*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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Towards the end of his life, one of Rorty’s favorite passages to quote from Dewey was, “democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature….”[fn.1] The earliest, clearest expression of what Rorty took this passage to mean is his “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” In that paper, Rorty sought to defend Rawlsian liberal philosophy from liberal theorists like Ronald Dworkin and communitarian liberal-critics like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor by urging that Rawls, like Dewey, is putting democracy before philosophy—democracy does not need philosophical justification (nor a fortiori has philosophical presuppositions), but it can, if people would like one, have philosophical expression. A few years after writing that paper, Rorty wrote the centerpiece of his lifework, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. This book famously erected the public/private distinction that so many liberals have found troubling. Rorty, however, meant no more and no less than what Jefferson meant by the separation between church and state—keep your private life out of the government, and the government will stay out of your private life.
The formulation of “man’s metaphysic,” the philosophical expression of the democratic ethos, that Rorty favored when talking about religion was as a “utilitarian ethics of belief.” The staging point is Jefferson’s incarnation of Mill in his swerve from Locke—the point of life is happiness, and let all be free to pursue it as they choose, just so long as their pursuits don’t infringe on the pursuits of others. Because we all have a right to our own private pursuits, just so long as they do not infringe on each other or public projects, Rorty argues that James formulates a new philosophy of truth and knowledge to suit the new cultural ideal created by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A utilitarian ethics of belief suggests, first and foremost, that the only claims that should be met are the claims made by actual people. A generalized update of Peirce’s disposal of Descartes’ fake doubt, this assertion doesn’t mean we can’t use hypotheticals or the examples of literary texts in our deliberations, but simply that their occasion must be, in James’ words, “live, momentous, and forced.”
Of course, what is as up for deliberation as any decision we may face is whether a particular choice is genuine, whether it is live, momentous, and/or forced. Abstract philosophizing, such as it is above the fray of life, must be careful not to pronounce too sharply on the denizens below, though it is tempting. James found this temptation in Clifford’s demand that the religiously pious give up the charade of warranted belief in the face of science’s advance. James and Rorty push back: the scientistically pious are as bad as the religious—perhaps everyone should hand in their clerical collars.
In Rorty’s efforts to fend off scientific reductionism and intellectual rationalism, however, he employs a mishandled strategy in several of his papers. The general strategy is this: by deploying the public/private distinction, we may separate out two kinds of demands respectively. Public demands are those we find when making laws, setting tax code, or when a nation struggles in the face of a neoconservative induced economic depression. For these kinds of demands, we need a thin level of discourse with which we can argue out disagreements. We may not always agree that the terms of debate are the best ones, but what is only required is that they are thin enough to not be too disagreeable to anyone. For private demands, on the other hand, disagreeability of terms of expression are grounds for considering the demand to be unforced. Unhappy with your boyfriend’s constant demand for attention? Get a new boyfriend. Don’t like the fact that women can’t be priests? Become a Methodist. Don’t like the Monopoly guy’s stupid face? Play Sorry. One doesn’t always have to set up a new shop somewhere else, one can alter their tradition from the inside (just look at poor Gary Wills), but unlike one’s government, switching private allegiance can be a bit easier.
Rorty’s strategy with religion, then, is to privatize it. On the one hand, we have the thin level of public discourse with which to debate public policy. On the other hand, we have as many modes of private discourse as we have private communities made up of like-minded, happiness pursuers. Something might seem initially wrong with this—when did science become a private path towards happiness?—but it is imperative that the pragmatist approach at this high level of abstraction construe science as such. Science is a private path because it is not political discourse. It is a job, for one thing, and then, on occasion, it is a source of intense private pleasure for some, with no end of scientists who enjoy waxing poetic about the relationship of science to the universe. Most importantly, however, science—though it may inform public discourse—is not itself the mode in which we interact with our fellow democratic citizens on issues of joint societal determination.
“Private projects versus public discourse” is not, however, the way Rorty often construes the distinction, most prominently in “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance.” Rorty there construes “the supposed tension between science and religion as the illusion of opposition between cooperative endeavours and private projects.”[fn.2] This is a mistake, and we can begin to see the road it takes us down by noting the fact that most religions (or, at least, most people involved in a religion) are still by and large traditions of group worship. Those atheists among us might not see the connection between what a scientist does with other scientists and what a pastor does with his parishioners, but we can’t make the mistake a wresting control of the religious believer’s right to self-description (not at this level, at least). A utilitarian ethics of belief is the philosophical formulation of a democratic citizen’s ethos qua citizen. It is a high-falutin’ way of putting the right to privacy. As a citizen, just so long as the other citizens’ projects of self-creation, pleasure, or redemption do not conflict with your ability to pursue your own, there should be no objection. As we put on different hats, however, or start distinguishing between the short-term and long-term effects of various options, legitimate objections might start being raised.
This might be just a slight mistake on Rorty’s part here, a kind of over-assertive preference for the Protestant turn against creed towards a personal relationship with God. And we might take Rorty’s preference for Tillich over Barth as a misguided intervention by an outsider. Rorty certainly has a right to these preferences, and to articulating them in the hopes of persuading others to reject creed, but not as part of the overall package of a utilitarian ethics of belief. Rorty leads himself this way because of his earlier identification of the issue between science and religion as “cooperative v. private,” but this leads to a formulation that is just empirically false on its face for any self-respecting Wittgensteinian. After noting that the heart of classical and contemporary pragmatism is the notion of a “holistic view of intentional content,” that “beliefs have content only by virtue of inferential relations to other beliefs,” a Sellarsian move which effectively substitutes objectivity-as-intersubjectivity for objectivity-as-correspondence, Rorty wonders rhetorically, “what becomes of intersubjectivity once we admit that there is no communal practice of justification – no shared language game – which gives religious statements their content?”[fn.3]
Rorty rightly supplies the answer in our ability to “use the attribution of such beliefs to explain what is going on,”[fn.4] but this is an outsider’s view, the external view of Davidson’s radical interpreter, the field anthropologist dropped in the middle of an alien society, trying to understand their language and culture (which one does holistically and at the same time). Certainly there might be no shared language game for enthusiasts (as Rorty is) of Whitehead’s definition of religion as “what the individual does with his own solitariness,”[fn.5] but traditions of group worship, let alone theological articulation, fly in the face of “no communal practice of justification.” An internal view of the language game used by Southern Baptists or Anglicans, if we are Wittgensteinian and Sellarsian enough, would most certainly include practices of communication and understanding intelligible to its practitioners.
I don’t think this does a whole lot to Rorty’s overall point, however, in regards to pragmatism, religion, and the requirements of democracy. It simply means that when Rorty redescribes “intellectual responsibility” as “simply responsibility to people with whom one has joined a shared endeavour”[fn.6] we take that to include religious communities. Rorty, in his defense of private projects, says that the religious believer legitimately lapses intellectual responsibility with regards to her religious beliefs because all we need do is make “a distinction between what needs justification to other human beings and what does not,”[fn.7] but what we really need are more nuanced, contextual distinctions between different types of communities to whom we owe responsibility, and when and how. Rorty is entirely right to construe intellectual irresponsibility as “the wrongness of pretending to participate in a common project while refusing to play by the rules,”[fn.8] he just needs to be more sensitive to the desire of others to spend their alone-time with others.
Endnotes
[1] From his “Maeterlinck’s Philosophy of Life” in The Middle Works, vol. VI.
[2] Philosophy and Social Hope, 149
[3] Ibid., 159
[4] Ibid.
[5] Whitehead, Religion in the Making, (New York: Macmillan Company, 1926), 16
[6] PSH, 151
[7] Ibid., 154
[8] Ibid., 151
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
American Lit Notebook: Whitman I
Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).
References are to the individual lines of each poem.
I should also note that Bloom is hiding behind my reading of Whitman (particularly the vocabulary deployed).
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The poet of Emersonianism, Whitman quickly states his subject-matter with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” (v. 1) It is not that Whitman is himself singing, it is that he’s singing a song called “Myself.” The first thing Whitman must set to move out of the way is the past, a recurrent theme during the Romantic period. “Creeds and schools in abeyance,/Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.” (10-11) What Whitman seeks is “original energy.” (13)
In the second section Whitman sets out on his leisurely, light voyage, sniffing “shelves crowed with perfumes.” (14) Books stand in for the past and by likening books with odors, he imbues them with an optional ephemerality, a wafting buoyancy that the past rarely displays. Whitman will not let the past intoxicate him, but instead wishes to find Nature and “become undisguised and naked,” seeking “for it to be in contact with me.” (19-20) It is interesting and significant that Whitman should be naked, for in the long Platonic tradition of standing reality apart from her appearances, it is most often reality that we wish to see naked. Whitman has already internalized the Kantian Copernican shift that Emerson saw clearly—reality is always naked and it is us who need to shed our encumbrances.
This shedding maneuver climaxes with the section’s last stanza:
Stanza 24 sees a continuance of Whitman’s Emersonianism. It begins grandly, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos….” (v. 497) “Kosmos” is the transliteration of the Greek word, which otherwise in English is “cosmos.” Whitman’s use of the Greek, rather than English, may be just fancy, but it is notable that in Greek kosmos is the noun form of a parent verb that means something like “to set in order, or arrange,” with aesthetic and moral overtones (whereas the English “cosmos” has no verb counterpart and so hangs more statically). Leaving aside the Greek roots, “cosmos” has come down to us as more or less coextensive with “universe.” What is significant is the article, “a kosmos,” not “the kosmos” as would be expected if we were talking about the only one of something, like the universe.
This is a tone of paradoxicality that Whitman breeds and thrives on throughout the poem—Whitman, “me myself,” is both universe and multiverse, one voiced and several, individual and society, everything and nothing and something. Whitman gives “the sign of democracy,” which is that he “will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” (v. 506-7) This should strike us as a tremendous move of equality, similar to Gloria Allred’s current legal argument about the recently passed Prop. 8 in California banning gay marriage—under California’s equal protection clause, if some class is forbidden marriage, all shall be forbidden marriage (and so the reductio ad absurdum).
However, notice the fourth line of the stanza: “…no stander above men and women or apart from them.” (v. 499) This is, again, a democratic move, eliminating the hierarchical nature of other modes of government and being. It also strikes a tone of solidarity, “or apart from them.” This figure, neither above nor apart, tends to meld in Whitman into a homogenizing relativism. Whitman will be the voice of “many long dumb voices,” (v. 508) but these are the voices of not only the inhumanly silenced, like slaves, but also the wicked, like thieves. By eliminating hierarchy, Whitman also seems to be eliminating value judgments. Whitman calls these voices “forbidden,” (v. 516) which suggests that these voices are silenced by an external authority, and that “by me” they are “clarified and transfigur’d.” (v. 518) What they are is him, the kosmos, nobody apart from anybody, all the same—him.
As I meditated on previously, Whitman is the poet of a paradoxical democracy and we can see one of his techniques in his gargantuan lists, lines that begin similiarly, and in most cases exactly, to each other, but are filled in differently. In stanzas 31 and 33 we encounter two more substantial lists. On the one hand Whitman’s lists have the effect of lighting areas that were commonly neglected by the so-called “higher arts” and so can be seen to be a kind of “poetry for the people.” By taking “low” subject-matter, particularly bodily and sexual (for example, v. 520’s “bowels” and 819’s “thighs and lips”), he is able to extend the purview of art and discourse to areas previously “forbidden.” (v. 516)
The problem with Whitman’s lists is that while they call attention to a vast array of items, “the buzzard,” “the snake,” “the elk,” (v. 679-81) “the native,” “the foreign,” “the homely woman,” “the handsome,” (v. 774-5), they are also pallid images with no life outside of their brief mentions in a litany that is expressly built to blend, and therefore homogenize. Metaphors and similes work to break down contrastive effects, they take two different things and bring them together through the verb “to be” or the preposition “like,” but while both poetic figures require two different things to create the effect, if overused they die and the items lose contrast, becoming not metaphoric but literal. As with Whitman’s lists, they are homogenizing tropes, blending all together to make equal and the same.
Whitman, however, seems to see us coming. Whitman is dancing in this poem, enacting a sequence of poetic defense, shifting his posture in time to the music of our protests. If we might protest that his poetry reduces us, Whitman will reply: “If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment, reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run” (v.1191). Whitman’s true goal, he will remind us, is to get all of us to become ourselves. He meditates quite frequently on himself, and “any thing is but a part,” (v. 1195) no doubt of himself, that kosmos, but Whitman is “the teacher of athletes” (v. 1234) and we are all, to ourselves, a kosmos.
References are to the individual lines of each poem.
I should also note that Bloom is hiding behind my reading of Whitman (particularly the vocabulary deployed).
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Whitman: “Song of Myself,” I
The poet of Emersonianism, Whitman quickly states his subject-matter with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” (v. 1) It is not that Whitman is himself singing, it is that he’s singing a song called “Myself.” The first thing Whitman must set to move out of the way is the past, a recurrent theme during the Romantic period. “Creeds and schools in abeyance,/Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.” (10-11) What Whitman seeks is “original energy.” (13)
In the second section Whitman sets out on his leisurely, light voyage, sniffing “shelves crowed with perfumes.” (14) Books stand in for the past and by likening books with odors, he imbues them with an optional ephemerality, a wafting buoyancy that the past rarely displays. Whitman will not let the past intoxicate him, but instead wishes to find Nature and “become undisguised and naked,” seeking “for it to be in contact with me.” (19-20) It is interesting and significant that Whitman should be naked, for in the long Platonic tradition of standing reality apart from her appearances, it is most often reality that we wish to see naked. Whitman has already internalized the Kantian Copernican shift that Emerson saw clearly—reality is always naked and it is us who need to shed our encumbrances.
This shedding maneuver climaxes with the section’s last stanza:
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,If with the first line Whitman states his premise, “what I assume you shall assume,” (2) the conclusion of the second section states his “intricate purpose.” (382) Persons, and indeed the whole cosmos (“earth and sun”), are likened to poems and that is the originary power we are seeking. We are ever-elongating texts, songs whose melodies may repeat motifs and accumulate harmonies, but whose true power lies in the note not yet sung, a repetition of what the first note was also—new. Whitman’s design is Emersonian. He realizes that the only way for us to follow him, as in Emerson, is to be non-didactic, even anti-didactic (“not look through my eyes”), though of necessity something is taught, something imparted, something passed from Whitman to the reader. Whitman and Emerson can be seen to be teaching forms, while leaving content to their newly self-reliant auditors, but Whitman is so strong a poetic power, so keen to protect its originality and newness, that he recognizes that any repetition will diminish him, take from him, like a metaphor dying. And so Whitman wishes also to block us from that (“nor take things from me”). Whitman’s method (which, given his poetic paranoia, we should wonder if it is his actual method, or simply the one he’s putting on the screen) is to take in all around and then filter what you find from yourself. An echo of Emerson’s dark anxiety, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty,” (Emerson 139) Whitman finds the path to the origin of all poems as an emptying gesture, taking in the past so as to ebb it all away, leaving us with only what is uniquely us.
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Whitman: “Song of Myself,” II
Stanza 24 sees a continuance of Whitman’s Emersonianism. It begins grandly, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos….” (v. 497) “Kosmos” is the transliteration of the Greek word, which otherwise in English is “cosmos.” Whitman’s use of the Greek, rather than English, may be just fancy, but it is notable that in Greek kosmos is the noun form of a parent verb that means something like “to set in order, or arrange,” with aesthetic and moral overtones (whereas the English “cosmos” has no verb counterpart and so hangs more statically). Leaving aside the Greek roots, “cosmos” has come down to us as more or less coextensive with “universe.” What is significant is the article, “a kosmos,” not “the kosmos” as would be expected if we were talking about the only one of something, like the universe.
This is a tone of paradoxicality that Whitman breeds and thrives on throughout the poem—Whitman, “me myself,” is both universe and multiverse, one voiced and several, individual and society, everything and nothing and something. Whitman gives “the sign of democracy,” which is that he “will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” (v. 506-7) This should strike us as a tremendous move of equality, similar to Gloria Allred’s current legal argument about the recently passed Prop. 8 in California banning gay marriage—under California’s equal protection clause, if some class is forbidden marriage, all shall be forbidden marriage (and so the reductio ad absurdum).
However, notice the fourth line of the stanza: “…no stander above men and women or apart from them.” (v. 499) This is, again, a democratic move, eliminating the hierarchical nature of other modes of government and being. It also strikes a tone of solidarity, “or apart from them.” This figure, neither above nor apart, tends to meld in Whitman into a homogenizing relativism. Whitman will be the voice of “many long dumb voices,” (v. 508) but these are the voices of not only the inhumanly silenced, like slaves, but also the wicked, like thieves. By eliminating hierarchy, Whitman also seems to be eliminating value judgments. Whitman calls these voices “forbidden,” (v. 516) which suggests that these voices are silenced by an external authority, and that “by me” they are “clarified and transfigur’d.” (v. 518) What they are is him, the kosmos, nobody apart from anybody, all the same—him.
Whitman: “Song of Myself,” III
As I meditated on previously, Whitman is the poet of a paradoxical democracy and we can see one of his techniques in his gargantuan lists, lines that begin similiarly, and in most cases exactly, to each other, but are filled in differently. In stanzas 31 and 33 we encounter two more substantial lists. On the one hand Whitman’s lists have the effect of lighting areas that were commonly neglected by the so-called “higher arts” and so can be seen to be a kind of “poetry for the people.” By taking “low” subject-matter, particularly bodily and sexual (for example, v. 520’s “bowels” and 819’s “thighs and lips”), he is able to extend the purview of art and discourse to areas previously “forbidden.” (v. 516)
The problem with Whitman’s lists is that while they call attention to a vast array of items, “the buzzard,” “the snake,” “the elk,” (v. 679-81) “the native,” “the foreign,” “the homely woman,” “the handsome,” (v. 774-5), they are also pallid images with no life outside of their brief mentions in a litany that is expressly built to blend, and therefore homogenize. Metaphors and similes work to break down contrastive effects, they take two different things and bring them together through the verb “to be” or the preposition “like,” but while both poetic figures require two different things to create the effect, if overused they die and the items lose contrast, becoming not metaphoric but literal. As with Whitman’s lists, they are homogenizing tropes, blending all together to make equal and the same.
Whitman, however, seems to see us coming. Whitman is dancing in this poem, enacting a sequence of poetic defense, shifting his posture in time to the music of our protests. If we might protest that his poetry reduces us, Whitman will reply: “If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment, reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run” (v.1191). Whitman’s true goal, he will remind us, is to get all of us to become ourselves. He meditates quite frequently on himself, and “any thing is but a part,” (v. 1195) no doubt of himself, that kosmos, but Whitman is “the teacher of athletes” (v. 1234) and we are all, to ourselves, a kosmos.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Rorty, Religion, and Romance
*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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Rorty never produced a lot of work on the specific topic of religion, but what he did write has a certain intensity that cuts to the quick of the consequences he sees for pragmatism on culture. The two pieces in Philosophy and Social Hope show well two sides of Rorty’s personality, and their two corresponding sides of his view of religion. Whenever I read “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” I almost begin to think I should start talking about God more. When I follow it as I always do with the succeeding piece, “Religion As Conversation-stopper,” I’m reminded why I don’t. The former is Rorty’s tender-minded reading of James’ “The Will to Believe,” his empathetic defense of the religious experience in the face of scientific reductionism and intellectual rationalism. The latter is Rorty’s viper quick, and slightly catty, defense of the Jefferson compromise with religion in the public sphere. These two papers correspond to the two sides of Rorty’s infamous private/public distinction in his political philosophy: as a private project, as personal path to redemption, religion is as equally valid as any other path, just so long as it does not encroach on others’ paths. This is the concession to the public sphere all projects—religious, philosophical, or other cultural manifestation—must make. And just so long as these projects are not shared with others, they become practically inappropriate to public deliberation because not shared.
David Hall said some years ago, about half way through Rorty’s mature phase, that Rorty probably chose Dewey over James as his philosophical hero, if only subconsciously, because he was too close to James and couldn’t get any traction in talking about him. I think Rorty and James’ personalities were too close, both humanist intellectuals less interested, in the end, with science than Dewey because they both felt personally more attached to conversation with their fellows than fidgeting with the stuff surrounding us. Like true humanists, they felt conversation far more important to life and the legacy of humanity than technology, even if they understood on some level that none of our progress would be possible without science and its more practically-minded offspring. Still the best discussion of James’ philosophy and personality is Santayana’s chapter on him in Character and Opinion in the United States and I suspect much of what he says there could go as well for Rorty.
Rorty’s orientation to life is reflected straightaway in his essay on James when he says, “One of James’s most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only ask which other claims … it runs athwart.” (“Faith,” 148, italics his) The ellipsis blots out some of James’s words from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” where he says, “we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly.”[fn.1] We see here immediately the instinctive humanism they both felt, the conversational inquisitiveness that drove them. Where there are not real threats, we should not see real tensions in belief. The inquiry that philosophy should take is not into some smooth, unchanging object called Truth or Reality, but into what obligations, and what kind exactly, we have to each other because of the beliefs we find ourselves with. And as obligations come into conflict do we find ourselves with the obligation to shift our beliefs.
Rorty’s first face to religion is a defense of the religious experience. Rorty’s more ecumenical name for religious experience, in that wide, quasi-universal sense we find our latter-day I’m-not-religious-but-spiritual types using, is “romance.” The underlying reason for this choice, I think, is ultimately conversational. Whether talking about our love for God or our love for our husband and children, this love—in conversation with others—is often intensely felt, difficult to convey, and sometimes inscrutable. Love is deeply personal. The only thing more universal than the fact that everyone loves is the idiosyncratic variety of the objects of our affection.
And because our love often subsists in ephemeral waves of crashing euphoria, we find it difficult to describe what it is we are actually feeling. So it is that we often keep these feelings to ourselves, or rest content in short phrases and beaming faces, only occasionally expressing them to our reciprocating objects or fellow enthusiasts (the mutually culpable typically being more forgiving of clumsiness). Some, though, think themselves quite good at expressing their awkward innerness, and a few of these actually are—we call these latter “poets.” For the rest of us, however, our muteness should not be taken as a sign of unfeeling or uncaring. All similarity is an imagining by analogy, and this pragmatist point about how language functions is merely punched up the fact of seemingly inexpressible experience.
Rorty’s own minimalism on the topic of romance—and experience—I believe, are evocative of a personal shyness in regards to his own powers of expression and, more importantly, of a rhetorical gesture of space clearing—by outlining the space of romance and refusing to populate it in any detail with his own words of power, Rorty seeks to defend our right to our own words. His passivity is designed to actively engage our own imaginations, to fill this space with ourselves. This is a supremely Emersonian and Whitmanian endeavor. Rorty’s gesture is neither command nor assertion—it is a sweeping arm of protective welcome and a suggestive come-hither look of experimental freedom. Strong poets impress upon us metaphors that dominate our consciousness, but the metaphors of Emerson and Whitman were designed to hold open the world to each of our imaginations, to clear a space from dominance so that we may each plant our own gardens of delight and fantasy.
If this face owes far too much to reading Romantic poetry and not enough to religious creed, then so much the worse—so Rorty would say—for creed. Rorty’s second face to religion is slightly irritated by the still existing presumption that readers of Wordsworth or Blake don’t have consciences according to American law. Rorty enforces the secular, democratic separation of church and state with an admittedly small amount of peevishness. Western democracies institutionalized the separation of religion from government in order to protect the freedom of people with different religions. In practice, Rorty again enforces this protection by thinking about conversation—what do you do when somebody proposes public policy on the basis of a religious belief you don’t share? How do you debate that? And in Rorty’s view, this goes for basing them on Nietzsche as much as on Christ.
Conversations, in Rorty’s manner, come in two different kinds—some we don’t have to agree with the person’s terms, and can just empathize and seek understanding, because the conclusions drawn in their thinking have nothing to do with us. Whether they love Carol or not, it shouldn’t exactly matter to us since we aren’t the ones going to bed with her. But other conversations, these don’t just demand understanding, but agreement in terms because the entire point of them is to lock down societally-binding conclusions and direction. So what needs to be created is a public language, if ever so thin, in which to debate these questions without begging the question over any particular side.
There is a third face, however, that Rorty displays to religion, though not so much in the two essays in Philosophy and Social Hope. This face might be summed up in pragmatism’s historicism—if religion began as the first attempts of primitive humanity to explain their surroundings, then surely some of these are outmoded. This face is conscientiously stern in open debates about where our culture should be heading. Dewey, on par, was better at this than James, and so was Rorty, which might explain Rorty’s overt affinity with Dewey, given his shyness. James was much more the phenomenological adventurer, exploring our current consciousnesses and sussing out the real tensions. Dewey, on the other hand, had more of an historical sense and was better at telling evolutionary stories of how we got these tensions—and where we might go to relieve them.
For pragmatists, beliefs are tools. They are inherently artifactual. We created non-linguistic practices like carpentry to help keep ourselves dry and we created linguistic practices to help tell other people how to do it. We created physical tools, like hammers, to help bind wood together and we created intellectual tools, like logic, to help bind our beliefs together. Every habit, every practice that was created throughout history was done so in response to a felt need. The question pragmatists wish us all to face down, religious or otherwise, is what were our needs and do we still have them? If Rorty’s private and public face to religion are somewhat oriented towards the past and present, the third face of historicism looks to the future with a somewhat open-ended, though no less urgent, question: So we know where we’ve been, now where should we go?
Endnotes
[1] In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, p. 194 of the 1956 Dover edition. Italics James's.
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Rorty never produced a lot of work on the specific topic of religion, but what he did write has a certain intensity that cuts to the quick of the consequences he sees for pragmatism on culture. The two pieces in Philosophy and Social Hope show well two sides of Rorty’s personality, and their two corresponding sides of his view of religion. Whenever I read “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” I almost begin to think I should start talking about God more. When I follow it as I always do with the succeeding piece, “Religion As Conversation-stopper,” I’m reminded why I don’t. The former is Rorty’s tender-minded reading of James’ “The Will to Believe,” his empathetic defense of the religious experience in the face of scientific reductionism and intellectual rationalism. The latter is Rorty’s viper quick, and slightly catty, defense of the Jefferson compromise with religion in the public sphere. These two papers correspond to the two sides of Rorty’s infamous private/public distinction in his political philosophy: as a private project, as personal path to redemption, religion is as equally valid as any other path, just so long as it does not encroach on others’ paths. This is the concession to the public sphere all projects—religious, philosophical, or other cultural manifestation—must make. And just so long as these projects are not shared with others, they become practically inappropriate to public deliberation because not shared.
David Hall said some years ago, about half way through Rorty’s mature phase, that Rorty probably chose Dewey over James as his philosophical hero, if only subconsciously, because he was too close to James and couldn’t get any traction in talking about him. I think Rorty and James’ personalities were too close, both humanist intellectuals less interested, in the end, with science than Dewey because they both felt personally more attached to conversation with their fellows than fidgeting with the stuff surrounding us. Like true humanists, they felt conversation far more important to life and the legacy of humanity than technology, even if they understood on some level that none of our progress would be possible without science and its more practically-minded offspring. Still the best discussion of James’ philosophy and personality is Santayana’s chapter on him in Character and Opinion in the United States and I suspect much of what he says there could go as well for Rorty.
Rorty’s orientation to life is reflected straightaway in his essay on James when he says, “One of James’s most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only ask which other claims … it runs athwart.” (“Faith,” 148, italics his) The ellipsis blots out some of James’s words from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” where he says, “we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly.”[fn.1] We see here immediately the instinctive humanism they both felt, the conversational inquisitiveness that drove them. Where there are not real threats, we should not see real tensions in belief. The inquiry that philosophy should take is not into some smooth, unchanging object called Truth or Reality, but into what obligations, and what kind exactly, we have to each other because of the beliefs we find ourselves with. And as obligations come into conflict do we find ourselves with the obligation to shift our beliefs.
Rorty’s first face to religion is a defense of the religious experience. Rorty’s more ecumenical name for religious experience, in that wide, quasi-universal sense we find our latter-day I’m-not-religious-but-spiritual types using, is “romance.” The underlying reason for this choice, I think, is ultimately conversational. Whether talking about our love for God or our love for our husband and children, this love—in conversation with others—is often intensely felt, difficult to convey, and sometimes inscrutable. Love is deeply personal. The only thing more universal than the fact that everyone loves is the idiosyncratic variety of the objects of our affection.
And because our love often subsists in ephemeral waves of crashing euphoria, we find it difficult to describe what it is we are actually feeling. So it is that we often keep these feelings to ourselves, or rest content in short phrases and beaming faces, only occasionally expressing them to our reciprocating objects or fellow enthusiasts (the mutually culpable typically being more forgiving of clumsiness). Some, though, think themselves quite good at expressing their awkward innerness, and a few of these actually are—we call these latter “poets.” For the rest of us, however, our muteness should not be taken as a sign of unfeeling or uncaring. All similarity is an imagining by analogy, and this pragmatist point about how language functions is merely punched up the fact of seemingly inexpressible experience.
Rorty’s own minimalism on the topic of romance—and experience—I believe, are evocative of a personal shyness in regards to his own powers of expression and, more importantly, of a rhetorical gesture of space clearing—by outlining the space of romance and refusing to populate it in any detail with his own words of power, Rorty seeks to defend our right to our own words. His passivity is designed to actively engage our own imaginations, to fill this space with ourselves. This is a supremely Emersonian and Whitmanian endeavor. Rorty’s gesture is neither command nor assertion—it is a sweeping arm of protective welcome and a suggestive come-hither look of experimental freedom. Strong poets impress upon us metaphors that dominate our consciousness, but the metaphors of Emerson and Whitman were designed to hold open the world to each of our imaginations, to clear a space from dominance so that we may each plant our own gardens of delight and fantasy.
If this face owes far too much to reading Romantic poetry and not enough to religious creed, then so much the worse—so Rorty would say—for creed. Rorty’s second face to religion is slightly irritated by the still existing presumption that readers of Wordsworth or Blake don’t have consciences according to American law. Rorty enforces the secular, democratic separation of church and state with an admittedly small amount of peevishness. Western democracies institutionalized the separation of religion from government in order to protect the freedom of people with different religions. In practice, Rorty again enforces this protection by thinking about conversation—what do you do when somebody proposes public policy on the basis of a religious belief you don’t share? How do you debate that? And in Rorty’s view, this goes for basing them on Nietzsche as much as on Christ.
Conversations, in Rorty’s manner, come in two different kinds—some we don’t have to agree with the person’s terms, and can just empathize and seek understanding, because the conclusions drawn in their thinking have nothing to do with us. Whether they love Carol or not, it shouldn’t exactly matter to us since we aren’t the ones going to bed with her. But other conversations, these don’t just demand understanding, but agreement in terms because the entire point of them is to lock down societally-binding conclusions and direction. So what needs to be created is a public language, if ever so thin, in which to debate these questions without begging the question over any particular side.
There is a third face, however, that Rorty displays to religion, though not so much in the two essays in Philosophy and Social Hope. This face might be summed up in pragmatism’s historicism—if religion began as the first attempts of primitive humanity to explain their surroundings, then surely some of these are outmoded. This face is conscientiously stern in open debates about where our culture should be heading. Dewey, on par, was better at this than James, and so was Rorty, which might explain Rorty’s overt affinity with Dewey, given his shyness. James was much more the phenomenological adventurer, exploring our current consciousnesses and sussing out the real tensions. Dewey, on the other hand, had more of an historical sense and was better at telling evolutionary stories of how we got these tensions—and where we might go to relieve them.
For pragmatists, beliefs are tools. They are inherently artifactual. We created non-linguistic practices like carpentry to help keep ourselves dry and we created linguistic practices to help tell other people how to do it. We created physical tools, like hammers, to help bind wood together and we created intellectual tools, like logic, to help bind our beliefs together. Every habit, every practice that was created throughout history was done so in response to a felt need. The question pragmatists wish us all to face down, religious or otherwise, is what were our needs and do we still have them? If Rorty’s private and public face to religion are somewhat oriented towards the past and present, the third face of historicism looks to the future with a somewhat open-ended, though no less urgent, question: So we know where we’ve been, now where should we go?
Endnotes
[1] In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, p. 194 of the 1956 Dover edition. Italics James's.
Friday, February 06, 2009
American Lit Notebook: Hawthorne II
Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).
References are to the Portable Hawthorne, edited by William C. Spengemann.
----------
I suspected at the time of writing that my harsh judgment of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” was perhaps a bit overhasty and that I was missing something. Post-lecture, placed in the context of a bald American nationalism and seeing the conflicted Rousseauian spirit of the mob scene, I see more clearly its power. Rousseau’s chained freedom is precursor to Emerson’s all-is-mediated and they form the conflict at the heart of an American form of life. What is clear from the miss, however, is that of the two kinds Henry James called Hawthorne’s “stories of fantasy and allegory” and his “little tales of New England history,” I clearly am most at home in the former (being more algebraic in Emerson’s sense), whatever James’ denigration of it. The Scarlet Letter, on most scores, moves back to this form, though it must in a more complicated sense.
The first interesting facet of the story to be noticed is Hawthorne’s relation to the writing of it. The Scarlet Letter does not present itself as simple piece of made-up fiction. Hawthorne presents it as a recorded narrative, like an historian. “Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader.” (160) Hawthorne’s figural gesture of plucking one flower to present creates the illusion of a larger reality in which the story sits, which is the illusion of reality, realness. Hawthorne isn’t, of course, pretending that he’s telling us about something that actually happened. What this gesture does is create a mask behind which Hawthorne can hide, essentially creating an Author persona that mediates between Hawthorne and the story.
This allows Hawthorne to use an ironic aside to his readers throughout the story. For instance, “On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.” (162) The question of what Hawthorne thinks about his contemporary situation is completely blocked behind the mask of the Author. What we are left with is an irony that reflects back on us the question of whether the statement itself is true or not: have we moved past the Puritanism of two hundred years ago? This is the constant question forced upon us by Hawthorne through the Author.
The great question in force, it would seem, is that of the nature of sin. I’m guided her by a comment of D. H. Lawrence’s at the outset of an essay on Hawthorne: “Sin is a queer thing. It isn’t the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one’s own integrity.” This is a distinctively Emersonian transvaluation of sin and gets something importantly right about the common project of mid-19th century American writers. Hester Prynne wavers a good deal on the scaffold, though almost always keeping a bold face to the crowd. What is fascinating is her summons of strength at the moment of truth: “Never!” she tells Dimmesdale, looking not at the crowd or her questioner, but straight into “the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman.” (178) And though her second cry breaks a bit, the strength of her will, having traversed the chapter’s rising sense of agony, is thunderous, and could only adhere to one of singular character. I take the “wildness of her nature” (188) to signal Hester’s authentic self, the one that thundered “Never!” in the face of society’s shame, and that her great sin is that she holds out hope for a reunion with Dimmesdale. Her wildness is chained in New England, the truth of which she must hide from herself, the great strike against sincere authenticity: “doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole.” (189) The serpent, Satan’s form in Eden, “the tempter of souls,” is here the form of her love for Dimmesdale.
Much of the middle section of The Scarlet Letter is given over to the development of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, two characters, I must confess, I find far less fascination with than Hester and Pearl. But part of the growing power in Hester and Pearl lies in their relations to the two, so pass through them we must.
Pearl, in her earlier chapter, is shown to be a vast font of unpredictable, unlawful power, akin by her perceivers to an imp and delivishness. I think this marks the unmistakable odor of a rising feminism. The rules of the past are being broken, and though Hester rests between the past and the future, she does wish “to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture.” (209) Pearl embodies her own passion and wildness, her own break with the past, her sin, and so is consistently held, as Chillingworth cogently sees, as having “no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child’s composition. … Hath she any discoverable principle of being?” Dimmesdale responds, equally cogently, “None,—save the freedom of a broken law.” (237) The wild unpredictability of Pearl depicted by Hawthorne, I think, is his correct apprehension of the unseen vistas of the future to which we in the present must hammer out. This is the romantic Coleridge’s (or was it Wordsworth?) suggestion that we create the taste by which we are judged given its American twist in Emerson’s call for internal, authentic self-reliance, setting out our own rules for ourselves, for Whitman’s vision of democracy and the eratic, yet internally compelled Pearl, with her as yet undiscovered principle of being.
The “melancholy prophecy of decay” (225) in Dimmesdale’s voice is partly found in this breakdown of law, impelled as he is “powerfully along the track of creed,” which was “essential to his peace” “while it confined him within its iron framework.” (228) It is again noteworthy that the breath of fresh air Chillingworth gives Dimmesdale, amidst the “musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral” of his books, is the unfamiliar counterpositions of “other moral scenery” (ibid.). But Dimmesdale’s sin lies elsewhere, too, in D. H. Lawrence’s supposition that sin is lying to yourself. Dimmesdale is unaware of Chillingworth’s hunt because of a “certain morbidness” which “rendered him suspicious of all mankind,” (234) a malady we first saw at the close of “Young Goodman Brown.” What Dimmesdale then conjures are sick self-rationalizations, putting him further from himself. He wraps himself in the cloak of God, reasoning that humanly revelations “are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of intelligent beings.” (235) If I read Hawthorne aright, with his belief in the power of symbols, when Dimmesdale declares that there can be “no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart,” (ibid.) Hawthorne is marking Dimmesdale’s blindness and self-interested swerving from justice, which ultimately is an authenticity to oneself.
Emerson and Thoreau are always pulled together, taken to be from common stock, but less often do we match Hawthorne with the so-called Transcendentalists. Chapter 13, “Another View of Hester,” however, maps on quite well with the Romantic view of nature American Transcendentalists were known for and seems to throw Hester into the mode of a prophet.
After Hester and Pearl’s encounter with Dimmesdale on the stockade, Hester recesses into herself, spending the chapter meditating on her situation, which is suggestively called “Another View of Hester.” In Hester, Hawthorne set up a strong dichotomy between outward and inward appearance, a conflict that manifests itself in deliberation over action, the greatest muddle between our private internals and public externals. To begin, Hawthorne rings a strong Emersonian bell when he says, “Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself…,” (261) one that even carries Thoreau’s hermetic influence.
Her seclusion, however, is forced by Puritan society, a decision she in part agrees with. She herself views her time with Dimmesdale as a sin and lives her life as Puritan virtue would have it: “it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought the poor wanderer to its paths.” (262, italics mine) But the doubleness of Hester’s behavior always remains—“This might be pride, but was so like humility….” (263) Though Hester acts like a Puritan, and does as a matter of course, believe in its virtues, her outward behavior passes through the third-person reported ambiguities (“pride or humility?”) to their mirror opposite in her mind, the world of thought where she acts as a true radical. What is interesting is that, like Thoreau, Hawthorne emphasizes the outward, behavioral aspect of this inward turn.
This mirroring of Hester’s Puritan virtue with her “emancipated,” radical theories, the outward behavior with the inward, ineffectual thinking is central to reading Hawthorne’s tale as an allegory for the human condition. Hester, like humanity, sits astride her warring passions and cool thinking, her puritanical behavior and radically feminist thought. The height of the allegory is achieved at the end, as Pearl, embodying the free, yet-unforeseen future, “that unknown region where Pearl had found a home,” (354) leaves her mother, who must return home to New England. Hester is shackled to the past, straddling past and future. Hester birthed the future, but she herself cannot be a part of it. If “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” suggests that the most fluid time for social norms—and so the only moments for transcendence—are during revolutions, Hester must come back because we cannot exist in total, permanent revolution.
References are to the Portable Hawthorne, edited by William C. Spengemann.
----------
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, I
I suspected at the time of writing that my harsh judgment of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” was perhaps a bit overhasty and that I was missing something. Post-lecture, placed in the context of a bald American nationalism and seeing the conflicted Rousseauian spirit of the mob scene, I see more clearly its power. Rousseau’s chained freedom is precursor to Emerson’s all-is-mediated and they form the conflict at the heart of an American form of life. What is clear from the miss, however, is that of the two kinds Henry James called Hawthorne’s “stories of fantasy and allegory” and his “little tales of New England history,” I clearly am most at home in the former (being more algebraic in Emerson’s sense), whatever James’ denigration of it. The Scarlet Letter, on most scores, moves back to this form, though it must in a more complicated sense.
The first interesting facet of the story to be noticed is Hawthorne’s relation to the writing of it. The Scarlet Letter does not present itself as simple piece of made-up fiction. Hawthorne presents it as a recorded narrative, like an historian. “Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader.” (160) Hawthorne’s figural gesture of plucking one flower to present creates the illusion of a larger reality in which the story sits, which is the illusion of reality, realness. Hawthorne isn’t, of course, pretending that he’s telling us about something that actually happened. What this gesture does is create a mask behind which Hawthorne can hide, essentially creating an Author persona that mediates between Hawthorne and the story.
This allows Hawthorne to use an ironic aside to his readers throughout the story. For instance, “On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.” (162) The question of what Hawthorne thinks about his contemporary situation is completely blocked behind the mask of the Author. What we are left with is an irony that reflects back on us the question of whether the statement itself is true or not: have we moved past the Puritanism of two hundred years ago? This is the constant question forced upon us by Hawthorne through the Author.
The great question in force, it would seem, is that of the nature of sin. I’m guided her by a comment of D. H. Lawrence’s at the outset of an essay on Hawthorne: “Sin is a queer thing. It isn’t the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one’s own integrity.” This is a distinctively Emersonian transvaluation of sin and gets something importantly right about the common project of mid-19th century American writers. Hester Prynne wavers a good deal on the scaffold, though almost always keeping a bold face to the crowd. What is fascinating is her summons of strength at the moment of truth: “Never!” she tells Dimmesdale, looking not at the crowd or her questioner, but straight into “the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman.” (178) And though her second cry breaks a bit, the strength of her will, having traversed the chapter’s rising sense of agony, is thunderous, and could only adhere to one of singular character. I take the “wildness of her nature” (188) to signal Hester’s authentic self, the one that thundered “Never!” in the face of society’s shame, and that her great sin is that she holds out hope for a reunion with Dimmesdale. Her wildness is chained in New England, the truth of which she must hide from herself, the great strike against sincere authenticity: “doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole.” (189) The serpent, Satan’s form in Eden, “the tempter of souls,” is here the form of her love for Dimmesdale.
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, II
Much of the middle section of The Scarlet Letter is given over to the development of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, two characters, I must confess, I find far less fascination with than Hester and Pearl. But part of the growing power in Hester and Pearl lies in their relations to the two, so pass through them we must.
Pearl, in her earlier chapter, is shown to be a vast font of unpredictable, unlawful power, akin by her perceivers to an imp and delivishness. I think this marks the unmistakable odor of a rising feminism. The rules of the past are being broken, and though Hester rests between the past and the future, she does wish “to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture.” (209) Pearl embodies her own passion and wildness, her own break with the past, her sin, and so is consistently held, as Chillingworth cogently sees, as having “no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child’s composition. … Hath she any discoverable principle of being?” Dimmesdale responds, equally cogently, “None,—save the freedom of a broken law.” (237) The wild unpredictability of Pearl depicted by Hawthorne, I think, is his correct apprehension of the unseen vistas of the future to which we in the present must hammer out. This is the romantic Coleridge’s (or was it Wordsworth?) suggestion that we create the taste by which we are judged given its American twist in Emerson’s call for internal, authentic self-reliance, setting out our own rules for ourselves, for Whitman’s vision of democracy and the eratic, yet internally compelled Pearl, with her as yet undiscovered principle of being.
The “melancholy prophecy of decay” (225) in Dimmesdale’s voice is partly found in this breakdown of law, impelled as he is “powerfully along the track of creed,” which was “essential to his peace” “while it confined him within its iron framework.” (228) It is again noteworthy that the breath of fresh air Chillingworth gives Dimmesdale, amidst the “musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral” of his books, is the unfamiliar counterpositions of “other moral scenery” (ibid.). But Dimmesdale’s sin lies elsewhere, too, in D. H. Lawrence’s supposition that sin is lying to yourself. Dimmesdale is unaware of Chillingworth’s hunt because of a “certain morbidness” which “rendered him suspicious of all mankind,” (234) a malady we first saw at the close of “Young Goodman Brown.” What Dimmesdale then conjures are sick self-rationalizations, putting him further from himself. He wraps himself in the cloak of God, reasoning that humanly revelations “are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of intelligent beings.” (235) If I read Hawthorne aright, with his belief in the power of symbols, when Dimmesdale declares that there can be “no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart,” (ibid.) Hawthorne is marking Dimmesdale’s blindness and self-interested swerving from justice, which ultimately is an authenticity to oneself.
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, III
Emerson and Thoreau are always pulled together, taken to be from common stock, but less often do we match Hawthorne with the so-called Transcendentalists. Chapter 13, “Another View of Hester,” however, maps on quite well with the Romantic view of nature American Transcendentalists were known for and seems to throw Hester into the mode of a prophet.
After Hester and Pearl’s encounter with Dimmesdale on the stockade, Hester recesses into herself, spending the chapter meditating on her situation, which is suggestively called “Another View of Hester.” In Hester, Hawthorne set up a strong dichotomy between outward and inward appearance, a conflict that manifests itself in deliberation over action, the greatest muddle between our private internals and public externals. To begin, Hawthorne rings a strong Emersonian bell when he says, “Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself…,” (261) one that even carries Thoreau’s hermetic influence.
Her seclusion, however, is forced by Puritan society, a decision she in part agrees with. She herself views her time with Dimmesdale as a sin and lives her life as Puritan virtue would have it: “it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought the poor wanderer to its paths.” (262, italics mine) But the doubleness of Hester’s behavior always remains—“This might be pride, but was so like humility….” (263) Though Hester acts like a Puritan, and does as a matter of course, believe in its virtues, her outward behavior passes through the third-person reported ambiguities (“pride or humility?”) to their mirror opposite in her mind, the world of thought where she acts as a true radical. What is interesting is that, like Thoreau, Hawthorne emphasizes the outward, behavioral aspect of this inward turn.
“Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain.”
This mirroring of Hester’s Puritan virtue with her “emancipated,” radical theories, the outward behavior with the inward, ineffectual thinking is central to reading Hawthorne’s tale as an allegory for the human condition. Hester, like humanity, sits astride her warring passions and cool thinking, her puritanical behavior and radically feminist thought. The height of the allegory is achieved at the end, as Pearl, embodying the free, yet-unforeseen future, “that unknown region where Pearl had found a home,” (354) leaves her mother, who must return home to New England. Hester is shackled to the past, straddling past and future. Hester birthed the future, but she herself cannot be a part of it. If “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” suggests that the most fluid time for social norms—and so the only moments for transcendence—are during revolutions, Hester must come back because we cannot exist in total, permanent revolution.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Quote of the Day 2
Once again, instead of New Me or Old Me, let's have some Repeated Me:
"What the pragmatist is suggesting ... is that reductionism is a special case of redescription and realism (in the sense of pluralism, the attempt to "save the appearances") is a special case of pragmatism. What both special cases hinge on is a so far fruitless and conversation stifling essentialism. After brushing aside essentialism, what is left is our ubiquitous power to create new descriptions and our particular power to choose which descriptions we use for which purposes. This means that a scientist can go on reducing color to wavelengths in the laboratory without worrying about whether red doesn't exist and that a poet can go on writing sonnets about love without worrying about whether the Freudian next door will say that it's all in his id."
--The Parable of the Reductionist
"What the pragmatist is suggesting ... is that reductionism is a special case of redescription and realism (in the sense of pluralism, the attempt to "save the appearances") is a special case of pragmatism. What both special cases hinge on is a so far fruitless and conversation stifling essentialism. After brushing aside essentialism, what is left is our ubiquitous power to create new descriptions and our particular power to choose which descriptions we use for which purposes. This means that a scientist can go on reducing color to wavelengths in the laboratory without worrying about whether red doesn't exist and that a poet can go on writing sonnets about love without worrying about whether the Freudian next door will say that it's all in his id."
--The Parable of the Reductionist
Friday, January 30, 2009
American Lit Notebook: Hawthorne I
Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).
References are to the Portable Hawthorne, edited by William C. Spengemann.
----------
What a contrast Hawthorne is to Emerson and Thoreau, so-called Transcendentalists! Sin is a primary source of meditation for Hawthorne, it would seem, and it is nowhere in evidence in Emerson, agonistic wrester of the Christian tradition. Whereas Emerson seems more intent on setting the ideals of America, Hawthorne would take the culture as he finds it to complicate and enrich the laden tensions.
The swift, penultimate paragraph of “Young Goodman Brown” sums up the wisdom found in Hawthorne’s allegory: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream, of a witch-meeting?” (64) The point of the tale is that it doesn’t matter. Brown has been changed by the experience, and lost to the forces of sin. The shape-shifting devil says that the knowledge he would bestow those who’ve traveled is “to know their secret deeds,” (62) of all your neighbors, “to penetrate … the deep mystery of sin….” (63)
What knowledge is this? seems to be the question. At the outset of Brown’s journey, Hawthorne sets in contradistinction the lonely solitude of the traveler with the possibility of “passing through an unseen multitude.” (52) This “unseen multitude” eventually takes the shape of all his neighbors: “And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her [Faith] onward.” (58) Even if we can commonsensically distinguish between saints and sinners, Hawthorne blurs them all together in Brown’s nightmare.
The figure of Faith completes the allegory, for the significance is the setting of faith against doubt, and the triumph of doubt. Previous convictions of purity are shattered as he hears their whispers in the dark gloom of the wilderness. We should take the wilderness to be simply the living of life: we walk through life without truly knowing the hearts of our fellow-travelers, but—and this is key—only our own. “But, where is Faith?” (61) says Brown, and it is the loss that sinks us. The trick of the devil is his “reasoning as we go,” (53) “discoursing so aptly, that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor….” (56) The reasoning that the devil teaches, which seems so natural in the “uncertain light,” (53) is that, if we harbor any sins in our own hearts, even living as if we did not, then could not any other, including those pure saints we esteem as being beyond sin entirely?
“My Kinsman” seems a step down from “Young Goodman Brown,” a mere fable compared to the latter’s complex allegory. “My Kinsman” seems to be not much more than a running joke capped with a good, old-fashioned piece of potted American wisdom: we rise and fall on our own merits; no hereditary hand for us. Hawthorne lets the story unfold, but we get it early on and the references to “dreaming” at the end are in no way narratively central, and are no doubt a first attempt to use a good idea, which he was able to capitalize on in “Young,” though not earlier.
Like every good poet, Hawthorne chooses his words carefully and there are three repetitions that call for attention, the first two responsible for the humor. The joke is that every time Robin opens his mouth to seek the Major, he says, “my kinsman, Major Molineux,” a phrase chosen with great calculation by Robin (with the attendant pomp), but for which backfires every time. The exact phrase, barring the title, appears nine times (11, 14, 15, 16, 18, twice on 19, 22, and 27). On 23, when we would expect the phrase, Robin says “one Major Molineux,” which allows him brief headway in finding his kinsman. And, of course, the tale ends with the converse, “your kinsman, Major Molineux,” thus capping the joke and the bit of Emersonian Americanism.
The joke is aided by a second repetition, that of “shrewd” and its cognates. This aids the joke, it being repeated over and over how intelligent, cunning, and perceptive Robin thinks he is, yet the reader already knows exactly why he keeps getting the treatment he is, totally misreading the situation he is in by, as Hawthorne puts it, a pompous “assumption of consequence.” (14) The use of “shrewd,” however, also allies itself with a major thematic of Hawthorne’s, here and in “Young.” Whereas Hawthorne hasn’t figured out yet how to use dreaming in his narrative yet, the two tales have in common what lies at its root, a preoccupation with “appearances,” the appearance of reality, or people, or streets.
Shrewdness, intelligence, doesn’t help Robin read his situation. We may question how shrewd Robin really is, and it certainly is a mistaken assumption that guides Robin’s actions, but the third repetition, of “countenance” and its cognates, pleads us to think deeper into the subject: the “long favored countenance” (11) of the first man he accosts, the “strange hostility in every countenance” (14) at the inn, the final stranger’s “altogether prepossessing countenance” (23). I’m not sure Hawthorne was able to successfully harness the thematic to open up a dialogic space, but it is raised in two coded places. The first is the vanity of “the philosopher seeking an honest man.” (15) I’m unsure whether this is an old saw or not, or whether it is a reference to some specific philosopher, but Socrates’ quest for someone who knew something, always ironically disarmed by his own profession of ignorance, certainly rings with it (because when faced with Socratic irony, the honest thing to do is admit, no, I don’t know anything) no less with the second code, “physiognomy.” (19) Socrates became a meditative source for Montaigne on just this score, with such a beautiful soul but ugly face. The question of the relationship between the appearance of something, and its reality, floats around the tale, though is never quite put centrally into place.
References are to the Portable Hawthorne, edited by William C. Spengemann.
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Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown”
What a contrast Hawthorne is to Emerson and Thoreau, so-called Transcendentalists! Sin is a primary source of meditation for Hawthorne, it would seem, and it is nowhere in evidence in Emerson, agonistic wrester of the Christian tradition. Whereas Emerson seems more intent on setting the ideals of America, Hawthorne would take the culture as he finds it to complicate and enrich the laden tensions.
The swift, penultimate paragraph of “Young Goodman Brown” sums up the wisdom found in Hawthorne’s allegory: “Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream, of a witch-meeting?” (64) The point of the tale is that it doesn’t matter. Brown has been changed by the experience, and lost to the forces of sin. The shape-shifting devil says that the knowledge he would bestow those who’ve traveled is “to know their secret deeds,” (62) of all your neighbors, “to penetrate … the deep mystery of sin….” (63)
What knowledge is this? seems to be the question. At the outset of Brown’s journey, Hawthorne sets in contradistinction the lonely solitude of the traveler with the possibility of “passing through an unseen multitude.” (52) This “unseen multitude” eventually takes the shape of all his neighbors: “And all the unseen multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her [Faith] onward.” (58) Even if we can commonsensically distinguish between saints and sinners, Hawthorne blurs them all together in Brown’s nightmare.
The figure of Faith completes the allegory, for the significance is the setting of faith against doubt, and the triumph of doubt. Previous convictions of purity are shattered as he hears their whispers in the dark gloom of the wilderness. We should take the wilderness to be simply the living of life: we walk through life without truly knowing the hearts of our fellow-travelers, but—and this is key—only our own. “But, where is Faith?” (61) says Brown, and it is the loss that sinks us. The trick of the devil is his “reasoning as we go,” (53) “discoursing so aptly, that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor….” (56) The reasoning that the devil teaches, which seems so natural in the “uncertain light,” (53) is that, if we harbor any sins in our own hearts, even living as if we did not, then could not any other, including those pure saints we esteem as being beyond sin entirely?
“Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward.” (62, italics mine)It is because Brown treats the possibility of goodness as coextensive with the existence of pure cases of purity from sin that, having finally lost faith in this easily doubted notion, he becomes a storm of gloom, “a distrustful, if not a desperate man,” (64) treating everyone as a secret horrid sinner, lustful for the worst depravities. Forever after, Brown “shrank from the bosom of Faith….” (ibid.)
Hawthorne: “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”
“My Kinsman” seems a step down from “Young Goodman Brown,” a mere fable compared to the latter’s complex allegory. “My Kinsman” seems to be not much more than a running joke capped with a good, old-fashioned piece of potted American wisdom: we rise and fall on our own merits; no hereditary hand for us. Hawthorne lets the story unfold, but we get it early on and the references to “dreaming” at the end are in no way narratively central, and are no doubt a first attempt to use a good idea, which he was able to capitalize on in “Young,” though not earlier.
Like every good poet, Hawthorne chooses his words carefully and there are three repetitions that call for attention, the first two responsible for the humor. The joke is that every time Robin opens his mouth to seek the Major, he says, “my kinsman, Major Molineux,” a phrase chosen with great calculation by Robin (with the attendant pomp), but for which backfires every time. The exact phrase, barring the title, appears nine times (11, 14, 15, 16, 18, twice on 19, 22, and 27). On 23, when we would expect the phrase, Robin says “one Major Molineux,” which allows him brief headway in finding his kinsman. And, of course, the tale ends with the converse, “your kinsman, Major Molineux,” thus capping the joke and the bit of Emersonian Americanism.
The joke is aided by a second repetition, that of “shrewd” and its cognates. This aids the joke, it being repeated over and over how intelligent, cunning, and perceptive Robin thinks he is, yet the reader already knows exactly why he keeps getting the treatment he is, totally misreading the situation he is in by, as Hawthorne puts it, a pompous “assumption of consequence.” (14) The use of “shrewd,” however, also allies itself with a major thematic of Hawthorne’s, here and in “Young.” Whereas Hawthorne hasn’t figured out yet how to use dreaming in his narrative yet, the two tales have in common what lies at its root, a preoccupation with “appearances,” the appearance of reality, or people, or streets.
Shrewdness, intelligence, doesn’t help Robin read his situation. We may question how shrewd Robin really is, and it certainly is a mistaken assumption that guides Robin’s actions, but the third repetition, of “countenance” and its cognates, pleads us to think deeper into the subject: the “long favored countenance” (11) of the first man he accosts, the “strange hostility in every countenance” (14) at the inn, the final stranger’s “altogether prepossessing countenance” (23). I’m not sure Hawthorne was able to successfully harness the thematic to open up a dialogic space, but it is raised in two coded places. The first is the vanity of “the philosopher seeking an honest man.” (15) I’m unsure whether this is an old saw or not, or whether it is a reference to some specific philosopher, but Socrates’ quest for someone who knew something, always ironically disarmed by his own profession of ignorance, certainly rings with it (because when faced with Socratic irony, the honest thing to do is admit, no, I don’t know anything) no less with the second code, “physiognomy.” (19) Socrates became a meditative source for Montaigne on just this score, with such a beautiful soul but ugly face. The question of the relationship between the appearance of something, and its reality, floats around the tale, though is never quite put centrally into place.
Friday, January 23, 2009
American Lit Notebook: Thoreau
Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).
References are to the Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode.
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Not to unduly continue my ritualistic invocation of Bloom, but writing in 2003 (in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?), he said that Americans are haunted by “the paradox of Emerson’s influence: Peace Marchers and Bushians alike are Emerson’s heirs in his dialectics of power.” (198) This epileptic seizure of a rhetorical riverbed bears strong witness in Thoreau, overinfluenced as he was. “Civil Disobedience” is a cavalcade of conflicting contemporary resonances: the Iraqi Wars, as many have pointed out, are their Mexican War, but the neoconservative takes great respite in his “the government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.” (110)
What I think we can see clearly in the essay are the political ramifications of Emerson’s call for a return to “moral intuition,” for people to listen to their inner, true, authentic selves, rather than others. This informs Thoreau's use of “conscience” (111) and becomes all the stronger, speaking of the Abolitionists, in “it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one [in a first-past-the-post election’s 50% plus one].” (120) The key modifier for Thoreau, in his model of life with governments, remains in the beginning: “‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” (109, italics mine) Everything hinges on “when men are prepared for it,” for without it we are stuck with needing a neutral arbiter between fractured views of right and wrong—a government. I’m not sure Thoreau is entirely cognizant of the problems attendant the Emersonian conception of “inner guidance” for, quoting the famous line from Jesus on “rendering unto Caesar,” he says, “leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know.” (124) I think the trouble is exactly not that we do not wish to know, but that the struggle of life is not being entirely sure which is which, but still having to act. The political life was created because we are not perfectly wise, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, but instead need to expediently balance the exigencies of life (let alone the proclamations of those who think themselves wise).
Walden takes an oblique route through politics, and its first long chapter would more properly be called “Economy of the Soul.” Thoreau meditates long and hard on the notion of work in our lives and the give and take, the sacrifice we make (or rather, think we have to make) to survive in life. Thoreau echoes a long, hallowed tradition of social discontent that A. O. Lovejoy called “primitivism,” stretching from the Stoics to its modern font, Rousseau. Recalling the First Discourse, Thoreau says, “Most of the luxuries … are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” (269) “Elevation” is Thoreau’s chief concern, and, like in Emerson, it is a solitary, writerly concern. Emerson was after “tropes,” and for Thoreau the thinker, the play of life is “a kind of fiction.” (386) Thoreau, as he said in opening, lives “by the labor of my hands.” (258)
References are to the Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode.
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Thoreau: “Civil Disobedience,” Walden
Not to unduly continue my ritualistic invocation of Bloom, but writing in 2003 (in Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?), he said that Americans are haunted by “the paradox of Emerson’s influence: Peace Marchers and Bushians alike are Emerson’s heirs in his dialectics of power.” (198) This epileptic seizure of a rhetorical riverbed bears strong witness in Thoreau, overinfluenced as he was. “Civil Disobedience” is a cavalcade of conflicting contemporary resonances: the Iraqi Wars, as many have pointed out, are their Mexican War, but the neoconservative takes great respite in his “the government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.” (110)
What I think we can see clearly in the essay are the political ramifications of Emerson’s call for a return to “moral intuition,” for people to listen to their inner, true, authentic selves, rather than others. This informs Thoreau's use of “conscience” (111) and becomes all the stronger, speaking of the Abolitionists, in “it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one [in a first-past-the-post election’s 50% plus one].” (120) The key modifier for Thoreau, in his model of life with governments, remains in the beginning: “‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” (109, italics mine) Everything hinges on “when men are prepared for it,” for without it we are stuck with needing a neutral arbiter between fractured views of right and wrong—a government. I’m not sure Thoreau is entirely cognizant of the problems attendant the Emersonian conception of “inner guidance” for, quoting the famous line from Jesus on “rendering unto Caesar,” he says, “leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which; for they did not wish to know.” (124) I think the trouble is exactly not that we do not wish to know, but that the struggle of life is not being entirely sure which is which, but still having to act. The political life was created because we are not perfectly wise, like Plato’s philosopher-kings, but instead need to expediently balance the exigencies of life (let alone the proclamations of those who think themselves wise).
Walden takes an oblique route through politics, and its first long chapter would more properly be called “Economy of the Soul.” Thoreau meditates long and hard on the notion of work in our lives and the give and take, the sacrifice we make (or rather, think we have to make) to survive in life. Thoreau echoes a long, hallowed tradition of social discontent that A. O. Lovejoy called “primitivism,” stretching from the Stoics to its modern font, Rousseau. Recalling the First Discourse, Thoreau says, “Most of the luxuries … are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” (269) “Elevation” is Thoreau’s chief concern, and, like in Emerson, it is a solitary, writerly concern. Emerson was after “tropes,” and for Thoreau the thinker, the play of life is “a kind of fiction.” (386) Thoreau, as he said in opening, lives “by the labor of my hands.” (258)
Friday, January 16, 2009
American Lit Notebook: Emerson
Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).
References are to the Portable Emerson, edited by Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley.
----------
I wasn’t exactly shocked to hear that Emerson holds a recessed position in our contemporary minds, but it was odd, having read a handful of his essays previously, to hear that people have a hard time figuring how so many found their voice in him (like people in the 60s in Dylan). All I hear in myself, since reading him, is my own voice, and in others besides. Perhaps I’m overdetermined by Harold Bloom, on Emerson no less than most of what I read.
The former Unitarian minister wreaks fantastic revenge on the profession in “The Divinity School Address” (DSA). In a stance that should be called an aggressive anti-clericalism, Emerson takes the form of the Protestant Revolution radicalized. Luther and Calvin wished to replace one orthodoxy with another, but the centuries-long transplantment of religious minorities in America produced a cultural space that was consistently at odds with orthodoxy in general. Railing against all priest classes, he says that religion in American “suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest….” (DSA, 77) Prophesizing our contemporary desire to say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” Emerson says, “The idioms of [Jesus’] language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.” (78)
This last is a dark saying, particularly for the writer. Emerson struggled with this impetus, that we are all, at last, only with ourselves, his long life and this produced his strong (and easily appropriated) sense of individuality. The moral, religious sentiment, for Emerson, “is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation….” (76) Emerson’s style, consequently, is one of exhortation, and not argument. Emerson wishes to provoke us into an “original relation to the universe,” one that through “revelation to us” will help us produce “our own works and laws and worship.” (“Nature,” 7, italics mine) Without mediation by tradition we shall make ourselves by ourselves.
What Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence” produces in Emerson one of the strongest, most provocative versions of reading. What Emerson preaches is a refashioning, the taking of contingent materials in order (only in order?) to make something authentically “you,” where this at the same time means “new.” “It came into him life; it went out from him truth.” (“American Scholar,” 55) Emerson essentially shucks off concern with “authorial intention,” something an ordinary literary critic cannot do without. But for Emerson, the first pragmatist, “the sacredness which attaches to the act of creation … is transferred to the record,” and this is a “grave mischief.” (ibid.) “Genius,” for Emerson, “is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence.” (57) The suggestion is that “One must be an inventor to read well,” that the only good reading is a selective, “creative reading,” a misreading in Bloom’s terms—“the discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle;—all the rest he rejects….” (58)
Harold Bloom once remarked that, despite his preternatural verbal memory, he had a tough time recalling the placement of prominent passages in Emerson, thinking it in one essay and instead finding it in another. The experience must be a common one, and I’ve already encountered it many times. It no doubt has much to do with Emerson’s solid foot in oral tradition, with its reliance on interchangeable formula, but also with his obsession with the transumption of the past, which he often identified with power and the promise of America.
Emerson is America’s theorist of self-creation and this comes out well in “Circles.” The trope of the circle contains the core of Emerson’s vision of an agonistic relation to the past. We are born into life and find ourselves amongst circles already drawn, but Emerson’s Law of Compensation says that “every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn….” (“Circles,” 228) Emerson analogizes thinking and acting to the activity of drawing circles, as summing up a situation as this or that. As always, though, Emerson wants us to focus on the activity of drawing as the important bit, not the circle itself: “a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built.” (229)
Emerson’s conception of the poet goes back to its Greek roots: poiesis, or “making.” The poet is the self-maker, involved in “the transcendency of their own nature….” (“The Poet,” 255) Emerson twice calls poets “liberating gods” (257, 258) and one has to think that, in America’s lionization of freedom, that Emerson has Shelley’s maxim at heart when he says, “They [poets] are free, and they make free.” (258) This comes to a head (a little later on then our reading) when Emerson laments that he looks “in vain for the poet whom I describe.” (261) Emerson slyly bids to be that poet for America, but in the wide sense in which the Greeks first used it before the coming domination of prose in Plato’s Athenian 5th century. Presaging Whitman, America’s poet in the narrower sense, Emerson declares that “America is a poem in our eyes….” (262)
Emerson takes a much darker form in “Experience.” Waxing to the philosophical milieu current in the Old World, Emerson echoes to the gulf between the subject (person) and object. For Emerson, though, this isn’t simply a distinction between us and rocks, but between us and our desires, us and other people. This creates a great pathos, one summed up by the cliché “The grass is always greener…,” but in Emerson, “Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.” (267) Emerson grieves for the time we once had originary participation with the world, called Eden, which we were fated to be ejected with “the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.” (284) Emerson’s darkest passage, however, is the knowledge that all we hold dear is held together simply “by love on one part and by forbearance to press objection on the other part….” (285) All life is a continual negotiation, fragile and always open for option.
References are to the Portable Emerson, edited by Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley.
----------
Emerson: “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address”
I wasn’t exactly shocked to hear that Emerson holds a recessed position in our contemporary minds, but it was odd, having read a handful of his essays previously, to hear that people have a hard time figuring how so many found their voice in him (like people in the 60s in Dylan). All I hear in myself, since reading him, is my own voice, and in others besides. Perhaps I’m overdetermined by Harold Bloom, on Emerson no less than most of what I read.
The former Unitarian minister wreaks fantastic revenge on the profession in “The Divinity School Address” (DSA). In a stance that should be called an aggressive anti-clericalism, Emerson takes the form of the Protestant Revolution radicalized. Luther and Calvin wished to replace one orthodoxy with another, but the centuries-long transplantment of religious minorities in America produced a cultural space that was consistently at odds with orthodoxy in general. Railing against all priest classes, he says that religion in American “suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest….” (DSA, 77) Prophesizing our contemporary desire to say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” Emerson says, “The idioms of [Jesus’] language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.” (78)
This last is a dark saying, particularly for the writer. Emerson struggled with this impetus, that we are all, at last, only with ourselves, his long life and this produced his strong (and easily appropriated) sense of individuality. The moral, religious sentiment, for Emerson, “is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation….” (76) Emerson’s style, consequently, is one of exhortation, and not argument. Emerson wishes to provoke us into an “original relation to the universe,” one that through “revelation to us” will help us produce “our own works and laws and worship.” (“Nature,” 7, italics mine) Without mediation by tradition we shall make ourselves by ourselves.
What Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence” produces in Emerson one of the strongest, most provocative versions of reading. What Emerson preaches is a refashioning, the taking of contingent materials in order (only in order?) to make something authentically “you,” where this at the same time means “new.” “It came into him life; it went out from him truth.” (“American Scholar,” 55) Emerson essentially shucks off concern with “authorial intention,” something an ordinary literary critic cannot do without. But for Emerson, the first pragmatist, “the sacredness which attaches to the act of creation … is transferred to the record,” and this is a “grave mischief.” (ibid.) “Genius,” for Emerson, “is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence.” (57) The suggestion is that “One must be an inventor to read well,” that the only good reading is a selective, “creative reading,” a misreading in Bloom’s terms—“the discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle;—all the rest he rejects….” (58)
Emerson: “Circles,” “The Poet,” “Experience”
Harold Bloom once remarked that, despite his preternatural verbal memory, he had a tough time recalling the placement of prominent passages in Emerson, thinking it in one essay and instead finding it in another. The experience must be a common one, and I’ve already encountered it many times. It no doubt has much to do with Emerson’s solid foot in oral tradition, with its reliance on interchangeable formula, but also with his obsession with the transumption of the past, which he often identified with power and the promise of America.
Emerson is America’s theorist of self-creation and this comes out well in “Circles.” The trope of the circle contains the core of Emerson’s vision of an agonistic relation to the past. We are born into life and find ourselves amongst circles already drawn, but Emerson’s Law of Compensation says that “every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn….” (“Circles,” 228) Emerson analogizes thinking and acting to the activity of drawing circles, as summing up a situation as this or that. As always, though, Emerson wants us to focus on the activity of drawing as the important bit, not the circle itself: “a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built.” (229)
Emerson’s conception of the poet goes back to its Greek roots: poiesis, or “making.” The poet is the self-maker, involved in “the transcendency of their own nature….” (“The Poet,” 255) Emerson twice calls poets “liberating gods” (257, 258) and one has to think that, in America’s lionization of freedom, that Emerson has Shelley’s maxim at heart when he says, “They [poets] are free, and they make free.” (258) This comes to a head (a little later on then our reading) when Emerson laments that he looks “in vain for the poet whom I describe.” (261) Emerson slyly bids to be that poet for America, but in the wide sense in which the Greeks first used it before the coming domination of prose in Plato’s Athenian 5th century. Presaging Whitman, America’s poet in the narrower sense, Emerson declares that “America is a poem in our eyes….” (262)
Emerson takes a much darker form in “Experience.” Waxing to the philosophical milieu current in the Old World, Emerson echoes to the gulf between the subject (person) and object. For Emerson, though, this isn’t simply a distinction between us and rocks, but between us and our desires, us and other people. This creates a great pathos, one summed up by the cliché “The grass is always greener…,” but in Emerson, “Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.” (267) Emerson grieves for the time we once had originary participation with the world, called Eden, which we were fated to be ejected with “the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.” (284) Emerson’s darkest passage, however, is the knowledge that all we hold dear is held together simply “by love on one part and by forbearance to press objection on the other part….” (285) All life is a continual negotiation, fragile and always open for option.
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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