30.07.1996

The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Henri Bergson and Cubism

The philosophy of Henri Bergson was a major and perhaps the most important direct influence on the development of the Cubist aesthetic - as well as central to the development of early twentieth century Modernism. It is my contention that it was on the back of Bergson’s philosophy that a set of philosophical ways of thinking with a fundamentally Platonic and Neoplatonic core were carried into at least a number of the leading art currents in the first two decades of the twentieth century - particularly that of Cubism - itself pivotal to Modernism.    

The connection between Cubism, Bergson and Platonism has been written about since the early development of Cubism, notably by those involved with that development. Yet despite the evidence, to my knowledge it has only been explored to some degree by R. Antliff. Antliff’s writing is exemplary of the confusion and hesitancy of scholarship on this subject. On the one hand he argued that Bergson played a seminal role in shaping the art and politics of the Fauvist, Cubist and Futurist movements,1 that the first attempts to align Cubist theory with that of Bergson began in about 19122 and that ‘no sustained comparative examination of Cubism’s precepts with those of Bergson has been undertaken thus far.’3

On the other, he wrote not only that Bergson’s influence on Cubism has remained enigmatic4 but that his question was not whether the progenitors of Cubism and Fauvism invented their art forms in response to Bergson, but how his ideas were received in a pre-existing (my emphasis) Fauvist and Cubist milieu.5 Other writers recognised an interesting connection between Bergson’s philosophy and Cubism or dismissed any possible influence of the former on the latter.6 Hence, since Bergson’s philosophy has long been ‘out of favour’, I consider it necessary to state the following as an exposition of that philosophy, focusing particularly on those aspects I consider relevant to my subject. I will also make a number of connections with Cubism and the relevant artistic and philosophical work of others.  

Bergson was one of the most influential and widely read philosophers of the first decades of the twentieth century. His lectures at the College de France (where he was a professor from 1900) were immensely popular with students and wealthy intellectuals. By 1910 he was regarded as a national sage, receiving the Legion d’honneur in 1918 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. His most influential works were written in between 1889 (Time and Free Will) and 1907 (Creative Evolution). They are Matter and Memory (1896),  Laughter (1900) and An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). Many, particularly some religious and political zealots regarded him as an ally against positivism. In his introduction to an edition of Creative Evolution, Peter Gunter referred to that book as the first metaphysical system of the twentieth century. This book is regarded as Bergson’s most important work and it had a very strong impact when it was published.7   

Bergson’s philosophy played a major part in the ‘revolt against reason’ in French culture from the late nineteenth century. His epistemology was overtly anti-intellectual, putting ‘intuition’ in the place of thought. His notion of ‘mind’ was plainly dualist - ‘consciousness is essentially free, it is freedom itself’,8 ‘consciousness does not spring from the brain’9

the mind overflows the brain on all sides, and ... cerebral activity responds only to a very small part of mental activity ... mental life cannot be an affect of bodily life ... it looks much more as if the body were simply made use of by the mind, and ... we have, therefore no reason to suppose the body and the mind united inseparably to one another.10

Bergson thought that existence moves as a flow and not dialectically. For him, the unity of opposites resulted in a false movement. Deleuze noted that in this there is a Platonic tone.11 The implication  of  Bergson’s philosophy is  that  he  did  to  Plato what Marx claimed to have done to Hegel, yet his philosophy sought to maintain the development of Platonism standing upright. He opposed his eternity of creative evolution to Plato’s eternity of immutability based on Ideas. Bergson defined ‘eidos’ as ‘the stable view taken of the instability of things’.12

He wrote that Plato was the ‘first and foremost’ to seek true reality in the unchanging, whereas for Bergson, this reality lay precisely in what does change. For him, Plato did not take becoming seriously.

The whole of the philosophy which begins with Plato and culminates in Plotinus is the development of a principle which may be formulated thus: “There is more in the immutable than in the moving, and we pass from the stable to the unstable by a mere diminution.” Now it is the contrary which is true. Modern science dates from the day when mobility was set up as an independent reality.13

Yet, on investigation, this eternal and ‘independent reality’ is revealed as precisely the immutable of Plato.

Bergson asked how it is possible, having posited unchanging Ideas, to make change come from them, then argued ‘there is more in the motionless than in the moving’,14 that Ideas are contained in matter and that nothing, the source of becoming, moves between Ideas, creating ‘endless agitation’, which leads to the degradation of Ideas. Hence duration coexisted with Ideas. Forms are ‘snapshots’ of changing reality. ‘They are moments gathered along the course of time’.15

Beneath the changing phenomena will appear to us, by transparence, a closed system of concepts subordinated to and co-ordinated with each other ... It will be prior to human knowledge ... prior also to things, which awkwardly try to imitate it ... Its immutability is therefore, indeed, the cause of the universal becoming.’16

He argued

But when we put immutable Ideas at the base of the moving reality, a whole physics, a whole cosmology, a whole theology follows necessarily. We must insist on the point.17

Bergson thought that we are all born Platonists18 and that there exists nothing positive outside Ideas.19 He gave the example of  the Idea of a poem, how  thousands of people write on an Idea and how our ‘minds’ can leap from the words to the images and from these to the Idea.20 

the philosopher, ascending again from the percept to the concept, sees condensed into the logical all the positive reality that the physical possesses. His intellect, doing away with the materiality that lessens being, grasps being itself in the immutable system of Ideas.21    

In view not only of form in art but of the highly philosophic nature of Cubism, Bergson’s treatment of form is very important, and is both Platonic

the philosophy of Ideas ... starts from the Form; it sees in the Form the very essence of reality ... it posits Form in the eternal22  

and most productive in comparison. For example the following

Things re-enter into each other. What was extended in space is contracted into pure Form. And past, present and future shrink into a single moment, which is eternity. 23

compared with Picasso’s statement in 1923 

When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they are all the same images in different planes.24 

Again, on the limitation and unreality of appearance

(Forms) tend to withdraw into their own definition, that is to say, into the artificial reconstruction and symbolical expression which is their intellectual equivalent. They enter into eternity, if you will; but what is eternal in them is just what is unreal.25

Nietzsche wrote

The more ‘Idea’ the more being. (Plato) reversed the concept ‘reality’ and said: ‘What you take for real is an error, and the nearer we approach the ‘Idea’, the nearer we approach ‘truth’ - Is this understood? It was the greatest of rebaptisms ... Fundamentally, Plato, as the artist he was, preferred appearance to being! lie and invention to truth! the unreal to the actual! But he was so convinced of the value of appearance that he gave it the attributes ‘being’, ‘causality’ and ‘goodness’ and ‘truth’, in short everything men value.26

Picasso who had read most of Nietzsche’s works by seventeen and who co-edited a magazine recommending ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ in 1901 stated 

.. Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.27

Bergson distinguished between the ‘everyday’, ‘positive’ sciences which are characteristic of the intellect, remain ‘external’ to the object with the use of symbols, are restricted to separate moments, giving us a relative, convenient knowledge, and ‘true’ science which is obtained by the ascension to Ideas. This science is metaphysics which supposedly dispenses with symbols, is ‘preformulated’ in nature and is capable of attaining the absolute.

Science is not then, a human construction. It is prior to our intellect, independent of it, veritably the generator of Things.28

Bergson acknowledged his profound obligation to Plotinus29 and gave a course of lectures on him at the College de France in 1897-98. The metaphysical vision of Creative Evolution has been  compared with that of Plotinus.30 In this book Bergson suggested the possibility of applying the term ‘God’ to the source from which all things flow. In ‘The Two Sources of Morality and Religion’, the primal energy at the heart of the universe is stated to be love.

Creative Evolution is based on élan vital which for Bergson is the actualisation of memory in duration. This élan vital drives life to ‘overcome’ matter. Bergson believed there is a ‘tremendous push’ in nature which unites all nature and carries it along.31

As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organised beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible32

As in his theorising about science, Bergson’s dualism is again evident in his treatment of the concepts ‘time’ and ‘duration’ (durée) which are fundamental to his philosophy. There is ‘intellectual’ time - that which can be subject to analysis, and ‘real’ time - the time of psychological experience. There is  ‘mere’ duration - the general flow in time of all things (‘the phantom of duration')33 and ‘pure’ duration, the non-material basis  and origin of  all things. It is dynamic, creative and irreversible - ‘Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’.34   

Knowledge of duration can only be obtained by intuition - a direct, non-conceptual perception in which the act of knowing coincides with the person, experience or object in duration. Duration cannot be ‘spatialised’ i.e. divided into units. According to Bergson we do break movement and change it into simultaneous moments (‘simultaneity’) in order to act upon change. It is in our ‘inner’ life that the reality of change is revealed as indivisible, and it is this indivisible continuity of change which constitutes true duration. ‘Real’ time and ‘true’ duration are the same. 

Bergson criticised Plato and Plotinus for turning away from practical life, for  ‘escaping’ change and raising themselves above time, but this is precisely what Bergson did when he distinguished between time of the intellect and time of the immaterial ‘mind.’ This ‘succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines’35 is the site of Platonic reality. 

Bergson wrote ’(Plato) in his magnificent language ... says that God, unable to make the world eternal, gave it Time, “a moving image of eternity.”’36 The  Time referred to here is ‘intellectual’ time, the ‘eternity’ is Bergson’s ‘real’ psychological time or ‘pure’ duration. He regarded duration and consciousness as inseparable. Inner duration is perceived by consciousness and ‘is nothing else but the melting of states of consciousness into one another.’37

these distinct states of the external world give rise to states of consciousness which permeate one another, imperceptibly organise themselves into a whole, and bind the past to the present by this very process of connection.38

Bergson equated consciousness with memory. Hence duration is essentially conscious memory. The preservation of the past and the interpenetration of which Bergson wrote is enabled by memory and belongs therefore to the ‘mind’ only and not the objective world. In duration, there is no distinction between the present and the past and the emotions are paramount, entailing the addition to a present feeling of the memory of past moments.

Inner duration is the continuous life of a memory which prolongs the past into the present, the present either containing within it in a distinct form the ceaselessly growing image of the past, or, more probably, showing by its continual change of quality the heavier and still heavier load we drag  behind us as we grow older.39

For Bergson, there are different types of memory - memory applicable to daily existence (perception, ‘motor habits’, impulse) and memory attuned with the past (recollection). Referring to the two durations (not only do most commentators on Bergson incorrectly recognise only one - the ‘true’ or ‘inner’ duration; Bergson, as he frequently did, contradicted himself on this point) Bergson wrote of this interpenetration of memories

The duration wherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we should see ourselves, is a duration whose elements are dissociated and juxtaposed. The duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our states melt into each other. It is within this that we should try to replace ourselves by thought40

Memory is a synthesis of past and present with a view to the future and duration is resistant to law and measurement.41 Our perceptions are infused with memories and our memories are activated by what we see - ‘these two complimentary memories insert themselves each into the other.’42

If, in order to count states of consciousness, we have to represent them symbolically in space, is it not likely that this symbolical representation will alter the normal conditions of inner perception? ... our projection of our psychic states into space in order to form a discrete multiplicity is likely to influence these states themselves and to give them in reflective consciousness a new form, which immediate perception did not attribute to them.43

Not only do our different types of memory interpenetrate and interact in duration, any symbolic representation of this process will have further influence on our ‘mental’ states. Further ‘there are always some dominant memories, shining points round which the others form a vague nebulosity.’44 On recollection, Bergson wrote

Subject and object would unite in an extended perception, the subjective side of perception being the contraction effected by memory, and the objective reality of matter fusing with the multitudinous and successive vibrations into which the perception can be internally broken up ... Questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms of time, rather than of space.45

For Bergson, the synthesis performed by our consciousness of what is and what was, results in a permeation, completion and continuation.

Bergson held that change is the essence of life, that states of being do not exist distinct from each other, but as an endless flow - ‘there is only one unique duration, which carries everything  with  it - a bottomless, bankless river’.46 But the change of which Bergson wrote takes place not in objective reality but in the duration of ‘mind’. This change applies even to a motionless object.

Let us take the most stable of internal states, the visual perception of a motionless external object. The object may remain the same, I may look at it from the same side, at the same angle, in the same light; nevertheless the vision I now have of it differs from that which I have just had, even if only because the one is an instant older than the other. My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present. My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates.47 

Bergson urged that change and duration need to be grasped in their mobility, that we need to recapture this essence of reality by moving back into duration. 

No more inert states, no more dead things; nothing but the mobility of which the stability of life is made. A vision of this kind, where reality appears as continuous and indivisible, is on the road which leads to philosophical intuition 48

Bergson’s dualism is again apparent in his notion of reality - that it is both external and given immediately to the ‘mind’ - the latter being the reality of duration. In our perception, Bergson thought that we take ‘snapshots’ or ‘instantaneous views’ of flowing reality which we join together to give the appearance of becoming. He compared this with cinematography (‘the cinematographical instinct of our thought’).49 These solid points of support are necessary for living and for ‘positive’ science. They allow the essence of reality to escape. 

Bergson argued that the elements of the spatial world are perpetually simultaneous with duration, whereas consciousness is pure duration and its states cannot be adequately represented as being extended in space. Objects in the material world are mutually external and only succeed each other in so far as they are remembered as doing so by an observer. ‘Mental’ states succeed each other and to regard them as in anyway juxtaposed is to admit the validity of a translation of the continuity and interpenetration of ‘mental’ life into spatial terms. Simultaneity is a thing of space and the external world, duration exists in the flow of memory.

We perceive the physical world and this perception appears, rightly or wrongly, to be inside and outside us at one and the same time; in one way it is a state of consciousness; in another, a surface film of matter in which perceiver and perceived coincide. To each moment of our inner life there thus corresponds a moment of our body and of all environing matter that is “simultaneous” with it; this matter then seems to participate in our conscious duration. Gradually we extend this duration to the whole physical world, because we see no reason to limit it to the immediate vicinity of our body.50 

In its passage from what has been to what is, memory binds together and constitutes inner duration. Without the survival of the past in the present, there can only be a sequence of separate moments.

There is no doubt but that for us time is at first identical with the continuity of our inner life. What is this continuity? That of a flow or passage, but a self-sufficient flow or passage, the flow not implying a thing that flows and the passing not presupposing states through which we pass; the thing and the state are only artificially taken snapshots of the transition; and this transition, all that is naturally experienced, is duration itself. It is memory ... within change itself ... that prolongs the before into the after, keeping them from being mere snap-shots appearing and disappearing in a present ceaselessly reborn. 51 

In reality, the body has no form (since form is immobile) and is changing constantly. Form can only be an instantaneous  view of change. Similarly states of ‘mind.’ 

there is no state of mind, however simple, which does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory; and no continuation of a state without the addition, to the present feeling, of the memory of past moments.52

Part One/To be continued ...

Notes

1. R. Antliff, Inventing Bergson, Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, New Jersey, 1993, 6.

2. R. Antliff, ‘Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment’, Art Journal, Winter 1988 vol. 47 no.4, 342.

3. Ibid., 342

4. Ibid., 341 and ‘The  Relevance  of  Bergson : Creative  Intuition, Fauvism and Cubism’, Ph.D thesis, Yale University, 1991, 8

5. Antliff, ibid., 3.  In  his  important  study  on  the relationship between Neoplatonism and certain artists involved in the development of early twentieth century abstraction, Cheetham omits discussing Bergson. ‘I do not discuss Bergson, because in spite of his tremendous interest in memory and his influence in modern painting (especially Futurism), he was overtly anti-Platonic in his theorising.’ In the next paragraph, ‘Notions of purity are also central to Cubism and Orphism, as Apollinaire makes clear.’ M. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity, Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, Cambridge, 1991, xiv, xv.

6. Antliff cites G. Beck and M. Roskill in ‘Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment’ , op. cit., 347.

7. H. Bergson,  Creative Evolution, 1907, trans. A. Mitchell, New York, 1911, reprint., 1983, xxv.

8. Ibid., 270

9. Ibid., 262

10. H. Larrabee, ed., Selections from Bergson, New York, 1949, 119.

11. G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans., H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam,  New York, 1988, 44;  also ‘This multiplicity that is duration is not at all the same thing as the multiple, any more than its simplicity is the same as the One’, 46.

12. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 315

13. H. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. Hulme, New York, 1955, 54.

14. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 316.

15. Ibid., 317

16. Ibid., 328. This is what Cézanne sought to express in his late work.

17. Ibid., 315

18. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 64

19. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 316

20. Ibid., 320

21. Ibid., 321

22. Ibid., 318

23. Ibid., 320

24. Picasso in a statement to M. de Zayas, ‘Picasso Speaks’, The Arts, New York, May 1923, reprint., in E. Fry, Cubism, London, 1966, reprint., 1978, 167.

25. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 317

26. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, W. Kaufmann, ed., New York, 1968, 308.

27. Picasso to M.de Zayas in Fry, op. cit., 165-166.

28. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 321

29. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., xiii

30. ‘And, faithful to the spirit of Plato, he (Plotinus) thought  that the discovery of truth demanded a conversion of the mind, which breaks away from the appearances here below and attaches itself to the realities above: “Let us flee to our beloved homeland!” ‘, H. Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans., M. Andison, New York, 1946, 163.

31. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 270. Bergson’s vitalism was popular in literary circles, but was not accepted by many philosophers and scientists. Antliff quoted R. Grogin in noting that the greatest intellectual assault on the rationalist bases of French democracy before World War One came from Bergsonian vitalism. Antliff argued that Bergson’s theories bore comparison with precepts underpinning fascism. Inventing Bergson op. cit., 11.

32. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 270.

33. The Creative Mind, op. cit., 34.

34. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 4.

35. H. Bergson, Time and Free Will, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans., F. Pogson, London, 1910, reprint., 1950, 104.

36. In G. Beck, ‘Movement and Reality: Bergson and Cubism’, The Structurist, 15/16, 1975/1976, 112. Cf. Plotinus - he also quoted Plato on this.

37. Time and Free Will, op. cit., 107

38. Ibid., 121

39. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 40

40. H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 1896; trans. N. Paul, W. Palmer, New York, 1988, 186. On the quality of Bergson’s thought, it is worth noting that he wrote in this book ‘there can be no question here of constructing a theory of matter’, 188.

41. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 108

42. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 153

43. Time and Free Will, op. cit., 90. For Bergson, ‘space’ is a site of infinitely complex ‘mental’ interaction, to which I will return.

44. Matter and Memory, op. cit., 171

45. Ibid., 70

46. An Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., 48

47. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 58

48. Ibid. 111

49. Creative Evolution, op. cit., 316

50. H. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, with Reference to Einstein’s Theory, trans., L. Jacobson, 1922, reprint., New York, 1965, 45.

51. Ibid., 44. For Bergson, form is a snapshot of eternal truth in duration.  But Plotinus put another Realm above the Intellectual which is formless - i.e. the One. Therefore for Plotinus, Form itself is an image of The One.

52. Selections from Bergson, op. cit., 23

Marx, Nietzsche and the Individual

Feuerbach argued that man created God after his own likeness, that God is the abstraction and alienation of human attributes projected into an ideal type, denying man his own content and features, thereby impoverishing him. Marx pointed to a profound contradiction within Feuerbach’s argument: ‘he annuls the infinite, and posits the actual, sensuous, real, finite, particular (philosophy, annulment of religion and theology). ... he again annuls the positive and restores the abstraction, the infinite - restoration of religion and theology.’1 It was their developments on this contradiction that formed the diametrically opposed content of the work of Marx and Nietzsche.

The most fundamental question underlying all others is ‘Which precedes which - matter (that which is independent of thought) or “mind”?’ Marx understood that it is the former, Nietzsche, on the basis of ‘will’, chose the latter. He questioned both our sensory experience of material objects and even their very existence.2 Where Marx’s man creatively develops by projecting himself through social production on objective reality, Nietzsche’s ‘develops’ himself by focusing his creativity on his individual self. Where Marx had done with God and studied man in his practice in the material world, Nietzsche, inspired by Stirner and apophaticism, sought via Dionysus and the overman to bring God down to earth, and in the most subjective way.3 Where Marx’s socio-economic analysis identified man in the world, Nietzsche’s socio-psychological analysis found a theological world in man.

Despite the dichotomy between the basic and many other positions of Marx and Nietzsche, their criticisms of bourgeois society were equally strong and had a number of similarities. They both understood man as a being who creates himself historically through his relations to nature and society and both strongly challenged the premises of bourgeois society. Both thought that there is something wrong with it, that man’s life activity (his labour or his willing) is frustrated. Both conceived of it as the sacrifice of the individual and thought that it must be transcended because it is irredeemably alienated from those on whom their theorising focused, that the bourgeois was in control4 in a society in which for Marx the primary (economic) conflict was between the proletarians and the bourgeoisie and for Nietzsche the primary conflict, at the level of values, was between those of the herd and ‘higher men’.

‘Bourgeois individualism’ is an understanding of ‘individual’ in the context of the bourgeois class and its ideology. ‘Bourgeois individualism’ and ‘bourgeois individual’ denote essentially the shaping of the individual by both capitalist ideology and that person’s practice into, as much as possible, a self-focused unit of consumption who subscribes to the values of capitalism. Marx endorsed individuality as an expression of freedom and human potential but he rejected the bourgeois notion (with its implication of egoism) because it required a one-sided development and the dehumanisation of the great majority. Only the bourgeoisie had the wealth and power to experience this, yet even their personalities are conditioned and determined by class relations, by their opposition to the proletariat. Marx argued that the right to security protects the egoistic individualism of bourgeois civil society. ‘The concept of security does not enable civil society to rise above its egoism. On the contrary, security is the guarantee of its egoism.’5

The proletarians, forced to sell their labour power to the bourgeoisie, are denied the possibility of individuality in several ways by that class, who exploit and control them6 - their function is to produce commodities and surplus value for the bourgeoisie. They are alienated from their products (they collectively don’t own what they produce - it is appropriated by the capitalists), they are alienated from their productive activity (in producing, they are reduced to the level of a machine), they are alienated from their species essence (from what is distinctively human - their ability to create and learn) and from others (by specialisation and the division of labour). As a result, the worker is degraded morally and suffers a loss of self. Marx wrote that the proletarian is most human when he is away from work.7 Deskilling through the division of labour, prolonged working hours and a wage barely sufficient to enable their survival all keep proletarians at the level of a mere animal, in the position of a slave.8

What Marx wrote most passionately against and to change - the existence of a ‘slave’ class beneath and at the service of a ‘higher’, bourgeois class, Nietzsche wrote with equal passion in defence of and to retain. Where Marx defended individuality, Nietzsche did the same for individualism. Nietzsche thought that actions performed on the basis of respect for the law or sense of duty were marks of the herd, harmful to the ‘higher man’ who was a law to himself - unmanageable and unpredictable. The herd instinct of morality and ‘Socratic’ rationality threatened Nietzsche’s model. He believed that the modern and mediocre European had a rage against ‘noble men’ and ‘great types’, that he was adrift in a world devoid of creative capacity. Society was just a scaffolding for the appearance of higher types: ‘Basic error: to place the goal in the herd and not in single individuals! The herd is a means, no more! But now one is attempting to understand the herd as an individual and to ascribe to it a higher rank than to the individual - profound misunderstanding!!!’9

Liberal democracy is that form of political organisation best suited to a prosperous and stable capitalist system and to the notion of a mass ‘bourgeois individualism’. Both Marx and Nietzsche criticised liberal democracy - again, from opposed positions. Both argued that political freedom is oppression, that political equality is inequality (regarding those whose antipodal interests they represented). Marx argued as he did because inequality is concealed in bourgeois equality - despite the appearance of an exchange of equivalents when the worker sells his labour power for money, that part of it which constitutes surplus value is in fact appropriated under the guise of exchange, presupposing the worker’s labour power as the property of the capitalist. At the level of parliaments, Marx believed them to be fronts for the bourgeoisie and theorised little on them.

Nietzsche believed liberal democracy to be the manifestation of a profound sickness and crisis, that it is a sign for everything that is wrong with modernity. By placing one’s will on a par with others, one wills the denial of life. He regarded democracy as essentially on a continuum with Christianity - equality in the eyes of God becomes the rights of man and popular sovereignty. His virulent and laughable attack10 on socialism was even stronger on this basis. For Nietzsche inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of rights - those of the ‘noble man’. Democracy, the embodiment of herd morality, represents a disbelief in great humans. It was a threat to ‘all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man’11

Yet both saw some benefit in the potential of bourgeois democracy. Marx thought that in the most economically advanced countries the proletariat might use it to attain power while Nietzsche, though believing that it represented nihilism, saw it as a training ground for individualism and potentially the basis for the emergence of a new ‘aristocracy’ who would transcend justice, the herd and its state.12

Where Marx theorised for the emancipation of society and individuality13 through that of the great majority, and did so on the basis of a material analysis, Nietzsche theorised for the appearance of a self-focused few - geniuses and saints, the ‘peak of rapture’ of the world14 - beyond the constraints of the majority, on the basis of his fertile imagination.

For Marx freedom is only possible in society, and the grounds for the the development of true individuality would begin to show with the abolition of private property, the freeing of the proletarian ‘slaves’ and the attainment of socialism.15 The reactionary Nietzsche thought that ‘free society’ is a contradiction in terms and deplored the disappearance of slaves: ‘A higher culture can come into being only where there are two castes of society: the working caste and the idle caste, capable of true leisure; or, to express it more emphatically, the caste of forced labour and the caste of free labour.’16

The individualism that Nietzsche was committed to was a fantasist notion of a ‘higher man’ overcoming any self-identified imperfections and, sustained by his will, crafting himself towards a mystical perfection.17 His argument amounts to an aesthetic abstraction of and reactionary counterpart to the class conflict of which Marx wrote. Just as Marx’s theorising and activity was a threat to capitalism and it ideology, so Nietzsche’s theorising was consistent with them - the celebration of exploitation, the worker knowing his place, the justification of an elite, the focus on and aestheticisation of self, the satisfaction of one’s needs above all and the use of whatever means to achieve that - in practice, when God is dead, how else does one find solace in one’s hour of need other than attend the church of consumption? While Marx’s scientific austerity is distinct from Nietzsche’s ascetic will to suffering and a longing for mystical unity,18 there is a teleological finality implicit in his theories that contradicts the basic tenet of dialectical materialism - that the one absolute is change.

‘Bourgeois individual’, as with ‘bourgeois individualism’ are ideological concepts. They cannot be defended because they both not only embody the exploitation of the great majority by a small minority, but a self-centredness and degree of irresponsible consumption that is clearly an increasing threat to global survival. What is required is an orientation to the concept that Marx subscribed to - an individuality that functions as the full development of a person, ethically responsible within their society - one which is not based on exploitation.

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Notes

1. K. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, p. 135.

2. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, 1990, ‘aphorisms’ 12 and 14.

3. In their lengthy critique of Stirner in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels referred to him as ‘Saint Max’ and ‘John the Divine’. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, Progress, Moscow, 1976. On the benefits of mysticism: ‘Zarathustra’s speeches are carefully orchestrated ... to ensure that the prophet encounters no opposition, demands, or pressure to be precise.’ Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, trans., Shelley Frisch, Granata Books, London, 2002, pp. 267-268. The widespread ignorance by philosophers regarding the impact of apophaticism on their subject - a prime example being Nietzsche - the man of ‘god’ who told us God is dead - who cannot be understood without an understanding of apophaticism, is one of the great (deliberate?) failures of philosophy. Apophaticism suffuses Nietzsche’s writing from The Birth of Tragedy to the final words of his last book published during his life, Ecce Homo, to the last ‘aphorism’ of The Will To Power which is a synopsis of The Enneads. Wherever romanticism, there apophaticism. William Franke’s groundbreaking two volume anthology On What Cannot Be Said, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 2007 traces the history of apophaticism in the West through the writing of its greats in philosophy, religion, literature and the arts. Mark Cheetham has written on its impact in the visual arts - M. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity, Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1991. On the influence of Stirner on Nietzsche and why Nietzsche denied it, see Safranski, Nietzsche, ever the rhetorician and lover of ‘truth’, with one eye on his backside and the other on history, was quoted from a conversation in which he said that people would say he was a plagiarist but that the person with whom he was talking, who reported the conversation in her memoirs (Ida Overbeck, a close friend of his in the 1870’s) would not let on that he was familiar with the writing of Stirner. p.127 Safranski quotes one contemporary of Nietzsche’s having written that Nietzsche would have been ‘permanently discredited in any educated milieu if he had demonstrated even the least bit of sympathy for Stirner’. Ibid., 126. Why is this profoundly contradictory and tormented voluntarist and master rhetorician taken so much at his word? Style and sensitivity are neither arguments nor an excuse.

4. Marx and Engels wrote: ‘To this modern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt’ K, Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology op. cit., p. 99. Nietzsche: ‘Step by step, private companies incorporate state business; even the most stubborn vestige of the old work of governing (For example, that activity, which is supposed to secure private parties against other private parties) will ultimately be managed by private contractors’, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, Penguin, 2004, p. 225, ‘aphorism’ 472.

5. K. Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, Quoted in Nancy S Love, Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity, Columbia University Press, New York, 1986, p. 158.

6. Both classes are controlled by the uncertainties of the world-market.

7. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 op. cit., p. 71. For Marx in his later work the alienation of man’s species-essence no longer had explanatory power. He retained his concern with why man’s labour is alienated in capitalist society, but turned to historical materialist analysis of the economic laws of motion of modern society.

8. ‘Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. ... Not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State: they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine ... and above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.’ The Communist Manifesto in K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Progress, Moscow, 1977, vol. 1, p. 115.

9. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage, New York, 1968, p. 403, ‘aphorism’ 766.

10. ‘Whom among today’s rabble do I hate the most? The Socialist rabble, the Chandala apostles who undermine the worker’s instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his little state of being - who makes him envious, who teach him revengefulness...Injustice never lies in unequal rights, it lies in the claim to ‘equal’ rights’. These words and many similar were written by a man who travelled southern Europe for years on a pension. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (or How to Philosophise with a Hammer) and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Penguin, 2003, p. 191, ‘aphorism’ 57.

11. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future op. cit., p. 144, ‘aphorism’ 212.

12. The man who so forcefully expounded on his ‘aristocratic values’ while venting contempt for ‘the herd’ (among others) was the son of a provincial pastor. Marx wrote that ‘aristocratic radicalism’ expresses the class interests of the bourgeoisie - the ‘aristocratic radical’ finds the source of social revolution not in the brutal ‘mass’ but in its opposite, in critical individuals. (Marx and Engels, Holy Family, 111) ‘In their contempt for the masses, aristocratic radicals are at one with their supposed bourgeois antagonists.’ In Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity op. cit., 166. Safranski wrote ‘all of Nietzsche’s past humiliations fed into his destructive fantasies ... he had sought refuge in self-discovery and self-invention ... Hatred festered in him toward everything that had dragged him down: the milieu of Naumburg, his family, his sister, his mother, ultimately his friends as well - and, of course, Wagner ... In his view, all of these insults, affronts, and disdain stemmed from the tedious world of mediocrity. Nietzsche, the critic of ressentiment, was himself sometimes full of vengeance toward the common man of ressentiment ... Nietzsche responded with fantasies of annihilation (of the ‘last man’). He, the Ubermensch, with whom they will all come face to face. Woe unto them...(the ‘last people’)’. Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, op. cit., pp. 269-271. Marx and Engels wrote similarly about Stirner: ‘In actual content he is, therefore, the defender of the practical petty bourgeois, but he combats the consciousness that corresponds to the petty bourgeois, a consciousness which in the final analysis reduces itself to the idealising ideas of the petty bourgeois about the bourgeoisie to whom he cannot attain.’ K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology op. cit., p. 287. 

13. The handwriting of the famous section of The German Ideology where it states ‘society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind ...’ has been analysed and it has been argued that what Marx contributed to it (the section was in different hands) may well have been a playful afterthought. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology op. cit., p. 53.

14. Safranski op. cit., 264. In a draft to a preface for The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche wrote that the goal of mankind lies in its peaks, in the great individuals, the saints and the artists. Ibid., 287.

15. ‘In bourgeois society capital is independent & has individuality, while the living person is dependent & has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.’ The Communist Manifesto in K. Marx, F. Engels, Selected Works op. cit, pp. 121-122.

16. F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, op. cit., p. 211, ‘aphorism’ 439. Nietzsche was: ‘a proponent of child labour, noting with approval that Basel permitted children over the age of twelve to work up to eleven hours a day’, was against shortening the length of the workday in Basel from twelve hours to eleven and opposed educational groups for workers. R. Safranski, Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography op. cit., 148.

17. On the ‘death of God’ - Nietzsche wanted the Christian god gone...so his, a mix of Dionysus and the overman, could take centre stage - in the world. ‘what would there be to create if gods - existed!’ F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Penguin, 2004, p. 81, ‘aphorism’ 8; ‘the raising of an altar requires the breaking of an altar’ in The Genealogy of Morals in F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing, Doubleday, New York, 1956, p. 228, section XXIV.

18. ‘But the hope of the epopts was the rebirth of Dionysus, which we can now interpret, with some foreboding, as the end of individuation ... the basic understanding of the unity of all things, individuation seen as the primal source of evil, art as the joyful hope that the spell of individuation can be broken, as a presentiment of restored oneness.’ F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside, Penguin, 1993, p. 52, section 10.