How to Dissolve a Civilization
Jouvenel as Master of Suspicion
- An interesting twitter account 🤔
We ended our last discussion by saying that once the society’s founding myth, its tradition, the command of its founder comes into question, the society will necessarily descend into nihilism and death. Today we will show how that happens.
Writing in 1965, Paul Ricoeur called Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud the “masters of suspicion”. What Ricoeur meant was that these thinkers marked, as Rick Roderick put it, “childhood’s end” for the West—after them all moral and epistemic foundations were compromised, and even the attempt to restore them was suspect. In reality they were not the agents but the heralds of culture death—they were simply continuing a tradition and a line of thinking that had been present since Plato.
Let us examine each of their major contributions:
Marx — Dialectical materialism: “Events are born out of the conflict of social forces and then resolved into a unity of opposites.”
The basic assertion of Marx is that social forces (the so-called “base”) are ontologically prior to the ideological material they work on (the “superstructure”). Human agency is derivative of “material conditions”. History could not have taken a radically different course had say a Mohammed or a Genghis Khan never been born, because the men were simply the avatars of material conditions that made them inevitable—if not them, someone else. The character of the men themselves did not so much determine history as it was determined by history. This is obviously levelling and subversive, especially as it was interpreted by later Marxists.
Nietzsche — Genealogical method: “Anything real must be understood historically.”
In treating a subject as a historical phenomenon, we open up the possibility of investigation into its origins—this defrocks, demythologizes, and demystifies it. What created God? To raise the question is to undermine God. This strips the subject of its majesty, and what little is left to it is abolished by making the subject into a historical contingency. Presumably history could have been different, and so the subject is not necessary but merely a possibility. Nietzsche is a tragic figure. His thought has destroyed some things he hated, but has been used to destroy everything he loved.
Freud — Psychoanalysis: “The man is nothing but a constellation of pre-conscious drives and inaccessible to himself.”
Like Nietzsche, his mentor, Freud engages in some defrocking of his own. As with all the masters of suspicion there is deep insight here—it assumes in the subject a “thrownness”, an “already embeddedness” that it no doubt has—but it casts a cloud of disgust over this thrownness. We are embedded, yes, but in the muck. The anti-social nature of this hermeneutic corrodes any possibility of fellowship or understanding.
We could add to Ricoeur’s masters yet another:
Derrida — Deconstruction
Derrida’s hermeneutic is so truth-inapt that it can’t even be rendered into a proposition. As misreading raised to the power of a worldview, deconstruction corrodes anything it touches. Unfortunately for the left, deconstruction cannot be contained but is a universal acid that reacts with everything and must finally burst out of its container.1
What characterizes the masters of suspicion is that the hermeneutic taints what it touches; it is iconoclasm as a method. A closer reading of history presents a picture where this iconoclasm is not confined to the end point of philosophy, but has been present from its very beginning. We explained this in the last article, and it’s clear looking at the facts that in its early history philosophy buried the theological paradigm of its day. The paradigm that followed built itself on the dirt heaped upon the corpses, and now, not without some irony, philosophy has come back, hungry again. Saturn devours his children.
In the case of Nietzsche and Derrida, the iconoclasm cannot be contained and can be equally applied to left or right, progress or tradition, but in the case of Marx, it points in an ideological direction: against hierarchy, against will, against immutable and unconditioned character—against the right. However, a new master of suspicion has arrived on the scene, and his hermeneutic is pointed in the opposite direction.