A Road to Nowhere

The Idea of Progress and Its Critics

Matthew W. Slaboch

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780812294668
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría política

Since the Enlightenment, the idea of progress has spanned right- and left-wing politics, secular and spiritual philosophy, and most every school of art or culture. The belief that humans are capable of making lasting improvements—intellectual, scientific, material, moral, and cultural—continues to be a commonplace of our age. However, events of the preceding century, including but not limited to two world wars, conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, the spread of communism across Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, violent nationalism in the Balkans, and genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, have called into question this faith in the continued advancement of humankind.In A Road to Nowhere, Matthew W. Slaboch argues that political theorists should entertain the possibility that long-term, continued progress may be more fiction than reality. He examines the work of German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Oswald Spengler, Russian novelists Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and American historians Henry Adams and Christopher Lasch—rare skeptics of the idea of progress who have much to engage political theory, a field dominated by historical optimists. Looking at the figures of Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, and Adams, Slaboch considers the ways in which they defined progress and their reasons for doubting that their cultures, or the world, were progressing. He compares Germany, Russia, and the United States to illustrate how these nineteenth-century critics of the idea of progress contributed to or helped forestall the emergence of forms of government that came to be associated with each country: fascism, communism, and democratic capitalism, respectively.Turning to Spengler, Solzhenitsyn, and Lasch, Slaboch explores the contemporary relevance of the critique of progress and the arguments for and against political engagement in the face of uncertain improvement, one-way inevitable decline, or unending cycles of advancement and decay. A Road to Nowhere concludes that these notable naysayers were not mere defeatists and presents their varied prescriptions for individual and social action.

CHAPTER 1

“The Same, But Otherwise”: Arthur Schopenhauer as a Critic of “Progress”

Introduction

Scholars have tended to overlook the political import of the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). This is perhaps unsurprising, since Schopenhauer himself was not a political philosopher and in fact wrote relatively little about political matters. But his near silence on political topics should warrant our attention: why would a systematic philosopher, who made lasting contributions in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, devote so little of his attention to politics? Surveying the extant literature on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, we are hard pressed to find an answer, which this chapter aims in part to provide.

For Schopenhauer specialists, the political dimension of the Prussian philosopher’s work has hardly seemed worth addressing. In his impressive intellectual biography of Schopenhauer, David Cartwright contends that his subject approached political affairs with “relative indifference” and that whatever he wrote on the matter was “simply an afterthought.”¹ Bryan Magee disagrees on the personal importance of politics to Schopenhauer, arguing that he held his political views “with passionate conviction, and acted on them whenever it was appropriate to do so.”² But Magee, too, sees fit to offer in his monumental work on Schopenhauer merely a “sketch” (his words) of Schopenhauer’s political ideas.³ Major works by Patrick Gardiner, Christopher Janaway, Dale Jacquette, and Julian Young similarly downplay or outright ignore Schopenhauer’s thoughts on politics.⁴

When political theorists bring Schopenhauer into their conversations, they tend to highlight his affinity with or influence on other thinkers, thus minimizing the importance of his ideas in their own right. Joshua Foa Dienstag, for instance, draws parallels between Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), contrasting the former’s metaphysics with the latter’s psychology.⁵ Yannis Constantinidès identifies Schopenhauer and the Savoyard conservative Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) as intellectual allies in the fight against Enlightenment rationalism.⁶ The name most readily linked with Schopenhauer’s, however, is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Schopenhauer’s impact on Nietzsche is well known, and it is primarily in Nietzsche studies that one will find political theorists engaging with Schopenhauer.⁷

Only rarely has Schopenhauer’s political philosophy been discussed in its own right. The exceptions include a chapter in Raymond Marcin’s In Search of Schopenhauer’s Cat, which focuses on Schopenhauer’s theory of justice. Marcin contends that “the implications of Schopenhauer’s theory of eternal justice for contemporary political and jurisprudential thought are as sweeping as they are profound.”⁸ Such a claim might well be defended, but the short (six-page) chapter Marcin offers in support is hardly satisfactory. Neil Jordan offers a more insightful look at Schopenhauer’s political thought, elucidating the connection between Schopenhauer’s ethical views and his political reflections.⁹ Illuminating though his work may be, Jordan is no more likely than Marcin to convince readers that Schopenhauer’s ideas have “profound” or “sweeping” implications. The best defense of Schopenhauer’s value to those interested in the history of political thought perhaps comes from Robin Winkler, who argues that “Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not apolitical but anti-political.”¹⁰ Schopenhauer’s propounding an antipolitical theory is not in and of itself exceptional; what is so unusual is his antipolitical stance at a time when so much other thought was politicized.

I am sympathetic to Winkler’s portrayal of Schopenhauer as an antipolitical thinker, but I wish to offer a different take on Schopenhauer’s thought, focusing particularly on the relationship between his philosophy of history and his political ideas. I argue that Schopenhauer can best be regarded as a critic of the idea of progress, particularly “progress” conceived of as national development or the growth of the state. His articulation of ideas, strongly at odds with those of Johann Fichte (1762–1814) and Georg Hegel (1770–1831), made Schopenhauer a countervailing force in nineteenth-century German thought. As John Gray says, “few great modern thinkers have gone so much against the spirit of their time.”¹¹

This chapter proceeds as follows. First, I provide a brief biographical sketch of Schopenhauer. To better explain what makes him novel in intellectual history, I then discuss the idea of progress as it was articulated by four major predecessors in German thought: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Fichte, and Hegel. Following this, I re-create Schopenhauer’s arguments against the idea of progress, focusing particularly on his attacks on philosophies of history that glorify nation or state. The chapter concludes with a short discussion of Schopenhauer’s legacy–which includes his influence on Nietzsche and on German-Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897)—and his importance for contemporary political thought.

The Life and Times of Arthur Schopenhauer

For the antinatalist Arthur Schopenhauer, not having been born would have been preferable to existence.¹² But born he was, with February 22, 1788, marking the start of a life full of disappointments. He spent his first five years in Danzig; thereafter, his family called Hamburg home. His father was a successful merchant, and as a youth Schopenhauer apprenticed in this trade. Unsuited for commercial activity, however, he would later quit this pursuit to embark on university studies.

Schopenhauer began his university education at the University of Göttingen (from 1809 to 1811) and later studied at the University of Berlin (from 1811 to 1813). At Berlin, he attended lectures by such prominent philosophical figures (and objects of scorn, for Schopenhauer) as Johann Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). In 1813, the University of Jena awarded him a doctorate in philosophy for his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Shortly thereafter, Schopenhauer began writing his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, which was completed in 1818 and published in January 1819.

In the preface to his chief work, Schopenhauer acknowledges Immanuel Kant and Plato as key influences. “I start in large measure from what was achieved by the great Kant,” he writes. Indeed, Schopenhauer assumes from his readers a background in Kant’s philosophy, regarding familiarity with Kant’s ideas as requisite for understanding his own work. He adds, however, that, “if in addition to this the reader has dwelt for a while in the school of the divine Plato, he will be better prepared to hear me.”¹³ For the introduction to Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer was indebted to Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833).

To his other, more renowned teachers, Schopenhauer offered less gratitude. In his notes from Fichte’s lectures, he remarked that his professor had “said things which made me wish to place a pistol to his chest and say to him: You must now die without mercy, but for your poor soul’s sake tell me whether with all that gallimaufry you had anything precise in mind or whether you were merely making fools of us?”¹⁴ Schleiermacher’s lectures were hardly an improvement: he “bored the Berlin Academy for a number of years” with his moral discourses.¹⁵

Schopenhauer’s greatest target, however, was not Fichte, Schleiermacher, or any of his teachers, but Georg Hegel. To Schopenhauer, Hegel was a “common mind”¹⁶ and a “repulsive and dull charlatan and an unparalleled scribbler of nonsense.”¹⁷ Hegel’s philosophy was nothing short of “mind-destroying.”¹⁸ Indeed, calling Hegelian ideas “philosophy” would be misleading, for Hegelianism amounts at best to “pseudo-philosophy.”¹⁹ Hegel was guilty of “the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses.”²⁰ Should we find Schopenhauer’s invectives against Hegel in the World as Will and Representation too subtle and restrained, the author also offers this in On the Basis of Morality:

Now if . . . I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right . . . .

Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus . . . scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.²¹

To Schopenhauer, anyone who could challenge Hegel’s influence had an obligation to do so.²² He issued this demand with the utmost sincerity, and he himself made an earnest attempt to stem the tide of Hegel’s waxing popularity. Having in 1820 secured a teaching appointment at the University of Berlin, where Hegel was then teaching, Schopenhauer scheduled his own lectures against his bête noire’s. Hegel’s lectures were wildly popular; Schopenhauer’s were scarcely attended.

Socrates was sentenced to death by his fellow citizens for having corrupted the youth with his ideas. Hegel, Schopenhauer believed, was actually guilty of such corruption: Schopenhauer lamented the “minds strained and ruined in the freshness of youth by the nonsense of Hegelism.”²³ But Schopenhauer’s contemporaries failed to condemn Hegel for his “extremely pernicious, really stupefying, one might say pestilential, influence.”²⁴ Instead, they chose to place laurels around his neck and grant him free meals in the prytaneum. Schopenhauer’s attempt to counteract Hegel’s influence with his own ideas was mostly futile: his teaching career was short-lived, and he would not achieve a literary reputation until late in life.²⁵

The Idea of Progress in German Thought

His ad hominems notwithstanding,²⁶ Schopenhauer took issue with more than merely the personalities and writing styles of Fichte, Hegel, and other contemporaries; he chafed also at their ideas. Among the ideas en vogue in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, and one with which Schopenhauer took the strongest possible exception, was that of mankind’s continual and sustained progress through history. In German-speaking Europe, several marquee names in philosophy, from Herder to Hegel, helped promulgate the idea of progress. As will be shown, the definitions and proposed means of achieving progress varied from thinker to thinker.²⁷ What I will stress is the shift from the cosmopolitan philosophies of Herder and Kant in the eighteenth century to the nationalistic and state-centric doctrines of Fichte and Hegel in the nineteenth.

Several years before Immanuel Kant offered his musings on universal history, Johann Gottfried von Herder, his one-time student and later rival, propounded his own unique historical vision. Notoriously unsystematic in his thought, the ideas Herder expresses in This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity (1774) and Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Manki...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “The Same, But Otherwise”: Arthur Schopenhauer as a Critic of “Progress”
• Chapter 2. The Autocrat and the Anarchist: Nicholas I, Leo Tolstoy, and the Problem of “Progress”
• Chapter 3. “The Path to Hell”: Henry (and Brooks) Adams on History and Politics
• Chapter 4. Critics of the Idea of Progress in an Age of Extremes: Three Twentieth-Century Voices
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments