The starting points of liberal theorizing are never neutral between conceptions of the human good; they are always liberal starting points … liberal theory is best understood, not at all as an attempt to find a rationality independent of tradition, but as itself an articulation of an historically developed and developing set of social institutions and forms of activity, that is, as the voice of a tradition.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 145
The use of mechanical lines in the new art is in no sense merely a reflection of mechanical environment. It is a result of a change of sensibility which is, I think, the result of a change of attitude which will become increasingly obvious.
T. E. Hulme, Collected Writings, p. 284
A familiar account of the disenchantment of the world inaugurated by modernity emphasizes the overcoming of tradition, largely as a result of the impact of science, the rationalization of the social sphere, economic globalization, the spread of secularism, the dissolution of shared norms brought about by the pluralization of cultures, and the insinuation of a critical, sceptical attitude following on from post-Enlightenment philosophies. The transition from a form of life rooted in a long established habitus to one that projected itself towards an as yet unrealized but radically different future was at the heart of modernity. The flip-side of this transformative dream was its recognition of the world’s radical contingency, which threatened the nihilism that Nietzsche so brilliantly diagnosed and that he sought to overcome through an affirmative philosophy of the self-creating individual who would embrace a life without metaphysical props, positing ends out of himself. The possibility of re-imagining and re-making life vied with existential dread; severed from external sources of value, modernity had to ‘to create its normativity out of itself’ (Habermas, 1987, p. 7). For Zygmunt Bauman, modernity is then predicated on the desire to extirpate contingency by subordinating it to human necessity, but the inevitable failure of this imperative means that it is haunted by the ambivalence that became its hallmark (1991, p. 7).
Responses to this ambivalence have varied widely. On one hand, blueprints for a designed future, austere geometric architectural forms, and dreams of social engineering disclose a rage to order; on the other hand, attempts to capture human apprehension of temporality, the subjective nature of experience, and the multiple perspectives through which life is conceived betoken a willingness to accept, perhaps even to celebrate, haphazardness and uncertainty. One trajectory within literary modernism drew especially on the rhetorics of classicism in order to resist the nihilism discerned in the subjective turn. Bergson’s claim in Creative Evolution that ‘the universe is best understood on the model of the development and elaboration of consciousness’ threatened to reduce the world to the individual’s perception of it and to dissolve any sense of independent selfhood in the durée réelle (Burwick and Douglass, 1992, p. 4). With their calls to order, invocations of tradition and discipline, insistence on the fixed and limited nature of human beings, and support for stable social systems, a group of loosely linked writers such as T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound sought to articulate a conception of the aesthetic that could offer a viable alternative to this immersion in the temporal flux. The emphasis fell on art-works that were committed to public values, the stabilization of reality in solid forms, and a strong sense of space.
Hulme, of course, went through a Bergsonian phase, and his writing on art and politics after he disassociated himself from Bergson is marked by the latter’s influence, if only in the sense that it defines the parameters of the view Hulme is now reacting against. In ‘Cinders’ (1906-7), for example, his flux-driven view of the world is quintessentially Bergsonian. Stressing the grimy, messy aspects of life, which confound intellectual systematization, he wrote that the ‘aim of science and of all thought is to reduce the complex and inevitably disconnected world of grit and cinders to a few ideal counters, which we can move about and so form an ungritlike picture of reality – one flattering to our sense of power over the world’ (CW, p. 11). Hulme works here with a nominalist and pragmatist view of language, claims that all truth-claims are the amplifications of human appetites, and refuses the scopic drive of abstract theories. In opposition to the metaphysician’s penchant for the eagle’s eye perspective, he argues that ‘the eye is in the mud, the eye is mud’ and maintains that ‘we never get pure disinterested intellect’ (CW, p. 19). The labor of poetic creation is here imagined in resolutely physical terms.
Hulme’s move from classicism to anti-humanism and to a defence of absolutism in ethics and politics needs to be seen in the context of his later anti-Bergsonism, a position to which he moved in part as a result of conversations with Pierre Lasserre. This absolutism is inseparable from his search for a new aesthetic, since for Hulme signs of incipient social change disclosed themselves first in the realm of art. Like so many of his fellow modernists, he conceived the aesthetic as the means by which a wider cultural transformation might be inaugurated, and in his case this entailed sweeping away the assumptions of an entire system of values, the origin of which he located in the humanism of the Renaissance. One can see this position gradually crystallizing out of Hulme’s key essays. In 1912, his account of contemporary aesthetics still draws on the antithesis between romanticism and classicism, the latter being read as a reaction against the French Revolution and the belief in human perfectibility. The familiar emphases – order, structure, hierarchy, finitude – are mobilized to assault faith in innate human goodness and pantheistic conceptions of the art object. The poem or painting does not, contra romantic aesthetics, symbolize a transcendent realm but attends to the contours of purely material life: ‘The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description’ (CW, p. 68). This ambition is purged of philosophical idealism. The task is to find a visually concrete language to articulate perception, and this provides an adequate rationale for the writing of poems, Hulme claiming ‘that wherever you get an extraordinary interest in a thing, a great zest in its contemplation which carries on the contemplator to accurate description … there you have sufficient justification for poetry’ (CW, p. 70). This account already discloses the division between matter and spirit that would increasingly dominate Hulme’s thought, and which would lead in ‘A Notebook’ to the organic-inorganic binary. But here poetry is reduced to consideration of matter alone and is locked into the realm of the physical, which means that it can only offer human valuations of reality and remains trapped in contingency. By 1913, Hulme had recognized the problem and had turned to a geometric aesthetic that drew on resources from outside the European tradition in order not only to revivify modern art but more importantly to reject the humanist canons on which it had been based.
The revolutionary attitude underpinning this view of the aesthetic was already in place as early as 1908, although it then lacked the precision and rigor that Wilhelm Worringer’s theories would later bring to Hulme’s work.1 Hulme wrote in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908) that literary forms are always in need of renewal. Insincerity lay in imitating extant techniques and idioms when these no longer had any meaningful purchase on reality. Because of a kind of cultural inertia, a lazy acceptance of established exemplars, the transition from outworn modes to effective new forms required a conscious act of revolt. The required changes do not ‘come by a kind of natural progress of which the artist himself is unconscious’ but ‘are deliberately introduced by people who detest the old ones’ (CW, p. 51). And Hulme, of course, is a great hater of just this kind. His advocacy of a particular view of poetry is intensely subjective, and it marks out the terrain on which his battles for its future will be fought: ‘I have not a catholic taste but a violently personal and prejudiced one. I have no reverence for tradition. I came to the subject of verse from the inside rather than from the outside. There were certain impressions which I wanted to fix’ (CW, p. 50). At this stage, it is the realization of particular psychological impressions in poetry that motivates Hulme, but by 1913 this imperative will have made way for a more general concern with the clash of ideologies. By the time of ‘Mr Epstein and the Critics’ (1913) it is clear that the art Hulme is championing not only exemplifies a new aesthetic but also heralds an assault on secular modernity itself. The anti-vitalist aesthetic is now presented as the precursor of a root-and-branch rejection of humanism, an ideology that was in Hulme’s eyes so hegemonic (and unconscious) that it would initially be challenged in the oblique realm of art.
Hulme argued that this new aesthetic marked a return to religious convictions and political traditions that had fallen into desuetude. This linkage was so central to his entire enterprise, that to discuss his defence of the new geometric arts without reference to his theology and his politics is to risk misunderstanding his position entirely. He wrote, ‘I am emphasizing then, the absolute character of the difference between these two arts, not only because it is important for the understanding of the new art itself, but because it enables me to maintain much wider theses’ (CW, p. 270). These wider theses were at once theological and political, and Hulme’s insistence on their importance makes clear that he was not solely (perhaps not even principally) interested in tracing aesthetic change but rather was concerned with social change and philosophical debate. Hulme categorically rejects the idea that art exists and functions in an autonomous aesthetic realm. Art is for him always bound up with social formations: it participates in intellectual conflicts and contests political ideologies.
I want to suggest in this essay that towards the end of his life Hulme had moved away both from his earlier hostility to democracy and from his materialism: the new art he championed was central to the case he was trying to make. Modern art and aesthetics offered Hulme a way of advocating certain political and theological beliefs, which were neither widely held nor, indeed, identified by other critics as having anything to do with the art Hulme was discussing. His position was clearly an idiosyncratic one, but this does not make it any the less important to discussions of modernism. For Hulme based his anti-humanism on a religious and ethical absolutism whose roots lie in pre-modern traditions of thought. Before modernism had properly got under way, Hulme was already calling for a return to supposedly superseded convictions and insisting that a corrupt secular age could only be redeemed by the restoration of a Weltanschauung predicated on ‘the subordination of man to certain absolute values’ (CW, p. 449). Particular tendencies in modern art appeared to him to be hinting at just such a shift in worldview, hence their importance: ‘The fact that this change comes first in art, before it comes in thought, is easily understandable … . So thoroughly are we soaked in the spirit of the period we live in, so strong is its influence over us, that we can only escape from it in an unexpected way, as it were, a side direction like art’ (CW, pp. 269-70).
Hulme held that ‘either by nature, as the result of original sin, or the result of evolution, [man] encloses within him certain antinomies’ (CW, p. 234), but whereas in his early writing this led him to a hierarchical view of society, in the later work it results in the defence of a democracy predicated on these very antinomies. This defence derived support from the new machine aesthetic. Hulme argued that ‘the specific differentiating quality of the new art’ lay in its ‘association with machinery’ (CW, p. 282), and he saw it as ‘the precursor of a much wider change in philosophy and general outlook on the world’ (CW, p. 285). The severe geometries that characterized this machine art functioned for Hulme as analogues of his view of a fixed human nature, and he saw the intensity of the new art as ‘part of a real change of sensibility occurring now in the modern mind’ (CW, p. 266). He argued that the conception of a fixed human nature could provide the basis not only for social renewal but also for a theologically conceived reorientation of the human to the divine. Thus we find him at once suggesting that he holds ‘the religious conception of ultimate values to be right, the humanist wrong’ (CW, p. 455) and insisting that the ‘constancy of man provides perhaps the greatest hope of the possibility of a radical transformation of society’ (CW, p. 449).
Religion and social theory are inseparable from one another here: politics is grounded in theology. It is partly for this reason, I think, that Hulme was influenced by the syndicalist Sorel and the anarchist Proudhon, for both men (despite the key differences between them) scorned the belief in human perfectibility and sought to articulate theories of social justice based on the conviction that human beings were fundamentally flawed. This aspect of Sorel’s and Proudhon’s thought dovetailed with Hulme’s uncompromising theology. The result was a series of complex arguments to the effect that certain forms of geometric art were presaging a major transformation in thought (broadly speaking, from a secular humanism to a religious anti-humanism); that this transformation entailed the subordination of the individual to a non-organic and absolute realm of value; and that acceptance of human beings’ radical imperfectability could lead to an emancipatory theory of democracy. Hulme concluded that the historical association of liberalism with democracy was purely contingent, and he argued that the idea that the link between them was somehow a necessary one needed to be destroyed. Only then could one be led to ‘a different conception of democracy – to that, for example, which is suggested by Proudhon and Sorel’ (CW, p. 409).
In Time and Western Man, Wyndham Lewis wrote of Toryism, ‘Almost all Tories are simpletons – the simpletons of what passes with them for “tradition,” we could say – how they hastily close all the stable doors long after the horses have all disappeared; also by their rare instinct for closing all the wrong doors, behind which there were never any horses’ (1993, p. 27). Hulme, of course, was no simpleton, and neither was Lewis. Both were aware of the long-standing political tradition of Tory Radicalism, which in John Burrow’s words produced an analysis in which the past provides ‘the basis of a radical critique of capitalism and a repudiation of Whiggish complacency about the national history’ (1981, p. 241). Toryism and radicalism came together in this tradition via a shared hostility to industrialism and its negative socio-economic effects. Tory Radicals upheld paternalism and the values of landed society; attacked commercialism and plutocracy; criticized the unfair distribution of wealth; urged the moral economy of the ‘just price’ and protected the poor; and supported local self-government and small communities. The movement was anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, and anti-centralist. It was a curious blend of aspects of socialism and conservatism; although it never advocated the overthrow of society, it sought to eradicate poverty, condemned exploitation, and abhorred the abuse of power.2
Hulme has often been aligned with various forms of reactionary politics, and it is easy to see why. Many of his pronouncements lend themselves to a simple view of him as an out-and-out Tory, and he did pen a piece titled ‘A Tory Philosophy’. He was also prone to make statements that hid the complexities of his thought, most likely because he was such a lover of polemics. So in ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, for example, he defines the classical attitude thus: ‘Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him’ (CW, p. 61). This bald statement is later used to underpin his account of conservatism, leading some critics to conclude that his politics are straightforwardly reactionary. This view not only misses the extent to which Toryism may itself be imbued with radical strains, but also ignores the shifts in Hulme’s thinking over time. Hulme’s Toryism may seem paradoxical now, but it belonged to a recognizable political tradition. Tory Radicalism, moreover, underwent something of a revival in the years just prior to the First World War, before petering out in the early 1920s.3
Hulme from the outset of his career combined reactionary and radical traditions in his work. Writing in 1911, he suggested that in France the only two groups trying ‘to find a thought-out consistent political philosophy are the Syndicalists and the brilliant set of Neo Royalist writers grouped around L’Action Française’ (CW, p. 164). He drew on both these traditions, a fact that testifies to the complex genealogy of his thought. But more importantly, he didn’t just combine positions that would generally have been seen as politically antithetical but subjected them to ideological critique. Two aspects of Sorel’s thought are significant here: his stress on the role played by myths in the formation of individuals’ political convictions and his diremptive mode of socio-political analysis. As is well known, Sorel held that human beings do not act mainly according to the dictates of reason but rather are motivated by powerful emotions. In a famous letter to Daniel Halévy he wrote, ‘men who are participating in great social movements always picture their coming action in the form of images in which their cause is certain to triumph. I propose to give the name of “myths” to these constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians: the general strike of the syndicalists and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such myths’ (1999, p. 20). His own work sought to understand the role that myths played in history and to place his own counter-myths in the service of political revolt. This dubious strategy was irrationalist in conception, and it goes some way to explaining not only why Sorel’s work has appealed to activists of the Left and Right, but also why Sorel himself was finally attracted to fascism. Sorel’s diremptive technique, in turn, was a form of ideology critique, which aimed to analyze out the often invisible links between hegemonic discourses. He described his diremptions as attempts ‘to examine certain parts of a condition or event without taking into account all of the ties which connect them to the whole, to determine in some manner the character of their activity by isolating them’ (1969, p. xxx).
Hulme drew on both these aspects of Sorel’s work. In two articles on political conversion he argued that because no ‘intellectual conception has any moving force unless it be hinged on to an emotion or an instinct’ (CW, p. 207), conversion from one position to another ‘is always emotional and non-rational’ (CW, p. 209). This line of thought has its roots in Hulme’s earliest writings, where he declares that ‘general statements about truth, etc., are in the end only amplification of man’s appetite’ (CW, p. 8). Such a way of thinking may result in total skepticism, but it can also break the hold over the mind of convictions (or ideologies) that have appeared hitherto as immutable and hence unassailable. And this is precisely the effect that reading Sorel had on Hulme. Influenced by the latter’s view of myth, Hulme engaged in a form of political analysis that focused on ‘words of power’ (CW, p. 232) in order to isolate the unexamined assumptions underpinning various ideologies and to expose them as contingent, not necessary. When he wrote his preface to his translation of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, he immediately homed in on this aspect of Sorel’s thought. Referring to the connection between the working class movement and democratic ideology, he claimed that ‘the enormous difficulty in Sorel comes in this – that he not only denies the essential connection between these two elements but even asserts that the ideology will be fatal to the movement’ (CW, pp. 246-7). Hulme admits that following Sorel here presents major problems. The first step to understanding Sorel is to grasp that there is no necessary connection between democracy and socialism and to see that the link between them is the product of an ideological formation ‘with a recognizable and determinate history’ (CW, p. 249). Sorel’s method is valuable in that it offers a technique for dismantling what Hulme sees as an unexamined prejudice. And this requires people to accept that they are themselves products of ideologies that structure their worldviews:
All effective propaganda depends then on getting these ideas away from their position ‘behind the eye’ and putting them facing one as objects which we can then consciously accept or reject. This is extremely difficult. Fortunately, however, all ideologies are of gradual growth, and that rare type of historical intelligence which investigates and analyses their origins can help us considerably… . this type of history, by exhibiting certain ideas in a concreter form, existing as it were as objects in time, enables us to distinguish the same ideas, existing in us ‘behind the eye’ and to bring them to the surface of the mind. Their hidden influence on our opinions then at once disappears … This is a violent operation, and the mind is never quite the same afterwards. (CW, p. 248)
Once this operation has been effected, the path has been cleared to a different view of what revolutionary struggle entails. Hulme’s reading of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence stresses his critique of liberal ideology and finds in Sorel a riposte to liberalism through which classicism is aligned with a view of human subjects as strictly limited organisms.
Hulme derived his theory of human nature from his understanding of classicism. Holding that people are limited, imperfect, and therefore in need of social restraint, he argued that a radical transformation of society predicated on the belief in human perfectibility was strictly impossible. This line of thought, which has a long history and is not the sole preserve of ‘reactionary’ writers, was central to Sorel’s work but also to that of Proudhon. Proudhon, for example, rejected religion, deference, hierarchy, government, and property, arguing that the new social order he envisaged should be based on the ideal of equality. In his best known work, What is Property? he insisted that to practice justice is ‘to give each an equal share in wealth under equal conditions of labour’ (1994, p. 177). This conviction led him to reject both property and communism, on the grounds that the former is exploitative (a form of theft) and despotic, whereas the latter is impractical, rewarding laziness and inevitably resulting in the collapse of society. Proudhon sought to synthesize communism and property by way of a third term, liberty, which would be based on the principle of free association (1994, p. 212). But Proudhon, interestingly, had no patience with utopian notions of human perfectibility. He emphasized human limitations, arguing that the species was fundamentally egoistic and thus in need of restraint. His conclusion was that ‘The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy’ (1994, p. 216).4 Sorel, in turn, was in his early work influenced by Proudhon, and both writers worked with a theory of pessimism drawn from classical thought. Sorel deplored misunderstandings of this doctrine, arguing that pessimism properly conceived should be distinguished from the popular (and misguided) view of it as little more than disappointed optimism:
Pessimism is quite a different thing from the caricatures that are usually presented of it; it is a metaphysics of morals rather than a theory of the world; it is a conception of a march towards deliverance that is narrowly conditioned: on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired of the obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if one prefers, by the feeling of social determinism) – on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These three aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although as a rule little attention is paid to their close connection. (1999, p. 20)
This underscores the difference between a pessimism that follows the dashing of reformist hopes and one that derives from established convictions about humanity and its place within the world. Hulme was in his late writings without question a pessimist of this second type, and for him this then meant that Whiggish accounts of social progress in which notions of perfectibility loom large were as wide of the mark as utopian rhetoric. Emancipatory social change was possible, for Hulme, but only if the irremediably flawed nature of human beings was taken into account.
Hulme inveighed against naive beliefs in human progress, which he aligned with liberal thought and democratic politics. In contrast to the emphasis on evolutionary and organic social progress, a marked feature of late nineteenth-century liberal theorizing, Hulme worked with a narrowly conditioned view of human development, arguing that progress should be seen as ‘one of accumulation than of alteration in capacity’ (CW, p. 242). This emphasis probably derives from Sorel’s critique of views of progress that construe it as a historical law. As one of Sorel’s translators has argued, when theories of progress posit the perfectibility of humankind and the civilizations it evolves, then progress can be made to seem ‘virtually synonymous’ with the historical process itself, and ‘history’ can be deployed as ‘a source of political legitimacy’ (Sorel, 1969, pp. xx-xxi). In The Illusions of Progress, Sorel claimed that such assumptions were unwarrantable, arguing that liberal democracies sought legitimacy in a false notion of progress as historical teleology, whereas in practice they were dominative social systems.
Hulme was in accord with this indictment of liberal democracy. The anti-Hegelian in him was hostile to the idea that history was unfolding according to any discernible law and would culminate in some specifiable end.5 Like Sorel, he held that liberalism strengthened the coercive power of the state, privileged the needs of the bourgeoisie over those of the proletariat, and impoverished the political process by making it susceptible to demagoguery, manipulation, and corruption. Like the Rousseau of The Social Contract (1762), he believed that ‘there never has existed, and never will exist, any true democracy’ (1967, p. 70), and he would doubtless have applauded the latter’s bleak assessment of political realities: ‘If there were a nation of gods, it would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is unsuited to men’ (1967, p. 71). Hulme objected to the overly rationalistic view, which he associated with Benthamite thought, that the democratic mechanism would be perfected until it expressed the general will.6
Hulme scorned such vapid optimism. More seriously, however, he objected to its implicit organicism, which, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, also informed Fabian thought, leading in the case of Shaw to the notion of ‘an evolution of humanity beyond man’ (1979, p. 187). This was the view that Hulme sought always to resist, and he also took the Fabians to task for what he saw as their utopian idealism (CW, pp. 209-10). Objecting to a long-standing political tradition which held ‘that on no account must the “natural” remedial force of nature be interfered with’ (CW, p. 211), Hulme argued that social change took place as a result of ‘a consistent, constructive effort’ (CW, p. 212). Organic conceptions of the state came to trouble Hulme partly because they diminished the importance of human agency, attributing some sort of guiding spirit to the historical process, and partly because they were associated with German militarism. It was during the First World War that Hulme repudiated the argument that there was a necessary link between the ‘organic theory’ and his own ‘absolute view of ethics’ (CW, p. 365). Noting that the ‘war has greatly, to their own surprise, converted many men to democracy’, he rejected the obfuscatory mysticism inherent in the ‘organic’ theory and argued that he had been ‘driven to realise that the right theory of society is to be found in Proudhon, and not in the reactionaries’ (CW, p. 365).7
This statement helps to explain why Hulme was anxious to differentiate the arguments of Sorel and Proudhon from those of Action Française. Hulme insists that Sorel ‘expects a return of the classical spirit through the struggle of the classes… . Given the classical attitude, he tries to prove that its present manifestation may be hoped for in working-class violence, and at the same time the complementary notion that only under the influence of the classical ideal will the movement succeed in regenerating society’ (CW, p. 251). Having explained that Sorel wants to place the classical spirit at the service of class struggle, he adds an important note: ‘It is this which differentiates Sorel’s from other attacks on the democratic ideology. Some of these … are really vicious, in that they play with the idea of inequality. No theory that is not fully moved by the conception of justice asserting the equality of men, and which cannot offer something to all men, deserves or is likely to have any future’ (CW, p. 251). Hulme’s masculinist assumptions may blind him to the politics of gender, but he does not defend an authoritarian politics; he criticizes democracy for its failure to deliver on its promise of bringing about the general good. Robert Ferguson suggests that this ‘surprisingly trenchant affirmation of the equality of men was surely the direct result of Hulme’s experiences in the trenches, and it forms part of a larger attempt … to bring his most important ideas into some kind of focus’ (Ferguson, 2002, p. 222).
Hulme in his late writing persistently aligned Sorel with Proudhon, describing them both as democrats (CW, p. 395). He seemed to be moving away from the anti-democratic sentiments that can also be found in Sorel and trying to develop a hybridized theory of democracy that combined aspects of anarchism, syndicalism, and classicism all at the same time. Of real significance here is his reliance on an absolutist ethic, in which I think he was influenced by Proudhon as well as by his reading of Pascal. During his polemics with First World War pacifists, Hulme wrote, ‘I beg leave to point out that democracy is a little older than the tabernacles in which these people imbibed it. If I could correct their tenets by Ireton’s belief that “men are born corrupt and will remain so”, I should prefer to call myself a Leveller; for not only did they think “liberty a right inherent in every man … meaning by liberty … definite participation in whatever political arrangements the community finds it desirable to make”, but they were prepared themselves to fight for this right’ (CW, p. 362). The form taken by this invocation of the Levellers is revealing, for Hulme tempers his advocacy of their radicalism with Ireton’s insistence on humanity’s innate corruptness.8 And although the Levellers sought an extension of the franchise, they did not include women in their demands, and were prepared to deny the franchise to unpropertied wage-earners. Furthermore, in their statement of 1649, the Levellers maintained that although they sought a more representative government that would be accountable to the people, they did not wish to level men’s estates and were not in favour of abolishing private property, but wanted a system in which each man might enjoy his property without hindrance. They were, they claimed, for ‘Government and against Popular Confusion’; their aim was to reduce government ‘as near as might be to perfection, and certainly we know very well the pravity and corruption of mans [sic] heart is such that there could be no living without it’ (Aylmer, 1975, p. 154). The Levellers thus claimed that they were striving for ‘a good Government’ rather than for ‘none at all’ (Aylmer, 1975, p. 154), sentiments with which Hulme concurred.
At the same time, Hulme was aligning the Levellers’ view of representation with Proudhonian socialism, maintaining that both were ‘founded on the idea of Justice’ (CW, p. 363) and arguing that this version of democracy was the only one ‘which is likely to radically transform society’ (CW, p. 363). Proudhon’s writings on justice are complex and contradictory. It is difficult, and probably misleading, to try to produce a consistent account of his views, which underwent changes over time. In What is Property?, he argues that justice is born ‘of an affective and an intellectual faculty’ (Proudhon, 1994, p. 178) and is a hybrid concept that is the product of ‘social instinct and reflection combined’ (1994, p. 183). In later works, such as On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, he spoke of justice in transcendental terms, describing it as a ‘universal and absolute criterion of certitude’ or ‘the eternal formula of things, the idea which upholds all ideas’ (de Lubac, 1948, p. 278). There is a tension here between an immanent view of justice that construes it as innate to human beings and a transcendental one in which it is conceived as independent of human life.9 Alan Ritter sees Proudhon’s late position as a deontological one in which the rightness of actions is decided in accordance with ultimate norms that have been arrived at on non-empirical grounds (1969, p. 66). Hulme, of course, defended a similar position in his last writings, deriving his ethics from a normative supernatural realm that he described as non-rational: ‘Values are not relative only to life, but are objective and absolute, and many of them are above life. This ethic … may be called irrational, if … those values are rational which can be reasonably based on life’ (CW, p. 411). And the supernatural values Hulme defended were, in turn, the very source of his politics. He argued that ‘From the pessimistic conception of man comes naturally the view that the transformation of society is an heroic task requiring heroic qualities … virtues which are not likely to flourish on the soil of a rational and sceptical ethic. This regeneration can, on the contrary, only be brought about and only maintained by actions springing from an ethic which from the narrow rationalist standpoint is irrational, being not relative, but absolute’ (CW, p. 250).
Hulme’s break with secular modernity is inseparable from this deontological position: he is no longer arguing against post-Renaissance humanism from within its own episteme but asserting the viability of an alternative tradition against that epistemê. He describes his position as ‘irrational’ in a precise sense: it does not derive from and cannot be articulated in terms of humanist categories because it is sanctioned by a different ontology, one that is ‘absolute, not relative to human life, and in certain respects a priori’ (CW, p. 414). Hulme argues not only that the radical incompatibility of these two opposing standpoints must be recognized but also that ‘the religious attitude’ is not superstition but ‘is a possible one for the “emancipated” and “reasonable” man at this moment’ (CW, p. 444). The point here is to break away from the idea that the religious attitude is simply ‘a sentimental survival’, hence Hulme’s claim that he attaches ‘very little value indeed to the sentiments attaching to the religious attitude’ but rather holds ‘quite coldly and intellectually as it were, that the way of thinking about the world and man, the conception of sin, and the categories which ultimately make up the religious attitude, are the true categories and the right way of thinking’ (CW, p. 455).
Hulme’s views on art need to be seen in relation to his views on theology and politics. The importance of these connections is particularly clear in his late writing. In ‘A Notebook’, for example, he draws on an anti-naturalist theology to defend an anti-vitalist aesthetic: ‘Renascence art we may call a “vital” art in that it depends on pleasure in the reproduction of human and natural forms. Byzantine art is the exact contrary of this. There is nothing vital in it; the emotion you get from it is not a pleasure in the reproduction of natural or human life. The disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity, a perfection and rigidity which vital things can never have, leads to the use of forms which can almost be called geometrical’ (CW, p. 447).
Vital art was for Hulme trapped in the historically particular and was compromised by its over-valuation of the human; it not only portrayed the world from a resolutely human standpoint but also anthropomorphized God, thereby divinizing man. Hulme’s anti-humanism is thus at the opposite pole of Nietzsche’s naturalism. Whereas Nietzsche did away with metaphysics by describing a material world that required no external source of meaning or justification, Hulme posited a supernatural realm of absolute value while insisting on its otherness, its irreducibility to the plane of the human. This enabled him to assert the authority of dogma, which provided him in turn with a rationale for his aesthetics. The resultant face-off between religious dogmatism and post-Renaissance humanism may be seen as a conflict between incommensurable metanarratives, one that had already been confronted by Kierkegaard. In The Book on Adler, Kierkegaard addressed the problem of religious authority in a critical age that no longer recognized appeals to transcendence. Adler’s claim to have had a divine revelation represented a break with modernity, which was characterized by ‘insubordination to the authority of the religious’ (1998, p. 5). Stanley Cavell argues that Kierkegaard’s attempt to overcome the confusions that have deprived modernity of recourse to religious ground led him in this text to defend the concept of dogma. Crucially, this did not mean that he tried to ‘provide a dogmatic backing’ for dogmatic concepts but that he defended them ‘as themselves dogmatic’, as carrying ‘their own specific religious weight’ (1996, p. 131). For Cavell, the key shift here is from an immanent to a transcendental view of the divine, which then ratifies Kierkegaard’s well-known ‘insistence on God as “wholly other”’ (1996, p. 131). As the latter insisted in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript: ‘God is a supreme conception that cannot be explained by anything else but is explainable only by immersing oneself in the conception itself. The highest principles for all thinking can be demonstrated only indirectly (negatively)’ (1992, p. 603).10
It scarcely needs pointing out how close this view is to Hulme’s insistence on two entirely unrelated ontological categories and his conviction that neither can be translated into the terms of the other. Equally significant was his belief that within the hegemonic secular discourses of modernity the theistic view could scarcely be articulated, let alone taken seriously. T. S. Eliot, who was influenced by Hulme’s thought, was of the same view, arguing that because modern literature was so permeated by secularism, ‘it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life’ (1972, p. 398). Hulme and Eliot both confronted the problem of incommensurability not by trying to translate one language game into the terms of another, but rather by insisting on the fundamental differences between them, and then taking their stand on those very differences. In this respect, Eliot echoed Hulme when he claimed that the ‘real conflict is not between one set of moral prejudices and another, but between the theistic and the atheistic faith; and it is all for the best that the division should be sharply drawn’ (1972, p. 367). The religious worldview attracted Hulme precisely because it ratified the wider theses he wanted to maintain and enabled him to purge the language of the affects from his grammar of assent. He scorned the emotional attachment to religion and defended an intellectualist conception of belief, articulating an abstract theism that sanctioned an anti-romantic anthropology and upheld an aesthetic that offered refuge from the imperfection and mutability of the natural world.
What are the implications of all this for Hulme’s aesthetics? I have already argued that Hulme was committed to a worldview he believed had been superseded by secular humanism and liberal conceptions of progress. A clue to what he was after may be found in his analysis of Bergson’s theory of art. Hulme argued that for Bergson creativity depended on the artist’s capacity to isolate some aspect of reality that the majority of people have either never seen or properly understood and then to reveal it as though for the first time. This means that artists ‘break through the conventional ways of looking at things which veil reality from us at a certain point’ and which most people are ‘unable to perceive’ (CW, p. 195). Artists are able not only to render reality with a greater intensity than is vouchsafed to most people, but also to make them grasp truths they had not hitherto been aware of. Hulme then explains why this matters: ‘Both these things are of very little advantage as far as actual art criticism is concerned, but they are distinct advantages to anyone who wants to place art definitely in relation to other human activities’ (CW, p. 204). Because art could offer a different angle of vision, uncover an alternative conception of reality, it could act as the advance guard of the kind of aggressive diremptive ideology critique Hulme wanted to apply to modernity.
Hulme was one of the earliest art critics in England to recognize the importance of much of the new art. He was abreast of all the latest developments and wrote trenchantly in support of artists and sculptors such as David Bomberg, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Frederick Etchells, Jacob Epstein, C. F. Hamilton, Wyndham Lewis, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, and Edward Wadsworth. In no sense was he an uncritical apologist for their work: he not only discriminated between artists with respect to the value of their works, but also differentiated between movements and tendencies. It might well be said that he was rather stinting in his praise, reserving his unqualified approval solely for Epstein. Of particular importance was the connection he sought to establish between the Worringerian ‘tendency to abstraction’ he discerned in much of the new art and the break-up of the optimistic humanism he despised. Hulme argued that critics attacked this art because they saw its sympathy with non-European artistic canons as a modish, hence inauthentic, form of borrowing, and because they thought the underlying attitudes it expressed were irrelevant to modern life. The latter accusation was meat and drink to Hulme, since it permitted him to claim that what was really at stake was not an aesthetic difference of opinion but an ideological conflict. He made his central point in response to criticisms of Epstein’s bold ‘Carvings in Flenite’:
It is, says the critic, ‘rude savagery, flouting respectable tradition-vague memories of dark ages as distant from modern feeling as the loves of the Martians’. Modern feeling be damned! As if it was not the business of every honest man at the present moment to clean the world of these sloppy dregs of the Renaissance. This carving, by an extreme abstraction, by the selection of certain lines, gives an effect of tragic greatness. The important point about this is that the tragedy is of an order more intense than any conception of tragedy which could fit easily into the modern progressive conception of life. This, I think, is the real root of the objection to these statues, that they express emotions which are, as a matter of fact, entirely alien and unnatural to the critic. (CW, p. 258)
Epstein was the type of artist Bergson had described, a sculptor and draughtsman who rejected established styles in order to explore a new outlook on life. Hulme had argued in the ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ that the particular form of expression required by each age is deliberately introduced by artists actively protesting against ossified traditions, and Epstein, described by the Pall Mall Gazette as ‘a Sculptor in Revolt who is in deadly conflict with the ideas of current sculpture’ (Rose, 2002, p. 68), was the perfect example of the uncompromising avant-gardist. Hulme was willing to concede that most people would be baffled by the drawing for ‘Rock Drill’, the work that was to be one of the most seminal of modernist sculptures, because they had ‘no preconceived notion as to how the thing expressed by it should be expressed’ (CW, p. 258), but negative responses to the ‘Creation’ drawing revealed a more general failure to grasp the challenge of this new art, and here Hulme followed Bergson: ‘They cannot understand that the genius and sincerity of an artist lies in extracting afresh, from outside reality, a new means of expression’ (CW, pp. 258-9).
What role, then, does machinery play in this aesthetic? Hulme on several occasions stresses its importance, writing, for example, that in the new art there is ‘a desire to avoid those lines and surfaces which look pleasing and organic, and to use lines which are clean, clear-cut and mechanical’ (CW, p. 279). This impetus to reproduce the inorganic forms suggested by machines is for him emblematic of ‘the new sensibility’ and ‘the culmination of the process of breaking-up and transformation in art, that has been proceeding since the impressionists’ (CW, p. 279). For Hulme, this new mode of expression is not concerned to beautify machinery in some naïve paean to the modern technological world but rather to satisfy ‘a different mental need altogether’ (CW, p. 282). What is this new need? It is essentially the requirement for an art that can not only communicate a religious intensity, but also evoke a non-humanist conception of humanity’s relation to the natural world. When treated in a geometric, monumental manner, mechanical forms offer both the durability and the stability that remove natural objects, such as the human form, from the organic realm, a strategy that insists on their fixed nature. In this conception of the aesthetic the geometrical treatment of objects manifests an anti-naturalism that proclaims a Pascalian view of human wretchedness and insignificance: ‘Man is subordinate to certain absolute values: there is no delight in the human form, leading to its natural reproduction; it is always distorted to fit into the more abstract forms which convey an intense religious emotion’ (CW, p. 447).11
The machine is not offered here as a template for beauty, nor celebrated à la Italian Futurism as the source of a technological sublime, nor even regarded as a social datum demanding interpretation: it is presented in abstract terms as providing the conceptual means by which an alternative Weltanschauung might obliquely be gestured at. J. B. Bullen suggests that here lies the crucial difference between Fry’s and Hulme’s respective understandings of the Byzantine art on which they both drew as a model: ‘Hulme and Fry attach equal importance to the relationship between Byzantine art and modern practice, but differ about the nature of that relationship. For Hulme it is the abstract spirit of Byzantium that lives on in modern art, not its outward formal qualities’ (1999, p. 674). The turn to this spirit is for Hulme neither a purely formalist matter nor a mode of passive imitation of older styles but rather the creation of a new art that, at most, can be said to ‘have certain analogies to the attitude of which geometrical art was the expression in the past’ (CW, p. 276). In Hulme’s understanding of it, a key aspect of contemporary geometric art was that it asserted the disjunction between the human and the divine and pointed to a realm of absolute value of a different ontological order from anything appearing in the natural world. It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find him claiming that if ‘we think of physical science as represented by geometry, then instead of saying that modern progress away from materialism has been from physics through vitalism to the absolute values of religion, we might say that it is from geometry through life and back to geometry’ (CW, p. 426).
Epstein was important to Hulme as the exemplar par excellence of this transition from one Weltanschauung to another. The new art drew on archaism – as exemplified by the art of Byzantium or Egypt, for example – in order to express a controlled vigor and to disclose a profound shift in outlook. The key features of geometric art, as Hulme saw it, were stiffness, angularity, durability, permanence, and purification. The objects being depicted or sculpted were deprived of their organic, natural qualities so that the mutable could be transformed ‘into something fixed and necessary’ (CW, p. 274). The attitude underpinning this aesthetic insisted on the separation of the human from its animate form; driving a wedge between the two, it was based on ‘the idea of disharmony or separation between man and nature’ (CW, p. 274). For Hulme, the inorganic qualities of a machine-influenced art pointed to the early elaboration of a new pictorial lexicon that subordinated the natural world to a supernatural realm of value.
In his last writings, collected together under the heading ‘A Notebook’, Hulme sketched out the basic lineaments of a Critique of Satisfaction, which would set out to dissect the often unconsciously held presuppositions underlying post-Renaissance humanist philosophy, and which once again drew on the lessons of Sorelian ideology critique. The purpose of this critique was not to reduce a series of complex strands to a simple unity but to establish the family resemblances among them, to try to work out why certain philosophical standards and ethical canons have seemed persuasive, in short, satisfactory. Hulme’s goal was to uncover the antecedent assumptions that led the ‘truths’ of humanism to be accepted in order to argue that its entire conception of reality was mistaken and to defend the view that there exist ‘many possible different ideals, or canons of satisfaction’ (CW, p. 431). He was, in short, insisting on the incommensurability of philosophical positions that depended on fundamentally opposed premises.
The geometric art Hulme had championed provided an aesthetic critique of humanism. This was now buttressed by an explicit philosophical critique, which took humanism to task for its misguided conception of the human subject and of the social order. The aesthetic theory and the philosophical critique both had exactly the same intention: to signal the break-up of humanism and to install in its place an alternative account of the nature of reality. It should already be clear that Hulme’s alternative was a dogmatic one, which insisted on human depravity and maintained that all aesthetic, ethical, and political theories had to take this as their point of departure. The religious attitude as he conceived it was to be found in Pascal’s Pensées, which articulated ‘exactly what I mean by a Critique of Satisfaction’ (CW, p. 432). Lest there be any doubt, he then added, ‘Everything that I shall say later in these notes is to be regarded merely as a prolegomena to the reading of Pascal, as an attempt to remove the difficulties of comprehension engendered in us by the humanism of our period’ (CW, p. 449).
Hulme in ‘Cinders’ articulated a conventionalist and pragmatist view of reality that is at odds with his late absolutism; in the earlier piece he claimed: ‘Truths don’t exist before we invent them. They respond to man’s need of economy, just as beliefs to his need of faith’ (CW, p. 20). Hulme’s late position might then plausibly be read as a response to his need to overcome a far-reaching skepticism. When he came to question the Bergsonian solution to the mechanist and determinist view of reality, his reaction was revealing: ‘I can never hope to attain in the future any “solidity” of belief. It is necessarily only a temporary illusion attaching to the moment of arrival. Now this would be an intolerable opinion. It is too thorough-going a scepticism for mental equilibrium… . I must save myself by some comforting theory from such a scepticism’ (CW, p. 156). It is thus arguable that in response to this shattering of his peace of mind Hulme came up with a ‘comforting theory’ at the end of his life, which enabled him to posit an Absolute that individuals could apprehend and that would confirm their aesthetic choices, structure their ethical lives, and guide their political designs.12 In Dominic Baker-Smith’s view, for example, ‘the appeal to religious models is made on behalf of purely cultural ends. What is at stake is a view of the nature of man with its implications for social performance in the arts and in politics’ (p. 274). But I would suggest that to put it like this is to beg the very questions Hulme asked. Another way of thinking about his late writing is to see it as going to the heart of modernism’s struggles with the competing, and seemingly irresolvable, claims of various intellectual traditions and political practices. Hulme might have meant what he said, a view that Baker-Smith seems unwilling to countenance, but which Robert Ferguson, Hulme’s most recent biographer, takes seriously.13 And Hulme, we should note, explicitly distanced himself from the Sorelian language of myth, with its intuitionist and voluntarist overtones, when he insisted that although the religious attitude ‘tends to find expression in myth, it is independent of myth’ and should be seen as ‘much more intimately connected with dogma’ (CW, p. 444).
To take Hulme at his word is to confront a modern problem that, as Eliot later insisted, he articulated with great lucidity. For the incommensurability he identified between opposed conceptions of reality and of humanity’s place in the world points directly to the vexed question of validity claims and authority that arises from the proliferation of language-games within modernity. Authority is of course a pre-modern concept, as Kierkegaard was quick to point out; in a secular age, it is treated as a legitimation crisis. Alasdair MacIntyre traces the notion of the ‘criterionless choice’ between ethical positions to Kierkegaard, but he sees Nietzsche as the most devastating critic of Enlightenment aspirations to rationally arbitrated universal norms, and, contra Nietzsche, he argues for a return to the pre-modern Aristotelian tradition. (MacIntyre, 1981, p. 38). For MacIntyre, there is a straight choice here, for ‘either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place’ (1981, p. 111). The relevance of this argument to Hulme’s thought is obvious, since his aesthetics derived from a stance that refused post-Enlightenment categories of thought. Hulme did not urge an Aristotelian theory of virtue, but he did insist that his understanding of an absolute, and religiously inspired, realm of value belonged to a discursive formation that was coherent on its own terms but could never be accepted as such by those whose intellectual commitments were of an entirely different order. The key point was to show that modern presuppositions were not self-evidently and objectively correct but belonged to identifiable, and historically locatable, traditions.
Hulme, like Eliot after him, grasped that once modernity’s secular premises were accepted the language of revelation, faith, or dogma would be ruled out as meaningless on a priori grounds; if ‘humanism’s alienation from religion was a condition of its development’, as Leon Wieseltier has argued, then religious dogma would be compromised from the start (Wieseltier, 1999, p. 97). Hulme defended a Pascalian position in order to insist that the truths he upheld did not derive from and thus could not be judged according to humanist or Enlightenment categories.14 He described this as an irrational position, meaning by this not that it was a voluntarism devoid of supporting arguments, but that it was grounded in an epistemê not principally structured around the operations of reason. As Hulme put it, ‘The attempt to explain the absolute of religious and ethical values in terms of the categories appropriate to the essentially relative and non-absolute vital zone, leads to the entire misunderstanding of these values’ (CW, pp. 426-7). He demanded a critique of satisfaction that would target the presuppositions informing humanism because he saw that the real ideological struggle was over basic postulates.
The unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, question was whether the practice of debate to which he was so passionately committed could resolve such a struggle. For all his advocacy of dialogue and discussion, his faith in the irreducible value of a vibrant public sphere, Hulme clearly wondered whether it could: ‘Our difficulty now, of course, is that we are really incapable of understanding how any other view but the humanistic, could be seriously held by intelligent and emancipated men’ (CW, p. 428). There is a marked shift here from Hulme’s early pragmatist and conventionalist position. Whereas an apologist for a postmodern liberalism like Rorty refuses to make the claim that his particular vocabulary (or language game) somehow gets things right, the modernist Hulme wanted to make exactly this assertion. The difference between them is instructive. Rorty defends his version of pragmatism on the grounds that it works better, and not on the basis of veridical claims that are in his view caught up in the representational theories of truth he finds unconvincing.15 Hulme, in contrast, insists that he does have access to the truth, but he also insists that this truth cannot be recognized within humanist canons of thought. Hence the need for a critique of satisfaction. By the end of his life, Hulme was no pragmatist.
Eliot was of course preoccupied with similar problems. He wrote in his essay on Dante, for example, that the Vita Nuova will not make sense ‘unless we have first made the conscious attempt, as difficult and hard as re-birth, to pass through the looking-glass into a world which is just as reasonable as our own. When we have done that, we begin to wonder whether the world of Dante is not both larger and more solid than our own’ (1972, p. 276). It was left to Eliot, after Hulme’s death, to make a stand on the incommensurability of different forms of life in the kind of caustic language that the pre-war knuckleduster would surely have approved: ‘I am not arguing or reasoning or engaging in controversy with those whose views are radically opposed to such as mine. In our time, controversy seems to me, on really fundamental matters, to be futile. It can only usefully be practised where there is common understanding … . The acrimony which accompanies much debate is a symptom of differences so large that there is nothing to argue about. We experience such profound differences with some of our contemporaries, that the nearest parallel is the difference between the mentality of one epoch and another. In a society like ours, worm-eaten with Liberalism, the only thing possible for a person with strong convictions is to state a point of view and leave it at that’ (1934, p. 13).
1 Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908) hugely influenced Hulme. In ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’, he says simply that his own argument ‘is practically an abstract of Worringer’s views’ (CW, p. 271).
2 See for example, Larry L. Witherell, Rebel on the Right; Matthew Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism; T. F. Lindsay and Michael Harrington, The Conservative Party; and Robert Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830-1867.
3 See Alan Sykes, ‘The Radical Right and the Crisis of Conservatism Before the First World War’, pp. 661-76.
4 Alan Ritter notes that although Proudhon was ‘a radical’, he was ‘a realist and a moralist as well’ (p. 3); he suggests that the biggest tension in Proudhon’s theory lies in his attempt to reconcile his desire for extreme liberty with his recognition that social restraint is unavoidable (p. 23).
5 See, for example, the scorn Hulme heaps on R. B. Haldane, an influential ‘new liberal’ at the turn of the century. Hulme mocks Haldane’s Hegelianism in his review of the latter’s book The Pathway to Reality in ‘Searchers After Reality–II: Haldane’ (CW, pp. 93-8).
6 See the essays ‘On Progress and Democracy’ (CW, pp. 219-25) and ‘Theory and Practice’ (CW, pp. 226-31). The philosopher T. H. Green, who held to an evolutionary and organic progressivism of the kind that Hulme rejected, is a target here. Green drew on Hegel for his view of a historical process by way of which humankind gradually approached perfection, and he was especially influential in this respect, outlining a view of progress that has been described as based on ‘the belief in an immanent God gradually realising Himself in the world through the idea of human perfection’ (Richter, 1996, p. 114).
7 In the preface to his translation of Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, which was written at the same time, Hulme is more drawn to Sorel than to Proudhon (CW, p. 252).
8 Henry Ireton (1611-51) fought alongside Cromwell at Marston Moor and Newbury, and he commanded part of the Parliament’s army at Naseby. He argued against the Levellers during the Putney Debates.
9 These contradictory views already coexist uneasily in What is Property?, where Proudhon veers between two views of justice: that it is a social instinct (p. 174) and that it is an innate, pre-rational, and divinely inspired sentiment (p. 216).
10 For the conflict between Christianity and the mediations of speculative thought, see Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 378-81. In his conclusion, Kierkegaard asserts, ‘If a single concession is made to speculative thought with regard to beginning with the pure being, all is lost, and it is impossible to halt the confusion, since it must be halted within pure being’ (p. 603).
11 See Pascal: ‘Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched. Thus it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched’ (Pensées, 1995, p. 59, fragment 397).
12 Nietzsche, of course, considered the kind of metaphysical stance taken up by figures like Hulme as the product of dread: ‘out of fear and need each religion is born, creeping into existence on the byways of reason’. See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p. 79. Needless to say, Nietzsche’s alternative – the self-legislating individual – was precisely the position Hulme was reacting against. See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, p. 182.
13 Ferguson suggests that whereas initially Hulme picked out ‘the disturbing notion of original sin from its religious context’ in order to ‘wave it under the nose of an increasingly secular society that would have liked nothing better than to forget all about it’, by the time of ‘A Notebook’ he ‘had outgrown the need to provoke and his interest was both deeper and more personal’ (p. 119).
14 See Pascal, Pensées, 1995, pp. 58-9 (fragment 339). Kierkegaard, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, argued that the presence of a transcendent divinity was not ratifiable on rational grounds. And Karl Barth, influenced here by Kierkegaard, was also to insist on the absolute otherness of the deity: ‘If I have a system, it is limited to a recognition of what Kierkegaard called the “infinite qualitative distinction” between time and eternity, and to my regarding this as possessing negative as well as positive significance: “God in heaven, and thou on earth.”’ Quoted in Gary Dorrien, The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology, pp. 68-9.
15 See Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism.