1. Rawls the hedgehog, Shklar the fox — Shklar’s inversions; 2. History shapes our conceptual resources — Traditions of commentary — Political praxis over political theoria; 3. Versatile stories, different angles — Jeffersonian education, Jacksonian fairness — Political rights without natural rights?; 4. Tradition as mythology — Heroes with warts; 5. Madison: democracy as political grind — Hamilton: democracy as fact hungry; 6. Jefferson: democracy as self-government — Adams: democracy as dangerously self-destructive — Our two aboriginal forces: hope and evil
1. With John Rawls, Judith Shklar will be recognized as one of the two most important politico-moral philosophers of the last half of the 20th century. [1] In 1971, Rawls published the definitive statement of liberal political philosophy in A Theory of Justice, and it not only revitalized the then widely recognized defunct discipline of political theory, but has defined its problems up to the present. Rawls the hedgehog spent the rest of his career restating, reshaping, and extending that powerful, central vision. Shklar the fox, however, while working in the adjacent department to Rawls at Harvard, left behind a fascinatingly variegated corpus of work behind. The most important to posterity, it seems to me, will be Ordinary Vices (1984) and The Faces of Injustice (1990). The latter inverts the traditional role of the political philosopher, fulfilled most grandly by Rawls, thus opening up a vast new space to be filled by theorists: instead of putting justice at the center of a systematic theory, she puts injustice, and she attempts to show how doing so requires us to reprioritize our conceptual resources.
Even more interesting, perhaps though, is the intellectual context in which Ordinary Vices appears. The traditional mode of political thought that puts justice at the center is also largely a Kantian enterprise (to which Rawls did much to give historical shape to). Rawls’s big enemy in Theory was the then-dominant tradition of politico-moral philosophy, utilitarianism. Utilitarianism and Kantianism had been the two overwhelmingly dominant traditions of thinking for nearly two centuries. No sooner had Rawls’ book appeared, however, then did a revival of Aristotelian-edged virtue ethics appear on the scene, rejecting the seesaw between means-end utility and deontological principle. Virtue ethics has been the most fertile tradition, it seems to me, in pure moral philosophy—but no sooner did it get its spurs, then did Shklar invert its paradigm. Reviving Montaigne’s inversion of Renaissance virtue ethics (which was before Kant and Bentham had blotted out virtue-oriented ethical systems like Shaftesbury and Mandeville [2]), Shklar makes an interesting case for placing vice at the center of one’s philosophy if one is committed to liberal democracy.
2. Central to both Rawls and Shklar’s work was an understanding of the historical line of thinkers that give shape to our conceptual resources. [3] Most of Rawls’ work on history was relegated to his lectures on political and moral philosophy that he gave at Harvard, and that have thankfully been published. Shklar wrote important studies on Rousseau, Hegel, and Montesquieu, in addition to a whole series of essays on individual thinkers (most collected in her posthumous Political Thinkers and Political Thought (1998)). And part of Rawls and Shklar’s enduring importance will be because of the students they spread into the world, most of whom take very seriously indeed our intellectual inheritance. [4]
Shklar’s life was cut tragically short, and among the work she left unfinished was a bit of writing on the specifically American political intellectual tradition, which has been published as Redeeming American Political Thought (1998). As Dennis Thompson, one of her former students who writes the forward to the collection, reports, Shklar taught the subject many times, but resisted writing a book on it because, she once said, “the subject is too hard” (vii). Thompson cogently notes the irony of this from someone who’d mastered Hegel (let alone everything else she’d written on). But reading her efforts to wrangle American political theory into an explanatory pattern, one begins to not only understand why she thought so, but believe her. Thompson suggests that “the difficulty lay not in the theorists themselves but in the interpretations that commentators had laid upon them” (vii). However, Shklar was never much of a polemical writer, preferring the mode in which the coherence and power of one’s own vision sustained interest, rather than a self-conscious situating in the current conversational milieu. [5] Lack of polemic characterizes these essays as much as elsewhere, which leads me to think that the difficulty didn’t lie in scraping off (sometimes deeply embedded) traditions of commentary.
Implicit in her approach is an attempt to balance numerous conditions and factors in eliciting American political thought. Above all, it seems that what makes American political thought difficult is that its founders were also the founders of American political practice. And this is significantly different than our European traditions. Whatever the brilliance of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel, they didn’t create a constitution and run for president. The fact that Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton created American political praxis didn’t itself make American political thought unique, and in fact Shklar looked somewhat suspiciously, as Thompson points out, at theses about American exceptionalism. After all, other countries have now tried democracy in various forms and have obviously had their own creators of political praxis that have touched off conversations about its functioning. But the flipside to exceptionalism is parochialism, and that has been an accusation about American political theory and Shklar does find it annoying. (See the beginning of “The American Idea of Aristocracy.”) Between exceptionalism and parochialism are the complex relationships Shklar tried to chart between an abstract, theoretical conversation and the historical practices it was intimately bound up with. It was this binding that seemed much more in force than in Europe. Implicit, I think, in Shklar’s book is a thesis about American political thought being itself implicitly an assertion of pragmatism’s inversion of the Platonic priority of theoria to praxis.
3. One of the unique features of the book is that it tells what is essentially the same story over and over, from different angles. For some this might be annoying, and if she’d gotten the chance to get this work to press, I’m certain Shklar would’ve eliminated the repetition. But angular overlap, done right, is a strength of the essay as a genre. In fact, it seems a stylistic parallel to James’s pragmatist idea, in “What Pragmatism Means,” that thoughts are instruments and beliefs habits. And the trick about instruments and habits is that you apply them over and over in new, technically unique situations. That’s how you know it is a good instrument or habit—for if it broke down, you’d get a new instrument or habit. Likewise for developmental stories—the more versatile the story, the better equipped it is to explain phenomena, the more likely it is that that story touches on something real and operative.
Shklar’s story moves through three basic stages: the Revolutionary Era that establishes the basic pattern of American political thought; the second generation of antebellum Jacksonian democrats that heroically failed to face the moral problem of slavery; and the post-war rise of the social sciences. The focus of most of the essays is on the first two stages, and hardly move out of the 19th century. The book is split into two, with the first on individual (or grouped) thinkers (like “Alexander Hamilton and the Language of Political Science” or “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson”) and the second on specific topics (like “The Boundaries of Democracy” or “Democratic Customs”). The first section is more polished and overlaps less than the second because most of the second half of the book is the unpublished material. However, the second half contextualizes the first—it’s the larger story that the individual thinkers move in. For example, “An Education for America” begins, “Do we really know what sort of schooling is most likely to make students into good citizens? ... How does American democracy educate its citizens or help them to educate themselves?” (65) It wasn’t until the second section that I understood how the chapter was implicitly answering a Jeffersonian question that Shklar felt attuned to. For “Jefferson promoted a plan for what he called a ‘natural aristocracy’ through a system of education,” effectively “replacing politics with education” (“The American Idea of Aristocracy,” 150). The Jacksonians, despite using “aristocrat” as a term of political damnation, carried the mantle of Jefferson, because for them “education was looked at entirely as an aspect of citizenship” (“Democracy and the Past: Jefferson and His Heirs,” 183). Indeed, it is during the Jacksonian period that the moral point of view of democracy becomes explicit, if looked at and defended differently by our founding traditions of political thought. For when Shklar says in “Democratic Customs” that “voting and education are marks of dignity, not means to other ends,” she’s invoking a very unpragmatic rhetoric, and quite purposefully I take it. She says that for the Jacksonians, “it was ‘special’ privilege and ‘idle’ wealth, not their very existence, that aroused their sense of injustice. It was a struggle for recognition for them, the right to a dignified status as workers and citizens” (193). This polemically moral vision, she says in her presidential address to the American Political Science Association, “Redeeming American Political Theory,” expresses itself as “fairness [being] the very essence of their notion of justice” (99).
“Justice as fairness” is the (very famous) slogan that was the centerpiece of Rawls’s politico-moral philosophy. [6] Its appearance shows how Shklar viewed Rawls’ contribution to the larger frame she generates. But it unfolds legally in American political practice, which she takes to be distinctive. She notes that Tocqueville had already noticed that “all political problems in the United States become legal problems” and says, “since all our rights are inscribed in the Constitution, every citizen can and must claim his or her rights before the judiciary. American political culture is radically legalistic and focused on the courts” (112). If you take a class on human rights, they will find it important to distinguish between natural rights and political rights. Shklar’s point suggests that American political practice makes the notion of “natural rights” moot in working out justice in the American system. This strikes me as another important site for work to be done, for does it mean that we can just do away with the notion of natural human rights? Or does the presumed existence of natural rights motivate the debate about political rights? Can we chuck the metaphysics and just subsist on our “human rights culture,” which Rorty commended, or do we need the rhetoric of “natural” in some more robust form? [7] And is “justice as fairness” an inherently legalistic doctrine, or a moral conception of some kind? Since Rawls tried making a distinction between moral conceptions and the neutrality toward moral conceptions of his theory of justice, the last has seemed a pressing question in trying to understand liberal notions of tolerance. Shklar helps remind us what it means for these ideas to be embodied and acted upon, however we end up botanizing them.
4. Shklar says of John Adams that he sometimes took history to be “a source of mythology” (189). There is something of the mythological, I think, in all forms of tradition—the live workings of the past in the present made self-conscious. The primary reason intellectuals like Shklar dig so deeply into the past is to make us aware of the roots that are providing our nourishment—and so that we can then make an informed decision about whether it is really nutrients we are getting, or rather poison, thus precipitating a self-conscious choice in what traditions we continue to perpetuate.
One thing that commends Shklar’s political intellectual mythology over others is that it is a polytheistic pantheon, not a unified whitewashing of differences. One thing our cultured despisers of the American democratic experiment have too easily gotten off on is the exposing of the warts on the Founding Fathers. Politically and culturally motivated historians through the 19th century are indeed guilty of promoting halos in their pictures through overexposure, which tends to also blot out many defining details. Perhaps American political culture was still too overinfluenced by the divine right tradition of aristocracy, which didn’t like its blemishes noticed and punished those who did. (A culture influenced, I suspect, by the Christian traditions of impiety and blasphemy.) But can we not have heroes, then? Do all pictures of heroes suffer from a whitewashing that is, on this account, a necessary byproduct of the hero-making process? Shklar would think this nonsense. If we had a more Greek mode of tracing our traditions, then we needn’t worry about manipulating the past. [8]
Shklar very resourcefully turns Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton into an in-fighting clan of begetters who disseminated active elements in our current political makeup, both good and bad—or rather, ineffectual when pure and by themselves, but generative when together and conflicting. “Redeeming American Political Theory” might have been the prospectus for the book she didn’t have a chance to write, and it is there she pulls together three of these threads, saying Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton founded “three political sciences in America”: “Jefferson’s was speculative and physiological. Madison’s was institutional and historical, and Hamilton’s was empirical and behavioral. None were perfect, all were prophetic” (94).
5. Madison, who Shklar talks the least of in these essays, “devised a profound theory of political rationality.” Madison is probably best known for Federalist #10, which suggests that we shouldn’t fear the ability for change to quickly sweep a democratic system because factionalism will produce a tug-of-war grinding reform to a creeping minimum. As Shklar says, Madison had a “deeply functional view of democracy.” What attracts Shklar, however, is the bit that we rarely notice—how the experience of this political grind will affect the individual political agent. Madison thought that individual agents will “learn to appreciate the necessity of limiting their interests in response to the rights of other. ... The individual political agent learns to adapt and is forced to become more public-spirited as he accepts and follows the procedures that institutions compel him to follow” (96-7).
Hamilton responded to the “radical democratization of political theory” implied by the Revolution by seeing that “how to assess the behavior and attitudes of the anonymous many who compose the electorate was a wholly novel intellectual task.” What Hamilton set in motion was the assessment of the “tortuous and long road from the individual voter to the public policies of the federal government” (4). Hamilton was no particular fan of democracy—he was the Founder, you’ll recall, who wanted to import a king—and didn’t have a very high opinion of the voters, but he understood that “the modern state ... depended on information.” As Shklar says, “constitutional democracy is inherently a fact hungry political system, in which both those who govern and those who are governed yearn for solid information” (98).
6. If Madison’s political sociology of interest groups and Hamilton’s political science of electoral politics seem the most of interest to a tough-minded political science, Shklar’s tender-minded spirit is most interested in the star-crossed friendship between Jefferson and Adams. The speculative element in Jefferson is what makes him the most admired by Shklar of the four. Time and time again Shklar returns to Jefferson’s dream of “replacing politics with education,” an education that would produce what he calls a “natural aristocracy” (150). Preceding the Jacksonian fear of aristocracy was Adams’s belief that any inequality, separating the few from the many, would turn itself into an oppressive regime. Adams was Calvinistic in this way, being deeply pessimistic about the ability of humanity to side with virtue against corruption. Jefferson and Adams pair nicely with the twin founts of American Romanticism: Emerson and Hawthorne. Jefferson is optimistic in the same way that Emerson was that the American citizen was “capable of self-government” (150), i.e. autonomy, self-reliance. But Adams and Hawthorne were too oppressed by history and their own sense of the self-destructive psychology of the individual to share that optimism.
Thompson suggests that if Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson, then her head was with Adams. I can accept this formula, and it captures quite well how we need to balance these two aboriginal forces in the American spirit: hope and evil. If you hope with your head, that’s when you end up with theological nonsense like the eschatological, providential future-perfect “this will happen—everything will end up for the best.” Likewise, no amount of intellectual evidence can tell you when to or not to hope—you either find it in your heart or not. Conversely, if you believe in the ultimate depravity of humankind with your heart, as Calvinism instructs and as Adams’s great-grandson, Henry Adams, seemed to find himself, then hope may prove impossible, turning a healthy skepticism into a paralyzing nihilism. [9] But understanding, in an intellectual way, that evil indefatigably exists in the world is a mode of tempering one’s optimism about outlook, keeping one tethered to the ground. Shklar’s heart was with Jefferson because she believed ultimately in the autonomy that education promised, and that is why Emerson, Hawthorne, and so many other pieces of literature appear in this and other of her books. Shklar did not believe, with Jefferson, that a natural aristocracy would or should arise, but as indicated by the title of “An Education for America: Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Emerson,” she took very seriously the idea that the democratic citizen had much to learn from books specifically, and their authors’ intellectual struggle with the experience of democracy.
Endnotes
[1] Important caveat: only partly due to ignorance, that assessment excludes (generally) all Marxist thinkers. This is because in part thinkers working in the Marxist tradition have (largely) excluded themselves from the conversation surrounding what liberal democracies should do, including the philosophical conversations to which Shklar and others were a part of. Anyone who holds that the “system” is irrevocably corrupt or faulty, and that the only thing to do is get a new system (what Bernard Yack calls the “longing for total revolution”), will inevitably fall back on the activity of diagnosis divorced from proposed action—there's nothing left to do, at that point, but endlessly point out how irredeemable everything is going on around you. And since I believe that Marxism in these forms will fade away because of their inutility, that is another reason why I don't feel bad for my relative ignorance or think it will mar my prediction about Rawls and Shklar. Some thinkers, though, like Foucault and Frank Lentricchia, who fall under this category are nevertheless quite useful. Habermas is so concerned with the functioning of liberal democracies that he hardly counts as being in the Marxist tradition. And there is one branch of what could be thought of as post-Marxist thought—in America known as “communitarianism”—that in the main combines with hope for democracy (even if it would quibble with the qualifier “liberal”). Of these, I suspect Michael Walzer, an important interlocutor of Shklar's and long-time editor of the, roughly, communitarian and thus non-Marxist, leftist rag Dissent magazine, will have the most enduring value.
[2] J. B. Schneewind, in The Invention of Autonomy (1998), tells the most complete story I’ve seen of moral philosophy from the end of the Renaissance and Reformation to Kant. His principle beginning point for modern moral philosophy is Montaigne, but on the revival of virtue (which figured so importantly to, for example, Machiavelli) see Ch. 14, on the now-neglected figures of James Harrington and Shaftesbury. (On Harrington’s importance to British and American political thought, see J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975).)
[3] The importance of this feature of their work should be entertained in the context of Anglophone philosophy’s general neglect of history. I would ultimately (and unsurprisingly) blame this on Plato. For some relevant finger-pointing on this score, one might see “What Happened to Political Philosophy?” and maybe also “On Literature’s Accidents.”
[4] It’s possible I’m more partial to Shklar’s students because, unlike the Kantian Rawls, they are more interested in literature and things American. I think the two most notable of Rawls’ students are Christine Korsgaard, who though an unrequited Kantian, has done much to help the general thinking-through of the conceptual requirements of normative autonomy that Kant and Hegel initiated (see, e.g., The Sources of Normativity (1996)), and Susan Neiman, whose Evil in Modern Thought (2002) is an exceptional non-epistemology centered story of modern philosophy and whose Moral Clarity (2008) is an important, nonspecialist book on liberal American moral problems. Foremost among Shklar’s students for me (exempting the unbelievably useful, though not well-enough known, work of the already mentioned Bernard Yack) is George Kateb, whose work on Emerson has been widely recognized by Americanists.
[5] In a number of disciplines, this is beginning to be frowned on as unscholarly, though really it’s a matter of instrumental self-analysis. Richard Rorty described this mode as “strong misreading,” though “misreading” might be misleading in this context. In a precursor piece to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity’s more famous use, Rorty describes his theft of Harold Bloom’s term this way: “The critic asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose. He does this by imposing a vocabulary ... on the text which may have nothing to do with any vocabulary used in the text or by its author, and seeing what happens” (“Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 151). The key is the reversal of priority of the purposes for which the author wrote for instead the purposes of the reader. The scholar knows a lot about why an author wrote, but the only way to think with a figure from the past is to have purposes of your own. In Rorty’s more careful moments, he distinguishes this as a philosophical mode as opposed to a historical mode. (See his “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” in Truth and Progress.) The trouble with this mode, barring the scholar’s anxiety of it being bullshit, is that anyone can try and be a strong misreader and simply read a text as one wants—there’s just no assurance at an audience who will care for it. So, to compensate for a lack of self-trust (or for the accurate assessment of limitation), a writer might try and engage his compatriots’ views on the subject in the discipline. But such limitation shouldn’t lead us to resent the strength of others. It is, in the end, a gamble, for as Emerson said, “we hope it is more than whim at last” (“Self-Reliance”).
[6] The slogan first appears as the title of the 1958 paper that eventually was transformed into the first chapter of A Theory of Justice. It appears prominently in his major revision of his stance, Political Liberalism (1993), and its the title of the final slim book (2001) that was to serve as both restatement and primer (edited by Erin Kelly, as Rawls fell ill before he could make final revisions and expansions).
[7] See “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality” in TP. Rorty took the term from Eduardo Rabossi. Shklar wrote twice on this issue, in Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (1964) and American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (1991). One of her students, Rogers M. Smith, wrote a massive book on the latter’s issue of citizenship in Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions on Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). (Given the nature of writing big books, Smith had been already working on the project when Shklar began her set of lectures that became her book, and the two talked over their work often before her death.)
[8] See Rorty’s related use of “polytheism” in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” in PCP.
[9] There is a “book review” of The Education of Henry Adams Shklar wrote in the collection, but it is somewhat out of place with the rest. For Henry Adams, as Thompson says, “nearly defeat[s] her effort to find something of value in every thinker” (xiii). She was not a big fan of his alienation and irony directed toward the democratic experiment.
Showing posts with label Yack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yack. Show all posts
Friday, July 04, 2014
Friday, June 28, 2013
Emerson's Development
1. He who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet — The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing — But in the third stage the great question begins to bore you — Searching for the inner dialectic; 2. Philosopher: one whose art of living is bound up with theory — Whicher on Emerson: acquiescence — The Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance; 3. The tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life — How do you reconcile the inner turmoil with the outer production? — Lapsarian accounts: right about biography, wrong about philosophy; 4. The Principle of Mood — Emerson’s dualism between monism/dualism — Assertion is relative to the mood in when we make them; 5. Juxtaposing “The Poet” and “Experience” — Nature loves to hide — Dream delivers us to dream — Romanticism’s promise of power as a dream to be actualized; 6. Whicher and Mumford — Self-preservation and self-transformation — Transformation and resistance, continuity and change
1. Harold Bloom once said that “critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” [1] One of the things Bloom meant about critics is that they are like metaphysicians, philosophers—these are the kinds of chaps who look for the meaning of things, for a reason why X happened and not Y. This is, pushed to the extreme, reduction which leads to monism. The things disappear beneath the meaning you’ve extracted, and do that enough times and you’ll be left with one thing—Meaning/Reason. (This is why logos is the enveloping term in Greek idealism.) [2]
A more practical version of this is the scholar’s dismay at the fox. As Isaiah Berlin reminded us, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” For Berlin, this was a distinction between those with “a single central vision, one system” and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” [3] Scholars like to connect things; they like to explain why X was written. And it is, honestly, much easier if the writer is a hedgehog, because then you can keep drawing connections back to the central thesis that you’ve sussed out on behalf of the writer. This becomes particularly important as a tool of efficiency if the writer in question wrote material over a long period of time—first book or last, juvenilia or marginalia, hey, wouldn’t you know: it says the same thing.
Life (sigh) is never like this, though it’s difficult to imagine why we’d want to spend so much of our time as scholars on such imagined repetition. But we do like order—we like it when a writer does things for reasons that form a pattern. We don’t like it when those reasons are boring. Why did John Grisham write The Firm? To make money? Yawn. Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? To fight racism? Okay, that’s more interesting; I can work with that. Why did Heidegger turn away from Being and Time? Because he realized that the goal of metaphysics was to both do it and transcend it and so had to work out a way of realizing both his own ambitions for conceptual mastery and desires for mystical silence? Now we’re talking. We like people like J. M. Coetzee, who described this hoped-for hedgehogginess thus:
When we fail at coming up with a single ambition or vision that a writer adheres to, we like just as much the challenge of showing how a writer unfolds via an inner dialectic. “Ralph was bored so he asked himself a different question” isn’t good enough—doesn’t really seem to merit attention (by itself). But how Richard Rorty’s first famous article, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965), displays the central conceptual move that leads to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and from there to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but equally that that first article is not Rorty’s answer to the mind-body problem, nor is Mirror Rorty’s final answer about philosophy—that is interesting. It takes time to show, and to show it is to shed new and needed light on what Rorty was really doing.
2. This search for an inner dialectic works quite well when approaching the central American Romantics, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. It’s easy to tell a “death of the imagination” narrative with Hawthorne and a “retreat to private expression” narrative with Melville. Emerson’s tale of development was established definitively by Stephen Whicher. Whicher’s Freedom and Fate (1953) is the beginning point for any serious scholarly work on Emerson, [7] and especially any work on Emerson as a philosopher. For Whicher’s book is about Emerson’s “inner life,” and Emerson’s inner life was taken up by the obsession with intellectual problems. Whicher shows how Emerson is a philosopher in Alexander Nehamas’s sense, someone whose art of living is bound up with the propounding of theoretical theses. [8]
Whicher’s central story is one of “acquiescence” (xvi). The general gist goes like this: Emerson’s first stage was the impress of the typical New England heritage of a Calvinistic belief in God’s Providence. However, do to the watering down of “the white-hot core of the original Calvinistic piety” (8) in Unitarianism, Emerson became susceptible to Humean doubt. This doubt laid waste to all the underpinnings of his faith in Providence, without actually touching the faith itself. This meant that natural, rational, and supernatural paths of justification were out for Emerson, but what saved him was the realization that God was within him—Emerson turns the original Protestant Reformation into a full-blown revolution. “The rock on which he thereafter based his life was the knowledge that the soul of man does not merely, as had long been taught, contain a spark or drop or breath of voice of God; it is God” (21).
So the first two stages of Emerson’s development, that take us to the resignation of his post in the Unitarian Church, give us the interaction of two fundamental principles to understand Emerson: 1) his faith in God’s Providence becomes Emerson’s Principle of Compensation which is then supplemented by 2) the God-within which becomes the Principle of Self-Reliance. The story that Whicher tells is that in the third stage the Principle of Self-Reliance expands into a kind of power madness, “that when Emerson found a basis for the assertion of unconditional good, in his discovery of the God within the soul, the law of compensation slipped into a subordinate place in his thoughts” (39). Finding God within gave Emerson the sense that all of our shackles were man-made, and thus paled in comparison to the power we had when we relied instead on God for support. Mad with his belief that he could do anything, Emerson’s Principle of Self-Reliance quite naturally collapses under its own weight, from the unbalanced ratio between claims-of-power and evidence-for-power. The more the world “remained obdurately independent of his will” (60), the more he saw that the Principle of Self-Reliance was clearly not all there was. So in the fifth and final stage, the Principle of Compensation returns in order to circumscribe the power announced by Self-Reliance. And so the promise of freedom Emerson felt with the discovery of the God within is diminished as he acquiesces to the encompassing demands of fate.
3. There is something very powerful and importantly right about Whicher’s narrative. However, there are two interlocked problems that should lead us to dissent from the conclusions Whicher draws about Emerson’s philosophical attitude. The first is the condensation of the proposed shift between all five stages at the very beginning of his career. The evidence Whicher accumulates doesn’t point at a steady development, but that the major movement of acquiescence has already occurred by Essays, First Series (1941). Nature (1836) is, without a doubt, a bewildering text that does not see Emerson at the height of his powers, but everyone affirms that all the action is in his first two books of essays. [9] How can his most powerful moments be an acquiescence?
Given that the evidence of the interplay between the Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance is present at minimum in seed form even at the beginning of his career as writer, it is equally easy to mark not a sharp break but a gradual unfolding of the essential elements of his mature thought. The difference between the two is that what Lawrence Buell calls Whicher’s “tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life” [10] doesn’t do well in suggesting that Emerson has a coherent philosophy. In essence, Whicher explains away incoherence as biographically legible conflict that is, indeed, conceptually bunk. This treatment, of course, is given industrial strength justification by Emerson himself, his most famous line being “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”).
So the second problem that leads from the first is that Whicher’s account doesn’t precisely help us read the final product. The reason is simple: there’s a reason that Emerson’s journals were raided for the final product of his polished essays and that things appeared as they did, and other things (from the journals) disappeared as they did. The question is what those local reasons were, something that would aid our ability to interpret how the essays hang together as they stand. We should not use the journals to explain away the need for us to think hard about what Emerson was meaning to do in the essays. Barbara Packer, in her book which we should see as an extension of Whicher’s account, summarizes the scholarly problem well in relation to Nature: the problem is in “finding a stylistically sensitive way of reconciling a diachronic account of the book’s genesis and growth with a synchronic account of its structure.” [11]
The main thesis I would forward is that Whicher-Packer lapsarian accounts are broadly right about Emerson’s biography, but wrong about his philosophy. I think such biographical sleuthing has been successful in establishing that Emerson’s initial, cosmically high hopes about the power that could be unleashed within each of us were tragically dashed—what I don’t think they’ve done as well in is in suggesting what Emerson did with that tragedy in constructing his philosophy. In particular, formulating the account as lapsarian gives us exactly the wrong handle on the heart of Emerson’s thought. Emerson may have thought in such biblical terms as the Fall of Man, and mythologized the paradox of having infinite power within while continuing to fail without in those terms, but the central strain of Emerson that faces the future breaks radically with these modes of thought, and so to interpret him according to them is to darken precisely what is most enlightening about him on our problems.
4. Whicher’s problem, I think, is that he doesn’t ascribe enough importance to what I shall call Emerson’s Principle of Mood. I think the hidden message of Emerson’s trajectory is not the fundamental importance of the struggle between the optimistic power of Self-Reliance against the pessimistic power of Fate (which has significant prima facie evidence in the trajectory to The Conduct of Life), but the struggle between the promise he felt in Self-Reliance and it’s ephemerality in the face of changing moods. The Principle of Compensation, which is always overinfluenced by Emerson’s faith in Providence (which is quite cheery), gives way to Mood as the most important element waging battle against Emerson’s optimism. It isn’t optimism vs. pessimism, but optimism vs. optimism/pessimism.
The conceptual source of Whicher’s rhetoric of acquiescence is his sense that Emerson is trying, and failing, to find a way to live in the Power of His Soul all the time. I think all of the following summarizing moments go wrong on precisely the point I’m addressing, and they mount in a steady progression (italics are all mine): “Though not quite ready himself to give up to the soul beyond the possibility of a quick self-recovery, the thought then central to his mind was of a new state of life, a state of greatness and freedom beyond anything in human experience, into which, if he could only hit upon the password, he and all men might at any moment enter” (48); “If freedom lay only in the total self-trust of greatness, and if in fact he could be great only in inceptions and not in act, how did his new faith free him?” (70); “Even if we drop the question of action, and seek on ‘Reality,’ the problem still remains, How is such wholeness to be won and kept?” (83-4); “But the radical defect of man, the creator in the finite, is his incapacity to maintain his creative force. ‘The only sin is limitation’—but this is original sin beyond the power of grace” (97); “Man is promised the world—a promise perpetually renewed and never kept” (111). You can tell Whicher’s account begins to lose explanatory power when he perversely construes Emerson’s exuberant redescription of sin as a lapsarian tragedy. He may, biographically, have been looking for a password and totality, but the philosophy we get in its finished form is not like this. Emerson’s tragic optimism lays precisely in his giving up of the desire for completeness—not as a lost hope, but as a dumb hope. (And this, to me, seems perfectly consistent with having to be reminded oneself about how dumb one’s hopes might be.)
I think we can find this sense of duality—between the elated promise of independence and the depressed realization of its fragmented nature—in his published work, from beginning to end. Less than a year after the publication of Nature, Emerson writes in his journal “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” [13] For Emerson, Unity is the essence of God and thus Self-Reliance’s promise of power, and thus duality is a fragmented deflation of that promise. What I think we find in Emerson’s writing is a dualism between monism/dualism—depending on mood, he sees the world through one lens, and then another.
The importance of the circumscription of mood is that it creates a radical positionality to the Emersonian utterance. And this is how we are to understand Emerson’s hobgoblin—for while it makes sense to say that you cannot hold both “there is a god” and “there is no god,” what sense does it make to say that you cannot be both happy and sad? Oh—at the same time, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to say that a person is being incoherent when they wake up in the morning happy and end the evening sad. Emerson’s radical thought is that our assertions about the world are equally relative to the mood we are in when we make them. And this then makes conceptual coherence a more complex affair to adjudicate the importance of. This means that to understand the most important syntactical unit in the Emersonian corpus—the sentence—you have to ascribe a mood, and that way mount a picture of coherence relative to the kinds of moods. The Principle of Mood is essentially the claim that it is rhetoric all the way down, that we are always contextually and rhetorically defined—but more, for it points the way toward a necessary expansion of our conceptual accounts to include the emotions, passions, temperament, attitude. So while the last half the 20th century has pretty much seen the rhetorical stance become common sense for the intellectuals, we still have Emerson sitting beyond.
5. On the surface, the necessity of understanding the text in context seems so obvious in terms of understanding anything as having one particular meaning as opposed to another that to invoke it to justify apparent contradiction looks suspiciously convenient (which is what many of Emerson’s contemporaries thought—Melville, for one). So I’d like to give one example that illustrates how Emerson uses this thought in a constructive mode. Emblematic of this general train of thought is the first two essays of Essays, Series Two: “The Poet” and “Experience.” These two essays cannot be read separately without giving a very misleading picture of Emerson’s vision. “The Poet” gives us a predictably up-beat picture—by this time, even to his contemporaries, Emerson was The Optimist. “The poet is the sayer, the namer … a sovereign, and stands on the centre.” “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” “Poets are thus liberating gods.” But in “Experience,” Emerson uses the death of his son, Waldo, to establish the much darker tone of the piece, offering this disturbing reaction:
6. Since Whicher supplies all the evidence needed to modulate his case, I think it’s easy to see the slant he puts on it as an unfortunate Mumfordism. While above I attempted to show what the conceptual source of the rhetoric of acquiescence was, it’s nearest historical source is Lewis Mumford’s groundbreaking and very influential The Golden Day (1926). With Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, they composed the “Young American” critics, a group of wide-ranging intellectuals and cultural critics whose central philosophical preoccupation in the early 20th century was an attack on John Dewey and pragmatism for, essentially, not being radical enough. After Mumford’s chapter on the central American Romantics (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville), “The Golden Day,” follows his chapter on William Dean Howells, Twain, and William James, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence.”
Rather than confuting Mumford’s particular interpretation of pragmatism, I want to close by offering this more general observation about the conceptual resources of James and Dewey’s pragmatism. What I think Mumford and Whicher misunderstand about Emerson and the pragmatists is the importance of romantic self-transformation. They saw the essentially conservative character of “reality” and instrumentalism, but didn’t see how the Emersonian tradition was attempting to unlock a radically different orientation to a necessary recognition of the crossed axes of self-preservation and self-transformation. When Whicher sees Emerson try to assimilate the world’s resistance to the Poet’s Self-Reliance by his Principle of Compensation, he thinks Emerson has sold the pass to inevitability. In instrumentalism, we see how ends must first be fixed before deciding on what means or instruments one uses to carry out those ends, and thus how it doesn’t provide the opportunity to change those ends. But this understanding of Dewey’s instrumentalism completely ignores what Dewey tried to articulate in his notion of the means-ends continuum—that in the process of formulating a set of means to carry out a defined end we alter our sense of what end is desired, thus setting off a dialectic, as now new means are needed for the new end, the search for which will again alter the end-in-view, requiring new means, ad infinitum. [16] If we think of romanticism as the movement of thought that apotheosizes the transformative character of human power, we will see that while Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatism plays down the importance of romanticism in pragmatism in favor of Emerson and Whicher’s interpretation of Emerson plays down the importance of romanticism in Emerson in favor of pragmatism (unfortunately, on this view), and that what we really need is a view of Emerson and pragmatism that integrates their views of transformation and resistance, continuity and change, future and past into a coherent conceptual account. [17] It isn’t for them that we must do this, for it certainly may well turn out to be the case that we will have to reject some of their particular ways of understanding things—this is for us, for if Rorty is right, then figuring out how to get their conceptual projects to work is a way for us to understand how to get our conceptual projects to work.
Endnotes
[1] Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 78
[2] This is obviously a very particular understanding of what philosophy is, roughly romantic. For example, it’s the picture that is unveiled in my discussion of John Barth—see the third section of "On Literature's Accidents."
[3] From the beginning of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which can be found in Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Proper Study of Mankind.
[4] Quoted in Christopher Tayler’s “Tables and Chairs,” London Review of Books, March 21, 2013.
[5] This was the burden of Robert Brandom’s “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism. Rorty’s response was that Brandom’s paper gave him “a more flattering view of the course of my work than before. Brandom has suggested a coherence between my earlier and my later writings that had not occurred to me. I had not seen that there was a connection between the eliminative materialism I was urging in the 1960s and the private-public distinction I have been urging since Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. My unconscious has been more cunning than I had realized” (“Response to Brandom,” 190n4, in Rorty and His Critics).
[6] When you look at Hawthorne, you find a writer with a fairly stable vocabulary for tropes, an intense desire to make those tropes about troping, and an abiding concern about his ability to trope—so we can spot a trajectory wherein many of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches thematize the problem of writing within them, to his three vital novels—all in some manner internalizing the problem of writing, whether Hester’s needlework or Holgrave’s daguerreotyping or Coverdale the minor transcendental poet—to the final Marble Faun, all about death, representation, and the death of representation. Tack on Hawthorne’s inability to finish his final projects and you have a pretty good outline for a “death of the imagination” narrative. (If you want a display of what "thematizing the problem of writing" means, you might check out section 2 of "Work and Idleness.") When you look at Melville, you find a writer fascinated by the act of storytelling, but struggling to find his real voice as a writer. All his books through Moby-Dick are first-person narratives, and after encountering Hawthorne’s work and its literary-conceptual gymnastics, Melville writes his Great Book, publishes it, begins writing the next, and as the bad reviews of Moby-Dick come out, we can see him transforming Pierre into something that seems designed to fail (gloriously, for the book is brilliant). And The Confidence-Man—there’s no protagonist, no narrative! (On the surface, only, of course.) After that he gives up prose entirely for poetry, never publishing another story (Billy Budd was unfinished and posthumous) and writing the longest poem in English (barring, I believe, The Faerie Queene), nearly 18,000 lines, and some other short lyrics in the last 30+ years of his life. This story, reading his increasing impenetrability as a form of private expression, is the burden of Edgar Dryden’s Monumental Melville.
[7] Along with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which obviously has a much larger scope. I hope to say something about Matthiessen’s book soon.
[8] See the “Introduction” to Nehamas’s The Art of Living. Nehamas makes a number of other distinctions in approaching theory and philosophy, all of which are pertinent to understanding Emerson. In particular, as Nehamas himself notes, the kind of philosopher his study is in large part about (Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault) are often called “literary” because central to their act of philosophy is the process of self-creation that happens in the written medium. Additionally, Nehamas’s exemplars “do not insist that their life is a model for the world at large. They do not want to be imitated, at least not directly. That is, they believe that those who want to imitate them must develop their own art of living, their own self, perhaps to exhibit it for others but not so that others imitate them directly. Imitation, in this context, is to become someone on one’s own; but the someone one becomes must be different from one’s model” (10). The relationship to the Emerson who said “imitation is suicide” (“The Poet”) and the Thoreau who said “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account” (Walden, Ch. 1) should be obvious. However, Nehamas has never given any attention to the relationship (genealogical or otherwise) between Emerson and Nietzsche, though everyone who works on either is well aware of it. Nehamas’s story in that book is structured by the obsession his three later writers had with Socrates (and, hence, Plato). And given that two major heroes and influences on Emerson were Plato and Montaigne, there might be an interesting story to tell about the refraction of ideas through all these prisms of intellectual power and self-reliance.
[9] Considering Emerson’s Principle of Transition, that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition” (“Self-Reliance”), an argument could be made about the nature of Nature’s power being based on its slippery fluidity. That is, however, not an argument I intend on making, nor will I discuss the Principle of Transition. Nature is great fun, but Emerson’s acme is in the 1840s work.
[10] Buell, Emerson, 98
[11] Emerson’s Fall, 29
[12] The argument I would make about Emerson’s central line of thought—which is clearly well beyond the space afforded here, and beyond my present grasp anyway—is analogous to the arguments Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Yack mount against philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin. The latter two basically formulate narratives in which today’s modern, secular problems are simply the revenging of old, religious problems because our secular terms are simply written over the palimpsest of religion. (This is sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” and Löwith’s Meaning in History is paradigmatic.) By contrast, Blumenberg and Yack in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Longing for Total Revolution, respectively, attempt to show how some secular conceptual mechanics are genuinely new moves that produce new problems with no precursor in the older modes of thought. What I think is important in understanding Emerson are the reasons for his formulation of self-reliance as self-reliance, and not “God-reliance,” in Whicher’s very influential conflation (57). There’s no doubt in my mind that Emerson sincerely believed that God was within, and so that self-reliance was in some way God-reliance, but the conceptual work being done by his formulations of self-reliance were ultimately antithetical to belief in any and every form of God that is not found within—and this means that most forms of religion are behind the Emersonian curve. Furthermore, I think there’s a reason why his synonym for self-reliance in “Self-Reliance” is “self-trust” and not “self-faith” as well.
[13] May 26, 1837
[14] This is from the extraordinary close of Ch. 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” I use it here as a placeholder for a larger discussion about the Melvillean and Emersonian strands of antirepresentationalism that I find pervasive in the central American Romantics. For in “Experience,” Emerson comes as close as he can get to the apocalyptic pessimism Melville displays in his mature work about the very possibility of representation, of there being any point to this pathetic negotiation we call “life.” Emerson articulates it—and somehow swerves back to optimism. I think of Melville and Emerson standing to each other as, in a manner, Derrida stands to Rorty. Rorty recognizes Derrida’s “arguments” as having an affinity to pragmatism’s antirepresentationlism, but equally that that rejection does not a pragmatist make. To make inroads on this angle, one should coordinate “The Whiteness of the Whale” with Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (in his Margins of Philosophy). Compare Ishmael’s rhetorical question, “is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” to Derrida’s thesis: “White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (213).
[15] The Golden Day, 83 of the 1957 Beacon Paperback edition
[16] Brandom has reformulated Dewey’s notion of the means-ends continuum for Rorty’s notion of what Brandom calls the “vocabulary vocabulary”: “Every use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—and transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expression” ("Vocabularies of Pragmatism," Perspectives on Pragmatism, 153). It's worth pointing out that here Brandom is attempting to assimilate some very specialized points in the philosophy of language with Rorty's taking up of the Mill-Berlin tradition of articulating a public/private distinction in order defend liberalism, but that given Emerson's own preoccupation with the distiction society and solitude, there might be some interesting resources in Emerson to think through this angle on pragmatism that Brandom has done so well in bringing to light. For a different application of Brandom's philosophy of language to the public/private distinction, see my "A Spatial Model of Belief Change."
[17] Despite the previous note, Brandom has rejected romanticism as an important genealogical root of pragmatism. See my discussion of this in “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
1. Harold Bloom once said that “critics, in their secret hearts, love continuities, but he who lives with continuity alone cannot be a poet.” [1] One of the things Bloom meant about critics is that they are like metaphysicians, philosophers—these are the kinds of chaps who look for the meaning of things, for a reason why X happened and not Y. This is, pushed to the extreme, reduction which leads to monism. The things disappear beneath the meaning you’ve extracted, and do that enough times and you’ll be left with one thing—Meaning/Reason. (This is why logos is the enveloping term in Greek idealism.) [2]
A more practical version of this is the scholar’s dismay at the fox. As Isaiah Berlin reminded us, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” For Berlin, this was a distinction between those with “a single central vision, one system” and those “who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.” [3] Scholars like to connect things; they like to explain why X was written. And it is, honestly, much easier if the writer is a hedgehog, because then you can keep drawing connections back to the central thesis that you’ve sussed out on behalf of the writer. This becomes particularly important as a tool of efficiency if the writer in question wrote material over a long period of time—first book or last, juvenilia or marginalia, hey, wouldn’t you know: it says the same thing.
Life (sigh) is never like this, though it’s difficult to imagine why we’d want to spend so much of our time as scholars on such imagined repetition. But we do like order—we like it when a writer does things for reasons that form a pattern. We don’t like it when those reasons are boring. Why did John Grisham write The Firm? To make money? Yawn. Why did Harriet Beecher Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin? To fight racism? Okay, that’s more interesting; I can work with that. Why did Heidegger turn away from Being and Time? Because he realized that the goal of metaphysics was to both do it and transcend it and so had to work out a way of realizing both his own ambitions for conceptual mastery and desires for mystical silence? Now we’re talking. We like people like J. M. Coetzee, who described this hoped-for hedgehogginess thus:
One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labour away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere. [4](The third stage, of course, is back to Yawnsville, but then I think that might be precisely the point.)
When we fail at coming up with a single ambition or vision that a writer adheres to, we like just as much the challenge of showing how a writer unfolds via an inner dialectic. “Ralph was bored so he asked himself a different question” isn’t good enough—doesn’t really seem to merit attention (by itself). But how Richard Rorty’s first famous article, “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965), displays the central conceptual move that leads to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and from there to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but equally that that first article is not Rorty’s answer to the mind-body problem, nor is Mirror Rorty’s final answer about philosophy—that is interesting. It takes time to show, and to show it is to shed new and needed light on what Rorty was really doing.
2. This search for an inner dialectic works quite well when approaching the central American Romantics, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. It’s easy to tell a “death of the imagination” narrative with Hawthorne and a “retreat to private expression” narrative with Melville. Emerson’s tale of development was established definitively by Stephen Whicher. Whicher’s Freedom and Fate (1953) is the beginning point for any serious scholarly work on Emerson, [7] and especially any work on Emerson as a philosopher. For Whicher’s book is about Emerson’s “inner life,” and Emerson’s inner life was taken up by the obsession with intellectual problems. Whicher shows how Emerson is a philosopher in Alexander Nehamas’s sense, someone whose art of living is bound up with the propounding of theoretical theses. [8]
Whicher’s central story is one of “acquiescence” (xvi). The general gist goes like this: Emerson’s first stage was the impress of the typical New England heritage of a Calvinistic belief in God’s Providence. However, do to the watering down of “the white-hot core of the original Calvinistic piety” (8) in Unitarianism, Emerson became susceptible to Humean doubt. This doubt laid waste to all the underpinnings of his faith in Providence, without actually touching the faith itself. This meant that natural, rational, and supernatural paths of justification were out for Emerson, but what saved him was the realization that God was within him—Emerson turns the original Protestant Reformation into a full-blown revolution. “The rock on which he thereafter based his life was the knowledge that the soul of man does not merely, as had long been taught, contain a spark or drop or breath of voice of God; it is God” (21).
So the first two stages of Emerson’s development, that take us to the resignation of his post in the Unitarian Church, give us the interaction of two fundamental principles to understand Emerson: 1) his faith in God’s Providence becomes Emerson’s Principle of Compensation which is then supplemented by 2) the God-within which becomes the Principle of Self-Reliance. The story that Whicher tells is that in the third stage the Principle of Self-Reliance expands into a kind of power madness, “that when Emerson found a basis for the assertion of unconditional good, in his discovery of the God within the soul, the law of compensation slipped into a subordinate place in his thoughts” (39). Finding God within gave Emerson the sense that all of our shackles were man-made, and thus paled in comparison to the power we had when we relied instead on God for support. Mad with his belief that he could do anything, Emerson’s Principle of Self-Reliance quite naturally collapses under its own weight, from the unbalanced ratio between claims-of-power and evidence-for-power. The more the world “remained obdurately independent of his will” (60), the more he saw that the Principle of Self-Reliance was clearly not all there was. So in the fifth and final stage, the Principle of Compensation returns in order to circumscribe the power announced by Self-Reliance. And so the promise of freedom Emerson felt with the discovery of the God within is diminished as he acquiesces to the encompassing demands of fate.
3. There is something very powerful and importantly right about Whicher’s narrative. However, there are two interlocked problems that should lead us to dissent from the conclusions Whicher draws about Emerson’s philosophical attitude. The first is the condensation of the proposed shift between all five stages at the very beginning of his career. The evidence Whicher accumulates doesn’t point at a steady development, but that the major movement of acquiescence has already occurred by Essays, First Series (1941). Nature (1836) is, without a doubt, a bewildering text that does not see Emerson at the height of his powers, but everyone affirms that all the action is in his first two books of essays. [9] How can his most powerful moments be an acquiescence?
Given that the evidence of the interplay between the Principle of Compensation and the Principle of Self-Reliance is present at minimum in seed form even at the beginning of his career as writer, it is equally easy to mark not a sharp break but a gradual unfolding of the essential elements of his mature thought. The difference between the two is that what Lawrence Buell calls Whicher’s “tragic lapse theory of Emerson’s inner life” [10] doesn’t do well in suggesting that Emerson has a coherent philosophy. In essence, Whicher explains away incoherence as biographically legible conflict that is, indeed, conceptually bunk. This treatment, of course, is given industrial strength justification by Emerson himself, his most famous line being “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”).
So the second problem that leads from the first is that Whicher’s account doesn’t precisely help us read the final product. The reason is simple: there’s a reason that Emerson’s journals were raided for the final product of his polished essays and that things appeared as they did, and other things (from the journals) disappeared as they did. The question is what those local reasons were, something that would aid our ability to interpret how the essays hang together as they stand. We should not use the journals to explain away the need for us to think hard about what Emerson was meaning to do in the essays. Barbara Packer, in her book which we should see as an extension of Whicher’s account, summarizes the scholarly problem well in relation to Nature: the problem is in “finding a stylistically sensitive way of reconciling a diachronic account of the book’s genesis and growth with a synchronic account of its structure.” [11]
The main thesis I would forward is that Whicher-Packer lapsarian accounts are broadly right about Emerson’s biography, but wrong about his philosophy. I think such biographical sleuthing has been successful in establishing that Emerson’s initial, cosmically high hopes about the power that could be unleashed within each of us were tragically dashed—what I don’t think they’ve done as well in is in suggesting what Emerson did with that tragedy in constructing his philosophy. In particular, formulating the account as lapsarian gives us exactly the wrong handle on the heart of Emerson’s thought. Emerson may have thought in such biblical terms as the Fall of Man, and mythologized the paradox of having infinite power within while continuing to fail without in those terms, but the central strain of Emerson that faces the future breaks radically with these modes of thought, and so to interpret him according to them is to darken precisely what is most enlightening about him on our problems.
4. Whicher’s problem, I think, is that he doesn’t ascribe enough importance to what I shall call Emerson’s Principle of Mood. I think the hidden message of Emerson’s trajectory is not the fundamental importance of the struggle between the optimistic power of Self-Reliance against the pessimistic power of Fate (which has significant prima facie evidence in the trajectory to The Conduct of Life), but the struggle between the promise he felt in Self-Reliance and it’s ephemerality in the face of changing moods. The Principle of Compensation, which is always overinfluenced by Emerson’s faith in Providence (which is quite cheery), gives way to Mood as the most important element waging battle against Emerson’s optimism. It isn’t optimism vs. pessimism, but optimism vs. optimism/pessimism.
The conceptual source of Whicher’s rhetoric of acquiescence is his sense that Emerson is trying, and failing, to find a way to live in the Power of His Soul all the time. I think all of the following summarizing moments go wrong on precisely the point I’m addressing, and they mount in a steady progression (italics are all mine): “Though not quite ready himself to give up to the soul beyond the possibility of a quick self-recovery, the thought then central to his mind was of a new state of life, a state of greatness and freedom beyond anything in human experience, into which, if he could only hit upon the password, he and all men might at any moment enter” (48); “If freedom lay only in the total self-trust of greatness, and if in fact he could be great only in inceptions and not in act, how did his new faith free him?” (70); “Even if we drop the question of action, and seek on ‘Reality,’ the problem still remains, How is such wholeness to be won and kept?” (83-4); “But the radical defect of man, the creator in the finite, is his incapacity to maintain his creative force. ‘The only sin is limitation’—but this is original sin beyond the power of grace” (97); “Man is promised the world—a promise perpetually renewed and never kept” (111). You can tell Whicher’s account begins to lose explanatory power when he perversely construes Emerson’s exuberant redescription of sin as a lapsarian tragedy. He may, biographically, have been looking for a password and totality, but the philosophy we get in its finished form is not like this. Emerson’s tragic optimism lays precisely in his giving up of the desire for completeness—not as a lost hope, but as a dumb hope. (And this, to me, seems perfectly consistent with having to be reminded oneself about how dumb one’s hopes might be.)
I think we can find this sense of duality—between the elated promise of independence and the depressed realization of its fragmented nature—in his published work, from beginning to end. Less than a year after the publication of Nature, Emerson writes in his journal “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” [13] For Emerson, Unity is the essence of God and thus Self-Reliance’s promise of power, and thus duality is a fragmented deflation of that promise. What I think we find in Emerson’s writing is a dualism between monism/dualism—depending on mood, he sees the world through one lens, and then another.
The importance of the circumscription of mood is that it creates a radical positionality to the Emersonian utterance. And this is how we are to understand Emerson’s hobgoblin—for while it makes sense to say that you cannot hold both “there is a god” and “there is no god,” what sense does it make to say that you cannot be both happy and sad? Oh—at the same time, sure, but it certainly doesn’t make any sense to say that a person is being incoherent when they wake up in the morning happy and end the evening sad. Emerson’s radical thought is that our assertions about the world are equally relative to the mood we are in when we make them. And this then makes conceptual coherence a more complex affair to adjudicate the importance of. This means that to understand the most important syntactical unit in the Emersonian corpus—the sentence—you have to ascribe a mood, and that way mount a picture of coherence relative to the kinds of moods. The Principle of Mood is essentially the claim that it is rhetoric all the way down, that we are always contextually and rhetorically defined—but more, for it points the way toward a necessary expansion of our conceptual accounts to include the emotions, passions, temperament, attitude. So while the last half the 20th century has pretty much seen the rhetorical stance become common sense for the intellectuals, we still have Emerson sitting beyond.
5. On the surface, the necessity of understanding the text in context seems so obvious in terms of understanding anything as having one particular meaning as opposed to another that to invoke it to justify apparent contradiction looks suspiciously convenient (which is what many of Emerson’s contemporaries thought—Melville, for one). So I’d like to give one example that illustrates how Emerson uses this thought in a constructive mode. Emblematic of this general train of thought is the first two essays of Essays, Series Two: “The Poet” and “Experience.” These two essays cannot be read separately without giving a very misleading picture of Emerson’s vision. “The Poet” gives us a predictably up-beat picture—by this time, even to his contemporaries, Emerson was The Optimist. “The poet is the sayer, the namer … a sovereign, and stands on the centre.” “The Universe is the externization of the soul.” “Poets are thus liberating gods.” But in “Experience,” Emerson uses the death of his son, Waldo, to establish the much darker tone of the piece, offering this disturbing reaction:
In the death of my son, now more than two years ago, I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me. If tomorrow I should be informed of the bankruptcy of my principal debtors, the loss of my property would be a great inconvenience to me, perhaps, for many years; but it would leave me as it found me,—neither better nor worse. So is it with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.I don’t intend to here attempt to read this passage, which continues to shock our sensibilities. (I should add that Emerson’s grief in his journal is overwhelming—if there is anything in his published work that needs to be understood according to the Principle of Mood, it is this passage.) For now I simply offer the above two cross selections to establish the tenor of the essays as a whole. What I want to instead compare are two examples of a more specific procedure that Emerson uses to great effect in these two essays. Compare these two passages, and ask yourself—which essay does it come from?
I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition. Nature does not like to be observed, and likes that we should be her fools and playmates. We may have the sphere for our cricket-ball, but not a berry for our philosophy. Direct strokes she never gave us power to make; all our blows glance, all our hits are accidents. Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.If you guessed I would be tricky and put the second essay first and the first second, you’d be right. The mood of the two passages are so starkly opposed—the first depressing while the second, though speaking of the sad nature of the poet to be useless in society, makes it sound great. What I want to punch up are the two lines that express the same conceptual thought but in two precisely different attitudes, like an apple being looked at from two different directions. “Nature does not like to be observed” and “Thou shalt lie close hid with nature.” This is an allusion to an aphorism of Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide.” In the darker essay of “Experience,” Nature’s tendency to hide from us is really our fault, the “most unhandsome part of our condition.” But from a different direction, the poet is who transcends this condition (and thus liberating gods for it) though at the expense of being lost to social intercourse. (“To be great is to be misunderstood,” as Emerson says in “Self-Reliance.”) One more:
For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen and shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower and thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console thee with tenderest love.
That also is the best success in conversation, the magic of liberty, which puts the world, like a ball, in our hands. How cheap even the liberty then seems; how mean to study, when an emotion communicates to the intellect the power to sap and upheave nature: how great the perspective! nations, times, systems, enter and disappear, like threads in tapestry of large figure and many colors; dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we will sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.Again, the moods are so clearly juxtaposed. The poet, drunk on his power to say, would sell off everything else—which is precisely the dark fringe to this dream, the nightmare hanging off in the wings: What if it is all an illusion? If it’s an illusion, then getting drunk on it seems to just double down on a shitty hand. Emerson’s early life took Humean skepticism very seriously, and these two passages perfectly illustrate Emerson’s constructive use of that early encounter. Emerson conceptualizes romanticism’s promise of power as a dream, which is both its best and worst feature. Progress is contingent on our ability to actualize the dream in the world, but what then is the world but an endless succession of particular people’s dreams? This is how you make the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume practical again. (Something, I should add, Hume I think already began to do if Annette Baier’s reading of him is right in A Progress of Sentiments.) For the output of this line is not paralysis, as a practically lived Cartesian skepticism would be—if you are self-conscious enough about mood circumscribing speech acts, as I think Emerson is, then the mood in which you become depressed about mood circumscribing speech acts and how it just shows it all to be a sham, an illusion, “so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within” [14]—then you’ll also recognize that sometimes you aren’t in that mood. And this suggests to me that the point of this juxtaposition of moods on the metaphor of dreams is that what we must really beware is not the act of saying tout court, but the drunkenness of dogmatism—self-reliant saying can forget its fallibility in its moment of power, of changing the shape of the world by changing what it is possible for us to dream of.
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem.
6. Since Whicher supplies all the evidence needed to modulate his case, I think it’s easy to see the slant he puts on it as an unfortunate Mumfordism. While above I attempted to show what the conceptual source of the rhetoric of acquiescence was, it’s nearest historical source is Lewis Mumford’s groundbreaking and very influential The Golden Day (1926). With Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, they composed the “Young American” critics, a group of wide-ranging intellectuals and cultural critics whose central philosophical preoccupation in the early 20th century was an attack on John Dewey and pragmatism for, essentially, not being radical enough. After Mumford’s chapter on the central American Romantics (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melville), “The Golden Day,” follows his chapter on William Dean Howells, Twain, and William James, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence.”
What is valid in idealism is the belief in this process of re-molding, re-forming, re-creating, and so humanizing the rough chaos of existence. That belief had vanished: it no longer seemed a genuine possibility. … It was an act of grand acquiescence. Transcendentalism, as Emerson caustically said, had resulted in a headache; but the pragmatism that followed it was a paralysis. This generation had lost the power of choice; it bowed to the inevitable; it swam with the tide; and it went as far as the tide would carry it. [15]I don’t wish to whitewash Mumford’s complex relationship to James, Dewey, and pragmatism, but his view of it was perhaps a little overinfluenced by Santayana’s criticism of Emerson through James as “the genteel tradition.” For it’s not hard to see how Emerson himself led to the situation—the divine providence that became Emerson’s Principle of Compensation later became what Emerson called “fate.”
Rather than confuting Mumford’s particular interpretation of pragmatism, I want to close by offering this more general observation about the conceptual resources of James and Dewey’s pragmatism. What I think Mumford and Whicher misunderstand about Emerson and the pragmatists is the importance of romantic self-transformation. They saw the essentially conservative character of “reality” and instrumentalism, but didn’t see how the Emersonian tradition was attempting to unlock a radically different orientation to a necessary recognition of the crossed axes of self-preservation and self-transformation. When Whicher sees Emerson try to assimilate the world’s resistance to the Poet’s Self-Reliance by his Principle of Compensation, he thinks Emerson has sold the pass to inevitability. In instrumentalism, we see how ends must first be fixed before deciding on what means or instruments one uses to carry out those ends, and thus how it doesn’t provide the opportunity to change those ends. But this understanding of Dewey’s instrumentalism completely ignores what Dewey tried to articulate in his notion of the means-ends continuum—that in the process of formulating a set of means to carry out a defined end we alter our sense of what end is desired, thus setting off a dialectic, as now new means are needed for the new end, the search for which will again alter the end-in-view, requiring new means, ad infinitum. [16] If we think of romanticism as the movement of thought that apotheosizes the transformative character of human power, we will see that while Mumford’s interpretation of pragmatism plays down the importance of romanticism in pragmatism in favor of Emerson and Whicher’s interpretation of Emerson plays down the importance of romanticism in Emerson in favor of pragmatism (unfortunately, on this view), and that what we really need is a view of Emerson and pragmatism that integrates their views of transformation and resistance, continuity and change, future and past into a coherent conceptual account. [17] It isn’t for them that we must do this, for it certainly may well turn out to be the case that we will have to reject some of their particular ways of understanding things—this is for us, for if Rorty is right, then figuring out how to get their conceptual projects to work is a way for us to understand how to get our conceptual projects to work.
Endnotes
[1] Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 78
[2] This is obviously a very particular understanding of what philosophy is, roughly romantic. For example, it’s the picture that is unveiled in my discussion of John Barth—see the third section of "On Literature's Accidents."
[3] From the beginning of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” which can be found in Berlin’s Russian Thinkers or The Proper Study of Mankind.
[4] Quoted in Christopher Tayler’s “Tables and Chairs,” London Review of Books, March 21, 2013.
[5] This was the burden of Robert Brandom’s “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism. Rorty’s response was that Brandom’s paper gave him “a more flattering view of the course of my work than before. Brandom has suggested a coherence between my earlier and my later writings that had not occurred to me. I had not seen that there was a connection between the eliminative materialism I was urging in the 1960s and the private-public distinction I have been urging since Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. My unconscious has been more cunning than I had realized” (“Response to Brandom,” 190n4, in Rorty and His Critics).
[6] When you look at Hawthorne, you find a writer with a fairly stable vocabulary for tropes, an intense desire to make those tropes about troping, and an abiding concern about his ability to trope—so we can spot a trajectory wherein many of Hawthorne’s tales and sketches thematize the problem of writing within them, to his three vital novels—all in some manner internalizing the problem of writing, whether Hester’s needlework or Holgrave’s daguerreotyping or Coverdale the minor transcendental poet—to the final Marble Faun, all about death, representation, and the death of representation. Tack on Hawthorne’s inability to finish his final projects and you have a pretty good outline for a “death of the imagination” narrative. (If you want a display of what "thematizing the problem of writing" means, you might check out section 2 of "Work and Idleness.") When you look at Melville, you find a writer fascinated by the act of storytelling, but struggling to find his real voice as a writer. All his books through Moby-Dick are first-person narratives, and after encountering Hawthorne’s work and its literary-conceptual gymnastics, Melville writes his Great Book, publishes it, begins writing the next, and as the bad reviews of Moby-Dick come out, we can see him transforming Pierre into something that seems designed to fail (gloriously, for the book is brilliant). And The Confidence-Man—there’s no protagonist, no narrative! (On the surface, only, of course.) After that he gives up prose entirely for poetry, never publishing another story (Billy Budd was unfinished and posthumous) and writing the longest poem in English (barring, I believe, The Faerie Queene), nearly 18,000 lines, and some other short lyrics in the last 30+ years of his life. This story, reading his increasing impenetrability as a form of private expression, is the burden of Edgar Dryden’s Monumental Melville.
[7] Along with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), which obviously has a much larger scope. I hope to say something about Matthiessen’s book soon.
[8] See the “Introduction” to Nehamas’s The Art of Living. Nehamas makes a number of other distinctions in approaching theory and philosophy, all of which are pertinent to understanding Emerson. In particular, as Nehamas himself notes, the kind of philosopher his study is in large part about (Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault) are often called “literary” because central to their act of philosophy is the process of self-creation that happens in the written medium. Additionally, Nehamas’s exemplars “do not insist that their life is a model for the world at large. They do not want to be imitated, at least not directly. That is, they believe that those who want to imitate them must develop their own art of living, their own self, perhaps to exhibit it for others but not so that others imitate them directly. Imitation, in this context, is to become someone on one’s own; but the someone one becomes must be different from one’s model” (10). The relationship to the Emerson who said “imitation is suicide” (“The Poet”) and the Thoreau who said “I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account” (Walden, Ch. 1) should be obvious. However, Nehamas has never given any attention to the relationship (genealogical or otherwise) between Emerson and Nietzsche, though everyone who works on either is well aware of it. Nehamas’s story in that book is structured by the obsession his three later writers had with Socrates (and, hence, Plato). And given that two major heroes and influences on Emerson were Plato and Montaigne, there might be an interesting story to tell about the refraction of ideas through all these prisms of intellectual power and self-reliance.
[9] Considering Emerson’s Principle of Transition, that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition” (“Self-Reliance”), an argument could be made about the nature of Nature’s power being based on its slippery fluidity. That is, however, not an argument I intend on making, nor will I discuss the Principle of Transition. Nature is great fun, but Emerson’s acme is in the 1840s work.
[10] Buell, Emerson, 98
[11] Emerson’s Fall, 29
[12] The argument I would make about Emerson’s central line of thought—which is clearly well beyond the space afforded here, and beyond my present grasp anyway—is analogous to the arguments Hans Blumenberg and Bernard Yack mount against philosophers of history like Karl Löwith and Eric Voegelin. The latter two basically formulate narratives in which today’s modern, secular problems are simply the revenging of old, religious problems because our secular terms are simply written over the palimpsest of religion. (This is sometimes called the “secularization thesis,” and Löwith’s Meaning in History is paradigmatic.) By contrast, Blumenberg and Yack in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Longing for Total Revolution, respectively, attempt to show how some secular conceptual mechanics are genuinely new moves that produce new problems with no precursor in the older modes of thought. What I think is important in understanding Emerson are the reasons for his formulation of self-reliance as self-reliance, and not “God-reliance,” in Whicher’s very influential conflation (57). There’s no doubt in my mind that Emerson sincerely believed that God was within, and so that self-reliance was in some way God-reliance, but the conceptual work being done by his formulations of self-reliance were ultimately antithetical to belief in any and every form of God that is not found within—and this means that most forms of religion are behind the Emersonian curve. Furthermore, I think there’s a reason why his synonym for self-reliance in “Self-Reliance” is “self-trust” and not “self-faith” as well.
[13] May 26, 1837
[14] This is from the extraordinary close of Ch. 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” I use it here as a placeholder for a larger discussion about the Melvillean and Emersonian strands of antirepresentationalism that I find pervasive in the central American Romantics. For in “Experience,” Emerson comes as close as he can get to the apocalyptic pessimism Melville displays in his mature work about the very possibility of representation, of there being any point to this pathetic negotiation we call “life.” Emerson articulates it—and somehow swerves back to optimism. I think of Melville and Emerson standing to each other as, in a manner, Derrida stands to Rorty. Rorty recognizes Derrida’s “arguments” as having an affinity to pragmatism’s antirepresentationlism, but equally that that rejection does not a pragmatist make. To make inroads on this angle, one should coordinate “The Whiteness of the Whale” with Derrida’s “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” (in his Margins of Philosophy). Compare Ishmael’s rhetorical question, “is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?” to Derrida’s thesis: “White mythology—metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (213).
[15] The Golden Day, 83 of the 1957 Beacon Paperback edition
[16] Brandom has reformulated Dewey’s notion of the means-ends continuum for Rorty’s notion of what Brandom calls the “vocabulary vocabulary”: “Every use of a vocabulary, every application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit in communal practice—its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean anything (though it can cause something)—and transforms those norms by its novelty—its private dimension, apart from which it does not formulate a belief, plan, or purpose worth expression” ("Vocabularies of Pragmatism," Perspectives on Pragmatism, 153). It's worth pointing out that here Brandom is attempting to assimilate some very specialized points in the philosophy of language with Rorty's taking up of the Mill-Berlin tradition of articulating a public/private distinction in order defend liberalism, but that given Emerson's own preoccupation with the distiction society and solitude, there might be some interesting resources in Emerson to think through this angle on pragmatism that Brandom has done so well in bringing to light. For a different application of Brandom's philosophy of language to the public/private distinction, see my "A Spatial Model of Belief Change."
[17] Despite the previous note, Brandom has rejected romanticism as an important genealogical root of pragmatism. See my discussion of this in “Pragmatism as Enlightened Romanticism.”
Friday, July 02, 2010
The Representation of Animals
Talk of "the Other" was popular for a long time in Continental philosophy. Perhaps it still is. To tell you the truth, it bores the hell out of me. People who still think capitalizing the "O" is going to shock people into realizing something are perhaps misjudging how much ground they've gained in the last 50 years, and forgotten that it was a rhetorical tactic, not an ontology. (Well, in fairness, much of the mischief was because many did originally think it was an ontology.) This will likely be the only time I talk about animals in a philosophical way, since I tend to think that all the hard work to be done is in talking about factory farms, which means for the most part giving up trying to penetrate the silent face of animals to hear their call. I register in some fashion the fact that all philosophical reflection deals on some level with two prior distinctions in order to get off the ground--humanity's distinction from Nature, and humanity's distinction from Animals. But I don't think this fact gets us terribly far by itself, though a lot of ground has been gained in better ways of treating both ideas.
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Apparently reporting on a break in recent scholarship, Greg Garrard says that there is a “split between philosophical consideration of animal rights and cultural analysis of the representation of animals” (Garrard 136). Whether this is accurate or not, I should argue that it is odd, since how we represent animals leads directly into how we philosophically consider them, for you can’t consider them without first conceptualizing them in some manner. Garrard briefly takes up this line of thought in talking of Mary Midgley, but the power of this point in tackling not only the particular issue of animals, but also the wider issue of “nature” is obscured. I will argue that Midgley’s pragmatic sensibleness opens up a vista with which to explore representations of animals as reflections on humanity that histrionic talk of the radical otherness of nature and animals obliterates—which, then, ironically destroys the only hope of these silent beings. To illustrate the profitability of this vista, I will consider Robert Burns and Anna Barbauld’s different representations of mice in their two short poems.
Midgley’s appreciation of anthropomorphism, which Garrard briefly considers (137-8), basically consists in the note that language—and hence all verbs, nouns, and particularly descriptive adjectives—is in some sense a projection of our own humanity. When facing down the threat of Cartesian solipsism produced by the sundering of Mind from Nature (in Descartes’ res cogitans and res extensa), we face what Midgley calls the “unrealistic sceptical isolation of human life from every possible context” (Midgley 1 128). It is because of this previous Cartesian platitude that anthropomorphism—when taken as an ecocritical concept—becomes distended. Defenders of nature and animals, wishing to do right by those they defend, wish to render the “authentic” animal, the lion qua lion. But registering the previous note that language is a set of human categories, the idea of anthropomorphism can generate the sheer impossibility of conceptualizing animals entirely, suggesting that “God – and indeed all non-human life – must be so unlike us that none of it can be understood from a human standpoint at all” (128). This is what Wittgenstein meant when, pointing at this Cartesian picture holding us captive, he said, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (Wittgenstein 223). The idea that we could understand the lion qua lion is a mirage created by our previous posited isolation from him, and this mirage—appearing the oasis from humanity’s tainted touch—is what renders the lion qua human categories reprehensible.
This Cartesian isolation is what produces the tangled web of Horkheimer and Adorno’s and Heidegger’s pessimism about the human situation. The haunting inevitability of “blindly pragmatized thought” [fn.1] lurks behind Heidegger’s obscure attempts to clear away and rehabilitate what he calls, in contradistinction to scientific thought, “Thought.” But Heidegger’s late-stage obscurity about what exactly he means by “Thought,” or “the Thinker” or “Poet,” just highlights the on-going struggle with the Cartesian problematic. Even Midgley falls for it, albeit briefly: “There is nothing unusual about confusing a symbol with the thing symbolized, about projecting a fantasy. … Mixing up a symbol with an attribution is, in fact, normal. Among human beings, it is often best checked by the victim, the walking symbol himself, who can say, ‘Hey, look—I am not that, but me’” (Midgley 2 33) Asking “the victim” is the Heideggerian point about the redescription of essence (res) as a “gathering,” which leads to Heideggerian authenticity (every “thing” has its own authentic collection of attributes) and the switch to aural metaphors (if only we could hear them). But this distinction between projected attributes and essential attributes can’t be maintained for the same reason that the Galilean metaphor of Science reading the Book of Nature cannot be maintained—only humans have and use language, and Heidegger’s reversal (“language speaks man”) simply obscures the silence Baudrillard says haunts us about animals. Even here, however, Baudrillard’s sense that Reason, and hence experimentation, is simply out for the “admission of the principle of objectivity” (129) muddles just what else we are supposed to do. Baudrillard says, “What is essential is that nothing escape the empire of meaning, the sharing of meaning. Certainly, behind all that, nothing speaks to us, neither the mad, nor the dead, nor children, nor savages, and fundamentally we know nothing of them, but what is essential is that Reason save face, and that everything escape silence” (137). Baudrillard is attempting to cast Reason as a bad guy for putting words in unspeaking mouths, but it is unclear what speaking is once you get “behind” the “empire of meaning”—behind meaning is noise, and even those who speak for themselves take part in that empire, which means animals do not present humans with a peculiar problem, so much as the constant threat of the breakdown in communication always does.
The representation of animals has to remain a pragmatic event of trial-and-error, for there is no “essence” to anything that we do not put there. This antiessentialism comes out of a consideration of how language works in the Cartesian problematic because the only way to beat Cartesian solipsism is by attribution, by the extension of what you are aware of (as a self-aware res cogitans) to everything else by analogy. The cessation of doubt, rather than through the theoretical scaffolding Descartes hoped to erect from undoubted doubting, to God, to everything else, is rather a practical affair of testing extensions and seeing what works. When we come to the particular kinds of attributions humanity has made to animals, they are varied, but one pernicious one Midgley analyzes is the “Beast Within” (Midgley 2 35). Midgley suggests that this image was created to “solve the problem of evil” (39). Whereas in the Iliad, the formula for explaining misfortune seems to be “if you cannot blame the enemy, blame the gods” (41), the slow slide in belief in Gods' efficacious externality (including their internalization as thumos—will, drive, spirit) produced the need for a new scapegoat. And so we get Plato’s Simile of the Charioteer, with the partitioning of the soul into a good horse and a bad horse, and as Midgley says, “the feelings named in this connection are shame, ambition, the sense of honor, never, for instance, pity or affection, where the body might be held to make good suggestions to the soul. Plato’s map excludes such a possibility” (42).
This is the shift we see taking place in the Romantic era. The rise of the function of Imagination in the role of the mind’s relationship to reality is concurrently the rise of sympathy’s fortunes in the realm of morality, which we can see in Edmund Burke’s account of the mind’s faculties in the Philosophical Enquiry and most especially in the Scottish Enlighenment’s redistribution of the mind’s powers for morals, e.g., in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The dynamic begun by Homeric and Platonic similes is still best given by Bruno Snell in his still classic, if a bit battered, The Discovery of the Mind: “it is not quite correct to say that the rock is viewed anthropomorphically, unless we add that our understanding of the rock is anthropomorphic for the same reason that we are able to look at ourselves petromorphically…. In other words, and this is all-important in any explanation of the simile, man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself" (201, italics mine).
In Burns’s and Barbauld’s poems about the mouse, this analogical attitude is on full display, though in different ways. What is interesting in this juxtaposition is that, as Perkins notes, Barbauld’s “mouse speaker is an intellectual” (Perkins 9), whereas Burns’s ploughman is “more personal, impulsive, and emotional” (10). This juxtaposition registers the fact that the ploughman, on the one hand, as a human is the intended audience for the sympathetic plea. So the reader, as a fellow human, identifies with the ploughman, who makes the plea because he shows imaginative sensitivity to the plight of the mouse (e.g., lines 19-24, when the “Nest” of the title is analogized to “Thy wee-bit housie”). On the other hand, the first move of imagination is already made in Barbauld’s poem when she makes the speaker’s voice the mouse’s. Instead of having to make the superior position (the ploughman) receptive to the work of sympathy, Barbauld’s taken the locus of weakness as the poem’s voice, and the mouse—following out Burke’s insight about size—makes itself quite a naturally sympathetic voice. To counter an over-balancing, in which the mouse becomes pathetic and therefore threatens to become an object of contempt, Barbauld rather makes the mouse a site of intellectual power. And in the course of the plea, Barbauld’s mouse argues for sympathy—unable to display the sympathetic ear (as with the ploughman), the mouse reasons that the “well taught philosophic mind” “feels for all that lives” (line 25, 28). The important move in Barbauld’s poem is “men, like mice” (line 46)—the center of gravity of the simile is the mouse. The conceit of the poem is the projection of the highest virtues of humanity (vaunted Reason and Philosophy) to mice, which are only then glancingly reflected back to humanity.
Endnotes
[1] I talk a little about Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in "Blake and the Dialectic of Englightenment," though not nearly extensively enough. Their pessimism is succinctly treated in Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 56-7. Bernard Yack diagnoses the underlying problem of both Horkheimer and Adorno and Heidegger as a totalizing concept of modernity in his The Fetishism of Modernities, Ch. 5. Yack's impressive little book presses home the thought on contemporary theory he excavated in The Longing for Total Revolution: that the troubling theoretical problems of both post-Marxist forms of thought (Frankfurt School critical theory to Birmingham School cultural studies) and post-Nietzschean forms (from Heidegger and Sartre to Foucault and Derrida) are one and the same--a totalizing concept of Society requiring a Herculean concept of autonomy.
- Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
- Press), 1995
- Garrard - Ecocriticism, (New York: Routledge), 2004
- Midgley 1 - Animals and Why They Matter, (Athens: University of Georgia
- Press), 1984
- Midgley 2 - Beast and Man, Rev. Ed., (New York: Routledge), 2002
- Perkins - Romanticism and Animal Rights, (New York: Cambridge University
- Press), 2003
- Snell - The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, (New York: Dover),
- 1953, 1982
- Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe,
- (New York: Macmillan Company), 1953
A version of Robert Burns's "To a Mouse."
A version of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition."
References:
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Apparently reporting on a break in recent scholarship, Greg Garrard says that there is a “split between philosophical consideration of animal rights and cultural analysis of the representation of animals” (Garrard 136). Whether this is accurate or not, I should argue that it is odd, since how we represent animals leads directly into how we philosophically consider them, for you can’t consider them without first conceptualizing them in some manner. Garrard briefly takes up this line of thought in talking of Mary Midgley, but the power of this point in tackling not only the particular issue of animals, but also the wider issue of “nature” is obscured. I will argue that Midgley’s pragmatic sensibleness opens up a vista with which to explore representations of animals as reflections on humanity that histrionic talk of the radical otherness of nature and animals obliterates—which, then, ironically destroys the only hope of these silent beings. To illustrate the profitability of this vista, I will consider Robert Burns and Anna Barbauld’s different representations of mice in their two short poems.
Midgley’s appreciation of anthropomorphism, which Garrard briefly considers (137-8), basically consists in the note that language—and hence all verbs, nouns, and particularly descriptive adjectives—is in some sense a projection of our own humanity. When facing down the threat of Cartesian solipsism produced by the sundering of Mind from Nature (in Descartes’ res cogitans and res extensa), we face what Midgley calls the “unrealistic sceptical isolation of human life from every possible context” (Midgley 1 128). It is because of this previous Cartesian platitude that anthropomorphism—when taken as an ecocritical concept—becomes distended. Defenders of nature and animals, wishing to do right by those they defend, wish to render the “authentic” animal, the lion qua lion. But registering the previous note that language is a set of human categories, the idea of anthropomorphism can generate the sheer impossibility of conceptualizing animals entirely, suggesting that “God – and indeed all non-human life – must be so unlike us that none of it can be understood from a human standpoint at all” (128). This is what Wittgenstein meant when, pointing at this Cartesian picture holding us captive, he said, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (Wittgenstein 223). The idea that we could understand the lion qua lion is a mirage created by our previous posited isolation from him, and this mirage—appearing the oasis from humanity’s tainted touch—is what renders the lion qua human categories reprehensible.
This Cartesian isolation is what produces the tangled web of Horkheimer and Adorno’s and Heidegger’s pessimism about the human situation. The haunting inevitability of “blindly pragmatized thought” [fn.1] lurks behind Heidegger’s obscure attempts to clear away and rehabilitate what he calls, in contradistinction to scientific thought, “Thought.” But Heidegger’s late-stage obscurity about what exactly he means by “Thought,” or “the Thinker” or “Poet,” just highlights the on-going struggle with the Cartesian problematic. Even Midgley falls for it, albeit briefly: “There is nothing unusual about confusing a symbol with the thing symbolized, about projecting a fantasy. … Mixing up a symbol with an attribution is, in fact, normal. Among human beings, it is often best checked by the victim, the walking symbol himself, who can say, ‘Hey, look—I am not that, but me’” (Midgley 2 33) Asking “the victim” is the Heideggerian point about the redescription of essence (res) as a “gathering,” which leads to Heideggerian authenticity (every “thing” has its own authentic collection of attributes) and the switch to aural metaphors (if only we could hear them). But this distinction between projected attributes and essential attributes can’t be maintained for the same reason that the Galilean metaphor of Science reading the Book of Nature cannot be maintained—only humans have and use language, and Heidegger’s reversal (“language speaks man”) simply obscures the silence Baudrillard says haunts us about animals. Even here, however, Baudrillard’s sense that Reason, and hence experimentation, is simply out for the “admission of the principle of objectivity” (129) muddles just what else we are supposed to do. Baudrillard says, “What is essential is that nothing escape the empire of meaning, the sharing of meaning. Certainly, behind all that, nothing speaks to us, neither the mad, nor the dead, nor children, nor savages, and fundamentally we know nothing of them, but what is essential is that Reason save face, and that everything escape silence” (137). Baudrillard is attempting to cast Reason as a bad guy for putting words in unspeaking mouths, but it is unclear what speaking is once you get “behind” the “empire of meaning”—behind meaning is noise, and even those who speak for themselves take part in that empire, which means animals do not present humans with a peculiar problem, so much as the constant threat of the breakdown in communication always does.
The representation of animals has to remain a pragmatic event of trial-and-error, for there is no “essence” to anything that we do not put there. This antiessentialism comes out of a consideration of how language works in the Cartesian problematic because the only way to beat Cartesian solipsism is by attribution, by the extension of what you are aware of (as a self-aware res cogitans) to everything else by analogy. The cessation of doubt, rather than through the theoretical scaffolding Descartes hoped to erect from undoubted doubting, to God, to everything else, is rather a practical affair of testing extensions and seeing what works. When we come to the particular kinds of attributions humanity has made to animals, they are varied, but one pernicious one Midgley analyzes is the “Beast Within” (Midgley 2 35). Midgley suggests that this image was created to “solve the problem of evil” (39). Whereas in the Iliad, the formula for explaining misfortune seems to be “if you cannot blame the enemy, blame the gods” (41), the slow slide in belief in Gods' efficacious externality (including their internalization as thumos—will, drive, spirit) produced the need for a new scapegoat. And so we get Plato’s Simile of the Charioteer, with the partitioning of the soul into a good horse and a bad horse, and as Midgley says, “the feelings named in this connection are shame, ambition, the sense of honor, never, for instance, pity or affection, where the body might be held to make good suggestions to the soul. Plato’s map excludes such a possibility” (42).
This is the shift we see taking place in the Romantic era. The rise of the function of Imagination in the role of the mind’s relationship to reality is concurrently the rise of sympathy’s fortunes in the realm of morality, which we can see in Edmund Burke’s account of the mind’s faculties in the Philosophical Enquiry and most especially in the Scottish Enlighenment’s redistribution of the mind’s powers for morals, e.g., in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The dynamic begun by Homeric and Platonic similes is still best given by Bruno Snell in his still classic, if a bit battered, The Discovery of the Mind: “it is not quite correct to say that the rock is viewed anthropomorphically, unless we add that our understanding of the rock is anthropomorphic for the same reason that we are able to look at ourselves petromorphically…. In other words, and this is all-important in any explanation of the simile, man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself" (201, italics mine).
In Burns’s and Barbauld’s poems about the mouse, this analogical attitude is on full display, though in different ways. What is interesting in this juxtaposition is that, as Perkins notes, Barbauld’s “mouse speaker is an intellectual” (Perkins 9), whereas Burns’s ploughman is “more personal, impulsive, and emotional” (10). This juxtaposition registers the fact that the ploughman, on the one hand, as a human is the intended audience for the sympathetic plea. So the reader, as a fellow human, identifies with the ploughman, who makes the plea because he shows imaginative sensitivity to the plight of the mouse (e.g., lines 19-24, when the “Nest” of the title is analogized to “Thy wee-bit housie”). On the other hand, the first move of imagination is already made in Barbauld’s poem when she makes the speaker’s voice the mouse’s. Instead of having to make the superior position (the ploughman) receptive to the work of sympathy, Barbauld’s taken the locus of weakness as the poem’s voice, and the mouse—following out Burke’s insight about size—makes itself quite a naturally sympathetic voice. To counter an over-balancing, in which the mouse becomes pathetic and therefore threatens to become an object of contempt, Barbauld rather makes the mouse a site of intellectual power. And in the course of the plea, Barbauld’s mouse argues for sympathy—unable to display the sympathetic ear (as with the ploughman), the mouse reasons that the “well taught philosophic mind” “feels for all that lives” (line 25, 28). The important move in Barbauld’s poem is “men, like mice” (line 46)—the center of gravity of the simile is the mouse. The conceit of the poem is the projection of the highest virtues of humanity (vaunted Reason and Philosophy) to mice, which are only then glancingly reflected back to humanity.
Endnotes
[1] I talk a little about Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in "Blake and the Dialectic of Englightenment," though not nearly extensively enough. Their pessimism is succinctly treated in Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 56-7. Bernard Yack diagnoses the underlying problem of both Horkheimer and Adorno and Heidegger as a totalizing concept of modernity in his The Fetishism of Modernities, Ch. 5. Yack's impressive little book presses home the thought on contemporary theory he excavated in The Longing for Total Revolution: that the troubling theoretical problems of both post-Marxist forms of thought (Frankfurt School critical theory to Birmingham School cultural studies) and post-Nietzschean forms (from Heidegger and Sartre to Foucault and Derrida) are one and the same--a totalizing concept of Society requiring a Herculean concept of autonomy.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Blake and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
This is a fairly uninteresting piece, gerrymandered together out of reading Blake, Horkheimer and Adorno (H/A), and a Romanticist named Mark Lussier (for a class reflection in ecocriticism). In my understanding, H/A formulated one of the most thorough articulations of the post-Rousseauian longing for total revolution, a phrase borrowed from Bernard Yack. I think this longing is one of the most important conceptual pieces to understanding much about modern thought. Once one identifies society as the problem and pervasive, you begin to wish it would all go away--somehow. English Romanticism contains this longing, but like Rorty, I see something else going on, too. I think American Romanticism--Emerson--does much to overcome the problem of this longing, and I take it to be the tension between what Emerson termed "solitude and society" and the identification of that tension as power.
There isn't any of that here, but what Harold Bloom calls Emerson's "dialectics of power" has echoes in this discussion of people "across the pond" (as we stuffy litcrits apparently like to say), and what I identify below as Blake's sly humbling through metonymy is Emerson's mode in Nature. So while below I suggest that Blake's Platonism can't break through H/A's formulation of the dialectic, the real problem isn't Blake's Platonism (which I take to be ironic like Emerson's), but the formulation--the longing--itself. In Blake, the dialectics of power that shirks this longing shows up as the dialectic between Poets and Priests found in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, also not discussed here. To understand this dialectic, between self-alone and self-among-others, it helps to translate Blake's categories into Bloom's: poetry and belief. Santayana helps beautifully with this, too: "Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry" (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion v). Working out the involution of that sentence will move one far towards understanding what Rorty means by metaphors as the catalyst of cultural change and his public/private distinction.
What I have left to work out in these stories is the relationship between mathematics (an enemy common to H/A in the Dialectic of Englightenment and Heidegger in, e.g., "The Age of the World Picture") and the ironic Platonism I find in Romantics from Blake and Emerson to Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. I suspect that I find their Platonism ironic precisely because Platonism took the path of method identified with mathematics, and that this path ironically transformed into materialism in the New Science (an irony charted by Blumenberg)--hence, the needed irony of a return to Plato and Greek idealism.
References are to an article by Lussier, "Blake's Deep Ecology," in Studies in Romanticism Fall 1996 (my pagination is not coordinate to the hardcopy). The H/A translation of the Dialectic of Englightenment used throughout, except one place noted, is to the new Jephcott translation.
*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.
----------
The story Horkheimer and Adorno tell about the history of thought is compressed and dense, but one of its central components is that “in thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered” (Horkheimer and Adorno 31). What Horkheimer and Adorno fear is the instrumentalization of thought, the turning of thought into merely a tool: “blindly pragmatized thought loses its transcending quality and, its relation to truth.”[fn.1] The disturbing thing in Horkheimer and Adorno’s picture is that once the dialectical path is stepped upon, there is no getting off until the bottom. Like Marx’s sense that once the division of labor is made, the rest of history is but an extension of that first moment, it is difficult to find in Horkheimer and Adorno where the wrong but civilization-creating turn was. What they term “enlightenment” is out to destory myth, but it is a hopeless battle: “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology” (8). So the question is: can we turn back the clock? Can we break the dialectic of enlightenment?
Mark S. Lussier has suggested that Blake has, indeed, formulated a way through. By driving straight at Blake’s dualism between humanity and nature, and suggesting that they are deeply symbiotic, Lussier hopes to capitalize on Blake’s formulation of the fall from innocence that marks the birth of modernity Blake stands astride. And much like Horkheimer and Adorno, Lussier highlights Blake’s fingering of Bacon for complicity in the act. Horkheimer and Adorno say that “Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically…” (18). Mathematics bring the “self-satisfaction of knowing in advance” (18) which is ironically coupled with the “apotheosis of advancing thought” (18). Galileo is associated with the former and is the treatment of “nature as self-repetition” (12). But in its repetitious nature, there is the endless scribbling to reinstate math’s preplanned plan—experimentation, of which Bacon is the father. Scientific thought advances in empirical experimentation, just as math makes the experiments less and less interesting.
Lussier references one of Blake’s handy lists of mathematizing, empirical culprits, “Bacon, Locke & Newton” in Milton, but I’d like to refocus on that same list in Jerusalem: “I am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!” (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, v. 16-17) This line tells us something important about the spirit of Bacon and enlightenment—they teach humility before nature. Rather than treating nature as a god to be fought with, as the myths show us, we must acknowledge nature’s power. We must bow respectfully before it and simply trace its contours. But through humility, we gain power. Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Odysseus help unlock this process: “The formula for Odysseus’s cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her” (Horkheimer and Adorno 45). By reducing ourselves, we reduce nature—much along the lines of Lussier’s reversal of Blake’s formula: “just as ‘nature is barren’ in the absence of man, so too, by necessity of the proverb’s own symmetries, man is barren in the absence of nature” (Lussier 5). This reduction of nature’s power by draining ourselves of our own functions along the lines of Harold Bloom’s figure of kenosis, and Bloom assigns the trope of metonymy to this poetic maneuver—the trope Blake is constantly using, as in his use of “Bacon.” By this logic, the enlightenment stands humbled before nature, promising to experiment and test nature slowly, in order to circumscribe nature with mathematics. And Blake humbles himself before “Bacon & Newton & Locke” in order to circumscribe them with his poetry.
The difficulty in breaking the dialectic Horkheimer and Adorno map out still lies before us, though: “Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion” (Horkheimer and Adorno 9). Even a humbling is a succumbing to the dialectic. It isn’t clear how Blake’s Platonism can save him, for it still posits a dichotomy between humanity and nature, and even if they are symbiotic, the trouble is that humanity would rather debase themselves by instrumentalizing their thought than suffer nature’s tyranny. “Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature or its subjugation to the self” (25). In such a dark formulation of the problem of enlightenment, it’s difficult to see how a regression to Platonism, the earlier metaphysics which was the first step past myths (which inexorably produced it), is the way through. And as Lussier, quoting a deep ecology mission statement, agrees, “nothing short of a total revolution in consciousness will be of lasting use” (Lussier 5). The trouble that even stunted Horkheimer and Adorno was in how to conceive of it.
To ferret out this problem in Blake’s Platonism, I would reread a selection of the Book of Thel that Lussier glosses:
It isn’t clear to me that Blake proposes a total revolution, nor is it clear that he even wants to escape Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he says “Without Contraries is no progression.” (Plate 3) An other-worldly, Platonic-like answer would be to shunt progression, then, to avoid the dialectical devolution portrayed by Horkheimer and Adorno entirely. But Blake says these contraries are “necessary to Human existence.” (Plate 3) The escape of an Edenic Heaven is always paired with the energy and vitality of Hell and Milton’s Satan. For Blake says, “this history has been adopted by both parties” (Plate 5).
Endnotes
[1]This is the old translation by John Cumming, which I greatly prefer to Edmund Jephcott’s translation: “thought in its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and therefore its relation to truth” (xvi).
There isn't any of that here, but what Harold Bloom calls Emerson's "dialectics of power" has echoes in this discussion of people "across the pond" (as we stuffy litcrits apparently like to say), and what I identify below as Blake's sly humbling through metonymy is Emerson's mode in Nature. So while below I suggest that Blake's Platonism can't break through H/A's formulation of the dialectic, the real problem isn't Blake's Platonism (which I take to be ironic like Emerson's), but the formulation--the longing--itself. In Blake, the dialectics of power that shirks this longing shows up as the dialectic between Poets and Priests found in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, also not discussed here. To understand this dialectic, between self-alone and self-among-others, it helps to translate Blake's categories into Bloom's: poetry and belief. Santayana helps beautifully with this, too: "Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry" (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion v). Working out the involution of that sentence will move one far towards understanding what Rorty means by metaphors as the catalyst of cultural change and his public/private distinction.
What I have left to work out in these stories is the relationship between mathematics (an enemy common to H/A in the Dialectic of Englightenment and Heidegger in, e.g., "The Age of the World Picture") and the ironic Platonism I find in Romantics from Blake and Emerson to Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. I suspect that I find their Platonism ironic precisely because Platonism took the path of method identified with mathematics, and that this path ironically transformed into materialism in the New Science (an irony charted by Blumenberg)--hence, the needed irony of a return to Plato and Greek idealism.
References are to an article by Lussier, "Blake's Deep Ecology," in Studies in Romanticism Fall 1996 (my pagination is not coordinate to the hardcopy). The H/A translation of the Dialectic of Englightenment used throughout, except one place noted, is to the new Jephcott translation.
*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.
----------
The story Horkheimer and Adorno tell about the history of thought is compressed and dense, but one of its central components is that “in thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered” (Horkheimer and Adorno 31). What Horkheimer and Adorno fear is the instrumentalization of thought, the turning of thought into merely a tool: “blindly pragmatized thought loses its transcending quality and, its relation to truth.”[fn.1] The disturbing thing in Horkheimer and Adorno’s picture is that once the dialectical path is stepped upon, there is no getting off until the bottom. Like Marx’s sense that once the division of labor is made, the rest of history is but an extension of that first moment, it is difficult to find in Horkheimer and Adorno where the wrong but civilization-creating turn was. What they term “enlightenment” is out to destory myth, but it is a hopeless battle: “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology” (8). So the question is: can we turn back the clock? Can we break the dialectic of enlightenment?
Mark S. Lussier has suggested that Blake has, indeed, formulated a way through. By driving straight at Blake’s dualism between humanity and nature, and suggesting that they are deeply symbiotic, Lussier hopes to capitalize on Blake’s formulation of the fall from innocence that marks the birth of modernity Blake stands astride. And much like Horkheimer and Adorno, Lussier highlights Blake’s fingering of Bacon for complicity in the act. Horkheimer and Adorno say that “Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically…” (18). Mathematics bring the “self-satisfaction of knowing in advance” (18) which is ironically coupled with the “apotheosis of advancing thought” (18). Galileo is associated with the former and is the treatment of “nature as self-repetition” (12). But in its repetitious nature, there is the endless scribbling to reinstate math’s preplanned plan—experimentation, of which Bacon is the father. Scientific thought advances in empirical experimentation, just as math makes the experiments less and less interesting.
Lussier references one of Blake’s handy lists of mathematizing, empirical culprits, “Bacon, Locke & Newton” in Milton, but I’d like to refocus on that same list in Jerusalem: “I am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!” (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, v. 16-17) This line tells us something important about the spirit of Bacon and enlightenment—they teach humility before nature. Rather than treating nature as a god to be fought with, as the myths show us, we must acknowledge nature’s power. We must bow respectfully before it and simply trace its contours. But through humility, we gain power. Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Odysseus help unlock this process: “The formula for Odysseus’s cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her” (Horkheimer and Adorno 45). By reducing ourselves, we reduce nature—much along the lines of Lussier’s reversal of Blake’s formula: “just as ‘nature is barren’ in the absence of man, so too, by necessity of the proverb’s own symmetries, man is barren in the absence of nature” (Lussier 5). This reduction of nature’s power by draining ourselves of our own functions along the lines of Harold Bloom’s figure of kenosis, and Bloom assigns the trope of metonymy to this poetic maneuver—the trope Blake is constantly using, as in his use of “Bacon.” By this logic, the enlightenment stands humbled before nature, promising to experiment and test nature slowly, in order to circumscribe nature with mathematics. And Blake humbles himself before “Bacon & Newton & Locke” in order to circumscribe them with his poetry.
The difficulty in breaking the dialectic Horkheimer and Adorno map out still lies before us, though: “Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion” (Horkheimer and Adorno 9). Even a humbling is a succumbing to the dialectic. It isn’t clear how Blake’s Platonism can save him, for it still posits a dichotomy between humanity and nature, and even if they are symbiotic, the trouble is that humanity would rather debase themselves by instrumentalizing their thought than suffer nature’s tyranny. “Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature or its subjugation to the self” (25). In such a dark formulation of the problem of enlightenment, it’s difficult to see how a regression to Platonism, the earlier metaphysics which was the first step past myths (which inexorably produced it), is the way through. And as Lussier, quoting a deep ecology mission statement, agrees, “nothing short of a total revolution in consciousness will be of lasting use” (Lussier 5). The trouble that even stunted Horkheimer and Adorno was in how to conceive of it.
To ferret out this problem in Blake’s Platonism, I would reread a selection of the Book of Thel that Lussier glosses:
Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud.Lussier says that, “in an interesting reversal,” “it is consciousness, and not nature, that ‘mirrors’” (4). This strikes me as just wrong, and it signficantly elides the dialectical danger of Platonic dualism. Lussier wants the reversal so he can say, “See—nature and man need each other so that neither is barren.” But the reversal is not strongly tuned in Lussier’s direction. Noting Bloom’s comment that “Thel” is Greek for “will,” Lussier, I think correctly, identifies Thel with consciousness. But whereas Lussier is focused on Thel’s transformations through the repeated and varied simile, I think one needs to slow down and look at what exactly Thel is like, particularly “a reflection in a glass” and “shadows in the water.” Thel, consciousness, is “like a reflection in a glass”—consciousness is paired with “reflection,” which means nature, as earlier in the Vision of the Last Judgment, is the mirroring glass. “Shadows in the water” is even more Platonically disturbing for consciousness—the water, nature, again reflects back consciousness, and what it reflects are transitory shadows, like those in the Plato’s Cave.
Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water.
Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face.
Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the air; (I, v. 8-11)
It isn’t clear to me that Blake proposes a total revolution, nor is it clear that he even wants to escape Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he says “Without Contraries is no progression.” (Plate 3) An other-worldly, Platonic-like answer would be to shunt progression, then, to avoid the dialectical devolution portrayed by Horkheimer and Adorno entirely. But Blake says these contraries are “necessary to Human existence.” (Plate 3) The escape of an Edenic Heaven is always paired with the energy and vitality of Hell and Milton’s Satan. For Blake says, “this history has been adopted by both parties” (Plate 5).
Endnotes
[1]This is the old translation by John Cumming, which I greatly prefer to Edmund Jephcott’s translation: “thought in its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and therefore its relation to truth” (xvi).
Thursday, January 08, 2009
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:
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
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,
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,
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,
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,
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
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
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