by Arthur Pontynen

an has no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out. The latter is what we commonly call culture and enlightenment today.—G. K. Chesterton, The Common Man

It is easy today to be an advocate of freedom. As long as we pay attention to facts, and purport to do no harm, we insist upon our right to believe and do as we wish. To suggest that we ought to encourage freedom is safe indeed, but try to link that freedom to the pursuit of truth, and just watch the fireworks begin. The notion that freedom relies on truth, on knowledge that is to some degree objective and purposeful, is widely made to seem intolerant and even oppressive. It seems un-Enlightened, as well it is.

Primarily associated with eighteenth-century German culture, with proponents in England and France as well, the Enlightenment was dedicated to advancing society beyond the constraints of superstition, tradition, and social habit. Immanuel Kant praised the Enlightenment and provided its slogan:

Enlightenment is humanity’s departure from its self-imposed immaturity. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause is not lack of intelligence but failure of courage to think without someone else’s guidance. Dare to know! That is the slogan of the Enlightenment.

It is easy today to advocate freedom, but perhaps that advocacy has itself become a matter of superstition, mere tradition, and unexamined social habit. Perhaps it has become a manifestation not of maturity but of a new and perverse form of immaturity, one that rests on accepting the dictates of the few, who influence the many to think little if at all. Postmodernism replaces thought with the pursuit of pleasure and power, and in place of beauty and truth it forges a violent aestheticism in the service not of Beauty, but of the Beast.

The crux of the problem is the disassociation of freedom from truth. Freedom is now commonly associated with creativity. In place of truth, of thoughts that correspond with or inform reality, we now pursue facts—accurate descriptions of particular things. Creativity, in turn, involves arranging facts in ways that please us. A tolerant society is assumed to be one where there exists a shared commitment to freedom of conscience, where each person can construct a unique vision of reality and life. The older notion of truth, as being a matter of objective knowledge of reality, is denigrated as doctrinaire, oppressive, and intolerant. But given that the slogan of the Enlightenment is “Dare to know,” then, lacking the notion of truth, we might reasonably wonder: Just what is it that we are attempting to know, and how?

Denying Reality

Kant attempted to answer that question in an important text of the Enlightenment, his Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant holds that the world as it is, the ding an sich, cannot be known, and that therefore the truth cannot be known. Instead, he posits the pursuit of facts, feelings, and style. Facts are objective, but how we put those facts into explanatory narratives is linked to how we think. Thus, the process of making sense of the world via a rational arranging of facts is held to be both aesthetic and creative, and at its best, that process is the work of genius. According to Kant’s argument, although facts are objective, reality is subjective—it is an aesthetic construct. Nelson Goodman summarizes this worldview in his book Ways of Worldmaking (1978), claiming that the mainstream of modern philosophy began when Kant “exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts,” and has resulted in “the movement . . . from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making.”

How, then, do we decide among these conflicting versions of the truth? The exemplary Postmodernist Friedrich Nietzsche trumpeted the triumph of the will, an intrinsic, individual right to self-expression and self-realization. Other Postmodernists have shared this advocacy of self-expression and self-realization, but associate that right with particular groups. Marxists associate it with economic class, Nazis related it to racial class, and gender feminists associate it with sexual class. In all of its many forms, however, the unifying dogma of Postmodernist thought is the will to power. As Goodman put it, :

Truth, far from being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant. The scientist who supposes that he is single-mindedly dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself. . . . He seeks system, simplicity, and scope; and when satisfied on these scores he tailors truth to fit. He as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much designs as discerns the patterns he delineates.

Thus, the Enlightenment-inspired duty to know is actually a duty to create. We are worldmakers. This assumed duty to create reality posits that we can aesthetically construct the world and our lifestyles according to our will.

Twisted Pleasures

The aestheticization of reality and, indeed, life has discernible personal and social consequences. In Creativity and Perversion (1984), Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel identifies them by examining the psychological association between aestheticism, creativity, and perversion. She finds that the driving cultural force behind each of these impulses is the unwillingness of the child to acknowledge reality, particularly the differences between things. Following Freud, she notes the importance of an individual’s recognizing differences between the sexes and the generations, observing that denial of those differences is neither enlightened nor tolerant; in fact, it results in a psychology that is fundamentally sadistic. It is grounded in an immature attempt to obtain a single goal: the violent elimination of all distinctions. As an illustration, Chasseguet-Smirgel refers to another prominent figure of the Enlightenment, the Marquis [Comte] de Sade:

The materialistic reasoning of Sade when he speaks of the equality of man with an oyster, the equality of all human beings, the equality of Good and Evil, the equality of death and life . . . reveals but one basic intention: to reduce the universe to faeces. . . . The Sadean hero actually becomes the grinding machine, the cauldron in which the universe will be dissolved.

Chasseguet-Smirgel depicts the unwillingness to come to terms with reality as an act of pride, and consequently as an act of violence. That violence has a sexual component: because it is grounded in a denial of reality, it involves a wish to make others conform to one’s own will—or pleasure. This impulse has played out vividly in art. Chasseguet-Smirgel considers three examples of Luciferian characters: a historical one, Caligula; a fictional one, the scientist Doctor Moreau; and a real-life artist, Hans Bellmer. Each of these characters exhibits a will to construct reality according to his own pleasure, and each also displays a tendency toward sexual sadism. Bellmer, who was known for creating dolls that suggest a disturbing sexual violence, was quoted as saying in 1965,

The body can be compared to a sentence inviting one to disarticulate it for its true elements to be recombined in a series of endless anagrams . . . leib (body), lieb (love), Beil (axe).

The sadist refuses to accept reality, and thus takes pleasure in rearranging it in perverse ways. Bellmer is not alone in this regard—the culture of the Enlightenment has provided countless examples of such sadistic content, from the Marquis de Sade to Edward Munch (whose paintings and prints titled Madonna link sex with violence) to Marcel Duchamp (“The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors,” with its onanistic male grinding machines). More recent examples include Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, which was spattered with feces and displayed in the Brooklyn Museum. In these last two cases, images representing a powerful reality are used to provide perverse pleasure by being associated with, and thereby violated by, human waste.

This attempted equalizing of differences is nothing new in human experience. It is central to the work of the Marquis de Sade, who merely updated the worldmaking aspirations of the Roman emperor and consummate worldmaker Caligula. For a detailed historical account of the sordid activities of worldmakers through the ages, the reader can visit the histories of Suetonius, Procopius, and a wide variety of others. More timely is the work of a current philosopher, Peter Singer.

Avatar of Perversion

Here the choice between beauty and the beast becomes peculiarly mordant. Now holder of the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at Princeton, Singer established his reputation in advancing the cause of animal rights. In contrast, however, to the traditional notion that animals simply should not be treated with cruelty, the cause of animal rights asserts moral and legal equality between all sentient beings. The Sadean notion of the equality of man with an oyster comes to mind, as does its concomitant sexual sadism. Singer recently advanced the logical consequences of his, and the Enlightenment’s, arguments in this regard, in an article entitled “Heavy Petting,” published in the Web magazine Nerve.com (April 2001). Noting that sexual contact between humans and animals has been taboo not only in the Judeo-Christian tradition but in the thinking of Kant as well, Singer poses a different way of thinking suggested by the Viennese writer Otto Soyka in his book Beyond the Boundary of Morals. Singer writes,

Never widely known, and now entirely forgotten, it was a polemic directed against the prohibition of “unnatural” sex like bestiality, homosexuality, fetishism, and other non-reproductive acts. Soyka saw these prohibitions as futile and misguided attempts to limit the inexhaustible variety of human sexual desire. Only bestiality, he argued, should be illegal, and even then, only in so far as it shows cruelty towards an animal.

Singer takes this logic to the next level, arguing that nonviolent bestiality should not be seen as offensive to our status and dignity as human beings. The pursuit of only nonviolent pleasure appears to separate Singer from de Sade, but appearances can be deceiving. At a minimum, sex without violence involves consent, and how such consent can be discerned in animals is difficult to imagine. Singer gives examples of dogs and orangutans indicating some type of transspecies erotic interest, but consent involves consciousness, and to confuse instinct for consciousness is un-Enlightened indeed. Likewise violent is Singer’s false assumption that mere conscious consent is enough, unless one wishes to defend the psychological violence of pedophilia and other such behaviors. Finally, it is important to note that although Singer does not say who should decide what constitutes conscious consent and whether such consent is present, he cannot realistically mean anyone but persons as enlightened as he.

In the context of Singer’s worldmaking, however, the fact that a mature orangutan has roughly the cognitive ability of a young child, or a mentally handicapped adult, is significant. Singer maintains that part of our ethical responsibility consists in the right to kill what he calls “miserable beings”: “Once we abandon those doctrines about the sanctity of human life that collapse as soon as they are questioned, it is the refusal to accept killing that, in some cases, is horrific” (emphasis added). And who should be killed? Those beings whose existence lacks pleasure: “The most obvious reason for valuing the life of a being capable of experiencing pleasure or pain is the pleasure it can experience.” Singer explains that in order to increase the total sum of pleasure in the world we can either bring into existence more beings capable of experiencing pleasure, increase the pleasure of already existing beings, or remove what he calls “miserable beings.” If orangutans lead pleasurable lives, he is all for saving their habitats and keeping them out of zoos, and if handicapped people have lives that aren’t pleasurable, he is equally ready to have them killed.

Singer argues that we live in a world where the aim of life (and sex) is pleasure, and that this pleasure has no ulterior purpose. Consider, then, the repugnant hedonistic calculus that follows. An orangutan might have the same level of cognition as a child or a mentally handicapped person, but according to Singer, the orangutan can enjoy a life of pleasure, and the handicapped cannot. Following Singer’s argument (which is unfortunately necessary because ideas affect how we think and live), sex with an orangutan is acceptable if there is consent and it is nonviolent. It is reasonable then to come to the same conclusion about children and the mentally handicapped. But even though in these instances the same level of consciousness is present as in the orangutan, the postcoital mentally handicapped person remains nonetheless condemned to death. Therefore, according to Singer’s calculus, young children and the severely handicapped are worthy of sexual exploitation, but when deemed “miserable beings” are unworthy of life. Thus, Singer’s alleged separation of pleasure from violence is illusory. In Singer’s Sadean cosmology, pleasure and violence go hand in hand.

How is it that we have gone from the clarion call of the Enlightenment—Dare to know-!—to the Postmodern dirge of advocating bestiality and government-determined euthanasia? From a well-intentioned Kant, we have proceeded to Marx and Nietzsche and, not much further down the same path, Stalin and Hitler. The twentieth century after all, was a time of unprecedented, government-enforced euthanasia, in which numerous societies ruthlessly “eliminated”—through mass murder—“miserable beings” such as Jews, Russian Kulaks, Chinese “anti-revolutionary” elements, the Cambodian bourgeoisie, “unwanted” American unborn children, and others so defined by race, class, or some other unchosen status. It is, alas, not much of a leap further to declare that sex might be permissible with animals, children, and the mentally handicapped before their rationalized murder.

Postmodern Alchemy

The Enlightenment’s goal of escaping superstition, which was widely understood to mean escaping religious dogma, has thus displayed its terrible flaw. As Chasseguet-Smirgel notes, the Sadean hero puts himself in the position of God, and through a process of destruction, attempts to become the creator of a new kind of reality. That creative act of worldmaking is aesthetic and violent: it centers on pleasure qualified only by the will—and therefore not qualified at all. This notion, moreover, is embodied in the most basic assumptions of the Enlightenment. In God and the Knowledge of Reality (1993 edition), Thomas Molnar brings to our attention Kant’s private notes, not published until 1920, quoting him as follows:

God must be represented not as a substance outside me, but as the highest moral principle in me. . . . The Idea of that which human reason itself makes out of the World-All is the active representation of God. Not as a special personality, substance outside of me, but as a thought in me.

As Kant’s private notes verify, and as Hegel openly asserted, in a realm of worldmakers the philosopher becomes God, the scientist becomes an alchemist, and the individual is encouraged to think and do as he pleases. The choice, then, is clear, and it is not one of religious dogma versus secular enlightenment. Rather, it is one of seeking objective truth or making the world, of seeking beauty or making aesthetic constructs.

Molnar notes that worldmaking is neither new nor progressive; it is a perennial point of foolishness operating on principles like those behind ancient Hermetic thought and the practice of alchemy:

The most notable thing about this comparison between Hermetic speculation and modern philosophy is the fact that all the operations of the philosopher are mental operations. They take place in the subject—not in the sense in which cognitive processes are, of course, mental ones, but in the sense that the subject regards his ideas as agents shaping the real world. . . .

The subjectivist philosopher is convinced . . . he modifies the constitution of being. His increased “true knowledge” signifies a general increase of mankind’s and the world’s maturity. . . . [I]t brings about an absolute change, a transmutation in man’s morality, intellectual powers, and political insights; it brings about a change of being.

Culture of Violence

It is useful to keep in mind that the worldmakers (and worldmaking) here discussed have been in the ascendancy for a long time; as noted, attempts to make reality conform to the will were commonplace in the twentieth century. In universities across the nation, worldmakers have taught us, and they teach our children. They influence the formulation of our laws and our public policies. In the Enlightenment culture, the philosopher, scientist, artist, and citizen are all demiurgic, possessing the special knowledge and right to be worldmakers. This transformation of culture is legitimized as a progressive pursuit of creativity and tolerance. That claim to legitimacy is, however, illusory. The unrestrained pursuit of creativity produces a culture of violence.

In his Theology and Social Theory (1990), John Milbank documents this process of cultural decline and shows its roots in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment-ordained refusal to pursue objective reality leads to the Nietzschean conclusion that freedom is power, but a culture of power must deny freedom—and love. Milbank offers this conclusion:

Kantian liberalism is merely the “great delayer.” . . . For once it has been conceded, as by Kant, that ethics is to be grounded in the fact of the will and of human freedom, then quite quickly it is realized that freedom is not an ahistorical fact about an essential human subject, but is constantly distilled from the complex strategies of power within which subjects are interpolated as unequal, mutually dependent persons. The protection of an equality of freedom therefore collapses into the promotion of the inequality of power.

Just as we have seen in the modern world’s passion for government-induced euthanasia, the Enlightenment advocates freedom and pleasure but delivers violence; its program of attempting to achieve freedom by democratizing power leads to a society in which all people must live as beasts.

Milbank argues that any secular society must be based on an understanding of reality and life that is fundamentally violent, and that this ontology of violence results in a society at war with itself. Milbank contrasts this with an ontology of harmony, derived from St. Augustine, where society recognizes virtue as rightly ordered love. Milbank refers to the Augustinian understanding that genuine community is based upon a striving to live with purpose, dignity, and joy and that violence is an absence of love:

Neither ignorance nor sin make “mistakes”; instead, they somehow do not do enough. . . . Evil becomes the denial of hope for, and the present reality of, community.

The point, of course, is not that we must necessarily be Augustinians to escape violence. There are traditions around the world that encourage community and conversation rather than violence and posturing, thereby avoiding the folly of worldmaking:

The reconciliation of virtue with difference implies a harmonic pattern in the happening of difference, a “tradition” whose norms are only seen in the course of its unfolding.

The worldmakers cannot escape their own logic: if we agree that communities are made, then the makers of those communities can pursue a strategy either of violence or of harmony. They can use facts to be worldmakers, or use them only to verify their attempts to understand the world.

There is cause for optimism that people devoted to the latter course can prevail. In attempting to understand Postmodernism, in her essay “What is Freedom?” the twentieth-century philosopher Hannah Arendt considered Augustine’s comment, “To will and to be able are not the same,” and noted, “Only where the I-will and the I-can coincide does freedom come to pass.” As Augustine and Arendt realized, both freedom and love need objects as well as subjects. And as both Freud and Augustine noted, those who refuse to recognize objective reality and the differences between things fall into superstition and destructive narcissism. Hence, they may be vulnerable to displacement by people who are willing to accept reality, as the Soviet Union fell before the challenge of the prosperous, free-market United States.

Enlightenment and Postmodern worldmakers substitute myth for reality, so let us conclude by using a myth to return to reality. “The Beauty and the Beast” is a well-known tale representing not a Sadean world of equality and violence, but rather an epiphany. The Prince’s failure to recognize and love others is what condemns him to live as a Beast. The solution, however, is not for the Beauty and the Beast to be seen as indistinguishable, nor for the Beast to use the Beauty against her will for his own pleasures. On the contrary, it is the love of Beauty that restores the Prince to his full dignity as a human being and brings him happiness. It is not worldmaking that indicates a mature freedom, but rather the pursuit of beauty.

Arthur Pontynen is an associate professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.

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