Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude

Introduction

Introduction excerpted from my book Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude, available for purchase in both paperback and kindle versions.

At a time when one’s presence on social media can appear as the only reality, and when an individual life seems a performative activity involving the circulation of fashionable or culturally rewarded moral and social attitudes, it can be an interesting investigation, and an instructive one as well, to look at thinkers and writers of roughly a century ago who emphasized the virtues of being a loner. For lengthy periods Wittgenstein lived and worked alone: in tiny Austrian mountain villages where he served as a teacher, at the house he built overlooking a Norwegian fjord, and on the deserted Connemara coast of western Ireland. He felt that being a professor at Cambridge turned him into a performer, a result that distorted and contaminated his intellectual activity and his moral status. Nietzsche gave up his teaching position in Basel and worked alone in cheap hotels and pensions along the coast from Genoa to Nice. He claimed that, unlike others who needed to perform before a full house, he worked before an empty house with only himself as audience. His Zarathustra returns gladly like a prodigal son to what he calls his home solitude. While Kafka lived with his parents or sister much of the time, he said that the ideal situation for him would be to write in a basement room without contact with others, with food left at regular times at the door. His long, mostly epistolary relationship with Felice Bauer was a complex and subtle exercise in manipulating distance and avoiding genuine intimacy. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa walked the streets of Lisbon and captured its moods and psychological weather as an inveterate loner, as the semi-autobiographical character he creates in The Book of Disquiet indicates. Proust felt that his real life was the one he spent writing alone in his cork-lined room and that time spent with friends or in the social whirl was usually wasted time that catered to a false self rather than to one’s genuine inner ground of individuation and creation. Even someone who was married, such as T. S. Eliot, can qualify as a loner for this overall narrative. That marriage was a disaster for both parties and after he separated from Vivienne, he lived for 25 years in a clerical house or in an apartment where he was little disturbed. Other writers and thinkers of this period might be mentioned as well in this regard.

But first I should be clear about just what sort of individual I am investigating. I do not mean the radically isolate loners whom one encounters in media stories about those who died alone in urban apartments, unnoticed for weeks by any relative or friend, or about those who have lived for long periods in a private fantasy world and who suddenly erupt in violence. Those in my study, while emphasizing their preference for living and working alone, generally lived fairly rich social lives. Insofar as they form a rough grouping for my investigation, they might be characterized by the following traits. They express an unusually strong need for solitude and for resisting the pressures of others upon them. It is as if their very task of individuation, of forming themselves as genuine individuals, is seriously at risk from those external pressures, so that they might collapse and dissolve if they do not, on their own, mold an enduring and self-sustaining form of selfhood. They see the available social training in shaping and shoring up a well-formed individuality as woefully inadequate, largely because of the deep overall flaws of modernity, so that they themselves must take charge of that task as private individuals rather than depending on the social world’s backing and its rituals of forming individuals. Another trait that appears common to those I am studying is what appears to be substantial difficulty in the early-childhood forming of a stable architecture of self and other. Psychologists speak of a necessary process of what is called separation-individuation. A young child must move from an almost symbiotic attachment to a primary caregiver to a status as a well-differentiated individual capable of enduring separateness and aloneness. As this process develops, there may be considerable instability, mobility, and oscillation regarding what counts as self and what counts as other. In consoling a doll or some other object, is one consoling oneself? In a particular relationship, is one bringing the other into the self through an idealized identification or is one projecting the self upon the other, so that one’s being is somehow at stake in what is happening to this other individual? A key human trait is that what may begin as activities of warning, interrogating, berating, and consoling others may eventually become activities of self-warning, self-interrogation, self-berating, and self-consoling. We can come to occupy both slots in what was at first a set of structures involving our interactions with others in the world. There can be an easy back-and-forth shifting of self-to-other, other-to-self, and self-to-self relations.

For the loners I am studying, that mobility of patterns in a transitional, self-to-other space of childhood, where elemental structures of being an individual are crucially at stake, may continue its effects into adulthood, in the way that ancient buildings in Rome might have shaped the architecture of later years. The results may be ambivalent. On the one hand, a great richness of inner life can develop. On the other, a blurring of what is self and what is other as well as a great emphasis on self-to-self relations, as a substitute for supportive gestures that ought to have been offered by the world, can diminish one’s capacity for well-formed intimate relations with others. One way this outcome might occur stems from the fact that the erotic brain seems to develop well before one’s sexual development in puberty makes reproduction possible. If there is a strong sense of the fragility of individuation, of being a separate self, and if one is anxious about a dissolving of one’s boundaries as if something like drowning or fragmentation were a real psychological threat, then the brain’s engineering may look around for any free energy to contribute to the developmental task at hand. Erotic energy, without a clear goal at this earlier stage of life, may be repurposed and recruited for the task of securing the boundaries, integrity, and continuity of the self. One likely strategy could be an eroticizing identification with another individual who seems to express the desired qualities of individuation: an aura of self-sustaining integrity; a confident and distinctive style of being a self; a self-actualizing power that seems to come from within and to resist external pressures on the self’s boundaries; and a way of transforming the physical bodiliness that threatens decay and death into a lighter, more vital, more elevated, more self-determining state. The problem is a common one. What might be a strategic success in the space of childhood separation-individuation turns out to be a bad strategy in adulthood. Erotic and sexual relationships can become quite generally in one’s life an almost magical effort to assure self-identity and to avoid a dissolution of boundaries, rather than pressing one toward a partnership well-suited in its various qualities to the project of forming a long-term intimate relationship and perhaps raising a family.

It is notable that the painful pressures of individuation, as well as its rewards, will increase as civilizations become more complex. Much of the social behavior in hunter-gatherer societies can be strongly shaped by programs wired into the brain by evolution. But as tasks become much more diverse and sophisticated, we may have to determine matters through a slower, self-conscious process of deliberation. Nietzsche compares humans engaged in their more sophisticated, reflective activities as analogous to sea animals who, once having dragged their bodies onto land and no longer supported by buoyant oceanic currents, felt their painful weight for the first time. Certainly a part of our human history is an increasing sense of the weight of agency, responsibility, deliberation, choice, guilt, and regret. And as our intellects become more empowered, we can look at our lives all at once from a far larger perspective, from birth to death, and see the ways we have failed to make something meaningful out of them. Faced with that pressure, one might well hope for a return to some less individuated state, to a more symbiotic union with a more buoyantly supportive universe. More complex societies will increase our sense of loneliness not only through the weight of individual agency but also through the fact that it is much easier in these societies to live alone, unpartnered, in urban settings and still satisfy the necessities of life. And as we become far more different from one another, as so many forms of life and areas of interest become available, we find it harder to find a mutually affirming social life, with shared themes of discursive interaction. (In hunter-gatherer societies, everyone is going to be ready to talk about hunting or gathering.) Individuals find themselves, then, with a greater weight of aloneness. Wittgenstein both demanded solitude of himself and felt that the loneliness of his Norwegian outpost might be too much to bear, so that he might be tempted to suicide. Nietzsche, notably through Zarathustra’s “Night Song,” expressed his very great loneliness. It seemed to him that he shed light and warmth on others while it was his destiny never to receive light and warmth from others in return.

The loners I am investigating seem to feel especially strongly this stark fragility of the self, as well as the burden of individuation, in a larger world not designed to give humans comfort or security. There seems to be as well, in their case, a social world that refuses to offer the kinds of recognition and emotive attachments that would have allowed a more confident passage through a project of separation-individuation, as well as a progression to mature self-to-other relationships. That sense of precarity, both psychological and metaphysical, seems to repeat the experience of a young child forced, with its inherent weakness, to face a painful separateness and vulnerability. One outcome of the extension of that childhood space into adult circumstances is that one may be more sensitive than others to large issues about the situation of the human self in the universe. One may be less likely to be satisfied with the usual strategy games of the social world and more likely to be aware of the larger metaphysical space in which our actions and strategies occur, such that a certain mood of metaphysical sadness seems appropriate, while there is also a sense of satisfaction that one has arrived at this point of view and can accept it calmly.

The configuration I am assigning to my group of loners includes as well a turn to literature or philosophy as crucial to the project of becoming an individual, of securing the self. There are many varieties of literature with their many virtues, but certain qualities of literary work may be especially relevant in the case of those loners for whom writing and thinking are often linked with a difficult early process of handling separateness. Literary space may be a proxy, a scaffolding, a template, or a prosthesis for the psychological space of the self, a temporary support and model for helping to design an enduring style and manner of arranging mental life as well as a reliable pattern of appropriating the experiences of the world. The compelling style and rhythm of the text, its capacity to maintain its distinctive momentum as difficult experiences are handled, may suggest the capacity of the individual to sustain her own rhythm and style of selfhood in the face of the challenging, overwhelming pressures of experience. For a writer for whom style is important, the lightly moving line of prose may seem supported by an underlying persuasive cadence, and that relationship may suggest the way the individual life is supported by deeper, more elemental currents related to nature and the unconscious. Literature can often be a place where the burden and aloneness of a human existence, in an environment far removed from the hunter-gatherer existence we were designed for, becomes felt with a special intensity. The world of the text can be a space where one may be trying out different structurings of self and other, different phenomenological attitudes toward the world, so that out of that mobility a more satisfying mental architecture might emerge. Literature, like other arts, may offer a space where elements are connected in a more convincing, even a more inevitable, manner. Such an arrangement may take the contingent, arbitrary, awkward details of a life and make them have something of that feel of inevitability. It is as if literature may help us to establish, for our second nature as Nietzschean land animals, something of the lightness and buoyancy that characterized our more instinctive natures. Then the weight of agency and individuality and separateness will not be so oppressive. Literary space also allows us to expand and contract to an extraordinary degree, and in the briefest moment, the viewing point on a life. One thinks of Joyce’s story “The Dead,” where the immediate richness of the dinner party in Dublin is finally set against an ever-expanding viewpoint that takes in snow that is falling generally upon Ireland and upon graves out to the west, a snow that dissolves in the end as it strikes the waves of a great river leading into the Atlantic. Such a spatiotemporal expansion and contraction may allow us to bring together the moments of life in a way that gives greater integrity to the whole and makes us more easily reconciled to the passage from birth to death, and to the fragile, minuscule position we ultimately occupy in a larger universe.

All of these features of the scene of writing, as well as the general project of literary commitment, may be especially important for those who, as adults, are still working through issues related to what we have been calling the childhood space of separation-individuation. Nietzsche offers a further role for writing. He claims the great revolutions in history are the quiet ones, such as the Christian redesign of the human psyche in the ancient world. He says that now that Christianity has lost much of its psyche-shaping power, one must, in order to avoid cultural exhaustion and nihilism, learn a new such design for the mental life of the self. This is a task individuals must now accomplish on their own, since modern cultures are not capable of it. Nietzsche offers the model of mountain peaks that once were layers of silt at the bottom of oceans and the model of mountain pines that rise to the heights because they are deeply rooted in the earth. We must learn to elevate, reorder, integrate, repurpose, and concentrate our most basic drives, even the so-called evil ones, until they give shape to a compelling, distinctive style of selfhood. He suggests that literature and music may be crucial to this task. For they work on an unconscious level that has the capacity for bringing out what is truly individual in us, rather than training us to repeat the fashionable utterances of others, and they may, on his account, transfigure the elements of the psyche until they become more heightened, more beautiful, and more compellingly linked. So threats of dissolution, drowning, fragmentation, and general ennui can be resisted by this new engineering of the self, an engineering that may be supported (Nietzsche believes that it is) by the practice of writing or reading literature (and even more, for him, by music).

Another feature of the configuration in question here may already have occurred to the reader: many of these thinkers or writers, though not all, may be linked to at least a strong suggestion of same-sex eroticism. That outcome will not be a surprising one given certain features of the separation-individuation architecture that I have discussed. Such features include an early eroticizing of mobile, shifting self-other structures, where self-to-other patterns easily blur with self-to-self ones. An eroticizing of someone of one’s own gender, then, might be built upon such an earlier process by which eros is recruited for the task of securing self-identity, of shaping, through identification, an individuality that can resist dissolution and external pressures on one’s boundaries. The other thus eroticized can be a model of self-sustaining wholeness, of a vital resistance to the gravities pulling upon it, of a lightness and grace of gesture that suggest a less tangible level of things, and of a sublimation of disturbing underlying forces into a heightened, focused, and lightly functioning mental coalition. Individuals with same-sex desires may well feel that the social world’s process of forming and recognizing individuals offers them rather little, and that it is up to them, in rather lonely endeavors, to perform the work of individuation on themselves that the social world might have performed but did not. For some with homoerotic forms of attachment, the difficulties, tensions, and ambiguities in the process of separating from an early caregiver, with both anxiety and guilt attached to this process, may mean that one is more likely to continue as an adult within the configuration I am describing here.

Yet we need to be careful on that last matter. Familial raising of homosexuals and social attitudes toward them have changed so much in recent decades that patterns of psychology that we find in writers and thinkers of a century ago will appear now as a contingent, historically located phenomenon. Today members of the same sex, much as with heterosexuals, can practice dating when young and can then enter into long, intimate marriages. Fathers play a greater role in childcare, and mothers, instead of being assigned a somewhat isolated and often depressive social situation that distorts their early psychological interactions with children, now have rich forms of employment in the outer world. The gay child is not forced into a lonely, private world for years at a time. So it may be questionable just how much of the psychological life of the writers and thinkers I am studying can be instructive for us today. There is a further need for caution. The narrative I am putting forward about self-formation, individuation, and literature may risk supporting an old stereotype: that homosexuals are characterized by arrested development. I will be suggesting that in certain gay writers we may note the continuing effects of a project, especially strong in early childhood, of learning to handle the pressures of individual separateness, of profound experiences of attachment and loss. But I do not see that claim as supporting a more general one about arrested psychological development. We need to reject the idea, one owing much to Freud though perhaps not capturing his views with full accuracy, that one advances through stages of psychological maturation such that one is, in a very general way affecting all one’s activities, at a particular point in that journey. If in certain respects there is a continuing influence of childhood structures of experiencing, then one’s overall psychology as well as one’s ethical and intellectual stances must count as immature. On the cognitive-science model that impresses me, in contrast, there are many different internal “programs,” perhaps at quite different levels of sophistication, development, and repurposing, that form coalitions directing us toward the objects we invest in. A’s love of B may repeat certain mother-child structures of attachment while also being, in most daily interactions, an expression of very mature adult ethical attitudes. Someone may have achieved a strongly Kantian notion of rational autonomy as well as a scientific record of impartial objectivity while, at certain times, slipping back into suggestions of the young child’s experience of the terror of aloneness and of the loss of a crucial attachment. Gay people who may confess to a psychiatrist about a certain relative immaturity in some of their erotic relationships may at the same time score very highly on tests of ethical and psychological sophistication. The overall model of arrested development should simply be jettisoned.

There is another significant feature that generally characterizes these writers and thinkers and that often distinguishes them from members of our own culture. Nietzsche claims that he is doing a rigorous and painful self-vivisection of a kind that few others are capable of. He will deliberately place himself in painful states in order to find out how the machinery of the psyche actually works, not how moralists and other psychologists tell us it is supposed to work. He thinks that what we call conscious experience is a social construction for the sake of communication with others, such that the unconscious patterns of mental life that actually individuate us are lost. Proust holds much the same position. He criticizes so-called realist writers for giving us experience only as it is overlaid and distorted by our habits and conventions, by our readiness to imitate others through their moral pressure on us, and by the operations of our abstract intelligence. He will examine instead how our impressions and feelings actually take shape and resonate with other ones within our unconscious mental lives. Pessoa says that early on he discovered how to handle painful states by giving the most rigorous possible analysis of them. Thus he learned to achieve a kind of distance from them, to regard them as if they belonged to someone other than himself. Wittgenstein engaged in tough-minded reflection on how his mental states were actually occurring, both to belie the pictures given by the empiricists, by Russell, and by the logical positivists, and to investigate ruthlessly his own moral unworthiness. Kafka believed he had great literature within him if he could only find the time and situation to uncover the truly disturbing forces in his mental life and transfigure them into a more spiritual form.

All these thinkers appear to form a contrast with the intellectual habits of today. Now an intellectually lazy groupthink, where one competes to emphasize one’s ideological agreement with peers as well as one’s presence on a fashionable moral bandwagon, is accompanied by very little in the way of harsh self-analysis and self-assessment. The fruits of solitude seem to hold little attraction. I will spend considerable time comparing my chosen loners to the cultural practices of today. I should grant, on the other hand, what is quite obvious: these loners are not, in general, persuasive models for living a happy human life. Having a long-term intimate relationship with a companionable and equal partner, while also raising a family well, remains the most reliable route to human happiness, and none of my figures succeeded in that respect. Existence was often painful and lonely for them. Yet they experienced with unusual vividness, and captured with exceptional intelligence, certain states of aloneness and separateness, of loss and emptiness, of the burdens and pressures that come with the experience of being an individual self. And they offer as well a range of responses, both powerfully basic and intellectually sophisticated, to those conditions of being a self. Such an often painful force and vividness in the having of these experiences, and such a deeply felt need for satisfying responses to them, may be closely associated, I have been suggesting, with the early childhood project of negotiating matters of separation-individuation. In certain individuals (as in Proust) the proportion of psychological energies devoted to matters of this sort, and the notable intensity of the emotions surrounding them, make certain psychological machineries, those relevant to facing the difficult challenges of living an individual life, come into view with unusual transparency. It is that transparency, as displayed by certain writers in their literary output, that enables them to be a useful resource even for those, the many, who do not experience that sense of aloneness, that metaphysical weight of individuation, quite so intensely. Most of us, even if we have lives that are richly and socially fulfilling, will have periods when depression, anxiety, loss, and ennui overwhelm us, so that our basic stance as selves in the world comes into focus and into question. It is advantageous in those circumstances to have intellectual, literary, and musical resources that can aid both in giving articulate form to our painful states and in guiding strategies of sustaining the self in the face of them. My loners are among the resources of that kind. One might expect them to be especially important in a certain larger project: using such resources in training the young to assimilate in a more compelling and satisfying manner the task or the burden of being an individual.

That expectation will be very much frustrated as one notes how the world of present academic life in America is vastly different from the intellectual world of my loners. It is natural to ask how we got from there to here. The story is in some respects a remarkable one. To an astonishing degree the intellectual life of the 20th century tended to devalue, in an often scornful and iconoclastic manner, the project of giving shape on one’s own to an individual life. Two closely occurring events are indicative of this tendency: the Dada performances in Zürich in 1916 and the Russian revolution in 1917. Dada and its companion surrealism represent a substantial break in the narrative of modernism. The great literary modernist writers such as Proust, Mann, Joyce, James, Eliot, Lawrence, and so forth found themselves in a situation where the techniques and conventions of Victorian writing no longer seemed adequate to the subjective and cultural experiences they were trying to convey. Facing this crisis of representation, they had to come up with new techniques and styles and means of representing what they were experiencing in the world around them and in themselves. Yet in all their experimentation they remained focused on the significance of an individual life. They worked to capture the subtlest aspects of the phenomenology of individual experience, without their investigations being distorted by the conventions of Victorian-era discourse. They wanted to know about the shape and meaning of an individual life against the background of a larger metaphysical world that seemed to devalue it. They were deeply concerned with the issues I have traced above regarding a project of separation-individuation: anxiety about a dissolving of one’s fragile boundaries yet also a desire for a surrender of the pressures and pains of separateness and agency; ways of sustaining through aesthetic means a rhythm and style of selfhood now that religious and metaphysical models of self-grounding had to be given up; and an experimentation with an architecture of self and other that managed to maintain some of the resources of a more mobile, transitional phase of self-formation; and so forth.

Nietzsche is the great model here. He was himself at times a harsh iconoclast challenging the forms of life of the bourgeois, liberal, egalitarian, or socialist individual. He saw those forms as a secular reinterpreting of the Christian redesign of the human psyche and he hoped to offer his own powerful and challenging alternative to that Christian psychic design. Yet with all his brilliant psychological, cultural, and historical criticism, he remained intensely devoted to the project of leading a distinctive and admirable individual life, one that was not simply a product of social conditions or of the pressures exerted by others. He vigorously examined his own mental resources for this task but also looked to past cultures for such resources in their disciplined and beautiful habits of life, in their literary works, and in their music. (He loved Palestrina and Mozart, for example, as well as, of course, the classical works of Greece and Rome.) His Genealogy of Morals might be read as a tough-minded analysis of aspects of his own mental life, and Zarathustra is a celebration of, and a model of, a process of sublimation that yields not a weakened individual psyche but a more powerful and satisfying one. In the end, so he believes, his long and difficult project of individual self-formation has overcome the decadence and romanticism within him and has left him with a re-ordered psyche capable of an exuberant, joyful lightness of maneuver in situations that normally oppress people and leave them fragmented.

I see my chosen loners is following in some broad sense Nietzsche’s line. Dada, surrealism, and Marxism take us in a different direction. Tristan Tzara’s Dada aims to thoroughly smash all bourgeois conventions, all bourgeois conceptions of the individual self, and all traditional aesthetic practices as well. Little remains of the traditional humanist project of individual self-cultivation. Marxism is, of course, a much stronger influence on the 20th century. Quite often today one notes leftist thinkers who are deeply upset regarding what they call rightist conspiracies about the deleterious influence of cultural Marxism or cultural Bolshevism. But one does not need a conspiratorial mind at all to see how Marxism dominated so many of the German, French, and British intellectual discourses that influenced the American academy profoundly from 1970 on. Marxism according to its most basic conceptions must thoroughly challenge central features of the configuration of thought I am assigning to my chosen loners. The phenomena associated with individuals’ experience of the world and of themselves are said to be surface expressions of economic and social mechanisms. Individuals are marionettes whose strings are pulled by those underlying economic and other machineries. They are mere mouthpieces for the structuring power of deep social relations they do not likely understand. A slightly different Marxist account is that to the extent that individuals are not the illusory expressions of economic and social realities, they may indeed have attained a limited degree of genuine individuality and self-determination during the early days of capitalism, with its focus on small entrepreneurship and the patriarchal family. But the logic and inertia of capitalism inevitably wipe out such individuality thoroughly and form selves into shallow exchangeable commodities, into sites fit for the easy circulation of attitudes and preferences favorable to the capitalist enterprise. Bourgeois individuals are either illusions put forward by the ubiquitous economic machinery, historical artifacts that capitalism itself eventually made vanish from history, or, to the extent to which they still survive, leftover obstacles to the radical social revolution that must be brought about. That revolution should be generating a new socialist self that identifies fully with fellow members of the proletariat. If one considers the individualist projects of a Nietzsche or a Pessoa, an Eliot or a Proust, they will appear to be drawing away a great amount of energy from the needed socialist commitments and toward ultimately selfish undertakings that only confirm habits of thought needing to be done away with. It will not be surprising to the Marxist that several of the writers I am surveying, in so far as they genuinely criticized bourgeois habits of life, did so from a standpoint that had considerable sympathy with earlier aristocratic and classical cultures rather than with newly forming socialist ones.

Surrealism in France, having absorbed Dada, quickly became Marxist by the late 1920s. Both surrealism and Marxism agreed on the task of radically smashing bourgeois forms of life and of art. Surrealism can in one respect be subjective and individualist, but it also sees the individual as a tiny fragile wave carried by underlying forces that are not understood but that might reveal themselves in dreams, in unlikely juxtapositions that elude rational scrutiny, in artifacts generated by games of chance, or in transgressive forms of art and action. So individual self-determination and self-mastery will seem laughable illusions. The alliance between Marxism and surrealism did not go well in one clear respect. Stalin’s control of the communist movement allowed him to determine that socialist realism, rather than avant-garde art, would be the preferred choice of Marxist parties. That favored kind of realism would emphasize training individuals to take on their new role as social beings. But it was Walter Benjamin’s and Theodor Adorno’s version of Marxism, and not Stalin’s, that contributed to shaping American academic life after 1970. Benjamin spoke about an esoteric and messianic Marxism that might arise in the future but concerning which we could have no concept whatever in the present. The desirable future could never be a further actualizing or richer self-development of political or cultural or intellectual features of the present. It had to come out of nowhere, completely unpredictably, from what must seem to us an incommensurable, ineffable realm. Benjamin gave no credit whatever to the great efforts of the Weimar Republic to make a worthy German form of life. None of the forms of individuation made possible in the present could have any lasting value for him, as the political and social world was a place of shattered ruins, with no resources internal to it for improvement and development.

In France at least, with Sartre’s existentialism, there might be a brief period in which attention was paid to the individual’s shaping a life of her own, with a stark acceptance of the pressures of loneliness and separateness. But Sartre himself turned in the 1950s to a rather doctrinaire Marxism as he wrote what he thought of as a masterwork on dialectical materialism. The Marxist undermining of all pretenses of the liberal individual was coincidentally aided in France by the appearance in anthropology and sociology of a discipline called structuralism. It focused on the insight that speakers are competent speakers of their language without having any self-conscious knowledge of the grammatical rules that actually structure all their utterances. One might expand this idea and suggest that very many of our cultural performances are like that. There are underlying cultural grammars that determine correct rules of combination for how we arrange food items, myths, animal classifications, and so forth. A crucial point here is that once again the individual’s mental life of beliefs, desires, and intentions is being devalued as a generator of meaning in favor of underlying structuring machineries unknown to us. These might change in the way that an ecosystem changes, so that we simply find ourselves in a new cultural space, apart from any intentional activity on our part, with new rules for what feel to us to be “correct” arrangements of cultural items. Structuralist ideas spread, especially through the work of Roland Barthes, into discussions of literature and of criticism. Barthes and others tried, in a radical manner, to separate a purely linguistic generative power characterizing language on its own from, on the other side, the entire mental life of the individual self as a source of literary meaning and value. Experimental novels were written in which that intentional, volitional, emotional, meaning-making life of the individual self was to play as minimal a role as possible. The point of this brief history is to give a picture of what the French intellectual life of the 1960s and 1970s was like that ended up having such a strong influence on American academic life. Most intellectuals preferred some version of Marxism, at least for a time. The fight was often over whether to be committed to Russia and the French Communist party or to a more radical Maoism.

Various European models contributed to a great shift in the U.S., after 1970 or so, in the philosophical influences shaping academic life, at least in the humanities and social sciences, and intellectual life in general. That large shift at American universities can be seen in many respects as a move into a quasi-Marxist space of thinking, even if the movements were not as determinately and confessedly Marxist as was the case in Europe. I am using that term in a generously embracing sense rather than trying to delineate the actual beliefs of Marx himself or of particular Marxist intellectuals. Some of the important intellectual influences on American humanities and social sciences departments considered themselves Marxist, as with Benjamin, Adorno, Lukács, Sartre, Barthes, Gramsci, Althusser, Jameson, and so forth. Others had alliances, either long or brief, of various complexity with Marxist movements, as with Derrida and Foucault. Derrida’s attachment was of the “it’s complicated” sort and he seemed to wish to turn Marx eventually into some version of a Derridean deconstructionist focused on a messianic realm to come. Foucault defended Maoism for a brief time but in his later years, themselves too brief, he claimed that Marxism had really nothing of value to add to his cultural analyses of power and of the strategies of response to it. I am less interested in who might be called a Marxist or not than in what I see as, in a broad sense, a Marxist intellectual infrastructure that was laid down. This infrastructure roughly determined a set of beliefs, attitudes, and preferences that would come to dominate much of intellectual life at American universities, even among those who would not call themselves Marxists. Various movements of identity politics and of radical gender and racial theory could depend on that infrastructure even if members of these movements might have resisted particular philosophical labels, and even if Marx himself would not have recognized such movements.

What do I mean by such an intellectual infrastructure? It is significant, first of all, what has been excluded from it. At the beginning of the 20th century there were several strong intellectual influences that placed an emphasis on individual self-development and self-determination rather than on social indoctrination, social construction, and the formation of a socialist self. First, there was the tradition of British liberalism, empiricism, and utilitarianism, with its focus on individual experience and individual liberty. Second, there was the Christian design, from Augustine to Kierkegaard, of an intense individual interiority grounded in anxiety and guilt. Third was the tradition of classical humanism, based on Greco-Roman culture and focusing on individual self-cultivation through the study of literature, philosophy, art, and music. Fourth was the German idealist tradition, expressed especially in Kant and Hegel, that assigned a dominant role to the idea of rational autonomy as it is expressed in the individual. (Even when Hegel requires the individual to move into the social world of objective Geist, and to become a citizen of a state, that process is part of the individual’s own achieving of a richer self-determination, and the earlier social structures favoring individuation do not vanish.) Fifth, there was Nietzsche’s Dionysian individualism, which is anti-liberal to be sure, but which still emphasizes the project of shaping an individual life, of becoming what you are.

Someone looking at the intellectual world of the early 1900s might have thought of those five influences as far too powerful to be shunted aside by future developments. But in the great run of culture across the 20th century, all five have been radically discredited. If one looks at university studies in the humanities and social sciences since 1970, it becomes increasingly difficult to find vigorous supporters of traditional Anglo-American liberalism, of classical humanism, of Christian interiority, of the German idealist notion of rational autonomy, or of Nietzsche’s Dionysian-modernist version of individualism. Nietzsche, it is true, is often mentioned favorably, but only insofar as his radical genealogies of cultural formations can be used to support contemporary leftist political positions. Almost everything that he himself valued is, in that process, left behind. So, to a quite astonishing extent, all those powerful intellectual strands that would foreground the stance of the individual experiencer are devalued and discredited over the course of a century.

The roughly Marxist infrastructure (not precisely equivalent to Marxism itself) that accomplished this work of devaluation, so I noted, assigns a fundamental explanatory value to underlying economic systems and their cultural expressions, to basic cultural grammars that give a distinctive structure to cultural experiences, and to social machineries that structure power relationships (regimes of discourse-power) but that operate beyond the understanding of most participants. To devote one’s strong attention to a project of individual self-formation must therefore be a wasted effort based on a delusional understanding of how the formative machinery works, and that undertaking will also draw time and energy away from the project of forming a new world grounded in a particular conception of social justice. On this overall story, we are now at a great juncture in history. The bourgeois, liberal, Christian, humanist self that held sway for several centuries is being replaced by a socialist self constructed by a new social order. One now looks at structural systems for explanations rather than at the efforts of individuals. One is linked with other selves in common social enterprises needed to transform the planet, to create a just social order, and to engender a new form of life. It will be true as well, as an aspect of forming this socialist self, that in the academic realm the social sciences will subordinate the humanities and the natural sciences to their way of looking at the world. The realm of literature will become a matter of uncovering the social machinery that is at work in texts and that is relevant to the ideological goals of today, such as identity politics. The explanatory power of biology will be radically diminished in favor of social construction, since attributing such power to social shaping will indicate why the forming of a radically new kind of society and a radically new kind of self is possible. Even in examining a scientific essay, the key questions will be the sociological ones regarding power, race, and gender that determine who can speak, what they can say, and how the determining of disciplinary excellence is an ideological and unjust phenomenon.

To an astonishing degree, virtually all the intellectual practices available radically diminished the importance of the standpoint of the individual experiencer. Any project of self-shaping, of forming a life of one’s own aimed at a real degree of self-determination, of self-mastery, and of giving a compelling overall pattern to a whole life, might be ridiculed as an ideological error of the most serious kind. We could actually see in journal articles in France a kind of competition to show how radically one had rejected any attachment whatever to the humanist, bourgeois, liberal, idealist individual. One could win any strategy game with opponents by accusing them of still being trapped within some version of that liberal individualism. A thinker might claim to analyze texts as purely linguistic phenomena, without any reference to the intentional life or the meaning-generating capacities of the human writer. Another thinker might claim to deconstruct in a radical manner all appearances of self-identity or integrity or continuity in the individual self, as all one’s human gestures, so it was argued, were taken up into a non-human linguistic machinery whose fundamental operations were ultimately those of dissemination and disintegration, so that only a scattered non-identity was possible for selves. Many different practices might be at stake: Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, some leftovers of surrealism. But all agreed on radically devaluing and disabling the stance of the individual self as engaged in a possibly successful project of self-formation, self-determination, and self-mastery.

It is also historically notable how strong was the reaction of very many academics, over the last fifty years or so, against Hegel. That thinker explores a number of very great cultural tensions and oppositions. There is the opposition between a highly idealized and abstract notion of rational autonomy (at first assigned to a divine being) and the entrapment of individuals in the particularities and contingencies of nature in general and of human nature as well. There is the great tension between what the interior life of the self demands and what attachment to external political and social institutions requires. There are many more such tensions, of course, and Hegel has long stories to tell about how they come about. The point is that the essential movement of Hegel’s form of thought is to find higher-level, more sophisticated resolutions of these tensions. The at first highly abstract notion of rational autonomy, seemingly an attribute of the divine, becomes incarnated through historical and social developments in actual human individuals and in their forms of life. The at first oppositional space of one’s interior life is seen to become empty and arbitrary without participation in larger institutions that can give a secure and mature embodiment of the inner notion of individual freedom. These outcomes do not occur for Hegel by means of an unexpected messianic entry from without. They arise through the self-actualizing and self-unfolding of a potential already inherent in the cultural history leading up to them. (There is thus something profoundly Aristotelian about Hegel.) Hegel is very much aware of the great violence of human affairs, of the great butcher block of history. But ultimately he is a philosopher for whom the highest-level human ideals become incarnated in human life, for whom the greatest social tensions can be reconciled, for whom historical advancement is a self-unfolding of what is inherent in our development. He endorses a rich notion of individuality. There is a very complicated learning process by which the human self is led up to the stage of being a self-determining individual. Hegel describes in this regard both forms of mutual recognition and an education in self-relational processes that involve property, exchange, morality, family, civil society, and citizenship along with others. Benjamin and Adorno are influential in rejecting this entire Hegelian picture, even if they rarely mention Hegel. They are adamant about rejecting all incarnations of higher-level ideals in present-day forms, all reconciliations, all self-developments from within. We must recognize humans as living in a thoroughly unreconciled world where tensions and suffering are only exacerbated, where available institutions and practices are only empty ruins, and where salvation can only come through a messianic entry from without that we cannot describe at all. Virtually nothing of Hegel can remain.

There is, all in all, a great confluence of anti-individualist tendencies. It will be a point of my narrative that Nietzsche and the writers and thinkers I will be classifying as my group of loners lived at a privileged cusp in intellectual history. They could already see how biological, psychological, and economic discoveries offered the fiercest challenges to liberal, humanist notions of the self. Few are better than Nietzsche at uncovering the unconscious forces that distort and redirect our conscious intentional lives. Few understood the power of the Dionysian realm that both threatens and promises release from individuation as well as he does. Yet the product of his investigations is an ever more exuberant project of forming on his own an admirable individual self that can be a model for others of a worthy individuation achieved only under great duress. All the writers and thinkers I will be exploring here follow Nietzsche on this matter. My own belief is that they are extraordinarily valuable in this regard and that most of the intellectual life that shaped American humanities and social sciences departments for the last five decades has been empty, bankrupt, and ultimately extremely damaging to students and to their psychological and intellectual development. I hope an examination of the writers I will be looking at will offer evidence for this claim.

I was myself a graduate student in the 1970s and while I was in philosophy, concentrating mostly on the Anglo-American analytic version of it, I was aware of the changes going on around me among some philosophers and among many in literature and political theory. What was most faithfully transported from the European setting was an absolute scorn for any trappings of the liberal humanist self. Marxism was less a genuine political phenomenon leading to action in the streets, as in France or Germany, then it was one more weapon in the arsenal of various forms of identity politics or of postcolonial studies. One noted countless articles that spoke, for example, of blending Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis in order to question and undermine traditional ways of thinking. If the goal was to devalue and delegitimize earlier forms of privilege, then a good tactic was to associate those forms with the discredited liberal humanist ego, which was shown to be hardly a neutral achievement but an instrument of oppression and exploitation, when it was not simply a metaphysical illusion that had managed somehow to achieve considerable dominance. The most striking American analogy with French thought was that you could win any strategy game simply by outdoing your opponent in your degree of rejection of all aspects of that liberal humanist individual self or by painting your opponent as failing to divest himself thoroughly of such a notion. No further arguments were required, or else simplistic arguments attacking metaphysically overstrong notions of the self were employed. More subtle examination of the kinds of individuation, self-shaping, self-determination, and self-mastery that might still be defended were rare.

I am deeply curious as to how two phenomena are related: first, the 20th-century intellectual history that has strongly devalued individual agency and self-determination, the project of individual self-formation, and the phenomenological stance of the individual experiencer; and second, the present-day changes in cultural attitudes such that securing and protecting the space of the self seems a “socialist” responsibility of large institutions more than one focused on individuals’ strength and resilience, such that an individual on its own, without constant social protection and propping up, is considered inevitably fragile and traumatized. It is, of course, an immensely challenging enterprise to try to establish causality when so many social and psychological and historical factors are interacting in the culture. But when for decades large cohorts of humanities and social science students come out of our colleges and universities having been trained to see the liberal, humanist individual as an illusion, as a dangerous ideological function, and as a hindrance to the great transformation that social justice demands, then some significant social changes must occur. Less pressure will be placed on individuals to shape and take responsibility for their own lives; it will be up to the social world around them to protect them against intrusions they find discomforting in any sense at all. Securing individual boundaries and self-identities will be a never-ending task assigned to social institutions; that overall stance will mean that individuals achieve ever less self-mastery and thus require ever more institutional support and protection. Individuals will be less well trained in using the resources of literature and other similar cultural artifacts to work on a worthy and difficult project of self-formation that often employs the special resources of solitude. There will be greater pressure to join humans together into a larger social animal with individual components that think and act alike. All of us will have less support in handling those very difficult aspects associated with the process of separation-individuation: attachment and loss, separateness, grief, the weight of selfhood, the contest between a desire for autonomous individuality and a desire to be absorbed back into a symbiotic oceanic union, the need to find a style and rhythm of selfhood that can endure against overwhelming external pressures. These are not contingent, historical phenomena associated with bourgeois capitalism. They help define our human condition as evolutionarily biological animals who have managed to enter into highly sophisticated cultures.

I am going to pick out instructive features in the lives and works of my group of loners. They take an opposite stance from that of very much of the intellectual history of the 20th century. They believe that if they work hard enough and in the right manner, they can produce something of value that is truly their own, indeed a self that is truly their own. So much of the intellectual history that shaped American universities from 1970 on is deeply suspicious of any such thing. It is one of the central points of Derrida’s thought that any notion of what is one’s own will be thoroughly deconstructed, and, from another direction, Marxist critiques of private property can be used to raise a similar challenge. Derrida thinks that one of Nietzsche’s failures, in spite of his powerful attacks upon and analysis of conventional beliefs, is that he is still committed to finding ultimately what is his own in everything he encounters. Such terminology appears, for example, throughout Zarathustra.

On my narrative, my loner thinkers have the great luck of residing in a fortunate transitional space. They have absorbed, and are often responsible for, the great critiques of the 19th-century liberal view of the self. But they still find the project of working rigorously on their own to shape a worthwhile individuality to be valuable. They are well aware of how traditional metaphysical conceptions of the world and of representing the truth have been undermined. But they are still deeply attached to a notion of getting things right, of bringing into view the subtle contours of reality and of human psychological life, rather than letting conceptions of truth and of representation settle back into merely social agreement with others. One of the more socialist tendencies of much 20th-century thought was to do just the opposite: to align truth as much as possible with agreement with others rather than with a letting-appear of the actual contours of the world. On this matter Nietzsche, as should be evident so far, remains a central figure for me. He offers powerful critiques of traditional metaphysical notions of truth, objectivity, impartiality, impersonality, and the like, and shows what unconscious forces are often at work when such notions are invoked. Yet in his final summing up in Ecce Homo, he keeps emphasizing that his hero Dionysus is a truth-teller, able to face up to the most challenging features of reality without flinching. He praises himself for having overcome the romanticism, decadence, and sickness within himself and for having turned that overcoming into the most rigorous possible investigation of the actual psychological life of humans. He has, through patience and error, followed the maxim “become what you are.” That is, rather than learning practices of social agreement, he has discovered and let emerge the unconscious forming of a particular style and shape of selfhood that has been guiding the secret engineering of his development. There are many attempts to recruit a new Nietzsche or postmodern Nietzsche in academic work after the 1960s. But these attempts are ludicrous mismatches. They delete almost everything that was important to Nietzsche himself: wholeness, beauty, courage, individuality, disciplined excellence, a graceful lightness of maneuver, sublimation, solitude, self-reliance, and so forth. They do not seem to recognize that Nietzsche had only contempt for almost everything that the postmodernists, the deconstructionists, the new historicists, and the identity-politics ideologues value.

In trying to understand the culture of the academic humanities and social sciences in America today, we should draw a robust contrast not only between that culture and Nietzsche’s thought but also between that culture and traditional liberalism. Regarding what I have called the Marxist infrastructure laid down since 1970 (whether or not individuals call themselves Marxist), the characteristic virtues of liberalism will be thoroughly devalued by that infrastructure. Liberals believe in the most rigorous possible assessment of all claims, including one’s own. What beliefs are supported by the best evidence available? What is the inferential strength of supporting arguments? What biases might have entered into a set of beliefs, especially those that one holds oneself? Coming to have the most well-justified beliefs requires vigorous, open debate and the airing of, and fair weighing of, unpopular views such as those of one’s opponents. Letting others with beliefs very different from one’s own enter openly into the debate is not mere tolerance, but may help improve the quality of one’s own beliefs and the competence of one’s self-critical faculties. The point of thinking and debating is to capture the actual layout of reality as clearly and as accurately as possible, so that one’s policy decisions for the future have a higher likelihood of being successful. One has the attitude throughout, as a liberal, that one may well not be in possession of the truth and one wants to set in place the conditions that will move one closer to that possession. The highest priority should be placed on individuals themselves as the site where beliefs are to be tested, justified, and accepted, so they can truly be said to think and reason for themselves and to have beliefs that are truly their own.

The framework favored by the Marxist infrastructure I am describing is very different. There is a strong belief that one is already in possession of the correct ideology. The task of education, then, is one that is much closer to indoctrination and consciousness-raising. Success in forming an ideologically correct future world, with a genuine achievement of one’s conception of social justice, requires not a rigorous assessment of beliefs at an individual level but a training in holding shared ideological beliefs that allow a participation in common social enterprises needed for the future. Marx said that a new socialist self must be formed, with new socialist eyes and ears, with new socialist senses. In a similar manner, at universities today, one will be trained in the attitudes needed to contribute to shaping a world consistent with an identity-politics and social-justice conception of the future. It is not just one’s cognitive attitudes that are crucial here. What is also required is training in having the correct emotions and feelings that allow for communal agreement at a deeper psychological level and that support communal rituals of shared ideological purpose.

What follows is an intellectual space very different from the liberal one. Genuinely open debate is dangerous because it encourages too great a diversity of opinions and so makes forming the new kind of socialist self needed for the new ideological world much more difficult. Instead, one should try to remove one’s opponents from the debate as effectively as possible, to prevent their even presenting their case. Views opposing one’s own should be censored and discredited from the start as disinformation or as causing perceived harm to favored classes of individuals. The best strategy in game theory is to find a way to disallow one’s opponents from ever entering the field of play. Those with views that dissent from the favored social-justice narrative and identity-politics ideology should not even be allowed to give presentations on campus. Young university graduates who go into work at mainstream media organizations or at the new social media should never see their job as fostering open liberal debate but as an opportunity to censor opponents whose views do not coincide with those of the intellectual framework dominant at the universities. Like young Red Guard members, they will search the internet to locate damaging, disabling information about anyone who does not toe the ideological line. If you keep expanding the notion of harm, then almost any expression used by your opponents can come off as causing harm to ideologically preferred groups, and these opponents can therefore be censored and ostracized. Since you feel you are already in possession of the truth, no value will be assigned to the liberal practice of encouraging expression by your opponents precisely in order to correct and sharpen your own beliefs. Instead, discussion should be a matter of gratifying socialization with those on your own side. If you watch MSNBC or CNN and their various panel discussions, the point is clearly to have social rituals that celebrate and confirm shared beliefs, that portray one’s opponents in a simplistic manner that encourages the gratifying skewering of easy targets. To watch the faces of an interviewer and an invited guest on these channels is to see how the facial expressions of each are enticing and reinforcing shared, predictable emotional responses that are a part of the pleasurable ritual experiences or that at least demonstrate one’s loyalty to the cause.

The liberal assigns a high value to competent practices of self-criticism. Such practices need to be learned through training over time. At first the criticism comes from without, from teachers and others who evaluate your arguments, find weaknesses in them, point to alternative explanations, make you seek out more evidence, and so forth. Gradually you internalize such practices so that what has been a self-to-other interaction becomes a self-to-self one, as you develop habits of critically assessing your own beliefs. On this liberal view, teachers are cheating students and are failing to recognize their dignity as rational selves if they affirm and endorse whatever positions and attitudes a student expresses, simply because that student belongs to an ideologically favored group. In that case there are no critical practices to internalize. In contrast, the Marxist does not try to develop in the young highly advanced skills of self-assessment that rigorously deploy the principles of rational inquiry. Instead criticism is offered only of beliefs and attitudes do not measure up to ideological standards. Some may believe that journalists and major media practitioners should be contributors to a larger process that trains ordinary citizens in how to reason better, how to assess evidence more skillfully, how to acknowledge the virtues of competing arguments more astutely, how to recognize and discount for biases on all sides, how do form one’s overall beliefs more convincingly and more subtly, and how to think truly independently. But journalism in America today does nothing of the kind. It sees its goal as unquestioning support for its favorite ideological narrative. It supports governmental, security-state, and institutional practices that further that narrative, rather than worrying, as the liberal surely would, about the dangers of such concentrations of power.

The Marxist infrastructure I am articulating also differs from liberalism in that the latter prizes genuine efforts at impartiality while the former does not. The liberal has a strongly formal, procedural sense of legality, of ethics, and of the conditions of rational inquiry and argument assessment. In the fashion of Kant or Rawls, justice requires that procedures be applied equally to those who are equally situated, no matter what their political views or their demographic details. In the matter of assessing arguments, the same tough-minded procedures should apply to all, no matter whom the argument is coming from or what its content. For the Marxist (again in a very broad sense), since you know what the proper direction for the future is supposed to be, it is quite proper to treat arguments differently depending on the ideological point of view they support. It is naïve and old-fashioned, and an inefficient use of resources, to aim at impartiality or objectivity. That notion is itself an illusion that has been deconstructed, since all policies reflect a strategic use of power for particular interests. We should not even attempt to try for an even-handed fairness. For MSNBC and CNN commentators, any use of legislative procedures to discredit Trump, no matter how flimsy the evidence, is a noble defense of democracy, while any analogous attempt by Republicans to question Democratic figures is a contemptible, parochial violation of the basic spirit of a representative legislature. Expressing correct ideological positions has become so dominant that the ordinary valued practices of journalism, expressing the epistemic virtues that take evidence and argument with utmost seriousness in an attempt to have well-justified beliefs, have almost entirely vanished.

The liberal, in the end, believes strongly in those intellectual virtues that lead to truth, to an accurate capturing of the contours of reality. In determining public policy, the liberal takes an engineer’s stance: how do the social machineries truly function and what causal interventions will make conditions better rather than worse. For the Marxist intellectual infrastructure I am delineating, in contrast, that tough-minded engineer’s stance is always trumped by a desire to make favored groups feel good about themselves when it comes to selecting causal explanations. Truth seems to have very considerable aspects of social construction about it. Each new regime of ordering the world replaces earlier ones with its own ways of organizing reality and its ways of forming the self. So we cannot compare succeeding conceptions of the world in terms of which captures reality better. A new social and economic regime of power will be constituting the very world against which it is to be measured. A revolutionary social regime will bring about the world that makes it true. So, the liberal’s focus on the virtues leading to truth is an error, one that displays an entrapment in a way of seeing that now has become outdated. Ideological agreement and ruthless transformation of the views of intellectual stragglers is more important, then, than empirical testing, since objectivity has been deconstructed.

I noted above that for those in my group of loners, the difficult task of individuation, the task of establishing a secure identity and a space for the self, now falls, with the conditions of the modernity they see around them, mostly to individuals on their own. These thinkers understand the universe they live in as one that puts great pressures on the frail individual self, threatening dissolution, fragmentation, and loss of boundaries. Perhaps certain highly disciplined cultures of the past trained members to form the kind of hardened, resilient, self-securing individuals that could handle all those negative intrusions without being overwhelmed or transformed in an undesirable manner. But those in my loner group of a century ago recognize that in a very diverse modern society with so many different possibilities offered for shaping the self as such, there cannot be the cultural confidence to impose one particular harsh discipline of self-formation on the young. So, it is up to individuals themselves to take on that challenging labor through often difficult practices of securing a reliable and enduring space for the self, a distinctive style of engaging with the world and with others, a set of disciplined habits of responsiveness to the difficulties of life. They have to provide the kind of rigorous training of the self that earlier cultures once provided convincingly and unquestioningly for their members through their forms of cultural discipline. These thinkers in question have very little faith in the capacities of the social world around them to assist them in this process. That social world, they believe, is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It is constantly pressing the self to take on the shallow beliefs and attitudes of others, to take up the moral stances that are most easily praised and rewarded, to fit one’s statements into the circulating narratives favored by one’s peer group or identity group. Individuals, then, must learn to become resilient on their own. They must expect that they will often experience very painful mental states, that it will be up to them in their self-relational practices to find effective ways of handling these when they come. Nietzsche offers the image of a well by the side of the road into which passersby toss trifles and garbage. But he has the strength, he says, to continuously purify and cleanse himself from within, from a self-forming power that cannot be overwhelmed by the negative external interventions. He says that one should be happy to have worthy opponents whose negative opposition is crucial to the process of learning to strengthen the self. Proust claims that despite all the many pressures of the social world that he had exposed himself to, he has discovered, with great difficulty and labor, a true inner core of selfhood whose autonomous unfolding and expressing make his writing project have the worth that it does. Wittgenstein handled the terrible events he endured as a soldier often under attack in the war by forming a space of self-determined activity that included writing much of the Tractatus.

Matters are very different for many in our contemporary world. They believe it is up to the social world to establish for them safe spaces where unwanted intrusions from the outside world cannot occur. A large number of individuals have been trained to present themselves as having suffered traumatizing experiences, so that very painful states are easily triggered. Social authorities must therefore find ways to protect individuals from any such triggering experiences. The notion of individuation at work here is one that encourages not self-reliance but rather entitlement and resentment. One is angry at a social world that has not (perhaps like so-called bulldozer parents early on) transformed the environment to make things automatically come out well and to minimize hurtful, painful, negative mental states. There can thus be considerable encouragement towards socialism. The society as a whole should arrange the social order, and keep on intervening in it, to prevent individuals from having to face what they define as negative emotions or as negative intrusions on their space. It is not that there are no forms of individual self-shaping. It may appear that with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and so many other social media spaces available, human selves have never had so many opportunities to show off their individuality. But an argument from Adorno seems decisive here. He claimed that in capitalist societies the large cultural pressures toward sameness and conformity were disguised by the production of consumer goods that allowed the appearance of a great range of individual choices. You might be able to get one of thirty versions of a particular doll or forty possible variations regarding options on a car. But that was just one more strategy by which the capitalist order made you fit into systems of exchange and circulation of items that were ultimately the same. Even human mental states became such commodities, he said, because they were constructed to be easily exchanged and circulated from one person to the next, to be just variant appearances of the same attitudes and tendencies. Adorno sets this story against a philosophical stance of his own that seems, in the end, deeply unpersuasive. He sets virtually the entire history of human politics, economics, and scientific classification, all of which he considers regimes that transform difference into identity, against an indescribable utopian future and against an archaic past in which humans supposedly had a mimetic or copying relationship to individual phenomena in nature rather than trying to classify these as instances of the same. It is very hard to see how any human culture could develop that did not have the features that Adorno dislikes. But on the narrower point regarding the system of commodities that only appears to encourage individuation, Adorno’s claim seems applicable to the experience of very many with their performances on social media. Today the cultural carrot-and-stick methods of reinforcement, with tens of thousands of likes and dislikes available immediately, may bring about a certain uniformity even regarding any attempt to differentiate oneself. These effects are obvious as well within the mainstream media. As a lifelong liberal Democrat, I used to take pleasure in watching MSNBC and CNN and in reading the New York Times. But they offer little pleasure nowadays since participants in these media seem to compete with one another to express with sufficient enthusiasm the preferred ideological stances of the day. The traditional liberal, favoring a tough-minded assessment of the best evidence available, has been replaced by the progressive ideologue with Cultural Revolution tendencies, someone who looks always to be on the correct moral bandwagon instead of demonstrating skepticism, curiosity, and self-criticism.

It follows as well, since the success of the future socialist ideology is so important, that coercion is an acceptable strategy. Little value is given to the liberal practice of encouraging individuals to form their beliefs and attitudes on their own. That is an old-fashioned bourgeois practice that is dangerous for, because discouraging to, training in forming new socialist selves with shared correct beliefs. Opponents should not be thought of, as they are in liberalism, as worthy participants in a legitimate debate. Rather they are considered either as evil or as less than rational, as needing a coercive de-programming, re-education, and consciousness-raising, as in all Marxist nations across the 20th century. Such nations used, as an accessory means of coercion, ordinary citizens and family members, who were expected to spy on neighbors and parents and report their ideological failures to the government. In a similar manner the young today, like citizen spies for the Stasi, are encouraged to use social media investigations and interactions to discover even the slightest ideological errors in others and to punish them for their going astray. When it comes to this Marxist infrastructure, fear and intimidation are crucial methods. From university professors to ordinary online users, all must be made anxious that a small ideological error on their part will lead to their downfall, as in the Cultural Revolution in China.

Another aspect of the intellectual framework favored at universities today is a fairly radical iconoclasm toward earlier cultural achievements. In spite of their very significant intellectual differences, modern liberalism, classical humanism, German idealism, and Nietzschean individualism agreed on the great value of the intellectual and aesthetic resources of the past, such as the literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome and the literature and music of modern Europe. The quasi-Marxism of today, in contrast, tends to be suspicious that such earlier aesthetic and intellectual resources carry with them the now illegitimate patterns of thought and of social organization associated with aristocratic, ecclesiastical, or bourgeois cultures. Chinese students during the Cultural Revolution would throw ancient books, scrolls, and paintings out of professors’ windows and onto bonfires. Cambodian Marxists would get rid of every single aspect of previous social orders and wished to start from Day Zero. Universities today will not be so radical as that. But there is a conviction that the cultural heritage of the West is so contaminated and morally corrupt that it must be radically devalued and marginalized. Traditional courses in the history of Western civilization have been dropped from the curriculum in very many places. Courses must be assessed by directors of diversity, equity, and inclusion to see if they have assigned too many dead white males who were part of traditional courses. Earlier forms of art and literature are seen as valuable only if they can be made to serve present-day identity-politics interests. Only if previous cultural forms are seen as valueless and empty, it is claimed, will we be able to go forward into a thoroughly new form of life, as defined by our present-day conceptions of social justice. The idea that earlier aesthetic resources might be seen as profoundly valuable in a project of individual self-formation, in the facing of distressing experiences of loss, separateness, and depression, is thought of as an ideological error and as an illusory promise to begin with.

I am exploring my group of loners precisely in order to counter the force of that entire Marxist-socialist infrastructure that shapes the arrangement even of non-Marxist frameworks today. One pathway for countering it is to emphasize an absolutely vigorous testing of one’s beliefs according to the demands of rational inquiry, especially in the case where there is a standard belief that almost everyone else accepts through being part of a social system. Wittgenstein is a great example here. A very high percentage of thinkers in the Oxbridge philosophical world, from Locke to Russell, took for granted the unproblematic existence of sense data and their crucial role in epistemic justification. So did most of the members of the Vienna Circle at the time Wittgenstein was interacting with them. Wittgenstein himself then went on a decade-long program of rigorous self-examination and argument analysis to see just how well the notion of sense data held up to his severe challenges to it. What actually is happening when we are supposedly describing our interior states? Could there be a private interior language whose meanings we can make determinate on our own? He lives and studies alone for very long periods, trying to press his arguments as far as they will go, while resisting the great formative pressure of the British philosophical world (as well as the Viennese one), which he found contaminated his thinking and degraded its quality. He was as far as one could be from any practice that sees conversations as rituals of ideological agreement, as contributions to a new social order requiring a group consciousness-raising.

So that is one way of resisting what I have been calling the quasi-Marxist infrastructure of the American universities and mainstream media. One will press with special intensity a commitment to subjecting one’s beliefs to the toughest rational scrutiny. They will then be beliefs that one has earned for oneself, that are truly one’s own. One will not just be a site where favored ideological memes are circulating so as to form a new supra-personal social being, with shared beliefs and attitudes. It will not be the case that intelligence assessment has migrated from the level of individual experience and thought to that of a larger social network that seems to be acting with some coercive autonomy and self-evolving power of its own.

While I strongly endorse that way of making beliefs one’s own, against social pressures, I will mostly be investigating my group of loners to examine a different way of making things one’s own, of engaging in a project of self-formation that allows for a distinctive individuality and a genuine individual autonomy in the end. The influential thinker here, once again, is Nietzsche. What I find in him regarding the cultural resources for a satisfying individuation is reflected as well, I will argue, in Proust, Eliot, Pessoa, and others. Nietzsche argues that our reporting on our conscious states to others makes us take up a vocabulary that simplifies, distorts, and makes uniform such states, so that we are brought into a social world that dominates what we think and pressures us into having the same set of beliefs as others do. (One thinks of social media today.) Fortunately, says Nietzsche, the operations of the unconscious have a complexity, subtlety, and mobility that go well beyond the common-making pressures of the social world. These qualities allow not only for a greater distinctiveness among individuals but also for underlying mental forces that, in their unconscious competitions, negotiations, and coalition-building, can support and energize a truly individual project of self-making. An important aspect of Nietzsche’s account for my story here is that music, literature, and art (as well as geography, climate, city architecture, landscape, and diet) are some of the ways we are engaged with our unconscious life in the process of shaping it. That is one reason why my group of loners is so important for evaluating the university curriculum in the humanities today. They reveal a sophisticated and subtle understanding of the ways that training in literature and music may contribute to a crucial process of self-formation, so that experiences of depression, aloneness, loss, separateness, the weight of selfhood, and a kind of metaphysical sadness can be handled with greater mastery. Social indoctrination in preferred common beliefs will not accomplish this outcome at all. Developing a sense of individuation by competing with others to market a brand or style of self on social media will be a laughably inferior alternative.

Nietzsche studies the complex interactions between literature and music, on the one hand, and a project of reshaping the self so that its available resources can be more effectively deployed in the process of achieving a style of selfhood. The individual, so it is hoped, can become more confident, compelling, resilient, self-sustaining, and enduring through such a process. Having described the ancient Christian redesign of the psyche, he hopes to lead a parallel, though at the same time much healthier, redesign of the human psyche for our own time. We can get a clearer sense of his hopes if we ask how the experience of literature and music may contribute to such a mental redesign. Nietzsche offers a model where greater integration, mastery, elevation, and psychological power are the goals but where these do not emerge principally from an imposing of the rational mind upon unconscious forces. They emerge rather from struggles among the forces within the unconscious psyche, as if these forces were warlords competing for territory and power. Morally problematic forces as well as profoundly painful emotions are not to be dismissed, but they are to be transfigured and made to fit into larger arrangements that change their significance. A typical human experience is that dangerous drives, such as aggression and sexuality, as well as challenging emotions, such as grief over serious loss or paralyzing anxiety, simply arrive, whether from the outer or the inner worlds, as overwhelming intrusions. They are arbitrary, disconnected, unbidden invasions that threaten the sustaining style and structural integrity of the self. Literature and music may be able to work upon those drives and emotions so that they are assimilated into larger arrangements that do not deny the basic character of such drives but that make them seem less invasive and overwhelming, more easily handled as aspects of a confident and complex inner self-arranging. James Merrill’s poem “Lost in Translation” is about such a process. The poet in middle adulthood, living in Greece, is recalling the time when his parents divorced, back when he was twelve, and he is considering the failure in the present of a very important love relationship. He recalls making a wonderful orientalist jigsaw puzzle at that earlier age, one whose scene might well have reminded him of his parents’ impending separation but whose significance he did not then understand. His writing of the poem in his mid-40s is compared to the putting together of the puzzle back then, as word pieces click together because of their sounds in the way that puzzle pieces click together because of their shapes. The poet is also in Athens looking for Rilke’s German translation of a French poem, “Palme,” by Valéry. That poem celebrates the way that what may appear to be long, wasted days in a life may be sending psychological roots deep into the unconscious and into reality itself, so that one day a renewed form of self as well as a fine aesthetic artifact may emerge. (That sounds rather like what Nietzsche was describing.) But in the translation, says Merrill, the warm, romantic sounds of the French version have been translated into cooler German ones, as if one were moving about in a deserted ancient ruin at sunset. The point is that the poet’s own aesthetic practice over the long term, his making of poems as if making jigsaw puzzles, has been a process of arranging and re-ordering and transfiguring the contents of his psyche so that his most painful earlier emotions can be more properly understood and more effectively handled. There is a trade-off, according to the poem, in that the adult later-stage understanding, as with Rilke’s translation, may offer a somewhat cooler, if more widely and effectively embracing, experience of one’s emotional life. What were seen as arbitrary, violent, unconnected invasions of the self are displayed now as aspects of a convincing inner self-unfolding and self-arranging; it is the poet who has completed the psychological jigsaw puzzle. Placing the difficult, seemingly invasive experience within a compelling pattern of internally related items makes it no longer so threatening.

Nietzsche himself in Zarathustra, while agreeing with such an account of integration, transfiguration, and eventual mastery of the unconscious life, seems to believe that the sublimated, rechanneled, elevated, and integrated condition just described is actually a more desirable one. For energies that normally are wasted in futile, arbitrary low-level behaviors are recruited for more powerful mental gestures. He would agree with Merrill’s poet-narrator that what ought to be at issue here are an integration into larger configurations and an activity of mastery where once one had been weakly passive and arbitrarily responsive to powerful, unpredictable intrusions. That is why literary style is so important. To be able to keep up a sturdy, distinctive rhythm in one’s sentences as one assimilates difficult experiences, and to give one’s sentences a pleasing architectural shape as one handles threatening emotions and drives, is to stand for, and also to enact, the capacity of the individual to sustain itself, its boundaries, and its characteristic rhythms in the face of experiences that threaten to undo the self. That is why Merrill often prefers quite disciplined aesthetic forms with their built-in restrictions.

Yet why could not this process be accomplished through ordinary conscious reflection? The kinds of redesign of the self that Nietzsche, Proust, Merrill, and my other writers are treating concern not an acceptance of a set of beliefs but rather transformations of cognitive-emotive complexes that go deep into the hunter-gatherer origins of human brains. The brain modules and overall engineering on which these overall responses to the world are based depend on evolutionary developments that were not top-down, due to intellectual reflection, and that are not very susceptible to reflective assessment. In addition, many of the emotions that are allowed to emerge in literature and to be more effectively assimilated are due to experiences of early childhood having to do with the complex project of separation-individuation, in all its various manifestations. (I will be emphasizing this point in presenting my group of loners.) The society’s conceptual repertoire was not much available to the very young child handling those matters of loss and separateness, so the literary working upon the psyche that reaches down to those experiences will not generally be a matter of intentional, reflective enterprises. The cognitive-emotive complexes at issue go earlier and deeper than that. That is why Nietzsche keeps emphasizing the musical qualities of literature in his efforts to transform the modern psyche. His early work spoke of the birth of Greek tragedy from out of the spirit of music. He continues to mention the crucial character of the music he listens to in the forming of a transfigured Nietzschean self, and he emphasizes the thoroughly musical character of any literary prose that truly matters. For music captures archaic, deep-seated connections with the basic human emotional repertoire, with its subtle gradations and patterns, and with associated bodily gestures. Music maintains its extremely close connection with that emotive machinery, and its rhythms suggest both the ongoing self-sustaining capacity of the individual self and the underlying, seemingly oceanic cadences that seem to support the self from a deeper level. Literature that is simply about literature in a reflexive postmodern manner may appear to violate this Nietzschean directive, but it will do so while making itself eminently forgettable in the long run. For we remain creatures with hunter-gatherer brains moved by the music of prose, by what Nietzsche calls its dancing character in relation to the body. We are not formed into new Marxist-socialist selves who are beyond this. On this Nietzschean account literary work, especially insofar as it is driven by a musical character that reaches deep into the human emotional repertoire and helps to give that repertoire a more satisfying and sophisticated shape, can offer sample phenomenologies for taking in the world, for handling its pressures on the human psyche. Literary prose, in being such a sample phenomenology of a self-to-other structuring of experience, can be a scaffolding or prosthesis that we as readers can use to test out possible aspects of our own style of selfhood.

An additional factor of the account under consideration here has to do with the long historical process of developing the mind. Much of the brain’s architecture in the early stages of human development consisted of narrowly focused modules or programs, such as those designed to survey the world for very particular features of the environment significant for human survival. But advanced cultures place greater demands on the mind. We have to repurpose some of these narrowly focused, environment-oriented programs. We have to string some of these together in novel and complex configurations to perform sophisticated functions we were never designed for. Our metaphorical capacities are a good example. Simple visual experience of features of the world may come to suggest more abstract metaphysical insights and ideas. Some of this needed work today may be done at a highly conscious level. But for the most part these repurposings, these linkings of low-level modules into larger, more abstract, more complicated configurations, will involve intelligent pattern-forming and pattern-recognizing abilities that are mostly unconscious in their operations. (As Nietzsche claimed, most of our intelligent activity will be like this. Only a small portion of it will become conscious under the pressure of social communication. Such repurposings into larger configurations will be part of the psychic redesign of the self for the modern world that Nietzsche is recommending.) An excellent novelist or poet or writer of short fiction will often be adept at contributing to this kind of mental development. That is, these writers will feel, for unconscious reasons they cannot quite explain, that certain elements not typically associated in the common conversations of the culture somehow mysteriously suggest a complex, novel, more subtle, and more sophisticated configuration of thoughts, attitudes, and emotions. In the Merrill poem mentioned above, why does it seem strongly convincing that a memory of making a jigsaw puzzle, an Egyptian orientalist setting, a German translation of a French poem, and a scene at the poem’s end of a palm tree growing tall and fertilely in its desert isolation all belong together? In Eliot’s “The Waste Land” there are all of the following: an image of roots forced upward in spring when they would prefer to remain dormant, a memory of a visit to Munich, an image of taking a sled down a snowy hill, a reference to a scene in a Wagner opera and to hyacinths, brief illusions to Dido and Aeneas and to Cleopatra, an image of Ionian design in a London church, an unsatisfying conversation of a husband and wife, an invitation from a decadent Greek merchant of currants, and so on. We could effortlessly add dozens of other nodes of reference in the poem. How can these all belong together? How is the brain of the reader being pressed to form an extremely sophisticated and encompassing configuration that it might not have shaped before as a framework for seeing the world? What is crucial to note here is that the novel configuration in question is not simply occurring at an intellectual, conceptual level. It is also true that a set of emotional states and attitudes that usually are more primitive and separate, and may often be opposed to one another, are being brought together in a shifting, mobile constellation that will not quite stabilize itself but that yields a more complex, more encompassing attitude toward the world and toward the self.

Recall my claim that one of the powers of literature in training the human mind is the ready capacity to expand and contract, to a very large scale or to a very tiny one, the stance we are taking upon the world. At the end of Moby Dick we have the very local and fragile setting of Ishmael barely escaping drowning on Queequeg’s coffin while oceanic currents extending much farther spatially and temporally swirl around him. One is reminded of the scene of astronauts watching the tiny, fragile blue marble of the earth rise over the moon’s horizon in 1968. There is in these cases a combination of extreme human fragility along with a sense of human power at having raised ourselves to a point where we are capable of taking on the expanded metaphysical view that highlights our fragility. It can often seem one of the great triumphs of literature to be able to link our higher-level capacity to experience our metaphysical precarity, in a universe much greater than we are and uncaring in regard to us, with our still powerfully operative emotions linked to early childhood experiences of separateness and individuation, with their own preverbal sense of our fragility as separate and ungrounded.

On this overall account of literature that I link especially to Nietzsche, Proust, and Eliot (and to Merrill’s “Lost in Translation”), literature can help us in the designing of an individual psyche with greater integrity among its elements, more sophisticated mental coalitions, more encompassing and innovative cognitive-emotive complexes, and a greater sense of mastery, against earlier feelings of being overwhelmed by seemingly arbitrary, poorly comprehensible threats to the integrity of the self. Active self-making replaces a passive susceptibility to whatever those overwhelming forces, whether external or internal, might bring. This account, then, is one that finds an extremely fertile intersection among the psychological, the metaphysical, and the aesthetic. At universities today, in contrast, the intersection that is favored in the reading of literature is that among the social, the political, and the moral. That preference eliminates from the educational experience the very great resources that, in a Nietzschean manner, literature might offer students today in times of depression, sadness, loss, and a sense of fragile individual boundaries. The suggestion seems to be instead that joining others in a great socialist-political enterprise will solve whatever difficulties of self-formation are legitimate.

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