On vitalism

Announcing a reading group and seminar for interested subscribers

What once was capable of magnifying the concept ‘man’ and of giving it a more beautiful content must be present eternally in order eternally to have this capacity. That the great moments in the struggle of individuals form a chain, that in them the high points of humanity are linked throughout millennia, that what is highest in such a moment of the distant past be for me still alive, bright and great -- this is the fundamental thought of the faith in humanity….

Friedrich Nietzsche

The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another.

William James

These quotes may be taken as expressions of vitalism. Vitalism is a response to the claustrophobia of modern life. It begins with the feeling that some kind of cowardice is being urged upon us from every quarter.

The hunch that guides the selection of readings listed below is that there are greater affinities between vitalism and Christianity than are commonly appreciated.

They share a positive intuition that human beings are called out of themselves toward something higher, and that to refuse this call is to lead a diminished life of self-satisfaction. They also share an adversary in modernist metaphysics. Reductive materialism and determinism give us a picture of reality that can make no demand upon us, subsuming the human to a realm of dumb causation from which it is hard to imagine any resplendent deed shining forth. Nor is such a determinate world one into which the divine can intrude: experiences of grace and wonder are declared unreal.

To be struck by these continuities is a minority position. Nietzsche is one of the figures most associated with vitalism, and he was also the most powerful critic of Christianity of modern times. He found in this religion something that was profoundly anti-life. In the present landscape, a quarrel has emerged between a “neopagan” or Nietzschean vitalism of the Right, on the one hand, and a renascent interest in orthodox forms of Christianity, on the other. Both appeal to young men, and indeed the status of the male is one of the issues at stake in the larger quarrel between both of these camps (on one side) and the surrounding, institutional progressivism that both see as feminizing. For the Nietzscheans, progressivism is but a thinly secularized version of Christian ethics, the working-out of a rot introduced to the West in the Gospels. The newly orthodox, on the other hand, are more likely to emphasize the break rather than the continuity in the arc from the Gospels to the present. Both camps may claim as their own the dictum of Chesterton that “the vices of the modern world are the Christian virtues gone mad,” with a difference of emphasis.

Beginning this Thursday, January 16, I will be co-teaching (with Adrian Walker and Mark Shiffman) a weekly seminar on vitalism at St. Patrick’s Seminary and University in Menlo Park, California. It runs through May 1. I would like to extend an invitation to paid subscribers to participate vicariously. The readings are listed below, after some orienting paragraphs of my own. I will make the texts of the readings available electronically to those who participate, in cases where copyright permits it. I will post weekly reflections to highlight whatever elements in the texts I find most interesting, to spur discussion. Think of this as an online reading group that will track the in-person seminar over the next three and a half months, with the comments section of Archedelia serving as our meeting place.

If there is sufficient interest (let me know in the comments section below), I could offer a weekly video recap of insights arrived at during the in-person seminar, perhaps with an interlocutor (likely one my co-instructors).

An Overview

In this seminar, we will trace lines of force between cosmology, that is, our sense of the basic character of reality, and psychology. Of the preeminent world-pictures that are available, we will ask, how do they inflect or condition human experience? Do they tend to diminish life and make it more shallow, or enliven it and deepen it? We will also flip the causal arrow and ask whether a cosmology may be attractive less for its fit to reality than as the expression of a prior psychology, the spirit of an age. (For one may end up with a cramped cosmology as prop and support to a cramped form of life.)

These questions shade into political questions, some of them uncomfortable. In what sort of polity do the human endowments find their fullest expression? Is there an ecology of the human that, like a natural habitat, requires a bounded territory of “owned space”? Do “the nations” or ethne have an ongoing providential character, or are they to dissolve in a coming Kingdom of Christ? If the latter, how is this to be distinguished from the “undifferentiated human matter” of a universal and homogenous suburb? More concretely: Where is the boundary of solidarity to be drawn in a world of mass migrations? Does the universalism of Christianity enjoin acquiescence in colonization by newcomers? What is the role of remembrance and inheritance in carrying a people forward into the future? Where does hospitality end and ethno-masochism begin? What does the early history of Europe (the “Dark Ages”) have to teach us about the interplay of the universal and the particular in the conversion of the Western pagans and rise of Christendom? We will consider these questions from a variety of viewpoints, including a Burkean critique of universal moral systems (including Christianity), a romantic condemnation of Christian empire as the bulldozer of indigenous particularities, a Catholic critique of nationalism as idolatry, and a Protestant brief in favor of “Christian nationalism.”

We will also consider the anthropological significance of sexual difference, and ask whether Christianity is inherently feminizing. Does this religion undermine the harder qualities in which greatness is incubated, or does it rather give them focus? Does it heighten or flatten the drama of seduction, conquest and rebellion between men and women? Does the sexual act offer a mode of access to theological truth?

Finally, we will stage a confrontation between the technological attitude, marked by the aspiration to bring the world fully under our control, and a fundamentally different posture toward the world that Joseph Ratzinger calls “belief”. Which of these dispositions better reflects the vitality of the “healthy animal” admired by Nietzsche? The hunch that guided the selection of readings in this final section is that techno-rationalism yields compulsive anxiety, while belief supports boldness, the spirit of play, and receptivity to moments of wonder. This would seem to reverse the secular conceit that religion is a form of cowardice -- a solace to those without the courage to face a cold universe.

In our concluding session, we will consider the erotics of God and man. If God’s love is constantly generative, and this activity of love provides the fundamental ontology of the world, how does this inform the task of human being? Is gratitude a disposition that is “in the service of life?”

Links and PDFs to be distributed to all who write “SEMINAR PLEASE” in the comments section.

Schedule of readings

Part One: Does Christianity diminish man, or enlarge him?

Jan 16: Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, First Essay (entire) and Second Essay, sections 1-11. Together these are pp. 24-76 in the Kaufmann translation.

Jan 23: Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay sections 12-25 and Third Essay (entire). Together these are pp. 97-163 in the Kaufmann translation.

Jan 30: Guest lecture by Talbot Brewer (philosophy, University of Virginia) on Plato’s Timaeus, with text to be distributed ahead of time.

Feb 06: Max Scheler, Ressentiment, chapters 1-3 (pp. 23-77 in the Marquette translation).

Feb 13: Max Scheler, Ressentiment, chapters 4-5 (pp. 79-125 in the Marquette translation).

Part Two: A brief history of vitalism in America

Feb 27: Jackson Lears, Animal Spirits, Introduction and chs. 7&8

William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” (beginning with section II) in The Will to Believe, pp. 38-62 and “The Moral Equivalent of War.”

Part Three: Solidarity, the circumscribed life-world, and the universal

March 13: Michael Oakeshott “The Tower of Babel” in Rationalism in Politics, pp. 465-487

Stephen Jenkins, “The Rock and the Hard, Hard Place” in Come of Age, pp. 211-232.

March 20: Andrew Willard Jones, “Nationalism” in The Two Cities, pp. 219-224.

Stephen Wolfe, “Loving Your Nation” in The Case for Christian Nationalism, pp. 117-171

Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of the West, chapters 1,2,4.

Part Four: Men and women

March 27: Leon J. Podles, “Can a Man be a Christian?”, “What Is Masculinity” (parts) and “God and Man in Judaism” in The Church Impotent, pp. 27-46 and 60-73.

C.S. Lewis, “Eros” in The Four Loves

Part Five: Metaphysical courage

April 03: Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, pp. 1-4

Paul Sherz, Tomorrow’s Troubles, Ch.3: “Anxiety and the Temporality of Risk” and Ch.4: “The Hunger for Security”

April 10: Matthew Crawford, “The Boldness of Belief and the Timidity of Technology”

Mark Shiffman, “Hope and Optimism”

Conclusion: The erotics of God and man

May 1: George Grant, “Appendix” in Technology and Justice, pp. 71-77

Dionysius, “On the Divine Names,” IV: 7-17 and VIII: 7-9