Sex Is Not a Metaphor: the Politics of the Modern Self
Carl Trueman has written an important book that accomplishes three interrelated tasks, any one of which would have been impressive by itself. In the first part of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, Trueman draws together the arguments of Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, and, to a lesser extent, Alasdair MacIntyre to make the case that the modern self should be understood in terms of “expressive individualism.” In the second and third parts, he follows Taylor’s example in giving us a genealogy of expressive individualism that begins with the Romantics and culminates in the odd synthesis of Marxist and Freudian theory. Here, he explains how expressive individualism was initially formulated and advanced and, further, he suggests how it came to “triumph.” Finally, in the book’s fourth part, he surveys the political questions involving sex and identity that have overtaken public debate and the courts in recent decades.
Trueman begins with a remark likely to intrigue many and irritate many more:
The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.”
With this sentence, a book that proposes to serve as a disinterested guide to the thought of three major contemporary philosophers seems to be pitched in the language of the “culture wars.” As political writers such as Michael Lind and Thomas Frank have argued, from a certain perspective, the “culture wars” was a phenomenon on the American right that advanced a rapacious global capitalism and sought to distract the lower classes’ hurt by that economic regime by exciting them with the red meat of so-called social or cultural issues: sex, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and more sex. Such a perspective is, in a basic sense, Marxist: the real political questions are those governing economic and class structure; all the rest is mere epiphenomenon or “superstructure,” a passion-inflaming diversion for the simple minded to prevent them from becoming conscious of their real—that is to say, class—interest.
On Trueman’s telling, this Marxist analysis is not merely contemptuous and condescending—it is entirely wrong. Wrong, he writes, not because economic questions are secondary, while cultural issues are primary, and not because such a classic Marxist analysis has nothing to say for itself. It is wrong precisely because any honest account of modern social history will reveal that the Marxists themselves were quick to embrace Freudian theories of human sexuality. In doing so, they translated Marx’s concern for liberation in terms of class and material conditions into the realm of human sexuality and psychological freedom from “repression.” If the conservative politics of recent decades have often seemed to focus on questions of sexual identity and freedom, the left was there long before and in fact set the terms of debate.
Trueman’s thesis is that this transformation of politics was a late but determinative stage in the transformation of the modern person’s understanding of the self from an externally determined reality to an internally determined one. Where once human beings understood their selves as socially-given and defined in terms of outward function or telos, contemporary persons think of themselves in terms of an “identity” that is internally derived from feelings and whose only function is to be authentic. The self exists to be true to itself, and it can only be so insofar as it sloughs off the heteronomous influences of society. The unhappy result is that “we are all expressive individuals now.”
Trueman begins by summarizing three major thinkers on the intellectual conditions of the modern age, each of whom has authored a distinctive vocabulary to describe that age even as their vision arrives at something of a consensus. Philip Rieff (1922-2006) stands out as the most important of these three for Trueman’s argument. Rieff offered a critical genealogy of selfhood, and the outsized influence of Sigmund Freud upon it, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). There, he proposed that human beings went through a series of successive self-understandings: man as “political” (as in Aristotle), man as “religious” (as in Augustine), man as “economic” (as in John Locke), and finally, man as “psychological” (as in Freud). Human self-definition has nadired, one might say, in an entirely internal sense of one’s feelings; human life therefore becomes governed by a regime of “therapy,” of efforts to manage those feelings for their maximum, healthy satisfaction. In his posthumous trilogy, beginning with My Life Among the Deathworks (2006), Rieff argues that the solipsism of psychological man transforms the world beyond the skull. Whereas earlier civilizations submitted to a sacred order such that their cultures became the social interpretation and expression of the sacred, psychological man denies that there is any sacred order to be obeyed or expressed. The result is not a culture but an anti-culture, a condition where every reference to the transcendent is rebelled against and denied. “Deathworks” are those acts of the anti-culture that tear down all reference to the sacred, liberating us from everything but our selves.
Trueman senses that such terms as “psychological man” and “anti-culture” are too categorical for the tastes of the contemporary historian, who sees history not as a grand narrative but as a contingent, inconsistent, and nuanced unfolding of overlapping tendencies. He therefore turns to Charles Taylor, whose intricate genealogical studies, Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007), echo Rieff but in a subtler key. The upshot is the same: Taylor believes the modern self is an “expressive individualist,” a “buffered self” to be detached from outside influences and who presumes the aim of life is to find one’s own authentic self and give it expression.
Trueman turns also to Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) is a work as ambitious as those of Rieff and Taylor, but it plays a subordinate role for Trueman. MacIntyre helps define the ethical theory of expressive individualism as “emotivism.” By this, MacIntyre means the basic modern assumption that all moral claims are founded in a taste or feeling. That is, all “evaluative judgments” are “nothing but expressions of preference.” As Thomas Hobbes first put it, to say “good” means nothing more than “I like it.” MacIntyre’s recovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics also helps to clarify the impoverishment of “psychological man” and “expressive individualism.” Modern persons can envision no end besides the realization of their own preferences. They therefore cannot accept their formation by a particular community, their playing of a particular role, or their determination to a specified end as their good as anything other than irrational suppositions and oppressive impositions.
From the book’s front matter, one gathers that Trueman sought chiefly to draw these three thinkers together to clarify and synthesize the consensus vision of the modern person they offer. But the great value of the book lies in how Trueman develops their thinking with a history of his own. That history begins in Trueman’s recapitulation of familiar accounts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s sentimentalism and anti-social idealization of the “noble savage,” and of the Romantic poets who followed him. What he says there is largely uncontroversial but nonetheless helpful. Rousseau was the most important of many modern thinkers to reduce morality to the sentiments. Rousseau reduced sentiment to the conscience or natural feeling that is uncorrupted by society’s “artificial” influences. The Romantics popularized this sentimental moralism.
That said, Trueman speaks of Rousseau’s morality as “aesthetic” insofar as it relies on one’s natural “taste” or feeling. He is correct to say that Rousseau reduces aesthetics to taste, but not in saying that Rousseau is distinctive in reducing morality to aesthetics. The classical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle onward, understands morality in terms of beauty. Rousseau’s dubious contribution lies in his reduction of the beautiful to a sentiment. The consequences for moral theory follow from there.
Trueman’s narrative also pays no mind to the deep social character of the early Romantics, and this is a mistake. William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge celebrate the individual person as a spiritual entity but consistently do so because it is only as souls that we can enter into the life of the world and the life of community. Their inspiration would drive the Oxford movement in its opposition to liberalism, the ancestor of expressive individualism. But Wordsworth and Coleridge were outliers insofar as the general thrust of Romanticism was, as John Middleton Murry put it more than a century later, that individuals must “depend upon the inner voice.”
Trueman also gives an equally familiar, but helpfully synthesized, account of Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin as the great underminers of belief in human nature. If human beings have no essential form and no final cause or function that follows from it, then they are “plastic” beings who may become the authors of themselves and who may appoint their own ends, choose their own life’s good, by force of will. Following Rieff, Trueman reserves special place for Freud as paving the way for this theory of “human plasticity.” For, while Marx advocated for revolution and class war and Nietzsche for individual self-assertion, Freud thought of the self as something to be managed for the maximalization of the pleasure principle. Therapy was the new means by which psychological man would be remolded for the sake of managing sexual desire.
As Trueman reminds us, Marx and Freud should, in principle, seem incompatible figures. The most important achievement of this volume is its showing us how they were made compatible and how the resultant synthesis of Marx and Freud would come to dominate our politics. When the English poet and critic W.H. Auden began publishing in the late 1920s, his work was unusual in its drawing together of Marxist and Freudian theory. The “hard-headed” analysis of Marxist historical materialism seemed incongruous with the individualistic materialism and dubious science of Freud’s modern psychology. The true revolution was collective and objective, not interior and emotional, said his critics. What Auden drew together in the manner of a dilettante others would unite with dogmatic force. The apparent incongruity would disappear very soon. Trueman introduces us to such figures as Antonio Gramsci, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. Their writings had the effect of transforming the class-based analysis and concern for the liberation of the proletariat of classical Marxism into a Freudian concern with sexual liberation from bourgeois hang-ups. The dictatorship of the proletariat all but disappeared; the Brave New World where “everyone belongs to everyone else,” and where even the young could engage in “erotic play,” appeared somewhere on the horizon of historical necessity.
For the New Left, sexual liberation became the chief aim of the revolution. It is not uncommon in modern literature and film to find an essentially liberationist narrative, in which sexual freedom seems like a metaphor for, a mere symbol of, a larger, grander vision of human freedom in general. As Trueman suggests, some of these late Marxists merely integrated the Freudian pleasure principle with their concern for the socialist revolution. But the long-term effect was the total replacement of concern for class and material conditions with the drive to liberate the “identity” of the individual, so that it may find expression. Because the individual is understood in terms of interior feelings, and sexual desire is an irreducibly, ineradicably strong instance of such feelings, leftist politics came to be concerned with sex and sexual identity and nothing else. Sex is not a metaphor for freedom; sex is the revolution.
We see this in the final part of Trueman’s history. There, we find otherwise respectable bourgeois and, indeed, extremely wealthy people fighting for their own “liberation” through the decriminalization of sodomy or the recognition of homosexual marriage. Our politics has been reduced to a battle between oppressive conservatives harboring irrational “animus,” and the revolutionaries and liberators who would add letter after letter to the ever-expanding acronym of sexual identities.
Trueman leaves us in a disconcerting position. On the one hand, many of us oppose these changes to society, morality, and the law. On the other hand, he claims, we are so thoroughly steeped in modern “expressive individualism” that we lack the resources to offer rational resistance. The burden of his volume, it would seem, is to make visible the genealogy of an idea. Like such genealogical social critics of the last century as Michel Foucault, Trueman suggests that if we can stand outside of a social transformation and see its contingency—the way certain choices were made, ideas and conditions converged, the way events just shook out one way or another—we may also be able to resist and even reverse its power. But this can be no more than a suggestion. The history he gives us describes a total victory for “expressive individualism.” Someone may speak, with MacIntyre, of incommensurable moral theories, but what the majority will hear is irrationality and animus. One wonders that there is anyone left who might read this book and recoil in disgust at the ideas it brings to light.
James Matthew Wilson is the director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston. His most recent book is The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020).