E. P. Thompson on Jacobitism

‘To hinder insurrection by driving away the people, and to govern peaceably by having no subjects, is an expedient that argues no great profundity of politics. It affords a legislator little self- applause to consider that where there formerly were an insurrection, there is now a wilderness.’ – Samuel Johnson


We are habituated to think of exploitations something that occurs at ground level, at the point of production. In the early 18^th century wealth was created at this lowly level, but it rose rapidly to higher regions, accumulated in great gobbets, and the real killings were to be made in the distribution, cornering and sale or goods and raw materials (wool, grain, meat, sugar, cloth, tea tobacco, slaves), in the manipulation of credit, and in the seizures of the offices of State. The patrician banditti contested for the spoils of power, and this alone explains the great sums of money they were willing to expend on the purchase of parliamentary seats. Seen from this aspect, the State was less an effective organ of any class than a parasitism upon the backs of that very class (the gentry) who had gained the day in 1688. And it was seen as such, and seen to be intolerable, by many of the small Tory gentry during the first half of the century, whose land tax was transferred by the most patent means to the pockets of courtiers and Whig politicians – to that same aristocratic elite whose great estates were, in those years, being consolidated against the small. An attempt was even made by this oligarchy, in the time of the earl of Sunderland, to make itself institutionally confirmed and self-perpetuating, by the attempted Peerage Bill and by the Septennial Act. That constitutional defenses against this oligarchy survived these decades at all is due largely to the stubborn resistance of the largely Tory, sometimes Jacobite, independent country gentry, supported again and again by the vociferous and turbulent crowd.

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As we move backward from 1760 we enter a world of theatrical symbolism which is difficult to interpret: popular political sympathies are expressed in a code quite different from that of the 1640s or of the 1790s.  It is the language of ribbons, bonfires, of oaths and of the refusal of oaths, of toasts, of seditious riddles and ancient prophesies, of oak leaves and of maypoles, of ballads with a political double-entendre, even of airs whistled in the streets. Edon’t yet know enouh about[popular Jacobitism to assess how much of it was sentiment, how much was substance, but we can certainly say that the plebs on many occasions employed Jacobite symbolism successfully as theater, knowing well that it was the script most calculated to enrage and alarm their Hanoverian rulers. In the 1720s, when an intimidated press veils rather than illuminates public opinion, one detects underground moods in the vigor with which rival Hanoverian and Stuart anniversaries . . . it was a wat of nerves, now satirical, now menacing. The arrows sometimes hit their mark.

 

[2] Despite the substantial advances in Jacobite historical studies, the evidence as to the dimensions of popular support remain slippery. AN excellent assessment is in Nicholas Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’; in Eveline Cruikshank (ed.) Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh, 1982). Professor Rogers shows that a considerable volume of anti-Hanoverian and Jacobite manifestations ( especially between 1714 and 1725) cannot be taken as an indication of organized commitment or of insurrectionary intent but should be considered as a symbolic taunting of Hanoverian rulers – ‘ provocative, defiant, derisory’ – and not less important for that reason. Rogers has developed these insights in Whigs and Cities, passim, and he speculates on the reasons for the marked decline in the Jacobite sympathy of English urban crowds between 1715 and 1745.

 

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Every society has its own kind of theater, much in the political  of contemporary societies can be understood as a contest for symbolic authority. But I am saying more than that the symbolic contest in the 18th century were peculiar to that century and require more study. I think that symbolism, in that century, had a peculiar importance, owing to the weakness of  then organs of control: the authority of the Church is departing, and the authority of the schools and the mass media have not yet arrived. The gentry had four major resources of control –m a system of influence and preferment which could scarcely contain the un-preferred poor, the majesty and terror of the law: the local exercise of favors and charity; and the symbolism of their hegemony. This was, at times, a delicate social equilibrium, in which rulers were forced to make concessions. Hence the contest for symbolic authority may be seen, not as a way of acting out ‘real’ contests’, but as a real contest in its own right. Plebian protest, on occasion, had no further objective than to challenge the gentry’s hegemonic assurance, strip power of its symbolic mystifications, or even just blaspheme. It was a contrast for ‘face, but the outcome of the contest might have material consequences – in away the poor law was administered, in measures felt by the gentry to be necessary in times of high prices, in whether Wilkes was imprisoned or freed.

At least we must return to the 18th century, giving as much attention to the symbolic contests in the street as to the votes in the House of Commons. These contests appear in all kinds of odd ways and odd places. Sometimes it was a jocular employment of Jacobite or anti-Hanoverian symbolism, a twisting of the gentry’s tail. Dr.  Stratford  wrote from Berkshire in 1718:

Our bumpkins in this country are very waggish and very insolent. Some honest justices met to keep the Coronation day at Wattleton, and towards evening\ when their worships were mellow they would have a bonfire. Some bumpkins upon this got a huge turnip and struck three candles just over Chetwynd’s home . . . they came and told their worships that to honor King George’s Coronation day a blazing star appeared above Mr. Chetwynd’s house. Their worships were wise enough to take their horse and go and see this wonder, and found, to their no little disappointment, their star to end in a turnip.

The turnip was of course the particular emblem of George I as selected by the Jacobite crowd, when they were in good humor; in ill-humor he was the cuckold king, and horns would do instead of turnips. But other symbolic confrontations in these years could become vey angry  indeed. In a Somerset village in 1724 an obscure confrontation (one of a number of such affairs) to place over the erection of a maypole. A local land-owner (William Churchey) seemed to have taken down ‘the Old Maypole’, newly dressed with flowers and garlands, and then to have sent two men to the bridewell for felling an elm for another pole. In respionse his apple and cherry orchard were cut own, an ox was felled and dogs poisoned. When the  prisoners were released the pole was re-erected and May  Day was celebrated with ‘seditious’ ballads an derisory libels against the magistrate. Among those dressing the pole were two laborers, a maltster, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a butcher, a miller, an inn-keeper, a groom and two gentlemen.

As we pass  the mid-century the Jacobite symbolism wanes and the occasional genteel offender (perhaps pushing his own interests under the cover of a crowd disappears with it [2]. The symbolism of popular protest after 1760 sometimes challenges authority very directly. Nor was symbolism  employed without calculation or careful forethought. In the great strike of seamen on the Thames in 1768, when some thousands marched on parliament, the fortunate survival of a document enables us to see this taking place. At the height of the strike (7 May 1768), when seamen were getting no satisfaction, some of their leaders went into a dock-side pub and asked a publican to write out in good hand and in proper form a proclamation which they intended posting on all docks and river-stairs. The publican read the paper and found ‘many Treasonable & Rebellious  Expressions’ and at the bottom ‘No W-,Nn K,” i.e ‘No Wilkes, No King’ . . .



[2] As the maypole episodes remind us, the Tory tradition of paternalism, which looks backward to the Stuart ‘Book of Sports’, and which extends either  patronage or permissiveness, remains extremely vigorous even into the nineteenth century. This theme is too large to be taken into this chapter, but see R. W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850; Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution; E. P. Thompson, page 76 note 2, Customs in Common

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The price which aristocracy and gentry paid for a limited monarchy and a weak state was, perforce, the license of the crowd. This is the central structural context of the reciprocity of relations between rulers and ruled. The rulers were, of course, reluctant to pay this price. But it would have been possible to discipline the crowd only if there had been a unified, coherent ruling class, content to divide the spoils of power amicably among themselves, and to govern by means of their immense command over the means of life. Such coherence did not, at any time before the 1790s, exist, as several generations of distinguished historical scholars have been at pains to show.

 

The tensions – between court and country, money and land, factions and family –ran deep. Until 1750 or 1760 the term ‘gentry’ is too undiscriminating for the purposes of our analysis. There is a marked divergence between the Whig and Tory traditions of relations with the crowd. The Whigs, in those decades, were never convincing paternalists. But in the same decades there developed between some Tories and the crowd a more active, consenting alliance. Many small gentry, the victims of land tax and the losers in the consolidation of great estates against the small, hated the courtiers and the moneyed interests as ardently as the plebs. And from this we see the consolidation of the specific traditions of Tory paternalism – for even in the 19th century, when we think of paternalism, it is Tory rather than Whig which we tend to couple it with. At its zenith, during the reigns of the first two Georges, this alliance achieved an ideological expression in the theatrical effects of popular Jacobitism. . . . By the ‘fifties this moment is passing, and with the accession of George III we pass into a different climate.


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The 18^th century crowd was protean: now it employed Jacobite symbolism, now it gave full-throated endorsement to Wilkes, now it attacked Dissenting meeting houses, now it set the price of bread. It is true that certain themes repeat themselves: xenophobia (especially anti-Gallicanism) as well a fondness for antipapist and libertarian (‘free-born Englishmen’) rhetoric. But easy generalization should stop at that point. Perhaps in reaction to overmuch sympathy and defensiveness which was shown by crowd historians of my generation, some younger  historians are willing to tell us what the crowd believed, and (it seems) it was also nationalistic and usually loyalist and imperialist in disposition. But not all of these historians have spent much time in searching the archive where enigmatic and ambivalent evidence will be found, and those of us who have done so are more cautious. Nor can one read off ‘public opinion’ in a direct way from the press, since this was written by and for the middling orders; an enthusiasm for commercial expansion among these orders was not necessarily shared by those who served by land or sea in the wars which produced this expansion. In contrast to the populist tone of the 1960s it is very much the fashion of our own time for intellectuals to discover that working people were (and are) bigoted, racist, sexist, but/and at heart deeply conservative and loyal to Church and King. But a traditional (’conservative’) customary consciousness may in certain conjunctures appear as a rebellious one; it may have its own logic and its own solidarities which cannot be typed in a simple-minded way. ‘Patriotism’ itself may be a rhetorical stratagem which the crowd employs to mount an assault upon the corruption of the ruling Hanoverian powers, just as in the next century the Queen Caroline agitation was a stratagem to assault  King George IV and his court. When the crowd acclaimed popular admirals it might be away of getting at Walpole or at Pitt.

 

 

 

Customs in Common, see the index.

 

Culloden by Murray Pittock

The Jacobite period has been strongly and systematically misremembered within historiography in order to emphasize a secure framework for the development of a British habitus. A history which threatened the very existence of the state has been presented in terms which are designed to foreground it as a foundational part of the success of that state, technologically, financially, culturally and militarily. Michel Foucault identified as the  loi de rareté, the principle of rarity, the point where a diverse set of data and possible memories or histories are "condensed through the selectivity of recall. the convergence of memories, the recursivity in remembrance, the recycling of  models of remembrance and memory transfers.’ Anaphoric historiography, which feeds on itself and repeats its own secondariness rather than identifying fresh primary resources, has been a feature of the treatment in British history, whose modeling up to recent times has been brutally binary. Just as Horace Walpole represented the feudal past haunting the usurpation of the present in The Castle of Otranto (1764), so British history modeled its own Gothic chiaroscuro on to the complex realities of the Culloden battlefield and the forces engaged on it.

 

The key oppositions in Jacobite history were in place from an early date as shown in Table 1.m (click for full image)

 

The supposition that Jacobitism was oral and antiquarian is linked to long-standing omission  by many to consult a wide range of readily available primary sources (for example) Jacobite regimental and military organization. In a related vein, the idea that the Jacobite Army or militant Jacobite support was largely Catholic disappears when the context alters, for example, in respect of Highland regiments in the Seen Years War of 1756-63 and subsequently, alleged Catholicism mysteriously vanishes though no mass conversion is ever recorded. The need to brand them as ‘other’ has simply disappeared.

A similar schema can be seen operating in analysis of the Jacobite Army in Table 2.

Jacobite Army                                               British Army

Clannish and tribal                                        State and patriotic
Swordsman & individual warriors                Muskets and collective drill
Savage amateurs                                            Civilized professionals
Hillmen and troglodytes                                Bourgeois and propertied interest
Rural and barbaric                                         Urban and civilized


Until quite recently, historians have been content to frame the Rising in these strong and oppositional primary colors. In the 19^th century this was linked to a division of Scotland into two quasi-separate ethnic and cultural (and at times political) entities: the “Highlands’ and the ‘Lowlands’ This division is still in frequent and popular use today, even though, as the leading historical geographer Charles Withers reminds

 

‘ a separateness between Highlands and Lowlands did not exist. In economic relations, in tenurial practices, in marriage patterns, and in the routines of seasonal migration, the Highlands and Lowlands were closely connected . . .in explaining the geography . . ,.we should not suppose the Highlands and the Lowlands separate regions.’

As with the battle itself, the actual evidence of Highland-Lowland economic and social integration presents a much more complex and integrated picture than a stark binary oppositionalism promoted in cultural memory, and until recently by much historiography.

From the 1740s, historians often took their cue from the language of anti-Jacobite propaganda. There were some unsurprising exceptions: for example, James Macpherson, a Jacobite sympathizer from a Jacobite family, asserted ‘the racial and ethnic superiority of the Celts to the English,” and made it clear that Jacobitism had a clear political goal, as the Scottish Jacobites were resolved to risk everything to prevent union.’  There were also some unusually fair-minded writers like Henry Hallam. However, the general framework of Culloden as the victory of progress over backwardness was clearly visible from the loyal addresses of the 1740s to the historians of the 19th century. Even the not unsympathetic Robert Chambers, writing in 1827, saw the Jacobites as deriving from ‘the rudest and least civilized part of the nation’, addicted to a ‘patriarchal society,, and thus primitive in stadial terms. These ‘children of the mountains’ were in their ‘vigor’ (a term which bears out the language of Morier and the cartoon tradition) ‘willing and ready as ever to commence and civil war.’ Though some historians, such as Catherine Macaulay, were sufficiently radical to be relatively positive on Jacobitism in the face of Whig corruption, the general Whig interpretation held. It has been recently stated that the term Whig history ‘lacks specificity and historians should no longer use this prejudicial title’, but the application of stadialism to historical study, the assumption of  teleological progress toward the condition of modernity, and above all the conflation of victory and chauvinistic pride with moral categories can be characterized by no other term so well.

In the middle of the 19th century, Henry Buckle saw the 1745 Rising as ‘the last struggle of barbarism against civilization’. While Macfarlane and Thomson in 1861 sneered at the very notion of a Jacobite chain of command, and Justin McCarthy in 1890 noted that the ‘clansmen’ were ‘as savage and desperately courageous as Sioux or Pawnees’. In 1899, Sir John Fortescue’s magisterial history of the British Army  noted (perhaps with the more recent conflicts on the Northwest Frontier in mind) that ‘the campaign ended, as victorious campaigns against mountaineers must always end, in the hunting of fugitives, the burning of villages, and the destruction of crops’. For Fortescue, Culloden meant that Jacobitism . . .the curse of the kingdom for tree quarters of a century, was finally slain, and the Highlanders, who had been a plague -. . .were finally subjugated’, being ‘little else’ than ‘half-savage mountaineers’. Here the history of the conclusion of the Rising is presented in away which barely veils the subtext of Jacobitism as an avatar of the challenges faced by British imperialism.

In 1939, Basil William took A slightly different tack, personalizing the Rising as a misadventure, ‘which appealed to the romantic Scots’, despite the Prince’s lack of ‘character or strategy’. The ‘romantic attachment’ which led to the unfortunate Rising was itself a character flaw of course, one of fey individualism and the triumph of sentiment over rationality. No evidence of course was adduced for these sweeping ethno-cultural judgments or personality assessments; and William’s point was simply repeated in 1974 by John Owen, who noted that ‘the romantic appeal and personal charm of Charles Edward had proved no substitution for judgement and leadership.’ Cumberland put down the Rising with a firm hand, it was true, but ‘scarcely . . .savagery.’

At the same time, the imperialist metaphors of the Jacobites as ‘backward colonials continued to be reiterated. The image of Morier’s picture, drawn as its gaze was from the expectations of political cartoon propaganda, presented the Jacobites as virile and sexually charged ( the upraised leg and naked thigh), savage and violent. If their attachment to their “Bonnie’ prince was a sign of the sentimental over-emotionalism that made them in darker contexts irrationally and animalistically sexual so their violence and savagery aligned them with Britain’s global; struggles against tribal societies, built- like the victory at Culloden as depicted by Morier – on technical and moral superiority. As the empire decayed, these tropes lingered. In 1952, G. M. Trevelyn identified the Rising as a ‘fantasia of misrule . . . in defiance of Parliament and its laws . . .an Afghanistan . . .within fifty miles of the ‘modern Athens’. The ‘immemorial zest for plunder’ of the ‘hill tribesmen’ was Churchill’s view in 1956, while in 1973  Charles Chevenix Trench proclaimed the Jacobite army to be ‘ savage  Highland horde, as alien . . . as a war party of Iroquois. J. H. Plumb’s approach in 1950 was somewhat different: in England in the Eighteenth Century, Jacobitism is apparently irrelevant enough note even to appear in the index – this is loi de rareté  at its most acute, scarcity translated into absence. John Prebble’s very popular study Culloden, first published in 1961, presented Jacobitism as a backward ideology of ’A race of tribesmen’ whose chiefs were ‘civilized savages’ defending a  society ‘as obsolescent’ as the Jacobite cause itself. In 1981, J. A. Houlding noted that ‘not only were many of the clansmen Catholic . . . but they were a primitive people whose tribal organization was utterly archaic’. Paul Langford noted ‘the preservation of England against a Highland rabble’ in 1989, while Rex Whitworth in 19902 characterized the army and its leaders as ‘the upstart and his rabble of ferocious Highlanders.’ In the same year, Linda Colley utilized the motive of bankruptcy rather than that of charisma to explain way Jacobite support- economic rather than rational incompetence – while noting (incorrectly) that ‘only the poorer  Highland clans’ supported Charles. While more balanced accounts began to increase as we near the present day (although American historiography remains more resolutely Whiggish and still often reacts in a hostile way to the very mention of Jacobitism,), the fundamental account we inherit is based on this narrow and highly binarized version of the victory – and indeed the teleology – of civility over barbarism.. It may have begun to pass from academic to popular history, but its power remains. It was just as well in the terms of this construction that what it identifies as Charles Edward’s band of deluded and sexually incontinent savages were ‘cut to pieces by the withering artillery’ on Culloden battlefield.

The same kind of strongly framed accounts have traditionally prevailed with regard to specific issues relating to the Rising and Culloden. To take only one example, Charles Edward’s conduct in the battle has long been characterized by Lord Elcho’s reputed words on his unavoidable flight after defeat, terming him ‘an Italian coward and a scoundrel sometimes popularized as ‘There you go, you cowardly Italian’. This account has long seemed to carry more weight than the alternatives, where a cornet in the Horse Guards noted that the Prince wanted to charge forward and saved the day, while Sullivan ordered Colonel Colonel O’Shea of Fitzjames’s to take Charles Edwards to safety. ‘They won’t take me alive!’ he screamed, minutes before  being led off the field, guarded by Glenbuchat’s men and the soldiers of the Edinburgh Regiment. Still he tried to return to the fray, before a Scottish officer, Major Kennedy, ‘seized the bridle and led the prince firmly away from the scenes of carnage.’ AS Charles Edward later noted, ‘ he was forced off the field by the people about him. This is especially interesting as the sources for the latter account are Sullivan, Elcho, the Stuart Papers, and the Historical Manuscripts Commission papers; there is strong corroboration. And yet the source for the former account is not Elcho himself (though he loathed Charles Edward and had little motive to conceal it), but an article by Sir Walter Scott. Scott’s account was was comprehensively rebutted by A. C. Ewald in 1875, who noted that it was not in Elcho’s Manuscript Journal and was inconsistent with other accounts. It is not the only piece of Scottish history for which Scott is the uncorroborated source. Yet, despite quite the comprehensive documentation available elsewhere, this characterization of Charles’s cowardice is frequently alluded to, even if the original source is forgotten. It is a powerful denominating line in Peter Watkin’s influential film of 1964, even though modern historians are careful to describe it as a ‘tradition.’

This episode typifies the persistence of un-evidenced allegation and imprecision in describing Culloden; to take one other example, the National Trust for Scotland at the Visitor Center still describe Elcho’s and Balmerino’s Life Guards, Bogot’s  Hussars, and Strathallan’s Pershire Horse as ‘Highland Horse’, though there was nothing “Highland’ about any of them. Morier’s depiction, reinforced by Gaelic romanticism, continues to frame events strongly is such repetitive and limited ways, just as it is telling how many of the more serious historians quoted above virtually repeat each other word for word in their re-inscriptions of the permitted, defined and authorized portrait of Culloden.

The outer parts of this frame were the first to get damaged. History from below and the reassessment of the degree or urban and rural unrest in an age of stability seemed to have little to do with Jacobitism, but began to open up the possibility of considering it in a similar light: it was no coincidence that E. P. Thompson recognized the unacknowledged social; strength of Jacobitism, for example.

[ e.g. “The Tory tradition of paternalism, which looks backward to the Stuart ‘Book of Sports’, and which extends either  patronage or permissiveness, remains extremely vigorous even into the nineteenth century. This theme is too large to betaken into this chapter, but see R. W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850; Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution; E. P. Thompson, page 76 note 2, Customs in Common ]

 

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The politics of Jacobitism has been strongly framed as primitive because of the threat it posed, and the function of the defeat of that threat has in the national narrative of foundational reconciliation. However regular were the Jacobite armies, however well armed and decently led, however welcome their officers in the courts of Europe, the framing power for both British state teleology and Scottish patriot nostalgia relies on a image, ultimately Morier’s image and that of the cartoonists of his era. This is the framing story of dirty badly armed primitives sacrificing themselves with pointless nobility to the orders of an Italian princely, but in the end not contemptibly as they were in reality defending an ancient way of life. Arguably no battle out of living memory is remembered so powerfully and so falsely. ON Culloden Moor on 16 April 1746, what was in some ways the last Scottish army- construction so, paid so, drilled so- with its Franco-Irish and Scoto- French allies, sought to restore Charles Edward’s father to a multi-kingdom monarchy more aligned to European politics than colonial struggle. They were in many essential a regular army; if they had not been, they  would not have have to fight, nor would the Prince  willingly have led them. Outnumbered but not outgunned, cavalry proved their downfall. Ironically, it can be argued that it was not British ball that brought down kilted swordsmen as much as British dragoon blades that cut down Jacobite musketeers. The effect of flanking cavalry on an over-extended infantry formation with little effective reserve was a constant in warfare for centuries, and it is the key to Culloden. The traditional qualities of the battle are as much British as Jacobite. Culloden as it happened is in fact much more interesting than Culloden as it is remembered. It was neither a sacrificial hecatomb of Highland history nor a catalyst for the triumph of British modernity. It was the last battle fought on British  and ended the last armed conflict in which the nature of Britain – and indeed its existence- were at stake. But it no more ended Scotland and Scottish identity than it encapsulated it.


                      

 

Nietzsche's Five Contributions to the Discovery of the Mind by Walter Kaufmann

[ An exposition by Stanley Corngold]

First and foremost is Nietzsche’s skepticism about the reliability of ‘consciousness.’ It is a contribution so complex . . .[with] such far-flung implications that one might despair of putting the point briefly if he himself had not stated it once parenthetically in a mere four words ‘consciousness is a surface.’ In any different contexts he showed how the role of consciousness in our psychic life had been widely and vastly overestimated [D2 54].

In this connection, Nietzsche emerges as a great theorist of repression, as Freud himself noted in The Psychopathology of Everyday , citing Nietzsche’s aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil (2:68): ‘I have done that’ says my memory. ‘I could not have done that,’ says my pride and remains inexorable. Finally, my memory yields’ [D2 55].

Among the most memorable and productive of Nietzsche’s formulations we read:

“Our moral judgments and evaluation, too, are only images and fantasies about a physiological process that is unknown to us . . . All of our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text” [D2 56].

Nietzsche’s rich reflection on the element of fiction that all men and women insert into ordinary experience inspires a good summation from Kaufman, en bon pedagogue: “Finally, there is Nietzsche’s suggestion that our experiences consist largely, if not entirely, of what we lay into them.” These supplements are provoked by our bodily life. Nietzsche  “suggests that our moral judgments and evaluations are rationalizations of unconscious physiological processes. I take it that this means that we are not indignant because an action outrages our moral sense but that the indignation is primary and the moral judgment a rationalization”[D2 57].

Kaufmann certainly rewards us in elaborating Nietzsche’s originality as a theorist of repression. “Resistance”, he writes, “this key concept of psychoanalysis – is actually encountered in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (section 23): a proper physio-psychology has to contend with the unconscious resistance in the heart of the investigator . . . .” [D2 64-65]. As for the distinction between the factitious ego and the deep Self, which consists of the ego’s resistance to ideas, we have only to quote, with Kaufman, Zarathustra’s great, plangent cry: “Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage- whose name is self . . .Always the self listens and seeks; it compares, overpowers, conquers and destroys. It controls, and it is in control of the ego to.. . . What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even perceive himself completely”[D2 69].

 

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“Nietzsche’s second major contribution to the discovery of the mind was his theory of the will to power,’ a concept to which “he  himself gave a central place in his books, beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ [D270]- though contrary claims which can’t be ignored have been made e.g. by Brian Leiter. Nevertheless, on the strength of even its occasional mentions, it has since proved tremendously interesting. Heidegger, for one, singles out the doctrine of the will to power as Nietzsche’s leading idea, supporting his view of Nietzsche as  the last great metaphysician of the West. Kaufmann vigorously denies that the concept of will to power has a metaphysical status for Nietzsche – for Kaufmann this is out of the question, as implying a two worlds view of appearance and ulterior reality, of phenomena and Ding-an-sich, which Nietzsche abhors.

How does Nietzsche profile the will to power? It stands behind his audacious argument in the preface to the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy on behalf of ‘deception’, such “as semblance, delusion, error, interpretation, contrivance, art” as futherers of life. Kaufmann celebrates Nietzsche’s understanding of the will to life, again in opposition to Spinoza and Darwin: in Nietzsche’s words:

“The wish to preserve oneself is the symptom of a condition of distress, of a limitation of the really fundamental instinct of life which aims at the expansion of power and, wishing for that, frequently risks and even sacrifices self preservation [!] .  .   In nature it is not conditions of distress that are dominant but overflow and squandering  .  .  . the struggle for existence is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to live. The great and small struggle always revolves around superiority, around grown and expansion, around power – in accordance with the will to power, which is the will to life (from The Gay Science)” [D2 80-81].

 Kaufmann elaborates the concept  of will to power , for example, the wrong idea of thinking that Nietzsche “associated power exclusively or even primarily with military or political power . . . To his mind, one-up-manship, aggressiveness, jingoism, militarism, racism, conformity, resignation to a drab life, and the desire for Nirvana were all expressions of weakness [D2 91-92]. The crux of Kaufmann’s argument is found in one of Nietzsche’s late jottings, which Kaufmann terms the ‘classical formulation’ of the will to power: “ I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows to turn to its advantage” [D2 105].  The conceptual force of the drive is its demoralizing “the shamefully moralized way of speaking which has gradually made all modern judgments of men and things slimy” [D2 101-2].

Readers of Nietzsche might object to the probity of this claim on recalling that Nietzsche also has no hesitation in flinging about charges of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, but Kaufmann has an answer:

‘When a way of life fascinates us but at the same time elicits strongly negative emotions, this shows that we have a strong desire to live like this ourselves but feel even more strongly that we must not do this. Whether we are fully aware of this or not, we give ourselves moral credit for not indulging in such behavior, and we resent those who do not deny themselves as we do. Nietzsche’s highly emotional attacks on ‘the weak’ are a case in point” [D2102].

 

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Nietzsche’s third important contribution to the discovery of the mind is his analysis of ressentiment. This concept is a lever with which he – and now others- can operate analytically on entire world views as they are shown to inform religions, philosophies, and other belief systems.

Nietzsche locates the origins of ‘slave morality’ in repressed rage at the power of a ruling class or human type, a revaluation producing, for one thing, the table of Christian values. Resentment of vitality inspires the value-creating ‘priest to conceive ‘meekness’ as a virtue; resentment of ostentation as ‘poverty of the heart’; resentment of sexual power as ascetic self-denial; and so forth. There can be no greater tribute to the animating presence of repressed resentment in Christian values than the voluptuous delight that believers will experience from their vantage point in heaven while witnessing the eternal tortures of the damned – nonbelievers by choice or by the unlucky fate of having been born too early or elsewhere. Kaufmann cites another ‘classical’ formulation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: “The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures who are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with imaginary revenge” [D2 12]. But there are ways to get around revenge when you think you have been harmed: you can master that harm, grow from it, and ‘prove” this way, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says, “that [your enemy] . . .did you some good.” Kaufmann is surely aware that this sublimation is easier said than done. Yet the value of this wisdom is unassailable, for “there is no nobler way to overcome resentment and transmute self-pity into a .pervasive sense of gratitude” [D2 122].  Kaufmann associates this transmutation of self-pity with a willingness to absorb criticism and respect for alternatives. “The essence of critical thinking is the consideration of objections and alternatives, while dogmatism ignores both.”

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We have arrived at the fourth of Nietzsche’s major contributions to discovering the mind. This is his pioneering of psychohistory. ”I am trying to show how a psychological understanding of the principal figures . . .help us to understand their philosophies better.” It’s a matter of having some grasp of the mind or mentality of one’s subject.” The interpreter ‘must develop a feeling for what this human being meant of thought”; add to this, “an understanding of a person’s individual style that can only come from prolonged immersion in the works and documents” add to this, finally, a readiness to practice a ‘critical rethinking of the writer’s ideas.” Nietzsche practiced psychohistory in his brilliant analysis of Paul and Jesus and, in its beginnings, Luther. These portraits  are less models to imitate than cogent suggestions for emulation.

Kaufman’s intent is to heed the patient in the text, again and again that invisible but felt author, whose sensibility exceeds any range of ’nuances’ one might find in a work read merely as a weave of words. We have arrived at the clearest understanding of the principle behind Kaufman’s “humanism”: it is the claim that the human being is a richer object of study than any of his works, the value of which is measure in turn by the degree of felt presence of the man. Kaufman’s postulate stands boldly formulated: “The anti-psychological bias of so many scholastics in the humanities is ultimately anti humanistic [FH 71]. It is a war of extreme banners swung by readers who, on he one hand, listen to the author’s wildly beating,(mostly) broken heart; and on the other hand, detect various textual sites of ‘disjunctive ensemble operations.’ More than anyone before them Nietzsche and Freud called attention to the human being who finds expression in a text’ [FH 71].

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The last  of Nietzsche’s contributions to the discovery of the mind is his philosophy of masks [D2 137].  In opposing the ordinary idea that masks are markers of insincerity, Nietzsche (and Kaufmann) bring high praise to this device: it makes for irony, subtlety, and appropriate reserve. Still, “thhe question remains how intellectual integrity and honesty .  .  . can be reconciled with his philosophy of masks” [D2 149]. The answer is not crystal clearer, and Nietzsche’s remarks are rather cryptic, as form fits function. We read, from the speaker’s position of strength, ‘Whatever is profound loves masks”; here there is no suggestion of a compromise in depth. And we also read in the same passage, rather from the position of one who has been harried, how a mask grows around “every profound spirit . . . owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives” [D2 156]. He can no longer  bare his thought if it is only to invite mean thrusts. In any case, we mask the world: “Without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live – that renouncing false judgments would be renouncing life” (D2 152]. How then, could the temptation not arise to think that a personal fiction  might be necessary for survival?

Reference:

[D2] : Discovering the Mind, vol. 2,  Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber; Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 1992
[FH] : The Future of the Humanities. New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1977