No, European Cynicism Doesn’t Undermine Liberalism

Fallacious postmodern explanations of the self’s origin

The modern, progressive world that’s supposed to have emerged from the static medieval one is premised on the idea that we’re each individual persons who have inherent natural rights, irrespective of whether we’ve been created by an all-powerful deity.

There had better be such rights if post-medieval society is to remain viable since the end of medievalism was marked by doubts about supernatural guarantor of human rights.

Early modern Western philosophers such as Rene Descartes and John Locke are considered humanists because they turned to the only things that remain as their sources of value and meaning, after scientific skepticism had run roughshod over the archaic dogmatisms that propped up the travesty of Christendom. These progressive sources that remain are supposed to be the virtues of human personhood, such as self-consciousness, reason, autonomy, conscience, compassion, imagination, creativity, ambition, and so on.

But scientific and philosophical skeptics didn’t apply their doubts only to theological superstitions about the natural order; eventually, skeptics scrutinized humanism, too, and thus the basis of liberalism and its capitalistic and democratic institutions.

Antihumanism from Hegel to Freud

These anti-humanistic doubts in Western philosophy began with the likes of GWF Hegel, who incorporated Romantic criticisms of rationalist optimism about science and technology. Hegel argued in a proto-Darwinian way that there’s a dialectical logic in all our affairs, that individuals are products of sweeping historical processes that resolve their conflicts. Karl Marx naturalized and politicized Hegel’s talk of dialectics, positing materialistic clashes between social classes that resolve themselves in economic revolutions.

Both of their accounts are relatively optimistic about the human potential, though, even as they undermine naïve conceptions of the self by emphasizing external things such as historical processes and collective struggles.

Friedrich Nietzsche stood between their optimism and Arthur Schopenhauer’s all-embracing, world-weary pessimism. Still, Nietzsche was a more thorough critic of humanism, arguing effectively as a social Darwinian that our so-called virtues which supply our life with purpose and dignity are shams.

What matters, rather, he said, is our will to power which we either accept or resent. The human “herd” of bad-faith followers often resents our true nature and disguises its search for power with rationalizations, whereas the aristocratic few who accept reality, including the unflattering historical origin of our precious cultural norms are “beyond good and evil,” having graduated from humanity to transhumanity.

Sigmund Freud applied Nietzsche’s pessimistic psychology to the clinical setting. For Freud the human subject is hardly as noble as the early modernists supposed. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Freud argued that, given our underlying animal nature, we’re ill-suited to our social obligations. We evolved to live as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but we opted for sedentary life and that choice of only around twelve thousand years ago has imposed all sorts of alienating compromises on us.

Freud famously posited the unconscious as lying at the root of the conscious self. The self we identify with, our “ego,” is only the false front we project. Our true self is repressed because it’s socially unacceptable. Dreams testify to our unconscious promptings which our daily life doesn’t satisfy. We confabulate, filling in the gaps of our public image with excuses and myths so that the egoistic mask of a self that we take for granted is more like a lie than a guarantor of our respectability after the death of God.

Lacan’s antihumanism

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was a careful reader of Freud, and he reformulated the classic psychoanalytic concepts many times, combining Freudianism with theories from linguistics, topology, and anthropology. In the process, he influenced the most strident Continental antihumanists. Lacan, then, is a jumping-off point for the repudiation of the humanist support for liberalism that’s found in the so-called “postmodern” period, and now also in “woke” culture.

Lacan followed Freud in emphasizing childhood development as the source of our mature, adult compromises or neuroses. The Oedipus complex, for example, was still deemed the turning point when the child is socialized as the child confronts its insufficiency. But Lacan brought out the relevance of society as an amorphous collective to this transformation, again seemingly undermining humanism by diminishing the role of individuals.

For Lacan, our earliest act of self-identification is riddled with alienation because we identify with a stable image of us in a mirror which contrasts with our infantile inability to master our body. Then, when the child competes with the father for the mother’s attention and recognizes that the father has something the child lacks, a lack which Lacan calls the “phallus,” the child is invited to interpret that weakness as a promise. What’s relevant isn’t that the child lacks a serviceable penis since the reason the child can’t satisfy the mother in all possible ways is that the child hasn’t yet ascended from the discourse of falsifying images to the symbolic order.

The unconscious, for Lacan, isn’t an internal well of psychic energy, like Schopenhauer’s “will” that makes a puppet of all natural manifestations. Instead, the unconscious is the public system of language or the role of the Other in speech acts. The father pleases the mother not just physically but symbolically because both adhere to social conventions to which the child isn’t yet suited. But as the child matures, the child realizes it needs to compete not just with the father but with society and with a system of symbols that itself only delays complete gratification. The promise behind what Lacan calls this “castration,” or this domestication and socialization of the child is a false one.

As Lacan says in his later formulations, we naturally long for “jouissance,” for unbearable unconscious pleasure in suffering, a paradoxical state that Georges Bataille construed as taboo ecstasy and that emerges as the symptoms of neurosis that show up in psychoanalytic therapy. According to Lacan, the purpose of society and of language is to neutralize this wild side of ourselves, so that personal maturation is a kind of societal trap.

We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, between (a) the failure to cope with these external codes, in which case we suffer from mental disorders such as paranoia or neurosis, and (b) accepting our social roles in the symbolic order of language and contenting ourselves with an arbitrary master signifier that channels our antisocial creativity into some acceptable “imaginary,” “symbolic,” and “real” sets of concepts with which we can personally identify.

The problem is that Lacan portrays the self as something altogether undignified, from a humanistic standpoint. If the unconscious extends well beyond the individual’s mind to the whole society that dictates the language’s conventions, conventions that fill the individual’s head with signifiers that are combined in emotionally charged ways, the personal identity produced by this asymmetric relationship isn’t something any individual can own. No one owns the natural language that encodes this identity, so that once again the human self looks like a sham.

So much for the honour of progressive liberal modernity.

The shoddiness of European philosophical illiberalism

Again, Lacan’s Freudian formulations have inspired Continental philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Zizek, and Alexander Bard in their illiberal, unflattering portrayals of the individual self that’s supposed to stand as the respectable source of human rights and progress.

What interests me here, then, is whether these process-oriented philosophies of how the self is formed threaten to undermine humanism, individualism, and thus liberalism. After all, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan all focus not on the self’s abilities but on how these abilities are formed. Their accounts are etiological, dialectical, or developmental. Is that sort of explanation, then, liable to threaten liberalism?

A preliminary concern here should be with the sheer shoddiness of Continental philosophy in general. Indeed, Lacan’s flights of psychobabble are closer to a witch doctor’s divinations than to a scientist’s testable conjectures.

Freud, too, posited “resistance” on the patient’s part, a forerunner of Lacan’s “jouissance,” some negative force that was supposed to explain why the patient still shows symptoms of a disorder even though the analyst has fully accounted for the mental problem. Rather than confessing that the disorder may live on despite the analyst’s thoroughness because psychoanalysis is an impotent pseudoscience, leaders of the movement turned their “theories” into theologies by immunizing them from falsification with this sort of arbitrary postulation.

At least, we should be skeptical of these philosophers’ claims because their entire discourse is a literary, prose-poetic, obscurantist free-for-all.

Dialectical philosophy and the genetic fallacy

But let’s leave that aside and grant their accounts of human development, for the sake of argument.

Just consider, then, the Darwinian paradigm. For instance, does the fact that land animals evolved from fish mean that mammals can’t walk or climb? Does the fact that caterpillars turn into butterflies mean that butterflies can’t fly, that they’re confined to the mode of transportation employed at their point of origin? Or does the fact that humans evolved from apes mean that we’re not furless and can’t talk or travel to the moon?

Or notice how the planetary bodies of solar systems evolve from stellar gas. Does the fact that planets are made of star stuff mean that all planets are still too hot to walk on?

These are rhetorical questions to illustrate the genetic fallacy that social Darwinian or Freudian philosophers are liable to commit.

Suppose, for instance, that Lacan is correct in saying that parents wean their children from infantile pursuits, introducing them to social opportunities with language. Does that mean all adult endeavours are automatically childish because they developed from infantile games? No, that would be fallacious because novel things can emerge from a developmental process. To equate the product’s capacities with the status of the product’s origin is fallacious.

Evidently, the adult human self doesn’t fall from the sky. This self develops as the brain grows and as the child is enculturated. And certainly, language and society are involved in that process. But that doesn’t mean nothing new and autonomous generally emerges as the product of that process.

In fact, the Freudian point about how the self is alienated from society because of the mismatch between our natural instincts and our social obligations presupposes this self’s isolation and thus its self-awareness and freedom. We’re alienated because we recognize what and where we are, which are the grounds of liberalism.

Adulthood results from a childhood state, but that doesn’t mean there’s no difference between the two. Children need to be socialized, but that doesn’t mean adults are just as helpless and dependent as their young offspring. Children are instinctively receptive to advice from their elders, and they absorb varieties of information faster even than adults can manage because the child’s brain hasn’t yet established itself as an independent entity. But evidently that acute dependency changes with adulthood.

To be sure, some cultures are relatively infantile or “medieval,” and there are large corporations that are in the business of infantilizing adults. But there are still degrees of mature personhood, and if we recognize where societies can go wrong in that respect, that’s because we hold them up to a progressive humanistic standard. Some countercultures are superior to mass cultures, in better respecting their members’ human rights and potential, and free societies are more humanistic than totalitarian ones. Thus, liberal standards aren’t unrealistic.

These dialectical explanations, then, are side-shows, fallacious distractions from the fact that adult personhood generally emerges from childishness, just as personhood evolved more generally from animality. The fact that language and society play roles in domesticating children doesn’t mean that those are their only roles. Once we’re socialized, we can act as individual persons in pursuing our interests in the classic liberal manner. In so far as these quasi-Darwinian, “postmodern” philosophies are taken to deny that that’s possible, their arguments likely commit the genetic fallacy.

Pragmatism and how all concepts simplify

But there’s another problem for this intellectual illiberalism. Take the Freudian contention that the ego is full of rationalizations, that the conscious self normally deceives itself, whether in repressing its unconscious urges or exaggerating its responsibility for its actions and downplaying the impact of social systems.

The problem is that we should think of all concepts pragmatically, including scientific or pseudoscientific ones like the Freudian therapist’s. All concepts simplify and therefore, technically, falsify. No concept is perfectly adequate to its subject matter because concepts are formed for practical purposes, and we can’t possibly fathom the innumerable complex relationships between the subjects of our thoughts.

You don’t understand butterflies unless you understand caterpillars; and you don’t understand the former unless you understand flight and thus gravity; and you don’t understand the butterfly’s life cycle unless you understand natural selection and thus the entire history of life, as well as life’s origin in nonlife. And so on and so forth until your mind explodes with mental maps of the empirical details.

Due to the universe’s inhuman fullness, we simplify whenever we think. Thus, as Freud and Lacan imply, we simplify in thinking of ourselves too. We ignore our unconscious side and the linguistic and social contexts of our identity, and we focus on the part of which we’re proudest, on our personal identity as Johnny Humperdinck or Delilah Applebaum. We emphasize our conscious ability to get stuff done with reason, imagination, willpower, and all the other traits of personhood.

Is that self-conception a delusion rather than just a typical conceptual simplification? If so, the concept should be useless in the field, whereas this basis of folk psychology nicely explains ordinary human behaviour.

By assuming this folk theory of mind, we explain and predict human behaviour all the time. We interpret facial expressions and assume that the person is happy or sad and will act accordingly. That is, we assume we have a mind that expresses itself in our actions. We assume we have beliefs and that we use them to get what we want, that we prioritize our interests, and that there’s a logic to our thinking.

All of which is consistent with the foundations of liberalism.

Whether a concept is delusional should be judged pragmatically. The liberal’s assumption that individual, relatively autonomous minds exist has proven useful countless times. Therefore, this concept of the self isn’t delusional, even if it surely simplifies matters.

Alas, as I said, Lacan’s theoretical concepts will likewise be simplifications, and he and his followers would presuppose those concepts’ legitimacy in using them to undermine the classic liberal’s metanarrative about the self’s capacity for rational progress. That presumption would be so much lingering Freudian scientism, the presumption that only scientific discourse is a valid way of acquiring knowledge.

Somehow, the illiberal Lacanian must rely on Freudian concepts while denigrating the early modern concept of the self. Yet on pragmatic grounds, both concepts are, at best, equally simplistic, compared to the subject matter’s real complexity. If Lacan’s theoretical concepts of the mirror stage, the phallus, the Other, and so on are deemed true enough because they’re useful in psychological or clinical contexts, why wouldn’t the same pragmatic justification apply to the liberal’s conception of the self in the folk psychological context?

Once the scientistic basis for privileging the Freudian’s theoretical concepts is dismissed, and the pragmatic basis for taking all concepts to be simplifying models is understood, we no longer have any compelling reason for dispensing with liberalism because the liberal’s ordinary self-conception distorts the truth or leaves out some information. Again, all concepts do that, and we don’t dispense with all our concepts.

Moreover, the liberal’s conception of the self is partly normative. We aim to be rational, imaginative, free, and strong-willed because we admire the Renaissance men who transformed the medieval period in Europe into what we call the “modern” one. Whether we ignore the extent to which we often fail to achieve these ideals doesn’t entail that the ideals are impossible to approximate.

There are surely unconscious, societal influences on adult behaviour, but the liberal’s point is that we ought to attempt to be rationally independent. That’s an ethical claim, which means that psychiatric theories of personal development are irrelevant, in so far as the latter are supposed to be merely empirical.

Critics of liberalism can argue that liberal ideals are misguided or are inferior to conservative alternatives. But arguing that the liberal’s ethical principles are bad because the self is subject to some typical process of maturation would be fallacious. The ethical judgment wouldn’t follow so obviously from the factual premises. What you could show is that, given some facts of human development, a prescription for how we ought to behave is unfeasible and thus perhaps delusional.

But there’s no sense in evaluating liberalism based strictly on an empirical model that has no alternative normative implications. And once a model has such implications, it’s no longer science.

Real and phony threats to liberalism

The above, then, amounts to a firewall between liberalism and the excesses of Continental philosophical artistry. Liberalism is threatened by authoritarians and by technological advances, such as artificial intelligence and the automation of labour. We needn’t invent frivolous, pretentious threats to the humanistic self-conception, like those that are grounded in little more than decadent philosophical aspersions.

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