Christian anarchism and the Problem of Nihilism - part I
Providing anarchism with a moral basis for anti-authoritarian action
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The opposite of Christian anarchism possibly shouldn't be viewed as capitalism or even sin. Instead, we turn to a more pernicious enemy—nihilism, understood as a lack of values (which is a natural byproduct of a denial of meaning). This might come as a surprise to some and open betrayal to others: “here is an eccentric defense of anarchist capitalism wrapped up in perfectly reactionary packaging”, the would-be anarchist scholar might say. Sadly not—I’ve not made myself quite that easy a target to hit, I’m afraid. Instead, I am suggesting that nihilism - genuine nihilism - is a product of a capitalist, consumerist society and a failure to recognize this deeper need for resistance beyond simple economic means (although, that has also been abandoned in favour of liberal identity politics in the vast swathes of anarchist “thought”) has led to anarchists becoming something of a chimera: faux-revolutionary liberalism wrapped up in snappy clichés, imagined radicalism, and “jellyfish-ness”1.
Identifying the enemy
Before we explore why nihilism stands in dialectical opposition to Christian anarchism, we should establish the group of ideas which constitute nihilist thought. For anyone who has spent any real time exploring the development of nihilism, the most notable aspect will have been the eclectic and contradictory positions that we find under this particularly patchy umbrella term. Ranging from the denial of objective "value" (itself usually defined in an obscured way) to pessimistic scepticism2 to the outright denial of all possibility of morals and values, we find identifying a tangible enemy is particularly difficult. Instead, we'll start by identifying something that even the most "interesting" of would-be burgeoning minds—no doubt on their way to becoming Hegelians—would want to reject: the failure to appropriate meaningful values into their own lives. This means a recognition of some kind of value external to the self and making it internal through commitment and repetition. Obviously, the nihilist who rejects objective value will also deny this position in order to remain consistent, but breaking down the subject-object divide is key to undermining the confidence that people have placed in nihilist thought.
Firstly, we will identify the problem of the "nihilist self"; then, we will explore the role of Christian commitments in becoming a self; finally, we will explore nihilism as liberalism par excellence and offer a critique which goes beyond the acceptance of democratic levelling and proposes a postpolitical and anti-Enlightenment plan towards the Christian τέλος.
Nihilism as necessarily selfless
Nihilism leads to the individual failing to establish themselves as a "self". In this sense, nihilists are the perfect consumer, liberal subject, and performative radical—they simply lack the values that allow for i) individual self-actualisation, ii) relating to others in the actual, and iii) collective actuality. Of course, for Kierkegaard, nihilism couldn't be better expressed than in Hegelianism (“The immorality in this is surely clear to anyone, as also the propriety of what another author has said regarding the Hegelian system, that with Hegel we got a system, the absolute system – without having an ethics”3), so please excuse the repetitive and altogether unscholarly dismissal of the Hegelian ghost at the feast. This requires, however, for us to take a step back past Kierkegaard into the Enlightenment and also beyond him into postliberal theology. Call it a dialectic, a perfectly ironic set of sources that disagree with each other in just the right way for us to agree with both of them.
Immanuel Kant - the unlikely radical
Primarily, we move backwards to Kant—as is so often the case when trying to understand Kierkegaard in his most anti-Hegelian moments. To understand the Kierkegaardian self, we need to understand his contrast in relation to Kant: moving beyond a two-part understanding of the self qua ethical being and into the well-known and generally poorly understood "Platonic Realism"4 of the Kierkegaardian spheres. The grounds for this is in the Kantian distinction between the “knowing self” and the “moral agent”: objectivity vs subjectivity5.
What the nihilists - and in fact most anarchists - have failed to recognise is that morality plays an important role in the development of the self. Calling back to the Kantian sense of the free individual, the unknowability of the self requires us to “discover” ourselves via moral action. Das Ding-an-sich, or, rather, das Ding-in-mir is an alien concept to us prima facie and requires for us to become moral agents who carry out our duties in order to be able to reconcile the effective unknowability of the self through knowable action with a recognisable ideal.
How does one actually access this “knowable” action?
"Either I self-consciously strive to intend all my life-activities, and am becoming subjectively actual, or I do not, and am this not subjectively actual: I have ethical reality only as a possibility."6
This quote from Mehl on Kierkegaard’s challenge to practical philosophy is key: only through the self-conscious appropriation of the duties which fulfill my “life-activities” can I reasonably say that I am acting in a free, genuine way. I become a subject by acting on subjective desires, not in flitting from desire to desire and basically accomplishing nothing7. This requires the long-term commitment to certain goals which rise above the individual as a τέλος and drag the image of the self as is into alignment with the necessary unknowability of the future in relation to certain teleological goals - towards the imago Christi. While an extensive discussion of the differences between Kant and Kierkegaard would be fruitful, it would drag us too far away from our intended goal. The theme, in its modified form over the Kantian skeleton, is ever present in S. K.’s writing, especially Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Christian Discourses, and Works of Love. Let’s leave this section with this in mind: the absolute negative freedom of the most popular forms of anarchism is no freedom at all; in order to be truly free, we must have a recognisable sense of sense that is realised in both our actions and our intentions - a positive freedom8.
Anarchist duties…?
Already, the anarchist is presumably hearing alarm bells - duties! Could you imagine! Well, yes, in fact - I can imagine. The simple fact that anarchists recognise their role in resisting state oppression and resisting the state, promoting the right to well-being9, the duty to become an autonomous self, or any other particular example of sloganeering is evidence enough that they understand the role of duties in the formation of a life and praxis which can extend beyond the outer extremities of their cranial cavities. As we have established the grounds for an agreement on the concept of anarchist duties, we shall assume that establishing (at least) a minimal collection of virtuous duties is acceptable whilst staying within the outer bounds of anarchist thought.
As we can only maintain ourselves as free, self-directed, and self-mastered individuals if we maintain ourselves in the “inward-outward” agreement of the self-fulfilling its duties that it aims to achieve towards a particular τέλος. This, of course, requires us to develop a system of duties and identify a τέλος that fulfils these criteria.
The will to become an object
If you have not been able to tell by now, the point I am outlining is that the nihilist lacks these Kantian qualities. By refusing to adopt appropriate desires, volitions, and cares towards the self10, the nihilist lacks the “volitional identification”11 to actually assert any form of self onto the world. By creating a moral “floor” for the evaluation and refinement of τέλους, we create the means by which the self actually exists in the world - but this requires commitment, risk, and an openness to pursuing a goal into the future even if the road is hardship12 or our rational faculties fail us. This theme of commitment that ran from the Kierkegaardian pen and into the mid-1800s streets of Denmark (expertly illustrated in "The Meaning of Kierkegaard's Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre"13) is something the nihilist necessarily lacks - there is no objective value that exists beyond the individual to “get a hold of them”, so any attempt to become an actual self outside of the negative (non-)form championed by liberalism is, at best, doomed to failure or simply a fiction that is instantly dismissable.
Many lesser thinkers than the likes of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Levinas, and Derrida throughout modernity have proposed “aesthetic” values to life, but the simple fact is that without a lasting commitment that holds the individual towards something, there is no self to express - there is only randomness; unique, but ultimately scattered, randomness. Without a self to identify, the nihilist has no possible way of exerting themselves onto society as they intend; instead, any assertiveness is merely a random “lashing out” against reality in a way which will eventually be rejected by the flitting philosophy of the nihilist (presumably whenever they get around to reading a different book).
Like bone on bone
The outcome of this “selfless”, “identity-less” sense of nihilism leads to a state of collapse. This happens in a couple of ways (we should resist the modernist temptation to divide the world into good and bad, effective and ineffective, bourgeois and proletariat, etc.), which we will explore in time. But the unifying aspect we want to identify is a society without joints, the synovial-less society: individuals in a state of nihilism rub up against each other like bone on bone.
Without effective commitments directed towards a concrete τέλος, individuals are in constant danger of finding that they are fixed in looking at one another: without an “Idea”, there is nowhere left to look but at the Other - and then we become too close and lose our interrelation14. To want something from the Other for the sake of ourselves is to be stuck in selfless selfishness; to love something in the Other for the sake of ourselves is to be stuck in selfless selfishness; to exist near the Other for the sake of ourselves is to be stuck in selfless selfishness. If there is no “third point”, nothing to sit between the relation of two individuals, one of them will always fall into using the Other for the sake of their own needs. But “only when one more light appears can you fix the place of the first, in relation to it”15.
The Christian response
If nihilism is truly selfless, the question that comes to mind is “doesn’t this fit with agapic love?” - but hopefully you dismissed that thought when the irony became clear. Unlike Christian unselfishness, i.e., a genuine will to love the other in faith, love, and hope that they turn to God, the “selflessness” of the nihilist is simply a genuine lack of a self. From this point, Kierkegaard enters the stage to dismiss the faux-radical:
"To be spirit is to be I. God desires to have Is, for God desires to be loved."16
This obviously seems like a rather obscure demand - why precisely is an “I” so important to Kierkegaard (and Christianity, of course)? Why would the Christian - or would-be Christian - be interested in becoming an “I” in a way that they may possibly not be already?
"...in the world of individuals. If the essential passion is taken away, the one motivation, and everything becomes meaningless externality, devoid of character, then the spring of ideality stops flowing and life together becomes stagnant water - this is crudeness."17
Despite the (ironic) terminological crudeness here, S. K.’s worries about the decent into crudeness are the main reason for the Christian to pay attention here. If we are incapable of identifying “the spring of ideality”, i.e., the Christian τέλος, we have no way of avoiding our descent into “meaningless externality, devoid of character” - which makes it impossible for someone to genuinely hold themselves to a standard.
Think back to our Kantian understanding of the self - without conscious, self-directed, and self-mastered “inward-outward” agreement in our actions and our intentions, we cannot really be understood to be a self in the most robust sense. We would be a slave to our senses and a slave to sin (John 8:3418). Only through the robust realisation of the self’s capacity for freedom can we turn towards Christ and overcome the consumerist nihilism of the Present Age.
Turning against nihilism
The Kierkegaardian charge against nihilism is an important one. Not only is it necessary to avoid falling into nihilism accidentally, but being a Christian is the demand that we refuse and oppose nihilist tendencies. As God desires “Is” to appear before him, the Christian is charged to become an “I” in a crowd which might not accept them. But this is the charge of the Christian nonetheless.
In the next article, we explore a Kierkegaardian methodology for realizing the self in conversation with Hauerwas.
""The individual" - that is the decisive Christian category, and it will be decisive for the future of Christianity."19
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"The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage" from Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 402, ed. V. Eremita
The seductive prose of Emile Cioran echoes with Kierkegaardian influence, with his Nietzschean pessimism offering a rich, poetic critique of modernity and existence outright; indeed, a small collection of articles have been written by scholars concerning the relationship between Kierekgaard’s Anti-Cliamcus’ sketch of overcoming despair through faith and repetition and Cioran’s “method of agony” (On the Heights of Despair, p. —however, his self-imposed declassing into relative poverty, absolute despair at the human condition, and insistence on solitary suffering against the immovable hopelessness of existence still places Cioran in the camp of the nihilist and, as such, should be held at arm’s length.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 101, J. Climacus, ed. A. Hannay
"Kierkegaard and the Critique of Political Theology", A. Rudd, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 25, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan
"Kierkegaard and the Relativist Challenge to Practical Philosophy", P. Mehl, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 6-7, ed. J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd
Ibid., p. 15
While it would be unfair to criticize the “petty-bourgeois anarchism” of Pyotr Kropotkin of inaction (although, the praxis of the Makhnovists in realising the Proudhonian-Bakuninist ideal of pogroms is not one that I’m particularly interested in appropriating into this body of thought), we are long overdue a “midnight cry” from the faithful to the recently deceased Alfredo Bonanno (1937-2023) and the “black bloc”, a movement almost telegraphed for the age of social media - spontaneous, ineffectual, and concerned with only appearances.
Although an extended reference to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” would be ideal here, the following page from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy should suffice: Carter, Ian, "Positive and Negative Liberty", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), link
The Conquest of Bread, p. 14, P. Kropotkinr
On this point, see the work of H. Frankfurt in relation to free will and moral responsibility; the collection Love, Reason, and Will: Kierkegaard After Frankfurt, ed. A. Rudd and J. Davenport is an excellent introduction to Frankfurt’s thought in comparison with and under critique from Kierkegaard’s radical libertarianism.
"The Meaning of Kierkegaard's Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre", J. J. Davenport, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, p. 85, ed. J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd
“The Joy of It That It Is Not the Road That Is Hard but That Hardship Is the Road” in "The Gospel of Sufferings: Christian Discourses", from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 289-305, S. Kierkegaard
J. J. Davenport, from Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. J. J. Davenport and A. Rudd
"Envy as Personal Phenomenon and as Politics", R. L. Perkins, from International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. XIV: Two Ages, p. 118
"1834-1836: The First Journal Entries" from Papers and Journals: A Selection, I A1, p. 9, S. Kierkegaard, ed. A. Hannay
JP IV: 248
Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age–A Literary Review, p. 62 S. Kierkegaard
“Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.”
Point of View, p. 133-134, S. Kierkegaard