Constant’s Speech of 1819

I have spent more time studying Benjamin Constant and Gotthold Lessing, both veritably unknown today, than any other intellectuals of the past (barring Plato). It was a matter of happenstance, those having been the current objects of study of the professor that influenced me the most, but both Constant and Lessing have turned out to be more important to me than the canonized figures we read in philosophy classes. It isn't surprising then that I encountered them in intellectual history classes.

Constant's importance to me at the time was that he seemed to take the same position that Rorty took in his political philosophy 200 years later. And considering that my professor continually tried to talk me out of my love-affair with Rorty, I thought it was pretty convenient to just point to Constant: Rorty doesn't slide into relativism any more than Constant does, and for the same reasons (the talk about moral education towards the end).

Looking back now, however, I find most interesting the bits about historical consciousness. The shorthand I use in discussing Constant makes it sound like the Greeks didn't have enough wars to be tired of fighting, unlike 18th-century Europeans. This can't exactly be true, though--whatever history they did have, it was about war. What I wrote I think is still largely right, but I've come to see better why. The exact point is "whatever history they did have." The principle shift that occurred during the Greek Enlightenment was the permanent assertion of literate culture over oral culture. The only sense of the past the Greeks did have was through their stories.

These stories, as we all know, glamorize war and its warriors. One of the major reasons for this, I've come to see, is because of the practical constraints of oral transmission of knowledge--for wisdom to be remembered (for there was, need I mention, no way to write it down for later) it must be memorable. There were many techniques available to Greek rhapsodes and one of them was the creation of heroes. Greek warrior culture kept reproducing itself partly because of the constraints of the available means of cultural reproduction. The creation of writing began to change all that.

More than that, though, is the even more contentious issue about the creation of history writing. Herodotus is often cited as the grandfather of history and Thucydides the real father. Thucydides was a contemporary of Socrates and, similar to Plato, heaped scorn on the practices of those around him, for instance on what counts as good evidence for an event having actually happened. There has often been bafflement as to how Thucydides suddenly, and almost alone, felt this way, about how and why the transition between mythos and logos actually occurred.

The puzzle becomes much easier to understand once one realizes that in oral cultures "accurate representation" of the past didn't make much sense--what would it be accurate with? Ephemerality contains much more of a hold when words pass out of existence as soon as they attain existence, when they are spoken unlike when they are written down. How would a rhapsode even reliably know whether they'd repeated the story exactly the same way? The gist is that rhapsodes repeated the wisdom of the past in their songs to present audiences with present purposes in mind--that was the point in repeating them. Our "clichés," potted, formulaic wisdom like "don't put all your chickens in one basket" or "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," are remnant practices of oral culture (including the misprision). The Homeric stories aren't history, but they are an oral culture's preserved past.

It is often, and correctly, said that the Greeks had no historical consciousness. It wasn't a strange anomaly, and neither was the creation of history. However, Constant was definitely taking advantage of a culture internalizing literacy and the multitude of practices it enabled.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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In “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” Benjamin Constant develops a distinction between two kinds of liberty. In the course of this speech, though, Constant enters in a discourse developed by two seemingly separate parties: liberal theorists and republican theorists. While developing the example of modern liberty, Constant plays upon themes developed David Hume and Bernard Mandeville: attacks on ancient regimes, particularly Sparta, and the doux-commerce thesis, a composite discourse developed by Albert Hirschman. At the same time he sounds chords similar to Hume and Mandeville, he sounds chords similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a republican who held Sparta in the highest regard. Like Rousseau, Constant feared the de-politicization of the public sphere and desired a moral re-entry. In the course of this essay, I hope to draw out the applicable similarities and differences between these thinkers, how Constant navigates the possible pitfalls of synthesizing ancient and modern liberty, and how, in the end, Constant runs headlong into a tension in philosophical presuppositions that he inherits from the Enlightenment.

The explicit purpose of Constant’s essay is to draw a distinction between two types of liberty that are floating around in the intellectual air. That they are both called “liberty” causes confusion and Constant wishes to clarify the difference between them and argue that one is more desirable than the other. What Constant calls “modern liberty” is synonymous with “individual liberty” and “individual independence” and what he calls “ancient liberty” is synonymous with “political liberty” and “political rights.”[fn.1] What develops is a modern liberty designed for the private sphere and an ancient liberty designed for the public sphere.

The novel thing about Constant’s argument, though, is that it is an historical argument. Rather than making a transcendental argument, sketching the contours of an ahistorical, inviolable human essence like Kant, Constant seems to remain purely socio-historical.[fn.2] Beginning with his identification of the two types of liberty with historical epochs, and continuing with his sketch of the changing conditions between ancient society and modern society, Constant makes pragmatic arguments about what best fits the needs of modern society. He identifies the aims of modern society as “the enjoyment of security in private pleasures” and liberty as “the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.”[fn.3] These institutions, though, are modern institutions, for “none of the numerous and too highly praised institutions which in the ancient republics hindered individual liberty is any longer admissible in the modern times.”[fn.4] Constant typically refrains from arguing that modern liberty is the true liberty of mankind, and limits himself to arguing that, though ancient liberty was possibly the most fitting freedom at one time, its day in the sun has now past and modern liberty, a liberty centered around the protection of a private sphere of free action, is now the most fitting liberty.

What these historicist arguments show is Constant’s unwillingness to be nostalgic. He is an anti-primitivist in this sense, refusing to gloss the great civilizations of the past, even Athens, as idyllic. Constant warns us of what happens when we become nostalgic:

“One could not read the beautiful pages of antiquity, one could not recall the actions of its great men, without feeling an indefinable and special emotion, which nothing modern can possibly arouse. The old elements of a nature, one could almost say, earlier than our own, seem to awaken in us in the face of these memories. It is difficult not to regret the time when the faculties of man developed along an already trodden path, but in so wide a career, so strong in their own powers, with such a feeling of energy and dignity. Once we abandon ourselves to this regret, it is impossible not to wish to imitate what we regret.”[fn.5]

The end result of this imitation, for Constant, is the Terror following the French Revolution. For Constant, the viciousness, arbitrariness, and wretchedness of Robespierre and his cronies provides the greatest reason to abandon ancient liberty to a bygone era.

Constant’s refusal to be nostalgic does not stop at saying that our changed context demands new tools. Constant not only says that society has changed and our conception of liberty must change with it, but also that this change is for the better.[fn.6] By modern lights, the evolution from the ancient polis to the modern state can be considered progress, not simply a lateral shift in means and ends. Constant says that when the ancients sacrificed “that independence to their political rights, [they] sacrificed less to obtain more; while in making the same sacrifice, we would give more to obtain less.”[fn.7] The applicable “we,” of course, is “we moderns.” Constant is saying that by our lights we have made progress. This progress comes out particularly in his sounding of the doux-commerce chord.

Doux-commerce is a multi-layered discourse that many eighteenth century intellectuals (notably excluding Rousseau) took part in. The central claim of doux-commerce is that commerce is a “powerful moralizing agent which brings many nonmaterial improvements to society.”[fn.8] “A society where the market assumes a central position for the satisfaction of human wants will not only produce considerable new wealth because of the division of labor and consequent technical progress, but generate as a by-product, or external economy, a more ‘polished’ human type.”[fn.9] Hirschman cites Montesquieu as a paradigmatic example, as when Montesquieu says, “it is an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there are gentle mores.”[fn.10] Hume enters this discourse when he says, “men become acquainted with the pleasures of luxury and the profits of commerce; and their delicacy and industry, being once awakened, carry them on to farther improvements….”[fn.11] Hume’s invocation of “delicacy” announces his participation in doux-commerce. Additionally, Hume’s “more ‘polished’ human type” includes other “virtues” such as industriousness. Industriousness isn’t always thought of as being a virtue, but doux-commerce theorists typically redescribe traditional (read: ancient) virtues in a manner more fitting for modern times, best exemplified, though in extreme form, by Mandeville’s slogan, “private vices, public benefits.”[fn.12]

Constant begins this line of argument by sketching the differences between ancient republics and modern states. The ancient republics were small and bellicose; modern states, large and peaceful. Ancient republics, being constantly on their guard from attack, had to rely on slave labor for the production of goods. Modern states were “essentially homogeneous in their nature” and were “sufficiently civilized to find war a burden. Its uniform tendency is towards peace.”[fn.13] This is Constant’s primary doux-commerce formulation. Unlike Hume’s historical argument, which makes pretensions about mankind’s “nature,”[fn.14] Constant’s argument remains unburdened by this essentialism. Constant says simply, “War and commerce are only two different means of achieving the same end, that of getting what one wants.”[fn.15] However, this doesn’t lead him down the relativist cul-de-sac of saying, “War and commerce are simply two different means, therefore one is just as good as the other.” Constant argues that history has given us moderns the

“experience, by proving to him that war, that is the use of his strength against the strength of others, exposes him to a variety of obstacles and defeats, that leads him to resort to commerce, that is to a milder and surer means of engaging the interest of others to agree to what suits his own.”[fn.16]

Constant does not argue that the ancients were denying their essential humanity; he argues that the ancients simply did not have the historical wisdom that we moderns have. The ancients did not have their own bloody wars to look back on and reflect. Constant argues that, because we moderns can look back on the mistakes of the ancients, “an age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.”[fn.17] And because in the modern period commerce “is the normal state of things,” modern states can now see that “every day war becomes a more ineffective means of satisfying their wishes.”[fn.18]

Constant’s refusal to be nostalgic, then, is rooted in an historical analysis of the rise of commerce. This leads him to enter the chorus of disparagement surrounding ancient republics, particularly Sparta. Hume presages Constant’s description of the ancient republics as militant when he says, “the labour of the HELOTES could not have maintained so great a number of SPARTANS, had these latter lived in ease and delicacy,” like moderns do. Mandeville finishes the redescription and joins Constant in refusing to be nostalgic when he says,

“I have heard People speak of the mighty Figure the Spartans made above all the Commonwealths of Greece, notwithstanding their uncommon Frugality and other exemplary Virtues. But certainly there never was a Nation whose Greatness was more empty than theirs….”[fn.19]

For Mandeville and Hume, the modern period should no longer count frugality as a virtue. “Grave moralists,”[fn.20] those “men of severe morals,”[fn.21] are those who enter into “voluntary frugality.”[fn.22] For Constant, the attack on Sparta isn’t limited to lamentations on the Spartans’ outdated economic sensibilities. Constant says, “It would be easier today to make Spartans of an enslaved people than to turn free men into Spartans.”[fn.23] This unpacks partially to mean that modern people would no longer be able to tolerate the tough conditions that a militant lifestyle would demand.

Rousseau picks up on this same theme, though for Rousseau it should be lamented that modern man is no longer durable and robust. While Constant praises the ability to enjoy private pleasures and pursue private interests, Rousseau condemns these same pleasures. As private pleasures and interests increase, “true courage is enervated, the military virtues vanish.”[fn.24] Rousseau is a primitivist in this sense: he is nostalgic for the past, holding them up as a paradigm of moral virtue.[fn.25] Martial prowess is held to be a moral virtue and Rousseau takes Sparta as a rhetorical rallying point. In an animated homage, Rousseau writes,

“Can I forget that it was in the very lap of Greece that was seen to arise the City equally famed for its happy ignorance and for the wisdom of its Laws, that Republic of demi-Gods rather than men, so much superior to humanity did their virtues appear? O Sparta! Eternal shame to a vain teaching!”[fn.26]

Rousseau here juxtaposes “happy ignorance” with “wisdom.” The full meaning of Constant’s statement about the Spartans then comes out as “we moderns are too knowledgeable to go back.” While Rousseau is nostalgic for the “happy ignorance” of the now long gone Spartans, Constant remains skeptical as to whether, even if we wanted to, we would be able to return to the ignorance of Sparta and “the wisdom of its Laws.”

While Constant does not join Rousseau in being nostalgic, he does join him in being critical of modern institutions. Like Rousseau, Constant worries about the de-politicization of the people. Rousseau laments the loss of citizens (and attacks those professions born in the lap of luxury) when he says, “We have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens.”[fn.27] Both men were against Mandeville’s collapsing of the public sphere into the private, his “sociology of excess,” the “petticoat thesis” that “presented commercial society as the product of the uninhibited, and often whimsical, pursuit of human passions and needs.”[fn.28] Mandeville thought that this was all that was needed for a nation to be successful. Constant warns, though, that “the danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.”[fn.29] Hume helps in this middle position by de-moralizing luxury, the consequence of private independence and particular interests that Rousseau lambastes in the First Discourse. Hume speaks also for Constant when he says against Mandeville the “libertine” and Rousseau the “severe moralist,” “men of libertine principles bestow praises even on vicious luxury, and represent it as highly advantageous to society; and on the other hand, men of severe morals blame even the most innocent of luxury, and represent it as the source of all the corruptions, disorders, and factions, incident to civil government.”[fn.30] Like Hume, Constant considers “innocent luxury” to be harmless, even beneficial such as when it opens up space for scientists, mathematicians, artists, etc. But, like Rousseau, Constant still worries that overindulgence in our private pursuits will lead us to too easily “surrender our right to share in political power.” For Constant, political liberty is a necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) condition for the existence of private independence. Without political power there is no guarantee for our idiosyncratic interests. As Constant says,

“Could we be made happy by diversions, if these diversions were without guarantees? And where should we find guarantees, without political liberty? To renounce it, Gentleman, would be a folly like that of a man who, because he only lives on the first floor, does not care if the house itself is built on sand.”[fn.31]

Constant is worried about how to protect the individual. Rousseau’s solution is the exact opposite of Mandeville’s: he collapses the private sphere into the public. Rousseau submerges the individual into the general will. In the ultimate modern expression of ancient liberty, Rousseau says, “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”[fn.32] Constant refuses this course of action. As we have seen, for Constant, such an act would be a reversion into a past form of liberty, a form that our historical consciousness has evolved out of. Constant says, “Let us mistrust … this admiration for certain ancient memories. Since we live in modern times, I want a liberty suited to modern times.”[fn.33] William W. Holdheim plays on how history informs Constant’s thinking when he says, “The French Revolution has shown that in practice the general will to which we submit may be far from representing our ideal selves: we simply submit to those men who wield the power. Instead of attaining to a superior form of freedom, the individual is crushed under the onslaught of state and society.”[fn.34] Constant recognizes that we moderns need a different solution. As Philippe Raynaud says,

“If, by renouncing the Rousseauistic reconciliation of the individual and the body politic, Constant predicts a retreat of individuals into the private sphere, he also shows that this relative ‘privatization’ of social life can only be preserved if individuals remain citizens.”[fn.35]

Constant’s solution is to merge ancient and modern liberty, private independence with political duty. The difficulty is attempting to convince people, preoccupied with their own pleasure, that to continue in pleasuring themselves they must exercise their political rights. Constant’s solution, his point of moral re-entry, is with a fitting education.

Holmes points out that “the final section of ‘Ancient and Modern Liberty’ comes as a surprise,”[fn.36] almost seeming to contradict the first part. The practical problem of the liberal dilemma is: “how to motivate individuals to participate, how to galvanize them into civic activism, given the scant rewards each individual might expect from time expended on political affairs.”[fn.37] Constant solves this dilemma by using the idea of a moral education: “The work of the legislator is not complete when he has simply brought peace to the people. Even when the people are satisfied, there is much to do. Institutions must achieve the moral education of the citizens.”[fn.38] This statement should remind us of Rousseau’s Great Legislator.[fn.39] And again: “Political liberty, by submitting to all the citizens, without exception, the care and assessment of their most sacred interests, enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people.”[fn.40] This seems to be unmistakably Rousseauian with political liberty seeming to be a mere placeholder for the general will. So, the question should be asked, “How is Constant’s solution different from Rousseau’s?”

Rousseau says,

“it must also be agreed that although men cannot be taught to love nothing, it is not impossible to teach them to love one object rather than another…. If … they are trained early enough never to consider their persons except as related to the body of the State, and not to perceive their own existence, so to speak, except as part of the state’s, they will eventually come to identify themselves in some way with this larger whole…. Not only does Philosophy demonstrate the possibility of these new directions, but History provides a thousand stunning examples.”[fn.41]

Constant parallels this thought when he says, “the progress of civilization, the changes brought by the centuries require from the authorities greater respect for customs, for affections, for the independence of individuals.”[fn.42] Reaching back to his historicism, Constant can say that the objects of education are different now and we should not feel hypocritical when we shape a moral education surrounding our new understanding of what it is to be a modern. Constant says, “since the liberty we need is different from that of the ancients, it needs a different organization from the one which would suit ancient liberty.”[fn.43] Constant’s moral education is a rehabilitated one, one that does not make pretensions towards innate humanity, the humanity that Rousseau wished to free with his moral education. The liberty that Constant envisions being taught is not a straight modern one. It goes beyond a simple liberty for the private sphere, simple private independence. Constant argues that we must synthesize the liberty of the ancients with the liberty of the moderns, thus ushering in a form of liberty that is different from both. Constant, “far from renouncing either of the two sorts of freedom,” shows that in order to keep the gains moderns have made over the ancients we must “learn to combine the two together.”[fn.44]

The one loose end in this reading of Constant’s speech of 1819 is his use of eternal rights rhetoric. Constant says right before discussing the progress of civilization, “We still possess today the rights we have always had, those eternal rights to assent to the laws, to deliberate on our interests, to be an integral part of the social body of which we are members.”[fn.45] I view this as a tension in Constant’s position that results from the common parlance of his time. Like Hume’s contrast between natural and unnatural, Constant’s dependence on eternal rights is not necessary for his theoretical position. The crux of Constant’s argument in his speech of 1819 is on historical analysis. Both Hume and Constant fall prey to Enlightenment philosophy, that philosophy which searched for the eternal. But his outdated mode of discourse can be ignored in favor of the practical suggestions Constant made about how to negotiate the modern world.

In the course of this essay I’ve attempted to pull apart the argument Constant makes in his 1819 speech, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.” I have tried to situate it in the discourse of its time by noting the similarities of Constant’s argument with those arguments forwarded by Hume, Mandeville, and Rousseau. Like Hume and Mandeville, Constant argues that commerce has a soothing effect on any warlike tendencies. But like Rousseau, Constant fears that commerce’s ascent to prominence may have unfortunate side effects, such as seen with the rise of Napoleon. That Constant’s position falls in between Hume and Mandeville’s on one side and Rousseau’s on the other adds to the difficulty of interpreting the end of his speech, but hopefully the suggested reading, that Constant’s argument hinges not on eternal pretensions, but on historical analyses, smoothes out some of the difficulties putting the first three-fourths of his speech together with the last fourth.

Endnotes

[1] These turns of phrase are peppered throughout Constant’s essay, for instance, pages 315, 317, 321, 316, respectively for each. (Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Political Writings, ed. B. Fontana)

[2] As Biancamaria Fontana says, “[Constant’s] views on the limits of public authority, individual liberty, sovereignty and representation were not offered as universal principles but were embedded in a preliminary understanding of the type of historical society to which they applied to the exclusion of others.” (Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 29.)

[3] Constant, 317

[4] ibid., 321

[5] ibid., 317

[6] Pierre Manent stops short of this conclusion when he says, “It is clear that Constant is in no way asserting the superiority of modern principles over those of the ancients. He is simply saying that in the ancient city-state, the social and political conditions of human happiness were radically different from what they are in modern times. By refusing to make a value judgment regarding these two versions of human happiness, he necessarily condemns attempts to impose on a given social and moral state any political institutions modeled on a radically different state. Constant is not asserting, as Montesquieu had clearly suggested, that modern liberty is friendlier to man’s nature than was ancient liberty, or that ancient liberty is ‘inhuman,’ or brutalizes his nature.” (Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 89.) While I agree that Constant does say that “the social and political conditions of human happiness were radically different” and that he does not say, with Montesquieu and Hume, that “modern liberty is friendlier to man’s nature,” under my analysis, I think it is quite clear that when he strikes the doux-commerce chord (to be discussed shortly), as when he says, “thanks to commerce, to religion, to the moral and intellectual progress of the human race, there are no longer slaves among the European nations” (Constant, 314, emphasis mine), he is saying that moderns have made improvements over their ancient counterparts. So I agree with Guy Dodge who says, “It was Constant first and then Henri de Saint-Simon who reversed Rousseau … by pointing out the superior virtues of modern commercial over ancient military society.” (Guy Dodge, Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 30.) I do not think that “moral and intellectual progress” is simply a rhetorical flourish set out to grab his European audience. I think it is central to his repudiating the title of relativist that he strike this limited ethnocentric chord. By doing this he limits his context to “Europeans,” and thereby to history, rather than an extravagant, universal and ahistorical context like “humanity,” which allows him to retain the ability to condemn “attempts to impose on a given social and moral state any political institutions modeled on a radically different state.”

[7] Constant, 317

[8] Albert O. Hirschman, “The Doux-Commerce Thesis,” in Rival Views of Market Society, 109.

[9] ibid.

[10] Charles de Secondat de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 338.

[11] David Hume, “Of Commerce,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed., (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 264.

[12] This is the subtitle for Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees.

[13] Constant, 313

[14] Hume says, “the less natural any set of principles are, which support a particular society, the more difficulty will a legislator meet with in raising and cultivating them. It is his best policy to comply with the common bent of mankind, and give it all the improvements of which it is susceptible. Now, according to the most natural course of things, industry and arts and trade encrease the power of the sovereign as well as the happiness of the subjects….” (Hume, “Of Commerce,” 260) Hume’s argument in “Of Commerce,” though historical, is of the kind that moves from the unnaturalness of the ancients, to the naturalness of the moderns, thus holding “nature” as an ahistorical bar of judgment.

[15] Constant, 313

[16] ibid. Fontana says, “Constant’s attempt to bring or restore to political theory a sociological understanding of the nature of modern European nations went beyond the aspiration of adding some historical background to the activity of constitutional engineering. His political theory was the theory of a particular historical reality: large nation states with a developed commercial economy within the European cultural tradition.” (Fontana, 45)

[17] Constant, 313

[18] ibid., 314

[19] Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 245.

[20] ibid., 150

[21] Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 269

[22] Mandeville, 157

[23] Constant, 319

[24] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, First Discourse, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20.

[25] Arthur O. Lovejoy says that primitivism “has … been rather the expression … of an emotional nostalgia or an idyllic day-dream … one may in principle distinguish ‘sentimental’ from ‘practical’ primitivism…. But the one naturally shades off into the other; a mood of intense dissatisfaction with some or all the characteristics of the civilized life of one’s own time will obviously produce in some minds a hope and an endeavor to put an end to them.” (Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935), 16.) Bernard Yack calls the modern variant of this hope “the longing for total revolution.” (see Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 3-10.) For more on Rousseau and primitivism, see my "Primitivism in Rousseau."

[26] Rousseau, First Discourse, 11

[27] ibid., 24

[28] Dario Castiglione, Readings of Mandeville on Commercial Society, 167

[29] Constant, 326

[30] Hume, “Of Refinement in the Arts,” 269

[31] Constant, 326. Stephen Holmes partly attributes Constant’s worries about political liberty to the historical experience he and France endured when Napoleon rose to power. He says, “the postrevolutionary urge to escape from politics and delimit the political sphere had nourished an invasive dictatorship. Constant experienced the pang of enforced depoliticalization in his own person when he was ejected from the Tribunat in 1802. It is inconceivable that, having suffered this humiliation, he would have afterward viewed privatization as simply and exclusively a public good.” (Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 41.)

[32] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. E. D. H. Cole, (Vermont: Everyman, 1973, 1993), 192.

[33] Constant, 323
[34] William W. Holdheim, Benjamin Constant, (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1961), 85.

[35] Philippe Raynaud, “Constant,” in New French Thought: Political Philosophy, ed. Mark Lilla, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 87.

[36] Holmes, 39

[37] ibid., 42

[38] Constant, 328

[39] Rousseau, Social Contract, 213-7

[40] Constant, 327

[41] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on Political Economy,” in Collected Writings of Rousseau vol. 3, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 155.

[42] Constant, 324

[43] ibid., 325

[44] ibid., 327

[45] ibid., 324

Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia

This is another short paper written for a class that looked at how the concept of time worked in literature and theory. Every paper in the series takes up whoever we were reading and pairs them together. They aren't exactly haphazard pairings, but ya' know. It is an open question as to how forced brevity effected the efforts--good exercise; still not used to it. This continues on about Fredric Jameson's idea of "postmodernism" and formed the basis for my much expanded final. What is interesting here for fans of Pirsig is Sherman Alexie's meditations about Native Americans and the connection with madness, a very profitable intersection that hooks up nicely with Jameson, too.

You'll also notice the forced MLA. God I hate MLA.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Fredric Jameson, piggybacking on Jacques Lacan, “describes schizophrenia as a breakdown in the signifying chain.” (Jameson 26) Having already preemptively disposed of atomistic conceptions of language (in which meaning is generated when words are paired off with their appropriate world-chunks) by presupposing a Saussurean holism, Jameson bridges from the analogy between the psychic life of persons and the functioning of language to the meltdown of literary and historical meaning as postmodern artists set out to render life in contextless (and hence, meaningless) chunks. This movement, I should argue, requires a monumental leap from the theoretical to the empirical and using Alexie Sherman’s treatment of the past will help bring out this point.

Jameson states rightly that in the new holism the old “signified,” which used to be classically seen as a material world-chunk, is now seen to be just another signifier.[fn.1] A signifier-as-signified, however, is in a particular kind of context, one of, roughly, being-pointed-to as opposed to the usual doing-the-pointing situation of a signifier. Jameson, again rightly, calls this a “meaning-effect,” but then goes on to call this an “objective mirage of signification generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers among themselves.” (ibid.) This is not something a convinced holist would say. For the holist, the context-dependence of meaning does not put objectivity in jeopardy, but simply replaces a bad philosophy of language with a better one, one that redescribes the sources of objectivity accordingly.

Jameson, it would seem, is a holist, but a particular kind—a nostalgic one, wishing for the theoretical comforts of old. Schizophrenia, as stated before, is the breakdown of the signifying chain.[fn.2] Jameson’s fear of schizophrenia is the cultural realization of “a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers.” (ibid.) He says this creates “an experience of pure material signifiers … a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.” (27) We might feel Jameson’s fear, which could be described “in the negative terms of anxiety and loss of reality,” but we might also “just as well imagine in the positive terms of euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity.” (27-8) The old, atomistic view of language once safe-guarded our sense that we could get back in touch with a solid reality, but—now in postmodernity—we no longer have this comfort.

What I would like to suggest is that Jameson’s argument breaks down by its very ability to compose itself as an argument.[fn.3] Put very simply—schizophrenic contextlessness cannot actually exist, for if it did, it would be just as much a “meaning-effect,” an effect of context, as any other normal-seeming, contextually generated meaning.[fn.4] Jameson cannot move from holism to a scary form of schizophrenia because holism simply describes how we are (and were) always situated, not a new situation. The only new thing in holism is the fact that we are rejecting Plato’s way describing our reality, not introducing a massively new and differently behaving and organizing reality.[fn.5]

According to Jameson’s theory, we should encounter cultural artifacts that are isolated and contextless, “randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary.” (25) The consequence of this theory is that displays of history and time should be free-floating, broken from their signifying chain. A good example of how this theory founders in practice is Alexie’s “A Drug Called Tradition.” In this section, Victor and his friends take an unnamed drug and free-float through a series of hallucinatory dreams in the recapitulation of the evening. This would seem to be a good example for Jameson’s cause: the very concept of history is called into question as the boys see pasts and presents that are clearly not what had happened or is happening. And by the end, Alexie has someone hallucinating a theory of history that ends with “We are trapped in the now.” (Alexie 22, italics his)

The ironic return of context begins with analyzing the italics in the passage. Devoid of the context of the piece, one might think Alexie was emphasizing the trap of presentness, much like Jameson’s notion of the sad, but inescapable state of postmodernism. But this is not what the italics mean. The italics are part of a consistent effort to demarcate the boundaries between hallucinative state of dream and normal state of reality. This stylistic choice, among others, is what signals to us, the readers, that we are reading something different than what is contained in the other parts (whatever the differences end up meaning on any of the many levels one could interpret them).

The point is that Alexie, as a writer, circumscribes the context with which we are to read the passages as much as the atomist supposes that the world circumscribes our words and what they mean. The hallucinatory effects in Alexie are as much “meaning-effects” as are normality. This doesn’t mean atomism is true, it simply means that context always determines meaning, including the appearance of meaninglessness or contextlessness. Jameson has confused a theoretical point about language-functioning for an empirical shift in culture, including the empirical shiftings of literary production.

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Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. New York: Grove Press, 1993, 2005.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Endnotes

[1] This is the real meaning behind Derrida’s much parodied line “Il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text,” or better, “There is no outside-text”). Derrida was not staking out a new form of idealism, or denying the existence of rocks, but denying, like Wittgenstein when he denied ostensive definition, that language is (or perhaps, can be reduced to) a word-world relation. Words are words (i.e., have meaning and are not just sounds or marks on a page) because of how they hang in a web with other words.

[2] This notion can be used just as well for an atomist, but there seems to be a heightened sense of precariousness for the holist. In the atomist picture, a break in the chain can be rectified by being put back in touch with the solid, unalterable signified. On the holist picture, on the other hand, everything is a chain of signifiers, every signified can be reduced to a signifier such that a shift in signifiers alters the composition of the signified. This is the force of Jameson’s “objective mirage”: once our solid signifieds are really as ephemeral as our constantly shifting significations, we begin to really fear the loss, now irrevocable, of our grip on reality.

[3] Which should be suitably ironic, given how much fun holists-cum-deconstructionists have in showing how displays of intelligibility slide into unintelligibility, that Jameson’s display of unintelligibility should slide into intelligibility.

[4] For instance, the actual psychological state of schizophrenia could be described as signifiers losing touch with their signifieds (which seems to be the image that Jameson more relies on), but that reposes on the old atomistic view. On the holist view, schizophrenia would better be described as signification-chain-A losing touch with signification-chain-B. On this view, schizophrenics don’t behave oddly because they are acting without context, but because they are acting in the wrong context, an A-chain that would be less socially awkward if it were an AB-chain.

[5] Jameson commits this mistake when he says our “cultural production” “can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world,” but is now “in Plato’s cave.” (Jameson 25, italics mine) Plato was suggesting a metaphorics for describing our knowledge-production. The holists, like Derrida, want to reject wholesale this entire edifice, whereas Jameson seems to swallow Plato’s poison pill and imagine we were once out in the light of Plato’s Form of the Good, but we have now—in real historical time—been shuttled back down into the cave.

Notes on Experience, Dewey, and Pirsig

My confrontation with Pirsig can be said to center around two terms, “philosophy” and “experience.” In particular, it is when you put the two together that, as in a “philosophy of experience” (or, in Pirsig’s terminology, a “Metaphysics of Quality”), that I think you can get problems of a kind that Pirsig is elsewhere at pains to distance himself from and criticize (all depending on how you define the terms, of course). My development of this angle of confrontation and this picture of Pirsig has been in part due to the pressures from my interlocuters, expositors of Pirsig who think that there’s nothing wrong with such a formulation, and vice versa with them. Our pictures of Pirsig, developed in partial dialectic with each other, have over time overflowed into the general pictures of philosophy we may hold and other particular philosophers we may attend to. This has led to surprise, on both sides, when we look in more detail at what the other is describing and drawing in our continuing efforts to expand our own horizons.

This phenomenon shouldn’t itself be surprising. It happens all the time and might most generally be called “education.” The peculiar thing about developing a picture of Pirsig is that there isn’t all that much material of Pirsig’s to keep in mind, not a lot of detail to dig around for or have to remember (though, as always happens to diggers, we may become so focused on the mineshaft we are currently in that we sometimes start to forget about the others). This isn’t so, though, for the job of developing a picture of Pirsig’s place in philosophy (or anything else), for developing a picture of how Pirsig resonates with or reverberates into the rest of what people are saying and doing. There are a lot of mineshafts out there to look through and the phenomenon of surprise is the effect of having a shaft described to you for so long as one thing, and then going into it and finding something else.

This effect, I think, isn’t due to willful mis-description or even partial understanding. All of us move through the world with partial understandings that are further increased, though never made less partial. Some people understand more about one thing than another and should be taken as authorities on X, over this other person over here. Who should be taken as an authority, as having a good understanding, is something developed over time, over conversation and debate and the dialectic. Our finitude is what produces the demand that we never rest totally certain on a platform, but always be looking for or producing a better one.

This is all to say that I’ve had my own little moment of surprise, which turned rapidly, as dawning understanding swept over my face, into joy. The ball got rolling, oddly enough, by me, but not in the usual way. In this case, my girlfriend and I were having a conversation about racism and moral progress and I started to try and impress upon her my slightly counterintuitive viewpoint. She’s studying psychology and has a bit of the scientist in her and I’m, of course, an irrepressible Rortyan and so scientistic rhetoric doesn’t take too well with me. As we were talking, I called upon Dewey to help me out. I pulled out his “means-ends continuum” to try and help me describe my hocked vision of moral progress. Turns out, she was quite taken with it and over the next few days kept asking me for where it was and more information on it.

Here’s my partial: I don’t know where in Dewey it’s from and I don’t have my Dewey books with me anymore. She wants to incorporate it in an art project she’s doing (which, she’s told me, she’d rather have me call an “art experiential” because “art project,” in her words, makes it sound like she’s in eighth grade; I told her she looks like she’s in eighth grade—she has a young face—at which point she called me a “butthead”) and maybe a paper she’s writing, so I read to her sections of Rorty that continues to gloss the notion. She also goes onto the web and grabs some papers about Dewey, art, and the means-ends continuum. They’re lying around the apartment and so I read a few of them. Most of them are lame articles about Dewey and art (not because they are about his vision of art, but because they are just lame), but one article is solely about the means-ends continuum that she picked up from the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, a reputable philosophical journal. The scales fell from eyes.

In his paper, “The Means-Ends Continuum and the Reconciliation of Science and Art in the Later Works of John Dewey,” (Summer, 1999, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 595-611) Leonard J. Waks seeks to focus on something that has never, apparently, received much isolated focus: Dewey’s analysis of the means-ends continuum. The first part of the paper is an admirable summation of the background that Dewey was reacting to. Nothing out of the ordinary here; just the usual stuff about dehumanizing, technical action, theory and practice, teleology, etc. But then the second part, “Dewey’s Analysis of Means-Ends,” which should be the meat of what I’d like to learn about, begins, “Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls”—and at this point I can hear the choir of antithetical, experience-jargon toting Pirsigians chime in triumphantly—“primary and secondary.” (598)

I rolled my eyes and got ready my thresher, ready to neatly cut out all of that kind of talk as merely the ways of the time, a vocabulary handed down to us from Locke to Kant to Northrop, the kind of thing I had hoped that James and Dewey had gotten away from in the main, or at least not used those damn exact words, words that have haunted me ever since my interlocuters had started reading more Northrop into Pirsig than they should’ve, hammering down every time Pirsig writes that Quality or DQ is the “primary experience.” I got a little ticked because here I am wanting to read about moral progress and the means-ends continuum and I have to go through a negligible discursus on experience. But then I read the next paragraph, which if I hadn’t completely forgotten by the reading of it that I had just started my thresher, I should have thought was a complete non sequitor (all in-text citations of Dewey have been removed, though all italics, before and after when quoting, are Waks’s):

“Let us turn to the deconstructive argument. Its key distinction is that between two dimensions of experience which Dewey calls primary and secondary. This distinction emerges from his ‘doubt-belief’ theory of inquiry.

“According to that theory, the live organism acts to sustain the conditions needed for its continuing life. Every experience is thus situated in a causal continuum of life-sustaining activity. Every feature of experience is conditioned by the life-directing goals of the organism; it is perceived in relation to a reaching, a trying to bring into or sustain in existence the conditions required for life. Every situation is qualitatively felt as enjoyable or unsettling, depending on whether the conditions for life sustaining activity are, or are not, maintained in existence by present activity. The features are potentially cognitively meaningful, because they are all elements in the web of causal connections; they are related to their own antecedent conditions, and they are pregnant with possible consequences bearing on the life goals and life-sustaining ativities of the organism. Doubt is felt as uneasiness or imbalance, as obstacles are encountered that frustrate activity. Frustrations emerge as entrenched habits prove inadequate to the life-sustaining task and must be reconstructed. This reconstructive process, which terminates in new belief as more adequate habits are formed and doubt gives way to renewed action, Dewey, following Peirce, calls inquiry.”

When I finished that paragraph, I nodded my head in agreement. I had read about Peirce and Dewey’s redescription of inquiry and absorbed it from Rorty’s redescription (primarily from “Inquiry as Recontextualization,” ORT). The paragraph was all fairly abstract, but when you navigate your way through the jargon it says something very simple and commonsensical: you putter your way through life as you’ve been puttering until you hit something that you can’t just putter through, which causes doubt in the way you’ve been puttering, which causes you to think about whether you should perhaps find some new way of puttering. In nodding my head serenely, of course, I had completely forgotten that that paragraph was supposed to be explicating primary and secondary experience. I didn’t see anything plainly relevant and forgot all about it.

But then Waks hits me with this simple, straightforward gloss on the previous paragraph: “For Dewey, life activities undergirded by adequate habit and intelligence-in-action constitute primary experience.” (ibid.) Like a ton of bricks, it hit me all at once. First, I went, “Oh yeah, he was supposed to be talking about that.” But then: “Oh…my…God….” The constellation of what primary and secondary experience shifted completely out of kilter from my normal understanding of how neo-Kantians and Pirsigians use it by five simple words: “adequate habit … constitute primary experience.” It was almost as if the word “primary” had been italicized just for me, for the quakes of what those five words mean for a confluence of Dewey and Pirsig are tremendous.

The background is simple: for Pirsigians, Dynamic Quality is the primary experience and static patterns of Quality are secondary, following in a wake behind the cutting edge of pre-intellectual experience. Simply stating it allows one to see it: static patterns are adequate habits, which means that Pirsig is the exact reverse of Dewey.

According to Waks, for Dewey, we make our way about the world following a pattern of accumulated habits. “In this dimension tacit goals adequately direct behavior and condition a relatively fluid field of experience apprehended as a qualitative whole.” (ibid.) We just live when we are in this dimension, we don’t think about what we are doing, we just act. This is often how a Pirsigian will want to describe Dynamic Quality. For Dewey, however, accumulated habits, or static patterns, are the primary experience and the secondary is, though oddly just as in Pirsig, the reflective experience. Dewey, like Pirsig, annoyingly uses the language of “reflective delay,” but the point here is that both agree that reflection causes us to analyze into parts, as opposed to the qualitative whole of primary experience.

Dewey’s description is very convincing and intuitive: we navigate the world by a set of habits, obstacles cause doubt, doubt causes a rethinking of our habits, and the rethinking causes us to change our habits. If one finds this very convincing, however, it puts Pirsig in an awkward position—his description of DQ as the primary experience, as the qualitative whole, has to be rejected. I think one could make a run at trying to creatively put Dewey and Pirsig back together. I’m not going to attempt that here. What I will do is first try and explain why Pirsig would suggest something backwards to Dewey and then try and explain why I prefer and find quite congenial Dewey’s distinction between primary and secondary experience, a distinction I hadn’t been able to countenance before.

I think Pirsig reverses Dewey (after Dewey had reversed Kant) because he still shows signs of what Heidegger called “nostalgia for immediacy” (and what I have previously called the “pathos of distance”). This comes out in several places, but I think it’s easiest to see when we link together the baby passages in Lila to the hierarchy passages in ZMM. When Pirsig calls DQ the cutting edge of experience, he is obviously making use of a sense of immediacy, our sense that the present is a knife’s edge of conjoined beginning and ending, ever moving onward. Before Pirsig conceives of DQ in Lila, however, he already has one of its functions in mind: “You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree, and between the instant of vision and instant of awareness there must be a time lag. … The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality. The tree that you are aware of intellectually, because of that small time lag, is always in the past and therefore is always unreal. Any intellectually conceived object is always in the past and therefore unreal.” (ZMM, 250, italics his)

I’m not going to slap Pirsig on the wrists for saying that the past is unreal because one of the things that I make it a point of trying to do is realign people to ZMM, that the book is not a doctrinal exposition but a dialectical journey. However, even if we don’t take this passage as doctrine, something like it is still in Lila (which much more closely resembles a doctrinal exposition). Even after the refuse of these statements in ZMM is cleared away, there is still left the sense of importance that Pirsig places on them, how emphatic Pirsig is remains.

One might wonder how or why we would want to call this a “nostalgia.” After all, isn’t Pirsig suggesting that immediacy is our only reality? How can one be nostalgic for all that there is? The nostalgia comes in when Pirsig links DQ with the experience of a baby. “One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention.” (Lila, 137, italics his) By this linking, Pirsig makes a very real shift in the meaning of DQ. No longer is DQ simply the only state we are in, how we experience reality. DQ is something that we can lose, something we can be more or less in touch with. The nostalgia for immediacy is the lost, purely new experience of a baby, or that first time we heard that one song that one time.

This creates no small amount of tension, but it is the kind of tension that is required to produce the grand effects that Pirsig claims for DQ on metaphysical thinking. However, it does tend to put a strain on its logical coherence. Further strain comes from Pirsig’s suggestion that we are static patterns, that our ego, our I, is static patterns and does not, as the Cartesian tradition has suggested, have static patterns, are separate from them. It is this suggestion of Pirsig’s that most fully aligns him with Dewey.

If Pirsig had focused more attention on the repercussions of this reversal of the tradition, I think Pirsig may have shifted his emphases in DQ. For the time being, I shall content myself with pointing out why I prefer Dewey’s description (with the idea that it doesn’t take much to see Pirsig’s conception of “static patterns” the same way). The two problems I’ve always had with the formulation of the primary and secondary distinction between experiences are the senses that 1) primary experience is more important (as in the fact that DQ is a trumping good over static patterns) and 2) that the primary experience comes before our concepts (as in DQ as pre-intellectual experience). In Dewey’s formulation, both problems disappear.

Taking the latter sense first, we can see that the supposed “time lag” in Dewey becomes totally innocuous. Waks says that for Dewey, “when habits fail and obstacles frustrate action in a situation, the unease of doubt prompts a transition to a secondary dimension, characterized by reflective delay.” (Waks, 598) This delay in Dewey, however, is not the same delay as in Pirsig. For Pirsig, the time lag is a razor thin delay between experience sans concepts and conceptualized experience. For Dewey, there is no experience that is not conceptualized. Dewey affects this shift from Kantianism by moving from concepts to habits. By dispensing with talk about concepts, and when we have them, where we get them, can we get rid of them, etc., Dewey moves us to talk about our habits of behavior. Instead of talking about how a baby forms concepts, as Pirsig does, Dewey would talk about how a baby forms habits—and the idea of concepts drops right out. This leaves us as being a set of habits, just as Pirsig says we are static patterns, accumulated patterns of behavior.

Reflective delay, then, becomes the same thing you get between the time of placing the nail and hitting the nail. When doubt enters our domain of habit, we cease the habit so that we may think about the habit and how we may reform it. There’s no mysterious time lag here, just the normal lag between hitting your thumb with a crowbar and thinking that maybe you shouldn’t use the crowbar to pound the nail, that perhaps a hammer would work better.

The nostalgia for immediacy also drops out once one recognizes that “primary” and “secondary” are simply two separate modes of being, two dimensions of experience, two different activities. Pirsig and Dewey’s highly philosophical way of putting the point can obscure the effect, but the only reason one is primary to the other is that you can’t have doubt until you have a habit to be doubtful of. Reflection on our habits is secondary because we have to have habits to reflect on. However, reflection is just as much a habitual activity as anything else that goes on in our primary experience.

This is how the first problem, the problem of beatifying primary experience, is muted. The primary and secondary designations are simply ways of distinguishing how we usually make our way about the world and a special case of making our way about the world. What is also interesting in Dewey’s model is the importance placed on secondary experience, which is often lost in Pirsig’s DQ/static set up. For Pirsig, the only reason we have static patterns is so that we won’t fall apart into chaos. Otherwise, Dynamic Quality plays all the good roles in our lives: newness, betterness, wholeness. For Dewey, the very idea of falling apart into chaos doesn’t arise. In Dewey’s arrangement, secondary experience, or inquiry, plays an important role in giving us better habits, static patterns. “Inquiry leads to a re-cognition—a new, explicit view of the situation, a new causal map enabling the formation of new plans that liberate us from doubt and re-engage us, armed with new habits, in cognitively enriched primary experience.” (ibid.) Wholeness cut into parts holds at bay the Otherness of Chaos, the fear of degeneracy, in Pirsig, but for Dewey cutting things into parts enables us to construct a better wholeness.

So much for my notes on experience, Dewey, and Pirsig. Dewey’s vision, and Waks’ article, continues into his conception of the “means-ends continuum,” which I won’t go on to discuss here. I’ll simply note that was interesting about how the distinction between primary and secondary experience links up with the means-ends continuum is that the purposes for which we construct the means to get them (ends-in-view) are incomparable to the end results after following through on our plans. This is because ends-in-view and end results exist in two different dimensions of experience, secondary and primary respectively. This produces the famous oscillation that Rorty emphasizes when we he takes up Dewey’s mantle. This isn’t to say I’m about to start talking about primary and secondary experience. I still think it is needlessly esoteric to talk about two dimensions. But Dewey’s vision in out-of-date jargon still foresees many moves made in the game of philosophy that the best pragmatists are carrying out (most of them acknowledging their debt).