De Tocqueville on democratic despotism

     I wish to imagine under what new features despotism might appear in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.  Each of them, living apart, is almost unaware of the destiny of all the rest.  His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the human race; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he stands alongside them but does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself; if he still retains his family circle, at any rate he may be said to have lost his country.

     Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny.[1]

De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II (1840).

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[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003) p. 805. For further details see Volume II, Part 4, chapter 6: “What sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”.

Dostoyevsky and Trump

The following selection is from Part One, section 8 of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground.  A careful reading of all of Part One is highly recommended, as it reveals how Dostoyevsky resists the entire Greek tradition since Plato which Nietzsche later develops.  Could Dostoyevsky’s critique of reason and his emphasis on the Will help explain Donald Trump’s populist presidency and anti-Western bias?
    

     Yes, but that’s just where the snag is for me! Gentlemen, please excuse me for carrying my philosophizing to such absurd lengths – forty years underground, after all!  Let me give my fancy free rein.  You see, gentlemen, reason is a good thing that can’t be disputed, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s intellectual abilities, while volition is a manifestation of the whole of life, I mean the whole of human life including both reason and speculation.  And although in this manifestation life frequently turns out to be rubbishy, all the same it is life and not merely the extraction of a square root.  After all, I, for example, quite naturally want to live so as to fulfil my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy simply and solely my intellectual capacity, which is only one-twentieth of my whole capacity for living.  What does reason know?  Reason knows only what it has succeeded in finding out (and perhaps there are some things it will never find out; there may be no consolation in this idea, but why not express it?), but man’s nature acts as one whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or unconscious, and although it is nonsensical, yet it lives. … In short, anything can be said of world history, anything conceivable even by the most disordered imagination.  There is only one thing you can’t say – that it had anything to do with reason. …

     Ah, gentlemen, what will have become of our wills when everything is graphs and arithmetic, and nothing is valid but two and two make four?  Two and two will make four without any will of mine!  Is that what one’s own will means?[1]

Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864).

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[1] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, tr. and intro. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin, 1972), pp.35-39.