Optimism, pessimism and social science
Marx and Nietzsche are naturally seen as people who should not be grouped together. But is this really the case? Marx and Nietzsche are both preoccupied with the exact same problem, and they deal with it with equal rigour - namely the decline of the bourgeois-Christian world.
With the French and Industrial Revolutions the world-picture of Europe is shattered to pieces along with the social-economic framework underpinning it. From a society of estates a society of classes and individuals arises; from a world of Truth a multiplicity of perspectives emerges. History enters a phase of unprecedented dynamism. Marx and Nietzsche are preoccupied with the implications of this, but they each deal with their own side of the same coin. Marx dedicates himself to the study of the social and economic transformation and its consequences; Nietzsche with the psychological and spiritual consequences of the transformation which he is living through.
The question of the meaning of life and its future comes to the forefront, and with it the two main perspectives of optimism and pessimism. With man freed from the past, but the past still haunting him and the future being uncertain, the main problem of the 19th - and frankly also the 20th and 21st - centuries begins. This problem is twofold, namely: (1) the loss of any objective cultural form which unifies society, and (2) the psychological-spiritual crisis of the person living in a world which lacks an anchored form of transpersonal meaning.
With the grip of religion waning, and with socio-economic development giving birth to new social forms and social mobility, man is left to increasing subjectivity - man becomes increasingly a tabula rasa. The great triad of desire-means-end replaces the old Trinity. The contemplation of eternity is replaced by the contemplation of the moment of desire, of need, of want and of wish. But with social development the problems of scale, atomisation and perspective multiply, and the means to ends become ever more complex. With their increased complexity, the means increasingly become the primary object of consciousness. Instrumental thinking shapes perception, and existential-meaningful content slowly fades away. The chief enabler of this is technology and technicity.
In the face of this, Marx and Nietzsche remain optimists, but to different degrees. Schopenhauer is of course the man most associated with 19th century pessimism, and perhaps rightly so. But Schopenhauer in many ways also reflects the fundamentally inner condition of modern man - the constant yet unattainable yearning for meaning in the world of immanence. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics leaves no real room for any form of optimism. Nietzsche and Marx also hold metaphysics of their own, but they express it in a life-affirming moralism.
Despite this contrast between the three, one should still take into account the fact that the base assumption of Schopenhauer - despite his pessimistic prescriptive - is still the will, which is vitalistic. Nietzsche takes the vitalistic sentiments underpinning Schopenhauer and turns the life-denying endpoint of the latter’s philosophy into the life-affirming beginnings of his own. In the end, no matter whether one holds a pessimistic or optimistic view of the world, the main concern animating both views is the question of life itself. When the question of life is raised, the study of life comes to the fore, and this is precisely where social science comes in.
The question of life and its trajectory is what animates social science because it is realised that society is where man is made and realises himself. Thus in its original form, social science is concerned with life as it is. But as its studies grow ever more complex, it seeks the dynamisms behind how life unfolds; it studies the many forms that life can take. But the dualistic split between “Marx” and “Nietzsche” is untenable, and it dawns on us that life is a structural whole. An early fusion of Marx and Nietzsche can be found in Wilhelm Dilthey and his Lebensphilosophie which sought to address the dualism. It is through the bridging figure of Dilthey that social science takes off and it does so through the melancholic pair of Georg Simmel and Max Weber.
With them, a holistic social science comes into being. Social science reaches its proper form with Simmel and Weber because they realised that society cannot be separated from culture, and culture cannot be comprehended without history, and history cannot be understood without a clear conception of what man is. It is the study of historical, secularised man in its totality, with a full view of all his desires, strivings, actions and toil. Social science shattered every idyllic and utopian picture of man, because it encountered him at his most bare.
Written by Armfelt (@archipelag0_man
