[D66] “Misanthropy in the Age of Reason”

[René Oudeweg]

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Misanthropy in the Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to 
Schiller


  Tragic Revolutionary Comic Figures: On Joseph Harris’s “Misanthropy in
  the Age of Reason”

May 26, 2023   •   By Ian Ellison 
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/ian-ellison>

12–16 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

“PEOPLE ARE RENDERED ferocious by misery; and misanthropy is ever the 
offspring of discontent,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1794 defense 
of the French Revolution. What some had condemned as the violent 
excesses of the revolution Wollstonecraft defended as an extreme 
reaction by the degraded French population. This was, she argued, a 
direct result of the actions of the despotic Ancien Régime. At the time, 
the term /misanthropy/ was a relatively new coinage. It emerged in 
common usage as an invented word-for-word translation from the Greek 
/μῖσος/ (mísos, “hatred”) and /ἄνθρωπος/ (ánthrōpos, “man”). Over 
subsequent centuries, however, misanthropy became almost banally 
ubiquitous. Do we really hate each other that much?

Europe in the 18th century witnessed a period of vast intellectual 
development and social progress in numerous respects. In other words—the 
Enlightenment. Writers at the time increasingly felt that they had a 
social vocation, a moral obligation to spread certain virtues and ideals 
of tolerance, humanity, reason, nature, and emotion. But perhaps 
inevitably—and unsurprisingly—some of these ideas and their proponents 
came into conflict with each other.

Many writers of the time came to see the theater as a privileged medium 
for communicating their ideas to a large audience. Plays of this period 
were often didactic performances that gradually enlightened their 
audiences, shedding light on the injustices and intolerances of society. 
This process also occurs on a micro level within the works themselves. 
Sometimes there are characters who, over the course of the plot, are 
progressively enlightened. Not only do they become aware of issues 
surrounding them, but they also possibly grow conscious of the 
prejudices and intolerances at work in themselves.

Numerous plays from the so-called Age of Reason successfully manage to 
demonstrate some of the problems inherent in the process of 
enlightenment itself. Typically, comedies from this period are named 
after the butt of the joke. But rather than cruelly satirizing the 
Jewish people, as the title might lead an audience to expect, Gotthold 
Lessing’s play /The Jews/ (1749), for instance, is in fact a politically 
motivated attack on antisemitism. Lessing sympathetically argues for 
religious and societal tolerance, highlighting how antisemitism is 
harmful to its proponents as well as its targets. In Charles Palissot’s 
hugely successful and scandalous 1760 play /The Philosophes/, moreover, 
public intellectual figures traditionally associated with the 
Enlightenment—à la Diderot, Rousseau, or Voltaire—come in for a 
satirical drubbing. Certainly, these plays suggest, it’s a noble idea to 
try and spread enlightened reason to the masses. But if people aren’t 
interested, or are too entrenched in their own beliefs, then you might 
need another strategy of persuasion. Enter the misanthrope.

Here he comes (for it is almost always he), shambling on stage, face 
a-grimace, fist a-shake, eyes aglare. He seems, from our contemporary 
vantage point, perhaps little more than a cliché. A proto-online-troll 
or gammon. Yet, as with Enlightenment theater productions, there are 
degrees of complexity and nuance. Different forms of misanthropy have 
shifting relationships to phenomena such as contempt, paranoia, 
melancholy, and pessimism. Joseph Harris’s new book/Misanthropy in the 
Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to Schiller/ considers 
manifestations of this character—the hater of humanity, of people—in 
European theater during a period roughly from the late Renaissance up to 
the turn of the 19th century. The book has a particular focus on the 
17th and 18th centuries and brings together what is truly a wealth of 
insightful material from the English, French, German, and Italian 
speaking worlds. Citing Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Jonathan Swift, 
Giacomo Leopardi, and a host of other noncanonical writers, Harris 
reveals how the misanthrope is far from a cliché or stock character in 
early modern literature. Misanthropy is an attitude, even a pose, that 
is both emotional and intellectual with its own inherent paradoxes. 
“While it condemns the vices of others, it also risks becoming the worst 
vice of all,” Harris notes. Hating humanity comes in many guises, “from 
philosopher to comic grouch, from tragic hero to moral censor, from 
cynical villain to disappointed idealist, from quasi-bestial outsider to 
worldly satirist.” And the story is far from the linear one that the 
book’s subtitle might imply.

The archetypal misanthropes of this period are Timon of Athens (the 
subject of a Shakespeare play written around 1606 that turned out to be 
neither particularly popular nor very successful) and Molière’s play 
/The Misanthrope/ from 1666. The two characters of Timon and Alceste 
(Molière’s titular misery guts) serve as figureheads for different 
models of hating humanity. According to ancient Greek myth, Timon is 
apparently based on a real person, though this is difficult to confirm. 
In any case, the story goes that he has retreated from Athens after 
being fleeced by people who were supposed to be his friends. After they 
bankrupt him, he goes off to live in the desert, or in the wilderness, 
or in a forest, depending on which version of the story you read. 
Subsequently, Timon rejects and shuns all of humanity, hurling abuse—and 
sometimes rocks—at anyone who dares to approach. Molière’s version of 
the misanthrope from roughly 50 years later, however, is a far more 
urbane character, albeit also based on a real person. What is most 
intriguing is that, for the majority of the play, Alceste elects to 
remain within a society that he professes to hate.

Shakespeare constructs Timon as a tragic figure, someone who dies by the 
end of the final act (though it’s never quite made clear what causes him 
to perish), as his hatred of the world expands until he ends up hating 
not just all of humanity but the entire cosmos as well. Ultimately, for 
Timon, the entire universe is a collapsing morass that is debased and 
savage. Molière, on the other hand, attempts to make the misanthrope 
into a figure of comedy. In his hands, Alceste becomes a hypocrite who 
hates society but is far too attached to it to leave it entirely. By 
doing this, as Harris argues, Molière ends up sundering two dramatic 
moments that in Shakespeare’s play basically occur simultaneously: a 
character’s transformation into a misanthrope and their final decision 
to leave society altogether. Whereas this happens at the outset in 
/Timon of Athens/, it’s only at the very conclusion of /The Misanthrope 
/that Molière’s character leaves society definitively. What these two 
plays nonetheless have in common is that they end with—or, at least, 
they chart the progression of—someone choosing to remove themselves from 
their society.

By the 18th century, ideals of friendship and sociability were becoming 
hugely important in theatrical work. Many plays from this time start by 
following characters who have abandoned their fellow man, characters who 
live cut off and remotely, as they are brought back into society. Their 
misanthropy is progressively dismantled or disproved—cured, in certain 
ways. These works trace the misanthropic character’s reconciliation to 
society. In fact, as Harris’s study shows, various writers—including 
Friedrich Schiller and the Marquis de Sade—produced sequels to Molière’s 
play roughly a century after it was first written and performed. In 
certain cases, such plays bring the character of Alceste progressively 
back into having sympathy of sorts, even friendship, with humanity. Some 
of these sequels even see him married off. Although Molière’s original 
play was billed as a comedy and audiences would have been expecting a 
happy ending of marriage (/The Taming of the Shrew/, /A Midsummer 
Night’s Dream/, and /Twelfth Night/ each conclude with not just one but 
three weddings, after all), it is a fairly bleak example of the genre. 
Molière instead delegates wedded bliss to some of the secondary 
characters. The later sequels to /The Misanthrope /sought instead to 
offer a more conventional degree of happy closure to Molière’s more 
unconventional original play.

Speaking of theatrical convention—one of the things that really 
fascinates in Harris’s study is how misanthropy does not seem to fit 
into either comedy or tragedy as a genre. This is not unlike the 
misanthrope character, who “[a]s both critic of humanity and object of 
critical scrutiny […] challenges straightforward oppositions between 
individual and society, virtue and vice, reason and folly, human and 
animal.” Molière’s comedy on the misanthrope is so much darker and more 
serious than many of his other comedies, and Shakespeare’s /Timon of 
Athens/ is one of his most satirically biting tragedies as well. There 
seems to be something richly complex and subtle within misanthropy as a 
theme that makes it difficult to pigeonhole. This might help to explain 
why at the very end of the 18th century, when playwrights were exploring 
new sentimental dramatic genres that were neither tragic nor comic, 
misanthropy suddenly started to flourish. By the early 19th century, as 
Harris notes, “the misanthrope re-emerges as a figure of (often 
unrepentant) savagery and cruelty,” the specter of Timon returning to 
usurp Alceste’s sophisticated urbanity, yet exceeding the bounds of 
being a template this time: “[M]isanthropy may still be alive and well, 
and indeed thriving in various new forms and manifestations, but its two 
early modern archetypes have finally lost their conceptual stranglehold 
over it.”

And what about now, a few centuries later? Where are today’s 
misanthropes? Is it those at the head of multinational corporations, 
plundering the planet’s resources at the expense of its workers and 
citizens, that hate their fellow humans? Reclusive, vain, and 
self-important billionaires blasting themselves towards the stars? Or 
those denouncing them from below, younger generations who have had the 
odds stacked against them since before they were born? Those of us who 
are so wired into our devices that we neglect to realize there is 
scarcely a society left to retreat from? At times, it can feel like we 
are all complicit in a collective act of species self-loathing. This 
isn’t new, though: in the latter half of the 1700s, Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau argued that, as Harris puts it, “humans do not only feel an 
undeserved collective pride over other species; individually too, humans 
tend to exhibit a similarly undeserved scornful superiority over their 
peers, in ways that might suggest that misanthropy is actually the norm 
rather than the exception.”

Following up her diagnosis of misanthropy as the result of the people’s 
discontent, Mary Wollstonecraft declared:

Let not then the happiness of one half of mankind be built on the misery 
of the other, and humanity will take place of charity, and all the 
ostentatious virtues of an universal aristocracy. How, in fact, can we 
expect to see men live together like brothers, when we only see master 
and servant in society? For till men learn mutually to assist without 
governing each other, little can be done by political associations 
towards perfecting the condition of mankind.

In times like these, this can still seem far off. As Wollstonecraft 
later acknowledged, “it is perhap[s] difficult to bring ourselves to 
believ[e] that out of this chaotic mass a fairer government is rising 
than has ever shed the sweets of social life on the world. […] But 
things must have time to find their level.” The question for us today 
is, surely, how much time is needed, or indeed left available? Can 
hating humanity still be a quasi-theatrical, even performative, form of 
instruction? Does it get us anywhere?

Speculative fiction author China Miéville seems to think so. In his 
polemical 2022 book /A //Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto/, 
Miéville calls for misanthropy as a revolutionary force. “Against the 
rolling eyes of the know-all cynic, we should retain our shock at those 
litanies of iniquity capitalism throws up,” he writes. “That they 
provoke in us an appropriate, human, humane response, the fury of 
solidarity, the loathing of such unnecessary suffering. Who would we be 
not to hate this system, and its partisans?” These days, misanthropy is 
on all sides. But to effect change, it must be focused, targeted, no 
longer the blanket loathing of yesteryear, lest we end up sounding like 
some kind of politically radicalized Agent Smith (“Human beings are a 
disease, a cancer of this planet”). “We should feel hate beyond words, 
and bring it to bear,” Miéville exhorts his readers. “This is a system 
that, whatever else, deserves implacable hatred for its countless and 
escalating cruelties.” Under the savagery of our contemporary 
misanthropic system, we have forgotten, or elsewise managed to unlearn, 
how to be relational beings. Perhaps it’s time for hatred to come out of 
the theaters and into the streets.

¤

/Ian Ellison is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Kent 
and the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He was short-listed for the 2023 
Peirene Stevns Translation Prize and his book /Late Europeans and 
Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium/(2022) is out now./ 
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/ian-ellison/>
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