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Title: Historical Pessimism Author: Georges Palante Date: 1914 Language: en Topics: philosophy Source: Retrieved on 2016-10-28 from http://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/palante/1914/historical-pessimism.htm Notes: Source: Pessimisme et Individualisme. Paris, Alcan, 1914; Translated: by Mitch Abidor for marxists.org; CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.
Historical pessimism is inspired by a retrospective ideal, an historic
or even prehistoric ideal whose nostalgia haunts the thinker disgusted
with the present. Two names can be put forward in this regard: de
Gobineau and Nietzsche.
Count de Gobineau judges current civilization in the light of an ethnic
type that is distant, almost prehistoric, or at least so little
historical that it would be disappointing to write its history: the
Aryan type. Nevertheless, Count de Gobineau thinks he can follow it
throughout its evolution, its transformations and its deviations. “I
compared,” he says, “ races among themselves. I chose one from among
them that I saw as the best and I wrote ‘The History of the Persians’ in
order to show, by the example of the Aryan nation the most isolated from
its relatives, how powerless differences in climate, environment and
circumstances are in changing or inhibiting the genius of a race.” His
“Discourse on the Inequality of Races” traces the long vicissitudes and
the irremediable degeneration of this type of superior humanity as a
result of the mixing of bloods that adulterated it. “Ottar Jarl” tells
of the ancestry of a Scandinavian hero of the ancient Nordic race from
which Gobineau claimed to descend. The novel “The Pleiades” presents a
few survivors of the noble Aryan race lost in the midst of unworthy
contemporaries, but who don’t renounce the fight in this degraded
milieu, succeeding in making their presence felt.
What are the moral and intellectual traits that constitute the Gobinien
superman? These traits can be found in “The History of the Persians,”
the “Discourse on the Inequality of Races,” in “Ottar Jarl” and “The
Pleaides.” Gobineau places judgment in the first rank of the qualities
that constitute the superior man. What he values in intelligence is not
imagination, but judgment. Judgment is the superior characteristic of
the Aryan. The Aryan is above all a man of judgment and action. For de
Gobineau the true role of intelligence can only be that of a guide to
action. The goal of intelligence is not to meditate, to build poems in
the air, to withdraw into itself and to think for thinking’s sake. The
role of intelligence is to see clearly and dictate actions. It should
not be forgotten that de Gobineau is the descendant of a line of
warriors, of politicians, of diplomats and a diplomat himself. His
heredity, his traditions, his experience, his trade all led him to
esteem above all else the qualities that constitute a man of action, a
leader of men.
According to him the superior man is not the artist or the speculative
writer: the superior man is he who is capable of commanding a people or
an army, or the skillful diplomat. The qualities that constitute the
Gobinien superman find themselves summed up in the portrait of the
Viking. “In the personality of Ottar we find three clearly pronounced
traits, and it is essential to engrave them from the start, for we will
recognize one or another, if not all of them, in most of his
descendants. The activity of intelligence, the ‘Vestfolding,’ carries it
to all the points it can reach and that circumstances place within its
sight. He is avid for knowledge, for he wants to know just how far his
country extends, but he also doesn’t want occasions for gain and profit
to be neglected. He is also sensible, for he doesn’t believe the
speeches of the Bjarmes (priests) without reservation... Along with the
activity of the intelligence he has the passion for independence, and on
the day he has to submit to Erik’s domination he says no and goes into
exile. He appreciates the advantages of wealth, but he appreciates even
more not having to yield, and yields little. In the third place he is
stubborn in his views...Understanding, independent, patient, these are
three qualities from which as much good as evil result and are
susceptible of diverse applications. In Ottar, issued from a pure race,
we find its essence in all sincerity, with the maximum of energy, and
exactly as the hero’s ancestors possessed it, receiving it from their
blood.” It is the purity of blood that makes for strong individuality.
“His race was pure and so his individuality was very strong. In him
individuality was everything, agglomeration little or nothing. On the
contrary, among more southern populations the blood had been noticeably
altered: in the Franc become half-Roman, in the Roman rotted by Semitic
mixtures. Everyone counted on everyone else, and while the Scandinavian,
jealous of his liberty, only accepted temporary associations, those they
vanquished found it good to hold a master or guide responsible for their
will. It is this obedience, which then becomes a servility, that in
truth constitutes not human culture – always ennobling – but
civilization, vehicle of a contrary effect.” Another portrait of the
Gobinien superman is that of the Englishman Nore in “The Pleaides.” “I
am fantastic? Why? Am I less a man because I seem to you different from
the model from which my contemporaries are carved? What do they and I
have in common? Fantastic? Because I don’t care about their grandeur,
their baseness, their distinctions, their humiliations, their elections,
their means of making a fortune; not their fortunes or their problems! I
would be a fantastic creature if, conceiving my desires in accordance
with puerile imitation, I mixed in with them the things of common life,
ever ready to abandon what are only dreams for banal reality from which
I neither knew how to or wanted to detach myself. But thank god nothing
like this exists...It is possible that creation, which randomly casts
about disparate seeds, erred in my regard and having prepared me for
another milieu inadvertently let me fall into this one. But for whatever
reason, here I am! I am myself and no other, feeling in my way,
understanding things with my own intelligence, and as incapable of
renouncing what I once wanted, of abandoning the pursuit of what I
desired, as incapable of demonstrating to myself that I was wrong as I
am to renounce breathing for an hour!” Energy, independence, strong
individualism, an intense sentiment of the personality: such are the
traits of the Gobinien superman.
The humanity of today has badly degenerated from this superior type.
Good brains and strong wills are rare, for they are in proportion with
the excellence of the race. A character in “The Pleaides” says that
there are still perhaps 3,000 “sons of kings,” superior men of Aryan
race, three thousand well made brains and strongly beating hearts. “The
rest is a vile mass that makes up the triple tribe of imbeciles, brutes
and scoundrels, the current form of European barbarism. Not youthful,
brave, daring, picturesque, happy barbarism, but a suspicious, glum,
bitter, ugly one that will kill all and create nothing.” What is
horrible to think about is that these few superior brains, these few
strongly beating hearts, lost in the mass, can do nothing to raise up
the ruins and bring decadence to a halt. This was seen once before, at
the end of the Roman Empire.
“It can be argued of the work of these great men that, despite the
universal decomposition, there were yet firm and honest hearts in the
Empire. Who denies this? I am speaking of multitudes and not of
individuals. Could these noble intelligences stop for one minute the
rotting of the social body? No. The most noble intelligences didn’t
convert the crowd, didn’t give it heart.” The presence of a few of the
Just couldn’t save Sodom. It is the same today. The few survivors of the
ancient virtues of the race cannot today stop European decomposition.
When the mixing of blood has degraded a race to a certain degree there
is nothing to be done. All that is left is to dispassionately witness
the death of the race. Such is Gobinen pessimism. A complete,
definitive, and hopeless ethnic and social pessimism. We find a strong
expression of it in the pages where de Gobineau combats the thesis of
humanity’s indefinite progress, as well as in the final pages of the
“Essay.” “The prediction that makes us sad is not death, it’s the
certitude of arriving there degraded. And perhaps that shame reserved to
our descendants would leave us indifferent if we didn’t feel, by a
secret horror, that destiny’s rapacious hands are already posed upon
us.”
By virtue of the law we seek to establish, Gobinen pessimism turns into
individualism. Stoic individualism, isolatedly ferocious, haughty and
despairing. The Aryan is always recognized by his indomitable
individuality. In the presence of a civilization he hates and holds in
contempt he doesn’t resign himself. He stiffens in the haughty attitude
of a wounded aristocrat. “I don’t care what will result from your
changes,” a character of “The Pleaides” says, in whom it is believed
Gobineau incarnated himself, “I don’t know future morals so that I can
approve of them, future costumes so I can admire them, future
institutions so that I can respect them, and I maintain that what I
approve, what I admire, what I love is gone! I have nothing to do with
what will succeed them. Consequently, you don’t console me by announcing
the triumph of parvenus who I don’t care to know.” The same character
says elsewhere: “It doesn’t please me to see a once great people now
laid low, impotent, paralyzed, half-rotted, decomposing, surrendered to
stupidities, miseries, evil, ferocity, cowardice, the weaknesses of a
senile childhood, and good for nothing except death, which I sincerely
hope for so that it escape from the dishonor in which it wallows,
laughing like imbeciles.” Someone asks of this despairing character: “No
religion, no fatherland, no skill, no love. The void has been installed.
The tables have been swept clean. Absolutely nothing is left. What do
you conclude? I conclude that man is left. And if he has the strength to
look his own will in the face and to find it solid we have the right to
say that he possesses something. And what, I ask you? Stoicism. Times
like these have always produced this severe authority.” This is also
Gobineau’s response. This is the stoic individualism in which he takes
refuge. Nevertheless, de Gobineau fights up to the bitter end. Even
though isolated, even though his efforts are made sterile because of his
isolation, he continues to work in the direction of grandiose dream,
whose vague and magnificent perspective his imagination of the superman
has allowed him to glimpse. Despite it all, he has enough pride to
create for himself an ideal he won’t betray, a goal he will pursue. A
table of human values, a scale whose summit he will occupy in a sterile
but splendid isolation. In a way he recalls the symbols of Leconte de
Lisle in his energy, his disdain, and his despair.
The wounded wolf who stays silent so as to die,
And who twists the knife in his bleeding mouth
Nietzsche at a certain time became enamored of an ethnic ideal no less
ancient and no less uncertain than the Gobinist ideal. He was enamored
of primitive Hellenism, the radiant and prestigious Hellenism of “The
Origins of Tragedy,” i.e., the primitive Greek soul, at one and the same
time Dionysian and Apollonian. The Greek soul in which the apotheosis of
the ardent, overabundant, joyous, exalted and triumphant life is
summarized, as well as the beauty, the purity of line, the nobility of
attitude, the majesty of the face and the serenity of the gaze. It is
with this magical image that Nietzsche confronts current civilization,
with its regulated and domesticated societies, with its tyrannical and
servile democracy, with its depressing Christianity, with its
narrow-minded morality, which weakens and makes ugly. And he too sounds
the alarm issued by de Gobineau: Decadence! Decadence!
In truth, Nietzsche’s pessimism, like that of Gobineau, doesn’t lack for
a secret relationship with romantic pessimism. There is much romanticism
in the historical pessimism of Gobineau and Nietzsche. If these two
thinkers take refuge in the past it is because the present brings only
vulgarity and ugliness, it’s that they situate their grandiose dreams of
impenitent romantics in a vanished utopia and uchronia. Whatever the
case, by virtue of a law whose effects we are following, the pessimism
of Nietzsche, like that of Gobineau, turns into individualism. It is
true that the nuance in Nietzschean individualism is more difficult to
determine than in that of Gobinien individualism. Gobineau’s
individualism is a despairing stoicism, an isolation of the defeated man
of action, of a haughty thinker taking refuge in an ivory tower, from
the heights of which he witnesses the slow agony of a world without
either force or beauty.
Nietzsche’s individualism is clearly an anti-social individualism. But
is that anti-societism absolute or relative, provisional or definitive?
Does Nietzsche indict only modern society or all societies? Nietzsche’s
ideas on this subject is somewhat unclear. “Modern societies,” says M.
Faguet, “are anti-Nietszchean in their nature, and Nietzsche cannot
prevent himself from being, and especially appearing, anti-social.
Certainly (and why not recognize this?) he must have had moments of
anti-societism and have said to himself: ‘It is possible that life as I
conceive it was simply savage life and it can only be fully and
brilliantly realized in the state of nature or in that primitive state
of little organized societies that we sometimes call the state of
nature. At heart, it is social invention that is against me.’ He could
have told himself this, though he didn’t write it anywhere, he who wrote
everything that he thought with so much bravura and daring. He could
have thought this on several occasions and for my part I know him to be
too intelligent to doubt that he had this thought. But persuaded,
perhaps erroneously, that there was a race – that is the Greeks – that
was organized in a society and that created the free, beautiful and
strong life, he didn’t stop at anti-social thought, leaving to a few of
his disciples the task or the pleasure of deducing his premises. What of
which he carried out a penetrating, subtle and uncompromising criticism
of was modern society.” It is difficult to determine the exact place
that anti-societism occupies in Nietzschean philosophy and the scope
that Nietzsche attributed to it. At certain moments this anti-societism
attacks modern society, at others it seems to attack the very conditions
of social life. Is Nietzsche’s anti-societism radical, as radical as
that of Stirner, when Nietzsche violently protests against the conduct
and the virtues that every society imposes on its members: the spirit of
consistency and a spirit of adaptation and obedience to the rules; when
on the contrary he glorifies the faculties and energies stifled by life
in society; when along with Stirner he celebrates that happy freedom of
the instincts, horror of the rule, love of the fortuitous, the
uncertain, the unforeseen? Nietzsche’s social philosophy seems here to
be an absolute and definitive anti-societism, it seems to summarize the
common basis of social pessimism and individualism: the perception of a
natural, profound and – in a way – psychological antinomy between the
individual and society, the individual having instincts that do not
yield before social life, since man is not adapted to social life, which
wounds him like a poorly made shoe. Seen in this way Nietzschean
individualism is profoundly anti-social and Strinerite; it is a revolt
not only against our society, but against any society, future or
possible.
But it is only fair to remark that in certain aspects of his philosophy,
which are perhaps not the least important, Nietzsche puts the lie to
this rebellious attitude, or at least places it in a secondary position
and subordinates it to an ideal of a human grandeur still possible and
realizable in the future.
An important difference separates Nietzsche from Gobineau in this
regard. It’s the concept of the Superman, which is in opposition to the
Gobinien law of the necessary limitations on the resources of human
aptitude. This law is formulated in the “Discourse on Inequality:”
“Man,” says de Gobineau, “was able to learn certain things; he has
forgotten many others. He has not added a single sense to his senses, a
member to his members, a faculty to his soul. He has done nothing but
turn to another side of the circle that is his lot.” De Gobineau closes
humanity into a narrow circle of capacities and works. He assigns him
unsurpassable limits within which he can, it is true, regress, but which
his physiology forbids him from ever surpassing. From this flows the
theory of irremediable decadence once human races are adulterated
through mixing, and Gobineau’s hopeless pessimism. Opposed to this is
the concept of the Superman. While de Gobineau looks on the superior
human race as definitively fallen from its original purity and beauty,
Nietzsche, he too theoretician of decadence, performs a sudden about
face. At a certain moment in the development of his thought, and in what
is perhaps an example of inconsistency, he introduces into his
philosophy the strange concept of the Superman, that is, of a humanity
called on to indefinitely surpass itself, to make itself indefinitely
superior to itself, incomparable to itself, incommensurable with itself.
Through this unexpected change in front Nietzsche displaces his human
ideal. He transports it from the rear to the front, from the past to the
future. From historic and retrospective this ideal becomes futuristic.
The human ideal is no longer the primitive Hellenism from which we are
fallen, it is the Superman of tomorrow. In this way Nietzsche
superimposes or rather substitutes for his theory of decadence a theory
of indefinite progress. And decadence itself takes on a new meaning.
Nietzsche admits that the current decadence is a period of transition
from which will come a society containing the possibility of nobility
and beauty. He only rejects current society in the hope of finding a
society hospitable to great souls, a society where masters will reign
and where great things will yet be done. At those moments Nietzsche is
not a hopeless pessimist like the Count de Gobineau, nor is he an
anti-social individualist , a theoretician of revolt for revolt’s sake
like Stirner. On the contrary, he is then, or wants to be, a creator of
values, the founder of a society, a prophet, a priest.
And so Nietzsche’s attitude towards the problem of the relations between
the individual and society are not clear. But through its very lack of
decisiveness it confirms the psychological law that we are attempting to
establish: the correlation between individualism and pessimism. At those
moments when Nietzsche is optimistic, when he believes in the Superman,
he is not an anti-social individualist. He repudiates Stirnerite
individualism as a manifestation of the “slave revolt,” as one of the
symptoms of our modern decadence. On the other hand, at those times when
Nietzsche is pessimistic, at those times when he says that the Greek
miracle was unique and we have no chance of reviving it, he shows
himself to be an uncompromising enemy of society and hater of social
ties. He expresses an anti-societism as radical, as absolute as that of
Stirner.