Pathologies of the Will
In an as-yet unpublished paper ‘Addictive consumerism and the roots of ecological ungovernability’ I have written of contemporary civilisation as insane – as suffering from “a pervasive syndrome of interlocking pathologies of the will”. Both there and in my most recent book Lifeworld I have suggested how that insanity manifests itself not just in our apparently helpless trashing of the living world, but in the kind of individual and collective living in pursuit of which we are doing that damage:
“the achingly unfulfilling work suffered by so many, the obscene disparities in wealth and status, the associated hectic celebration of crass vulgarity, the appalling clutter of needless stuff, the ugly mass-produced artefacts everywhere, the vacantly passive entertainment, the frantic mobility, the muddled sexuality, the distracted twittering of ‘social media’, and perhaps above all the blighted childhood and adolescence of young people presented with this state of affairs as normal” (Lifeworld, p.3).
I stand by this characterisation – which does not, of course, say everything there is to be said about late modernity (it evidently omits various partially countervailing positives, such as improved health, greater material comfort and so on, though none of them is without its attendant drawbacks). But it presents, however warrantably, a rather headlong catalogue of dismay. I want to show here how its various elements can be organised under defensible broad headings, and (more fundamentally) how each of those categories is indeed constituted as such by a shared pathology. Each, I shall argue, involves trying to deploy the human will ultra vires – that is, in ways which employ it beyond and in defiance of its proper scope, and which consequently reinforce a general condition fairly describable as derangement.
Modes of derangement
As to the heads to be identified for purposes of analysis, I suggest that I have brought together above three distinct, though obviously interconnected, modes in which vital human relations have become crucially dislocated. These are our material relations, our relations to value and meaning, and our relations to the wider life in which we are embedded. I shall offer a brief elaboration of the above concerns under each of these heads in turn.
By our material relations I do not just mean what Marx meant, that is the relations of production (still overwhelmingly configured by capitalism) which shape the nature and possibilities of human labour. That labour, though for the most part – at least in the West and North of the world – no longer consisting in the sweated exploitation of the industrial proletariat, remains for vast numbers “achingly unfulfilling” in its enslavement to sleeker modern forms of mechanisation and their continuing reduction of the worker to an alienated fraction of his or her whole self. But the motor of this process is no longer, as in Marx’s day, principally the capitalists’ profit motive, but resides very powerfully in the relations of consumption which now prevail. These relations express themselves most evidently in the relentless accumulation, by majorities in the ‘advanced’ societies of the West and North together with their now widespread imitators elsewhere, of material goods far beyond what is objectively needed for a flourishing human life, and indeed in quantities actively detrimental to such flourishing. Conducted in essentially the same spirit is the frenzied modern pursuit of mechanised mobility, to a large extent for its own sake, and the daily absorption of a majority of the population in the turbid passivity overwhelmingly offered as mass-mediated entertainment. These forms of consumerist relationship to the broadly material dimension of existence – the dimension, we might say, of what can be ‘consumed’ – exhibit as their common characteristic a pattern of addictivity which we must explore further below. This maintains a self-reinforcing dynamic connection with the restless quest for market advantage driving capitalist production, and thereby powers the resource demands on a limited planet which are driving environmental crisis .
Perhaps most clearly indicative of our deranged contemporary relations to value and meaning is the shrillness with which minority preferences regarding sexual- and gender-related matters are now proclaimed to be inalienable human rights, and on the other hand ‘traditional’ values in these and other matters are proclaimed as unchallengeable absolutes, as part of the ‘culture warfare’ into which what sociologists like Anthony Giddens used to call ‘life politics’ has descended. These claims, wilfully insisted on to compensate for the strained fragility tacitly recognised even by their proponents, are rapidly amplified into characteristically hysterical form by the electronic media of communication which now serve as an apparently inescapable echo chamber. But essentially connected with such hysteria, indeed enabling and encouraging it, is the way in which long-established value-framings have lost purchase, so that, for instance, the flaunting of indecently excessive wealth is not just tolerated but met with adulation, while a glance at any brutal megalopolitan skyline of steel and glass suggests that the instinctive aesthetic sense for scale and grace has largely deserted modern humanity.
Our exploitative and destructive relations with the living world, on the viability of which we wholly depend, really need no elaboration, having now been exposed irrefutably by the accelerating climate and ecological emergency – though different aspects of these relations have been a longstanding admonitory concern within the broadly environmental tradition. But it is not of course just non-human life which we are thus blindly and casually impoverishing. The growing sense among the rising generation that they are being left a blighted and decreasingly habitable world, one into which more and more of them are hesitant about bringing children of their own, represents a very grievous impairment of that vitally hopeful intergenerationality in which so much of human flourishing consists. At this level, unrelenting anthropogenic damage to the biosphere can appear to express the same kind of radically disturbed and dislocated human existence as is manifest in the two other areas just examined.
This last claim might be challenged by someone nervous of its evident corollary: that we cannot hope to tackle the climate and ecological emergency with even partial success, without also addressing the even more fundamental derangement of which it is here asserted to be a symptom. In face of this seriously daunting prospect, it might be optimistically argued that our relations to the material world and to the domain of value, while no doubt giving cause for concern, do so independently of our attitudes to living nature and the biosphere, which latter might then still be beneficially adjusted without our having to confront any across-the-board implications. But I want to counter that challenge by showing that all these modes of disturbance have a common source in the attempted deployment of the will ultra vires, and that this accounts for their closely-connected and syndrome-like pathological configuration. (What would follow would then be to remain undaunted by this state of affairs, while properly conditioning for it in trying to deal with the emergency.)
The will and its powers
Traditionally the human will was supposed to be a faculty of the soul from which arose acts of volition causing choices, decisions and bodily movements impinging on the physical environment. This ‘para-mechanical’ picture, an application of the Cartesian ‘ghost-in-the-machine’ model of mind and body, was decisively dispatched by Gilbert Ryle’s blunt demonstration that such acts of volition are never subjectively experienced, could never be empirically identified in any other way, and thus could never supply a respectably causal explanation of voluntary behaviour – on the sole basis of our ordinary ability to identify which they were indeed postulated in the first place (see The Concept of Mind, chapter III). Divested of such awkward theoretical baggage, however, the idea of the will remains indispensable to capture what is engaged when a whole person, mental and bodily capacities collaborating, addresses him- or herself with more or less determination to intentional action. The human will, we might say, is the human self brought to bear in such action. The question which then arises for us here, is what it could be for that process to have proper powers, such that we might find ourselves drawn into trying to exceed their scope in our dealings with the material world, value and life.
A fairly straightforward example of the will being deployed beyond its powers, from which we might begin our consideration of this question, is the case where our generally harmless tendency to wishful thinking – that is, to imagining things to be in some or other respect how we should prefer them to be, rather than how we suspect or know that they actually are – is indulged to the point of forsaking reality in favour of various kinds of self-gratifying or self-protective fantasy. We could call this the ‘Dorrit case’, after the character in Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit whose portrayal demonstrates it to be such an insidiously frightening human possibility. William Dorrit is one of Dickens’ most poignant and at the same time most terrible creations. Feckless long-term inmate of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison (the novel is set in the early nineteenth century when imprisonment for debt was still in force), he nevertheless succeeds in creating for himself a persona of gentlemanly dignity as the respected elder of a kind of collegiate institution (the “Father of the Marshalsea”), a persona which he succeeds in imposing not just on his fellow prisoners and the turnkeys but also on a succession of visitors, from whom it nevertheless doesn’t prevent his cadging small gratuities while managing to hide almost completely from himself that this is what he is doing. To this threadbare but self-cherishing image he sacrifices all exercise of proper fatherhood toward his three children and all recognition of any world of work and obligation beyond the prison gates. We are shown, in a masterly extended narrative of his interactions with a wide range of complementary and contrasting characters, how this initially defensive fantasy of status becomes such second nature that he cannot escape it even when he comes into a fortune and leaves his physical prison. As fantasy, his own self-immersion in it, and his ability to persuade many of those around him to go along with it, both certainly evidence force of will – but it is a will plainly perverted, one which flinches from dealing with the recognised world into allowing recognition only of a world with which its bearer feels comfortable dealing. This perversion, at first painfully comic in its grotesqueness, is progressively revealed through the course of the novel to be essentially monstrous and destructive.
The point for present purposes is that unless the will is guided by how things actually are, like it or not, we are liable to come in this kind of way to grief. And humans, as the only creatures we know of who are actively conscious of representing the world to themselves, are always in danger of coming thus to grief if they allow how they represent it to themselves to turn onwhether they do like it or not. The proper scope of the will in relation to the world, that is, is to initiate intervention, but not to substitute for that intervention – it has no magic powers to bend what we find into conformity with our desires or intentions by mere fiat. In order to be able to have real choices about how to act, we have no choice but to start from the world as we encounter it, not as we would like to encounter it, and the will is being abused, pushed beyond its powers, if we deploy it to disguise from ourselves that founding absence of choice.
But if we recognise any such deployment as a paradigm of the will’s misuse, we must also recognise that the need to acknowledge the facts if we are to engage with reality is not the only way in which we are confronted with fundamental absence of choice.
For consider the nature of value. Suppose my culture embodies some particular value, say honesty, in the form of common imperatives or rules of conduct such as ‘Don’t steal’ and ‘Tell the truth’. If I just blindly obey these rules because they are ‘The Rules’, without in any sense internalising them or taking them to heart, I cannot properly be said to value honesty. But then, nor can I if I consciously and deliberately choose to obey the rules, on any of a range of grounds from respect for their established acceptance to distaste for the consequences of breaking them. For to obey a rule is to adopt it as guiding my relevant action, and to do that is to bring not just my present but my future conduct under it. But if this self-enrolment under its banner stands only on my present choice, there would be no saying whether my acting differently on the next occasion was a case of my disobeying the rule which I had adopted, or of my simply choosing to obey a different one – and thus, there could be no genuine rule in place. Something like this recognition was the basis for Kant’s profound, but also profoundly paradoxical, concept of morality as underpinned by a single or basic law which I not only do but rationally must lay down to myself in all cases. The essential difficulty arises, however, not just for moral values but for values of any kind – aesthetic, for instance, or even prudential. Rules like ‘Admire clarity of expression’ or ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ present us at bottom with the same issues: to follow them blindly is not to have grasped their purport, while to adopt them by deliberate free choice is (as we might now put it) not reliably to have submitted one’s will to their guidance.
Thus for value to be real, it cannot be dictated to us, but nor, it seems, can we have any ordinary choice about deferring to it. This lack of choice is not straightforwardly like that which confronts us in the case of brute (‘objective’) facts, but it is such as to make seriously problematic the idea that value is ultimately a ‘subjective’ matter. Our values, taken seriously across the full range of our practical lives, are there to guide our choices; they cannot themselves, it therefore seems, be ultimately matters of choice, any more than following my nose can substitute, as guidance, for finding a signpost. But nor can their relation to our action be compulsive – a signpost precisely guides me on my way, rather than impelling me, and for it to do that I have to take it as a guide, which seems on the face of it a choice. Here is a conundrum in which our representation of the will and its powers is deeply implicated.
‘Having a choice’
Confronting this conundrum requires us to probe more deeply the idea of choice, and in particular the relation between the self and its acts of will as they are involved in choice.
There are choices in which this relation is what we might call executive. Recognising how things are in the world, and desiring them to be in some respect otherwise, I deploy my will in action intended to bring about the appropriate change. This can be as simple and mundane a business as my having bought the lunchtime sandwich, or as comparatively complex as my having completed some extended task like filling in a job application. The point of saying that the will is deployed in such processes executively, is to indicate that the paradigm of self-world relation here is control: in bringing things into at any rate greater conformity with my desires than they were before, I remain unchanged in respect of having those desires. My choice reshapes the world, not myself; and this is what it essentially is for the self to have, that is, to be in possession of, a choice – an option or options on world-altering action.
But there are also choices where, in reshaping the world, the self too is reshaped, actually or potentially – in which it is, at least, at stake, so that the paradigm of control by an unchanging bearer of will is inappropriate to the actions in which these choices issue. Consider for an obvious instance the choice to develop any kind of serious relationship with another person, to have done which is not just to have changed my status vis-à-vis that person, but in an important sense to have hazarded who I am, to have embarked the sense of myself which I can make in an open-ended process of transformation. Again, to commit myself to some intellectual or practical project – say, to the writing of a book – is such a choice: for unless one has as it were invested one’s identity, one’s self as it figures to oneself, in a project of that nature, one is not really serious about it. In cases of these kinds, of which human life supplies many other examples, we might call the will’s relation to the self in respect of its choices formative, rather than executive. And correspondingly, I confront such cases as situations where it is at least misleading to say that Ihave a choice or choices; indeed, it would be less so to say that Iam the choice in which I must invent myself forward.
This idea, it should be noted, applies more widely the insight of the American philosopher Laurie Paul, who points to the transformative nature of various life-changing commitments, such as that to bearing a child – choices through experiencing the upshot of which one’s core personal preferences may be significantly recast, making it rationally unpredictable ex ante how, post-change, one would evaluate the contemplated act. (See her book Transformative Experience.) The point is that there are actually a very wide range of choices – acts of will – which, while not necessarily transformative in this decision-theoretical sense, are nevertheless recognisably identity-involving. And it should be clear enough that the way we will value into effect is formative in this sense. Values can seem to be a curious kind of entity – at any rate until we think about language, which has essentially the same mode of existence. Their presence can be pointed to in codes of conduct variously inscribed (from tablets of stone to newspaper advice columns), norms of behaviour variously embodied in the institutions and practices of a group or society, and habits of expectation enculturated into individual members of such collectives. (In all these forms, it may be noted, we have no more choice about the value-systems which we inherit or in which we are brought up than we do about the word-meanings in terms of which we are inducted into language, and which are inscribed in dictionaries and embodied in communicative practice.) But in none of these manifestations are values really there, in effectual being, until they are taken up as guidance by some individual will – just as words actively mean, and language is there, only in individual acts of meaning things with words. (Honesty, to stick to that example, cannot be said to exist as a value for someone who does nothing at all which could be represented as trying to act honestly, however prominently he or she has the Eighth Commandment on display.)
Of course, to say that value only exists in the acts which it guides is to offer what is formally a paradox – to be able to guide, must it not already exist? But here we must appeal to the essentially creative nature of our realisation of value. I realise some given formulated code or embodied standard expectation as an operative norm by investing my will – myself as ongoing concern – in taking it normatively. That is why, as providing a rule for both present and future action, it is not revisable simply ‘at will’, in the executive sense; rather, its guiding force is bound up formatively with my identity, which is not at my (at whose?) disposal to revise, but rather grows and changes through developments of just the kind which this ongoing engagement in normativity represents. Something only becomes a real value for me, whether aesthetic, prudential or moral, insofar as I establish who I am through my commitment to living it out in this way – to becoming ‘this kind of person’. This is the sense in which the rule of conduct which any genuine value prescribes is not something, such as a merely legal rule, for instance, which binds my action, insofar as it does, as it were from outside (or as Kant would put it, heteronomously). I do not ‘give myself a rule’ here, so much as constitute myself as ruled in my active constitution of a prompting as normatively guiding.
At the bottom of this inner dynamic lies the reflexive nature of human consciousness, the way in which we have evolved the capacity to be aware not just of our surroundings and of our interactivity with them, as are other animal subjects of consciousness, but also of that awareness itself and of the self as its subject. For in such consciousness I am a twofold self to myself, both as the unique individual centre or focus of this sensation and this impulsion, and (reflexively) as an ongoing being presented with these kinds of phenomena. (This latter is the consciousness which Feuerbach, and after him Marx, developing what they took to be an Hegelian theme, designated as awareness of our speciesnature.) Just as in reflexive awareness I do not merely react to the deliveries of the senses but must characterise them to myself as changing impingements and so take them as externally driven (thus objectivising the empirical world), so I do not just undergo motivating impulsions of various kinds, but must characterise them, and place myself vis-à-vis them, as imperatives addressed to my will, at the same stroke of consciousness taking responsibility for acting on them. Some such imperatives are simply that, as when the experience of hunger says ‘Eat!’, but very many of them are self-presented as normative in structure: ‘In a situation of this kind, act in such and such a way’. As Hare’s ‘universal prescriptivist’ account of what is involved here explains, that is for my prospective action to come with an ought attached – and my acting becomes my incorporating obedience to that rule into my overall consciousness of being a self. Thus I am ongoingly realising myself individually in prompted action on the clue of my species being or nature, with my engagements in value being key moments in this creative living process.
What this means is that, although values do not have the status over against the will of mere brute facts, our creative self-investment in realising publicly-registered codes and standards as normatively effectual is wholly misrepresented if conceived of as our ‘having a choice’, in the executive sense, when engaged with any evaluative concern which we take seriously. I neither choose the value-codes which I inherit, nor does my self-embarkation in realising them as living guidance properly constitute ‘choice’ exercised by a detached continuing self.
But now it is perhaps clearer how in general the pathologies of the will characteristic of late modernity arise and are to be diagnosed. For the signature emphasis of modernity, throughout its three-centuries’ trajectory, has been increasingly on autonomy – the independent individual choosing freely for him- or herself and in rational control of those choices, in ever-widening dimensions of life. Paul well expresses what she calls this “cultural notion prevalent in wealthy Western societies”:
“As an authentic rational agent you are expected to take charge of your own destiny. You chart your future, deliberating and reflecting on who you really are and what you really want from life, and, once you’ve determined your preferences, you determine the right course and act accordingly…In this way you experience yourself as a located, conscious self with control over who you are and how you evolve.” (Transformative Experience, pp.105-6)
This mode of engagement evidently involves the executive will, the will as executing the choices which as autonomous individuals we are supposed to have. But modernity has more and more stridently insisted that the individual has a choice, or at least a right to a choice, about everything – and this has been to demand ever-extending scope for the will conceived of as the exponent of aspiring control. Executive will must thus be considered capable of being brought to bear not just in working the evermore pervasive machinery, where such a mode of control makes obvious sense, nor just in democratic-political contexts where some version of it may be (or may once have been) defensible, but across the board – in matters of value, of life-meaning and of life-relations generally. In these vital areas, as culturally-borne recognition of the formative creativity actually involved has correspondingly faded, the executive will has come to be exclusively deployed where it cannot actually serve – that is, where it is being exercised beyond or in defiance of its proper scope in contexts actually calling for formative engagement. Compensatory insistence on its executive deployment has then followed on tacit recognition of the patent inadequacy of such deployment in such contexts, in a pattern of self-reinforcing hysterical intensification for which ultimately only the diagnosis of insanity seems apt.
To tracing this pattern in each of our three broad areas of analysis I turn in the second part of this essay. We have been focussing on the phenomenology of value in developing the foregoing account, so let us continue by taking that area first. Here pathology of the will manifests itself most plainly, as I have already suggested, in the clashes between militantly-asserted value-commitments whether ‘progressive’ or ‘traditional’, which have come to labelled the ‘culture wars’.
Value-hysteria and culture warfare
The characteristic sign of such misplaced militancy is the perversion of language typically involved, in particular (on the ‘progressive’ side) the regular misuse of the terms hate and phobia. An instance of this which appeared in The Guardian (where else?) a few years ago (25th May 2022) was so usefully revealing that I have kept it on file. The columnist, a homosexual woman with a young son, reported receiving a local election leaflet including the statement that “natural marriage between a man and a woman is the fundamental building block for a successful society and the safest environment for raising children” – a claim which she did not merely contest, as you might expect, but classified without the faintest pretence at an argument as “hate speech”. This is just the same knee-jerk intensification as enables any mildly-expressed distaste for lifestyle X to be dismissed out of hand as X-ophobia, that is, as founded in (deep, unadmitted, unreasoning) fear of X. In fact, of course, genuine hatred of homosexuality – an emotion of which there are indeed examples both historical and contemporary – sounds very different from that leaflet; nor need one fear homosexuals at any level to believe that their relationships, while now very properly neither legally nor socially penalised, nevertheless cannot while we remain mammals embody a humanly central way of living. But what can be seen in miniature here is a process now very widespread. People such as this journalist are tacitly aware that there is no basis for many of the value judgements which they would like to assert – here, implicitly, the judgement that homosexual relations form a perfectly good basis for family life – except their own identification with a particular group or lifestyle; but they are also haunted by the consciousness that genuine value cannot stand on such a ground, because its realisation through creative inheritance of community-sanctioned standards lies beyond the scope of the executive will which chooses to celebrate a non-standard lifestyle out of the ‘autonomous’ self’s self-cherished identity. So instead the relevant preferences are asserted as laying claim to a kind of respect which could only stem from a generally-endorsed value of tolerance, while consciousness of them as too insecurely based for substantive value makes it impossible for expressions of hesitation regarding them to be tolerated. This position is evidently quite unstable, since any respect due to (for example) homosexuals experimenting with ways of including their practices and relationships in a good human life must also be due to those who deny, respectfully, that such things can provide a generally sound basis for such a life: the arguable nature of what makes for the good life, in other words, is inherent in the concept of toleration. Experiments in living, as Mill called them, must like any other experiment be inherently and indefeasibly capable of being deemed failures as well as successes, and simply demonising such assessments out of hand when they happen not to be yours excludes you from claiming toleration’s benefits. It is suppressed recognition of the instability of this stance which very characteristically emerges in the compensatory hysterical assertiveness.
This is not, of course, an affliction only of the enlightened – defensive self-assertion by various divergent minorities is far from the only source of such hysteria. It is at least matched in this regard by the edifices of bigotry which right-wing populism has erected with gutter-journalistic support on a crazily ramifying structure of factoids. This is the process which gave Britain the reality-denying extravaganza of Brexit and which in the United States licenses the systematic mendacity of a Trump. The aetiology is slightly different, in that what get asserted in these quarters are ‘traditional values’ rather than configurations of preference for novel or non-standard lifestyles, but the assertiveness itself is just as unstable. Not even the long-cherished values of an established historic community can survive being embraced defensively, just because parts of that community feel threatened (whether by immigrant numbers, urban cosmopolitanism, economic marginalisation or whatever), any more than toleration can properly be demanded with menaces by a militant minority. Genuine value, the authority of which must in its dependence on the formative will be in its own way as ‘unchosen’ as that of truth, simply cannot consort with the wilful grinding of any kind of axe. Because this is also tacitly recognised, the demand to respect traditional values just because they are traditional is felt to be hollow even as it is made, and must therefore be bolstered not just by demonisation of the unpersuaded as ‘woke’ or treacherous, but by appeal to all the ‘alternative-factual’ scenarios which the internet and social media make so readily available, in a constantly intensifying dynamic of dangerous fantasy. So hysteria confronts hysteria and its contrasting constructions clash in ‘culture wars’ which are actually a form of street-fighting amid the ruins of a genuinely humane culture – the collapse of which entails loss of any intuitive sense of the way in which what matters is collaboratively established, for all of us, by the creative-exploratory inheritance of common standards.
Consumerism: life-meaning and addiction
Essentially the same analysis can be brought to bear in demonstrating how contemporary addictive consumerism has roots which lie in the widespread failure of genuine life-meaningfulness characteristic of modernity.
Human beings need guiding purpose in life as they need air to breathe – not just the ad hoc tasks and goals with which each day presents them, but a pattern of settled purpose organised by the pursuit of what is felt deeply to carry lasting significance. Such purposes people cannot simply choose for themselves, for the same reason that values merely chosen would carry no more authority than could be countermanded and redirected at the next choice point. (Merely chosen purposes would no more offer guidance, which is their whole point, than a compass which always swivelled to point in the direction you had already decided was North.) But equally, purpose of this order cannot be given to the individual from some authoritative external source of divine or human injunction, nor by any conventions of society – for a requirement externally imposed in any of these ways cannot become a life-purpose unless endorsed by the individual’s own thrust of life-energy. Nor can life-purpose be understood as given merely causally, by the circumstances of one’s upbringing, one’s psychology or any other form of involuntary habituation. When Luther famously said “Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders”, he did not mean: I can’t help it, this position is just where I, as an agent with a particular history and psychology, find that I am coming from, and so assert. Rather, he meant something like: standing on and asserting this ground is who, in doing so, I both constitute and discover myself as having to be, which self therefore has no real ‘choice’ in the matter. The givenness of a life-purpose, that is, must be encountered as given in the way genuine value is given, as inner necessity created by radically formative will; the necessity which ich kann nicht expresses is that anyone acting otherwise could not be me.
But this kind of necessity has become both unavailable and indeed widely unfathomable in a modernity which, in crying up ‘autonomy’, emphasises so exclusively the will in executive mode, the will expressing control by making action something always open to choice by the formed identity – ‘I express my autonomous self by choosing where I stand’. Consequently the person born into this modernity and lacking any strong humane culture providing access to earlier phases (which now means, the increasingly large majority) finds him- or herself with a culturally-configured, but personally exigent, hole in the soul from which any robust form of life-meaning or purpose is missing. This hole is inherently unfillable, because any substitute filling, tacitly recognises as failing to meet the case even as it is grasped for, serves only to deepen it. (Only the human soul can contain so paradoxical a void, since only humans can pursue substitute satisfiers while simultaneously acknowledging them to be unsatisfactory.)
But so strong is the human need for life-meaning and purpose that substitute satisfiers, for all their recognised inadequacy, must nevertheless be unremittingly pursued – so that here the essential conditions for addiction are in place. Addictions to a range of substitute satisfiers have emerged in response. There are those to the television (sat in front of for 20% of the waking life of the average Briton), or to multiplying smartphone applications – both kinds purporting to enhance the self’s agency and control, while really offering little but helpless passivity. Various increasingly prevalent forms of food-related addiction, whether to over- or under-eating or to specialised diets, perhaps fall into the same category. Then there are substitutes for life-direction manifesting as addictions to work (where this has enough human content to support the appearance of providing significance), or as attachment to sterile –isms (Marxism, feminism…), which claim to provide a general explanatory shape for experience. But the addiction which most compellingly combines both these kinds of appeal, to pseudo-control as well as to pseudo-givenness, while also (and of course, quite un-coincidentally) having the full force of our current capitalist mode of economic organisation behind it, is the attempted pursuit of life-purpose and life-meaning through the acquiring of commodities. To quote myself here for the sake of economy:
“the role of…substitute satisfiers is…so very readily taken by commodities, because the capitalist dynamic supplies such an easy replacement for purposiveness in the form of competitive acquisition. Capitalism, familiarly, tends to commodify and marketise everything it can – to turn not just bodily necessities and material goods but a whole gamut of other desirables, from entertainment and adventure through education and health all the way to beauty and virtue, into items available for sale and purchase. That transmutation, equally familiarly, interacts with ordinary human psychology to turn acquisition of these various commodified entities into sources of excitement (or at least, of boredom alleviation), modes of self-assertion and vehicles of status-display. But what is fundamentally addictive about the relation of the majority population to this process is the way the restless churning of commodities, endemic to capitalism’s central competitive drive, supplies such a powerful form of substitute life-direction. The logic of capitalist production, distribution and exchange dictates a constant quest for novelty and ‘improvement’ in the relentless pursuit of market advantage; and keeping up, or attempting to keep up, or even just aspiring to keep up with this dynamic provides people who ‘find their soul in commodities’, as Marcuse put it [in One-Dimensional Man, 1964] – in iPhones, cars, flat-screen televisions and holiday flight-packages, to update his examples – with a permanently available source both of apparent autonomy and of apparent point in their lives.” (Lifeworld, pp.267-8)
And it is in the very nature of addictivity that the permanent failure of such consumption to do more than placate temporarily the profound craving for significance which these exercises of executive will inherently cannot meet, recursively intensifies the incentive to continue pursuing consumption – the role of chemical-somatic dependency in ordinary substance-addiction being here taken by the instinctive ramping up of psychological sunk costs.
Hence, when we recognise (as clearly we should) that the role played by global capitalism’s resource-extraction and energy-dependence in bringing on the climate emergency and rendering it so intractable must be urgently addressed, and when we point to those with vested interests in defending that system, even while catastrophe looms, as needing somehow to be restrained , we need to acknowledge that the most powerfully vested interest in the continued operation of this engine of planetary destruction is now that of the ordinary consuming majority in preserving the kind of civilisation which ours has become – because that represents the overmastering interest of the addict in maintaining continuity of supply. And that is a compulsion the grip of which is not weakened, here anymore than in other forms of addiction, merely by knowing that continued dependence will sooner or later have lethal consequences.
Nature and pathological will
We can now situate the insanity of a destructively exploitative stance towards the rest of the natural world within the conceptual framework which this essay has articulated. It takes its place alongside our dealings with value and with life-meaning, as a manifestation of modernity’s pathological insistence on pushing the executive, would-be controlling will beyond its powers of engagement. The watchword here is provided by a simple but compelling remark which the biologist and pioneer ecologist Rachel Carson made in an interview recorded at the end of her life, as reported in Paul Brooks’ The House of Life (p.319): “We have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself”. By precisely the same token, our careless exploitation of nature and the damage which we do to its systems constitute abuse and damage inflicted on ourselves, and our attempt to stand apart from nature in controlling mode is a disruption of our own integrity of being. That is as much as to say that our larger-scale dealings with the wider natural world involve, in terms of the key distinction which I have been drawing, the inherently formative deployment of human will: who we are, our collective identity as a particular species within that great web of interconnection, is always and inescapably embarked in them. Correspondingly, any approach in a spirit of merely executive willing, any approach to the natural world as a set of resources available for us to employ as we choose, is bound to mislead and betray us.
But just that spirit, of course, characterises the originally Baconian project of modernity, the attempt to harness nature to the triumphal car of human material ‘progress’ through the control over its working which Enlightenment science seemed increasingly to offer. And what follows mirrors the pattern of addictive intensification which we have now traced in other areas. There are, it is now authoritatively recognised, natural limits to how far we can treat the land, the oceans or the atmosphere as exploitable resources for the pursuit of human ends, before their pervasive interconnectedness starts to generate unforeseen consequences undermining and defeating that pursuit. (In rough justice at its most melodramatic, the holiday resorts in flying to which the majority population burns fossil fuel are incinerated by wildfires provoked by the climate changes resulting from fossil fuel use.) But when these limits do begin to bite, we do not take them as representing limits also to the sense we can make of ourselves on the resource-exploitative paradigm – as prompting, in formative mode, a revised and more respectful posture towards our surroundings. Rather, we very characteristically meet their consequences as incitements to further strivings of executive will – that is, as challenges to reapply the exploitative paradigm in would-be smarter ways, for instance through geoengineering or biotechnological ventures, to the pursuit of which without further unpredictably dangerous consequences (disruption of agriculturally vital weather patterns, say, or irreversible genetic effects), there are also natural limits. The more the human control model demonstrates its inevitable failure, the blinder those currently responsible for our destinies seem wilfully to make themselves to that inevitability. This trajectory plainly replicates on a larger scale the addictive consumption, so ironically autonomy-cherishing, which both expresses and drives the model. This is the condition which the sociologist Ingolfur Blühdorn has sought to capture as the signature of late modernity (though without, in my view, fully recognising its crucial dimension of insanity) in his concepts of sustained unsustainability and ecological ungovernability. (See his forthcoming book Beyond the Green Transformation.)
Conclusion
We have seen that the climate and ecological emergency is indeed driven in its broad dynamics by the same deep-seated pathology of the will as characterises modernity in other centrally vital areas of human experience. There is therefore no escaping the difficult recognition which I started out to defend: that any hopeful grappling with the emergency must grapple also, and (very demandingly) at the same time, with the conditions of this pervasive pathology. And that recognition is so difficult, because doing this will surely call not just for political, still less for merely technical adjustments, but for a radical recasting both of our self-understanding and of our practical commitments.
I have at least begun to explore what that might involve in my recent book Lifeworld. As regards the sense which we make of human being, I there propose what I call ‘deep naturalism’, a fundamental levelling of ourselves with the rest of life, not by attempting (self-defeatingly) to include it within the human realm of morality, but by coming to see the world of nature available to our senses and intelligence as the human lifeworld, subtended by the reflexively-conscious activity of our species life-form as are those of other creatures by their various forms of embodiment. This view makes our understanding of the world finally answerable not to ‘objective-scientific’ reality but to the creative force of life. And for that changed perspective to play through effectively into the practicalities of governance, I argue that we now need to conceive of politics therapeutically, as a process directed above all to curing the culturally-embedded collective malady which has so long misrepresented us to ourselves as creatures apart – candidate planetary managers. As a corollary, it will be evident, there arises the question of how far our political ideals can continue to be fully democratic – for a culture of majority addiction cannot be expected to cure itself. These are extremely exigent issues, to which my responses both here and in the book represent very much a work in progress. Let others join in and enrich the discussion.