Autor: Bloom, Allan

Buch: The Closing of the American Mind

Titel: The Closing of the American Mind

Stichwort: Das Selbst - Seele; Machiavelli, Hobbes; Umdeutung des menschlichesn Zieles; Selbsterkenntnis -> Gefühl

Kurzinhalt: Throughout the whole tradition, religious and philosophic, man had two concerns, the care of his body and the care of his soul ... Machiavelli turned things upside down

Textausschnitt: 173a The domain now supervised by psychiatrists, as well as other specialists in the deeper understanding of man, is the self. It is another one of the discoveries made in the state of nature, perhaps the most important because it reveals what we really are. We are selves, and everything we do is to satisfy or fulfill our selves. Locke was one of the early thinkers, if not the earliest, to use the word in its modern sense. From the very beginning it has been difficult to define; and as Woody Allen helped teach us, it has become ever more difficult to do so. We are suffering from a three-hundred-year-long identity crisis. We go back and back, ever farther, hunting the self as it retreats into the forest, just a step ahead of us. Although disquieting, this may, from the point of view of its latest interpretation, be the essence of the self: mysterious, ineffable, indefinable, unlimited, creative, known only by its deeds; in short, like God, of whom it is the impious mirror image. Above all, it is individual, unique; it is me, not some distant man in general or man-in-himself. As Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's story explains, the "All men are mortal" in the famous syllogism that guarantees Socrates' death cannot apply to this Ivan Ilyich who had a striped leather ball when he was a child. Everyone knows that the particular as particular escapes the grasp of reason, the form of which is the general or the universal. To sum up, the self is the modern substitute for the soul. (Fs)
173b All of this goes back to that audacious innovator Machiavelli, who spoke admiringly of men who cared more for their fatherland than for the salvation of their souls. The higher demands made on men by the soul inevitably lead them to neglect this world in favor of the other world. Millennia of philosophizing about the soul had resulted in no certitude about it, while those who pretended to know it, the priests, held power or influenced it, and corrupted politics as a result. Princes were rendered ineffective by their own or their subjects' opinions about the salvation of their souls, while men slaughtered each other wholesale because of differences of such opinion. The care of the soul crippled men in the conduct of their lives. (Fs)
174a Machiavelli dared men literally to forget about their souls and the possibility of eternal damnation, to do so in theory as well as in practice, as did those men whom he praised. Hobbes, among others, took him up on the dare with a very new interpretation of the old Delphic inscription "Know thyself!," which Socrates had interpreted as an exhortation to philosophize, and Freud was to interpret as an invitation to psychoanalysis. Freud was unknowingly following in the line of Hobbes, who said that each man should look to what he feels-feels, not thinks; he, not another. Self is more feeling than reason, and is in the first place defined as the contrary of other. "Be yourself." Astonishingly, Hobbes is the first propagandist for bohemia and preacher of sincerity or authenticity. No wanderings to the ends of the universe on the wings of imagination, no metaphysical foundations, no soul ordering things as well as men. Man is perhaps a stranger in nature. But he is something and can get his bearings by his most powerful passions. "Feel!," Hobbes said. In particular you should imagine how you feel when another man holds a gun to your temple and threatens to shoot you. That concentrates all of the self in a single point, tells us what counts. At that moment one is a real self, not a false consciousness, not alienated by opinions of the church, the state or the public. This experience helps much more to "set priorities" than does any knowledge of the soul or any of its alleged emanations such as conscience. (Fs) (notabene)

174b Throughout the whole tradition, religious and philosophic, man had two concerns, the care of his body and the care of his soul, expressed in the opposition between desire and virtue. In principle he was supposed to long to be all virtue, to break free from the chains of bodily desire. Wholeness would be happiness; but it is not possible, at least in this life. Machiavelli turned things upside down. Happiness is indeed wholeness, so let's try the wholeness available to us in this life. The tradition viewed man as the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of two substances, body and soul. Man cannot be conceived as body only. But if the function of whatever is not body in him is to cooperate in the satisfaction of bodily desire, then man's dividedness is overcome. Simple virtue is not possible, and love of virtue is only an imagination, a kind of perversion of desire effected by society's (i.e., others') demands on us. But simple desire is possible. (Fs) (notabene)

175a This absoluteness of desire uninhibited by thoughts of virtue is what is found in the state of nature. It represents the turn in philosophy away from trying to tame or perfect desire by virtue, and toward finding out what one's desire is and living according to it. This is largely accomplished by criticizing virtue, which covers and corrupts desire. Our desire becomes a kind of oracle we consult; it is now the last word, while in the past it was the questionable and dangerous part of us. This unity of man in desire is fraught with theoretical difficulties, but it is, as we would say, existentially persuasive because, unlike the incomprehensible and self-contradictory union of body and soul, it is affirmed by powerful experiences, such as fear of violent death, that do not require abstract reasonings or exhortations. (Fs)

175b Hobbes blazed the trail to the self, which has grown into the highway of a ubiquitous psychology without the psyche (soul). But he, like Locke, did not develop the psychology of the self in its fullness, just as neither went very deeply into the state of nature, because the solution seemed to be on the surface. Once the old virtues were refuted-the piety of the religious or the honor of the nobles-Hobbes and Locke assumed that most men would immediately agree that their self-preservative desires are real, that they come from within and take primacy over any other desire. The true self is not only good for individuals but provides a basis for consensus not provided by religions or philosophies. Locke's substitute for the virtuous man, the rational and industrious one, is the perfect expression of this solution. It is not an ethic or a morality of a Protestant or any other kind of believer, but a frank admission of enlightened selfishness (selfishness that has learned from modern philosophy which goals are real and which imaginary), or self-interest rightly understood. Locke develops the opposite, the idle and the quarrelsome man-who, we see, may be the priest or the noble (i.e., pretenders to a higher morality)-to debunk virtue in a less provocative way than Hobbes did. Locke's rational and industrious man partakes, as a prototype, of the charm of the sincere man who acts as he thinks and, without fraudulent pieties, seeks his own good. Beneath his selfishness, of course, lies an expectation that it conduces more to the good of others than does moralism. The taste of the sincere expresses itself more in blame of Tartufferie than in praise of virtue. (Fs)

176a Terror in the face of death, an immediate and overwhelming subjective experience of the self and what counts most for it, and the imperative following from this experience that death must be avoided, were confirmed by the new natural philosophy which sees in nature only bodies in motion, bodies blindly conserving their motion by the necessity of inertia. All higher purposiveness in nature, which might have been consulted by men's reason and used to limit human passion, has disappeared. Nature tells us nothing about man specifically and provides no imperatives for his conduct. But man can be seen to behave as all other bodies behave, and the imaginary constraints on his following his powerful inclinations - constraints which would cause him to behave differently from natural bodies -vanish. Irrational passion and rational science cooperate in a new way to establish natural law: Pursue peace. Man's passionate subjectivity gives assent to the premises of natural philosophy-nay, takes them as its principles of action-and philosophy finds that that assent accords with nature. Man remains somehow a part of nature, but in a different and much more problematic way than in, say, Aristotle's philosophy, where soul is at the center and what is highest in man is akin to what is highest in nature, or where soul is nature. Man is really only a part and not the microcosm. Nature has no rank order or hierarchy of being, nor does the self. (Fs)