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Abstract
The classic studies of the authoritarian personality imply that free‐and‐just societies would need a different kind of personality. Social structure and personality are interdependent. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts but the nature of the parts is not irrelevant. Without a truly utopian world, we have to guess at what such personalities would look like—an important, often neglected insight of Marx. So we look for hints in a less‐than‐perfect world. Towards that end novelists have offered, intentionally and unintentionally, certain indices or codes of the kind of personality necessary for a just world. Kazantzakis’ Zorba is one such hint, as seen in his autonomy, manifested most importantly in his anti‐nationalism. In Zorba we see that community is possible where he has become “free” (rejection of nationalism, etc.); it is not possible where he is not “free” (vis‐à‐vis women). The paradox is that the just society needs autonomous personalities. Crudely put, real human community might require personalities who do not need it.
Notes
Anton Jacobs teaches Western Thought at the Kansas City Art Institute and pastors a Presbyterian/UCC church in Kansas City, KS. His Ph.D. is in sociology from the University of Notre Dame.
Since the Enlightenment, it has been customary to imply by the phrase free society both free, in the sense of civil/human liberties, and just. J.S. Mill argued that rights and justice are fundamentally linked. “Justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right” (CitationMill, 2001, p.50). This is not an unreasonable practice, but we could theoretically make a distinction between a free and a just society. Such a distinction could, then, in some contexts justify curbing liberties in the name of egalitarianism (i.e., justice), which is why, I presume, that Rawls is so insistent on liberty as the principle of highest priority in the just society (CitationRawls, 2001, pp.46‐47). At times, I will make use of the hyphenated free‐and‐just society.
It seems that interest in the relationship between personality and social structure has been eclipsed by several trends. The advances in genetics research and bio‐engineering have shifted much of the focus to the nature‐vs.‐nurture debate. The postmodern turn, with its dismissal of grand theories—what Lyotard (Citation1984) calls “metanarratives”—also shifted the focus away from the examination of whole societies for their consequences for the individual personality. Even those, like Habermas, who have continued to carry the Enlightenment hope, have followed another trend, the linguistic turn, so that instead of personality structure, the focus is on communicative structures (CitationHabermas, 1981).
CitationFriedrich Nietzsche, in Ecce Homo: “Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear” (1967b, p. 261). Kazantzakis was strongly influence by the thought of Nietzsche.
Kazantzakis studied with Henri Bergson and was an avid student of Friedrich Nietzsche. Zorba was also inspired by a man named Zorbas whom Kazantzakis worked with during a mining venture around 1917 (see CitationBien 1960, Kim 1960). I use the gender neutral “higher human” for Nietzsche’s Übermensch as opposed to the more usual “overman.” Nietzsche was anything but gender neutral. However, the German permits the political civility of higher human. Mensch, although a masculine noun, carries the neutral meaning of person, and Nietzsche also speaks of höhere Menschen which can be translated “higher persons/human beings/men” (see Nietzsche, Citation1967a, pp. 746‐754).