SEDUCTION BY NIHILISM

SEDUCTION BY NIHILISM

Y. SOGOMONOV,  P. LANDESMAN 

Nihilism today

PROGRESS PUBLISHERS MOSCOW 

Translated from the Russian by David Skvirsk

 It would seem that the growing doubts in the consistency of the myths of the sense of contentedness, especially the rupture with them and the increasing certainty in the falsity of one’s contentedness, should lead to a radical change in the individual’s world outlook, preparing him, if not at once then gradually, for the transition to revolutionary consciousness. But this takes place by no means in every individual who renounces old beliefs, feelings, and views. The protracted nature of the crisis, the clouded social status of the individual, everything that in bourgeois society is unstable and alarming under any conditions and particularly in the epoch of the general crisis, and the other causes that we shall deal 109with below, create among the former proponents of contentedness an emotional and intellectual susceptibility to pessimistic ideas. This is precisely the basis on which the sense of wretchedness appears. Is it an ideology of the conditions of life expressing solely the “logic” of an independently developing practical consciousness, or is it a product of ideological manipulation? These are the questions that must be answered before we go on to the reasons for the readiness to accept pessimistic ideas and to the very content of these ideas.

Like its counterpart, the sense of wretchedness is not free of ideological and psychological influences and manipulations. Although it is the consciousness of rank-and-file agents of social life and not of ideologists, it may only be partially recognised as a direct reflection of concrete vital practice, of assimilated cultural traditions and illusions, of one’s own, and therefore irreversibly curtailed, individual and group experience and conclusions of common sense. The point is that before becoming what it is the sense of wretchedness absorbs definite ideological notions (in the given case, of the nihilistic kind) in its spontaneously shaping attitude. These notions are assimilated gradually, not always consistently and most frequently in popularized form, in snatches, as scattered, unsystematized conclusions and formulas. Spontaneous empirical notions, formed in the process of breaking with contentedness and blind trust for the bourgeois social organisation, fuse with theoretically regulated ideas seeping down “from above”. They mix, stratify, and finally merge with more or less developed ideological structures. As in the case of the sense of contentedness, a special mythological perception of the world and, to some extent, the corresponding behaviour emerge.

What is the attitude of the rank-and-file proponent of the sense of wretchedness to the sum of pessimistic ideas assimilated by him? It seems to him (and he has more than sufficient grounds for this) that it is something fundamentally different from his own ideas but (due to some unclear circumstances) quite consonant with them and entirely bearing out the course and end results of his aspirations and thoughts. Without hesitation the consumer of nihilistic ideas believes that he is accepting a rational system of thoughts 110set in motion not by somebody’s whim or mercenary calculation but by the contradictions of reality itself. The concepts embracing and explaining the inner essence of seemingly incomprehensible but thoroughly familiar and intimate phenomena decoding his own feelings and moods pass before him as on parade. On the parade grounds these concepts, raised above the daily routine, go through fanciful motions conforming to the many rules of scientific thought. Despite their abstract generality, the judgments, and patterns, arranged in proper formation and dressed in the uniform of scientific terminology, allegedly express the might of the object world, of the incontrovertible facts of history. It seems to the sense of wretchedness that these concepts fit into reality, which is complicated and tangled, just as this is required of a responsible quest for the truth: without dogmatic premises, sharply, critically and, at the same time, without biased subjectivism.

As seen by the sense of wretchedness, it is only the sense of contentedness, like the Rabelaisian queen of the Island of Quint, that quenches its thirst for knowledge with barren abstractions. It alone, it is said, can rest content with specially selected and touched-up information about the world, brought to the point of exhaustion by the burden of bombastic phrases and biased arguments, which in the long run befog rather than clear up its own interests. It is nourished by the waste of social thought, and thinks and acts under the impact of the false aims thrust upon it. To the sense of wretchedness it seems that it alone has the prerogative of enjoying first-class ideological output giving a true or nearly true image of the actual world and helping to distinguish the true position of the individual in it. It thereby allegedly gets the possibility of really elucidating its fundamental and not transient and casual interests.

Actually, however, the sense of wretchedness becomes the victim of self-deceit to a no lesser degree than the sense of contentedness, which it ridicules and slights, and for that reason does not oppose it as truth to a delusion. With few exceptions the philosophy of nihilism is only a theoretical description of the sense of wretchedness itself, its pseudo-scientific twin. Presented as scientific, the concepts and arguments of this philosophy mirror not the facts 111of science and material relations as such, but the object nature of the sense of wretchedness, its attitude to the world and its beliefs, predilections, and expectations of a “ religion of ordinary life”. The facts of history are perceived superficially as transformed material relations, a semblance and not as the essence of social processes. Instead of breaking through to facts and material relations and their adequate reflection, this philosophy stops at fictions, displaying its helplessness to take apart the chaotic accumulations and the labyrinth of the current notions of certain social strata that close tight the door to reality as such. It proves to be able only to systematize these illusions and semblances.

In the theory of nihilism the sense of wretchedness thus finds for itself the new, which ultimately is nothing but the carefully turned and fundamentally obscured past. It is enriched not with thoughts about reality but with thoughts developed, systematized and, so to speak, given a scientific dressing, about ideas of a lower order, pre-scientific, fragmented, and ordinary, interlaced into the direct “language of real life”.  [111•*  It operates not with facts but with subjective ideas about them, with ideas conceived in the practice of atomistic existence. It has to do with logic turned upside down. It only seems to this sense that it is acquiring nonpreconditioned and socially unfounded truths, while in reality it has in its hands conclusions drawn from part of its own necessarily shaped notions. However the string of inferences vacillates, in the long run they return safely, with the sureness of trade winds, to some of the commonplace illusions of the sense of wretchedness. In the final analysis the advance to the cognition of reality proves to be a “drive to what had been known beforehand”. Cognition remains encased in the narrow chamber of self-cognition, a prototype of which were the zealous studies of the members of a medieval sect who seriously were lost in contemplation of their own navels.

Painstakingly camouflaged in pseudo-scientific form, this circumstance remains undisclosed to the required degree of clarity not only to consumers but also to its creators, and also to propagandists of nihilistic theories.

Let us consider the specifics of the actual vital process of individuals with the sense of wretchedness. Otherwise we shall never understand why the subjects of this process are given, to quote Marx, “enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world”.  [112•* 

Let us first examine the social composition of the proponents of the sense of wretchedness. Fundamentally, it differs little in the main thing from the social composition of the sense of contentedness: in both cases we observe motley, heterogeneous social parameters, and an absence of any visible or direct link with any particular class, stratum, or group. Properly speaking, this similarity of these sham antipodes ensures the philosophical, spiritual kinship of these forms of bourgeois mass consciousness. However, there is no complete identity between these contingents. Although the veil of contentedness is more easily dropped by those who find themselves most flagrantly deceived by the prevailing mode of production and distribution (and these are, of course, mainly working people), they are precisely the ones who most rarely become voluntary recruits of the sense of wretchedness.

Some people of other social strata who free themselves of the sense of contentedness likewise turn their backs on the old world with its myths and hopes. They get the possibility of going over to the side of the working people, of getting a grasp of the revolutionary consciousness and of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Needless to say, this transition is not an instantaneous illumination with immediate conversion to the socialist world outlook. It is inevitably contradictory because spontaneously formed notions mix with the ideas of scientific communism, forming a chain of intermediate states. Imposed and consolidated bourgeois political views, moral foundations and aesthetic attachments are transformed gradually. The way of thinking does not at once match with the way of action. Old principles gradually give way to new. This transition to Marxist-Leninist ideology is stimulated by the bitter experience of own errors and by honest self-criticism.

Although the possibility of moving towards the new world outlook, towards Marxist-Leninist ideology (and to a new system of emotions, to a new frame of mind) is used more and more often by people from various non-proletarian strata, still, petty-bourgeois groups, white-collar workers and intellectuals comprise the main social base of the sense of wretchedness. Intellectuals are by no means a free stratum of society. Their position in the modern capitalist world is dual due to the contradictory character of their way of life. On the one hand, intellectual work still retains a certain privileged position. Intellectuals are, therefore, aware of their prospects for holding on and even multiplying what they have attained, for making a career in industrial society in the sphere of business, management or in their own intellectual pursuits (science, culture, medicine, education).

Understanding (and frequently exaggerating) the significance of knowledge in the epoch of the scientific and technological revolution and taking into account its further enhancement in production and all other areas of social life, they hope to participate in controlling the decisive levers of power. For this, while taking part in the competitive struggle, it is necessary to fight one’s way to the management of industrial organisations and the leadership of bureaucratic agencies, to be prognosticators, “social engineers”, techno-bureaucrats (at least on the level of junior management), loyal suppliers of the required cultural values or scientists prepared to serve any preset programme. For this one has to be no more critical than the sense of contentedness, to take up arms only against the obsolete methods of traditional capitalism and welcome the modernization of these methods with enthusiasm. For this one has to bid farewell to humanistic ideals and acquire faith in the stabilisation of the capitalist system, in its improvement through moderate reforms. Possibilities of this kind, which spring from the social position held by the bourgeois intelligentsia, make the latter susceptible to pseudo-optimistic ideology, thereby giving it a sense of contentedness. This is true mostly of the privileged segment of the intelligentsia, which holds high posts and has become virtually part of the ruling class.

Let us now scrutinise the position of the intelligentsia in capitalist society from another angle. Intellectuals react keenly to the social antagonisms of state-monopoly capitalism, chiefly because the vast majority of them are exploited: the conditions of life of a steadily growing number of intellectuals are drawing closer to those of the workers ( besides, the intelligentsia not only reproduces itself but is also replenished from among the “lower classes”, something that in the old days was, generally, accidental). They view with alarm how their former caste monopoly of mental work and the accompanying right to independent ideological expression of the new requirements arising in society are melting before their very eyes, how the familiar mechanisms of a career operate with diminishing frequency. Under capitalism the intelligentsia cannot help reacting to the paradoxes stemming from the contradictions between reason and foolhardiness, between culture and barbarism, between freedom and totalitarianism, between morals and science. The intellectuals tragically feel their helplessness to change anything through their professional activity.

The work of intellectuals is increasingly regulated by bureaucratic structures and fettered by the mercenary interests of clients, administrative supervision, and the planting of the spirit of career-seeking and group struggle. By injecting time-serving and pseudo-collectivism, suppressing freedom of thought and conscience, and depersonalizing their participants, the intellectual co-operatives become simply comfortable barracks. Conveniences and the certain prestige do not save them from the inexorable choice of being actually free in their professional work and social sympathies or becoming clerks of the bourgeois organisation, acting in accordance with the latter’s class interests, and having their freedom restricted to whispering in lobbies, clubs, to friends or simply to themselves in face of “persistent pangs of conscience" (A. I. Herzen). The conditions for compromises and maneuvering are being reduced to a disappearing tiny magnitude, and “either or" resounds more and more imperatively: either a betrayal of the humanitarian essence of knowledge, surrender with mental reservations, renouncement of responsibility and freedom of creativity, or effective resistance to the bourgeois social organisation.

The progressive segment of the intelligentsia feels the heavy breath of the capitalist system’s crisis. It sees the growth and strengthening of socialism and the anti–monopoly and national liberation movements, capitalism’s economic and social instability, its ideological poverty, its undisguised hostility for some forms of spiritual activity. It foresees a further growth of class battles and the deepening of the crisis heralding upheavals of an ever greater magnitude. As long as it regarded the historical process as progress, everything was rosy. The promotion of this progress was regarded as the meaning of history, of individual existence and the self-justification of this activity. This was in its time the source of optimism. But as soon as the progressive character of capitalist development was questioned, everything changed: reality became an absurdity, while activity hung in weightlessness. The sense of involvement in historical creativity receded into the past. An epoch of mass disappointment in bourgeois-optimistic theories and ideals set in. Having lost faith in the bankrupt bourgeois form of progress, the intellectuals swung to the Left, no longer inclined to carry out zealously the prescriptions and norms of the system that was doomed and could no longer be trusted.

Approximately the same duality is implicit in the huge mass of white-collar workers, urban lower strata, small proprietors and, to some extent, even a segment of the middle bourgeoisie. This duality is to be observed particularly among students, who react most sensitively to the crisis of the capitalist system. With the same rapidity that it grows this segment is losing its faith in the bourgeois symbols of prosperity, in the allurements of industrial society, in the fetish of a future career, in the immutability of the scale and yardsticks of the sense of contentedness.

from the specifics of the objective social position of these strata and groups stems the specific type of thinking, social characters, and emotional states. It would be naive to believe that the ideas prevailing among these strata are solely the result of lack of information, of a false train of thought leading to erroneous conclusions, the result of an infantile level of thinking and only an inability to explain the essence of social development. Also, it would be wrong to think that 116these ideas arise solely as a result of the operation of “fate” that has so successfully duped huge numbers of people. Their consciousness is consonant with “their conditions of life”,  [116•*  the objective logic of circumstances inducing them to think and act in the given and no other way. It moves not arbitrarily but in a direction prescribed by the conditions of their life. Not ideas give rise to the modes of the vital process of the vacillating social strata and groups, but these very modes, of course with the assistance of “fate” (i.e., the corresponding ideological pressure), set the content of the notions and the specifics of the thinking and feeling of these groups. It is in this context that these content and specifics are not rubbish, an invention, deceit, or a mistake.

In capitalist society the intelligentsia, by virtue of its relative independence and the separation of labour by brain from labour by hand, is inclined towards abstractions, idealistic illusions, building castles in the air, towards escaping from real needs, the bustle of daily life and practical tasks into the realm of refined pure ideas and exalted ideals. Even when it is not directly linked with the struggle of the working people, it is able to put forward progressive demands, to which it is prompted by the requirements of the development of industry, management, science, art, education, and medicine. However, the fact that it is in the very nature of the intellectual’s way of thinking to separate theory from practice makes him disposed to contemplation, awakens in him the desire to “do the world a favour" by trying to explain it again and again instead of helping practically to reshape it on the basis of cognized laws.

Further, the circumstance that the intelligentsia does not comprise a special class makes intellectuals believe that they are in a position to express common interests as unprejudiced class-neutrals with King Truth as their sole inspiration. This pretentious illusion is the soil for political short-sightedness and a certain moral callousness and insensitiveness to the suffering of all other strata of working people. A tendency is generated towards misinterpreting the unquestioned fact of the numerical growth of the intelligentsia, of the regrouping and mutations it is undergoing as a social stratum, its 117concentration at large industrial, scientific, and educational centres, its increasing possibilities for organisation and, consequently, its growing influence on social processes.

It is inclined to regard its interests, of which it has a narrow and one-sided understanding, as a universal criterion of social needs, setting them above the interests of the people. And when its thinking runs along the lines that “ everything benefiting the intelligentsia benefits all society" it has either to fight for the aims we are already familiar with—to become a co-ruler in industrial society, to take its place among social leaders, become agents of corporate business and win the right to certain sparingly measured-out spiritual benefits—or, where it understands the limitations and hopelessness of the first alternative, it comes to the conclusion that, deeply rooted in its folly and dirty mercantilism, the world is moving to an abyss and, consequently, each has the right to look for an asylum suited to his tastes. This mission of atonement and salvation is anti-communist orientated, for the intelligentsia can only be revolutionary when it subordinates its immediate interests to its future, basic interests, and only to the extent to which it is able to renounce its group standpoint and adopt the point of view of the working class.

The character of the intelligentsia’s work and all the basic factors of its life foster individualistic and anarchistic feeling in it. Lenin wrote: ”...The intelligentsia, as a special stratum of modern capitalist society, is characterised, by and large, precisely by individualism and incapacity for discipline and organisation. .. . This, incidentally, is a feature which unfavourable distinguishes this social stratum from the proletariat; it is one of the reasons for the flabbiness and instability of the intellectual, which the proletariat so often feels; and this trait of the intelligentsia is intimately bound up with its customary mode of life, its mode of earning a livelihood, which in a great many respects approximates to the petty-bourgeois mode of existence (working in isolation or in very small groups, etc.).”  [117•*  In this lies the mainspring not only of abstract humanism and contemplationism, but also of apathy, fatigue, loss of hopes, because this stratum 118is particularly sensitive to the operation of the “periodic law of social weariness”.  [118•*  It is also the impetus for the readiness, in the quest for salvation from total desperation, to look for consolation, for ideological palliatives prepared by the pharmacologists of nihilism.

The instability and duality of the social conditions of existence of the intelligentsia and other strata and groups of capitalist society that renounce the sense of contentedness at a certain moment, and the entire superstructure of emotions, features of social character and philosophical prejudices towering over these conditions are quite clearly discernible in the intelligentsia’s criticism of bourgeois reality.

What strikes one most of all is that this criticism, which may be inaccurate, shallow, or impulsive, is increasingly forthright, is unquestionably sincere and sometimes courageous, and is aware of itself as a civic force. By expressing discontent, indignation, and hatred for the outworn social system, it virtually fulminates against the injustice, dehumanization, cruelty, and hypocrisy reigning in capitalist society. This criticism’s vital interest in destroying this system, its rejection of the “step by step" policy and the healing effects of time, its skepticism of the “organised intellect" being able to best capitalism by itself give it the hallmark of soberness, keen sight, radicalism, and genuine democracy. Political realism and a natural sense of proportion prevent the piled up hatred to take the form of bare nihilism, of disorderly, uncontrolled, and destructive action.

From here the road is blazed from democratic criticism attacking the most glaring manifestations of modern capitalism’s vices (omnipotence of the corporations, manipulation of the masses, bureaucratic excesses, police arbitrary rule, terrorist acts of suppression, the slide from parliamentary democracy to fascism, obscurantism, dirty wars, and so on) to criticism of capitalism as a whole. A merciless diagnosis of the sick society underlies the mass inducements for active participation in the anti-monopoly, democratic movements that as time passes are able to draw their participants into the socialist movement. On this basis there takes place the 119transition to Marxism-Leninism as the ideological alternative to all Right and “Left”, conservative and moderate liberal bourgeois philosophies, the transition to support for socialism as the only historically vital alternative of state monopoly capitalism.

But this is only one of the possibilities. Its’ opposite, while being not decisive but nonetheless real, is the possibility of a hypnotized understanding of the world and the corresponding attitude to it. It is hard for the intelligentsia’s criticism to surmount its fear of the machinery of power, of the machinery of repression and ideological and psychological manipulation, its fear of losing its meagre but as yet quite real privileges and prestige. It trembles before the formidable force of alienated society. The consciousness of seeming helplessness and fear of the difficulties of struggle (in this case want of courage is not an individual attribute but a sociopsychological quality of an entire stratum or group), of difficulties by no means invented but real, requiring sacrifice, long and systematic stress, enormous restraint and subordination to the discipline of revolutionary organisations, lend this criticism, to use Lenin’s words, its immaturity, dreaminess, political inexperience and revolutionary flabbiness.  [119•* 

This criticism has strong undertones of romanticism, utopianism, and affectation. There are “Leftist” kinks, much revolutionary verbiage, and more negative elements in it than positive. In practice it proves to be helpless and in many cases simply inactive. It deviates towards moralization and, as a consequence, shows more interest in comforting individual ideals screening reality than in clear-cut social programmes and socio-political ideals. This criticism of capitalism easily loses its head in the face of the complex conflicts of the age, fussing, fretting, succumbing to mystification, confusing the principal with the secondary, the temporary with the permanent, the local with the universal, the superficial with the real. Believing that truth is the sum of two weakened opposite delusions, it nourishes partiality for the golden mean, for academic objectivism, for a third way, for the intermediate between two class positions and ideologies. It sympathizes with systems of ideas proclaimed 120as non-class. It is impressed by a certain kind of “Marxism”, truncated, and falsified by various Marxicologists, reformists and revisionists with its strictly dosed social courage. It is prepared to proclaim hosanna as the ideal model of socialism and call for the crucifixion of living, existing socialism. It shudders at the very thought of the hegemony of the working class in the revolution, of the dictatorship of the proletariat, of party discipline as allegedly contravening the spirit of freedom and the banners of revolution. As a result, this criticism is predisposed to nihilistic teachings; at any rate, it is poorly protected against such teachings.

Does this mean that no distinction should be drawn between nihilistic ideas (whether expressed by artistic, religious, political, or socio-philosophical means) and the spontaneous, empirical notions of the intelligentsia and the petty-bourgeois “intermediate” strata? The former cannot be defined as a simple copy, cast or analogue of these notions. What breath-taking adventures are encountered by commonplace judgments and images, when, having risen a “ story higher”, they set out on the long and dangerous journey of systematization and development in order later to turn back to their hearth and home ennobled and surrounded by the exhilarating fame of theoretical daring!

Nihilistic theories have been concocted in accordance with a pseudo-scientific recipe and are a perverse form of ideology. We know from history that not every perverse ideology was reactionary. Suffice it to recall the destiny of the plebeian-peasant heresies (Lollards, Taborites, the early Anabaptists and others), which used inadequate ideological means but nonetheless expressed the progressive social and political demands of their day and consolidated the finest elements of the spontaneous, empirical notions of the advanced classes.

But this has nothing to do with nihilism, which mainly recreates the above-mentioned negative properties and features of spontaneous, empirical criticism. It universalizes and brings to culmination the sense of fear and helplessness, loneliness and alienation from the world, insecurity, depression, and confusion, which can be surmounted in the process of struggle against capitalism. Nihilism vulgarizes democratic criticism’s readiness to think and suffer. It takes its 121doubts in the significance of social action to the point of total lack of faith in the meaning of history. In the rarefied ingredients of nihilism’s theoretical salads the emotionality of spontaneous criticism becomes the antithesis of scientific criticism. The intensive search for social truth is enervated. In the same ingredients nihilism’s immaturity and emptiness are transformed into a virtue, the penchant for moralization is elevated into a mandatory principle of thinking, while conservative romanticism and utopianism are given every sanction. The elitarian ideas of a segment of the intelligentsia, frequently cohabitating with democratic feeling, are inflated into an “aristocratic spirit”, into faith in one’s special rights and destiny. Everything that prevented anti-capitalist criticism from accepting Marxism and socialism, from joining the working-class and communist movement, is fortified in nihilism, and with the aggravation of capitalism’s contradictions it is given an open or camouflaged anti-communist orientation.

Nihilism does everything it can to stop disaffection with and criticism of capitalism from crossing the Rubicon, from turning into revolutionary consciousness and action.

Nihilistic theories stifle and reduce all the strong aspects of the “ideology of the conditions of life”,  [121•*  suppress that ideology’s sense of anxiety and profound need for the spiritual nearness of people, destroy the forthrightness of its criticism that tears off all the masks, of a criticism reinforced by a willingness to act, by a preparedness to wage an organised struggle against social evil. In pursuance of its objective of seduction, nihilism proclaims that these aspects are alienated, that they are doomed to wallow in the ooze of prosaic commonplaces. It goes so far as to “correct” spontaneous criticism’s notions recognising the value of labour, association, and mutual assistance on the pretext of enhancing their competence. It mangles and deadens all the living, creative and advanced aspects of its judgments and notions, giving it the shape of an abstract system of dogmas and corresponding desperation. It does not let limited anti-capitalist criticism go beyond the framework of the bourgeois 122consciousness. It makes that consciousness sick and really wretched.

At this point it may be noted that the work of injecting nihilistic ideas into the mass consciousness, which is poorly protected against them, is nearing completion with the formation of the sense of wretchedness. Starting as the spontaneous, empirical consciousness of vacillating social groups and strata, it then fuses with the nihilistic variant of bourgeois ideology and emerges as a sense of wretchedness proper, with its own vision of the world, feeling, logic, thinking, value preferences, ideals, and behaviour.

Having considered in outline the genesis and nature of the sense of wretchedness, we can now turn to the content of nihilistic ideas in the shape they are being absorbed by the mass consciousness. Only after this the possibility will open for assessing the actual role played by these ideas in modern society. How does the sense of wretchedness, seduced by nihilism, see the world as a whole?

* * *

 

       Notes

[111•*]   Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, p. 42.

[112•*]   Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. Ill, Moscow, 1974, D. 830.

[116•*]   V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 411.

[117•*]   V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 7, p. 267.

[118•*]   M. Shaginyan, “Man and the Times”, Novy mir, No. 6, 1973, p. 135.

[119•*]   See V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 15, p. 208.

[121•*]   V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 17, p. 52.