The Scholar Starting Brawls with the Enlightenment

The Scholar Starting Brawls with the Enlightenment

 

Has the cult of rationality blinded us to the power of transcendence?

 

 

By James Wood

New Yorker

May 25, 2020

László Földényi conjures a parable from Dostoyevsky’s reading Hegel in Siberia.Illustration by Paul Davis

 

 

Who could resist the title? László F. Földényi’s new book of essays is called “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears” (Yale). It sounds like something that might happen in a Dostoyevsky novel: cause and effect scrambled, reason abolished by extremity, the thunderclap of irrationality producing religious storms of weeping and abasement. And behind it all something faintly farcical, deliberately exaggerated—another of Dostoyevsky’s self-consciously scandalous “scenes.” After all, who in world history has ever read Hegel and burst into tears? Except of frustration?

 

It turns out that we don’t know if Dostoyevsky burst into tears, either; Földényi is punting here. But Dostoyevsky may well have read Hegel in Siberia. His American biographer, Joseph Frank, tells us that in 1854 he wrote to his brother in St. Petersburg, imploring him to send Kant, Vico, Ranke, and the Church Fathers, and “to slip Hegel in without fail, especially Hegel’s History of Philosophy. My entire future is tied up with that.” In 1849, Dostoyevsky had been arrested on bogus charges of revolutionary conspiracy in St. Petersburg, and sentenced to four years of hard labor in a prison camp in the Siberian town of Omsk. On his release, in the spring of 1854, he was sent to Semipalatinsk, in southern Siberia, where he began several years of military service. In effect, this was a further installment of exile: consignment to an “Asiatic” oubliette, a place unnoticed and forgotten, far from “European” Russia. Földényi, in the title essay of his collection, vividly sketches the town’s stark otherness—a gray, treeless outpost, surrounded by barren sandy plains, with a population of between five thousand and six thousand, “half of whom were nomadic Kazakhs, for the most part living in yurts.” An American journalist, visiting in 1885, struck by the sight of camels and “white-turbaned and white-bearded mullahs,” likened the place to “a Mohammedan town built in the middle of a North African desert.”

 

Hegel seems to have viewed Siberia similarly, except that he felt no need to actually see the place. Philosophically, Siberia was flyover country, of no world-historical import. In his “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” published for the first time in 1837, Hegel begins his discussion of Asia with a disclaimer: “We must first of all eliminate Siberia, the northern slope of Asia. For it lies outside the scope of our enquiry. The whole character of Siberia rules it out as a setting for historical culture and prevents it from attaining a distinct form in the world-historical process.” This is what fascinates Földényi. What if, he hypothesizes, Dostoyevsky read Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history while in Semipalatinsk? How would it have felt to hear the great German rationalist philosopher casting you out from the notice of history (and thus from the narrative of European development as he tells it), even as your own country had similarly cast you out? How might that have compounded Dostoyevsky’s punishment and suffering?

 

Földényi uses his essay to stage a broad metaphysical melodrama between opposites that he pursues throughout this fierce, provoking collection (expertly translated by Ottilie Mulzet). He likes to set up the Enlightenment tradition as overweeningly rational and then to use a selected opponent (Dostoyevsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Antonin Artaud, the Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley) as an antirational or otherwise “Romantic” hatchet. Földényi makes Hegel his regal Enlightenment representative. And Hegel had indeed argued that universal history, when viewed philosophically, is rational: “Whoever looks at the world rationally will find that it in turn assumes a rational aspect; the two exist in a reciprocal relationship.” Hegel concedes that, down at the level of particulars, history is a bloody mess, even what he calls a Schlachtbank, a slaughterhouse; but he believes that, viewed from the right philosophical altitude, world history reveals itself as moving with purpose toward the realization and fulfillment of a Spirit—the universal idea of freedom. “Reason cannot stop to consider the injuries sustained by single individuals, for particular ends are submerged in the universal end,” he wrote. In this sense, history is not only rational but also providential: designed, purposive, teleological.

 

 

In Siberia, however, Dostoyevsky fell in love with something like the opposite: with the irrationality of miracle, with the impossible example of Jesus, and, in a sense, with suffering itself. In “Notes from Underground” (1864), Dostoyevsky certainly seems to be thinking of Hegel when his narrator, the Underground Man, concludes that anything can be said about the bloodbath and the mayhem of history except that it is rational: “You’ll choke on the word.” One of the great fictional ranters, the Underground Man mounts an all-out war against the dominant ideologies of nineteenth-century Europe: utilitarianism, scientism, liberal progressivism, communistic utopianism, and, above all, the prestige of rationality. History is not rational, Dostoyevsky’s narrator says, because humans are not. The human sciences are unable to account for our irrationality because they are unable to account for our desires. We want too many strange things (our “various little itches,” as Dostoyevsky wonderfully describes them), often in defiance of our apparent interests: we want to go to war, martyr ourselves for religious causes, take drugs, climb steep rock faces, have perilous affairs. For Dostoyevsky, freedom is tortuous and fraught, in part because it also involves the freedom to abuse it.

 

Földényi, a scholar and critic who teaches the theory of art, in Budapest, is an intense, tendentious, often maddening presence. Few books have as utterly engrossed and powerfully alienated me as this one has. He is drawn to all that was violent and metaphysically reactionary in Dostoyevsky; he admires the religious fist held up to the calm omnipotence of European reason and progress. What is exciting about his title essay is the way he inhabits Dostoyevsky in his very unreason. There is something beautiful in this ventriloquism. Taking the fight to Hegel, Földényi speculates that perhaps history reveals itself not to rational people “but to those whom it has cast out of itself.” In a brilliant moment of critical imagining—I think of Földényi as doing a kind of method acting—he jeers at Hegel’s proposal that whoever looks rationally at history will find that it looks rationally back at him. Well, Földényi asks, when Dostoyevsky glanced into his small mirror in Siberia, what did he see looking back? Not a rational man. Perhaps not even a man but an alienated other: “Nobody looks back at us from a mirror. We can try to bravely face ourselves: our gaze is engrossed in the eyeballs of a stranger, who stares fixedly into nothingness. Not only does this stranger not look outward, he does not even look inward. He is dead, numb—if we pay long attention—even haunting.”

 

The problem is that Földényi is not content to stage a merely imaginary struggle. He edges toward all-out brawls, generally between highly armed simplicities. On one side, there is Hegel, who is wielded by Földényi as the false god of everything most triumphantly repellent about Enlightenment rationality; and on the other side there is Dostoyevsky, righteously suffering and properly rebuking the European tradition for its secularizing arrogance. Földényi sees Hegel, and by extension the eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Enlightenment project, as a vast, disenchanting bulldozer, crushing God and mystery under the machinery of its rationality. Hegel’s narrative of history, Földényi says, might look religious, but in fact God has been dethroned. “In the Hegelian interpretation of history, everything designated ‘divine’ is subordinated to something under the supervision of human beings,” he writes. Enlightenment rationalism proceeded “in the name of God, but lacking all divine spirit.” Confident that it could solve everything, it sought explanation for things that could never be explained, and failed to respect the mystery of what Földényi calls “divine unboundedness” and, elsewhere, “the infinite and the transcendent.”

 

As Földényi works away at this theme, his rhetoric becomes unguarded. Behind Hegel’s dismissal of Siberia, he tells us, “lies his secret wish to assassinate God.” European civilization has never been more convinced of its rectitude than it is now, and yet has never been more threatened, either. Heirs of Hegel, we are spoiled children, allowed to do whatever we want with our unchecked secular power. The true god of the modern age is technology; we are tremendously, imperially successful, but “we have murdered God with our ambition”:

And it is none other than our drive to find an answer for everything. When we began to seek solutions for things for which there are clearly no solutions, this ambition became transformed into hubris. In other words, it occurred when even transcendence itself turned into a practical question.

Földényi can sound much like Dostoyevsky at his most religiously reactionary, in the eighteen-seventies when he was writing his monthly columns, with titles such as “Slugs Taken for Human Beings” and “A Landowner Who Gets Faith in God from a Peasant.” Földényi’s title essay does more wild imploring than the rest of his book, which contains subtle, calmer pieces on Kleist, on Elias Canetti, on sleep and dreams, on happiness and melancholy. One clue to its extremity might be that he was writing about Dostoyevsky in 1997 (most of the other essays first appeared in the twenty-first century). Back then, as a Hungarian academic, he was still at the periphery of the confident European political project (Hungary didn’t join the E.U. until 2004), a mere voyeur of the Western world’s post-Communist self-congratulation, chafing at American-Hegelian predictions of “the end of history” yet hurtling toward an unknowable millennium. One can see how anxiety and skepticism might have led him to overidentify with a Russian sufferer cast out of history.

 

Still, the same strident argument keeps pushing its claw through even the milder pieces. It could be compacted into an aphorism by the Romanian-French philosopher E. M. Cioran: “We know a great deal about ourselves; on the other hand, we are nothing.” Földényi regularly quotes Cioran (though not this particular sentence), and perhaps sees himself joining what is now a busy tradition of European lament, negation, and anti-Enlightenment critique, most of it by conservatives (like Carl Schmitt and Cioran himself), though occasionally by radicals (Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault); some of it atheistic (Friedrich Nietzsche), much of it religiously grounded (T. S. Eliot, Charles Taylor).

 

Földényi’s version can be told like this: Enlightenment rationality not only displaced God and made a new god of reason—it redefined freedom as purely instrumental rather than metaphysical, as something humans can shape and control. But true freedom, Földényi believes, is “only achieved through that which surpasses (transcends) me”—what is beyond our powers, beyond our comprehension. If we renounce this otherworldly idea of freedom, we start building utopias on earth, which rapidly become dystopias. Here, Földényi closely follows Dostoyevsky, who had seen the Crystal Palace built, in London, for the 1851 Great Exhibition, and had shuddered with horror at this temple to capitalist triumphalism. Földényi’s version of the Crystal Palace is what he calls, in an essay that takes the phrase as its title, “the globe-shaped tower”—the Tower of Babel, built by hubristic rationalism but spherical, to represent the single, globalized market of Western capitalism. When “the Good” became limited to utility, advantage, and pragmatism, “the globe began to shrink.”

 

But what is this “transcendence” that has supposedly been banished from the world? If you read only Földényi’s title essay, you might assume that he was a fervent Christian, but he’s notably coy about what it is that transcends us. He talks about transcendent “goals,” the importance of “remaining open to the metaphysical traditions,” of how our lives are “nested within a much larger coherence,” of “divine unboundedness,” and even of “the divine.” But if he really means God when he invokes the divine, why not say it? Dostoyevsky would not have been so mealymouthed. While excoriating rationalism for “the mistaken belief” that it can “explain the unexplainable,” Földényi urges us to be mindful of our “human embeddedness within the cosmos.” The person open to metaphysics understands that he “has received the gift of existence without ever having been asked about it, and he will lose his life as well without having been asked for his consent.”

 

Surely, though, there’s a large gap between acknowledging “the divine” (whatever Földényi means by this) and merely being “open to metaphysical traditions” (which sounds like a willingness to read a bit of Plato or Camus). Wisdom about the brevity of life, about how its gift was not requested and can easily be withdrawn, doesn’t presume transcendence or the divine; it may presume the very opposite. This lament for a steady disenchantment with the world has been called a “subtraction story.” The critic Bruce Robbins has pointed out that such elegies too easily conflate a loss of magic with a loss of meaning. To be without metaphysics is not to be without meaning. And are we without metaphysics, in any case? Hasn’t cosmology shown us, with extraordinary clarity, a version of “divine unboundedness,” minus the divine? It has shown us what lies beyond our comprehension and our control (at least, for most of us), and revealed very much our “human embeddedness within the cosmos.” Földényi presumes that we are nested “within a much larger coherence,” but at such a moment he reveals his own repressed Enlightenment inheritance: why coherence? To feel that we live within a much larger incoherence is still a metaphysical insight—ask Camus.

 

Földényi’s opacity about transcendence—any kind will do, as long as it “transcends”—would appear to involve him in the same kind of dethronement of which he accuses the Enlightenment. And his rendering of the Enlightenment is a grievous caricature. In his prosecutorial zeal, he passes over what a noble and hard-won achievement such rationalism represents. Think of the dark forces of religious superstition, backed up by the terrifying power of the state, that the great anti-religionists and rationalists had to fight in order to bring to us the illumination that nowadays is so painless. It cost Diderot three fearful months in a Vincennes prison, along with grovelling promises to toe the line for the rest of his life, to be able to write these moving, rational, fiercely anti-theological but actually humble words:

If we think a phenomenon is beyond man, we immediately say it’s God’s work; our vanity will accept nothing less, but couldn’t we be a bit less vain and a bit more philosophical in what we say? If nature presents us with a problem that is difficult to unravel, let’s leave it as it is and not try to undo it with the help of a being who then offers us a new problem, more insoluble than the first.

 

Conversely, Földényi tends to neglect just how religious many of those Enlightenment rationalists continued to be. Hegel’s God wasn’t just the “backdrop” to his rationalism; on the contrary, his version of history is essentially a providential theology, in which the Christian God, moving through world history in the guise of freedom, steadily reveals himself. Hegel calls it a theodicy: that is, a defense of God’s ways in the world. This vision is scarcely devoid of transcendence or metaphysics.

 

The strange thing is that, on the evidence of the rest of his book, Földényi knows all this. When he writes about Canetti (in one of the strongest essays), or about Kleist, or about sleeping and dreaming (he uses as his text Goya’s etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”), he proves himself a brilliant interpreter of the dark underside of Enlightenment ambition. Ironically enough, given his disdain for Hegel’s methods, Földényi is at his best when he is most dialectically supple: he shows how Enlightenment clarity, dedicated to banishing the shadows of superstition and intolerance, cast new shadows—the anxieties, doubts, tremors, and passions that would become what we choose to call Romanticism.

 

How and why did the Enlightenment produce such antibodies? In his essay “Kleist Dies and Dies and Dies” (he’s awfully good at those titles), Földényi notes that no death was more celebrated than the double suicide of Kleist and his lover and muse Henriette Vogel, near Berlin, on November 21, 1811. It joined Young Werther’s fictional suicide as the ultimate romantic gesture. But what really interests Földényi is that Kleist essentially began his career as a kind of Enlightenment optimist, with a work, written on the cusp of the nineteenth century, titled “Essay on the Sure Way to Find Happiness and to Enjoy It Even in the Greatest Tribulations” (1799). Two years later, though, Kleist went through what is called his “Kantian” crisis, in which his faith in truth was obliterated. He wrote to his sister, “The thought that we here on earth may know nothing, nothing at all of Truth . . . this thought has shattered me in the innermost sanctum of my soul.” Here and elsewhere in his book, Földényi seems to suggest that an insistence on happiness (whether political or quasi-theological) encourages and produces melancholy or despair—the dark opposite that it was always trying to banish.

 

Whether or not you accept Földényi’s account of Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment dynamics as intellectual history, he is at his best when situating himself on the wavering and vulnerable borderline between movements. His own contradictions are oddly engrossing. In the book’s magnificent final essay, Földényi calls Canetti’s strange, original masterpiece “Crowds and Power” (1960), “a great pessimistic expression of the viewpoint that man is irreparable,” an exploration of how “the European Enlightenment lost the potential for emancipation that lay within its reserves.” Canetti, Földényi says, sees the crowd as a universal phenomenon of history, something that cannot be separated from existence itself: “The crowd is the condition humaine.” The crowd can be both useful and terrible. It connects us to one another, “saves one from the fear of touch, offers protection from the unknown. And yet at the same time it eliminates my own individuality.” (In our current crisis, these words are charged with pathos.)

 

Földényi has almost returned to the intense pairing of his title essay. On one side, there is Hegel’s universal freedom, a final rational good in history; on the other side, Canetti’s universal crowd, at best an ambiguous, irrational potency in history. But, while the title essay is nearly fanatical, the last essay calmly explores Canetti on his own terms, and is the stronger for it. What becomes movingly clear is that Földényi also sees some version of himself in Canetti. He writes powerfully and sympathetically about Canetti’s position on the periphery of Europe, his every page bursting with metaphysical power, with the question “What is man?” This was a writer unwilling to be constrained by “the rigid grid system of academic disciplines”—a writer who loved Stendhal because, as he put it, “he thought much, but his thoughts were never cold.” In the midst of László Földényi’s intellectual storms, there is no higher praise. ♦

 

 

Published in the print edition of the June 1, 2020, issue, with the headline “In from the Cold.”

 

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In November, he will publish “Serious Noticing,” a selection of essays.