someone trying to hold himself on the side of a non-privileged elite should have no illusions about his involvement with trying to keep in balance differing parts of himself: to feel himself simple would be to fail. He must be handling both aloofness and the social cunning to remain aloof; holding on, not too tightly, to something fluttering, like a bird. As soon as success was grasped it would have to be freed; the mark of success would be something continually changing to stay the same. It would be like a child; to be fostered, to grow; but to live its own life: to be both held, and not held, at once. To learn to love oneself would be like tending a seed, a pearl (as has been said): a matter of skill however much also of luck the ability to take advantage of luck (and indeed of non-luck): a making the best, and something profitable, of whatever it is that comes one’s way: but what comes is usually averaged, and so one has a choice. There is something akin here to processes in psychoanalysis — the painstaking looking after, by making use of whatever turns up, projections; so that they can perhaps become healthy by being taken back; using a language which, by being listened to, can be seen to refer both to its own form and the things it refers to; by these means to undergo a search, a discrimination, an enablement to deal with the riddles that let trapped children out of cages. There is also something here akin to processes of writing plays or novels — that business that begins as the plaything of its creator and then takes off, disappears, comes back when it is ailing: takes off again (if it is any good) goes round and round somewhat demente
dly and only when you are not looking, but have persevered, it is there! Ah, these plays! on the grid and riddle like happy children! But there is necessarily something secret in all this: people talking about having to be able to choose what they want — how embarrassing! If what they want is life, then this is something that they have to search for, quietly, themselves, and to discover. If they do not — then what one can say is that what they want can indeed be given them on a platter.