The Inhumanist John Gray

The Spiked! review begins promisingly with a favorite quote from G. K. Chesterton and goes on to take apart the “inhumanism” of philosopher John Gray’s The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. Anthony McCarthy writes, after quoting Gray’s “When truth is at odds with meaning, it is meaning that wins,” a sentence he points out is meaningless:

This assertion comes after an excursus into the nature of myth and is followed by several pages of praise for Sigmund Freud who, Gray says, taught us to live without consolation, be it religious or a quasi-religious faith in ‘progress’. It is difficult to know what to make of this section in light of the words which end it, seemingly influenced by the poet Wallace Stephens: ‘Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves.’

Knowing there is nothing opens us up to . . . that same nothing? One does not have to hold that hope is a virtue – for some indeed, one of the great theological virtues – to see this as perverse. The idea that in our lives we can make rational choices which fulfil our nature and allow us to flourish as the kind of beings we are helps us to understand that we can also make choices which gradually reduce who we are and move us towards emptiness and nothingness — evil choices, if you will.

In the above passage, nothingness is embraced, being rejected, truth discarded. Rationality, order, goodness, logos — apparently we ‘know’ (and what does it mean to ‘know’ in this mindset?) they are ‘nothing of substance’. That Gray contradicts himself with every purposeful sentence he writes seems not to concern him (but what’s the use of concern anyway, on Gray’s view?).

“Progress” seems to mean not exactly progress but simply what most of us would have thought basic humanism: that the world has meaning and that man is a good if flawed thing. Man doesn’t have to get better for that to remain true. Gray proposals a kind of live in the moment philosophy — and be silent like the animals rather than speak as if your words meant something — though why live at all is the question his argument leads one to ask. The book has been much praised nevertheless.

My thanks to Prufrock for the link.