{"id":3476699,"date":"2019-04-24T11:11:24","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T11:11:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3476699"},"modified":"2019-04-24T11:11:24","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T11:11:24","slug":"on-finding-our-authentic-selves-or-the-true-and-the-false-in-the-age-of-rousseau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2019-04-24\/on-finding-our-authentic-selves-or-the-true-and-the-false-in-the-age-of-rousseau\/","title":{"rendered":"On Finding Our Authentic Selves: or, the True and the False in the Age of Rousseau"},"content":{"rendered":"

Being Part 3 of: Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness<\/h3>\n

It may be urged that every individual man carries, within himself, at least in his adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this ideal. <\/em>–Friedrich von Schiller<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Communism as the <\/em>positive transcendence of <\/em>private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real <\/em>appropriation of the human essence by and for itself; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being\u00a0 . . . . This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the <\/em>genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man\u2014the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.<\/em>–Karl Marx<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As in every kind of radicalism the moment comes when any critique of the present must choose its bearings, between past and future.\u00a0 And if the past is chose, as now so often and so deeply, we must push the argument through to the roots that are being defended; push attention, human attention, back to the natural economy, the moral economy, the organic society, from which the critical values are drawn.<\/em>–Raymond Williams[i]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, a recap: I have proposed in Part 1<\/a> and Part 2<\/a> that Liberalism (which, recall, encompasses mainstream liberals and \u201cconservatives\u201d) does not have the conceptual resources to enforce or even encourage limits to consumption.\u00a0 This helplessness in the face of a crisis of ecology is the flip side of Liberalism\u2019s strengths, especially the way it has stayed true to its founding celebration of freedom in the face of human heterogeneity and diversity.[ii]<\/a> \u00a0This is why Liberalism is officially neutral with regard to the good<\/em>.\u00a0 In contrast to most religions as well as the Aristotelianism we have begun to discuss, it asks the individual to determine his or her own ends according to free choice and preference, which in turn means that within a Liberal moral or social order there are no binding reasons that life should be lived according to any specific plan or towards any specific ends.<\/p>\n

Respect for limits, including ecological ones, has an inherent contradiction to liberal freedom, for it is also up to the individual to choose the limits he or she respects in the same way one might choose which God, if any, to worship, or which fitness regime to adopt. \u00a0Instead of the<\/em> good in a restricted sense, Liberalism offers the open-ended good of individual freedom, the virtue of tolerance, and as few limits as possible. \u00a0A limitless morality, says Wendell Berry, is no morality at all.\u00a0 Thus is the old-fashioned and stuffy notion of a moral life replaced by lifestyle, while the chief vice in Liberal society is \u201cimposing<\/em> your beliefs or ideology on others.\u201d\u00a0 In part 1 I discussed some of the moral consequences of life reduced to a style, the most significant of which may nevertheless be overconsumption.<\/p>\n

If I have a overriding theme, it is this: unless as a society or civilization we can conceive of a good <\/em>that celebrates a low-energy and low-consumption way of life, one that offers intrinsic reasons for living simply and within the Earth\u2019s ecological limits, we are likely either to consume our selves into oblivion, or should expect external or extrinsic limits of the sort imposed by heavy-handed governments.\u00a0 The appeal of Aristotelianism, in this context, is that instead of placing external limits on unfettered wants and desires, a recipe for frustration, resentment, and rebellion, it conceives of the good<\/em> as part of a moral education so that we want and desire what is virtuous, while virtue, which I\u2019ll take up again at a later date, is the means<\/em> to a life of human excellence or, as Marx would say, of achieving our true human potential.\u00a0 A properly conceived good<\/em>, Aristotle argues, does not require the oppression and denial of our wants, but helps us align our fundamental inclinations towards the best and most excellent life for humans, one in Aristotle\u2019s view where the virtue of moderation plays a major role.\u00a0 In our present circumstances, the good life<\/em> would not be based on unsustainable consumption, but upon the happy acceptance of limits, while ecological virtues would be the qualities which enable us to thrive in pursuit of that good.<\/p>\n

As nice as this may sound, and as implacable as some limits may be, this Aristotelian ideal, like most religious ones, doesn\u2019t have a very good answer for the Liberal challenge, which can simply point to previous conceptions of the good <\/em>as one group justifying the imposition of its way of life on others.\u00a0 In the modern age of individualism and global diversity, moreover, Liberalism is skeptical that there is one way of life that is good for everyone; it is aware that, absent a unified belief system of the sort characteristic of theism \u2014 of a single God and \u201chis\u201d law \u2014 we lack a cultural or moral authority to which we can appeal. \u00a0Any good not freely chosen, Liberalism holds, can\u2019t qualify as a legitimate good, for the act of choosing is integral to Liberal good. \u00a0That means each free individual is sovereign over his or her moral choices, including choices about what to dig-up, cut-down, make, buy, eat, and throw away.\u00a0 The best Liberalism can do, lacking a more positive notion of the good, is fall back on John Stewart Mill\u2019s formulation that we are free to do whatever we want up to the point at which it affects someone else.\u00a0 On a crowded and overheated planet, this postulate is merely formal.\u00a0 It may have logical coherence, but it has almost no possible content: everything we do affects someone else.\u00a0 Liberalism and ecological limits have little common ground upon which to meet and it should be of no surprise that Liberalism was born in an age of geographical expansion.[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n

But Liberalism represents only part of our political history since the eighteenth century.\u00a0 Soon after Liberalism began to enshrine a politics that rejected traditional forms of authority, basing it instead on a \u201crationalized\u201d society, featuring property-rights and contractual relationships, a counter-tradition was born, midwifed in large part by Jean Jacques Rousseau.\u00a0 Schematically, to cite Bertrand Russell, since the eighteenth century Western political philosophy can be divided into two groups: those who follow John Locke (Liberals) and those who follow Rousseau (the Liberal counter-tradition).\u00a0 Thomas Jefferson referred to Locke, with Newton and Francis Bacon, as \u201cthe three greatest people who have ever lived without exception.\u201d \u00a0Marx, Nietzsche, and existentialism, in addition to the main innovators in the arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, follow Rousseau.[iv]<\/a> \u00a0Locke and the Liberals represented pragmatic and utilitarian effectiveness with regard to largely commercial ends and the pursuit of property.\u00a0 Rousseau, Romantics, and revolutionaries have tended to value community, nature, and self-expression. \u00a0This is not to say that Locke and Rousseau are mutually exclusive, or at least that followers have not found ways to draw simultaneously from both sides.\u00a0 In fact, as I will explain in a later history of Liberalism, Locke and Rousseau have been reconciled in the modern Liberal lifestyle.\u00a0 As Charles Taylor puts it, \u201cmodern society, we might say, is Romantic in its private and imaginative life and utilitarian or instrumentalist in its public, effective life.\u201d\u00a0 But this reconciliation (or, rather, d\u00e9tente), as significant as it is, hides both the contestation which has defined modernity and the more specific nature of conceptual resources available within the modern episteme<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This Rousseauean counter-tradition set out to find an alternative to the instrumentalism, individualism, and utilitarian values that had begun to prevail as the market economy developed and the industrial revolution began.\u00a0 Its goal \u2014 visible in Romantic poetry, Marxist revolution, modernist literature, existentialist revolt, and in much of the modern environmental movement \u2014 was to re-ground the good<\/em> in a way that acknowledges the Liberal rejection of any illegitimate authority over individual freedoms and difference.\u00a0 With Liberalism, it admits that neither God, tradition, nor Aristotelian teleology can provide us with the good<\/em>.\u00a0 Note that when I contrasted Locke and Rousseau, I didn\u2019t place freedom on one side or the other; it is an ideal they both share, if measured with differing criteria.\u00a0 While the post-Rousseau tradition shares with Liberalism an ideal of freedom, it nevertheless rejects the Liberal view of a mechanical and meaningless Newtonian universe, or at least rejects the further conclusion that in a Newtonian world, as Hume eventually demonstrated, no moral belief can be grounded in reason.[v]<\/a>\u00a0 Its challenge is to preserve the notion of freedom, without giving it over to the arbitrary or contingent choices that free people, in fact, often \u201chappen\u201d to make in modernity.<\/p>\n

To recall an image I used in an earlier section, when the scientific revolution replaced the \u201cclosed world\u201d of antiquity and the middle-ages with \u201cthe infinite universe\u201d of modern mechanics, as Alexander Koyr\u00e9 writes, we witnessed \u201cthe discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning, and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts\u201d(4).\u00a0 In response to this infinite and value-free universe, a counter-tradition that reached its apogee in Hegel tried to create a closed and meaningful world for human beings that was nevertheless compatible both with the empirical advances of modern sciences and the modern project of human emancipation.\u00a0 This remains our struggle today.<\/p>\n

Before proceeding any further, I should situate this exploration of Liberalism and its Other in terms of my broader argument that is working its way steadily, if slowly, towards a yet-to-be-developed Aristotelian conservativism.\u00a0 Another way to characterize this counter-tradition in context of my overall argument is to return to a major distinction that I discussed at the outset and remains, if largely out of sight for now, a main subtext of these subsequent discussions: namely an Aristotelian distinction between effectiveness and excellence.\u00a0 Liberalism is the philosophy of effectiveness, of utilitarian values, of instrumental reason.\u00a0 Our Liberal counter-tradition, in contrast, attempts to find an alternative to the triumph of effectiveness.\u00a0 As Max Weber reminds us, for pragmatic, utilitarian, and commerce-minded Benjamin Franklin, \u201chonesty is useful because it assures credit\u201d and, despite his strong focus on virtue, lacks any sort of Aristotelian ordering of means and ends towards something like Eudaimonia (52).\u00a0 Those of a more, shall we say, spiritual bent revolted against the erosion of virtue into a means for the end of accumulation for accumulation\u2019s sake.\u00a0 Liberalism\u2019s Other sought to redeem honesty and truth for more noble or transcendent ends, for something more redemptive than success in the market place.<\/p>\n

A such, it has become an \u201cinescapable horizon\u201d (as Charles \u00a0Taylor puts it) of what we might call social criticism <\/em>for the simple reason that society (as opposed to politics) has generally been criticized for its \u201cdevaloriziation of being.\u201d\u00a0 I am interested in Aristotle, following Alasdair MacIntyre, because the Rousseauean counter-tradition has, despite its apparent inescapability, nevertheless failed to achieve its aims of finding an alternative way to ground the good \u2014 <\/em>and in large part because of its similarities with Liberalism.[vi]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em>\u00a0Unless we explore this tradition, then, we risk simply repeating it instead of exploring alternatives \u2014 like Aristotle as well as a kind of conservativism that is unfamiliar to us today.<\/p>\n

Coming Back to Who We Really Are<\/strong><\/h3>\n

So how does this counter-tradition attempt to find a non-arbitrary notion of the good <\/em>that is not merely a matter of \u201cimposing your ideology on others\u201d? \u00a0How does it respond to Liberalism\u2019s insistence on individual choice as the arbiter of meaning and value? \u00a0Where can it find a source of truth that recognizes the disenchanted world of facts but still identifies a substantial and non-arbitrary human world of meaning? \u00a0We live in an age that values above all the human as sovereign subject, to put a finer point on it: how, then, can we prioritize the subject without everything becoming \u201cmerely subjective\u201d<\/em>?[vii]<\/a><\/p>\n

Consider this example, which also brings us back to the challenges of deep sustainability<\/em> or of human abundance in a post-peak world, a movement in its broad contours that has adopted Rousseau as its patron saint, whether it is aware of it or not. \u00a0I\u2019m going to pick-up on a passage from Rob Hopkins, writing in The Transition Handbook,<\/em> cited in my last installment.\u00a0 At that time I was arguing that <\/em>deep sustainability depends on a notion of the good<\/em> in ways generally rejected by Liberal free choice.\u00a0 Now, I\u2019m looking more closely at where <\/em>this notion of the good<\/em> comes from in our modern, post-Enlightenment context \u2014 where it is grounded or on what authority it speaks, how (by what criteria) it differentiates \u201cgood\u201d from \u201cbad.\u201d\u00a0 Hopkins, recall, is putting forth what might be referred to as a positive morality as opposed to a restrictive or negative one \u2014 one that pursues the good<\/em> rather than avoids the bad.\u00a0 Hopkins suggests that an energy descent or the simplicity required by living within ecological limits \u201cneed not necessarily mean deprivation, misery, and collapse.\u201d \u201cThe idea of energy descent,\u201d he continues, \u201cis that each step back down the hill could be a step towards sanity, towards a place and towards wholeness.\u00a0 It is a coming back to who we really are<\/em>. . . \u201c(53; emphasis added).<\/p>\n

\u201cWho we really are<\/em>\u201d and the desire to be true to it, to live according to it and the value of \u201cwholeness,\u201d even to organize a culture around it, has become a commonplace thought, and thus risks passing unnoticed and without criticism.\u00a0 To those, following their intuition or hearts, who believe that such ideals are self-evident, in need only of immediate[viii]<\/a> action without the bother of reflection, this is written precisely with you in mind. \u00a0Now more than ever, instead of following our gut we need to examine its undigested history.[ix]<\/a> \u00a0My goal, in this installment is to observe where this idea of returning to ourselves<\/em> came from.\u00a0 Throughout this piece I will be providing a historical context for several concepts and distinctions that we may take to be timeless or universal and thus without history, in part, as Michel Foucault argued, because they are only effective if they erase their history. \u00a0These include a distinct concept of the self as individual and the ideal of nature and authenticity, all of which appeared for the first time as the market economy developed and changed the face of the Earth.<\/p>\n

Today one can, as Hopkins does, use the phrase \u201ccoming back to who we really are\u201d without any background explanation or justification, but only because we have become submerged in that background.[x]<\/a> \u00a0With the concept of \u201cwho we really are\u201d and the metaphor of \u201ccoming home,\u201d Hopkins is relying on terms not only unseen, but inconceivable, within the moral vocabulary or imagination of Western culture prior to what I am referring to as the age of Rousseau.\u00a0 These concepts or images point to an entirely new way of conceiving of the truth regarding human conduct.\u00a0 Instead of right and wrong, good and bad, virtuous or vicious, righteous or sinful, it divides the moral universe for the first time into the<\/em> real and the fake<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The notion of the real<\/em> was developed as an alternative to a life embedded in commerce, status, accumulation, and competition over arbitrarily conceived self-interest.\u00a0 Bourgeois wants and manners could not, a least not with any lasting credibility, <\/em>be referred to as immoral, evil, or un-Godly — as generations of industrious Puritans or faithful God-fearing Burghers can attest.\u00a0 To say that the industrial middle-class violates traditional norms is to pay it a compliment. \u00a0But utilitarian values can, in a stroke of innovative conceptual genius, be more credibly depicted as fake, <\/em>its so-called free choices deemed false.\u00a0 With this new distinction, one that seems more compatible with the new empiricism of science and its diagnostic powers, moral (or social) criticism may appear to be avoiding the cardinal sin of imposing an ideology on others.\u00a0 By referring to a way of life as fake, and then contrasting it to an alternative that is real — a matter of \u201ccoming back to who we really are\u201d \u2013 it has adopted a non-moralistic, non-teleological idiom that nevertheless has a sense of objectivity or universality about it.\u00a0 We realize both its novelty and its distinctive ring when we contrast the sound of calling someone \u201creal\u201d as opposed to \u201crighteous\u201d or \u201cmorally correct.\u201d\u00a0 This is an entirely new and staggeringly significant way of making value distinctions about human life: a culture that uses the one set of distinctions has a substantially different orientation and world-picture than one that uses the others.<\/p>\n

A new kind of intellectual activity is thus born, the kind that puts society on the couch and submits it to analysis.\u00a0 Reveling in newly minted metaphors of surface versus depth, it seeks for \u201cdeep truths,\u201d cutting through the ideological bulwark that forms the newly conceived false self of modernity; it teams up with another distinction separating the natural from the artificial and speaks now of the genuine<\/em>.\u00a0 Franklin\u2019s honesty for the sake of achieving credit may well be utterly dependable within his particular social context; but no one would think of it as \u201cdeep,\u201d \u201cmeaningful,\u201d or \u201cprofound,\u201d concepts yet to be applied to human conduct or life-orientation in Franklin\u2019s Philadelphia.\u00a0 For the very concept of an ideological bulwark<\/em> that exists and that can be cut through<\/em>, if it is to be remotely sensible, requires an entirely new conception of society, history, and the role and status of knowledge and belief.<\/p>\n

Sincerity and Authenticity<\/strong><\/h3>\n

One of the most common terms we use when speaking of this new kind of moral truth is authenticity<\/em>\u2014another term which we take for granted, ignoring its very specific history. \u00a0In its previous and, we might say, more literal meaning, authenticity<\/em> indicates that something is verifiably real, an alternative to a fake or counterfeit, now broadened to apply to moral and social life, suggesting in turn that our self-portraits might be false depictions, forgeries of our real selves. \u00a0This understanding of authenticity and its history was most influentially presented to English speaking audiences in Lionel Trilling\u2019s 1971 study, Sincerity and Authenticity<\/em>, where he observes \u201cthe moral life in the process of revising itself\u201d on the cusp of modernity (1).[xi]<\/a>\u00a0 Instead of being true to one\u2019s creator, community, or overseer, the new imperative in a bourgeoning market society, cutting itself free from all traditional sources of authority, was that we be true to ourselves<\/em>, perhaps setting out to return to \u201cwho we really are.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is one sense in which sincerity and authenticity are a paired set, part of an era when, in a moment, there appeared both the very possibility and the pressing threat that one might have the kind of self (mobile, striving, role-playing, inward-looking) to which one might not be true, in which playing a social role became a common requirement, and in which life could be spent in the pursuit of luxuries rather than necessities.\u00a0 Both sincerity and authenticity are moral ideals which respond to this new threat and are thus part of a modern project of selfhood<\/em> which required a number of changes to the idea of the self.[xii]<\/a> \u00a0In traditional, pre-modern societies, the self has ascribed identities with fixed social roles in which freedom as we understand it is clearly not possible.\u00a0 The modern metropolis, generally celebrated by the Enlightenment, provided all sorts of new options and possibilities for the triumph of freedom.\u00a0 But, Rousseau was to point out, with this freedom comes new burdens: should one fail to create a unique and self-styled self, one would be forced to endure loneliness.\u00a0 Creating an identity, to orient both oneself and others, involved competition and rewarded manipulation; it required both an adherence to fashion but the appearance of originality, something children in consumerist societies do with a savant-like effortlessness that hides the immense social education in subtle differentiation that defines one\u2019s early years. \u00a0Proving one\u2019s sincerity — that one could be trusted in a fluid environment lacking \u201cfixed, fast-frozen relationships,\u201d as Marx put it — became necessary to basic social order as well as psychological continuity.<\/p>\n

While sincerity and authenticity are both a part of the modern epoch of European exploration, conquest and colonization, the rise of the market economy, and the destruction of narrowly ascribed social roles, within this epoch they often find themselves in opposition.\u00a0 Sincerity, Trilling points out, preceded authenticity and, I would add, may also outlive it.[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0 Sincerity is a simpler concept, one which Trilling defines as the \u201ccongruence between avowal and actual feeling\u201d (2).\u00a0 One may have to search one\u2019s soul or provide an extensive confession as proof of one\u2019s sincerity, but there is a relatively simple honesty to it.\u00a0 Trilling marks the entrance of the concept of sincerity as an introspective project into Western consciousness in an otherwise fairly unremarkable if not banal speech made by Polonius to the departing Laertes in Hamlet<\/em>: \u201cThis above all: to thine own self be true\/And it doth follow, as the night the day,\/ Thou canst not then be false to any man.\u201d\u00a0 Benjamin Franklin\u2019s extensive table of virtues, tailor-made for effective economic competition, are an elaboration on Polonius\u2019s advice.<\/p>\n

Compared to authenticity, which we will discuss more fully, sincerity is a more individualistic quality, lacking also the depth and profundity I mentioned above: it makes assumptions about the society in which a person might be sincere or insincere, concluding that its execution is a matter of private integrity or Kantian good will.\u00a0 To be overly schematic about it while ignoring considerable overlap, sincerity is at home in Lockean Liberalism, where relationships are largely contractual, and social order is maintained when one is sincere about living up to contractual obligations.\u00a0 The honesty Benjamin Franklin describes in his table of virtues is sincere, rather than authentic.\u00a0 When I commit to a marriage, take out a loan, or propose to build someone a home, what matters is the congruence between my avowal and my actual feeling or, perhaps, more sustained intentions<\/em>.\u00a0 Constancy is a virtue required for the truly sincere.\u00a0 Despite the way it may require some introspection in order to ascertain one\u2019s \u201cactual feelings\u201d or one\u2019s ability to sustain an intention, sincerity, compared to authenticity, is a surface-dwelling value, indicated by connotations of earnest naivete, even a saccharine quality.\u00a0 To those in modernity committed to a more complex and searching mode of truth sincerity may ring false.<\/p>\n

A sincere person, we may intuitively grasp, is a simple one; but what exactly does it mean to be simple<\/em>?[xiv]<\/a>\u00a0 In the context of modernity, in which Marx points out, capitalism has \u201cgiven a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption,\u201d simplicity may refer to \u201cold local and national seclusion\u201d uninformed by the broad range of possibilities (Communist Manifesto 38-9)<\/em>.\u00a0 But the same cosmopolitanism, regardless of what we may think of it, requires a broader range of moral discrimination as well, such that simplicity can also refer to a lack (by seclusion) of broader social or historical awareness, an inability to contextualize one\u2019s transactions or consider far ranging and unintended consequences, thus permitting an unquestioning trust in their legitimacy.\u00a0 It bespeaks of a truthfulness that may represent a \u201ctrue heart\u201d but an unquestioning mind.\u00a0 We may doubt the used car salesman\u2019s sincerity when he tells us he\u2019d snatch that car up himself did he not think we\u2019d look better behind the wheel than he.\u00a0 But if he is in fact sincere, we would conclude that he is oblivious to the larger scam in which he plays a role.\u00a0 Hegel described sincerity, or something very much like it, as \u201cthe heroism of dumb service.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this way, says Trilling, \u201ca judgment may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic\u201d (11).\u00a0 The \u201ccongruence between feeling and avowal\u201d characteristic of sincerity might be oblivious to the source of the feeling (its ideological conditioning), ignorant of the manipulative relations in which it plays a well-intentioned part, earnestly committed to a kind of life that is not \u201creal.\u201d\u00a0 Authenticity in this way projects us forward into a world of the unconscious, unseen social influence or power, ideology, a culture industry where meaning is mass-produced for easy consumption.\u00a0 When we think of authenticity, we may think of depth, profundity, courage in the face of mortality or the immensity of the universe, even despair at the insuperable contradictions of our life that we cannot solve but nevertheless refuse to deny.\u00a0 In contrast to the \u201cheroism of dumb service,\u201d or \u201cthe honest individual,\u201d Hegel, foreshadowing Conrad and The Heart of Darkness,[xv]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> speaks of the \u201cdisrupted consciousness\u201d: \u201cthe shamelessness which gives utterance to this deception,\u201d he explains, \u201cis just for that reason the greatest truth,\u201d at least in the context of an inauthentic social arrangement (Phenomenology of Spirit <\/em>317).\u00a0 Hegel\u2019s \u201clabor of the negative,\u201d a force destructive of the superficial and inauthentic, is to become the chief protagonist of later literary modernism and deconstruction, of Sartre\u2019s nausea, Beckett\u2019s speechlessness, Warhol\u2019s repetition and reproduction, The Velvet Underground\u2019s \u201cHeroin.\u201d\u00a0 Disavowal<\/em> will become one of authenticity\u2019s chief deportments.[xvi]<\/a><\/p>\n

Authenticity, Trilling writes (in a phrase that I kindly ask you to read at least twice), thus implies \u201ca more strenuous moral experience than \u2018sincerity\u2019 does, a more exigent conception of the self and what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man\u2019s place in it, and a less acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life\u201d (11). \u00a0We will return to these ideas periodically.<\/p>\n

An operating assumption of Liberalism, in contrast to this, is that precise contractual relationships and procedural legal codes, along with rising material comfort, might adequately contain the dark forces of culture, desire, and deception.\u00a0 Against this, the ethos of authenticity notes the larger (structural or systematic) lie borne by this contractual sincerity and the goods and goals over which it presides.\u00a0 The classic example is that of capitalist accumulation, which requires honesty in many of its transactions in the service of wide spread manipulation and destruction. \u00a0The very idea of institutional racism, to take a current example, bespeaks of this \u201cwider reference\u201d and \u201cless acceptant and genial view of the social circumstances of life.\u201d\u00a0 Institutional racism is repeatedly misunderstood by sincere but simple people because it attempts to explain how a \u201ccongruence between avowal and actual feeling\u201d may, even for those who have no apparent hate in their hearts, nevertheless be the unconscious custodians of a tradition of violence and oppression.[xvii]<\/a>\u00a0 Authenticity entails more than good intentions; it requires a connection with what Marx would call the real <\/em>conditions of social life.[xviii]<\/strong><\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

Or consider some literary examples.\u00a0 The characters of Jane Austen are sincere, and in their sincerity also authentic, given Austen\u2019s relatively genial social world.\u00a0 Jim, in Huckleberry Finn<\/em> represents the kind of sincerity that Twain holds up as a sort of social utopia. \u00a0Emily Bront\u00eb provides a vision of authenticity with the character of Heathcliff, while Emma Bovary\u2019s dissatisfaction with her narrow provincial entrapment bespeaks of a will to authenticity if not one actualized. \u00a0Gatsby has a kind of sincerity about him, but his life is anything but authentic.\u00a0 The same could be said of the blunt and bullying Tom, in the same novel, whose cruel avowals match his feelings, even though his inauthentic life is at one with an extreme sort of social disorder depicted by Fitzgerald as anything but genial.\u00a0 Despite her propensity to lie, according to Fitzgerald, Jordan Baker\u2019s life approaches a piqued sort of authenticity (\u201cthe shamelessness which gives utterance to this deception,\u201d as Hegel put it) in which lying may be a way of distancing oneself from a society that is untrue at its core.\u00a0 In Heart of Darkness<\/em>, which I will at a later point discuss at length, Conrad articulates something similar, if interestingly mediated by the multiple layers of narrative, when he writes of Kurtz (also described as \u201chollow at the core\u201d): \u201cNo eloquence could have been so withering to one\u2019s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.\u201d\u00a0 Heart of Darkness<\/em> takes the ideal of authenticity a step further, however, such that we might say, with Conrad, that \u201ca judgment is passed on the very ideal of authenticity that it is not itself authentic.\u201d\u00a0 The inescapable horizon is maintained; everything in it, however, is hollow and dead, full of magnificent eloquence providing us only a choice of nightmares.[xix]<\/a>\u00a0 But that is to jump ahead of ourselves and the dawn of the age of Rousseau, where we must try to remain for now.<\/p>\n

To sum up, authenticity provides a radical new way of dividing up the moral universe.\u00a0 As Nietzsche, also an important part of this counter-tradition and its eventual demise, makes explicit, authenticity takes us beyond good and evil to a world of real and false, \u201cwhere lies are experienced as lies\u201d (Ecce Homo<\/em> 326), shifting the terms of the debate so that traction might be found in the face of the Liberal abandonment of the good <\/em>to personal preference, taste, and lifestyle.\u00a0 Put strategically, as if it were a matter of solving a philosophical problem, the Other of Liberalism will argue that the Liberal understanding of human life — as a cheapened and arbitrary matter of taste and preference — is itself an ideological manifestation of the false and artificial nature of modern, bourgeois, life.<\/em> \u00a0For this reason, one can denounce the \u201cfree choices\u201d made by actual people not only as more deeply unfree, but contrary to human good. \u00a0The \u201chappy-souled,\u201d honest and genial, friendly and laidback bourgeois consumer, guilt or shame-induced \u201chang-ups\u201d[xx]<\/a> filed smooth by therapy or group encounters, with a job in advertising or corporate management is, as Wendell Berry suggests in this vein, \u201cprobably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world\u201d (20).\u00a0 He or she is a victim of a divided, dis-ordered, dis-eased, and unsettled ideology which must be disentangled by the pursuit of authenticity, a return to who we really are in our health and wholeness, our connection to ourselves, each other, and the earth.[xxi]<\/a><\/p>\n

This idea that bourgeois values of self-interest and its pursuit of an instrumental kind of happiness is false, superficial, inauthentic, and ultimately unhappy will find repeated articulations from different perspectives ranging from Romantic poetry, to Marxist critique, to existentialism, and, perhaps finally \u00a0in the howls of beats and the free-love of hippies.\u00a0 Although they all define authenticity in different ways, all share this belief: that the Liberal view that there is no single good<\/em> is, itself, an expression of the fact that the Liberal self is lost and alienated, disconnected from \u201cwho we really are.\u201d\u00a0 Authenticity does not impose an ideology; it is, in claims, undoing the one already imposed upon us.<\/p>\n

This Strange Disease of Modern Life\u00a0 <\/strong><\/h3>\n

It may seem as though I\u2019m suggesting that authenticity was developed as part of a philosophical strategy or move, an attempt to maintain a kind of philosophical truth\u2014a stand-in for Aristotelian teleology or divine law in an age of rational skepticism.\u00a0 For many of the tradition\u2019s key figures this discursive, rather than experiential, description is accurate. \u00a0According to his biographer, as a young philosopher Hegel and his network of fellow intellectuals (including H\u00f6lderlin and Schelling) concluded that \u201ceither we found some way in which to establish a new philosophy appropriate for modernity; or we had to face Jacobi\u2019s [religious] indictment that the Enlightenment appeal to reason itself was mistaken, an act of human hubris, whose outcome could only be, to use the term Jacobi coined, \u2018nihilism\u2019\u201d (Pinkard 204). \u00a0\u00a0The problem that Hegel and his generation were grappling with was, in turn a result of Kant\u2019s very explicit attempt to salvage rational freedom from Hume\u2019s critique of the Lockean empiricism that had animated both the Enlightenment and the rise of democracy.<\/p>\n

But the urgency of this project came from a sense not only of philosophical ungrounding, but the unravelling of the fabric of life as it was experienced.[xxii]<\/a>\u00a0 As Terry Pinkard notes, \u201cprobably no generation lived through such a wrenching transformation of ways of life as did Hegel\u2019s (1870-1831), which included many of the artists and poets who, following Rousseau, initiated the Romantic revolt against modern inauthenticity.\u00a0 This transformation was both intoxicating and frightening.\u00a0 It promised an entirely new epoch of human possibility, but at the same time put the promised freedom and renewal just out of reach, while heads rolled and blood flowed from the guillotine of post-Revolutionary France.\u00a0 For those not simply caught-up in the thrum of achieving, maximizing, and accumulating, the advances of modernity, commercial society and the industrial revolution appeared profoundly and unmistakably false and artificial, cruel and dehumanizing, often base and ugly.\u00a0 Modern life had not only become unmoored, it brought on separation, division, alienation, as well as the proletarian misery later highlighted by Marx and Engels.\u00a0 As George Monbiot has more recently noted in this same vein, \u201cwe rip the Earth\u2019s living systems apart to fill the gap in our lives, yet the gap remains,\u201d while \u201cthe atomization we suffer has eroded our sense of common purpose\u201d (18,25). \u00a0\u00a0New questions, previously all but unknown to humans, suddenly demanded answers in the age of the sovereign self: who am I? what should I do and be? \u00a0How should I live my life? \u00a0There was, if I may, sincerity in the initial quest for authenticity, an earnest response to a world, in Marx\u2019s words, where \u201call that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I have mentioned, a good deal of this began with Rousseau, who had to invent a new way of seeing the world and many of the terms necessary for describing it. \u00a0Rousseau burst on the intellectual scene when his essay, answering a question put forth by the Academy of Dijon, won first prize (1750).\u00a0 Condorcet, as one example, expressed the Enlightenment\u2019s faith in rationality when he exclaimed that \u00a0we have \u201cthe strongest reason to believe, from past experience, from the observations of the progress which the sciences and civilization have hitherto made, and from the analysis of the march of the human understanding, and the development of its faculties, that nature has fixed no limits to our hopes\u201d (179). \u00a0The march of reason would set all of humanity free.\u00a0 Attempting only to gauge the effectiveness<\/em> of the overall project, and never for a moment doubting its basic goals, the Academy asked whether \u201cthe reestablishment of arts and sciences had contributed to the refining of manners.\u201d \u00a0Rousseau\u2019s answer turns the question upside down in a way that announced an entirely new era, perhaps without precedent.\u00a0 Yes, he says — the arts and sciences have helped refine manners.\u00a0 But the refinement of manners does not represent an advance of human good<\/em>.\u00a0 Rather, so-called progress represented a loss of virtue and a decline in human well-being.<\/p>\n

More specifically, says Rousseau, beneath the manners that have been refined lies a real self that has been lost or alienated, a word whose current usage can be trace back to him.\u00a0 Not only are the advances of culture and civilization unnecessary to human life, all this \u201cexpensive finery\u201d distracts us from nurturing the \u201cstrength and vigor of the soul\u201d (7). \u00a0In the advanced and cosmopolitan culture of Enlightenment Paris, one witnesses the triumph of the false and fake.\u00a0 The degree to which the heterogenous bustle of urban life \u201cstimulate or enlarges one\u2019s consciousness,\u201d Trilling writes, proportionally \u201cmake it less his own.\u201d\u00a0 The modern self \u201cfinds it ever more difficult to know what his own self is and what being true to it consists in\u201d (61).\u00a0 In a society enjoying the social mobility enabled by a belief in freedom and the material choices enabled by scientific advancement, says Rousseau, \u201cour outer appearances\u201d are not \u201cthe likeness of the heart\u2019s dispositions\u201d (7).\u00a0 As he exclaims, \u201ccommon customs are followed, never one\u2019s own lights.\u00a0 One no longer dares to seem what one really is\u201d; \u201cbefore art had fashioned our manners, and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our mores were indeed rustic, but sincere and natural\u201d (7).\u00a0 Doubling down on sincerity, however, will not solve the problem in this disintegrative and ungenial social arrangement; more radical social change is required, a degree of change that was by the end of the century to inaugurate the age of revolution.<\/p>\n

It is valuable to consider Rousseau\u2019s words, here, as they demonstrate a sort of sensibility with which the idea of alienation was initially conceived as well as some of the imagery that has been with us ever since.\u00a0 Rousseau turns ideals previously denigrated, such as the rustic, wilderness, nakedness, and simplicity into terms of value, while the stuff of civilization is contrastingly made to appear affected, fashion a matter of conformity and thus the loss of individuality.\u00a0 In modernity one doesn\u2019t want to be \u201cbehind the times\u201d or unfashionable, for that is to be conservative or to indicate one\u2019s lack of wider reference to the universe or society and \u201cman\u2019s\u201d place within it.\u00a0 But being au courant<\/em> and fashionable also makes one a slave to custom.\u00a0 Rousseau thus talks about \u201ca vile and deceitful uniformity,\u201d \u201cvile ornaments,\u201d and a \u201cdeceitful veil of politeness\u201d (7).\u00a0 \u201cAdornment\u201d becomes synonymous with corruption, nakedness with truth.\u00a0 Civilization is newly likened to enchainment while \u201ccivility\u201d and \u201cpoliteness\u201d are \u201cgarlands of flowers\u201d which hide the truth of our degradation from ourselves (6).[xxiii]<\/a><\/p>\n

The more specific cause or dynamic of this falseness further demonstrates why Rousseau is the patron saint of deep sustainability<\/em>, radical simplicity, or Transition.\u00a0 Material progress, argues Rousseau, creates luxuries and desires that are unnecessary to human life and well-being, thus creating false wants.\u00a0 Worse, though, these false wants breed competition and competition results in viewing yourself and your possessions through the eyes of one\u2019s fellows and thus seeking \u201cour happiness in the opinion of another\u201d (24).\u00a0 A life spent pursuing things we don\u2019t need in order to impress others whose opinions don\u2019t really matter thus doubly alienates us from our true interests and needs, separating us from ourselves and each other.[xxiv]<\/a> \u00a0This sort of material progress also marks the origin of inequality.\u00a0 The artistic and scientific advances that Rousseau criticized in his First Discourse<\/em> addressed to the Academy of Dijon, not only requires inequality, but breeds it.\u00a0 For the work of the scientist, philosopher, artist, and engineer are, he was the first to note, maintained by the simple fact that others are supplying for their sustenance; a life of study and reflection, he notes, is a luxury, and like luxury results in idleness and vanity (\u201cluxury seldom thrives without the sciences and arts, and they never thrive without it\u201d [15]).<\/p>\n

Rousseau\u2019s description of the Enlightenment resembles Wendell Berry\u2019s critique of the culture of specialization.[xxv]<\/a> \u00a0As these so-called advancements continue, we find ourselves increasingly separated from our \u201creal\u201d interests and a self-possessed regard for ourselves. \u00a0His is the first anthropology of what Joseph Tainter calls the \u201ccomplex civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because we are still emerged in the age of Rousseau, it is easy to forget that the idea of a real self<\/em> that might be capable of getting lost has not been with us forever.\u00a0 We are also accustomed to \u201cconservatives\u201d who are at once anti-intellectual, distrustful of artistic innovation, and declaim the loss of traditional virtues.\u00a0 But to think of Rousseau as a conservative who wanted to turn the clock back a few ticks is to miss his point, even if he seems to share a similar antipathy to rationality and progress. \u00a0In both mid-century eighteenth-century Britain and France, the Enlightenment was clearly a challenge to the Ancien R<\/em>\u00e9gime<\/em> of the monarchy and the church, and the French Revolution was as its culmination a sort of Rousseauean cult of freedom, at least according to Edmund Burke.\u00a0 But if Burke wanted to restore the recently-disrupted old order and base moral and political life on inherited traditions, Rousseau\u2019s emphasis both on freedom and authenticity gave him no such desire.\u00a0 Despite his use of imagery of simpler times and rustic peasant life, and despite the unmistakable \u201cbearing in the past,\u201d to recall Williams\u2019 phrase, a feudal or absolutist social organization was as inimical to freedom as the alienating metropolis.\u00a0 As Marshall Berman summarizes it, \u201cRousseau was at one with the philosophes<\/em> and their indictment of the Old Regime.\u00a0 Indeed, he grasped its moral bankruptcy more fully and criticized it more trenchantly than anyone in the eighteenth century\u201d (The Politics of Authenticity<\/em> 88).\u00a0 With the rest of the Enlightenment, his was a philosophy that was both forward-looking and overwhelmingly devoted to the project of human emancipation. \u00a0But human emancipation in the authentic mode, as with Marx as well, couldn\u2019t help but take as its model for fecund unity and organic reciprocity from some<\/em> image of the past, even if it were to be fully<\/em> realized only in the future.\u00a0 The disease of modern life, those sensitive to it realized, could never be cured only with a stronger dose of modernity and modernization.<\/p>\n

For this reason, even if the battle between the ancients and the moderns was on its way to articulating a familiar liberal\/conservative split, Rousseau adds a third term that still beguiles our political divisions today.[xxvi]<\/a>\u00a0 Although returning to recent pre-modernity provides no good options, Rousseau believed, the emancipation from tradition and the old order by use of reason may nevertheless interfere with the more important goal of human freedom, now described not as civil equality but as the potential to flourish in ways reminiscent of Aristotle.\u00a0 More specifically, as Berman explains, the Enlightenment following from Locke and Adam Smith, as well as Voltaire and Montesquieu, believed that emancipation was solely a political and legal issue, one to be settled by constitutions and the rule of law.\u00a0 Civil society, in other words, was conceptually cut-off from society and culture, an early version of the Liberal public\/private split.\u00a0 Freedom from an absolute monarch may have been an important start, Rousseau believed, but of little lasting value if men and women are imprisoned within manipulative social relations and the opinions of others or were impelled to pursue purposeless wants or compete for status. \u00a0In fact, not only is civil freedom not enough, in the form Rousseau encountered it, this \u201cfreedom of the void\u201d as Hegel would call it, combined with a faith in reason promoted utilitarian values and a distinct lack of social cooperation.[xxvii]<\/a><\/p>\n

We can, at any rate, include another item to our growing list of beliefs, concepts, and values that we take to be universal, but in fact entered human consciousness for the first time during the years following the European conquest of the Americas and the rise of the market economy and the dawn of the Liberal state as the primary force of social organization: namely, the paradox of progress<\/em>: as M. H. Abrams explains, what Rousseau and his followers quickly grasped, once given the necessary concepts, was that \u201chuman progress in intellection and in the sciences, arts, and social institutions, after an early optimal stage, involved a correlative decline in human happiness by imposing a growing burden of complication, conflict, oppression and instinctual renunciation\u201d (199).\u00a0 After Rousseau gave life to this idea, a flood-gate is opened, and modernity is newly questioned not only for the falseness of its manners and its obligatory insincerity; rather, nearly all of the features of progress come under question: the loss of artisanship, the rise of utilitarian and instrumental values, alienation and loneliness, the splitting of the self and the diremption of society, such that the law stands against religion, natural inclinations against the moral code, work against leisure, the interests of the self against the interests of the group.\u00a0 In his poem \u201cThe Scholar-Gipsy,\u201d Mathew Arnold was to later to describe \u201cthis strange disease of modern life,\/With its sick hurry, its divided aims,\/Its heads overtax\u2019d, its palsied hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n

An entirely new kind of art, one that rejected classical forms and constraints in favor of spontaneous personal expression was, in the wake of Rousseau, soon developed, often with overt allegiance to him.\u00a0 It emphasized themes of division and disunion, separation; poetry and art, in contrast tasked themselves with healing this \u201cstrange disease.\u201d\u00a0 As Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin, sometimes referred to as the first great modern European poet, wrote in the preface to his novel, Hyperion<\/em>: \u201cTo end the eternal conflict between our self and the world, to restore that peace that passeth all understanding, to unite ourselves with nature so as to form one endless whole — that is the goal of all our strivings\u201d (Abrams 238). \u00a0Similar themes appear again in Marx\u2019s critique of Capitalism.\u00a0 To the contemporary liberal or leftists, the part of Marx that was concerned with the problem of political power or that can be harnessed for a critique of inequality often overshadows the part concerned with alienation, defined by Marx as the loss <\/em>of ourselves (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts <\/em>111).\u00a0 Unlike today\u2019s democratic socialism (which wants \u201ca bourgeoisie without a proletariat\u201d), Marx was not concerned with the fair distribution of consumer goods.[xxviii]<\/a> \u00a0Even in his more \u201cscientific mode,\u201d authenticity versus inauthenticity is a controlling distinction.\u00a0 The labor theory of value, after all, carries deep connotations of authenticity.\u00a0 Exchange value, in contrast, is inauthentic, detached from need, undetermined by necessity.\u00a0 Although Marx was suspicious of Romanticism\u2019s idealism and, following Hegel, its faith in an aesthetic cure to modernity\u2019s breach, the ideals of Rousseau, Schiller, and other Romantics loom large in his consciousness.<\/p>\n

Between Rousseau\u2019s First Discourse<\/em> and Marx\u2019s declaration that the bourgeois epoch was distinguished by \u201cuninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation\u201d (Manifesto of the Communist Party <\/em>476), Europeans witnessed the French Revolution, Napoleonic conquest and defeat, the industrial revolution and accelerating urban squalor, photography, the steam-engine, and the revolutions of 1848, each recasting the idea of alienation and the loss of the self.\u00a0 But consistent nonetheless was the view that modern civilization had left us divided from each other, removed from honest work, and separated into competing spheres where sensitive souls would long for a lost harmony and unity.\u00a0 In 1767 Scottish Philosopher Adam Ferguson wrote of the alienating tendencies of the market economy in his Essay on the History of Civil Society<\/em>, explaining that in \u201ca commercial state. . .\u00a0 man is sometimes found a detached and solitary being.\u201d\u00a0 Men are put at \u201cvariance\u201d and \u201cthe bands of affection are broken\u201d (24). Community had been replaced by individuals spurred on by selfish motives, while society was a collection of individuals.\u00a0 Thomas Carlyle, who made common use of the phrase \u201ccash nexus\u201d before Marx, wrote in 1843 in Past and Present <\/em>of the devastation spreading across England in the name of \u201cpolitical economy.\u201d \u00a0Even in the face of poverty and deplorable work conditions, worse yet is the crisis of the heart: \u201cIsolation,\u201d he writes, \u201cis the sum-total of wretchedness to man. To be cut off, to be left solitary: to have a world alien, not your world; all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are! . . . . Man knows no sadder destiny.\u201d \u00a0Blake likewise wrote of the \u201cdreadful state\/Of separation,\u201d while for Coleridge the greatest evil was \u201cto be betrayed into the wretchedness of division.\u201d\u00a0 Just as Wendell Berry writes of the \u201cmodern disease of specialization,\u201d and the necessary unity of work and life, the Romantic movement mourned the way craftsmanship was being replaced by the machine, to which the worker becomes mere appendage; \u201cutility,\u201d wrote Friedrich von Schiller, \u201cis the great idol of the time.\u201d \u00a0Modern man, he says, is split \u201cinto numberless parts, . . .\u00a0 chained down to a little fragment of the whole, . . . having nothing in his ears but the monotonous sound of the perpetually revolving wheel, he never develops the harmony of his being\u201d (Aesthetic Education of Man <\/em>Letter VI).<\/p>\n

Romanticism\u2019s counter-Enlightenment and (sometimes) counter-Liberalism sought to re-enchant the world through myth, symbol, or feeling which, in their direct simplicity, promised a kind of freedom from the inauthenticity of \u201cexterior appearances.\u201d \u00a0At other times it sought refuge in the recent past or peasant life, slipping into nostalgia. \u00a0As Wordsworth wrote in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads<\/em> of his poetic approach, \u201cLow and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are under less constraint, and speak a plainer more emphatic language\u201d (596).\u00a0 \u00a0His language, Wordsworth proclaims, \u201cis the real<\/em> language of men.\u201d\u00a0 Art and beauty, now recast as an alternative to, rather than an example of, artifice and finery, charged itself with the task of articulating \u201cgenuine freedom,\u201d as Wordsworth put it — a freedom fully reconciled to community, place, and the ideal, if not the content, of tradition. \u201cIt is through beauty,\u201d a beauty cast in the shadow of ancient Greece, Schiller declared, \u201cthat we arrive at freedom\u201d (Letter II). [xxix]<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Marx would not admit to any interest in re-enchanting the world, he joins the fight against bourgeois disenchantment and the estrangement of the self under a regime of private property.\u00a0 Once abolished, Marx imagined the necessary emergence of an ideal communal order described with a distinctive language of authenticity.\u00a0 Explaining the idea of alienated labor, Marx exclaims that under capitalism, \u201clabor does not belong to his [the worker\u2019s] essential being; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind\u201d (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts <\/em>110). \u00a0If one\u2019s work \u201cbelongs to another,\u201d he explains, \u201cit is the loss of his self\u201d (111). \u00a0Communism, Marx claimed, would not only allow humankind to reappropriate that which was truly theirs, it provides for a more general \u201cself-actualization\u201d (a clich\u00e9d phrase, today, which we may forget Marx used with novel force).\u00a0 His entire work was performed in the service of the truth of and to oneself, balancing ideals of real need and fully-developed capacity.\u00a0 With a sort of utopianism also audible in deep sustainability, <\/em>even permaculture, communism, says Marx, is an association \u201cin which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all; it is \u201cthe complete return of man to himself\u201d; \u201cit is the riddle of history solved\u201d (Communist Manifesto<\/em> 53; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts <\/em>135; ibid).<\/p>\n

The Nature of Culture and the Culture of Nature<\/strong><\/h3>\n

But here\u2019s the problem:\u00a0 The symptoms <\/em>of the disease of modernity have received substantial consensus, and the notion of alienation has been given consistent descriptions.\u00a0 But there is little agreement, and much criticism, about the underlying cause of alienation and, to a greater extent, how it might be overcome.\u00a0 Additionally, there are few if any \u201cactualized\u201d political models to which we may turn.\u00a0 In<\/em>authenticity may be easy to detect, but authenticity, itself, has been a much more elusive goal.\u00a0 Conservativism, as cast by Edmund Burke, prized a traditional order that was under threat, but was still in existence.\u00a0 We may not actually be able to turn back the clock, but rebuilding ailing institutions is a different and more plausible task.\u00a0 In the wake of Napoleonic reforms spread across Europe by his conquering armies, a vigorous battle to reassert local customs and the power of the nobility and the church was waged with some success. \u00a0But the discourse of authenticity neither trusts the march of Enlightened reason and technological progress nor the comfort of the immediate past.\u00a0 If not the Ancien R<\/em>\u00e9gime<\/em>, then, what in human history \u2014 the apparent record of the possible \u2014 might provide an antidote to the inauthentic excess of civilization, cold dissective reason, fractured being, or our overtaxed heads and palsied hearts?<\/p>\n

The most common answer, at least in the first half of the age of Rousseau, was nature<\/em>.\u00a0 Nature provides an organic, harmonious, and interconnected whole, which seemed the opposite both of the dead mechanistic view offered by the Enlightenment and the disconnections of commercial life and its compulsory calculation.\u00a0 While modernity ceaselessly changes, nature is stable and unchanging.\u00a0 The city is loud and frenzied, nature is peaceful and serene.\u00a0 If culture and civilization appear false, artificial, and fake, nature is, as we have come to say, natural.\u00a0 It is original and real, uncorruptible except by the interference of men of palsied hearts who overtax nature. \u00a0\u201cEverything that comes from nature,\u201d Rousseau declared, \u201cwill be true\u201d (Discourse on Inequality<\/em> 46). \u00a0Rousseau escaped his constant alienation from urban frenzy and dissimulation by taking long and reflective walks in the country, beginning a tradition that continues today. \u00a0As historian William Cronon summarizes this view, one never conceived before the age of Rousseau, \u201cwilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul.\u00a0 It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives.\u00a0 Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity\u201d (80).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the ideal of nature or the natural — a word that has also come to inhabit the idea of human nature<\/em> in new ways — is more difficult to access than one might expect, a problem Rousseau understood better than many of his followers, but certainly not for the lack of effort on their part. \u00a0Romantic poets and their contemporary followers were and are drawn to dramatic natural landscapes in search of the awe-inspiring, fearful and sublime in some cases; in search of gentle pastoral scenes in others. \u00a0Diderot described a happy Tahitian tribal society, just as it was corrupted by European colonists, in his Supplement to Bougainville<\/em>.\u00a0 German Idealism in the early nineteenth-century worshipped ancient Greece as the perfect balance of nature and culture, while, later, Thomas Hardy and Martin Heidegger, each in very different ways, romanticized the simple lives of the pre-industrial peasant or the rural Volk.\u00a0 American Historian Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed in the 1870\u2019s that the wild frontier, which stripped each wave of settlers of their civilization so that they might be reborn, was responsible for the exceptional nature of American life and its democratic institutions.<\/p>\n

But in which of these examples can one find the \u201creal\u201d version of an uncorrupted nature?\u00a0 Do we return to nature through beauty, or the abolition of private property?\u00a0 Can it be accessed through H\u00f6lderlin\u2019s \u201cone endless whole\u201d or Wordsworth\u2019s \u201creal language of men\u201d?\u00a0 And if so, how?\u00a0 Or must we conquer a new world, and forget the genocide we performed as we seek rebirth in the wilds of the prairies, the Rockies, or the Sierra Nevada, the redwood forests and the gulf-stream waters?\u00a0 As I mentioned earlier, the search for deep or authentic truths stumbles when it recognizes its own history in ways that Hegel was to obsessively recognize.<\/p>\n

Rousseau, we will see, doesn\u2019t successfully answer this question \u2014 where can we find an uncorrupted version of nature to guide us? — despite all efforts; rather he prefigures the way the question will be posed over and over again, and still again today. \u00a0In order to understand this, we will need to take one more plunge into the history of philosophy. \u00a0The idea of nature<\/em>, a realm usually beyond or prior to the workings of human kind, had long been part of human consciousness and as Raymond Williams notes, \u201cany full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought\u201d (Keywords<\/em> 166).\u00a0 More particularly, natural law<\/em> had been central to Roman and Medieval jurisprudence. \u00a0Especially in the Christian tradition after Aquinas, natural law referred to the part of humanity that reflected the divine.\u00a0 Natural law referred to the way God confers justice on some forms of human behavior.\u00a0 In the middle of the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes rejected this view, providing an understanding of the state of nature<\/em> which was essentially lawless.\u00a0 What is perhaps most significant about Hobbes\u2019 rejection of tradition, though, was the way he imagines the state of nature according to newly available images from the Europeans conquest of what have come to be called \u201cprimitive societies.\u201d In these societies, Hobbes sees an absence of laws and a state of permanent warfare, against which, he supposed, human society was increasingly to develop protective measures as it \u201cadvanced.\u201d \u00a0Although we may agree that this history (or anthropology) is very poorly done, Hobbes nevertheless injects a historical view of human development and the idea of origins<\/em> in a way that was unavailable to earlier generations who did not have before them an image of their own alleged prehistory.\u00a0 For Aristotle or Aquinas, the natural was inferred or deduced; for Hobbes it was observed as part of a historical record, a matter of observation like Francis Bacon\u2019s \u201cnew science.\u201d[xxx]<\/a><\/p>\n

While John Locke, the next great theorist of the state of nature, disagreed with Hobbes that the state of nature was one of perpetual strife, he continues to rely on a quasi-historical view of humans, using our \u201cprimitive origins\u201d as a way of distinguishing what was legitimate (that which was natural to humans, visible in the state of nature) from what was not.\u00a0 As Locke put it \u201cin the beginning the whole world was America\u201d (Second <\/em>Treatise 29).[xxxi]<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0As with Hobbes, then, the non-European world was used as a point of contrast as Europeans sought to identify the nature of civilization and distinguish between what was \u201cnatural\u201d to it and what was illegitimate.[xxxii]<\/a> \u00a0Despite all his originality, Rousseau joins Hobbes and Locke by basing political legitimacy and, in his case, authenticity, on this sort of anthropological vision. \u00a0His \u201cnatural man\u201d provides the standard against which he judges modern society and its \u201cdecadence\u201d described in his First Discourse<\/em>, cited above.\u00a0 Natural man is real; social man is false.[xxxiii]<\/a><\/p>\n

But again, of primary significance is the way Rousseau describes his project and its difference from his predecessors, for in so doing he provides an interpretive strategy that has been repeated ever since.\u00a0 As Rousseau explains it, \u201cthe philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it\u201d (Discourse on Inequality<\/em> 45).\u00a0 The problem with Hobbes and Locke, and the reason why his interpretation of the state of nature is more reliable, says Rousseau, is that Hobbes and Locke weren\u2019t actually describing the state of nature.\u00a0 Rather, to use a more recent term, they projected a socially-constructed understanding of natural man on to the state of nature.\u00a0 When Hobbes suggests that humans are naturally warlike and violent, says Rousseau \u201che has wrongly injected into the savage man\u2019s concern for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions that are the product of society<\/em> and that have made laws necessary\u201d (Discourse on Inequality <\/em>60; emphasis added).\u00a0 Although he is less caustic in his critique of Locke, he implies that by projecting property rights onto the state of nature, Locke is dressing up the modern British bourgeoisie in loin-clothes as he imagines them running around the forest, displaying the natural \u201cpropensity\u201d (as Adam Smith was to add) \u201cto barter, truck, and exchange.\u201d[xxxiv]<\/a>\u00a0 Both Hobbes and Locke thus confuse \u201cnatural man with the men that they have before their eyes, and to transfer into one system a being that can thrive only in another\u201d (The State of War<\/em> 257).\u00a0\u00a0 Alternatively, this projection or \u201cinjection\u201d may in part also be related to not noticing \u201chow far these peoples already were from the state of nature\u201d (Discourse on Inequality <\/em>73), thus ignoring the fact that all \u201cprimitive\u201d people are already living in societies.<\/p>\n

What we must do, says Rousseau \u2014 and this has been a basic move of critical theory ever since \u2014 is go back further than Hobbes and Locke, dig deeper, shed local biases, taking \u201ccare not to confuse savage man with the men we have before our eyes\u201d (51), listening only to \u201cnature, which never lies\u201d (46).\u00a0 When we do this, says Rousseau, we discover that in the state of nature humans are absolutely free\u2014without laws, norms, or codes. \u00a0The social contract he advises, then, requires men and women to assert a general will that is self-determined, developing \u201ca form of association that defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and by means of which, each one, while uniting\u00a0 with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before\u201d (On the Social Contract<\/em> 164).\u00a0 Modern inauthenticity, in other words, derives from our associations that are not entirely self-determined, whether in their laws or in their culture and education.<\/p>\n

In addition to the problems of combining absolute individuality with a commitment to the sovereignty of community \u2014 a problem that deep sustainability has yet to consider with much seriousness \u2014 there are some logical or discursive problems with his claim to have apprehended a time prior to the proto-sociality described by Hobbes and Locke.\u00a0 Despite all appearances of going back further, as Rousseau rightly points out, it is not actually possible to find humans living in a state of nature (noticing \u201chow far these peoples already were from the state of nature\u201d).\u00a0 Rather than finding \u201chistorical truths\u201d he admits, his are \u201cconditional and hypothetical reasonings. . . better suited to shedding light on the nature of things than on pointing out their true origin\u201d (Inequality<\/em> 46). \u00a0His search, he claims, is one of simple introspective intuition; but to us it looks more like an elaborate argument for what the state of nature \u201cmust\u201d have been like, a necessity determined by making it the opposite not just of civil society, per se (as he might have supposed), but his<\/em> civil society.\u00a0 If cosmopolitan Paris is characterized by false manners, the concern with the opinions and tastes of others, as well, more generally, by laws and renunciation of instinct, then nature must be characterized by an absence of laws and the pursuit of instincts without regard to false pretenses — or what Rousseau calls freedom.<\/p>\n

This notion of freedom (obeying only ourselves as we might have prior to human sociality, as opposed to Locke\u2019s property rights, for instance) allows Rousseau to smuggle in two different and contradictory meanings.\u00a0 On the one hand, freedom doesn\u2019t seem to imply a specific kind of politics, but rather an absence of politics; because he is not attempting to reproduce an image of Paris in nature (as Locke attempted to naturalize seventeenth-century Britain), but the Other of Paris, his description may appear <\/em>to have shed this metropolitan corruption.\u00a0 The slate upon which Hobbes and Locke confuse \u201cnatural man with the men that they have before their eyes\u201d thus appears to be wiped clean.<\/p>\n

But were it truly wiped clean, Rousseau\u2019s philosophy would be a blank and empty formalism, incapable of supporting a very vivid and concrete version of the political good<\/em>. \u00a0\u00a0Fortunately for him, on the other hand, the concept of freedom, especially when depicted as a kind of anti-civilization grounded in nature, carries with it a wealth of images, at times leaning on observations of primitive cultures, using descriptions drawn from reports of \u201cprimitive savages\u201d or the ideal of Sparta, which Rousseau contrasted to the decadent Athens.\u00a0 Despite his rejection of conservative regression, he praises the simple virtues of rustic times, the peasant, the courageous Spartan warrior, the rude shepherd who founded Rome long before its degeneration. \u00a0Far from being empty or lacking historical references, Rousseau paints a colorful picture of human freedom, filled with images of primitive simplicity and the uncorrupted \u201chonesty\u201d of nature \u2013 images drawn from his <\/em>historical moment, reflecting it as much as any real or hypothetical time before social organization.[xxxv]<\/a><\/p>\n

To put this another way, Rousseau\u2019s criticism of Locke and Hobbes is that they don\u2019t describe natural man, but what man is like under particular circumstances.\u00a0 Rousseau may then be accused of wanting to show what man is like under no circumstances<\/em>, as a purely imaginary and abstracted being (where absolute freedom comes easily). \u00a0But under no circumstances<\/em>, man isn\u2019t like anything. \u00a0If his views, moreover, are \u201cconditioned and hypothetical reasonings,\u201d he loses the claim to empirical truthiness that animates his ideal of freedom.\u00a0 Failed historical induction is replaced by unverifiable inference.\u00a0 In this way his articulation of the state of nature is no different than an abstracted formulation of God\u2019s law pronounced in the absence of credible revelation. \u00a0Rousseau\u2019s impossible task, one repeated by Western Philosophy ever since, is to rid his transcendentalism of empirical particularity or local bias, while grounding that transcendentalism in something that provides something like<\/em> empirical verifiability.[xxxvi]<\/a>\u00a0 So has it oscillated between hard-headed naivete or dreamy sophistication, from data-driven to introspective false certainty.<\/p>\n

By refusing to project social man into nature \u2014 by reversing it to suggest that natural man has no social nature, only absolute freedom — Rousseau may think he have \u201cpushed his argument through to the roots being defended.\u00a0 In retrospect, it is easy to see the palimpsest of the Paris or Geneva from which he was in determined flight.\u00a0 The Other carries traces of the same, and Rousseau\u2019s natural Other does not separate nature from culture but is an image of nature constructed according to his specific antipathy to and alienation from the great modern metropolis of Paris.\u00a0 We might consider this more concretely by simply noting that the sort of absolute freedom — in which humans are entirely self-determining, subject to no laws not freely chosen and creatively constructed — is a particularly modern dream, fomented in the Paris that Rousseau paradoxically detested, available only to the wealthy that he despised.\u00a0 It is a dream that neither Wordsworth\u2019s peasants, Diderot\u2019s Tahitian \u201csavages,\u201d Schiller\u2019s harmonious Greeks, nor Rousseau\u2019s \u201cnatural man\u201d would have possibly entertained.\u00a0 While the identification of the \u201cfalseness\u201d of modern aspirations may seem relatively empirical, one wonders whether the alternative view of absolute freedom (delivered with transcendental certainty by Rousseau and then Kant and many others) isn\u2019t equally an aspiration possible to conceive only within that same sort of cosmopolitan modernity.<\/p>\n

Despite these contradictions, the post-Rousseau tradition of radical authenticity often follows Rousseau\u2019s move, tweaking it this way or that to find a more real version of the \u201creal.\u201d\u00a0 Its fundamental critical tic is to dig deeper, look further, think the unthought, return to origins in search of the original and thus genuine, to plumb the unconscious, find the more radical cause, transcend our age or beliefs more fully so that we might find and then come back to who we really are.[xxxvii]<\/a>\u00a0 The discourse of authenticity is beset by reversals, by turning ideas on their heads, all in perpetual flight from the inescapable image \u201cof the men we have before our eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Digging deeper, after all, is the original meaning of \u201cradical,\u201d whose name bears a common \u201croot\u201d with the radish<\/em>, which I am now going to go outside to plant, in hopes of gathering an early crop.<\/p>\n

[i]<\/a> The Country and the City <\/em>(1973).<\/p>\n

[ii]<\/a> Kant determined that the only laws and duties enlightened individuals should submit to are those that they determine for themselves by reason in a condition of complete freedom.\u00a0 Neither tradition, nor communal norms, nor revealed religion were to have any authority.\u00a0 But in so doing, Kant was not capitulating to hedonism or arbitrary assertions of the will; rather, he believed that in conditions of absolute freedom, necessary for the laws to be binding, all rational men would choose more or less the same laws, ones not coincidentally that looked a lot those an eighteenth-century German protestant post-Enlightenment, quasi-cosmopolitan, middle class philosopher might find familiar.\u00a0 When it turned out, in the face of geographical and historical continency and heterogeneity, that this was not to be so, the more utilitarian side of Liberalism associated with English and especially Scottish political economy and commercialism split off from the side associated with Rousseau through German idealism.\u00a0 The illusion of free and \u201crational choice\u201d was easier to maintain in market freedoms than in a more rationalist moral realm.\u00a0 This is of course to put it to schematically; the evolution of Liberalism included more intermixing and cross-mingling between various influences and traditions.<\/p>\n

[iii]<\/a> See https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2015-12-13\/the-closed-world-and-the-infinite-universe-the-metaphysics-of-freedom\/<\/a>\u00a0 and https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2016-01-11\/a-geo-physis-of-freedom\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[iv]<\/a> But not just so-called \u201chigh\u201d art.\u00a0 The most pedestrian understanding of the artist as spontaneously expressing his or her inner self is an inheritance of Rousseau.\u00a0 The \u201cstarving artists\u201d sale at the local Days Inn lobby is full of Rousseau\u2019s heirs.<\/p>\n

[v]<\/a> Liberalism does of course have its table of virtues.\u00a0 I mention Benjamin Franklin shortly.\u00a0 To his thrifty efficiency, we can add ones having to do with self-expression, and those having to do with tolerance, all of which are part of the moral education of a cosmopolitan, self-actualized, hard-working, hard-playing, complexity-managing consumer-citizen.<\/p>\n

[vi]<\/a> Within this inescapable horizon I include myself, even as I am looking for its edges (itself a common practice within a social criticism turning exhaustedly inward).\u00a0 As I indicate later, I agree with much of the diagnosis of social criticism, refusing the view of the stoic \u201cconservative,\u201d who says this is as it must be, or the liberal enthusiast who claims the arc of history bends effortlessly towards (across the board) progress.<\/p>\n

[vii]<\/a> This is the<\/em> philosophical question of modernity, from Kant through the present.\u00a0 Even those who desperately wish to change the subject end up being pulled back by the force of its gravity.<\/p>\n

[viii]<\/a> And therefore \u201cunmediated.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ix]<\/a>[ix] Donald Trump believes that his gut is the font of wisdom, a belief that comes from that same gut.\u00a0 Can expressions of our own guts, without holding ourselves up a mirror of what has been thought and said, submitting ourselves to the most rigorous dialectical stress-tests, provide any more certainty of the purity of our feelings?\u00a0 We feel certain that we are righteous, forgetting that one can be certain and be wrong, for certainty is, like indigestion, a personal and visceral feeling, a physical and mental, rather than epistemological, state.<\/p>\n

[x]<\/a> In a paradoxical way, this is not entirely unlike the way we have become submerged in the availability of cheap energy and no longer, but for the critiques provided by writers like Heinberg, Greer, or Hall, notice its unique historicity, even if the two are in contradiction.<\/p>\n

[xi]<\/a> In continental Europe (to the thought from which Trilling is no stranger), the idea of authenticity cannot be separated from Heidegger and the existentialism derived from him and Kierkegaard.\u00a0 For an excellent, if biting critical review of this, see Theodor Adorno\u2019s The Jargon of Authenticity. <\/em>Interestingly, though Adorno resists Heideggerian-type authenticity here and generally in his \u201cnegative dialectics\u201d by isolating himself from \u201cexchange-society anonymity\u201d according to a system of values and stances for which it is difficult to describe except by the term \u201cauthenticity,\u201d or truth to one\u2019s self now figured in terms of vigilant resistance (c.f. the exchange-society anonymity of Resist! Bumper stickers).\u00a0 Thus does authenticity in its rituals of increasingly vociferous disavowal<\/em> evolve into the quest for a pure negativity which can be sustained only through ironic distantiation.\u00a0 I will leave for another occasion a comparison of Adorno\u2019s nausea to, say, Sartre\u2019s.<\/p>\n

[xii]<\/a> Without a certain historical perspective, the idea that the individual is a recent \u201cinvention\u201d seems absurd.\u00a0 As Trilling articulates it, \u201chow was a man different from an individual?\u00a0 A person born before a certain date, a man\u2014had he not eyes? had he not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?\u00a0 If you pricked him, he bled and if you tickled him, he laughed\u201d (24).\u00a0 Liberalism, with its progressive belief in the liberation of man from superstition and illegitimate authority holds that this prickable, ticklish individual was always hidden in his constraining social roles, something we would conclude when we imagine ourselves, like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur\u2019s Court, projected with our current beliefs and sensibilities into the dark ages (thus the critique of introspection as a road to philosophical truth).\u00a0 That belief fails to understand the way our beliefs and sensibilities are part of our status as an individual, born and raised in the shadow of new possibilities and pressures, new educational and developmental imperatives, an entirely novel (I use that word purposely) sense of the range of life-stories from which we might or must choose.\u00a0 As Michel Foucault argued, the appearance of this self \u201cwas not the liberation of an old anxiety, the transition into luminous consciousness of an age-old concern, the entry into objectivity of something that had long remained trapped within beliefs in philosophies.\u201d\u00a0 Rather it was something entirely new \u2014 \u201cthe effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge\u201d (328).\u00a0 Prior to modernity the self did not, as Trilling writes, have \u201cinternal spaces,\u201d nor did \u201che imagine himself in more than one role, standing outside or above is own personality; he did not suppose that he might be an object of interest to his fellow man\u201d (24).\u00a0 He did not paint self-portraits or gaze into mirrors.\u00a0 Tribe, community, polis, and kingdom are replaced by \u201csociety,\u201d an arena for the battle of individual wills.<\/p>\n

[xiii]<\/a> The authentic civilization or culture which the discourse of authenticity pursues, after all, is one in which sincerity will become once more unproblematic.\u00a0 Or, alternatively, sincerity is all we have left once authenticity has entirely deconstructed itself and the depths upon which it depends.\u00a0 The \u201cturn\u201d in the late 90s from critique to ethics in critical theory represents a weariness with the ideal of authenticity and its cycle of disavowal.\u00a0 The neo-Romanticism of deep sustainability sometimes proceeds as if none of this ground has been thoroughly traversed.<\/p>\n

[xiv]<\/a> This makes the project of \u201cradical simplicity\u201d more difficult than it may appear, for its conscious adoption requires a \u201cwider\u201d cosmopolitan reference, but a refusal of cosmopolitan wants.\u00a0 I turn to Hegel, later, because his is the most sustained and nuanced reflection on this sort of \u201cantinomy\u201d and his inability to find a successful solution is instructive to our attempt to combine complexity and simplicity as well as individuality and community, freedom and limits.<\/p>\n

[xv]<\/a> A title, of course, but also a representative figure of the travails of authenticity, searching for itself to the utmost ends of the earth.<\/p>\n

[xvi]<\/a> As Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo<\/em>, standing \u201cup against<\/em> everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed, so far[,] I am no man, I am dynamite\u201d (326).<\/p>\n

[xvii]<\/a> I may appear to be contradicting my claim that authenticity represents an implicit critique of Liberalism.\u00a0 I will resolve this apparent contradiction in a later discussion of the \u201cdefetishizing critique\u201d and its eventual d\u00e9tente with utilitarian Liberal equality.<\/p>\n

[xviii]<\/a> The expression \u201cget real,\u201d as well as the general commodification and mass-marketing of disavowal indicate the extent to which the jargon of authenticity has penetrated contemporary consumer society.\u00a0 Instead of resisting it through an increasingly negative of deconstructive dialectics, this series is an experiment in substituting it with an Aristotelian dialectic.<\/p>\n

[xix]<\/a> One of the primary aspects of the modernist literary canon is its ironic quest for authenticity or, rather, a rejection through a permanent sort of negative dialectics or deconstruction of inauthenticity.\u00a0 As such, the bursts of sincerity it may present are often a rather blatant form of dishonesty given its wide reference and starkly ungenial view of the world of social relations.\u00a0 I will discuss this kind of ironic modernism later in my discussion of Hegel and post-Hegelian critical disenchantment.<\/p>\n

[xx]<\/a> These expressions can teach us much.\u00a0 A \u201chang-up,\u201d as it came to be used by the \u201cme\u201d generation, refers to a sort of obsolete hold-over expression of moral self-limitation, one that would stand in the way of guilt or judgment-free indulgence in wide range of consumer opportunities.\u00a0 It at once bespoke of the erosion of a now outmoded kind of moral restriction in an age where sex needn\u2019t lead to pregnancy nor social ruin, where pennies no longer needed to be saved to ensure a full stomach, and where energy was so cheap and abundant that wastefulness need not prohibit the pursuit of fun.\u00a0 Hang-ups, as something we are encouraged to avoid, repositioned a range of values, such that self-limitation came to be seen as a kind of inauthenticity, while the rejection of all social codes not self-assigned became a kind of authenticity in a consumer culture that celebrated rebels, now, without a cause, except for the cause of experience and consumption.\u00a0 It is at this point that authenticity has been tamed to fit a Liberal world order, one of the most interesting stories of modern social and cultural norms.\u00a0 For a great example of the ideology, if I may, of hang-up free authenticity, consider the clumsily didactive movie, \u201cDirty Dancing,\u201d as one of many possible instances.<\/p>\n

[xxi]<\/a> Is Wendell Berry a Romantic?\u00a0 In some ways he obviously is, but his thought is both eclectic (or non-systematic) and complex enough, maybe at times even dialectical, that he wears this label uncomfortably.\u00a0 His use of the past, the rustic, and the simple, as well as his focus on unity and wholeness bear a great deal of resemblance with Romanticism, as do his obsessive dualisms.\u00a0 However, the truth of which he speaks isn\u2019t truth to oneself so if his is a Romanticism, it is one that has interestingly rejected the pursuit of authenticity.\u00a0 He asks us to be true to a natural or cosmological order, thus making him in some ways a theologian.\u00a0 While the privileged side of his various dualisms have as their referent something usually too firm and determined for my taste, he will deserve another longer look in the context of a conservative philosophy of excellence, to which I will add the crucial category of producer in due time.\u00a0 In the meantime, I explore some of these ideas in:\u00a0 https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2018-07-23\/look-and-see-listen-and-hear-wendell-berry-and-the-contradictions-of-our-climate\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[xxii]<\/a> Good critical philosophy is a dialectic between lived crisis and systematic crisis.<\/p>\n

[xxiii]<\/a> Compare Rousseau\u2019s understanding of nakedness and clothes to the \u201cfather\u201d of \u201cconservativism,\u201d Edmund Burke, who may well have been thinking of Rousseau as he wrote these words, even though they are more suited to the Enlightenment\u2019s \u201cempire of light and reason\u201d: \u201cAll the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion\u201d (92-3).<\/p>\n

[xxiv]<\/a> Another interesting connection between Rousseau and Transition or the similar ethos of permacultural convergences comes in the form of his attack on theatre in his Letter to d\u2019Alambert.\u00a0 <\/em>His is not a Puritan attack on pleasure, though he does criticize the theatre for merely confirming the views of the audience, but rather a communitarian one: \u201cPeople think they come together in the theatre and it is there that they are isolated.\u00a0 It is there that they go to forget their friends, neighbors.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, as Trilling summarizes it, \u201cthere are to be free and festive gatherings \u2018in the open air, under the sky\u2019 at which nothing will be shown<\/em>.\u00a0 The incidents of these occasions of happy communality will be games and athletic contests, regattas, reviews, and the ceremonies of prize-giving\u201d (65).\u00a0 Or as Wendell Berry would later say of the farm of the future, in contrast to rural Kentucky in the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century, \u201cThey will not live where they work or work where they live.\u00a0 The will not work where they play.\u00a0 And they will not, above all, play where they work. There will be no singing in those fields.\u00a0 There will be no crews of workers or neighbors laughing and joking, telling stories, or competing at tests of speed or strength or skill\u201d (74).\u00a0 Instead they will be glued to their \u201cdevices,\u201d today\u2019s equivalent of Rousseau\u2019s theatre.<\/p>\n

[xxv]<\/a> It is interesting to note that Wendell Berry escaped to the country after spending time in cosmopolitan places of learning to which he responded with a Rousseauesque sense of alienation.\u00a0 The documentary, \u201cLook and See\u201d is framed in terms drawn, it seems, almost directly from Rousseau.\u00a0 Does this mean I don\u2019t value Berry\u2019s work?\u00a0 Far from it.\u00a0 While historical analysis may make all holy profane, I don\u2019t believe there is a place outside of history or influence where a writer might emerge, and therefore don\u2019t hold one\u2019s expression of a time or a bias as a reason for rejection, but rather for further consideration.<\/p>\n

[xxvi]<\/a> Is Wendell Berry a conservative or liberal?\u00a0 Is Permaculture and its suspicion toward technology and mechanical metaphors progressive?\u00a0 Is Transition\u2019s emphasis on the \u201cwholesome\u201d or the resilience of the pre-WWII market town conservative?\u00a0 If so, why are nearly all of its participants likely to gravitate towards parties of the left when it is time to vote?\u00a0 The tradition of Rousseau has lived in the spaces created by the contradictions of a Liberal world order divided into progressive and conservative, though without fully unseating those two wings.<\/p>\n

[xxvii]<\/a>A similarity, here, is what makes the Transition Movement and its fellow-travelers a legitimate response to human overshoot, in contrast to the vain Liberal tinkering of something like the Green New Deal, is its awareness that we need a cultural change not just improved means to an unimproved end, beyond which Liberalism has difficulty using its imagination.\u00a0 As an heir to this Rousseauean tradition (which at this point may sound better than it is), however, it lacks sufficient understanding of its own history and its perils.<\/p>\n

[xxviii]<\/a> Though his model of development assumes a high degree of overall surplus, now evenly divided.\u00a0 As with his lack of concern with the practical reasoning and normative codes that would be required by a successful dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx did not appear overly concerned with the more fundamental Rousseauean view that high surplus would encourage inequality, status, and competition.\u00a0 There is a sense in which Marx solves one paradox of human freedom in his understanding that the sort of freedom and self-expression he and Rousseau shared would require freedom from pressing wants.\u00a0 Rousseau doesn\u2019t address that problem but does address the problem of unintended consequences of material development.\u00a0 Of course neither was inclined to see nature as a source of limits.\u00a0 This is one of the ways in which Liberalism\u2019s Other suffers from some of the same problems as Liberalism.\u00a0 One of our most pressing philosophical and practical questions, today, one for which Hegel provides some conceptual assistance, is whether both problems can be dialectically reconciled.<\/p>\n

[xxix]<\/a> Initially a supporter of the French Revolution, Wordsworth later followed Edmund Burke\u2019s suspicion of it, something easy enough to do under the dark shadow of the Jacobin Terror.\u00a0 While Rousseau did not believe freedom could be found in the recent past, he is not fully immune from its rustic simplicity, as we saw above.<\/p>\n

[xxx]<\/a> Bacon\u2019s science has also been attributed to the influx of new information from the \u201cNew World,\u201d incapable of being situated within Renaissance tables of similitude.\u00a0 It required observation and the detection of regular and law-like patterns, of induction instead of deduction.<\/p>\n

[xxxi]<\/a> \u00a0John Locke,\u00a0Second Treatise of Government.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>Ed. C. B. Macpherson.\u00a0 (Indianapolis, IN:\u00a0 Hackett, 1980):\u00a0 29.<\/p>\n

[xxxii]<\/a> As Schiller put it, \u201cthe discoveries which our European seafarers have made in distant oceans and on remote shores afford us a spectacle which is as instructive as it is entertaining.\u00a0 They show us societies arrayed around us at various levels of development, as an adult might be surrounded by children of different ages, reminded by their example of what he himself once was and whence he started\u201d (\u201cThe Nature and Value of Universal History 325).<\/p>\n

[xxxiii]<\/a> The great structural anthropologist, Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss, was an avowed follower of Rousseau.\u00a0\u00a0 As he explains \u201cculture therefore relates to the specific differences between men and animals, thus leading to what has ever since been the classic antithesis between nature<\/em> and culture\u201d <\/em>(Structural Anthropology<\/em> 354).\u00a0 Yet as Derrida explains, L\u00e9vi-Strauss shows the limits of this distinction in, for example, the prohibition on incest.\u00a0 As Derrida writes \u201cthe incest prohibition is universal; in this sense one could call it natural.\u00a0 But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural\u201d (Writing and Difference <\/em>283).<\/p>\n

<\/a>Xxxiv About Locke, Rousseau says, \u201cOthers have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to him, without explaining what they mean by \u2018belonging\u2019\u201d (Discourse on Inequality<\/em> 45). for See Polanyi, The Great Transformation<\/em> Chapter 4 for a critique of man\u2019s \u201cnatural\u201d tendency to engage in free trade.<\/p>\n

[xxxv]<\/a> Without what turns out to be a communitarian content, one derived through the travails of\u00a0 introspection, feeling, and the great act of self-consciousness that Rousseau\u2019s German disciples were to understand so well, Rousseau\u2019s vision of freedom would be indistinguishable from the empty formalism of Liberal freedom and its inability to resist the instrumental quest for utility.\u00a0 As Schiller similarly put his Rousseau-inspired dedication to introspection and self-reflection, \u201cMy ideas [are] drawn rather from the uniform familiarity with my own self than from a rich experience of the world, or acquired through reading\u201d (The Aesthetic Education of Man<\/em>, Letter I)<\/p>\n

[xxxvi]<\/a> I am of course thinking of Kant\u2019s great project, in light of this sort of observation, of separating the phenomenal from the noumenal, the empirical from the transcendental.\u00a0 Kant\u2019s immediate followers saw the problem with this division and either doubled down on a \u201cbetter\u201d empiricism or a \u201cmore logical\u201d transcendentalism, or like Hegel, attempted to determine how the two might be reconciled.\u00a0 I am already imagining responses to this piece that will either be vociferous statements of empirical findings that neglect the perspective of the inquiring subject, or statements about the subjective truth of things, based on dogmatic introspective certainty.\u00a0 One of the best descriptions of this \u201cantimony\u201d and its aftermath is provided by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences<\/em>, his most sustained critique of authenticity.<\/em>\u00a0 The study of \u201cman,\u201d which started with Rousseau\u2019s anthropology, has as its subject and object of study an \u201cempirco-transcendental doublet\u201d whose analysis results in \u201can endless oscillation\u201d (336). \u00a0As Foucault summarizes what he refers to as \u201cthe anthropological sleep,\u201d \u201cparadoxically, the original, in man, does not herald the time of his birth, or the most ancient kernel of his experience: it links him to that which does not have the same time as himself; and it sets free in him everything that is not contemporaneous with him; it indicates ceaselessly, and in an ever-renewed proliferation, that things began long before him, and that for this reason, and since his experience is wholly constituted and limited by things, no one can ever assign him an origin\u201d (331)\u00a0 \u201cWhat is conveyed in the immediacy of the original,\u201d says Foucault, \u201cis, therefore that man is cut off from the origin that would make him contemporaneous with his own existence\u201d (332).\u00a0 In other words, the origin (or original) that would provide the stamp of eternal authenticity thus stands outside the time and history in which humans invariably and have always lived.\u00a0 The origin is always in retreat, whether as we delve back in time or wait for its appearance at the end of history.\u00a0 See also Jacques Derrida\u2019s \u201cIntroduction to the \u2018Age of Rousseau,\u201d in Of Grammatology<\/em>, where he analyzes Rousseau\u2019s role as the founder of modern anthropology or, as with Foucault, the study of \u201cman.\u201d\u00a0 As Derrida puts it elsewhere, \u201cthe name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology. . . has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play\u201d (Writing and Difference<\/em> 292).\u00a0 Rousseau\u2019s other most notable contribution to the study of man, one taken up by Romantic introspection and self-expression, is \u201ca new model of presence: the subject\u2019s self-presence within consciousness<\/em> or feeling<\/em>\u201d (Of Grammatology <\/em>98).<\/p>\n

[xxxvii]<\/a> The discourse surrounding peak oil often demonstrates the same sort of tic.\u00a0 It is with considerable force that Heinberg or Greer (among others) have shown that the invisible abundance of cheap and plentiful energy in the unthought of modern society.\u00a0 I myself have referred to oil as Liberalism\u2019s unconscious.\u00a0 That modern society doesn\u2019t understand its own conditions of possibility, though, does not provide us a clear<\/em> path to what an authentic alternative might be.\u00a0 It may only tell us that the passage of time reveals to us things we hadn\u2019t previously been able to consider in this Hegelianism without reserve.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Abrams, M.H. 1971. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature.<\/em> New York: W.W. Norton.<\/p>\n

Adorno, Theodor. 1973. The Jargon of Authenticity.<\/em> London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul.<\/p>\n

Berman, Marshall. 2009. The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society.<\/em> London: Verso.<\/p>\n

Berry, Wendell. 1977. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.<\/em> San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.<\/p>\n

Burke, Edmund. 1959. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790-92).<\/em> New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.<\/p>\n

Carlyle, Thomas. 2019. Past and Present (1843).<\/em> Whithorn: Anodos Books.<\/p>\n

Conrad, Joseph. 1973. Heart of Darkness (1902).<\/em> New York: Penguin Books.<\/p>\n

Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature<\/em>, by William ed. Cronon, 69-90. New York: W.W. Norton.<\/p>\n

Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology (1967).<\/em> Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.<\/p>\n

\u2014. 1978. Writing and Difference (1968).<\/em> Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n

Diderot, Denis. “The Innocent and the Corrupt (1772).” In The Enlightenment<\/em>, by Frank Manuel.ed, 99-105. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.<\/p>\n

Ferguson, Adam. 1782. An Essay on the History of Civil Society.<\/em> 5th. London: T. Cadell.<\/p>\n

Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archeaology of the Human Sciences (1966).<\/em> New York: Vintage Books.<\/p>\n

Hegel, G.F.W. 1977. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).<\/em> Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press.<\/p>\n

Hopkins, Rob. 2008. The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience.<\/em> Totnes, Devon: Green Books.<\/p>\n

Koyre, Alexandre. 1958. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.<\/em> New York: Harper & Brothers.<\/p>\n

Lasch, Christopher. 1991. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.<\/em> New York: W.W. Norton.<\/p>\n

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1967. Structural Anthropology (1958).<\/em> Translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Doubleday.<\/p>\n

Locke, John. 1980. Second Treatise of Government.<\/em> Edited by C.B. MacPherson. Indianapolis: Hackett.<\/p>\n

MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.<\/em> London: Duckworth.<\/p>\n

\u2014. 1988. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?<\/em> South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.<\/p>\n

Caritat, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Car, Marquis de Condorcet. 1795. “Future Progess of Mankind.” In The Enlightenment<\/em>, edited by Frank E. Manuel, 177-184. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.<\/p>\n

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. 1968. “Manifest of the Communist Party (1848).” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engles: Selected Works<\/em>, by Marx and Engels, 35-96. New York: International Publishers.<\/p>\n

Marx, Karl. 1964. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.<\/em> Edited by Dirk J. Struik. Translated by Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers.<\/p>\n

Monbiot, George. 2017. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis.<\/em> London: Verso.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. Ecce Homo: or How One Becomes What One Is (1888).<\/em> Translated by Walter Kauffman. New York: Vintage Books.<\/p>\n

Pinkard, Terry. 2000. Hegel: A Biography.<\/em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time.<\/em> Boston: Beacon Press.<\/p>\n

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2011. The Basic Political Writings.<\/em> Second. Edited by Donald A. Cress. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett.<\/p>\n

Russell, Bertrand. 1946. A History of Western Philosophy.<\/em> London: Unwin.<\/p>\n

Taylor, Charles. 1992. The Ethics of Authenticity.<\/em> Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

Trilling, Lionel. 1971. Sincerity and Authenticity.<\/em> Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

Weber, Max. 1958. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-5).<\/em> Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.<\/p>\n

Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.<\/em> Oxford: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

\u2014. 1973. The Country and the City.<\/em> New York: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

Wordsworth, William. 1973. “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802).” In Romantic Poetry and Prose<\/em>, edited by Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, 592-610. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If I have a overriding theme, it is this: unless as a society or civilization we can conceive of a good that celebrates a low-energy and low-consumption way of life, one that offers intrinsic reasons for living simply and within the Earth\u2019s ecological limits, we are likely either to consume our selves into oblivion, or should expect external or extrinsic limits of the sort imposed by heavy-handed governments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3476706,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79720],"tags":[96280,110721,213783],"class_list":["post-3476699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-conservatism","tag-liberalism","tag-rebuilding-resilient-societies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3476699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3476706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3476699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3476699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3476699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}