The Master Builder

The London theatre-goer has to get used to seeing what he reveres systematically demeaned. Such a thought occurred to me as I watched ‘My Master Builder’, a play very loosely based on Ibsen’s striking late work The Master Builder. This latest travesty turned the play into an incoherent and hectoring account of academic sexual politics, MeToo and much else, reducing the grandeur of Ibsen’s characters who are part of one’s mental life to the resentful distortions of a producer determined to subjugate that in man which points to what is beyond man.

In the original play The Master Builder, we learn that a guilt-ridden Halvard Solness has progressed from building churches to building homes to finally, and disastrously, building a house with a steeple merging into a “castle in the air”. In this last endeavour he has been goaded by the much younger Hilde Wangen, a Nietzschean character who arouses in Solness the desire for a ‘robust conscience’ which transcends the stifling ‘duty’ which fixates his wife Aline who mourns perpetually the loss of her ancestral home in a fire and the subsequent death of their twin children. Halvard ambiguously blames those tragedies of the home on his own ambition and is haunted by guilt. For it was on the back of loss of home, which Solness may have secretly desired, that Solness built his career. Yet Hilde encourages in Halvard the view that ‘life’ lived to the utmost pitch of intensity is the true criterion of morality and not the other way around.

Critics, especially Frode Helland, have noted Nietzschean ideas present in the play and it is surely right to do so, even if it is unclear how well-acquainted the great Norwegian was with the work of that feculent German genius. Ibsen was, of course, writing in a period when the mode of attack on the Christian churches was changing. Before Nietzsche many critics of Christianity sought to condemn the churches not so much for their moral teaching but for not holding firm to some more fundamental and natural morality which they were seen to have betrayed. This free-standing morality was somehow ‘purified’ of religion. Such a view still takes ‘man’ and what is his nature and its good as fundamental to moral thought. But Nietzsche asks the question, is ‘man’ good at all?  As he puts it, “the value of these values themselves must first be called in question”.  He goes on to state in his Genealogy of Morals,

“one has taken the value of these ‘values’ as given, as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated in the slightest degree in supposing “the good man” to be of greater value than the “evil man”, of greater value in the sense of furthering the advancement and prosperity of man in general (the future of man included). But what if the reverse were true? What if a symptom of regression were in the “good”, likewise a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, through which the present was possibly living at the expense of the future?”

In such a way does Nietzsche look down on Christian morality and its degraded progeny, be it liberalism, socialism, Kantianism or utilitarianism (aspersing also rational themes found in Greek philosophy reaching their height in Socrates, Plato and especially Aristotle). 

Yet in Ibsen’s play such a ‘looking down’ seems like it brings only death, even if Hilde is ecstatic that her ‘Master Builder’ has sought to overcome his fears and climb the steeple of the house in defiance of the warning of his wife and others. What Hilde takes to be an almost religious consummation of fantasy results in death without any tangible attending redemption which contrasts with the alluded-to paradigmatic consummation of God’s will brought about two thousand years before. 

The play is richly suggestive and might also be interpreted as a warning against a different philosopher. If we reflect on Solness’ career we might detect a movement away from the demands of faith, ending in a kind of suffocating Hegelian synthesis, the steepled house, which does not achieve the kind of ‘transcendence’ which Hegel insists upon. For Hegel sees all dichotomies as to be transcended, an inherently dangerous idea in this world.  The Master Builder’s final creation could even be taken as a symbol of the wretched and untenable account of the roles of State and Church in Hegel’s philosophy, where the former is in no way fundamentally subordinate to the latter. 

Hegel sought, especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit to develop and re-create the supposed immediacy and unity of Greek ethical life, but this time via a gradual increase in self-consciousness overcoming the alienation modernity had brought in its wake. It is a seductive vision which to some extent bewitched even the late Alasdair MacIntyre. It is also one which subtly minimises the effects of Original Sin and the essentially split nature of man, best revealed through the dictates of conscience cutting across our natural capacities. The playwright is sometimes more attuned to the dangers of ‘castles in the air’ sought by philosophers, even as he himself is fatally attracted to them.

Aline, Solness’ grieving wife, talks endlessly of duty, a duty seemingly detached from ‘life’ and thus presented as stunting and cold. Nietzsche was right to see that an ethic of virtue, taking seriously man’s desires and what he acts ‘out of’ had been neglected in a moral philosophy too fixated on ‘rationalist generic’ man and his needs – focussed too much on analysis of obligatory acts and not concerned with either greatness or moral character in any rich sense. Nietzsche’s mistake, among many others, was to assume that moral obligation only had its force when understood as a specifically religious command. Yet thinkers such as Francisco Suarez were always clear that that moral obligation is merely a special form of the ethics of virtue and vice, namely one which involves moral blame – it is not separate from considerations of what makes a character morally admirable or not. And the force of moral obligation can be rationally understood, even if religious faith will tend to ensure that it is understood in a deeper and fuller sense where the relation of faith and reason is kept in place.

Ibsen, although besotted with progressive causes in his day, had sufficient generosity of spirit to fear that disaster might be the result of radical ideas, even as he vividly portrayed the ways in which traditions can decay and corrupt. Such insight, reticence and caution only make sense in an era where the power of traditional moral ideas could still be appreciated and even revered, even by those, like him, who strained against them. The wisdom of the conservative voice is given its due in Ibsen 

The irony of the production I saw was that the predominant emotion I detected in the work of the producer/writer was one of ‘ressentiment’, a prevalent emotion in our age and one Nietzsche wrongly associated with Christianity. In our post-Christian age it is perhaps the dominant emotion which drives much of our cultural life. Nietzsche’s hopes for a ‘transvaluation of all values’ are no more, and in a delicious irony his works are now most prominently cited by incontinent know-nothing self-help gurus such as Jordan Peterson.  For those who wish to see a worthy version of Ibsen’s play, an old BBC version of it can be found on YouTube with the great actor Leo McKern taking the central role.