Ugo Stornaiolo S., Associate Editor of the Miskatonian, had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Hörcher and covered topics such as prudence and moderation in the conservative mind, Hungarian constitutional history, and the spirit and aesthetic manifestation of Central European culture.

Ugo – Hello and welcome, Professor Hörcher, thanks for joining us today.

Ferenc – Thanks you Ugo, I’m happy to be with you today.

Ugo – My first question is usually to ask our interviewees to introduce themselves a little bit so our audience knows better who you are and why we’re talking today. As a heads up, I can tell them already that you’re an Hungarian professor, and that you’re well known in circles where the work of Roger Scruton, the famous British conservative political philosopher, is appreciated.

Ferenc – Sure, yes: I am a historian of political thought, a political philosopher, an historian of art and I’m also literary critic and a poet, so I’ve have got a number of interests and I have a long experience of teaching in higher education. For quarter of a century I taught at the Department of Aesthetics of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, here in Hungary, where I also established a Doctoral School in Political Theory. I then led for six years the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and right now, I am the head of a relatively small research unit at the University of Public Service, here in Budapest, and since this is a research professor’s position, I have the obligation to publish and to have occasions like this one to give an account of my research.

Ugo – Well, it seems you’re a very busy person, and I happen to know some of your academic contributions because you do publish a lot. I think I was first introduced to your body of work with a book you wrote on on the historical Hungarian constitutions, so from that, I was wondering if you have any legal training or if you are somehow connected to the legal profession.

Ferenc – That’s right: I also taught at the law school of the Catholic University and I got an master’s degree in Legal Theory from the Universities of Brussels and Louvain/Leuven, in Belgium, and I taught for some years legal philosophy and the history of legal thought. I don’t know if you are aware of another book of mine on those subjects, because my master’s thesis got reworked and edited into a book format. The title is Prudentia Iuris: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Natural Law.

Ugo – Well no, I was not aware of it, so thanks for the heads up. I’ll get to check it soon for my own research, and speaking of which, I mean, I have been in Central Europe for around two years by now and when I first arrived I thought about getting in touch with some likeminded people in our common spheres, and I think I first found you through your book on the Hungarian historical constitution, but also because you have kind of an important presence in in social media, such as in Twitter/X, and there’s a lot of followers of the late sir Roger Scruton who are connected with you because of these links you have with, let’s say, the philosophy of conservatism and aesthetics, as many of your contributions have been in these two areas. My first question in that sense is how did you get involved in conservative political philosophy, where does your connection to Sir Roger Scruton comes from, and what’s your link with the philosophy of aesthetics.

Ferenc – Well, these are three independent questions, so I’ll try to answer them one by one:

First, I was born, you know as far as conservatism is concerned, in a communist country, in communist Hungary in the 60s, in 1964 in particular, so my conservatism is rooted into an anti-communist stance.

I guess it’s my family background which prepared me for that, so its was not a question that I was never really satisfied with my country being occupied by Russian communist tanks so, that’s the origins, but I did not prepare to become a conservative political philosopher per se because of that.

That came later, during my stay in Oxford, England, where I was a visiting graduate at Oral College and where I studied what I thought was a Third Way, beyond this duality of Communism and Western capitalism, but which turned out to be an investigation on conservatism, and in particular, on the work of Edmund Burke.

We could say, thus, that was my initiation into conservatism: through anti-communism and my research in Oxford into the work of Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and that’s not far away from Roger Scruton’s own interests, so that leads us to your second question.

Roger Scruton was a Cambridge-educated philosopher of art and political philosopher and he had a special interest in Central Europe, just like you, which is actually very rare, and very appreaciated by us Central Europeans, but basically Scruton was someone like that, and he came over beyond the Iron Curtain already in the late 70s and 80s so that was quite a courageous thing to do and, of course, I could have met him already then but I did not meet him until 1992 when it was already after the fall of the Berlin wall and the Iron Curtain but still decades ago and as I had always found his work relevant, we had a number of occasions to meet and participate in conferences and I even had the chance to respond to one of his lectures, at the University of Warsaw, so there were regular occasions to meet and discuss things.

I also worked as a journalist for some time in the 2000s and I made interviews with him as well, so we were well acquianted, and the result of that was that when he died in 2020, I decided to to write this book about him, Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, which got published by Palgrave McMillan in 2022/2023, so that’s the connection to Roger and it also leads to your third question: the philosophy of art, which is also an interest I shared with with Roger, whose primary interest was also the philosophy of art, which is, according to the German tradition, aesthetics: the the study of the sensual perception and in particular the study of beauty, the sublime and other aesthetic qualities.

This plays well with my other interests, as I mentioned I am practicing poet, so I was always interested in literature and the arts and that’s why I gave some time to study the theory of it and as a result of that, I published a history of the of the French, English and German uh early modern aesthetic thought from 1650 to 1800, so from the court of Versailles and Louis XIV up to Immanuel Kant and Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) so that’s that’s that’s my my interest it’s partly historical but also theoretical.

I have a a theory that in fact an aesthetic judgment the ability to make decisions about what is beautiful and what is not is connected or has it the same operational pattern as the judgment that we need in politics or for that matter in legal decision-making: a kind of practical wisdom or practical judgment.

Ugo – The way they actually connected was quite interesting and especially because it creates a train of thought which explains how you ended up working in the topics and the spheres you are, and at the same time it really gives a background into into your work.

I also kind of project myself a little bit into you because we have a similar background at least in our professions and in our interests, so I do understand how that goes.

But I mean, in more practical aspects one of my questions would be what exactly you learned and what exactly made you really feel you know inclined about the political philosophy of conservatism instead of any of the other currents.

I mean we have the misconception that conservatism is just pretty much defending free markets capitalism and know the American version of conservatism, but in British and in Central European thought is something way different and closer to traditionalism actually, so my question, maybe for you to add up a little bit to the first part of of your answer, would be what really made you be interested interested in that instead of just anti-communism and the superficial promotion of free markets and democracy.

Ferenc – Anti-communism for me was not only about free market and and free speech, although these are important things, I would say, but my basic problem with communism was that it was, well, if you want to be kind you can say it was “mistaken”, but if you are stronger you would say it was based on a lie and that mistake or lie concerned its view of human nature: it had a false view of human nature.

I myself was brought up as a Christian, a Catholic, in particular, and that was actually something that was forbidden, or maybe, “not advised”, let’s put it this way, in a communist context, to bring your children up in Catholic doctrine, and of course in Catholic moral theology you are introduced to the idea of the sinfulness of human nature, which is the starting point, so to say, and that was what I was brought up in, and so I saw it very obviously, that the perfectionism and the utopian hopes and optimism that is part of the Marxist ideological smoke screen are not true, so that’s why I thought that I should dig deeper.

With Edmund Burke I found an author who could indeed show me that that there is a political tradition which is based on the assumption that if we take into account the real nature of the human being, then you have to be much more cautious in your politics and after the 20th century I think that lecture or that lesson was even more important than in the end of the 18th century. Of course, the French Revolution, which was the cause of Burke’s Reflections was terrible and the bloodshed together with actually some very nice and very optimistic hopes, but the 20th century was even worse: the totalitarian regimes (nazi, fascist and communist) showed us the most brutal face of politics and the killing machines that can come out of that.

Some of those totalitarian regimes were based on these nice utopian illusionary views of the human being, so I always felt that as a responsible person (and we intellectuals need to be responsible because we have got that privilege that we could spend our time in our youth studying instead of just working for survival) that means that we have to take care of what the public opinion is about or about how the public perception of reality turns, and therefore I always felt it my obligation to try to share that sort of wisdom which comes out from the tradition that I trace back to Aristotle and partly even to Plato and then through the Romans, like Cicero, and the others up to Christianity, such as Augustine and of course Aquinas in particular, then the Renaissance humanists and the early modern thinkers like the Spanish Jesuits and their Italian counterparts as well as the British tradition.

These are all important for me because they all trying to call our attention to the fact that the human being is full of uncontrollable passions, aggression, willpower, and therefore you have to be able to control those passions, and in particular, you have to take care of mass psychology because we are living in a mass democracy and within that context it’s even more important to be able to have the balance and to keep the heat low in order to avoid major outbreaks of violence and terror and war.

Ugo – Taking in particular your last point and before my next question, I have something to ask you because, as you may know, conservatism, at least for some authors and for some thinkers, you included, is a philosophy or a doctrine of prudence and moderation, so I would like you to expand a little bit on that statement and to explain to people who might not be very familiar with that what that means, especially what’s prudence, what’s moderation, how are these virtues, and why do they matter to keep a healthy and a stable society.

Ferenc – Mostly yes: you are right. That’s a very strong historical tradition but I also use those concepts and ideas in my own understanding of political conservatism. I published a volume with the title “The Political Philosophy of Conservatism” and the subtitle “Prudence, Moderation and Tradition“, and I found these three concepts important for me for the same reason our liberal friends tend to start out from the cardinal virtue of justice.

Think about John Rawls, for example, perhaps the most influential 20th century liberal thinker, and his most important book is called A Theory of Justice. And in fact, yes, it tries to work out the conditions for a just society.

But I thought that justice might be important, but there might be something before one can turn towards achieving justice in your society. You need to keep order and peace in your society. You have to find the minimum conditions of cooperation and cohabitation. And for that, justice is too far away. What you need is rather, as I mentioned, to keep down the passions and the uncontrollable motivations for violence and brutality and envy and all those things.

And to achieve that, we know from the Christian teaching that the cardinal virtue of prudence or practical wisdom is crucial because it does not give us a key of the metaphysical truth of our conditions or the human phenomenon, but it provides not simply a technique or a skill, but rather a virtue, a habitus, a kind of ingrained and internalized excellence, which is a virtue of a practical nature, which will help us to make decisions in difficult situations. I usually describe this with the following metaphor or allegory:

Imagine that you enter a Saloon somewhere in the American Wild West in the early 19th century as a cowboy. And you are thirsty, you want to have a drink. But this is a pub which you never entered before. And you have to be aware that there are certain risks when you enter a Saloon or a Pub. You have to be careful about who is in, what are the intentions of those in, and what are the possible risks for you to enter.

And that is, I think, the attitude of the one who has got practical wisdom. It’s an attitude of cautious foresight, of an effort to try to be able to get all the necessary information to make good decisions, what to do next. That’s the most important thing: it’s not necessarily to have long-term strategies, but more of a tactical thing. But you always have to keep in mind the telos, the goal of the whole thing, and it’s not simply survival, but the common good of the community, in fact.

You are not only, as the cowboy who enters the Saloon, interested to save your own life, but you want to have a good time for all of those in there. And that’s the sort of thing, what you need, a practical judgment, the ability to see potential dangers, and also the space for maneuver, and the ability to do good, or at least to avoid to do bad things.

Ugo – I’m going to connect this reply about the meaning of prudence, and of wisdom, and of practical knowledge, which is kind of a staple in conservatism. Empiricism somehow became very, very associated with conservatism, despite not being part of the same tradition at first. This links with both your legal training and maybe the idea of natural rights and natural law.

So I want to ask you, how do you see that in the realm of natural law, since there’s the issue that there’s a lot of thinkers of natural law are either only lawyers, and they just think about it on the legal sphere, or only philosophers, and they don’t really apply it to the legal sphere. So maybe you have the right amount of votes as both a legal scholar and as a political philosopher to explain this to a layman.

The modern renaissance of natural law came after the Second World War, for obvious reasons, i.e. that positivism could not help avoiding the most horrible, anti-human, inhuman decisions by decision makers.

But my problem with the tradition of natural law is that it claims to have those universal standards for once and for all. And I never knew how to make sense of it within the historical dimension of the human being. I thought that there is a learning process, perhaps, here.

And even if these standards are universal, I had the feeling that Adam and Eve in paradise surely were not aware of all of them at once. So my assumption is that human history is actually a learning process, a learning process which comes out of repeated trial and error procedures. Human societies try to solve their practical problems, and the better the solutions are, the longer the society can survive. 

This allows us, on the long run, to find out those standards which help the societies to survive for longer. And that means that my idea of natural law is quite close actually to the concept of common law in the British context, i.e. that we need to see the precedence, we see have to see earlier cases, earlier historical states of affairs and decision-making processes and the results.

And through that we can find those principles and standards which crystallized with time and which we can claim belong to what we traditionally call natural law. So that’s my own understanding of natural law: the principles are universal, but they need to be learned through human history.

Ugo – Speaking of common law, well, as an Hungarian jurist, you know that the history of the Hungarian constitution is quite similar to how Britain has retained an unwritten constitution, and if I’m not wrong, Hungary has not had a proper written, “single document” constitution until, I would say, around 10 years ago?

Ferenc – Well, mid-20th century, in 1946 was the first written version and then the communist constitution was introduced and that was already a written paper.

Ugo – Sure, but I mean a constitution that actually follows the Hungarian tradition, not the communist experiment, and you as a jurist, could take the Hungarian cas, and actually you did in your book (A History of the Hungarian Constitution: Law, Government and Political Culture in Central Europe), explaining how that developed from centuries of political experimentation and changes in Hungarian history.

I was wondering if there was some connection in your study about Hungarian legal and constitutional history and some of your conclusions about natural law and about conservatism.

Ferenc – Yes, yes, of course, you are on the right track. One’s historical investigations and one’s theoretical reflections should be in harmony. And indeed, although I call myself an Anglophile, someone who appreciates British culture in general and the English common law in particular, and the British parliamentary system and all that, I am a Hungarian, a loyal Hungarian citizen, and as such, I’m very proud to have this long-standing tradition of unwritten or better said, uncodified laws, because there were certain laws which were put down and they adapt that uncodified constitution which we are talking about.

Now, you are asking me about that tradition, which is a centuries-long tradition: Hungary got its state formation 1,000 years ago, or by now it’s a little bit longer, and those 1,000 years of Hungarian history were based on certain Christian and certain local jurisprudential principles, but the basic one which was usually referred to was a collection of customary laws as well as statutes which tried to bring together about 500 years of legal developments, the so-called Tripartitum, the three-part collection by István Verbőczy from the early 16th century.

That means that we had 500 years without such collections, or at least just smaller ones, and mind you, this is not an official collection, it never got the signature of the king for its authorization, but it was accepted as a correct collection of Hungarian laws, partly customary law, but also partly the laws given by our kings.

And the major idea behind that is a kind of an interaction between the country, between the community of the different orders of society, you have to keep in mind that this is a feudal social system, and both the country and the king are part of a higher unit which is called the crown, as the Hungarian crown is the sacred symbol which unifies the king and his country.

And all the procedures of creating new laws are like a dialogue between the country, between the different orders assembled in the national assembly, and the king. They are the two partners to it, and as a result of the dialogues, the laws are born.

And that is, I think, a very nice and early example of how to formalize procedures in a way to ensure that different interests will be taken into account, but also the general interest, i.e. the interest of the country as represented by the assembly, and also as embodied by the king, so the two parts of the discussion unite and through that dialogue comes these procedures resulting in the right decision. And all that centuries-long history of dialogue resulted in certain principles, like the principle that the king should always take into care the good of the country.

Of course in those days “the good of the country” basically meant the good of the nobility, one should be aware of that, but the interest of the general good was the legitimating force behind the activity of the king, and as soon as there was a recognition that that was not the case, the king lost his position quasi by the force of the law, because he did not take into account the interest of the common good, which was the first and the primary interest of his rule.

Ugo – I’m going to make a connection with the next topic, since there’s a lot of historical coincidences, as well as a lot of differences between the constitutional development in Hungary and the one in Poland, in particular the idea of the crown as separated from the figure of the monarch, and the “enfranchised people”, the nobility, with political power that kind of collaborate or are in tandem with the monarch in order to compose the crown.

However, there’s a key difference, and that is that Poland successfully established an electoral monarchy during the existence of its First Rzeczpospolita/Republic, and they had a wider range of foreign and local monarchs, whereas Hungary became part of the Habsburg realm pretty early on, and it stayed as part of their Danubian monarchy until around a 100 years ago, and had their struggles for independence as well quite a couple of times. I think the two most famous ones are Rákóczi’s War of Independence and the Revolution of 1848 that ended up in the compromise of the 1860s, so I was wondering what do you think made these differences in Hungarian constitutional history and in the Hungarian political tradition?

Ferenc – Well, of course, the geopolitical situation of the two countries is different, and that resulted in different turns of their history. Most importantly, the Turks came up from the east-south and south-southern parts of Europe up to take the middle part of Hungary for 150 years, which resulted in the country divided into three parts, and as a result, the Habsburgs could strengthen their power over one part of it, and that became the foundation of the kingdom later on as well.

But it’s not the right formulation to give an account of the Hungarian constitutional situation in the early modern period, is not that Hungary is part of the Habsburg monarchy, because Hungary was always ruled according to the Hungarian constitution, and so from a Hungarian perspective, it was rather the case that we happened to have the House of Habsburg as our kings, but we, the Hungarian kingdom, the geographic locality called the Hungarian kingdom was not part of any other monarchy like the Habsburg monarchy, because this part of the realm was ruled according to different rules than all the other parts of the realm, and it could not be ruled without the support of the orders, the feudal orders, and that meant that no king could be crowned without taking an oath and without being crowned in presence of certain people, by certain persons who were either from the secular or the religious established order of the country.

That means that for all these hundreds of years, when we had Habsburg kings, it was always the case that they could only rule according to the oath that they made, and with the condition that they were crowned in the right presence, by the right persons, at the right location actually. So a number of criteria had to be met, and in fact that was not the case for any other parts of the Habsburg  realm. And as for the settlement of 1867, that was indeed perhaps the high point of Hungarian political wisdom. 

Why? Because Hungary had to realize that by that time, a mid-sized country within the center of Europe, with the Habsburgs and the Germans on the one side, and the Russians and the Turks on the other side, they had to find a modus vivendi, how to rule themselves, and in this way how to save the basic sovereignty of the country, under whatever construction it can be saved.

And the settlement was a dual monarchy. Once again, Hungary is not part of the Austrian monarchy, it’s a construction of a dual monarchy with the same ruler, the same king, but that king was an emperor in the Austrian part, and a king in the Hungarian part, and the settlement was that Hungary will keep on ruling itself according to its own constitutional tradition, so again this dialogue between the Hungarian people, its elites and the king, but the foreign affairs and the military decisions as well as the treasury were to be held together for both Austria and Hungary.

So these are the areas that were not exclusively controlled by the Hungarian government, but that did not meant they gave up their participation in the decision-making process in those fields. And I think that was a very substantial compromise, or rather settlement, because it provided ample opportunity for development, and also to keep the traditions alive, and it defended Hungary from foreign invasions until the First World War.

Ugo – There are two questions I could make from this. The first will stay on this historical development, and if I may play little devil’s advocate in here, because there’s a certain tradition, legal theory, even jurisprudence going in the development of the historical spirit of the law and so on and so forth, but then you also have a more power-based understanding of law which is fairly associated with the thought of German jurist Carl Schmitt.

And I was going to ask you: do you think this constant state of warfare in which Hungary found itself during half of its existence was what really gave the necessity to have these foreign rulers from the House of Habsburg to be pretty much their main military commanders against every other invasion that could be around?

I might be reading too much in between lines, but there’s a certain idea that if you need these powerful figures, usually military commanders, to take the reins of government because the situation is so overwhelming that you need someone with extraordinary, exceptional powers to rule and restore order. And this also happened with Admiral Miklás Horthy later during the years between both world wars. In both cases, there’s the strongman that takes power because the country is in a situation of exception.

Do you think we could apply Carl Schmitt’s understanding of power politics and of the exception of laws as a situation that explains some of the Hungarian political and constitutional development.

Ferenc – We can, of course, but we should tell our audience that on this issue, we have different positions, for I go for a more Aristotelian understanding of the nature of politics, and you appreciate more Carl Schmitt on this point, but of course, Schmitt says that within a geopolitical context, we would call an international law or international relations. 

Nonetheless, my understanding of politics is more about internal affairs, because it’s the Aristotelian starting point where you have a political community and you have to organize the life of that community.That’s my basic assumption, and for that, you might have occasions when you have, you are in need of a strong military leader. These are, for example, the Roman dictators, but otherwise, what you need is practical wisdom and and just a good sense, a sensus comunis, the right understanding of what’s at stake. 

And in that respect, my example of a good ruler in Hungary is not Horthy, who was actually quite successful, I do not want to deny that, but my example is from his period, it’s István Bethlen from 1920 to 1930 roughly, and Gábor Bethlen, who was a prince of Transylvania in the 17th century. 

These two, both named Bethlen, so it’s easy to remember their names, illustrate the idea that to rule, in fact, you need to make compromises, and you sometimes even have to give up certain powers of sovereignty. For example, Gábor Bethlen had to make deals with the Ottoman Empire, as well as with the Habsburgs. But if you make those external compromises, then you can rule your own country within your own borders, according to your standards and your values. I think that’s something very important.

Both Bethlens were regarded quite highly by the European powers in those days because it’s always important for foreign powers, for the great powers, that there is peace in the smaller areas, which they don’t want to deal with.

In this sense, I think you can find a modus vivendi between the requirements or the demands of the great powers around you and your own people. These are the two sides that you have to keep in balance, and in that respect, I think it’s not enough to have powerful military leaders. You also nned t have men of practical wisdom.

Ugo – In the end, it all comes to the distinction between the politics of community and friendship, which would be more in the Aristotelian sense, and a certain politics of friend-enemy distinction and of conflict, which is more of the Schmittian understanding. We somewhat understand who were the historical enemies of the Hungarian polity in history, and there might be some remnants of that, at least in the way how Hungary deals in its affairs now.

Ferenc – Well, there is always a division line within, I guess, most of the countries, but in Hungary especially, and the division line can be drawn along religious or political values. For example, we talked about the Habsburg influence in Hungary, and there were groups who were pro-Habsburg and anti-Habsburgs, and that was a very powerful division line within Hungarian politics for centuries, whether you could accept the Habsburgs or whether you would never accept them as legitimate rulers.

Another division line is the Catholic-Protestant division line, which divided Hungary along the line of the Danube. That was basically the most important geographic division line within the Hungarian kingdom, traditionally, and even today.

And the western part belonged earlier to the Roman Empire and it became early Christianized, and then it became also Catholic and remained Catholic when Protestantism got its time, and the eastern part became Protestant and the Protestants were usually anti-Habsburg as well, so the religious division and your position about a foreign ruler went hand in hand.

Interestingly, I would say that the best parts of our history was when the two sides could play out their roles in a balance.

For example, we had the Rákóczi’s War of Independence in the early first decade of the 18th century, and they failed. They were anti-Habsburg, and in that sense, the revolutionary ones. But then a very good peace treaty was drawn, and as a result, the 18th century is actually quite peaceful and quite dynamically developing in Hungary, which is not something that you learn in school, because in the school you learn your great struggles for liberty and your tragic falls. You don’t learn about the ordinary normal decades of human or national history when things went well, because there are no news in it.

You need to fight for liberty in order to get the settlement, but also you have to get the settlement to get out the best what that fight was for. So the successful periods are when the two things can go hand in hand. And I think that after 1990 with the newly born freedom again, there is a need for balance.

There is a need for those who fight and there’s a need for those who can make the compromises and the settlements. That also points to international relations, and there has always been this link with other countries around.

Ugo – Talking about Austria would be self-explanatory in the Hungarian historical context with the relationship with the Habsburgs, but what about other countries? Hungary has very brotherly relationships with other countries close by, Poland, in particular, or Croatia, maybe.

But I think that there is here also a kind of inferiority complex. Hungary used to be at least a mid-sized country and the country which had very powerful kings for centuries, and at some moment, our kingdom was as big as it was bordered by three seas, so it was quite a huge one. Sometimes Poland and Hungary were even under the same king as well.

But it has a good influence on a public mentality if a country was big and then it becomes small but it has some bad aspects as well. And that bad aspect of this Hungarian historical tradition is that we always complain. We complain that the world is conspiring against us, that we are the underdogs and we are not taken as equal or we are not dealt with in a fair manner. These are the complaints that I think can add up to a kind of an inferiority complex if it’s done without kind of moderation and tact.

So that’s my answer to it: sometimes Hungarians have this feeling that they only have friends in the Poles and perhaps sometimes the Croatians but that’s all. With Italy as well, there were good relations, but that’s it.

And you also have to take into account culture: the Hungarian language is not belonging to the Slavic or the Romance language families, so in that sense, it’s something very exceptional. Nobody else connects to it. The same way, Hungarian culture, in which literature has a very powerful position, is not understood by others, because they don’t speak the language. This means that a lot of things that are important in the Hungarian public mentality are not available for our Western friends, and therefore, they cannot make sense what is actually happening here with these strange guys, these Hungarians.

Ugo – Since you mentioned culture at last, my last question might be about it, and especially coming back to aesthetics, because Central Europe has a very defined identity when it comes to aesthetics. When you come to Central Europe, you feel everything is different, but at the same time, every major city, like Kraków, Budapest, even Zagreb, Prague, Vienna, in some extent as well, they’re very similar. They have like the same vibe. 

It also extends a little bit to the people, and you mentioned that there’s a certain way that Hungarians are, that they complain about a lot and they don’t feel they belong that much to the West. My experience in Poland has been quite similar. And mind you, those are two very different nations, but they’re still, they’re very close and they have always been close and they have very friendly relations in history.

So maybe my last question is about that, about the spirit and the aesthetic expression of that Central European identity.

Ferenc – Yes, that’s crucial for Hungary that we don’t regard ourselves as part of Eastern Europe, but rather Central Europe. And of course, Central Europe is a concept which is much discussed in historical literature. 

I tend to go with those who claim that it’s basically the Central European Habsburg powers, the Habsburg realm in this part of the world that defined this culture. But I also would call attention to this Hungarian historian named Jenő Szűcs, who had this not very novel idea that there are three historical regions in Europe: Western, Central and Eastern, but also claimed that there were different historical trajectories for these regions.

The Eastern model is a kind of monopoly of power or even a tyranny, the Western model is democratization even to the extremes like a mass democracy, and Central Europe is somehow a compromise between the two, like a constitutional monarchy or something like that.

Of course, there is an idealization in this scheme, but there is truth to it as well, that Central Europe could learn from both sides and could appreciate both sides. And in that sense, it has got a certain function in Europe even today, I would say. That’s why the Visegrad Group is an important political initiative.

Ugo – This also shows the aesthetics of the region. Whereas in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, you have like these grandiose monuments to both mass democracy, like if you go to Brussels or if you go to any other big city in Western Europe, you will see how they try to say “oh, we are the people and this is how the people hold power.” And then in Eastern Europe, you have these monuments to the power of the state, and usually, to the power of the ruler as well. But in Central Europe, you have something that goes in between. You still have big buildings, big churches, big palaces, but they are not massive.

Do you feel the connection between the people and the ruler, between community and those who belong to it and those who run it? This is something that doesn’t happen too much in both East and West, so maybe the aesthetic expression of that idea is something that we could take as a giveaway of how Central Europe really feels and thinks about itself and about its governance.

Ferenc – Yes, I would put it this way, because I’m not in favor of powerful rulers or very strong states because they need their control. That’s the idea of the rule of law. But I think that you have a point if you say that mass democracy, as Tocqueville teaches us, destroys hierarchy and destroys differences. It creates homogeneity and it creates gray areas. Grayness or dullness or a sort of flat and undistinguished landscape.

And in this respect, this is indeed a region of transitions, a region of meeting places, it has got its aesthetic, and by aesthetics, we also mean a certain ethos and a certain way of life, which is so important for conservatives like us.

Ugo – All right. Thank you very much for that, it’s been a pleasure sharing with you. Would you like to say one final message or one final comment to our readers?

Ferenc – I would really like that, and I hope it was not too far-fetched and not something without major interest, but my point is that indeed we Hungarians, we have a long history, have a lot of faults and mistakes, but we are quite friendly people, and all the visitors who come to Hungary usually say that they like to stay here. And we are happy if people are interested in our country and in our region, so Ugo, I’m really grateful for your interest as well.

The post Interview with Ferenc Hörcher appeared first on The Miskatonian.

We begin as follows: “If you are the dealer, let me out of the game/If you are the healer, I’m broken and lame/If thine is the glory, mine must be the shame, you want it darker we kill the flame.” Here, we have a dialogue between ‘I’ and ‘you’ in which ‘you’ does not speak. ‘I’ addresses ‘you’ as absent, yet every absence is a presence of the one not there. Plus, the form of the dialogue is interrogative. ‘I’ is addressing questions to you which ‘you’ is, presumably, not answering. The questions seem to be a mix of humility and challenge. Are these questions challenging? Are they confrontational? Might ‘I’ be rejecting ‘you’? Is ‘you’ being provoked to a response? Cohen has referred before to the ‘holy game of poker’ in ‘Stranger Song’ (Cohen; 1967), and here we seem to be addressing the dealer in that game, the one who hands out the cards. As the game is holy, the you here would seem to be God. If God, the holy one of Israel, is the one dealing the cards, then ‘I’ declines to play. ‘I’ folds and hands in his cards. We may think here of Ivan Karamazov, who declines his ticket to the world to come in protest against the suffering of children. Yet we are in the game whether we wish it or not. In the divine/human game, even refusing to play is a move in the struggle. The game is the entire context of our actions AND of our inaction. We play the holy game of poker regardless. Yet ‘I,’ on the assumption of ‘you’ being a healer, also puts his need before the other. ‘I’ is broken and lame. If ‘you’ are the healer, then I am needy, and indeed, ‘I’ may be lame and unable to walk on my own. God, perhaps, sustains the very possibility of the human stance of protest; we are in the game whether willingly or not, for whether we affirm or reject the cards given, we do not deal with them.

A protest may be groundless, indeed foolish, in the face of divine glory and salvation. Who would stand in judgment of God and bandy words with him? Who would put his lameness above the one who heals? This thought is intensified. If ‘thine’ is the glory, ‘mine’ must be the shame. Now, we have possessives in place of personal pronouns. Something belongs to ‘I’ and to ‘you’. This is, at this point, unshared and perhaps incommunicable. What one must be, the other is not. If glory belongs to ‘you,’ shame belongs to ‘I’. They do not share glory, and they do not share shame. It is a contest for who possesses which, and the form of the question implies that ‘I’ knows the shame can only be his. If the glory of ‘you’ is final, then the protest ends in abasement for the person who lost the contest. We might think of an athletic contest here or a trial where one wins and one loses. We are surely meant to think of Job or of Jacob wrestling with the angel. If one interlocutor is justified and glorified, the other is abased.

Yet, what does the contest concern? This will emerge gradually. We get here, even in the agon between ‘I’ and ‘you,’ a peculiar unity and harmony. ‘I’ labels himself by the divine pronoun when addressing ‘you’ as another. Identity is here asserted in difference. ‘He who’ is confronts another ‘I am’ in the human interlocutor. Plus, I and you co-operate, knowingly or not. ‘You’ want it darker, yet ‘we’ kill the flame. Here, we get the first clear reference to a collective. Is ‘we’ the human we? Is it the divine plurality evoked in the first verses of Genesis? Is ‘we’ a collectivity formed of ‘you and I’? If so, both operate in synergy. One wants it darker, and the other kills the flame. To anticipate, if we take ‘we’ as the human collectivity then a darkness in the human images a darkness in God and, indeed, responds to this darkness. As the one demands more darkness, the other provides it. If this is so, then Cohen would seem to be acknowledging human responsibility for at least part of the darkness of the world. We are not blind puppets. WE kill the flame of life in others with a free will. Man is a wolf to man, according to the proverb. A man who accuses God must also accuse himself before God for the darkness HE has brought into the world. Yet God is also the one who wants it darker. Why? If finite humans bring forth darkness out of their blindness and cruelty, why does God not only permit but also WANT this darkness? One thing to note is that ‘I’ here does not seem to distinguish himself from ‘we’. ‘I’ as is responsible for ‘we’ as ‘we’ is for ‘I’.

We then get a chorus: “Sanctified, glorified be thy holy name/vilified crucified in the human frame/a million candles burning for the help that never came/you want it darker…” There is much to ponder here. The first line comes from the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. In life or in death, the name is glorious and sanctified. Yet this is not all. God has a name, and Adam does, too. Indeed, like God, Adam names as he is named though, unlike God, he does not name himself. The glory of the name is reflected in his name as he is in the image of and likeness of God. Yet, in the ‘human frame,’ the name is vilified. It is slandered. This may refer to destroying someone’s good name of course but when we add ‘crucified’ the image gets even darker. The frame here may be the cross of Christ as well as the human body or even the skeleton. We may also think of a picture frame which surrounds an image. This frame, the body or its skeletal structure, surrounds the image of God, whose name is sanctified in the courts of heaven but blasphemed on earth. God in the human, God in the neighbor or stranger, God as Christ even, is slandered and put to death. When we see the flame, we snuff it out. When we see God in the human frame, we reject the vision in the most final and irrevocable way: by slander and murder. It is not only divine help that fails to come for the burning candles but human help as well. Perhaps we ‘sanctify’ the holy name when we address its glory but refuse to see it in the weakness and need of the other. We cannot see God in the picture frame, the God we ‘sanctify’ while at the very same time, our violence and pride blasphemes its image.

Then we get the conclusion of this chorus: the speaker says, “Hineni, Hineni, I am ready, my lord.” ‘Here I am” (hineni) is uttered by a number of biblical characters, most memorably Abraham when he is called to sacrifice his son Isaac. Hineni puts one radically at the disposal of some other, here God. When one is called one answers ‘here I am’ in expectation of something being asked. This was the stance of Abraham when he was called to leave his family and its gods behind and follow God into an undefined open futurity. This futurity is openness to a question that is yet to be asked. To that extent, we might even consider this a stance of trust and faith. One says ‘Here I am’ to the other before one even knows what the summons or the question is about. Of course, one COULD put the emphasis in ‘here I am’ on the I. This turns acceptance of the other into a challenge: here ‘I’ am, but where are ‘you’? I am here, but you are absent! As for ‘I am ready,’ it is the response of Isaac to Abraham. The singer is ready for something in connection with one he names ‘lord’. This might, on a personal level, be Cohen’s own looming death. This might also be readiness for a new revelation or a renewed faith. Every poet is ‘ready’ in this sense for what new, what other, the muse may bring. The poet, like Abraham, is open to surprises! Of course, one might also be ready for a fight like the patriarch Jacob! ‘Here for what’ and ‘ready for what’ are left suitably undefined, for these states are existential and universal, not private and particular. We are here for something undefined and ready for something undefined. We are not, say, ready for dinner!

Cohen told us the story of Abraham and Isaac in a song by that name. (Cohen; 1969) It is apposite to what we are saying here. The typical reader is shocked by the story of Isaac’s sacrifice but this reaction may well be hypocritical. The Hebrews knew well that many people were quite willing to sacrifice the firstborn to those gods who demanded it. In the Story of Isaac, Cohen sets this murderous will toward our own children in the context of the Vietnam War, just as Wilfred Owen had, before him, situated the story of Isaac in the context of WW1. When an ideology like communism or capitalism is at stake, we can’t wait to sacrifice Isaac to whatever Baal demands it. We build altars “to sacrifice these children.” We did not, like Abraham, see either the heights or the depths. We were not there before, the song says, when Abraham experienced the terrible ascent of Mount Moriah yet also saw, with trembling hands, the beauty of the word. We were not tempted by demonic evil or transcendent good. Our altars are built in the name of ‘schemes’ which are not ‘visions’. WE sacrifice Isaac to base utilitarian projects grounded in the lust for power or even greed for acquisition. Something in US responds to the darkness of killing the child. Agamemnon had ‘no choice’ in the killing of Iphigeneia, yet he fell to it with a will.[1] This hatred for one’s own ‘generation’ is powerfully conveyed by Owen in his poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’. When God offers the lamb in place of Isaac, the divine gift is rejected. When asked to sacrifice the ‘ram of pride’ instead of his son Abraham, he refuses: “But the old man would not so but slew his son/ and half the seed of Europe one by one.” (Owen; 1967) Communities put up signs saying they love their children, but where collective egotism is at stake, there is plenty of evidence that we do not.

We continue: “There’s a lover in the story, but the story’s still the same/there’s a lullaby for suffering and a paradox to blame/it’s written in the scriptures and it’s not some idle claim/you want it darker we kill the flame.” The ‘story’ here is presumably the story of Isaac, though it may be the story of the Jewish people as well. This story, like many good stories, has a lover. This may be true in a couple of senses. Abraham obviously loves his son, and indeed, it is in the story of Isaac that the Hebrew word for love is first uttered. Yet if we take the word ‘lover’ as implying an erotic relation, the lover is God who loves Israel, his bride. Here we are in the erotic space of the Song of Solomon.  The story, however, is the same. Again, we may take this into consideration in a couple of ways. “The story’s still the same” may indicate the abidingness of the covenant and, indeed, the perpetual, always renewing relevance of the story of Isaac. How often do the generations repeat such archetypal narrative patterns unknown to themselves? However, Cohen hedges here by inserting the word ‘but’. This is lightly but firmly deflationary. Abraham loves Isaac. God loves Israel, yet the story still ends in the flames of the holocaust (perhaps evoked on the cover of the album by the smoke ascending from Cohen’s hand?). I am unsure what to make of a lullaby for suffering’. Perhaps this is the consolation of song that lulls us to sleep, though the sleep may well be that of death.

Yet, there is a “paradox to blame”. This is the paradoxical relationship of light to dark or God to the world. God seems to abandon the world, and the world seems to abandon God. The divorce is mutual, as in Cohen’s 1979 song “The Ballad of the Absent Mare”. (Cohen; 1079) Yet the two remain mysteriously united even in this negation and separation. ‘You’ want it darker, and WE kill the flame. Cohen was probably more fluent in Cabbalistic speculation than I will ever be, but God, we learn from the Cabbalists, contains the polarity of a dark, unmanifest nature and a light-revealed nature. Both natures are implicated in the divine presence in the world. ‘You’ may want it darker as that may be, for us, the necessary backdrop for seeing the light. It is through a crack in the world that the light gets through. It is by passing through the darkness of Mount Moriah that Abraham can tremble with the beauty of the Word. We need not think there is any discursive mediation of this ‘paradox’. It does not have an ‘explanation’: God’s ways are not justified by any immanent reason. Here the Jewish standpoint turns against, say, Hegel’s optimism that freedom and reason must emerge from finite evil. Cohen offers us the paradoxical truths of experience over speculative mediation. Still, as there is dark, there is light, and it is against the darkness that the light shines. There is terror and horror, and there is the beauty of the word: there is the dark, unmanifest God, even the demonic God, and the God of light. Each side of this polarity is essential to the other. Perhaps ‘you’ wants it darker because only by pushing deeper into the darkness can the light fully emerge. This, perhaps, is what is ‘written in the scriptures’, though the singer gives us no clear answer.

We then get the following stanza: “They’re lining up the prisoners, and the guards are taking aim/I struggled with some demons they were middle class and tame/didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim/ you want it darker…” Our attention is drawn immediately to the second line as it is so arresting. What are the demons referred to here? I suspect they are the kind of demons that haunt a middle-class careerist like Eichmann. Eichmann had no visions, only schemes. They were schemes of the most banal and ordinary sort concerning social status, career, and the simple moving around of trains. Perhaps these are Cohen’s demons as well, centering on the banalities of fame, temptation, addiction, or money. These demons are tame, though; under the right circumstances, they may be just as deadly as open villainy. Yet the speaker, ‘I,’ confronts the dark thought that if God has indeed withdrawn from history and from his chosen people, then everything is permitted. If there is no judge, no standard, no authority, if there is no judgment, then humans are responsible for nothing and no one outside their own will. This will may be good or it may be tyrannous as the subject pleases. We may enhance the flame or kill it, but it is answerable only to ourselves for what we do. Is the speaker wondering whether he has restrained himself from murder and mayhem for nothing? If God does not care, why should he? Certain existentialists, of course, are prepared to confront the necessity of this total freedom and its implications. Sartre, for instance, told us long ago that existence radically precedes essence. The speaker, though, seems noncommittal. Does he desire such permission? Does he merely note the fact of it? Does he hold to the good in spite of it? We are not really told.

The end of the song is simply the beginning. The discussion turns back on itself. We get the first verse repeated. The repetition may be for emphasis or to underline the irresolvable nature of the discussion. We end with the same questions we demand. Do we continue to play the game? Are we broken and lame? Is the glory ours or the shame? Is it even a competition between ourselves and God? Must one win only at the other’s expense? In the end we are left waiting for the help, or the love, or the word that has not yet come. We are here, ready for the world to come, whatever shape it may take.

References

Cohen, Leonard. Recent Songs (Columbia Records, 1979)

Cohen, Leonard. Songs From a Room (Columbia Records, 1969)

Cohen, Leonard. Songs of Leonard Cohen (Columbia Records, 1967)

Cohen, Leonard. You Want it Darker (Columbia Records, 2016)

Owen, Wilfred. Collected Poems (Chatto and Windus, 1967, London).

[1] Cohen sings: “I will kill you if I must I will help you if I can”. He then reverses the line: “I will help you if I must I will kill you if I can.” The violence that is first accepted as a harsh necessity later becomes the default choice. The man who regards killing as a regrettable necessity will come to regard helping as a regrettable necessity once he is sufficiently habituated to violence. He will only ‘help’ when he comes to the limit of his power to harm.

The post Who Wants It Darker? Cohen and Theodicy appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Aleksandar Todorovski, the Editor in Chief of the Miskatonian, had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Hicks and covered topics such as the recent development of disruptive technologies and their impact on education, the business world, and the future of the Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Aleksandar – Good morning, Professor Hicks. Or should it be just ‘Stephen’?

Stephen –’ Stephen’ is fine.

Aleksandar – Thank you very much for making the time for our conversation today, it is much appreciated.

Stephen – You too. It looks like you guys have ambitions with your website. I looked at your website, a wide range of articles, and it looks lively.

Aleksandar – Thank you for that.

So, let’s start by sharing more about your current projects. I know you were supposed to, or you might have published a book for 2023. So, I guess if you could tell me more about what you’re doing and what keeps you busy and awake at night.

Stephen – Well, nothing keeps me awake at night. I do sleep well, and I have a lot of enjoyable projects going on right now.

One is that we’re working on a reissue of Eight Philosophies of Education. The education space right now, both lower education and higher education, is in turmoil, partly for ideological, political, and low-performance reasons. But at the same time, there’s a lot of exciting entrepreneurial stuff going on and rethinking the purpose of education.

So, we had a limited-issue publication of Eight Philosophies of Education. The idea is that education is a philosophical project, taking young people and preparing them for adult life in the real world.
Well, what is the real world?
What is adult life?
What are the critical values?
What strategically do I need to do?

Everything controversial in philosophy comes to be controversial when we think strategically about education: the curriculum, the methodology, how we will assess, what kind of people we will hire to be the teachers, and so forth.

We’ve also been doing a new video series called Philosophers, Explained, and it’s me guiding people through some of the classic and essential philosophical texts. The format is me speaking on the screen with the actual text alongside with key passages highlighted. It’s for serious students who want an in-depth but guided introduction through the significant texts. We’re working on that series and up to 40 episodes now.

And there are several shorter article projects, but we’ll set those aside for now.

Aleksandar – So, making something that can be an entry point for people who would not necessarily have a liberal education under their belts is a noble endeavor. That brings me to something else I wanted to discuss with you.

So, you have been working closely with Dr. [Jordan] Peterson for some time, and he’s building the Peterson Academy. So, can you tell me more about your part of the project now?

Stephen – A great question. Peterson Academy is one of the interesting new entrepreneurial ventures. In this case, I would not say that I’ve been working closely with Jordan Peterson in the higher education space. We have done interviews about postmodernism and related topics on his YouTube channel and have had a couple of other points of contact.

About the Academy: much of what’s been going on in higher education is a scandal, particularly in humanities and areas that have been infected by kind of skeptical, nihilistic, and anti-education trends. Yet on the positive side, many are working to provide solutions for the new generation, taking seriously the new technological tools that are available.

Aleksandar – Okay, sounds good. Can you tell me a little more?

Stephen – What the Peterson Academy is doing is going into the studio  – and this is a bit self-congratulatory – still, they select professors and others people they think are the best worldwide in various subjects, and then bring them into their studio to do a course in their expertise. The Academy wants a wide range of courses that would make up the standard liberal arts education.

Courses in history, religion, philosophy, mathematics, physics, and some applied issues like environmental science and economics. At any college or good university, you will have professors who can teach all those things, but you won’t have the best people in the world at any one university or college.

They have studio space and skilled editors and use CGI and imported graphics. It is an awe-inspiring, ambitious project. The result is a stand-alone series of lectures or a course that students anywhere in the world can take on their own time, out of interest, or they can take them for university credit that can be transferred to their institution.

Aleksandar – What was your part if I may dig deeper?

Stephen –I don’t know anything about the business side of things at PA. I was invited to be a professor teaching two courses in my area of expertise. So, I did an eight-lecture course on Modern Philosophy using the philosopher’s label for ‘modern.’ It begins with Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and the lectures go through early modern philosophy and twelve major philosophers up to John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche, ending in the 19th century.

Aleksandar– That sounds interesting.

Stephen – The second course is called Postmodern Philosophy. Not that all the philosophers covered are postmodern, but the trend of 20th-century philosophy has been skeptical and relativistic. It covers all the themes and major philosophers who fed into postmodernism, although also some philosophers who are critical of postmodernism are covered in the course.

Aleksandar – It sounds great, and this is in addition to your already ongoing projects regarding liberal education. It’s difficult for me not to probe further with you on liberal education because we are already in the interview.

You have shared that you are trying to balance disruptive technologies and the neck-breaking speed at which AI is progressing. What will happen with the most highly specialized and complex technical operations regarding different AI systems happening daily across the corporate world? – And do you believe that liberal education will regain its sovereignty as the most complete approach towards cultivating better citizens, knowing that most of the monotonous and repetitive tasks have been outsourced? Our readers and I would probably like to hear your thoughts on this.

Stephen – Those are big questions. You mentioned the corporate world. You also mentioned the concept of citizen, a more political concept about one role concerning the political structures and one’s role in the corporate world.

In that case, the question is the relationship of liberal education to both of those in connection with technological developments.

So that’s just huge. Some things are perennial and will never go away. We are human beings, and the task for us as individuals is always to figure out what we will do with our lives. A massive subset of that is how we will make a living for ourselves. Another huge subset is our relationship with the government and the political sphere. That will always be the same.

Technology is a set of tools, and how the tools are going to be used will always be a secondary question to me. I am figuring out who I am, my goals, and what character, habits, and skills I will acquire to achieve my goals. That’s perennial. What will change is that technologies can enable us to outsource many things that we do. Before we didn’t have a choice about doing those. Many, as you say, monotonous tasks can be outsourced, and we won’t need to do those anymore.

Aleksandar – Okay.

Stephen – So I have more free time, and then with that free time I’m right back to the human questions. What do I want to do with that time? How do I want to fill it up to make my life more significant, more meaningful? People won’t think fundamentally differently, but they can take all of our humans dreams and make it more realistic for those dreams to happen. Also more resources. The trend of the technologies has been to make us more affluent. It gives you more tools, and given that wealthy people live longer it gives you more time.

I think you’re correct to say that we will be more aware of liberal education’s importance as time passes. Liberal education prepares you to be a free person, not just politically free, but also an economically free agent and in the rest of your social life.

One of the liberal education’s philosophical assumptions is that you have agency. You are a free agent, not just pushed around by deterministic forces beyond your control. Also in your artistic life and your scientific life, being a free agent and a free thinker is its common theme of freedom all the way through.

The proper education for a fully human life will become a more pressing issue.

Aleksandar – Speaking of agency, Martin Heidegger spoke about the revealing or gradual process of attaining knowledge. If we have a rapid, high concentration of unimaginable expertise at our fingertips, do you think we’re missing out on what it means to be a human in the higher sense of the word?

Because I belong to a generation of taking notes and having 20 different color markers while studying, attaining knowledge also helped bring one to an inevitable conclusion.

Would you say that that disruption is detrimental if we can use platforms like ChatGPT to write research papers and then read the same research papers in the same way as if as if we actively participated?  Without AI, you would need two or three days to produce a fragment of knowledge specialized in a very narrow branch of a particular science or art. We have reinforced the process by obtaining results immediately, so can we tweak or adapt this process? We can certainly learn more about engineering and different operations. Still, it seems to me, and please correct me if I’m wrong, that there is an externalization of specific intellectual processes that makes us truly human.

Stephen – Another vibrant question, and to unpack some elements: one thing you’re pointing to is the speed with which we can acquire new knowledge and the impact of that. Another is the amount of knowledge that will be available and the challenge of absorbing the more significant amount of expertise. The next issue is what you do with large amounts of more readily available knowledge and how you add value significance to it, find value significance in it, or put it together so that value significance emerges.

I think a fourth thing you were saying is: what about people who want to make things easier, but tech can make it too easy for them so that they can copy whatever ChatGPT does and submit that without learning anything?

We can the questions sequentially and start with the speed issue.

I’m older than you are. I can recall my early days of learning. I liked to read books a lot. If I wanted to get new books, I would go to the library in town. My parents bought a lot of books for me, but I still had to go to the library and bring books home, and then I’d read the books and return them. So, all kinds of time costs are involved. But when we go to the Internet stage, much of that has been digitized and put online. So it saved me a lot of time, and then, say, ChatGPT comes along, and I can get and digest various books much more quickly.

Am I better or worse off because of the speeding up the process? Or would we say that engaging in the longer process by going to the library invests me in the process in a way that enriches the experience?

Another analogy I would give here is if you think just about the history of the encyclopedia as one form of the book where we go back to the very first encyclopedia, which I believe was the French encyclopedia project at the height of the Enlightenment, and all the collaborators involved.

Aleksandar – Okay.

Stephen – This massive project took them 20-something years to write all of the articles and then get everything published. It was conceived in the 1750s and, I think, finished in the 1770s. By then, some things are already out of date and incomplete.

So, we compare that very ambitious 18th-century encyclopedia – which was a magnificent project – then we fast-forward a century to another project, the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is also multi-volume, but the process of putting that together is much quicker because of the technology they can use. It’s also not just located in France, but is now an international team of scholars. So, it’s all the knowledge in the world and it’s put together much faster, and that’s an improvement. We don’t want to say that the slowness in the 18th century is more of an advantage compared to the late 19th century.

Then I’d like to jump to another century to Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and the Wikipedia project that started to come online in the 1990s.

Aleksandar – Right

Stephen – Another century goes by, and we have the entire Wikipedia at our fingertips. I sense that ChatGPT and its descendants will be the next evolution of that. So, you, in effect, have even more access to accurate information and have high-level summaries of whatever you want more quickly, right? So, just on that timeline, I think it is an improvement all the way through.

Aleksandar – This makes sense.

Stephen – I think the most significant thing is the second point you raised, which is the quantity of information available, and on this one, I think there’s more to the argument.

If you have less information or less knowledge available, that puts less cognitive strains on individuals because they know that there are only so many books, so to speak, that they can read, and less information they have to absorb to be a universal thinker or to know a little bit about any everything.

Aleksandar – Yes, exactly.

Stephen – So how do we confront that more significant cognitive challenge?

One way is having a genuine concept of a liberal education where we make education fun enough that people want to take on that challenge from a young age — to explore everything.

Also, I think this is what has also happened over the last couple of centuries: the editorial function or the curating function has become more critical. We turn more to teachers and professors in each generation to make decisions since they’ve devoted their lives to a particular area of knowledge — to sorting the good from the bad, telling us what’s important and why it’s important, and guiding us away from the 99 books that are just so-so and towards the exceptional ones.

Aleksandar – I agree.

Stephen – The same editing and curating function applies to newspapers, magazines, and other forms of periodicals.

While it does put greater cognitive loads on us as individuals, it should be seen as an enjoyable cognitive load and all the while we’re developing tools like ChatGPT and hopefully better professors and better editors who can help us, when we are younger, sort through the bewildering array of stuff that is out there.

That is a long set of answers to probably only half of what you had in your initial question. So let me put it back to you to ask where you would like to go next.

Aleksandar – I want to note here that I completely agree that once we have gone through cultivating a canon and knowing which books should be read vis-à-vis books that have usefulness, we also avoid epistemological traps of not distinguishing philosophy from ideology. But we will not go into this because we do not have time for that topic.

I had a very similar process. I went through a similar process of education and philosophical improvement to a certain degree in my study of law. I grew up among books. I come from a former socialist country, and education was pretty much put on a pedestal. Again, I do not want to go into ideology right now because we will lightly touch on the ideology regarding philosophy later in our conversation.

But what about the younger generation who seem to have issues with, let’s say, attention span? Reading 30 pages of Hegel can be challenging for people who are advanced in self-study of philosophy or even professional philosophy scholars.

Stephen – Yes.

Aleksandar– But what about the typical Z-generation young person who doesn’t have those points of orientation and those anchors in terms of having a canon that can be used as a point of departure into an intellectual exploration? So, I mean, there is a generational difference when it comes to the reception of those disturbing  –

Stephen – Is it?

Aleksandar – and disruptive technologies, because the level of integration of those technologies will be quite different between people who did not have them at their complete disposal, like children of the 21st century, right?

Stephen – Okay, I’m hearing two issue in your question. One is cognitive-psychological side of each new generation. As technology gets faster and faster, it creates different kinds of opportunities but also stresses and limits them.

Aleksandar – Yes.

Stephen – And I heard the word ‘canon’ in there. Or, on the supply side, if there is no longer a set of canonical works among the elders in each generation—I don’t want to put words in your mouth—works already sorted wheat-from-the-chaff to present to that generation.

If so, the new generation has more significant problems. If the older generation, say, has decided everything is equal, that there is no truth, and so on. They throw the younger generation into a sea of information, just a bunch of stuff. Then: Will they be doing that younger generation a disservice, combined with the greater rate of cognitive load that the new technologies are going to acquire?

So, let’s separate those, and then we can put them together again.

The first issue is the rate of change, and I think there is something to this. Every time there is disruptive technology, it puts better tools for information absorption in the hands of the people who learn and can then learn using the disruptive technologies. At the same time it puts more significant cognitive stresses on them.

That’s an ongoing learning curve, and the human mind is extraordinarily adaptable. If we make a historical point and go back to, say, the 1400s. The first generation of the Gutenberg printing press its widespread adoption—you find the same kind of worries there, people saying: Well, you know, for centuries, we’ve been hand-copying manuscripts and books.

Aleksandar – Sure.

Stephen – And now there’s this massive flood of books and periodicals available to people! Will people be able to handle this new flood of information to them? Won’t they be lost at sea and not have any cognitive bearings and so forth?

So it’s interesting that 500 years ago, that kind of argument was already raised.

It was raised again in the 1700s when the steam engine came along, and suddenly printing presses attached to steam engines could print out vast numbers of newspapers, magazines, and books again—and the same point was made.

Then the same worry was raised when the radio came along and television and there’s a flood of sounds and images and so many new print publications people can’t keep up. And the same with the Internet and with ChatGPT.

I think that every time disruptive technology has come along, we have this worry—but at the same time, we adapt pretty quickly and develop. People get smarter and cleverer in each generation. Parents and teachers determine better educational methods to get young people up to speed. The young people themselves, after a certain amount of experimenting, figure it out for themselves, making the new technologies work for them.

So, I’m not too worried about that one at all. I’m more concerned about the second part of the question. Though I’m not sure if I put those words into your mouth about the idea of there being a canon.

Aleksandar – Please do.

Stephen – I don’t think a fixed and firm canon of texts should be set in stone.

Aleksandar – Okay.

Stephen – There’s no dogma. Some works are better than others, and I believe some works are classics. I’m always ready to jump into the debate about making recommendations to young people about the top 20 or 40 books that you really ought to read, whether you’re going to be a ballet dancer or a quantum physicist, whatever you’re going to be, and make them part of your cultural furniture.

But there is a danger that our generation is facing—the postmodern generation when we have a significant number of people who are among the elite—the elite educational institutions, the elite professors, the elite cultural institutions—who are not only unfriendly to liberal education but unfriendly to education. They have abandoned the ideals of knowledge, truth, and objectivity.

Sometimes they are politically and ideologically motivated, and sometimes they are philosophically deep skeptics. Yet they have assigned themselves to the task of explicitly subverting the idea that there are more and less true works. Or better or worse works. In many cases, they are intentionally advocating works they know are bad with the idea of undermining works they know are good.

That is a more significant danger for young people, when they are more intellectually vulnerable. If these anti-education leaders mis-educate them, they will give up on their quest to become knowledgeable, free citizens. I mean free thinkers who can put together a meaningful life. Their capacity to do so will be destroyed early. That’s the more serious thing to worry about in our generation.

Aleksandar – Since we are talking about the younger people, without saying that you’re old, some thinkers are like a fine wine, and based on what I have heard and read coming from you, I most certainly would put you in that club of philosophers.

Stephen – Well, thank you for that.

Aleksandar – Absolutely. I think wisdom is very archetypal in that regard, and genuinely, wisdom does come with age, but I want to take you back to your intellectual development. Now, you have been a prolific writer on different topics, right?

Stephen – Okay.

Aleksandar – But if you ask anyone out there about Stephen Hicks, at least when it comes to your audience Nietzsche and the Nazis is considered your “magnum opus” by many.
I’m not saying that the rest of your work has less validity or less relevance, but somehow the name of Stephen Hicks is immediately associated with that guy who wrote Nietzsche and the Nazis, right? So why did you choose this topic? That’s the first part of the question, and I think at this point you’re used to me asking two or three questions as one question, but I think they’re all relevant.

Stephen – Hmmm …

Aleksandar – And the second one is your thoughts regarding the use and abuse of philosophical systems or such ideas to justify ideological goals. If this question doesn’t get me in trouble, I don’t know which one will, but it must be asked.

Stephen – Well, of course, if you’re going to be philosophical, you must ask questions that will get you in trouble. That’s part of the job description.

Aleksandar – Absolutely. So, I’m more than happy to put it out there boldly.

Stephen – Okay, good. Again that’s an excellent, rich question, and I appreciate the compliments that are built into it.

Nietzsche and the Nazis was part of a twofold project that I was working on when I was a younger scholar back in the 90s in the early 2000s.

National socialism must be understood in the classical sense of the “right.” In Nietzsche and the Nazis, I was thinking about developments on the political “right.” If we put the right in quotation marks, to recognize that it’s a fraught term.

Aleksandar – So, national socialism needs to be understood as it relates to what it would be in the classical sense of the right.

Stephen – Yes.

Aleksandar – I fully agree with you, but keep it on the right for the sake of arguments, right?

Stephen – Yes.

It was paired with my other book of the same era—Explaining Postmodernism—which is focused more on the developments on the political “left,” again puts that in quotation marks.

The problem is that both the political right—if we accept that in the form of Nazism—ends up in horrific totalitarianism. And the political left also manifests as a horrific totalitarianism. So, Explaining Postmodernism was about the intellectual history of the left ,and Nietzsche and the Nazis about an essential part of the political history of the of the right.

One of my career themes as a philosopher has been that philosophy makes a difference between life and death. Philosophy is a high theory, and when the high theory is put into practice in one’s personal life and then more broadly in societies and political communities, it makes a life or a death difference, getting it right or wrong.

To put it negatively, I’m very much against what are sometimes called dualist “spiritual” or “Platonic” approaches to philosophy–again, putting “Platonic” in quotation marks—that somehow there’s a big divorce between a theoretical or abstract world versus the real and practical world because I see the two as closely integrated.

The question about Nietzsche and the Nazis came about in part because I had a long-standing interest in Nietzsche as a philosopher. He is a great philosopher. Not that I agree with him very much, but he is excellent in that his influence on 20th-century philosophy and 20th-century cultural life has been enormous.

Aleksandar – Sure.

Stephen – And I don’t think there’s another philosopher whose influence has been more significant than Nietzsche. He is a thinker every serious intellectual needs to grapple with. So, I spent some time reading through Nietzsche’s major works, and I found him stimulating and taught him in my courses.

At the same time, I was doing a parallel reading in political history, and especially as someone born in the 20th century, there’s is a question with which everyone grapples: the question of the Nazis. How could the National Socialists come to power in a country like Germany, which was so cultured, so educated, so literate?

How could they plunge the world into World War Two and then, even more horrifically, how could something like the Holocaust come out of a country like Germany? Understanding and grappling with this astounding fact of what the National Socialists did is a part of any thinking person’s history.

SoI was doing a lot of reading about the National Socialists and reading Hitler’s works and Goebbels’s works, and I started to read the intellectuals behind them. I had questions like, who were Nazi supporters? It turns out deep-thinking people like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt.

Aleksandar – Yeah, Schmitt.

Stephen – And Moeller Van den Bruck, to a lesser extent, Oswald Spengler, and others. These are all high-powered German intellectuals in the 1920s, before the Nazis came to power.

Aleksandar – And some of them were victimized, I believe, during the night of the long knives because I think they were, well, too right-wing for the National Socialists.

Stephen – Some of them, yes. Lots of internal schisms, and things became quite violent. But the intellectual exciting thing is that you have that list of people, all of them—whatever your short list of critical German intellectuals who supported the National Socialists in the 1920s—all of them thought of themselves as Nietzscheans or as close-followers of much of Nietzsche’s works.

And when you read Hitler and listen to many of his speeches and those of Goebbels and the other more thoughtful politicians and activists in the National Socialist movement—they are aware of Nietzsche or citing Nietzsche, and in many respects see themselves as followers of Nietzsche.

So, in my thinking, there’s has been this big question: What is the connection between the most important late 19th-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, and perhaps the most significant political movement of the 20th century, National Socialism?

The Nietzsche and the Nazis book came out of that exploration. To spoil the story, my analysis ended up in a split decision. I think, in many respects, obviously Nietzsche would have been disgusted by the Nazis and would have disagreed with them in many political and cultural respects.

But at the same time, I do think that the Nazis, both intellectuals and activists, were right on target in seeing Nietzsche philosophically as one of their near ancestors. So, it was a scholarly working out of how the Nazis both properly used Nietzsche and diverged from Nietzsche.

Aleksandar – I think it’s a genuinely unique tractate. It can be read as a tractate. I believe that a documentary was produced on the book.

Stephen – Yes, the project …

Aleksandar – I can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure to see it. I don’t know if it’s possible to find it electronically.

Stephen – Yes, it did start as a documentary. We produced it in 2005, and it came out (if you remember that ancient technology) on DVD and it was available on Netflix for a few years when Netflix was a mail-order business and then the early streaming. It’s good quality technically for the early 2000s though not up to Netflix’s current standards.

There are bootleg versions on YouTube and other channels, if one goes hunting for it.

Then the book came out after I wrote the script and we produced the documentary, a few years later. I want to say it was 2010 that the book version came out.

Aleksandar – And on the second part of the question, what are your thoughts on using and abusing philosophical systems? This means to justify theological and ideological goals. Have we seen that before Nietzsche, and are we seeing that today?

Stephen – I think there’s been much more use of philosophy than abuse of philosophy. The most significant philosophers—going back to Plato, say—and even though quite a bit of Platonic philosophy was otherworldly, he wanted philosophers to influence kings and kings to become philosophers. That connection of philosophy to political practice runs though Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Rousseau, etc.

That idea of philosophy has been to say that the most general truths and values should guide us, not only in our personal thinking but more broadly in our social and political lives. Philosophy is meant to be applied.

At the same time, all of the more empirical philosophers say that philosophers should be engaging with politicians and economists and studying history and seeing history as a laboratory of human living so that we can properly learn and use that data.

Do our philosophical generalizations about true knowledge and actual values come out of our study of history? If philosophy is meant to be used—and I think that’s the proper conception of philosophy—the abuse issue will come up but mostly when so many philosophies that are applied go wrong. One get the philosophy wrong—you have some terrible untruths and value frameworks that people try to live by.

Aleksandar – Okay.

Stephen – But if they are wrong in the first place, then one reaches disaster or, to a lesser extent, negative consequences, when one tries to put them into practice. Then it is a common excuse that people will say when their theory doesn’t work out in practice: “Oh, you didn’t apply my theory correctly, or you abused my theory.”

Aleksandar – Right.

Stephen – There’s a long history of clear examples. If we take the early modern John Locke, the most famous of the classically liberal philosophers. His ideas were explicitly to be put into practice in the American Revolution by the Founding Fathers, who were very well-read and often who saw themselves as Lockeans. Not just reading but putting Lockean ideas into practice. When that revolution was by and large successful, they did not go on to say, “Oh no, we’re abusing Locke.” That’s a success case, so they’re happy to give the credit to Locke.

Another example, though, is the French Revolution and its third phase, when the Jacobins take over—Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the others—and the whole thing descends into chaos and blood and the guillotine and civil war and just all-round nastiness. Then we say: “Gosh, what went wrong? How could this happen?” Then we not that all these guys were explicitly disciples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They read his Social Contract. They carried it around. They considered it to be their Bible. They loved Rousseau, and they were trying to put Rousseau’s philosophy into practice. But then you start to hear. “Oh, no, no, no. Rousseau can’t possibly be held to blame for the Reign of Terror. They must have been abusing his philosophy!” It’s the negative results that people don’t want to take ownership of.

You find the same thing occurring in the next century and a half.

Think about Karl Marx, as a philosopher with a revolutionary program that inspires actual activists: Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and others. Then your judgment-call about the Soviet Union, which becomes a disaster with widespread torture, famine, mass murder, and so forth. Many people want to say: “That shows that Marxist theory is wrong, that we have done the experiments, and it doesn’t work. We need to reject it.” However, others want to say, “Oh, they just abused Marxism.”

Again it’s a philosophy that led to negative results, but some do not want to accept the negative results as indicting the philosophy in any way.

The same thing occurs in the case of Nietzsche and the Nazis, or even Heidegger and the Nazis. The same dynamic is at work, and my sympathies are with those who say that by and large the activists got the philosophy right when they were putting it into practice. We should take this seriously as a negative lesson: There is something deeply wrong in a philosophy when educated, articulate, well-resourced activists put it into practice—and disaster results.

The bad faith move is to self-seal the philosophy away from those negative results. The proper attitude is to be hyper-critical about said philosophy and reexamine every one of its assumptions under the microscope.

Aleksandar – I understand, and I do agree, especially the point that I believe it’s a well-established truism that any deep and authentic thinker, regardless of the authenticity and the paradigm-shifting force behind their thoughts. They can control everything except interpreting and implementing their intellectual legacy.

Stephen – That’s correct, partly because philosophers are operating at a level of generality, at a level of abstraction, and that always means there will be room for interpretation and different implementations.

For example, to take a more positive path, it’s one thing to say I am, as a philosopher, an advocate of “small r” republicanism. What I mean by that is that the power should reside with the public, broadly speaking, that there should be separations of powers and checks and balances, and so on.

Now, if I leave it there, that’s not going to predict exactly what voting mechanisms I’m going to have in place, whether I set the franchise at age 18 or age 21. At that level of generality, I haven’t even said anything about women or men yet, or anything about the level of education. Should there be two houses of Parliament or not? Should we have three branches of government or four? On all of those more applied issues, the philosophers are not going to decide, and there can be many experiments.

At the same time, I think it holds on the other side of the equation. If I say: Okay, I’m not in favor of republicanism. Instead, I favor some authoritarianism and want concentrated, centralized power in the hands of one or a few figures.” I can be a political philosopher at that level of abstraction, and it would be exactly right to say many different sub-versions of authoritarianism can follow. So, yes, that part is correct.

Aleksandar – And since we are approaching the time limits that we have agreed upon. In the spirit of the show, this is a question specifically about the choice that you would make personally, Stephen. Generally, do you follow instinct or intelligence when in doubt?

Stephen – Intelligence. Well-trained intelligence. I don’t think instinct is much of a guide.

I think you might make an argument depending on how you define instinct. You know, whether we have an instinct for eating or an instinct for sex, or an instinct that is for flight or fight, but those are all arguable.

Aleksandar – Or instinct to pick the right book?

Stephen – Well, no, there’s no such thing as that instinct. That’s too high level. But instinct, as it’s often used, really is a process of prior intelligence. What have you thought? What you have decided and automated in your thinking and behavior comes at us (in quotation marks) as “instinct.” Even there, when having a strong reaction-impulse, one should think about it and reassess, especially when the stakes are high.

Yes, you’re right. We are approaching the end of the time, and you had a longer list of questions. Maybe we should plan to do Part 2 at some point in the future.

Aleksandar – We’ll be starting a professional level of production podcast(s), so we are working on the infrastructure, and we are setting up the operations so we can have a high level of production because, as you know, with the proliferation of podcasts, it seems to me that every third person has a podcast. No offense. We need to find a niche that will genuinely make us exceptional. So, we have that ongoing project.

If you would do us the honor of coming on as a guest on a podcast, that would be amazing. I think we can cover more. It’s just the nature of our questions and the areas you cover, which are highly complex. Covering this much ground in an hour has been challenging, but it has been a pleasure.

Stephen – Okay, good. Thank you for the great questions and the invitation. Let’s plan to do a second round at some point in the future.

Aleksandar – Thank you very much for your time.

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The story of the film follows a supposedly great playwright and theatre director, Caden Cotard, who receives a MacArthur Fellowship out of the blue. This astonishing financial support allows him to pursue his own artistic interests, and he commits to doing so with magnificent fervor. He wants to create a theatre piece of absolutely brutal realism and unflinching honesty. He wants to pour his whole self into his work.

“Here’s what I think theatre is,” he explains at one point, “it’s the beginning of thought. The truth is not yet spoken. It’s a blackbird in winter. The moment before death. It’s what a man feels when he’s been clocked in the jaw. It’s love … in all its messiness.” It sounds very poetic, but it reveals a savage irony: Caden hasn’t got any idea what he’s doing. What he’s saying here is meaningless. The words are uttered less to explain than to evoke. Feeling is the goal, not meaning, and not truth. He does not even know how to be honest. And yet, this complete imbecile, who hides behind big words and grand gestures, must now create a masterwork, all while his life disintegrates.

So Caden does what any postmodernist would do. He rejects any story bigger than his own puny, sad life. In the absence of any sense of what is true and in the absence of any larger scheme, the best he can do is set up a world that emulates his own; only he must do this on a much larger scale. He makes a theatrical copy of his own life and even has a copy of the City of New York built inside a massive aircraft hangar. He hires an actor to play himself and other actors to play the people in his life. Soon, the actors playing the real people start to hire other actors to play the actors playing real people, and, well, it gets messy quickly. Rehearsals go on for decades without any performance taking place because, in deconstructionist style, no true performance is actually possible. Maybe a true life isn’t possible either.

As the size of Caden’s project—I almost said ego—grows, the meaning of it all continues to disintegrate. The constant metastasizing of meta-levels produces no explanatory power. Copies of copies devalue the very idea of an original. In the end, everything becomes interchangeable. Fiction and reality become indistinguishable. One of the lines towards the end of the movie, as it slumps into a deep melancholy, is, “Everything is everything,” and also, “Everyone is everyone.” Caden stops being Caden and becomes Millicent. And the real Millicent becomes Caden, narrating the life that once belonged to her to him, asking him to act out what she lived but has now become detached from. Was there any Caden to begin with at all? Suddenly, as Caden returns to himself, he has an epiphany about completing the project. But at that very moment, he dies.

The idea of the interchangeability of people in Synecdoche is echoed in Kaufman’s 2015 film Anomalisa, which perfectly depicts what Baudrillard calls the “hell of the same.” The definitive end-point of postmodernism, once everything has been ironized and deconstructed to death, is a sense that everything has been turned into more stuff, more content, just endless rehashing and repetitiousness. So many signs without any real referents. Everything is everything. Everyone is everyone.

This whirlwind of semiotic overload is still with us now. However, it has taken on a new flavor, one that is hinted at in Anomalisa. I say new, but this has been happening for a while now. Already in the early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate, I heard people talking about being sick of postmodernism and yearning for something else as if the best answer to a new thing grown old must always be yet another new thing. That something else was already on the horizon back then, but it took a while to see it. Still, now it’s clear enough to define. It is perhaps nowhere more noticeable than in the 2022 film, Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Welcome to peak metamodernism.

As you know, that film won a number of Oscars. This basic fact carries no real weight, but it does make it plain that we are dealing with a film and a phenomenon that is very much fitted to the tastes of the mainstream. Yes, the film has postmodern elements. But it’s got something else too.

There are complicated ways to understand the notion of metamodernism. At its simplest, metamodernism attempts to let sincerity and irony “hug it out,” as a headline from The New Yorker put it on the 27th of May 2010. It is often found in films that oscillate between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. The idea is captured in Joss Whedon’s trick of adding bathos to any overly serious moment: “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough,” he has famously said. “But then, for the love of God, tell a joke.” The same applies in reverse. If you’ve spent all your energies on making light of everything, excessive cultural references included, then you might as well pull a Bo Burnham and make it grim and tough with barely any light at the end of a distressingly dark tunnel, as he has done in both Make Happy (2016) and Inside (2021). I like Burnham’s work a lot, but I wouldn’t want to be like him. He seems miserable.

Metamodernism is not supposed to be ideological, claim metamodern theorists. It’s not trying to offer a utopian vision. That, after all, would be too much modernism and not enough postmodernism. It’s futile to aim for utopia, for instance, but to get away from that postmodern statement, metamodernism would also acknowledge that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we actually want utopias. And so the aim of metamodern discourse is to describe, not prescribe. It tells us what we might expect in creative works, not how to create.

There’s a bit of a metamodern twist to this, though. Metamodernism is not a program (how very postmodern), but it still has a manifesto (how very modern). The first point of said manifesto is: “We recognize oscillation to be the natural order of the world.” Wait, is it? That seems like a silly principle, like making cyclothymia ontological. The second: “We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child [that would be postmodernism].” Gosh, must we? And are those the only two options? The third point: “Movement shall henceforth be enabled by way of an oscillation between positions, with diametrically opposed ideas operating like the pulsating polarities of a colossal electric machine, propelling the world into action.” To cut a lot out, the whole thing concludes with, “Go forth and oscillate!” Look, hold on for a moment. I’m getting nauseous. Is my saying this metamodern? Why all this oscillation? Isn’t that just repackaged postmodern indecision?

Metamodern theorists would say that it’s vital to see the meta in metamodernism differently than the postmodern meta in metareferentiality. Meta means both between, more appropriate in the case of the former, and beyond, more appropriate in the case of the latter. This is not to say that postmodern reflection isn’t part of it. But this reflection shows up now not in postmodern copies of copies of copies but in the current obsession with the metaverse—in, for example, Everything Everywhere All At Once or Rick and Morty or Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse or Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. In these metamodern amusements, the copy does not appear as a mere copy—that is, as a denigration of authenticity—but as confirmation. Yes, everything is arbitrary, but somehow, some things still align!

As with the postmodern copy, the metamodern copy has no aura. Only, we are now free, in the metamodern era, to allow all of our warm fuzzy feelings to compensate for that fact. In the meeting of copies, meaning can somehow be manufactured. The guiding assumption remains, therefore, that there is no meaning. But the metamodern twist on this postmodern realization is that whatever accidental sense we do make of things matters more than any real meaning ever could.

Just add more subjectivity, and you’re ready to go!

This brings me, at last, to a refrain I’ve encountered in various metamodern permutations. This is the essential metamodern oscillation: “Nothing matters, and everything matters.” I’ve even heard someone express the idea in this way: “Nothing matters, therefore, everything matters.” If that statement’s sheer lack of reasonableness and logic doesn’t make you want to bash your head against a wall, I’m not sure what will. “I know we’re all nihilists,” say the metamodern artists, “but at least we care.” More or less, the idea is that sincerity is sufficient to make up for the lack of truth.

Yes, metamodernism is supposed to be descriptive. And, sure, I think the idea captures a lot that we see in our time. But it happens to be descriptive of a worldview that is an already well-established and fully operative nihilism with a smile. You can find it all over the place. Liberal theologians, for example, are classic metamodernists. I think of a gifted but ultimately vacuous pop theologian, Peter Rollins, who hurls Derrida and Lacan at theology like Jackson Pollock hurled paint at a canvas, as if to say, “It’s all pointless, but I care deeply about it. Let sincerity and irony hug it out!” He follows every liberal theologian who has ever reduced everything in the Christian tradition to a mere metaphor. Well, that’s just nihilism with Christian language. If you believe everything is metaphorical and nothing is true, that’s still nihilism. It’s just got metamodern flavoring.

I get that metamodernism is sincere. It is also, by clinging to sincerity alone, sincerely wrong. Why must we always be playing dialectical games and sublating a bad thesis and a bad antithesis to create a new and equally awful—and I’d say dishonest—synthesis? This is just reactivity. No self-awareness at all. And yes, I mean that. That, in fact, is one of the points of Kaufman’s Synecdoche. Adding a meta-level to something, whether postmodern or metamodern, doesn’t help anyone reach the truth. It may be smart, but it’s not clever, or clever but not wise. It may, in fact, do precisely the opposite of helping people to reach the truth. Building a house out of mirrors means you’re hiding more of the world and showing more of yourself.

The metamodern mindset almost seems to operate on Yogi Berra’s quip, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!” It structures a worldview that cannot tell you what a woman is (how very postmodern) but sincerely believes it is possible to become one if you are a man (how very modern). That oscillation is perfectly captured in the queer theory of the medical-industrial complex pipeline. The former is postmodern, and the latter is modern. It cannot tell you what being happy is, but it’ll sincerely offer you all the affluenza you can stomach. A lack of philosophy (postmodern) gives way to entire nations addicted to painkillers (modern). It has no principles (postmodern), but it’ll put it in writing and make sure to get all the bureaucratic boxes ticked (modern). Metamodernism cannot tell you what education is, but it’ll certainly and sincerely get you educated. And it’ll fail at every level to identify what justice looks like, but it’ll fight like hell very sincerely for social justice.

No one knows what’s right, but everyone has rights!

I may have quoted it before here, but I’ll risk quoting it again because it is something that I think captures the silliness of all of this rather well. It also reveals the essential continuity beneath the modern, postmodern, and metamodern modes of thinking, which is nihilism. It comes from Chesterton’s 1908 book Orthodoxy, and it says this:

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

Well, we are in the age of pity, it seems. We live in a time of immense sincerity. It is all to context-collapse a Jane-Austenian line, “Very agreeable.” But being nice and wrong does not seem to me to be ideal. To be sincere in beliefs that might land you or a few others in hell is a disturbing and not comforting thought. Is sincerity used as a defense against the task of actually figuring out what is true?

Metamodernism is not merely a way to describe certain developments in the creative arena. It describes very well what is happening beyond that. It describes a mask under which hides a very dark and ultimately mistaken worldview. It is still nihilism. In this, Bo Burnham’s depressive metamodernism gets closer to reality than Whedon’s bathetic metamodernism, although he is unlikely to dig beyond his therapeutic paradigm to find something more robust. Mere ontologised cyclothymia is not enough of a foundation. Merely oscillating from irony to sincerity when it feels emotionally uncomfortable to linger too long on one or the other is an attempt to cope with dissonance. It is much, much easier to believe that you get to manufacture and confirm the meaning you can sincerely care about than to consider that you may be answerable to someone else for the way that you have wasted your life and led yourself and others away from the truth, all while simply looking for ways to amuse yourself.

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