Where Sartre and Hitler agreed: The Shared Rejection of Teleology and Nature

Anyone familiar with the Aristotelian perspective on human nature, ethics, and politics knows that its critique of contemporary society cuts across typical ideological divisions. That means, for example, that ideas not just from the left-most margins of society will be rejected, but also from the right-most, and even from the purported “middle” which philosophical liberalism often occupies in a pretense of neutrality.

Since our societies have developed in a left-leaning direction since the second world-war, however, a good deal of the cultural critique one hears today from Aristotelian thinkers has a right-leaning character, even though in fact there are a number of things that they would agree with which are traditionally the turf of both leftists and liberals.

In light of this, conversations I have with friends from a more left-leaning perspective have ended in surprise. They don’t expect to hear that despite being traditionally conservative, I find human-friendly economic protections, welfare, worker’s rights, protecting human autonomy and dignity, and even climate protection very important. Their initial impression seems to be that if I were completely honest with myself, I could find nothing in my conservative worldview which in principle could stop me from sliding into the same kind of fascist authoritarianism which plagued the early 20th century.

But in fact this turns out to be quite wrong. There is a large and fundamental chasm between Aristotelianism and the set of assumptions and attitudes underlying the fascist authoritarianism which the 20th century embodied. But even further (and indeed controversially): I believe that today’s average leftist may share much in common with these ideologically, in fact far more than they realise. As surprising as it may sound, both stand on the same philosophical foundation which the Aristotelian categorically rejects. But given this certainly requires some explaining, let me do so.

In order to set up my argument, I’ll have to come up with general terms for the two parties I’d like to describe here, and ask the readers for their patience for the imprecision it will entail. The leftist, existentialist (in the sense of Sartre’s “existence precedes essence”), and tendentially atheist and deconstructionist I will label the existentialist. The authoritarian, fascist-like, extreme right “Nazi” I will term the voluntarist (who also is very often atheist, but not as public about it). The Aristotelian I will call the essentialist. Now, my claim is that the existentialist and the voluntarist both represent two branch-offs from the same deeper stream of thought, namely nominalism, which essentialism categorically rejects. So let’s discuss what that is.

Nominalism

Nominalism is, put as simply as possible, the idea that the objects of the world have no intrinsic identity. Put another way: for any natural object in the world (like a tree) the whole is never greater than its parts, and parts are always more real than the whole. So it is not really the tree that exists, but the atoms which make it up.

Explained on a deeper level, it is the rejection of the idea that objects as objects have objective reality and structure. A nominalist rejects that a person is, apart from human perception, objectively and singly a person. In other words, they dispute that someone’s being-a-person is somehow just as or even more metaphysically fundamental than the atoms that make them up. The same analysis applies to any natural object.

For essentialists who reject nominalism, the whole is often something fundamentally different from and greater than the sum of its parts - not in a supernaturally, but abstractly. For essentialists, a squirrel has a real existence which is ultimately independent of the precise collection of atoms which makes it up - completely apart from human thought. Thus that which makes a squirrel a squirrel for an essentialist is the fact that its material participates in an abstract, yet real pattern. This pattern is naturally merely a pattern and is destructible. Its material naturally ceases to participate in this pattern as soon as our poor squirrel gets run over on the highway.

For a nominalist on the other hand, a squirrel is in reality nothing more than a collection of atoms which humans have subjectively assigned (read: by the act of thinking about them) a nature and tendencies; so squirrellness is a socially shared perception (a social construct), not an objective reality. What imbues squirrellness on the material collection of particles which makes up the things we call squirrels is merely human thinking and social pattern-making.

If objects possess real intrinsic structures as essentialists suspect, then they will naturally exhibit dispositions and capacities aligned with those structures. A rock, for instance, has the capacity and tendency toward hardness; a tree has the real potential and inclination to grow and produce seeds; and humans have the objective disposition towards rational thought and deliberate action. These capacities and directedness of objects will represent something objective and fundamental about what its natural orientation is, and what makes it a healthy, good, or bad instance of the members of its class. Because these normative rules are based on objective features and dispositions of the nature of a thing, they stand athwart deconstructive approaches which would rightly deconstruct, for example, the somewhat arbitrary British table etiquette of the 18th century. For a more detailed explanation of this on a philosophical level, please see my article on Aristotelian Ethics and Metaphysics.

The Existentialist

The existentialist takes a deconstructivist approach. Deconstructivism means taking a skeptical stance towards all purported structures in society, such as gender roles, assumptions about “how things should be”, or authority in general. Naturally, they are not always wrong as many assumptions and structures in society are little more than human creations and deserve a good questioning every once in a while. But the existentialist goes as far as to deny the idea of objective natures which attribute specific characteristics or intrinsic purposes to people or animals or anything natural.

After all, Jean-Paul Sartre did not claim in his book Existentialism Is a Humanism that “existence precedes essence” for no reason, but in this statement virtually articulates the motto of the nominalist. The world does not have identity or meaning until we assign it. Don't get me wrong: it's not that existentialists claim that the way things appear to us and behave in the world are without specific characteristics or regularities. Rather, the idea is that it is all, apart from human thinking, an objectively meaningless assembly of matter which human societies actively construct by giving names and mental definitions to. In the end, trees, for example, are a blind accident of the evolutionary process and have no intrinsic identity or meaning, it is humans who create the abstract idea of a class of trees and assign every tree a membership in this class.1

In the human social domain, this has implications. The idea that there are, apart from social interpretation, objective differences between, for example, men and women, is rejected. Or that it is an intrinsic directedness of human sexuality that males seek females as sexual partners and vice versa.

Rooted in a nominalist foundation and driven by the uniquely existentialist imperative of radical freedom, the existentialist seeks to "transcend"2 the illusion of an objective nature by rejecting it and replacing it with subjective meaning. Accordingly, existentialist thought repudiates any teleological language that implies we possess an objective nature or structure oriented toward specific ends—since such ends would constrain the self-definition required by radical freedom.

Thus thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir avoid using words like "human nature" and instead describe it as "the human condition" - or the "facticity of the human condition" in order to avoid the idea of a teleological nature.

The existentialist makes use of the technocratic paradigm of thought, which deploys the facticity (the raw, denatured and utterly neutral “stuff”) of the world as a tool to support personal transcendence over nature via the ego. For example, women today often make use of the means of modern science (birth control, abortion) and the individualistic bureaucratic state (welfare) to “transcend” their natural orientation towards child bearing, motherhood, and a monogamous relationship with a male to pursue what they prefer to do with their lives rather than what nature forces upon them.

Men do the same in “transcending” their rational orientation towards responsibility and fatherhood by engaging in sex with many willing (or unwilling) partners by the use of birth control or condoms - again denaturing and “neutralising” the human frame and intervening in its purportedly meaningless facticity in order to serve the ends of the ego.

From these underlying assumptions, it follows with perfect clarity that such projects as breaking with ideas such as marriage, heterosexuality, traditional family roles, and embracing transgenderism, homosexuality, abortion and others can have no moral stricture on them except merely the power of social constructs. All religious and moral structures in society don't derive, more or less accurately, from something fundamentally real, namely human nature and its perfection, but represent rather the forces of power and oppression in society which thwart the authenticity of the individual to transcend their natural condition and be really free.

The Voluntarist

Yet far from representing a complete opposition to this, the voluntarist impulse (the far right one, if you remember) represents merely a different side of the same technocratic coin. For the voluntarist also rejects the idea that humans have a truly objective directedness which constitutes the ends of their bodies and souls, but sees the facticity of the human condition, instead of a hindrance, as a tool in the service of the individual or collective will to power.

With the rejection of a human nature and soul ordered towards rational ends, the voluntarist also departs from the idea of truth and replaces it with an ersatz concept. They conclude, perhaps even more honestly and consistently than the existentialist, that the assumption that humans lack any objective orientation towards physical or even rational ends ultimately dismantles and washes away all pretenses of moral and objective principles.

As Nietzche wrote in The Gay Science:

We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for "truth": we "know" (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "utility" is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day.3

The rejection of truth and morality gives rise to the need for a project to replace moral truth with something within the realm of human ego. For this, the Nietzschean will to power offers itself as an eager candidate, either on an individual level, or a societal level with an appeal to the authority of the “Volk”.

The voluntarist, just as well as the essentialist, as a result of their denial of objective morality and meaning, sees the world as fundamentally a power struggle, yet instead of utterly rejecting the biological facticity of our nature and using the technology of modern science and modern bureaucratic states to overcome the vagaries of the “human condition”, they seek to strengthen these and use them to aid their will to power, in which the dominance of the individual or of the Volk becomes the expression of pure power.

Here arises the deceiving impression that voluntarists may be essentialists who respect the ordered ends of nature. But in reality their approach towards nature is not one of respect but of utility towards aiding the individual ego or of “the folk” or “common blood” in achieving its ends. While the voluntarist praises the the physio-biological order because of the raw physical power of the masculine form and the pleasure that sexuality offers, his denial of justice as a truly real objective concept can offer him no reason why he should not use these to enrich himself at the expense of women via rape and seduction. Nor would he thereby hesitate to use contraceptives to thwart the natural end of the sexual act, as these would bind him to the responsibility of fatherhood - unless of course offspring would increase his power or pleasure.

To visualise here the collectivist branch of the voluntaristic tendency, Adolf Hitler offers numerous excellent examples. Erich Fromm cites Hitler in his book Escape from Freedom, illustrating his typical emphasis on domination through physical mastery: “A state which in the epoch of race poisoning dedicates itself to the cherishing of its best racial elements, must some day be master of the world.”4

Fromm continues:

Usually Hitler tries to rationalize and justify his wish for power. The main justifications are the following: his domination of other peoples is for their own good and for the good of the culture of the world; the wish for power is rooted in the eternal laws of nature and he recognizes and follows only these laws; he himself acts under the command of a higher power--God, Fate, History, Nature; his attempts for domination are only a defence against the attempts of others to dominate him and the German people.5

Here one notices that Hitler’s expression of his will to power makes use of a mythical self-objectivization in the form of a “law of nature” that one excellent race will dominate others. It should be mentioned that this fully inverts the very meaning of the idea of “law” making a moral imperative out of a tendency in a way contrary to natural law- as if the fact that it is a “law” that the human condition often leads to aging and death should imply that we should all attempt to rush the process and go ahead and kill ourselves.

The Same Root

While the existentialist sees the “facticity” of nature as oppressing the weak and seeks to set up a means to prevent it, the voluntarist seeks rather to divinise the “law” of the survival of the fittest. The existentialist refuses to recognise the inherent structure of his nature and what it makes clear about what he is made for, seeking every way possible to transcend it for the sake of personal pleasure. But the voluntarist, sharing the same rejection of nature nevertheless shows a, as Fromm insightfully observed, masochistic / sadistic identification with the lower biological “facticity” of human nature as well as the primitive technology of myth-making to gain a sense power over one’s situation and over others, categorically rejecting that his soul is made for anything like truth, justice, or virtue.

Both philosophies revile the other to such a degree that they fail to see how much they share in common. Both trees share the same nominalist root. As Alistair MacIntyre points out in his excellent book After Virtue, this is the reason that much moral debate and disagreement today has become deeply emotive, representing protest and shaming rather than objective argument. Though the existentialist has made use of highly sophisticated post-enlightenment moral systems of thought such as utilitarianism, rights, or deontology (Kant), and the voluntarist makes use of myth and pride, neither side can offer an explicit and objective foundation to prefer their side of the nominalist divide over the other. Thus in order to steer the moral debate, instead of arguments, attempts to emotively influence via tabus, protests, shut down, and propagandize are deployed by actors with influence.

The Essentialist

The Essentialist repudiates the nominalist denial of nature. In his view, both philosophies (existentialist, nominalist) locate themselves in a world in which human life has no objective or intrinsic orderedness. Both see the human soul as not intrinsically directed to a higher standard, either because it has no ability to recognise it or because such a standard does not and cannot exist. Both reject the idea of a world with an intrinsic disposition towards being animated and joined together by love and justice.

The Aristotelian’s response to the voluntarist is “yes, nature does represent a ‘law’, but not the way you imagine it, and we are obligated first to those closest to us, but true justice requires us to treat with respect even those who don’t belong to us”. The Aristotelian response to the existentialist is “yes, we are rational and capable of transcending facticity, but the full expression of rationality is to embrace and respect the natural perfections of the world instead of thwarting them for personal pleasure or avoiding pain.”

The reason both of these two elements which I have presented cannot recognize the possibility of a middle ground between them is because they have unconsciously internalized the philosophy of nominalistic thought, which rejects the idea of a truly and essentially, ordered nature.