Education, Nihilism, and Survival

Ernest Krausz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351312141
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Under the influence of science, modern civilization has adopted the view that only things that can be verified empirically or arrived at rationally are true. Modern people tend to regard themselves as mechanisms, without any subjective aspects to their nature. In this insightful and passionately concerned book, British educationist and man of letters David Holbrook retorts persuasively that this reductive view of human nature is profoundly false. Man's inner, subjective life is essential to his nature, what happens to his consciousness is the most important thing in his life, and his greatest need is to find meaning.Holbrook also warns that reductionism has pernicious, even lethal, cultural, social, and political consequences. The logical result is nihilism: if human beings and existence are but physical mechanisms, it necessarily follows that consciousness does not exist, life is meaningless, our concern with moral values is pointless, and so are our lives and actions. Life itself reduces to nothing but self-indulgence and self-assertion. A culture informed by this perspective is necessarily full of expressions of hate and meaninglessness, which coarsens and demoralizes the majority of the population and worsens the mental pathologies of unstable persons. "Egoistical nihilism" becomes ever more widespread, and a decent society becomes impossible.Holbrook advances a keenly insightful and eloquent critique of the radical individualism of Max Stirner's famous tract The Ego and His Own. Stirner's worldview, he argues, is grounded in psychopathology and takes the nihilist assumptions of modernity to their logical conclusion: "the unique one" totally detached from society and reducing others to mere means to his ends, fair game for exploitation unfettered by ethical considerations. Ominously, he notes, the Stirnerean attitude toward existence is becoming increasingly common. Against the reductive perspective of positivism, Holbrook argues that scientific investigations establish the reality of meaning and of values rooted in love. He calls for a reaffirmation of both.Originally published in 1977, Education, Nihilism, and Survival speaks prophetically and even more urgently to us today. The worsening coarseness, nihilism, and brutality of our culture, the partisan fanaticisms and widespread alienation and apathy of our politics, and horrors such as school shootings reveal the consequences of radical individualism.Education, Nihilism, and Survival will be of interest to well-educated general readers concerned at the state of culture and society; educators alarmed at harmful approaches in education; and psychologists and philosophers concerned about existentialism, Stirner's egoist philosophy, and the need for meaningful, philosophical anthropology.

Chapter One

MISCHIEF AT WORK AND THE TREACHEROUS INTELLECTUAL

The introductory quotation from Husserl should indicate that I am concerned with a problem of psychology and philosophy.

Our unprofitable intellectual atmosphere in England is preserved by absurd denials of certain areas of radical thought. English philosophy has been bankrupt for years, attached to a triumphant logical positivism and an analytical technique that greets every real problem with the disdainful cry, ‘Ah! Non-philosophy!’ In psychology, under Eysenck’s influence, every investigation of the inner life is dismissed as ‘amateur psychology’. It is even claimed that there is no such thing as ‘philosophical anthropology’. On what grounds? There is, indeed, such a discipline, which belongs, in Husserl’s perspective, to a respectable and well-established continental philosophical tradition. Yet such areas of thought are often greeted by British intellectuals with hostility and dismissal.

How then can we enter the subject of nihilism in our current culture? The writings of Viktor Frankl, who held Freud’s old chair at Vienna, will often be referred to in this book. Frankl survived Auschwitz, and wrote about this experience philosophically. He saw that the death camps were constructed at the desks of German nihilistic philosophers. He sees in our attitudes to life, and in the way in which our young are educated, a ‘living nihilism’, and a ‘tendency to devaluate and depreciate that which is human in man’. One of his most important contributions was to the seminar of scientists, the Alpbach Seminar, organised by Arthur Koestler and Robert Smithies, with such scientists as C. H. Waddington and W. H. Thorpe, published as Against Reductionism. I begin from there.

My approach is phenomenological: that is, it pays attention to the meanings of consciousness. What happens to consciousness is the most important thing in the world. And my argument is all around the question of how we approach human problems, of meaning and morality: my case is that our approaches today to the study of man have yielded little, and are essentially dead, because they cling to positivism ’ that is, to an approach which demands that nothing must be regarded as real which cannot be found by empirical science and rational methods, by ‘objectivity’. Since the whole problem with which I want to deal belongs to ‘psychic reality’, to man’s ‘inner world’, to his moral being, and to the subjective life, there can be no debate unless we are prepared to recognise the bankruptcy of positivism, and the failure of Objectivity’ to give an adequate account of existence, and are prepared to find new modes of enquiry.

Frankl stands firmly for such a recognition, and his work is taken seriously by distinguished scientists and psychologists. Frankl made a plea for ‘the human dimension’. The trouble today, he suggested, was not that scientists were specialising, but that specialists are generalising. The scientific généralisateur terrible turned biology into biologism and psychology into psychologism. Everything thus tended to be explained in ‘nothing but’ terms. It was necessary to restore the human dimension, and to recognise that if human phenomena are turned into mere epiphenomena, by suggesting that ‘values and meanings are nothing but defence mechanisms and reaction formations’, this reductionism is a mask for nihilism. No-one, he declared, is prepared to die for their ‘reaction formations’ and even less for their ‘defence mechanisms’: they are willing to die for their meanings.

The true nihilism of today is reductionism. Although Jean-Paul Sartre has put the word néant into the title of his main philosophical work, the true message of existentialism is not nothingness, but the no-thingness of man – that is to say a human being is no thing, a person is not one thing among other things.

Against Reductionism, p. 398

Frankl is concerned to resist that implicit reduction of man to an object, or to a mechanical organism, which is taught in many areas of education. He records his own^* protest as a youth to one of his scientific teachers: ‘Dr. Fritz, if this is true, what meaning, then, does life have?’ He declares that our children and students are taught, by a reductionist science, that life is meaningless, and the result, he suggests, is the ‘existential vacuum’ found in many lives. How, in the face of this existential frustration, do we uphold self-actualisation, by ‘living out the self-transcendent quality of human existence’?

We are subjected continually, not least in the Arts, and in the Humanities in Education, to a new dogma, to a metaphysic, whose assumptions are nihilistic – there is nothing to believe in, all former values are discredited, life can have no meaning. Man’s life has no moral dimension, and his strivings are absurd.

While a great deal in this new attitude is concerned with ‘freedom’, and ‘truth’, it is in fact devoted to an unrecognised set of beliefs which must not be questioned. For the view that man’s life must be absurd is only tenable so long as the universe remains that delineated by Newton and Gallieo, so long as the prevalent view is mechanistic, seeing all as ‘matter in motion’, operating only by chance and necessity. If these views of reality were true, there could be no response except one of futility and despair: but may it not be that these views of the world are false? Michael Polanyi, in Meaning, concludes that ‘modern science cannot properly be understood to tell us that the world is meaningless and pointless, that it is absurd’ (p. 181). The modern myth that it is so is based on profound misunderstandings of science and philosophy. Yet this nihilism, implicit in so much science, is reinforced by our culture both inside and outside college. My son, taking his ‘A’ levels, is studying Waiting for Godot: in his notes, supplied by his Humanities teacher, he is told that although Beckett tells us that there is no point in existence, and that no attempt to find life meaningful will succeed, this is ‘life-affirming’. If I open my Times, I find a review of a play by Durrenmatt. The gods are indifferent, and men are ‘pitiful victims of one another’. A planet is to explode. On Earth, people behave with exasperating folly. Troops die for no reason. Hippies have babies for no reason either. Prisoners move from torture to firing squad, lovers die helplessly, when their oxygen expires. It is, apparently, all very witty and intellectual. Yet it is sheer nihilism, rapturously enjoyed, and under the surface accepted as if it had a ‘scientific’ basis.

I go down to my local village Memorial Hall, to a jumble sale. There I buy a book published by Lorrimer Publications, called Savage Cinema. The pictures in this are violent, sadistic, perverted and pornographic. The roll of names of village men, killed in two World Wars, makes me reflect on the historical meaning of this document, and its phenomenological significance. What would they think of it, as a manifestation of the ‘freedom’ for which they fought? In my mind is the symbol of the ‘death camp’ in the work of Sylvia Plath. She was fascinated by these camps, and identified with their inmates. But, I believe, she did so not so much out of compassion and horror, but because she had become addicted to the negative side of her personality, her malignant animus. Her ‘death camps’ stood for the delicious feeling she had developed, in giving herself up to the joys of evil, because of the dreadful logic of her death-circuit. In desperation of ever finding meaning in her existence, she gave herself up to the joys of hatred, to obtain what satisfaction she could out of that. Thinking of the death camps reinforced her mental rage. She felt a deep satisfaction in ultimate brutality and death, without being able to explain it, or discriminate against it.

In one of the illustrations in Savage Cinema a naked girl was shown, being humiliated in a bath house. The picture had a salacious caption, and it was obvious, phenomenologically speaking, that this event was presented for the amusement of the audience, and the reader. That is, the viewers were invited to gloat on the debasement of the woman, and to feel a perverted satisfaction. They were invited to enjoy the ‘depreciation of everything that is human in man’. They were thereby seduced into the philosophical depreciation to which Frankl refers, and so into the very impulse which created the concentration camps.

When I return home, perhaps I take up my Times newspaper again. On the Arts Page (27th April 1976) I read two reviews. One is of a show called Cycle Sluts, headed ‘Perverse Delight’. Some American actors in black leather bikinis strip off to reveal ‘oil-funnelled breasts and tight g-strings which rather fail to hide their distinctive male parts.’ Flaunting ambi-sexuality, they sing of flagellation and transvestism. A masochistic song, called ‘Nasty’, goes ‘Baby, I’m born to be bruised’. They give a demented, druginformed, reading of Little Women, while You Made Me Love You is sung to the thumping of chains, with an ‘inventive’ leg-flashing display, Feel My Thigh. Mr. Irving Wardle, alongside, reviews with enthusiasm a drag show from France, in which ‘Jesus Joy of Man’s Desiring’ is ‘geared up’ to accompany a ‘Clockwork Orange number’: the Mozart Requiem serves as a parody of Jesus Christ Superstar with Herod in black stockings. One has to pinch oneself to realise one is reading the Times: the most shocking thing is the cool, approving, tone of reviewers, who should know better when confronted with nihilism.

What is noticeable in such shows, and the reviews which approve them, is the malicious and militant assault on human values. Every positive is turned into a chaotic black joke, hate and perversion. Yet one of the most significant aspects of the whole development is the absence of protest, and the way in which debate is suppressed, even as the incidents in the cultural realm grow close to the psychotic. For example, one of the things which has concerned me as an educationist is the exploitation of children. In an article in The Observer (‘The Basis of Perversion’, 9 April, 1972), Dr. Mary Miles made it clear that, in her experience as a child psychotherapist, children were suffering by being exposed to cultural debasement. She feared that some adults used their talents to seduce children. This made it more difficult for them to grow up sexually, and it also made it difficult for them to control their aggression. This view was confirmed in private communications I have had with Dr. Leslie Bartlett, the psychiatrist investigating the rising incidence in his area, around Southampton, of adolescent suicide attempts, after the Tina Wilson case. He told me that he thought exposure to too-adult forms of sexuality, and anxieties about ‘boy-friends’ such as are inculcated by the ‘pop’ world, had a good deal to do with the inability of some young girls to tolerate life.

There is also an element in the present trend, whereby adults (unconsciously) seem to want to harm children. Phenomenologically speaking, this is also part of the nihilism. Nihilism belongs to a desperate failure of meaning, and this in turn is a forfeiture of the future. As with brain-damaged patients, we have lost confidence in the future, and cling in panic to the immediate sensation. The child, however, is the future, and symbolises those protensions towards the future which we hold within us. Moreover, the child also symbolises the ‘unborn’, and otherwise vulnerable, elements within us, which have never grown up. He represents what W. R. D. Fairbairn has called ‘the regressed libidinal ego’ – that is, the hungry child-self in each of us which yearns to be satisfied. The satisfaction desired was once the body-satisfactions of the breast. But it contained then, in our infancy, a psychic element. It was a hunger to be confirmed, and thus given a sense of meaning. Traditionally, as in the image of the virgin and child, the infant is the symbol of emerging meaning, of love and confirmation. But it is also our hidden and feared weakness and reminds us of the pains of responsibility.

Thus today, the child is a symbol of those weaknesses which belong to being human, and are hated. In a film called El Tropo a little naked boy of seven was seen, clutching a teddy-bear, as he is exposed to violent scenes of rape, mutilation and murder. In The Nightcomers some children were shown watching sadistic sexual acts and imitating them. In Le Souffle au Coeur a boy of fifteen was shown seducing his mother. A programme of a local Film Festival described a film in which a young girl’s genital was shown ‘seething with maggots’. Reports from America speak of poor parents selling their children to the pornographers: Americans spend over f500m a year on pornography involving children.

Before our culture became corrupt we would shudder at such sinister attacks on the child, perversions of the normal impulse to love and defend him. Yet almost every intellectual with whom one raises such questions today will defend or deny them, and adopt what can only be described as a very special air of detached amorality. Only by very painful processes can we begin to recover from such decadence. The most striking example of this unreal detachment is perhaps that of Charles Newman in The Art of Sylvia Plath, where he recognises that there are schizoid elements in her work, and admits that there may be objections to her suicide: but none of this must be raised, in our response to her poetry. Our aesthetic enjoyment of art must be undisturbed by any consideration of its schizoid moral inversion, or its nihilism. Raymond Durgnat has argued in Books and Bookmen, that we must measure our degree of enjoyment of a film like A Clockwork Orange against the number of victims of gangs of youths who burn alive or murder in imitation of the film. How many may be maimed or killed, so that we may enjoy a satisfying experience? Whatever may suffer, it must not be our ‘right’ to indulgence in perverted fantasy and moral inversion.

So, we are faced with such a confusion of values that the whole question of a nihilistic culture ‘grows beyond access of debate. ‘ Without resistance, we slide into an almost paralysed acceptance of atrocities to consciousness.

This has infected education. Outside the school the child and the youth are exposed to a continual stream of films and television programmes whose message is plainly nihilistic. In school, he will have to study works which imply that human existence is meaningless, and there is no way it may be lived with purpose and authenticity. Yet the question must surely arise, where is all this nihilism taking us? Is there perhaps a path developing towards something more terrible than the death camps? Can we sustain any of those meanings and values upon which civilisation is based? Can we avoid chaos, if we do not retreat from the seductiveness of moral systems based on hate?

Here I hope to examine the problem at a deeper level of philosophy and psychology. Those who argue in favour of more brutality and nihilism in culture and education often tell us that ‘we must understand the vile side of our nature’, and thus to place any limitation on the imagination is a serious limitation of our ‘freedom’. The significant factor, however, is that, the more ‘freedom’ we are given, the blacker culture becomes. One reason, evidently, is that it is easier to peddle hate and perversion than love and truth. There may be a sense in which people like Mr. John Calder genuinely believe that ‘truth’ lies in wickedness and perversion: but ‘liberation’ has not yet meant that man’s aspirations, and his new potentialities, have come to be explored. What is explored, in the new world of our ‘permissive’ culture is the darkness, the bestiality, and the perverse. Teachers who foolishly transmit this negative ‘freedom’ to the classroom are doing serious harm. They have depressed children, and are placing serious limits on their capacities to find meaning in their world.

In The Daily Telegraph of 11 July 1974 there appeared a news item, reporting the criticisms made by a primary school teacher of a new anthology issued by Penguin Books. The reporter, David Fletcher, said that ‘children are being conditioned to accept violence as an everyday occurrence by a collection of stories of death and horror in use in thousands of classrooms’.

Mr. Clive Fairweather, a teacher, said that the stories used in English classes represented a ‘corruption of values’. The Penguin anthology is called Story: an anthology of stories and pictures, and Mr. Fairweather complained that the stories leave ‘an over-riding sense of pain, violence and fear’: they are about the ignorant, the trapped and the deprived. ‘There are graphic descriptions of racial violence, the Ku-Klux-Klan, urban guerillas, nuclear devastation, corpses and grave-digging. There is football violence, and hooliganism, classroom violence, accidents and mutilations; in three separate stories characters lose their finger ends; Negroes, Germans and Indians, portrayed as bewildered savages, are hounded and shot with tremendous gusto.’ The stories include accounts of the slaughter of rats, bears, locusts, a maimed horse, plovers, whales, sharks, bucks, porcupines, badgers, rabbits and chickens. The chicken-killing reads: ‘Catching it by the leg she raised it suddenly above her head, and brought down the bleeding body on the boy’s back, in blow after blow, spattering the blood all over his face and his hands.’ Mr. Fairweather said ‘Torturing a rabbit to death takes four pages; a man who kills rats by biting through their necks merits eleven pages; the details of badger baiting cannot be contained in less than fifteen.’

No doubt, the intention of those who compiled and published the anthology was to teach children about violence as an aspect of experience. But violence is not just a human fact: it belongs to the subjective real...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction To The Transaction Edition
• 1. Mischief At Work and The Treacherous Intellectual
• 2. Philosophical Anthropology As A Basis for Discrimination.
• 3. The Humanities At The Crossroads.
• 4. The Schizoid Diagnosis And The ‘Black’ Tradition
• 5. Political Dangers of Moral Inversion
• 6. Max Stirner’s Egoistical Nihilism, Culture and Politics
• 7. More Obstacles to Freedom
• 8. New Bearings Beyond Nihilism
• 9. Conclusions
• Selected Bibliography
• Index