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January 12 - December 10, 2021
For Blake, as for Shelley, the revolution that the world needs is essentially sexual and irreligious at its very core, for it is in the affirmation of free love and the rejection of institutionalized
religion that true liberty and personal authenticity are to be found.
artist, thus becomes the central figure in bringing about the transformation of values that is necessary for the liberation of humanity. The poet is, to use Shelley’s term once again, the unacknowledged legislator of the world.
Everything in this world has two handles. Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated aesthetically, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.66
morally interesting as it is typically predicated on the idea that murder and murderers are intrinsically fascinating. And this suggests that beneath the humorous hyperboles of De Quincey’s sardonic essay lies a serious and perceptive point. Sympathy and empathy are really functions of aesthetics, not moral law. The murderer can be set forth in a sympathetic light by presenting him as sophisticated or at war with himself or as a rebel against society or as a genius
engaged in a battle of wits with a detective.
Quincey is not, of course, advocating murder or really trying to make murder socially acceptable, let alone desirable.
once aesthetics is detached from some universal understanding of what it means to be human, from some universally authoritative moral metanarrative, from some solid ground in a larger metaphysical reality, then aesthetics is king.
a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste become those who exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards.
eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near to it; insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke’s philosophy in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection, (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.” On Murder, 16. 68. De Quincey, On Murder,
characteristic of today’s understanding of what it means to be human is not its sexual content but rather its fundamental plasticity.
the elimination of the notion that human nature is something that has authority over us as individuals.
the consumer society really does present persons whose being is in their becoming, constantly looking to the next purchase that will bring about that elusive personal wholeness.
we are typically subject to the range of options and the value schemes that society itself sets and over which most individuals, considered as individuals, have very limited power.
there are always specific individual limitations to our ability to invent ourselves.
while I may not be able to overcome the genetic and chronological issues that prevent me from being an eighteenth-century Austrian-born queen of France, I can at least deny the decisive say that my chromosomes might wish to have over my maleness.
To dispense with God, however, is to destroy the very foundations on which a whole world of metaphysics and morality has been constructed and depends.
This passage sets the scene for the madman’s later intervention. The basic point is that the foundation of religion may have been exposed as false, but the influence of religion, the systems of life and thought built on it, continue to live on, up until the present day. To use Charles Taylor’s term, God continues to inform the social imaginary, and Nietzsche wants to put an end to this.
When we claim to explain the universe, we are actually merely describing it and not really penetrating into any essence it may have at any deeper level than our ancestors did.6 Nietzsche also applies the same critique to logic7 and finally to morality.
By doing so, you have taken away any basis for a metaphysics that might ground either knowledge or ethics. In killing God, you take on the responsibility—the terrifying responsibility—of being god yourself, of becoming the author of your own knowledge and your own ethics.
The game in moral discussion ceases to be that of establishing categorical imperatives and is changed into that of exposing the psychology that underlies any such claims.
Hume dismantles Christianity by analyzing how human beings know things; Nietzsche dismantles it by asking what ulterior motivation lies behind it. Hume might laugh at the claims of the Christian faith; Nietzsche is nauseated by them.
If we removed the effects of these four errors, we should also remove humanity, humaneness, and “human dignity.”19
Freedom for Nietzsche is freedom from essentialism and for self-creation.
Rather, it appears to be a rhetorical ploy designed to elicit an existential reaction: If this were true, how would you live? Would it make a difference to you? Nietzsche is challenging individuals to affirm the life they have and to live every moment as if it possessed eternal significance.
For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry and art.
Again, Nietzsche is no nihilist; life is to be lived in a manner that brings about personal satisfaction.
But that personal satisfaction is, to risk tautology, deeply personal.
Nietzsche, sophisticated thinker that he is, is really giving a critical account of what we might express in the demotic banalities of our
time as “Be whoever you want to be, and do whatever works for you.”
Marx, however, was to break with this group, and with idealist trajectories of Hegelianism, in favor of a materialist approach.
but is its direct opposite.
me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.
For Marx, the basic pattern of Hegelian dialectic is sound, but it is not ideas that drive the historical process; rather, it is material conditions and relations.
bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.
stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.
into its paid wage-labourers.
Perhaps as no other person in the nineteenth century, Marx was aware of how industrial production and the capitalism it represented were overturning traditional social structures and remaking society.
it makes human nature and all that depends on such a notion to be functions of the economic structure of society.
Yet there is more to Marx’s view on religion than simply seeing it as a means of ideological oppression. When set in context, the original quotation regarding the opium of the people reveals a richer and arguably more sympathetic understanding, if not of religion as a phenomenon, then at least of the religious themselves. The full statement occurs in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844):
Man makes religion, religion does not make man.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.
Religion hinders human beings from being fully human.
Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
Hence self-delusion, if not wicked, insidious design, is at the root of
all efforts to establish morality, right, on theology.
In other words, for Marx religion is a function of alienation, but it is not so much alienation from human nature as specifically the alienation generated by the material inequities of the economic system.
it makes the criticism of, and the struggle against, religion a political struggle because religion is the ideological mask that the specific inequities of the current economic structure of society wear to give themselves a mystical, metaphysical disguise.
the tearing down of religion is thus the precondition for offering true happiness through the establishment of an economic system that does not alienate the workers from the fruits of their labor.
