Oddbjørn Johannessen, "Det autoritære og ‘svikerne’: et kortfattet studie med utgangspunkt i skuespillet Semmelweis. Sørlandsk magasin no. 7 (1991), 50-53. ©1991 by Oddbjørn Johannessen. Used by permission. English translation ©1998 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer.
Jens Bjørneboe's authorship embraces practically the whole field of belletristic genres: poetry, prose, drama. At his best he was also a glittering essayist. When I add that his artistic career began at the easel, we have a quick sketch of his all-roundedness.
A brief sweep over Bjørneboe's whole production would perforce have to be very superficial. It contains so much. For this little study I have therefore chosen a narrower focus: a closer examination of one of Bjørneboe's central thematic areas -- his view of authoritarianism and the role of the "traitor." The study's point of departure is the play Semmelweis (1968), about the doctor who discovered the cause of childbed fever, and who fought his lonely fight for this discovery.
In the foreword to the play Bjørneboe says: "None of the forms of society we know today has managed to break with the authority principle. Within these societal forms we find the dictatorial structure at its most cultivated within the churches, the military, the political parties, the university- and school system, and above all in the judicial system and its branches, the prosecuting authorities and the police." If one were to draw conclusions from this quote, it would be natural to interpret the Bjorneboesque authority principle as an almost formal one—linked to institutional status systems in the society. Earlier in the same foreword, however, he talks about the authoritarian person who has obedience as the highest virtue, and who "only feels safe and protected as long as he himself is kicked from above and can himself kick downwards." Here, then, he is speaking of an authority principle which is caused by psychological relations, something which is underscored by a third quote: "... almost all that the world has seen of evil is tied to authoritarian personalities' will to exercise power over others—in all areas of life."
Compared with, e.g., a Marxist understanding, we can then agree that Bjørneboe operates with a "broadened" concept of authority: The authoritarian principle is linked both to institutional conditions in society and to psychological realities in the individual. That psychological realities can theoretically reflect realities in the society is of course no alien idea to Bjørneboe: "In all my books the concept of false authority is linked with the problem of evil." And in addition to the problem of authority, "the problem of evil" is indeed a red thread in Jens Bjørneboe's writings. Wickedness is due both to demonic and to social forces. There are thus, broadly speaking, two factors which stand in the way of human freedom: 1. Man's indwelling evil. 2. The capitalist / Leninist (in short: authoritarian) social order.
Starting from this discussion of concepts, I will maintain that in the drama the author's intent is twofold:
1. To attack historically determined forms of authority.
2. To illustrate the authority principle itself as a reducible result of human nature's
inherent wickedness.
Here we touch on a tension which haunts Bjørneboe's writings: the tension between "an introverted, metaphysical attitude on the one hand and an active, extroverted political stance on the other."
The target of the first intention must be to abolish such authority forms, while the second concerns a timeless principle which can not be eradicated, but which through consciousness-raising can be reduced. Yet the two are interdependent: "One cannot organize a society aright before one knows what a human being is." This assertion of Bjørneboe's would indicate that he considers it essential to define human nature in order to clear away its negative expressions—in other words: Intention 1 has intention 2 as a precondition.
So there is no necessary contradiction between aiming the searchlight at timeless forces and combatting their historically determined manifestations. To insist on such a contradiction would be tantamount to maintaining that since evil is an integral part of human nature, it is vain to try to combat evil at all—and that in my view would be philosophical suicide.
Given Bjørneboe's background in an anthroposophical understanding of the world it is not unreasonable to assume that he believed in an evolution and ennobling of human nature itself. In that case there is no opposition at all between what I have called intentions 1 and 2.
In a letter to Kaj Skagen (reprinted in Arken, April 1981) Bjørneboe expresses himself thus: "For 24 years I have filled my soul with world history's worst manifestations of evil. It has been 24 years wandering on foot through hell. Now the job is done, and I'm a free man again. I have seen Satan with my own eyes in these long years, and now I see the pervasive force which sustains the whole—which permeates the solar system and my own interior—and which fills both the individual human life and all of human history with meaning. Every single person must meet himself, i.e. his own innermost spiritual core and I. Humanity must go through the same process, forward to a way of living on this planet which will make possible a true life of the spirit."
Now of course one cannot generalize too broadly from a single passage in a random letter, but seen against the background of Bjørneboe's earlier anthroposophical engagement, the utterance is decidedly interesting. Drawing such a parallel between the spiritual actualization of the individual and humanity's development need not by any means conflict with the fight against authoritarian manifestations. That this fight is in the first instance an individual process Bjørneboe has underscored several times, e.g. in the essay "The Traitor". One must first and foremost be true to oneself and one's own destiny—not to others' thoughts, because "it is a bad pupil who is always faithful to his teachers." (A quote he has taken from Nietzsche.) One must in other words think for oneself. Semmelweis is such an individual, "as all truly anti-authoritarian people are": He "does not believe in anything in the world for which he himself has not seen the proof." It is only those who in his way betray the collective to be true to their own I, who are able to drive the world forward—so to speak move humanity toward freedom.
Elsewhere in the abovementioned essay Bjørneboe says that "all progress, all development, all culture, all freedom, is due to such traitors. It is due to individuals' having betrayed the interests of their group and chosen a larger yardstick." The goal of this "larger yardstick" is absolutely not the salvation of the individual—but rather the cause of freedom for all humanity, as opposed to that of the group.
The more people who in this sense become "traitors"—and are thus in a position to observe the collective from without and unmask its destructive tendencies—the faster society too will be able to move away from the authority principle. However, the human being is split and "himself participates on both sides of the eternal war between the collective and the dissenter: One part of him—the best—belongs to the individual, to himself, his actual, thinking I. Another part of him—the biggest—belongs to the mass, mass opinions, mass feelings. And with this big, collective, apathetic, scared, bourgeois, habitual part of ourselves we daily betray our true, holy I. These are a few of the things one can say about the traitor and the outsider; he stands very close to that which is central in our culture." As historical examples of such "traitors" he cites in the same essay Socrates, Jesus and Giordano Bruno; all were executed by the collective because "they declared themselves for the truth and against the accepted opinion." Semmelweis too was such a "traitor"—and he too was executed by the collective, albeit not physically.
The authoritarian personality is one who chooses the collective part of himself, and who in that way keeps the authoritarian system going. In the novel Moment of Freedom (1966) he refers to this type of person—"the professor Kleins"—as "the little bears." Even if "the little bears" to a greater degree personify adjustment, what they have in common [with the Kleins] is obvious: They are underdeveloped human types who to a great degree have chosen the collective part of themselves.
The how far is it possible to justify the claim that Bjørneboe builds on such a train of thought in Semmelweis—if we take the dramatic text directly? It is natural to begin by determining what is said in the play about the basis of the authority principle's existence; and the one who, besides Ignaz Semmelweis himself, has the key speeches here, is the learned "traitor," Skoda: "Of course one can deny the facts. The authorities have always done that." "You must never rely on others! You must look for yourself!" "The authorities have no imagination." The typical conditions for activating an authoritarian mode of thinking are thus—according to Skoda—a milieu where the facts are denied, and where independent thinking and imagination get short shrift. It is regard for conventions and not for truth which then becomes the determining moral principle.
Bjørneboe defines the authoritarian personality's psyche more closely in the foreword to the play: "The authoritarian person feels protected and safe only so long as he is kicked from above and himself can kick downwards; therefore the authoritarian society will always glorify obedience." Fear and obedience are two sides of the same thing, and those who embody these concepts most clearly in the play are the medical students. For they have their careers to look after. They are, with some exceptions, extremely loyal to authority. In a stylized exchange with Semmelweis they give expression to this:
Student 1: We're sticking to the textbooks!
Student 2: To the authorities!
Student 1: We;re going to the faculty!
. . .
Student 3: We don't want to learn anything new!
Student 2: We want the textbook curriculum, not experiments!
The collective, angst-ridden mode of thought is here underscored by the dramatic form: The lines are delivered in an almost ritualistic, singsong style.
In the fight against the authorities it becomes important to break with precisely those principles which keep them alive: The collective mode of thought, lack of imagination, obedience. The prototype of the ideal authority-fighter thus becomes the disobedient "traitor" who chooses not to believe in anything but what he has seen himself. The traitor motif is central in Semmelweis. In what we may call the core drama it is of course Semmelweis himself, but also Skoda and Markusofzky, who personify it—while in the prologue and epilogue it is the students. These students thus play a role which is diametrically opposite to that of the students in the core drama.
The thought of "the traitor"—the disobedient pupil—has also been expressed by (among others) an earlier kindred spirit of Jens Bjørneboe, Aasmund Brynildsen. He presented a similar philosophy in his long, unfinished essay "Authority, power and man":
;... intellectual autonomy and self-reliance—that is also the most "individualistic" of all our psychological abilities, that which most of all demands our personal enterprise and independence and in that sense "disobedience."
Then is all authority of evil? Is it so that every broadening of authority will inevitably "lead humanity into the greatest catastrophe it has experienced"? In the abovementioned essay Brynildsen recognizes one form of authority—which he calls genuine authority: "The only genuine authority is the one whose assertions or commands every person in principle can test and with his own central psychic organ, the intellect, through free and critical activity make his own...."
The authority a teacher has and must have is, according to Brynildsen, an example of such real authority. But only as a starting point in a learning process. Yes, this may seem to work against antiauthoritarian, independent, critical thinking—but only ostensibly. For example, it is not enough simply to believe the Pythagorean theorem, for "with such an attitude the pupil will never get any further. He must internalize it by his own active reflection, make it his own perception ....When this happens, I see that my teacher's authority was intellectually justified, because it was in keeping with the truth, and that it was practical to rely on his guidance."
Thus Brynildsen. Then is there any reason to suppose that Bjørneboe accepts such a form of authority in Semmelweis? If we start with his statement in the foreword about what is "the chief component of the authoritarian principle itself," we see that at any rate he undertakes a gradation of authority. Here he describes the effect of expansion of "society-upholding" authority as "denial of the human being's spiritual freedom." And what the aim of this denial is clearly formulated in the prologue in the theater: "They expect us to keep our mouths shut. We are to read what they want us to, trust in the authorities of society and the university and accept what the authorities decide. But we have no trust." The authority these students don't trust may in Brynildsen's terminology be called "false." Another citation from the same play would indicate that Bjørneboe very clearly accepts one form of authority, and it becomes natural to see this as a parallel to Brynildsen's reasoning. When Skoda poses the question whether he too stands on Semmelweis' "proscription list"—"as an authority"—Semmelweis replies: "Only if you want power. Funny: there is a necessary death: those who want power over others, they must die." And in the essay "Anarchism ... today" Bjørneboe himself says: "there exists no other authority for them [the anti-authoritarians] than the true authority which comes from greater insight, greater experience—from reality itself." What Bjørneboe here calls "the true authority" is conceptually analogous with Brynildsen's "genuine authority."
If all authority were to be combatted, Semmelweis himself would also be condemned to extermination. However it is natural to maintain that Semmelweis himself exercises the "genuine," the "true" authority, even if in the course of the drama's development he treats the medical students in an almost brutally authoritarian fashion. For this last point, how ever, Bjørneboe has given an indirect "psychological" explanation in an interview. The interviewer doesn't ask about Ignaz Semmelweis directly, but in connection with a discussion of him it is established that the anti-authoritarian Bjørneboe can seem rather authoritarian at times—and to this Bjorneboe replies: "You can understand that when one has been anti-authoritarian for so many years as I have, it can happen that I come into a room where people have been engaged in indelicate things, for example hitting each other in the face and such, and I just put myself between them and say Enough of that now, and they stop at once."
All the same this is not an attitude which necessarily stands in contrast to a basic anti-authoritarian stance. Bjørneboe says further in the same interview: "I would very much like to be contradicted by young people who have had new experiences which I haven't had, and who can show me that I'm wrong." What Bjørneboe is actually describing here, then, is a basic attitude which stands ready to defer to a fellow human who, to quote Brynildsen, "with his own central psychic organ, the intellect, in free and critical activity" has arrived at other results than one's own. In other words the anti-authoritarian person says to himself: I stick to my guns, until another intelligence "can show me that I'm wrong." There is thus no reason to believe that Semmelweis would have insisted on his authority if one of the students had empirically disproved his theories.
Then where is the Bjorneboean conceptual pair freedom/truth in relation to this? Yes, to achieve freedom it is necessary to make an intellectual break with the collective, for only by taking into account what you as an individual have seen can the choice between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, be a free choice. Freedom is thus in the first instance individual—in the same way that the truth one can choose in freedom is one's own truth. Aasmund Brynildsen cites in the same connection a formulation from Augustine's De magistro (XI, 38): "When it comes to understanding the world, we must ask advice not of the rhetoricians, but of the truth which presides in our own soul."
In this way truth becomes a metaphysical quantity, and the question of objectivity in such a conception of truth is something one must accept or reject. So it is too with Bjørneboe's concept of freedom. The problem of human freedom is as old as the history of philosophy, and Bjørneboe's solution will come under fire from both the systems which have dominated European thought—Christianity and Marxism—at least by their most orthodox variants. Meanwhile in Moment of Freedom he defines the content of his idea of freedom more precisely: "Freedom is not to have any standard outside one's own consciousness, but to bear all responsibility oneself." Freedom thus becomes a type of cognitive attitude—namely the refusal to let oneself be hindered from choosing "the truth which presides in one's own soul." Ignaz Semmelweis has that very attitude.
In the fight for freedom it is not persons but a system which embodies the hostile image—namely the system of authoritarian power which wants to "dictate to us what we shall think or write, or what it behooves people to hear." And here we arrive at the "political" aspect of the anti-authoritarian attitude. At the end of the prologue in the theater the students prepare the public for a debate after the drama of Dr. Semmelweis has been shown, and the debate's theme is then formulated concretely in the epilogue: "How can we create a society which does not build on violence and oppression?"
The students in the frame play (prologue/epilogue) assert the"traitor's" right to refuse to submit to authoritarian legalism and thus oneself become a part of the authoritarian system: "We refuse to let ourselves and our abilities be used as means of power for political violent criminals in east and west. We refuse to let ourselves be used for oppression and mass murder." These students then do not want power over others, and neither do they want to be subject to others' acts of tyranny. They dare to disobey the authorities, and thus contrast sharply with the medical students in the core drama. They have come quite ways further than the latter in perception—they have, one might say, learned from the example of Semmelweis.
It is the very idea of an anti-authoritarian struggle that the author wants to stress, and in the frame play he has chosen a contemporary motif to illustrate this: The international student protests at the end of the 1960s. He could just as well have chosen another motif, for example the revolutionary industrial workers' struggle for a say about production and working conditions. The theme would have been analogous. The will to power over others which is expressed through an authoritarian power structure is—according to Bjørneboe—always oppressive, regardless of whether it is students, scientists or industrial workers who are subjected to it. Whether it is exerted regimes in East or West, whether by ecclesiastical or temporal systems of power, the struggle will be the same.
In the 1960s and 1970s Jens Bjørneboe professed openly declared himself an anarchist. In the essay "Anarchism ... today" he explains more precisely what type of anarchism it is that he adheres to:
... nothing seems to be perfectible in this best of all worlds. It 's a matter of degrees of imperfection, of degrees of perfection. Nor do I believe in perfection where anarchism is concerned. It is quite certain that anarchism today can only exist as a leaven, as an adjective if you will—it's a question of stronger or weaker strains of anarchism, greater or lesser degrees of true democracy. So I don't believe in the absolute, in an "either-or", but only in a "both-and", only in degrees.
As you can see, Bjørneboe has a rather pragmatic relation to anarchism as a political tool. His relation to the concept of freedom is in practice the same: "There is in reality no absolute, no total freedom—there are only degrees of freedom."
The goal of an anarchist is, in the Bjorneboean understanding, every individual's untrammeled right to defend his opinion. In the case of Semmelweis it concerns first and foremost the right to do research freely, and to be able to publish one's results. In the case of the students in the frame play, the right to make their own decisions about what to learn.
In the essay "Cultural politics—seen from the writer's viewpoint" Bjørneboe maintains that "literature is necessary because it keeps a watch on the politicians". And in "Anarchism ... today":
The revolution must become continuous—eternal—it must be new every single day; the revolution must be permanent. Otherwise the society will degenerate and fossilize into centralism. It will no longer grow. But living transformation, development and growth are not possible unless we swallow the bitter pill which today is the despised and dysvalued intellectual freedom.
In this (ideally) eternal, perpetually self-renewing revolution, the writer must be a corrective—along with other "traitors." In this way the fight Bjørneboe wages in writing the play Semmelweis is exactly the same fight in which Dr. Semmelweis is himself engaged—namely the fight for intellectual freedom on all levels of society. Here too is Bjørneboe's answer to the question the posed by students in the final scene: We can only create a society which does not build on violence and oppression by positing total intellectual freedom as a basis for it.
The play's message is clear, and when the police storm the stage and strike down the students at the end, it functions as the societal authorities' self-confirming "answer". Yet it is problematical to interpret this incident pessimistically, as if it were intended to function as a sort of proof of the impossibility of intellectual freedom. In this case it is rather a consequence of the authorities' fear—and as such a parallel to the "professorial power elite" which crushes Semmelweis in the core drama. Of course we know that Semmelweis' ideas broke through at last—but the positive effect of his battle against the authorities lies in the continuation of the concrete drama text. The same is the case with the students' fight: The effect lies in its reflection by the collection of individuals who comprise the public, and in a wider sense, the society.
The way to intellectual freedom does not go via confessions of faith of a religious or political sort. The first step is to "betray" the collective's authoritarian mass opinions. The way goes then to the individual's own interior—to his own I. In maximal openness, via a free choice, this way must be walked. But the final goal must not be the self. A self-actualizing perception must bring with it a free and true ethical obligation to the collective, to society. This whole process also illustrates humanity's way toward greater freedom. This is one of the main ideas in most of what Jens Bjørneboe has written.
This page added October 27, 1998; revised August 1999