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<p class="text-center text-xl text-black
dark:text-gray-600 text-opacity-100">Misanthropy in the
Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to
Schiller</p>
<h1 class="m-0 mt-8 text-black dark:text-white
font-semibold text-4xl sm:text-5xl leading-tight p-0 m-0
md:pr-16">Tragic Revolutionary Comic Figures: On Joseph
Harris’s “Misanthropy in the Age of Reason”</h1>
<p class="py-1 m-0 mt-2 text-larb-gray dark:text-gray-600
text-opacity-50 text-lg sm:text-2xl leading-tight">May
26, 2023 • By <a class="hover:text-larb-red
hover:underline"
href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/ian-ellison"
title="">Ian Ellison</a></p>
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<p>“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 <em>misanthropy</em>
was a relatively new coinage. It emerged in common usage
as an invented word-for-word translation from the Greek
<em>μῖσος</em> (mísos, “hatred”) and <em>ἄνθρωπος</em>
(ánthrōpos, “man”). Over subsequent centuries, however,
misanthropy became almost banally ubiquitous. Do we
really hate each other that much?</p>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
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.</p>
<p>
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 <em>The Jews</em>
(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 <em>The Philosophes</em>,
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.</p>
<p>
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<em> Misanthropy in
the Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to
Schiller</em> 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.</p>
<p>
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 <em>The
Misanthrope</em> 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.</p>
<p>
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 <em>Timon
of Athens</em>, it’s only at the very conclusion of <em>The
Misanthrope </em>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.</p>
<p>
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 (<em>The Taming of the Shrew</em>, <em>A
Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>, and <em>Twelfth Night</em>
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 <em>The
Misanthrope </em>sought instead to offer a more
conventional degree of happy closure to Molière’s more
unconventional original play.</p>
<p>
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 <em>Timon of
Athens</em> 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.”</p>
<p>
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.”</p>
<p>
Following up her diagnosis of misanthropy as the result
of the people’s discontent, Mary Wollstonecraft
declared:</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>
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?</p>
<p>
Speculative fiction author China Miéville seems to think
so. In his polemical 2022 book <em>A </em><em>Spectre,
Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto</em>, 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.</p>
<p>¤</p>
<p><a
href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/ian-ellison/"><em>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 </em>Late
Europeans and Melancholy Fiction at the Turn of the
Millennium<em> (2022) is out now.</em></a></p>
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