Julien Benda: Exercise d’un Enterré Vif: Juin 1940-Août 1944. Paris: Gallimard, 1946.
Hitler’s tyranny perfected the arts of killing people and mesmerizing Germans, but it also displayed a considerable talent for putting the peoples it conquered into a condition of moral hazard. Ordinarily, a conquered people elicits our pity at its suffering, our admiration for its resistance. But by carefully setting moral traps for its subjects—you may survive, but only by collaborating actively in our crimes, or passively, by pretending not to see them—the Nazis dis-spirited those of their victims they permitted to live, turning ordinary moral sensibilities against those who retained them, and into the service of the new regime which despised them. Even after the end of the war, with the Nazis defeated and expelled, the liberated peoples needed to find a way to live not only with what had been done to them, but worse, what they had been induced to do to themselves. When Charles de Gaulle met André Malraux in the months after the Allies had ended the Occupation, he asked what most impressed him about Paris, since Malraux’s return. “The lies.” For the French, and for peoples throughout Europe, it wasn’t easy to look in the mirror, in those days.
In a sense, Julien Benda’s moral circumstance during the war years was easier than most. By 1940 he was a man in his late seventies, hardly expected to join the Resistance. As a Jew, he could be admired simply for surviving; with the help of a friend, he fled Nazi-occupied Paris for the relatively safe city of Carcassone, far to the south and ruled by the puppet government at Vichy. There, he mostly stayed indoors, boring his surveillants, who were reduced to writing reports along the lines of ‘Observed going to the corner store; returned home with groceries,’ dossiers sometimes enlivened with animadversions about the seeming-innocence but suspected perfidy of all Jews. In his own description, Benda was “one buried alive.” His “exercise” consisted of self-examination—the only kind available to him, as the Nazis had confiscated his books. “The solitude and absence of dissipation” during the war years allowed his mind to exercise itself in considering “the whole truth of its nature,” intellectual and moral. He did this not as an act of self-absorption but “in the hope of bestowing to the science of Man an exact observation”(7). What he writes is an apology or defense of the ‘way’ or regime of his life of the mind, a defense against the intellectual and moral ways that had ‘buried’ him in the estimation of his fellow ‘intellectuals’ long before the war, and would keep him so buried for the remainder of his life, long after he had returned to Paris. He had enjoyed a brief moment in the public sun after the 1927 of his book La Trahison des Clercs, in which he opposed the regnant intellectual trends of historical determinism (he called it “divinized realism” and traced its origins to Hegel), and the preference for race-conscious and class-conscious willing and militant action over impartial thinking. He did so in the name of European civilization’s traditional esteem for classical philosophy and (mostly) humane Christianity. Critics of the book complained that Benda praises abstract thought while talking about himself and settling scores with his contemporaries; they ignored the genre of the book, which amounts to a sort of informal brief before the court of public opinion, not a treatise on epistemology. To do that, he should indeed be talking about himself and his adversaries.
He devotes most of his book to his understanding of the proper ‘way’ or ‘regime’ of the intellect. “The dominant order of my mind is the appetite for thought” (10). Although “strongly sensitive to poetry and to a beautiful form in art,” he prefers science to art. What is more (and a reader of Plato will recall Socrates’ argument in the Philebus), thought has its beauty, too, in the comprehensive theory and the profound satisfaction of the noetic moment. Politically, a due consideration for the practice of “thought in itself” beyond “particularistic passions”—such passions as individual self-interest, and especially nationalism—might establish “a real sentiment for peace among men” (12-13), although Benda doesn’t expect such an ethos to develop. The condition of “incessant inquietude” in the modern world hardly conduces to such thought. And that inquietude finds intellectual support among intellectuals themselves, philosophers like Henri Bergson (like Benda, a philosopher and ‘assimilated’ Jewish man), who misunderstand the nature of the cosmos itself as a condition of conflict, of perpetual and chaotic movement, and who as a consequence valorized “the fury of the moment” (13). Against “Nietzsche and German romanticism,” which anticipate Bergonism, Benda contends that the “aversion to the Apollonian is one of the things which makes me foreign to my time” (16-17).
He prefers the thinkers of the French seventeenth century, first of all Descartes, whom he associates not with the ‘Machiavellianization’ of science but with the attempt to examine his own mind in the hope of “leaving the moving sand to reach the rock in the clay” (16), a stable vantage point affording serenity and happiness. Benda seeks to understand “the nature of Man,” not man’s supposed “destiny”—the ever-receding ‘End of History’ promised by historicists. For this, he rejects subjectivism, the valorization of the imagination over reason, the preference for images over abstraction; to illustrate abstract thoughts, examples will suffice. He deplores the attempt by intellectuals to undermine their own strength by turning away from ideas to sense-impressions. An animal learns the temperature of a liquid by “dipping its paw into it,” whereas a man learns its temperature “by reading a number on a glass column,” a thermometer; “for me, the superior consciousness is that of the man; but for my contemporaries it is that of the animal” (25). With rigorous logic, he “honor[s] science for its method, not for its results” (26)—general theories derived from experimental testing of grand hypotheses impress him more than the inventions such theories may lead to.
Such theories, such thought, inevitably will be presented to the public, which leads Benda to a consideration of literary style. True to his seventeenth-century neo-classical models, he prefers correctness and simplicity to “beautiful images and musicality” in prose. He wants a writer to give readers facts, deploring “the French superstition of the form” (176), that is, the exaltation of mannered elegance of style over substance. Accordingly, he praises Xenophon over Plato, Polybius (“the most intelligent of the historians of antiquity” [176]), Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Taine, and Renan. He deplores such “false thinkers” (28) as Nietzsche, Paul Valéry, Alain, and André Gide (whom he singles out for several pages of criticism). Those who go into “ecstasies before pure acrobatics of words” only confuse themselves (32). He forthrightly concedes, “I myself am in some measure a littérateur and not a thinker” (36). Indeed, while abandoning his engineering studies (an initial attempt to follow in his father’s footstep), and switching to the study of history at the Sorbonne, he retained his esteem for science, and saw that science very much needed ‘literary,’ or at least literate defenders against the mythopoetic adepts of the doctrine of historicism. “Real thought is extremely rare, in all the world” (36), as the popularity of the various historical determinisms shows. Such doctrines mimic the dialectic of philosophy but do not really practice, basing their appeal on the passion for social, political, and economic justice. But like all passions, even “the spirit of justice” confuses the mind, obscures comprehension (32) by goading men to act indignantly but not thoughtfully. When it comes to justice, moral indignation is not enough.
Benda gets down to cases. Among contemporary French intellectuals, Paul Valéry displays “verbal virtuosity” but little else, placing metaphors before reasoning and neglecting to provide proofs for his assertions; he isn’t a philosopher but a sophist, at base an adherent of “intellectual nihilism” (47). The much-esteemed musicality of his verse appeals to intellectually fashionable Nietzschean motifs. Émile Chartier, a pacifist who published under the pen-name “Alain,” isn’t so much a sophist but a rhetorician or demagogue (47), and proved worse than useless in the years leading up to the Second World War. Benda reserves his most detailed criticism for Gide, who desires not truth but approval; in his vanity, he cannot say, as Socrates does to Gorgias, “I am, although alone, of another opinion” (39). Benda suspects that Gide took a disliking to him because Benda never mentioned him in his books. Although (or perhaps because) incapable of understanding Marxism, Gide became enraptured with the Soviet Union, whose rulers feted him when he visited it, then groveled to the Germans when they rolled into Paris in 1940; at the time, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was still in effect, so his obeisance to the twin tyrannies did not put him in jeopardy. “There was in [Gide], as with certain reptiles, a sort of genius of perfidy which, as is frequent among men of letters, will often be translated into brilliant formulas” (45). When Gide ventured a personal attack on Benda in print, their younger, mutual acquaintance André Malraux assured Benda, “There is only one way to hurt you as a man of letters; it is to show that your books are worthless” (42). Benda took comfort in that, while not neglecting to repay Gide in his own ad hominem coin.
His decades-long association with his fellow intellectuals in the offices of the ardently republican Nouvelle Revue Française and elsewhere persuades Benda that conversation with them is “vain talk, required by social propriety” but intellectually worthless. “The man concerned with clear ideas must resign himself to live alone, in the company of a few strong books, and renounce any trade in ideas with the secular” (63)—by which he means those who read and think about “the books of the moment,” those favored by current opinion (153-154). “My taste for serious thought has condemned me to a near-total solitude,” “set[ting] me apart from normal humanity” (64). With equanimity, he allows, “As is just, I pay for it” (64). Insofar as he is artful—after all, he does write for publication—his literary style “attaches itself more to the relations of ideas than to… individual taste; looks for sharp edges not flowing outlines; takes for its models the moeurs of architecture, not those of musical flow”; “in short, it’s just the opposite of what the world demands of this task” (66). In this he prefers such writers as de Staël, Tocqueville, and Taine, who, in “evinc[ing] a scientific method, are not literary, and are no longer held to be such” (70-71). With respect to his readership, he has been rewarded not with numbers but with “a small number of really fanatical admirers” (77). (He means that in a good way.) So convinced is he that association with other intellectuals only serves to drag down a serious thinker, “For my whole life I have wished that my thought should appear in a journal where I could write alone. It’s a dream that I still do not give up.” (78) He would have loved the blogosphere. However, he does not expect vindication from posterity, which more likely than not will remain as feckless as his contemporaries. He continues to write more to further his own philosophic quest than to impress the public—”to realize myself, to elucidate my ideas, to know who I am” (96-97).
The problem is fundamental to the relationship of society to thought. Men in society “demand that certain true problems be hidden; it is by the instinct of self-preservation that they are pleased to hear those who dissimulate such truths under literary flowers and flee from him who shows them the truth in its hardness” (90). The genuine intellectual “is a monster and must not forget it” (92), both for the sake of society’s good and his own. “My love for the exercise of thought merits the name of passion in the sense that when I can do it, I experience full joy and forget many external circumstances that make normal people suffer” (91-92). For a philosopher (especially one who practices some of the habits of Cartesian introspection in the service of forming clear and distinct ideas), there can be a certain charm to being buried alive.
But can such a monstre be sacré or, failing that, at least good in his own uncommon way? The second section of L’Exercise describes “my moral nature” (102). In contrast to his solitary intellectual life, this has a strong political element. Without allowing the passion for justice cloud his intellect, Benda found himself “detesting injustice “(104) when “the moral values to which I assign first rank”—order, discipline, tradition, and the national interest (all at the service of a republican regime of intellectual, moral, and political liberty)—”were in jeopardy” (103). He lists five such occasions. The first of these was the Boulangiste movement of the 1880s, when General Georges Boulanger and his followers nearly overthrew the Third Republic on a program of Revanche (revenge against the Germans, who had defeated France and seized the provinces of Alsace Lorraine in 1871); Révision (revision of the republican constitution framed as a result of the disgrace incurred by the Bonapartists who had lost the war); and Restauration (the return of the monarchy). The second was the famous Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish officer in the French Army was falsely accused of treason by anti-Semitic, right-wing elements, again intend on discrediting the republican regime. German aggression in 1914, touching off the Great War, was the third such crisis, followed by the rise of Fascism and Nazism in the subsequent decade. Finally, there was the “Sixth of February” uprising in 1934, when a gaggle of right-wing organizations, including Action Française and the Croix-le-Feu, rioted near the National Assembly and forced the resignation of President of the National Council Edouard Daladier. This last near-coup provoked leftist counter-demonstrations and, in the Parisian intellectual milieu, the formation of the Comité de viligilances des intellectuels antifascistes (members including Gide, Alain, and Malraux), a precursor of the Popular Front movement. Although Benda himself did not join the Comité or the Popular Front, on the pages of the NRF he denounced fascism so strongly that he alienated the pacifist Alain and other French appeasers, who pinned their hopes on the Nazi-Soviet Pact and called Benda a war-monger. On all of these occasions, he came particularly to detest “this recent thing, of which Nietzsche has been the high priest: the esthetics of injustice” (104), including the praise of cruelty and its underlying will-to-power metaphysic. “I had the idea that Cain sketched a dogma to justify his crime” (105); it is “the primitive man,” whom “Nietzsche calls the normal man,” who “finds a joy in the commission of injustice” (106) justified by his “master-morality” (110). Under these circumstances, “Vive les esclaves!” (110)
A consequence of Nietzschean ‘primitivism’—not only unintended but denounced by Nietzsche himself, it should be said, who advocated the establishment of an international aristocracy and despised the German nationalism of his own time—resulted in “racism” (107), “the return to collective punishment [which] marks a huge regression in human morals” (108), “installing in Europe the moeurs of the Asiatic sovereigns” (109). Against this new regime of despotism, Benda looks not to French thinkers, who now sacrifice “private interest to the general interest” (111) in concurrence with Rousseau, but to the “Anglo-Saxon” respect for “the rule of law and proprieties” (110). He quotes Tocqueville, saying that absolute power rests on our contempt for fellow-citizens, and identifies the moral flaw of “primitive man”: “He practices the gift, which derives from love, and not the exchange, which postulates justice” (112). He refers to the custom of small, tribal societies, which form social networks based on acts of generosity, often entailing obligation and therefore subordination on the part of the recipient in contrast to larger, more complex societies which form social networks based on impersonal, rational calculation of mutual advantage under the principle of equal value received by both parties to the transaction. Justice, he writes, is regulative and stable, standing ‘above’ human social life, providing an objective standard for it, all in contrast with the shifting alliances of intra- and inter-tribal relations, as it were ’embedded’ in tribal custom.
As a republican liberal, he also rejects radical social egalitarianism, revolutionary fervor animated by a passion for deploying force majeure to eradicate the slightest perceived injustice. Hence his measured endorsement of “the democratic regime,” which he finds good insofar as it attacks unjust civil inequality, bad when impassioned majorities attack other, weaker nations, as seen in colonial wars. Further, while anti-democratic regimes valorize “the artistic spectacle of a society hierarchized in the manner of a cathedral” (esthetically pleasing to look at, but no place to live), democracies exhibit the contrary folly; in them, the dominance of “the greater number necessarily implies the triumph of the agreeable”—with a concurrent “indifference to serious thought” (121). In making this point he can integrate his intellectual preference for science over art into his moral position, defending intellectual probity, the scrupulous treatment of both ideas and human beings, and an esteem for intellectual and moral systems which offer enduring principles against historicist relativism and temporality. His anti-sensualist, anti-sensationalist, anti-estheticist critique of the worship of talent and ‘genius’ over truth and morality—liberty wrongly understood—brings him so far as to defend the much maligned Americans. “I would like to see the Americans not to humble themselves so much because they have little artistic sense, but proudly answer the Latin who makes them ashamed that they may have better virtues” (128).
By integrating the life of intellect with moral life, Benda eschews the ‘fact/value’ distinction, based on the assumption that reasoning and morality do not mix. Toleration understood as “simply wanting liberty for others” (136) is one thing; tolerance misunderstood as moral relativism (often the result of intellectual laziness or moral cowardice) quite another. “My attachment to intellectual probity brings a smile to the secularists in the name of their ‘skepticism'” (129). But the new theory of relativity in physics does not apply to human nature, and therefore to morality; nor does particle-wave theory refute the principle of reason or non-contradiction, which states (in its original, Socratic formulation) the same thing will not do or suffer the same thing, at the same time, in relation to the same part, and not that the same thing might be understood as two different ‘things’ if considered in relation to different methods of observation, at different times. “My will to see respect for the human person is for me a position of judgment, not sentiment, and has nothing to do with love of the person, with humanitarianism, and especially with pity” (140)—here glancing again at Nietzsche’s fulminations. Not human life so much as human dignity counts; that is, the moral fact of equal human rights does not preclude a moral hierarchy among human persons. George Washington and Edmond Genêt both esteemed equal, unalienable rights, but whom would you entrust with high political responsibility?
Benda concludes his apologia or self-defense with a defense of Jewishness. The ancient Israelites were never ‘nationalists.’ Their prophets “never stopped denouncing the immorality of their own people,” along with that of foreign idolaters; indeed, the anti-Semites’ oldest and most virulent charge, that ‘the Jews’ were ‘Christ-killers,’ only affirms this, inasmuch as Jesus, “the most sublime among them,” was (of course) Jewish! (137-138). In sharp contrast, anti-Semites denounce Jews and other races, but never their own. For nationalists, as for over-indulgent parents, the love of one’s own always trumps the love of truth. The “respect for truth”—abstract, impartial, enduring—upheld by both “the religion of the scientific spirit,” seen, albeit in different ways, in both the Greek philosophers and in Descartes, and by “the religion of justice,” upheld by Judaism, taken together, characterizes precisely “many assimilated Jews in Western culture” (149-150). Jews like Julien Benda.
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