Book Review: A Hedonist Manifesto by Michel Onfray

Ethics, Art and Knowledge are all subjects that can be seen to have a transcendental element. Each is capable of acquiring a religious tone, especially when they unconsciously replace the un-touchable figure of God with abstract notions of un-corrupted beauty, goodness or truth. Even in nominally secular pursuits there is often a desire for contact with something beyond the mundane and terrestrial: a desire for art that portrays an ideal form, ethics that could transcend human subjectivity or even knowledge that we can be certain to represent reality as it is.

This transcendental impulse is what Onfray takes to be the stumbling block of philosophy. From Plato's cave to Kant's Noumena and Phenomena, philosophers have been obsessed with attempts to reach beyond the material world. Onfray's alternative is to refocus on the here and now. To reject any transcendental claim that pulls us away from the material conditions of life. Drawing on Pre-Christian philosophers such as Epicurus and Diogenes the Cynic, Onfray pulls together thinkers who rebel against the transcendental impulse identified early on in his historiography of philosophy: though he later also incorporates the existential humanism of Nietzsche and hints at some of the themes in Camus in order to more fully situate his approach. The result is a philosophy that is concerned with, and exalts, the human experience and rejects any attempt to supersede our subjectivity.

The book is philosophically iconoclastic in a very exciting way. Onfray doesn't just sneer at the empty verbal gesticulations of arm-chair theorists, he works productively to identify new directions for philosophy. What's more he identifies precedents in philosophy's own history that could act as starting points for more hedonistic and concrete theorising. Onfray's case is extremely compelling, perhaps one of the reasons philosophy is often seen as an impotent practise, next to more scientific endeavours, is due its lack of material relevance Onfray identifies in this book. To quote Dawkins 'Science works'. The criteria for successful scientific research involves an improvement of our ability to control and impact the world: something which is often independent of any abstract truthiness.

Ultimately, 'A Hedonist Manifesto' is not just an appeal to refocus philosophy on human affairs but it is also a polemic in defence of hedonistic human relations. Onfray does not advocate for any particular form of utilitarianism but rather for an ethic of honour and kindness; an ethic which considers acts with the the thoughts, feelings and freedoms of other humans at its heart to be the highest good. An ethic which asserts, perhaps un-controversially, that the highest good is whatever pleases us best. Our moral responsibility is then not to God or History or any empty abstract talk of values but to each-other and we must interrogate norms and practises which suggest otherwise.

His closing suggestion for making this world a better one is decidedly humble, but perhaps this is in line with the books ethos. He advocates not for social revolution or mass immediate change, but for his readers to become 'Nomadic Epicurean Gardens'. Doing what they can to look after those around them and build pockets of micro-resistances to the boredom and tyranny of the world.

This is a far reaching book that does well to unify Onfray's critical look at our current, sorely limited, idea of what philosophy can be, with his more bold and hedonistic sensibilities. It's iconoclastic in a constructive way and subtly political in a way that is more humanistic than it is partisan. An important read for ethicists and lay people alike.

Brief Thoughts: Rousseau's Social Contract.

Rousseau's shadow history is that of an unwitting proto-apologist for 20th century authoritarianism. Considering this, how much of his work is salvageable from an anti-authoritarian standpoint?

To be clear, his idealism is frighteningly Orwellian. Most worrying is his concept of the sovereign will: a justification for a perfectly paternalistic government that enforces laws in the knowledge that, despite any individual protests, it really has everyone's interests at heart. The abstract notion of a perfect righteous governtment is itself not so troubling, more-so the fact that Rousseau thinks that such an institution is worth attempting to emulate in an imperfect concrete world. A quote by Vaclav Havel springs to mind:


"[There is] a direct and logical progression from beautiful utopias to concentration camps... [which are] ...but an attempt of utopians to dispose of those elements which do not fit into their utopias" - Havel quoted in John P. Clark's "The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism" p. 131.

However, to view The Social Contract from this angle alone neglects the other points in his work where Rousseau acts as a pre-configuration of later left libertarian ideas.

For all its naivety, the book contains a number of perspicacious observations which still prevail in contemporary political thought. For instance, the noted distinction between socially constructed civil liberty and the baser, more solipsistic, "natural liberty". This distinction, which is nonetheless considered by its detractors a pernicious one that foists too much work on the shoulders of liberty resulting only in perversion, has had an explicit influence on the work of participatory democrats and finds many other parallels in anarchist thought.  

Other notable themes of contemporary interest are Rousseau's delineations of  the economic and political conditions necessary for wide-spread direct democracy and his post-classical interpretation of democratic subjects. Radical egalitarians, especially those with a love of democratic institutions, have often been quick to emphasise the incompatibility of inequality of wealth with harmonious and stable democratic arrangements. This is true for both for participatory democrats and for anarchists: though anarchists don't often argue for the harmony of egalitarianism via an explicitly democratic teleology. 

The "post-classical democratic subject", typically a response invoked to explain humans who are ambivalent to increases in their own access to democracy and liberty, is present and considered here:

"Aristotle was right; but he mistook the effect for the cause. Anyone born in slavery is born for slavery - nothing is more certain. Slaves in their bondage, lose everything, even the desire to be free." Rousseau, The Social Contract p.51-52

And a call for a revision of the classical political subject, which Rousseau's analysis is an early answer to, is found in Saul Newman's "The Politics of Post-Anarchism":

The crucial question raised by Deleuze and Guattari - "how can desire desire its own repression...?" - confronts all radical politics with a central ambiguity. The classical anarchists were not unaware of this problem; indeed, Kropotkin attributes the rise of the modern state in part to people becoming "enamoured of authority" and to their self-enslavement to increasingly centralised systems of law and punishment. However, this problem, while acknowledged, was not sufficiently addressed or theorised in anarchism. Yet it creates certain obvious difficulties for anti-authoritarian politics, unsettling the notion of the moral and rational agent who revolts against an immoral and irrational power.  - Saul Newman in "The Politics of Post-Anarchism" p.60 

So despite their notoriety Rousseau's ideas still have some currency: or at least there are ideas in his political philosophy that are not so offensive that anti-authoritarians discard them out of hand. That said, how do we separate the libratory Rousseau from the tyrannical Rousseau? Where does the problem lie, precisely?

The primary culprit would seem to be his uncritical endorsement of majoratarianism vindicated through his abstract soveriegn will. Rousseau's trust in the sovereign will excludes the possibility of it being usurped by interest groups or becoming exploitative of persistent minorities. Perhaps possibilities of abstention and conscientious objection, along with a greater cynicism towards majoritarianism and the power structures of the state, could render him more palatable?

Indeed modern liberatory writers who adopt his ideas are often markedly unanimous in their avoidance of the problematic concept of sovereign will, even while borrowing from the rest of his political canon. It seems while Rousseau's rhetoric is in places an unfortunate overture to the brutal regimes of the last century, many anti-authoritarians still owe him a philosophical debt.