Klaus Mann

Excerpt from Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude

Chapter excerpted from my book Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude, available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.

Klaus Mann, most of the time, has a busy and enviably interesting social life. When he is only 19, we find him working with his sister Erika in the cabarets of Berlin, along with a range of curious bohemians. Around the same time, he visits Paris and has opium with Jean Cocteau, while also meeting with André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Julien Green. In 1939, when Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood leave England for America, Klaus is there to greet their ship in New York. Later that year in Hollywood he is entertained by Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, and George Cukor. And so forth. His father’s importance and his own charm and intelligence mean that he has friends to visit in Budapest, Vienna, Zürich, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, New York, Los Angeles, and other cities. Yet his diaries over the years consistently record a loneliness and sadness so overpoweringly painful that he finds himself longing for death as the only possible source of rescue. “Once again, a tremendous wave of depression. Transience. How I sense the blessed sight of DEATH. . . LONELINESS – I have the sense that ‘loneliness’ and ‘transience’ are the only reality. Numb with sadness.”¹ “Once again screamed in sadness. How can I get through this? Dear God, how CAN I get through this? Ah, sweet death . . . Horrible night . . . Completely immobilized by depression.”² “An intense feeling of loneliness. So far away from everything. Far away – from what? There is no place or group or person to whom I belong. I feel more disconnected, uprooted, isolated than ever.”³ He tells himself that this loneliness has become so physically painful that he does not see how he can survive it. He tries on more than one occasion to take his life and seems to finally succeed at suicide in 1949, at the age of 42, though his recent biographer, Frederic Spotts, believes the cause was an unintended overdose of sleeping pills combined with a problematic drug concoction sent him by a friend.

One of my themes has been the painful burden of individuation for modern urban selves who still face the world with brains designed for hunter-gatherer societies, when one was almost always in the close physical presence of others and engaged in mostly collective activities. Just as with thirst or hunger, biological evolution would quite naturally build in painful states that pressed humans toward certain biological necessities: pairing up in partnerships for reproduction and forming close friendship alliances to assist one in times of danger or difficulty. One will experience a painful hunger when not achieving these two sources of attachment. Built upon those fundamental sentiments, as upon a basic scaffolding, would be the modern child’s complex experience of separateness and individuation, of loss and solitude, of the burdens of agency. Then over that structure would be built the intellectual awareness now possible, with advances in human reflection, of the metaphysical fragility and insubstantial character of the human individual in a very wide universe not designed for it. We might recall once more Nietzsche’s image of sea animals once buoyantly maneuvering in the ocean currents who feel the burden of their weight for the first time as they move onto land. Humans must now be driven by self-conscious awareness instead of by instinct. Klaus Mann can seem to be one who experiences that weight of individuation, of self-consciousness, of separateness, especially intensely. In response he seems to turn to promiscuous gay sex, to drugs, to frenetic travel and socializing, and especially to writing. None of these activities appears to overcome his painful sense of loneliness.

We might reflect on strategies for countering the burdens of individuation by comparing Klaus to others of my loners. One useful comparison is with Kafka. Recall his thought that he could not get married because he saw his father as a figure lying across the social map and filling up exclusively the space defined for marriage. He could not be assertive enough to dislodge his father from that space and could not see fatherhood as a more formal-grammatical social slot that different individuals might come to occupy, very many of them at the same time. Klaus throughout his life seems to feel the overwhelming presence of his father as a writer. It is as if, in a manner analogous to Kafka’s case, his father Thomas is lying upon the map of the social world and takes up completely the space of the writer. Klaus is not assertive enough to try to dislodge him from that space; it has always been Erika, not Klaus, who engaged in confrontations and difficult negotiations with their father. Nor does Klaus seem able to move on to a cultural architecture in which the slot of writer is a formal-structural one to be filled by different persons in different ways. He seems to be working within the space defined by his father and desperately wants his father’s approval, while Thomas is remarkably ungenerous in offering it. (Another Mann son, Golo, felt that same sense of Thomas monopolizing and defending his claim to such a writerly space and he was able to become a writer of history books, so he claimed, only after his father’s death.) Thomas typically responds to Klaus’s writing with the kind of banal, generalized praise that he offers to writers he hardly knows. He does not disguise that he thinks of Klaus as a lightweight who writes too fast and too glibly, without any depth of intellectual or of psychological insight and with too great an interest in fashionable happenings.

That treatment by his father surely appears to be one source of Klaus’s despairing sense of himself in times of loneliness as fragile, insubstantial, and ephemeral. Reviewing his life, one can ask more generally about why typical sources of self-strengthening and self-sustaining were not available to him. Much of our mental activity, as Daniel Dennett likes to remind us, comes over time from the outside in. We are part of social interactions where others warn us, berate us, advise us, and so forth. When we find ourselves alone without such others, we gradually learn internalized processes of self-warning, self-berating, and self-advising. If one’s childhood goes well, then one’s family environment offers many occasions of parental supporting and strengthening of the self. Gradually one learns, when they are not around, habits and attitudes of self-supporting and self-strengthening that one can engage in on one’s own. Klaus identified as a writer from the age of six, an activity associated massively with his father. In the experience of what he saw as great coldness from his father whose opinion meant so much to him, he never could internalize such processes into a self-strengthening he could call upon when feeling the pain of great loneliness.

Nor can Klaus find a substantial, enduring basis for his selfhood through having his character shaped by a form of life that could confidently project its values and its character-shaping practices over time. His adolescent years, from 1919 to 1926, are the very time when Germany is going through massive turmoil and chaos, when coups and soviet republics and armed repressions are in the news, when all traditional values are being questioned, when the economy is coming apart under hardly imaginable rates of inflation. Why expect German psychologies, asks Klaus, to be any stabler than their currency? Few of us would wish to share the morally flawed life of the ancient Spartans, but that life at least had the outcome that selves were created who were secure in the value of their own ways of acting, in their possession of properly admired traits of character. The chaotic German background experienced by Klaus was just the opposite. Also, he was as an adolescent intellectually curious, non-conformist, and anti-authoritarian, and so was less likely to gain any stability of self through identifying with whatever ethical forms did remain reliably transmitted in German culture. His father Thomas was different. He had grown up Lutheran in Protestant, commercial Lübeck and kept identifying, against some of his own desires, with the virtues of strong institutions and orderly arrangements that supported his life and linked it to a meaningful larger activity. Marriage and family were not a social cover for his homosexuality but were, he believed, the basis for a life that mattered over time through his participation in institutions that could withstand the pressures of history. Klaus, in contrast, invests his sexuality mostly in unsatisfactory, usually quite transient relations with young men he picks up, often for money, in baths, brothels, massage parlors, and off the street. Unhappiness seems structurally built in to these relationships. Erotic energy is not being summoned in the service of practices that, through mature reality-testing, will aim at attaching himself to those partners likely to provide a reliable long-term happiness. Rather, eros on his part is recruited for a flawed and somewhat desperate project of self-formation and self-securing, one that goes back to early childhood experiences of loss, separateness, aloneness, grief, and the insubstantiality of the self. Through a somewhat magical identification with a present immediate partner, he calls up some of that earlier flawed, fragile structure of self and tries to resolve its issues. Such a strategy is not likely to result in relationships providing a dependable stability for the self.

Klaus can also be distinguished from Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Pessoa, and others as I have presented them. Aloneness for them was associated with the positive aim of resisting and avoiding the pressures of others, of refusing to make one’s thinking or writing a performance for others, shaped by their responses and incentives. Klaus, in contrast, revels in such a performance. As a young man he wants to be a cabaret performer, an actor, even a waiter at a popular bohemian bar. He admits that from his youth he has wanted immediate fame, and he decides to become a playwright who will act along with his sister in the plays he writes. His fiction writing from early on is rather different from that of his father. Thomas aims for a certain almost monumental weight to his writings. He will work for long periods giving greater intellectual, psychological, ethical, and symbolic power to his various works. He can think of this writing as in some sense an activity of self-grounding so that through it he is able to stand there on his own as a substantial presence. Klaus writes more quickly, more flatly, and aims to register the currents of the swiftly changing social world around him. On the one hand, that registration is often a courageous and original one; he treats homosexuality in detail, unapologetically, and in a manner that is fairly obviously autobiographical. His father would not have dared such a thing. On the other hand, Klaus the performer is extremely dependent on the responses of others to his work. His writing on its own does not have the self-grounding, self-sustaining, monumental quality of his father’s, a quality that could then seem by osmosis to inhere in the writer himself. Klaus has considerable bad luck. Those opposed to or envious of his father treat Klaus with near contempt. Others claim he would never have been published except for his name. So Klaus often faces bitter disappointment in the public reception of his work. Like a cabaret performer receiving only boredom or catcalls from an audience, he is hurt by that reception and thus does not have that possible route, the sustaining responses of a public, as a means of experiencing the self as having a more substantial, enduring presence in the world.

Other routes are blocked as well. Nietzsche in Sils-Maria, Switzerland, or along the Riviera coast could identify profoundly with the natural order around him as a stabilizing aspect of his own character’s engagement with the world. Klaus is devoted rather to the social life of urban settings. Nietzsche also had a notably strong grounding in the classical literature of the Greco-Roman world and could fall back on that exceptionally rich set of resources for his individual project of achieving a compelling and resilient self-formation. Klaus, while very well read in general, had a combination of private tutors plus attendance at an experimental school that let students learn what they wished. He quit that school early and never went to a university. So one crucial aspect of Nietzsche’s own self-formation was not available to him. In the long run, he had to reject his identification with German culture because of the rise of the fascists, and though he tried, he was never truly at home in American culture, even after becoming a citizen. In addition, he was not interested enough in science or history on their own to be strengthened by an attachment to an enduring objective order apart from the self. When he wrote historical novels on Ludwig II, Tchaikovsky, and Alexander, he tended to be writing his own subjective autobiography through these figures instead of losing himself in an objective order of research. Still a further route for securing a substantial, enduring selfhood was not available to Klaus. A key move in achieving a mature individuality requires separating from one’s parents and forming a more autonomous world of one’s own. But Klaus never quite forms his own household. He lives for considerable time in hotels while traveling but then he returns and lives with his parents, whether in Munich, Princeton, Pacific Palisades, or near Zürich. For his entire adulthood he continues to depend on a monthly allowance from his father and mother.

Sometimes his homosexual relationships are not so ephemeral. He falls in love, for example, with Thomas Quinn Curtiss, or Tomski, and in some manner or other the relationship continues for several years. But Tomski can be cool and uncaring, almost cruel, when it comes to considering Klaus’s feelings, and he will take off with a new boyfriend when he feels like it. Klaus is left blaming himself for the failure, perhaps repeating aspects of his relationship with his father. He admits that he cannot seem to fall in love with anyone who might offer the promise of a genuine, long-term relationship. So Klaus appears, all in all, placed to an unusual degree in a set of circumstances that intensify enormously the pain and pressure and weight of individuation, of selfhood, of solitude. We can understand his diaries’ frequent confession that overwhelming sadness, loneliness, and radical transience seem the way of the world for him, so that a key life experience is both a longing for death and finding ways to stave off that conclusion, or to mitigate the pain through drugs or sex.

The answer to the oppressive weight of being an individual, in the absence of cultural practices that support a substantial, confident, resilient presence for the self, is, for several of my loners, writing itself. I have claimed that certain kinds of writing can serve as a scaffolding, a prosthesis, a template, or a surrogate for the self as it is experiencing its fundamental fragility and pressures toward de-individuation. Let me develop this thought in greater detail. For the young child who has difficulties in handling separateness and loss, in parsing out what is self and what his other, an identification with another individual may prove enticing. The desirable qualities in this other individual will be those suggesting a confident, successful, and enduring activity of individuation. Those qualities may include a natural and easy habitation of the body; a lightness and buoyancy of movement (recall Nietzsche’s sea animals who have moved onto land); a self-sustaining power that is not a mirror product of external pressures; and a distinct style that seems to come from within as the expression of an interior life. Other such qualities might include: beauty and form suggesting a self-arranging capacity that resists disintegration; an apparent self-sufficiency and lack of neediness; vitality; a way of bringing different aspects and gestures of the self into something of a pleasing musical whole; and a suggestion of earlier, more mobile childhood structures of self and other, so that the individual identified with may press into his pattern of selfhood several different layers of identification.

When there are serious difficulties in one’s project of self-formation, such an idealized other will be appealing. In the other’s presence, one may seem to possess those qualities oneself. But the situation here resembles that by which evolution makes us pick out quickly processed, superficial markers of health, such as good teeth and symmetric facial structures, as attractive. In this case, too, rather basic structures of the psyche are called on that focus on quite primitive markers of successful individuation, rather than the actual possession of qualities and virtues that might lead to satisfying long-term projects in life. So unconscious, primitively structured programs in the psyche may keep pushing one towards erotic union with others who will very quickly prove rather useless for the psyche’s goal of a more secure self-formation.

But writing might be different. It might come to possess a set of characteristics quite analogous to those of the idealized individual just described and it is a product of one’s own power, rather than an accidental appearing of an unreliable, arbitrary other. Writing may seem to have a self-sustaining, self-ordering power expressed as beauty and form; a distinctive rhythm and style that can maintain itself over time; a lightness and vitality; and so forth. I want to focus here on certain particular qualities. First is that the activity of writing may model a basic structural feature of the self: its way of taking in difficult experiences, impressions, and events, and assimilating them into its own style of self-arrangement. We might call this a distinctive phenomenological pattern of interacting with the world. In the steady rhythm of the prose, its way of sustaining its own patterns as different experiences are taken into its machinery, one enacts the capacity of the self to face the most troubling aspects of the world without losing one’s own style of self-ordering. In excellent writing, what is other retains its character as what it is while at the same time becoming an aspect of the inner self-unfolding of the writing self. With strong writers such as Nietzsche, Proust, and Thomas Mann, that assimilating power of a well-achieved selfhood, while at the same time letting emerge significant features of the reality encountered, is confidently enacted. Klaus’s subjective registering of the currents of the time does not have the same rootedness in a powerfully self-sustaining activity that can fuel itself even without the presence of others. Klaus is readier for an immediate responsiveness to the cultural environment.

Another feature of some admirable writing is pointed to by Nietzsche. He thinks of certain great aesthetic experiences as joining an Apollinian activity of confident form-giving and individuation with a more Dionysian, oceanic de-individuation. The latter involves an experience of both surrendering to, and being exuberantly energized by, unconscious forces that work instinctively within us. The goal is what we might call an Oresteian solution. In that trilogy of Aeschylus, the forces that would destroy the fragile individuality of Orestes and that are associated with nature, blood religion, and Asiatic rites to the mother goddess eventually go underground in Athens as a source of support, through agriculture and childbirth, for the polis, provided they are properly honored. In certain excellent literary texts, such as Melville’s Moby Dick, we seem to feel this very tension at work. Ishmael does manage to survive as an individual, but just barely, stuck on the coffin while floating in a great oceanic wilderness. To produce as a writer a successful facing of that Dionysian de-individuating power while maintaining a compelling form-giving power is, as it were, to set oneself against the forces of a great hurricane while in one’s house close to the beach, confident in the architecture of the house that is being tested. The melody line of the prose, standing for the maneuvers of the individual self, seems supported by a deeper underlying cadence that is carrying everything above it. Once again, Klaus’s writing does not have the gravitas or depth to enact such a structure convincingly. So, his writing, as satisfying as it is to him while he is doing it, cannot be a surrogate modeling of, a scaffolding or template for, a psychological solution that would help secure the substantial, enduring sense of himself that he needs. He will continue turning to his drugs and his homosexual pickups. We might return to Nietzsche’s thought that with the weakening, leveling, unconvincing institutions of modernity, it is now up to individuals to carry out on themselves the work of individuation that stronger, more self-disciplined cultures of the past provided for their members. He suggests that certain kinds of writing and thinking, performed in certain kinds of settings, might contribute substantially to that new task of individual selves. But Klaus’s writing does not seem able to carry out such a task successfully in his own case.

 We might develop this thought by looking at Klaus’s obsession with death. His diary frequently mentions how attractive death is to him, how much he longs for it in the great psychological painfulness he feels. One might be reminded of some of the poetry of Walt Whitman in which he chants a loving hymn to death. In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life,” Whitman greets the de-individuating power of death as a welcoming maternal embrace, the promise of bliss in a serene oceanic rocking. Whitman in his poetry offers something analogous to what I called the Oresteian solution. Instead of being a power that erases the self, the reality of death turns into an elemental rhythmic support for the maneuvering of an individual life, in the way that the power, beauty, and lightness of a surfer’s moves depend on being elevated and supported by the very oceanic currents that would dissolve and drown the self.

Klaus cannot transport that de-individuating power of death into his writing as a transfigured, supportive, elevating power, a power that depends on one’s coming close to the destructive force of reality, as in holding a hurricane party in a house along the beach. Death remains something external and alien for him, desired strongly at times but not transfigured aesthetically into a larger surrogate model of the psychological self. In Whitman’s Oresteian model, the awareness of, fear of, and desire for, death are integrated into a larger machinery of self, captured in the poems, as what energizes that tonic machinery from below. The poems can be a kind of prosthesis, a technical extension of the self in the world whose features (the steady rhythm, the confident advance of the line, the negotiation between unconscious pressures and compelling form, the seeming inevitability of the patterns that unfold) can appear as features of the poet himself. Klaus’s writing is not powerful enough to incorporate death into his work in this transfigured fashion. The overwhelming pain of existence and the strong appeal of de-individuation remain in a kind of naked isolation, covered over briefly but untransformed by drugs or sex. In “As I Ebbed with the Ocean of Life,” Whitman is walking along the shore of Long Island and compares himself to the scattered flotsam, the seaweed, shells, and bits of old wood, that wash up on the shore and that form a blurred boundary between the land and the sea. He recognizes that most of what makes him is due to a dark, oceanic heaving, the source of that flotsam, that he does not understand at all but that he accepts and embraces. That recognition of his present gestures as like fragile bits of residue from unconscious shapings that are unknown to him, bits that he presents as castaways called back into a maternal ocean, does not prevent him from reaching in the poem toward the land and joyously embracing a vitally paternal figure. He achieves through his writing a kind of balance that accepts the most dissolving, drowning pressures on his life and structures them as an energizing power. Klaus’s writing cannot handle the strong appeal of death in a similarly tonic fashion. His writing does not form the kind of powerful symbiosis between psychological happenings and aesthetic patterns that might have offered him a more enduring sense of support and strength.

Perhaps his depression and loneliness might have been lessened if he had worked harder to identify with the large social and intellectual movements of his age, so that he would have had a ready feeling of belonging to a group instead of feeling isolated. Many of his acquaintances were doctrinaire leftists for whom aligning oneself with the attitudes, ideologies, and individual representatives of the favored group was the primary concern. But Klaus could not be such a doctrinaire communist. He believed in the virtues of liberalism too strongly, including protections for a space of individual liberty, and he defended liberal political institutions. So he would often be treated with disdain by those on the left and did not have that collective resource as a means of fighting isolation.

It would be deeply unfair to Klaus to leave him at this point. For in spite of the fact that he retained a psychological fragility, being poorly rooted in any secure, socially grounded form of life, and in spite of the fact that he kept on living at home instead of achieving a needed psychological independence, Klaus was courageous and at important times showed an ethical strength that his father did not. Even though he had his very great depressions and his addictions, he continued to write most days and produced a large body of work. As I noted, he wrote openly, extensively, and unapologetically about homosexual attraction at a time when the topic was still a dangerous one. It is interesting that Klaus experiences even greater contempt for his homosexuality from the communist and social-democratic left than from the fascists. He bravely writes an article in which he condemns both of those political flanks for their similar intolerance and defends the ordinariness of homosexuality, neither better nor worse than its heterosexual counterpart. His father is hardly so daring. Klaus’s moral and psychological strength comes to the fore with the rise of Hitler. He spends a great deal of time and energy, after leaving Germany in 1933, organizing the intellectuals who have left into a culture of Germany-in-exile, especially through founding and editing an exile publication that attracts top intellectual names. But his father and other writers such as Stefan Zweig, still trying to sell their books in Germany, refuse to support the publication and it fails financially. Klaus is at his best during the war years. After spending the late Thirties crisscrossing America to inform Americans about the great dangers posed by Hitler, he decides that he must do something concrete that contributes to the defeat of the evil dictator. So, he makes himself fluent in English, becomes an American citizen despite enduring harsh FBI interrogations about his purported homosexuality and his communism, and volunteers for the U. S. army. While a large number of the German intellectuals who used to mock and belittle him, such as Adorno and Brecht, are having cocktail parties and an enjoyable lifestyle in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades, while indulging in their contempt for the America that rescued them, Klaus is going through basic training in Missouri. He has never in his life been an athlete or a health enthusiast and, while he is off drugs at the time, the years as an addict have not helped his overall conditioning. Yet there he is in his late thirties carrying a heavy pack for thirty-mile hikes along with recruits who are little more than half his age. He trains to master, without great success, taking a rifle apart and putting it back together, and he crawls along the ground in live-fire drills. He ends up with his unit on the front lines in Italy, though he is not assigned to direct combat but to interviewing German soldiers as they are captured, assessing their morale and trying to determine German battle plans. A poignant photo shows him at war’s end in his American military uniform, visiting the partly destroyed house in Munich where he grew up.

There is little place for Klaus after the war. He is too much of the left, though never a communist, for the anti-communist America of the late Forties. He is unwelcome in Germany, since Germans have no desire whatever to be lectured by the anti-Hitler exiles. He is far more at home in the daily social life of Europe than in America, but nations rebuilding from the war are not ready for his brand of intellectual and political cosmopolitanism. Again, Frederic Spotts, upon whose biography I have depended very much here, thinks that his death in 1949 in Cannes was not a suicide but an accident, a combination of sleeping pills and a contaminated supply of an opiate, sent perhaps either by a friend, Thea Sternheim, in Paris, or by a doctor he was friendly with, Robert Klopstock. His books have received more sympathetic treatment well after his death. His novel Mephisto, about a leftist German actor who trades complicity with the Nazis in exchange for fame and power, was made into an award-winning film. His memoirs, Kind dieser Zeit (A Child of this Time) and The Turning Point (written in English and later given a much expanded German edition by him) are seen as important and well-written documentary evidence of life under the Weimar Republic. His novel about German exiles (Der Volcan or The Volcano) is considered by some the best of the exile novels. Thomas would not interrupt his speaking tour of Europe to attend Klaus’s funeral in Cannes. He responded to the death with rather harsh condemnation, assuming it was a suicide by someone unconcerned with its effects on his mother and his sister Erika, and he suggested that Klaus had never appreciated all that his father had done for him.

Klaus Mann’s story shows how, in a human life, there is a negotiation between, on the one hand, a Nietzschean project of self-making, so that one can resist depression, exhaustion, loneliness, and becoming a mere performer for others, and, on the other hand, one’s ethical duties in a larger social setting. In spite of his problems with often overwhelming sadness, loneliness, and drug addiction, Klaus recognized that the crucial issue of the age was the rise of Hitler and strategies to defeat him. He put great effort into editing an émigré journal that would gather anti-Hitler cultural forces together, into grueling lecture tours to persuade Americans about the evils of the Hitler regime, and eventually into serving in the U.S. army in Europe. He would have considered it profoundly unethical, and a way of making his life worthless overall, if he had spent all his efforts during this period working on a form of writing that would shape a distinctive and enduring style of individual selfhood, a phenomenological stance for assimilating the onrush of experience. Our communal, collective duties relating to overcoming injustice and bringing about worthwhile conditions of life will often be far more important than finally resolving what I have been calling issues of separation-individuation. Yet even in such circumstances the latter remain in play. It is true that sometimes our commitment to a collective effort of great importance may itself make the burdensome weight of individuation and separateness less oppressive. Klaus’s drug problems and loneliness became worse during the first years of his exile from Germany, but in the late 1930s and early 1940s he mostly was off drugs as he campaigned against Hitler and fought along with the Americans in Italy. But the great weight of sadness he felt and the drugs as well returned after the war. The noble contribution to a collective effort was not sufficient to leave behind his earlier difficulties of trying to shape an adequate architecture of self and other, of handling his failure to find an appropriate long-term intimacy and partnership. With Wittgenstein as well, we see that his very difficult wartime service in the Austrian army did not make any less pressing and anxiety-producing for him the issues around forming himself as a certain kind of individual. My argument all along has not been that the kind of projects of self-making I have associated with my chosen loners should be the dominant projects in anyone’s life. The argument was rather about using literature and music, as well as a university education in general, to form selves who are better able to handle the metaphysical and psychological pressures of individuation, including threatening intrusions upon the self. That education will help to shape a self-maintaining style and rhythm of selfhood, one not dependent on constant support from others and one that does not require others to radically change their behavior so as to provide a safe space for us without undesirable triggers.

There are arguments, to be sure, that we would all be better off if we made the boundaries separating individual selves less important. There are at least two directions from which this thought might emerge. One is the obvious case of Marxism, which I have considered above. The other includes attitudes familiar in Buddhism, in Schopenhauer, and in certain recent analytic philosophers such as Derek Parfit. Both directions of thought have it that our rigorous sense of individual selfhood, of the deep, crucial significance of the boundaries that separate one self from another, is a product of a certain social, economic, or cultural forms of life, forms that are not essential to humans. In his book Reasons and Persons Parfit proceeds from the belief that the metaphysical and religious pictures that supposedly determine the deep fact of personal identity can no longer be accepted and can no longer be the basis for ethics. He examines various philosophical and science-fiction thought experiments to argue that personal identity is not a deep and rigid phenomenon, that it is to some degree up to us how robust, determinate, and essential we make the boundaries separating selves to be. Parfit argues against ethical theories of rational self-interest and recommends weakening such theories in two directions. We should not see so sharp a distinction between what happens to us and what happens to others and we should not see so strong a bond between the selves we are now and the selves we will be in the future. In both cases, on Parfit’s account, determinations of identity and otherness involve differences of degree, not differences of essential kind.

Parfit claims, as a result of these reflections, that he has a considerably weaker sense of his own personal identity than before, but that this result is a consoling one and actually allows him a life of greater happiness. He can take pleasure now in good things happening to others whereas in the past he was likely to restrict such pleasures to what was happening only to him. He is less afraid of death because he connects himself less closely and rigidly with this particular biological life that will end. He worries less about the future, since that future self is in some ways analogous to another person, and he spends less time regretting the past, since he is not quite the same person as the one who did the regrettable things.

I find Parfit’s thought experiments of considerable interest, but my own intuition is that matters having to do with the weight and burden of individuation and separateness go rather deep in us. Once you take our brains as they are designed by biological evolution and place them in selves who have to maneuver not in hunter-gatherer settings but within highly sophisticated and differentiated cultures, then anxieties about resisting disintegration and sustaining a style and rhythm of selfhood will be substantial. We will be like Nietzsche’s sea animals who lose their easy buoyancy and feel their burdensome weight when they move onto land. Loneliness, a profound sadness, and depression will still be possibilities to be faced. We will still be moved by thinkers such as Beckett, Melville, Proust, and Nietzsche. Taking on these burdens honestly will not only generate more robust selves in general. It will also produce individuals better able to think and feel for themselves, and such individuals are valuable to the overall cultural power of a form of life, since they will demonstrate greater curiosity, innovation, and resistance to groupthink. It is true that one can imagine quite drastic changes in our human future. Perhaps there will be some kind of symbiosis between humans and machines, as well as the technological joining of humans in superconnected networks, so that individual mental experiences truly do come to matter much less. Perhaps a Marxist-style collective can make its coercive formation of individuals from birth so overpowering that much of the natural functioning of human brains and bodies is left behind. In both of those cases, social changes and conditioning would make human biology and its evolutionary origins less important; we would be less dependent on the kinds of cognitive-emotive complexes that controlled the lives of hunter-gatherers and that now find themselves functioning in complex social orders of a very different kind, causing a certain inevitable painfulness. But those are not, one trusts, our conditions now, and learning to accept the pressures of individuation remains a goal today for a satisfying education.

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1. Frederic Spotts, Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 97.

2. Ibid., 105.

3. Ibid., 208.