Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second edition. London: Verso, 2014.

 

First published in 1985, reissued with a new preface a decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire derailed Marxist ‘praxis’ in Central and Eastern Europe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy has become a touchstone for the newer iterations of the New Left, the Left that departed from many if not all of the tenets of ‘scientific socialism’ as formulated by Marx and Engels, and especially as it had been propounded by V. I. Lenin. Precisely because Marxism attempts to unify theory and practice, the initial success of Leninist Marxism in Russia and its failure elsewhere (notably in Germany), funneled socialists into Marxism-Leninism. Prior to the Bolshevik revolution, the authors contend, Marxian thought had become “increasingly diversified,” but after it this “creative process” was derailed. Initially, the divergent voice of Antonio Gramsci, raised in the 1920s, received no fair hearing from mainstream socialists. This is no longer so, as “the problems of a globalized and information-ruled society are unthinkable” within the frameworks of either the idealist-Hegelian or the Marxist-materialist versions of historicism.

Marxist materialism, especially, centered on socioeconomic classes as the drivers of ‘history,’ i.e., the course of human events. Socioeconomic classes are sub-political groupings. Laclau and Mouffe vindicate a political understanding of socialism, and of modernity generally. Modern political life, even in commercial republics, isn’t simply dominated by economics and by the ‘capitalists’ who enjoy considerable sway within them. Politics has its own integrity as an independent variable, as it were, in the course of events, influenced by but also influencing social and economic life. Marxism additionally suffers from an epistemological deficiency, “the illusion of immediacy.” That is, its proponents assume that reality presents itself to our minds, through our senses, very much as it is, with little regard to the filters imposed by language and other ‘cultural’ phenomena. This is reminiscent of Socrates’ criticisms of the Greek natural philosophers and his turn to political philosophy, but Laclau and Mouffe are Socratic in no other way. They cite such philosophers as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, the structuralists, and the deconstructionists as the relevant critics of epistemological “immediacy.”  Behind them all is Nietzsche with his doctrine of the will to power, oriented as it is not to seeking truth but to enhancing life, very much in opposition to Socratic inquiry. Nietzsche follows Machiavelli and subsequent ‘moderns,’ who reduce politics to power, a motif the New Left has continued. Laclau and Mouffe borrow the term ‘hegemony’ from Gramsci; for him, the heart of ‘politics’ is power, not only physical but ‘cultural’—the power intellectual frameworks exert upon our thoughts, and through thoughts our actions. To understand politics as hegemony “retriev[es] an act of political institution that finds its source and motivation nowhere but in itself.” Human beings can choose their political actions; those actions are “contingent,” not simply determined by sub-political forces that drive it on. “This privileging of the political moment in the structuration of society is an essential aspect of our approach.” If politics is to some important degree self-determining, one of the most important ‘scientific’ predictions of Marxism-Leninism cannot be true; there can be no “withering away of the state,” as Lenin claims in The State and Revolution. 

Further, the fundamental cause of ‘history,’ the famous dialectic of class conflict Marx posits, cannot account for what Laclau and Mouffe call “social antagonism.” “Antagonisms are not objective relations,” susceptible to scientific explanation and prediction, “but relations that reveal the limits of all objectivity,” limits seen precisely in the importance of free choice, of ‘subjectivity,’ in class conflict and politics alike. “There is no ‘cunning of reason'”—whether guided by Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Marx’s dialectical materialism—which “would realize itself through antagonistic relations.” Social antagonism is quite real, and political conflict registers that reality, but it doesn’t work the way Marx said it did, and it therefore should not issue in a regime of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’—in practice the dictatorship of a political party, often itself dictated to by a tyrant. The authors favor not tyranny or oligarchy but a regime of “democratic socialism.” It will remain to be seen if that is not itself a contradiction in terms.

However that may be, the authors wish “that the collapse of the Soviet model would have given a renewed impetus to democratic socialist parties,” instead of discrediting socialism itself and empowering “neo-liberalism,” as seen in the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. As of the turn of this century, socialists themselves had retreated, “redefining themselves euphemistically as ‘center-left'” parties. Consistent with their political approach, Laclau and Mouffe demand regime change, revolution, “the establishment of a new hegemony,” a new power structure. “No doubt it is a good thing that the Left has finally come to terms with the importance of pluralism and of liberal-democratic institutions, but the problem is that this has been accompanied by the mistaken belief that it meant abandoning any attempt at transforming the present hegemonic order.” What is needed, then, is a regime of “liberty and equality” that extends “the democratic struggles for equality and liberty to a wider range of social relations,” as Left elaborates “a credible alternative to the neo-liberal order, instead of simply trying to manage it in a more humane way.” This will require, among other things redefining the adversaries of the Left. There is no such thing as “a non-exclusive public sphere of rational argument,” since regimes always define what is just and what is unjust, including and excluding as they go. “We will never be able to leave our particularities completely aside in order to act in accordance with our rational self.” But socialists should nonetheless strive to approximate “a harmony that we cannot attain” in practice. More egalitarian distribution of economic goods, yes; more egalitarian distribution of social ‘recognition’ (older writers would have said, ‘honors’), yes to that, as well. “Our motto is: ‘Back to the hegemonic struggle,”” the regime struggle that socialist preoccupation with sub-political causation and ’causes’ had obscured.

In constituting a new socialist strategy, socialist organizers have a much more complex task than that envisioned by Marxists. Feminism, ethnic and national ‘movements,’ demands for ‘gay rights,’ environmentalism, anti-nuclear protest, struggles “in countries on the capitalist periphery,” all “imply an extension of social conflictuality [sic] to a wide range of areas, which creates the potential, but no more than the potential, for an advance towards more freed, democratic and egalitarian societies.” The proletariat can no longer serve as the central organizing point for socialists, as it now stands exposed as “the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics.” Today’s social struggles are too “plural and multifarious” to make such a simplistic conception of society plausible in theory or useful in practice. ‘History’ as conceived by the Left, ‘Society’ as conceived by the Left, as intellectually comprehensible and practically ruled as if rational and transparent, susceptible to “a founding act of a political character,” a ‘social contract,’ can no longer be sustained. “Today, the Let is witnessing the final act of the dissolution of that Jacobin imaginary.” Marxism’s “monist aspiration to capture with its categories the essence or underlying meaning of History,” seen in its bestowal of an “ontologically privileged position of a ‘universal class,'” the proletariat, must be abandoned. But Marxism in its several permutations formulated between the death of Engels and the ascendancy of Lenin must be understood, as its theorists at that time already understood many of the problems inherent in the original theory. As early as the 1890s, a century before the failure of the Marxist-Leninist regimes and indeed some two decades before the founding of the Soviet Union, these theorists understood that Marxism was in crisis.

The key concept of hegemony arose as the response to that crisis—again, well before Gramsci, although he would articulate it better than his predecessors. The authors begin with Rosa Luxemburg and her book, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions. Published in 1906, it addressed the violent labor conflicts that has wracked Europe for the past ten years or more. Luxemburg believed the mass strike a means of uniting the working class on the road to revolution in Europe. She therefore needed to connect economic struggle with political struggle. In Germany, unlike Russia, the working class was fragmented, thanks to parliamentarism, which reflects the ordinary “course of bourgeois society,” in which “the economic struggle is split into a multitude of individual struggles in every undertaking and dissolved in every branch of production.” This fragmentation could only be “overcome in a revolutionary atmosphere.” Social democrats, she wrote, must show the proletariat “the inevitable advent of this revolutionary period, the inner social factors making for it and the political consequences of it.” The workers will then see the part their actions take in the larger “struggle against the system,” “the revolutionary process as a whole.” The spontaneous, contingent character of these events (it contemporary equivalent being the ‘flash mob’) exceeds the control or planning of trade union or political ‘leaders,’ many of whom are already compromised by the commercial and parliamentary life within the Kaiser Reich. 

Laclau and Mouffe applaud Luxemburg’s attempt to link economic and political struggle. But she failed to understand that economic and class struggles do not automatically cohere. Economic class partakes of necessity; spontaneous political action partakes of freedom. Each is “the purely negative reverse of the other.” Political subjects do not necessarily act in their economic-class interests, and the failure to see that this blinds socialists who are too committed to the determinist theory orthodox Marxism. The struggles against imperialism, the fights against fascism, the complexity of meeting the challenges posed by bourgeois reforms intended to perpetuate capitalism—all of these reveal not determinism but indeterminacy. All raise questions that require “a socialist answer in a politico-discursive universe that has witnessed a withdrawal of the category of ‘necessity’ to the horizon of the social.” 

Luxemburg was reacting to the passive, more or less apolitical democratic socialism of Karl Kautsky. If ‘History’ marches on, whatever human beings say or do, Kautsky, writing in the 1890s, assumed that socialists need only wait, propagandizing and organizing, reinforcing working-class identities without much political action at all. As he put it, “Our task is not to organize the revolution but to organize ourselves for the revolution; not to make the revolution but to take advantage of it.” In this “war of attrition,” allies beyond the working class are useless, or even worse than useless, because they must, as per Marx, become increasingly ‘reactionary’ as the revolutionary crisis nears. Capitalism will change and eventually collapse, “but this change is nothing more than the unfolding of its endogenous tendencies and contradictions.” 

But by the end of the decade, the Czech parliamentarian Thomas Masaryk called Kautsky’s complacency into question, announcing “the crisis of Marxism.” “This crisis,” the authors write, “which served as the background to all Marxist debates from the turn of the century until the war, seems to have been dominated by two basic moments: the new awareness of an opacity of the social, of the complexities and resistances of an increasingly organized capitalism; and the fragmentation of the different positions of social agents, which, according to the classical [Marxist] paradigm should have been united.” “Marxism finally lost its innocence at that time.” Kautsky himself attempted to ‘save’ Marxism, admitting that trade unionism alone could not “guarantee either the unity or the socialist determination of the working class.” These ends could only be achieved in a frankly political struggle, subordinate trade unions to the socialist party. Nonetheless, the part should maintain its own unity, and thereby working-class unity, by making itself “the depository of science, that is, of Marxist theory.” Determinism remains, under the formula that the “sole freedom consists in being the consciousness of necessity,” a consciousness “guaranteed by Marxist science.” Kautsky would redeem Marxism by giving it a slightly ‘Hegelian’ inflection. Still, Laclau and Mouffe deem this an advance toward acknowledgment of a dualism between a “logic of necessity” and a “logic of contingency.” 

Another socialist who diverged somewhat from Marxism was Max Adler, a key figure among the Austro-Marxians. Given the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s dual monarchy and the many nations within it, Adler saw that working-class unity “depended upon constant political initiative.” “In this mosaic of social and national situations, it was impossible to think of national identities as ‘superstructural’ or of class unity as a necessary consequence of the infrastructure.” The Empire’s political economy was obviously too complex to be conceived in terms of Marxian dialectic, at least in the straightforward, not to say stark form that Marx and Engels gave it. Further, Adler grounded his philosophy not only on Marx or on Hegel but on Kant. The universality of Kantian ethics “broadened the audience for socialism and also broke with determinism. In sum, Marxian historicism did not seem plausible. All this notwithstanding, the Austro-Marxists never completely broke with the dichotomy of the logic of necessity and the logic of contingency, reluctant as they were to give up on at least some degree of confidence that the workers ‘must’ win, in the end.

The Marxian ‘Revisionists’ took things a step further, carving out some “particular spheres” of political initiative, spheres undetermined by economic forces, for socialists to undertake. Like Adler, the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein questioned Hegelian-Marxian historical determinism, but he also pointed to changes that had occurred within capitalist civil societies, beginning with the monopoly firms that had begun to dominate the economic landscape in the second half of the 19th century. The middle classes and the peasantry were not sinking into poverty; no serious economic crisis loomed. Even the modern working class was “not the dispossessed mass of which Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto.” This being so, “socialism had to change its terrain and strategy, and the key theoretical moment was the break with the rigid base/superstructure distinction that had prevented any conception of the autonomy of the political.” What, then, can be done to unite socialists? Only a political party founded on “the general interest of those who depend on income for their labor” could be sufficiently broad to wield any real political power. Organizing such a party, however, “escapes the chain of necessity.” “History was not a simple objective process: will also played a role in it.” As with Kant, “the autonomy of the ethical subject was the basis of Bernstein’s break with determinism.”

Bernstein’s analysis had weaknesses of its own, however. He clung to the Marxist claim that the working class would lead the socialist party. And although he abandoned historicist dialectic, he retained a faith that history’s general trend was evolutionary; he was a ‘progressive.’ And each step in the progress toward democratic socialism was irreversible. He optimistically assumed that the modern state itself would become “increasingly democratic as a necessary consequence of ‘historical evolution.'” Even as Bernstein sat in the parliament of the Weimar Republic, Mussolini ruled Italy and Hitlerism gathered strength in Germany. Laclau and Mouffe argue that socialist advances are “always reversible.” Moreover, if the ‘law of progress’ isn’t really a law at all, and if “the worker is no longer just proletarian but also citizen, consumer and participant in a plurality of positions within the country’s cultural and institutional apparatus,” then the eventual regime form that issues from a party led by workers may not be socialist at all. Under those circumstances, “democratic advance will necessitate a proliferation of political initiative in different social areas,” and “the meaning of each initiative comes to depend upon its relation with the others.” 

Still another, and much more dramatic, response to the crisis of Marxism was formulated by Georges Sorel under the term, ‘revolutionary syndicalism.’ Sorel rejected historical determinism entirely, taking from Marx only the recognition that the proletariat could become the agent with the moral fervor needed to “supplant declining bourgeois society,” constituting itself “as a dominant force and impos[ing] its will on the rest of society.” That is, Sorel took as much or more from his contemporary Henri Bergson’s élan vital as from Marx. Sorel’s version of class warfare derives from Bergsonian élan and, behind it, Nietzsche’s will to power. Initially, Sorel democratized Nietzsche, urging the proletariat to grasp the “heroic future” he wanted it to realize. But as socialism in his native France, and neighboring Germany, became increasingly unheroic, content with parliamentary jockeying, he began to invoke not the practice but the “myth” of the general strike, writing that “strikes have engendered in the proletariat the noblest, deepest and most moving sentiments that they possess.” Their violence “is the only force that can keep alive the antagonism described by Marx,” even if this force is no longer primarily literal, as it was for Luxemburg, but, well, literary, poetic—a spur to spiritedness to be set against middle-class tepidness. This led some of his followers to the supplementary myth of nationalism, which they regarded as the best sentiment to bring about the triumph of “heroic values over the ignoble bourgeois materialism” of present-day Europe. Sorel himself welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution, not nationalist myth, as the sort of violent upheaval that could spread across Europe and wreck the bourgeoisie.

In Russia, Lenin and Trotsky stayed within the framework of Marxian determinism, but the Social Democrats had developed “the concept of ‘hegemony.'” It was Antonio Gramsci who combined this with Sorel’s concept of the socialist historical ‘bloc,’ not as a material-economic entity (which partakes too much of modern-bourgeois self-interest) but as a bearer of heroism in the all-too-mediocre modern world. Russian social democrats (for example, Alexander Plekhanov) introduced ‘hegemony’ “to describe the process whereby the impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie to carry through its ‘normal’ struggle for political liberty forced the working class to intervene decisively to achieve it.” That is, the working class in Russia wasn’t impelled by material conditions; it chose to enter the political struggle. Whereas in Europe the move from economic conditions to political action occurred within the proletariat and was directed against the bourgeoisie, in Russia the bourgeoisie hadn’t won its own liberty, and so the proletariat took up that fight on its own. If “the bourgeois class cannot fulfill its role…this has to be taken over” by the workers. The “democratic tasks remain bourgeois, even when their historical agent is the working class.” This is what the Russian social democrats meant by ‘hegemony.’ 

Lenin also saw that “hegemony involves political leadership within a class alliance,” but despised political liberty. He would mouth the principles of ‘bourgeois democracy’ in order to establish useful alliances with useful idiots before the revolution, but after his victory he would abolish the liberties prized by his erstwhile allies. Lenin “transferred” the “ontological privilege granted to the working class by Marxism” from the workers to “the political leadership of the mass movement”—that is, to himself, as the leader of the vanguard party of the vanguard class. The Communist Party “knows the underlying movement of history, and knows therefore the temporary character of the demands uniting the masses as a whole.” The Party becomes “the seat of epistemological privilege,” the “depository of science,” establishing “a rigid separation between leaders and led within the masses.” This “possibility” of what Laclau and Mouffe rather delicately call an “authoritarian turn” was “in some way, present from the beginnings of Marxist orthodoxy.” “Leninism evidently makes no attempt to construct, through struggle, a mass identity not predetermined by any necessary law of history,” a law “accessible only to the enlightened vanguard.” And “because the real working class is, of course, far from fully identifying with its ‘historical interests'” as defined by Marxist-Leninist rulers, “the dissociation” between leaders and led “becomes permanent,” and an ossified oligarchic regime develops, within a couple of generations. “The roots of authoritarian policies lie in this interweaving of science and politics,” the authors observe, weakly; throughout the book, the mass murders of ‘Left’ tyranny/totalitarianism remain scrupulously unmentioned. The closest they come is to allow that “a martial conception of class struggle…concludes in an eschatological epic.” A few pages later, we learn of “the great merit” of Mao Zedong’s “analysis of contradiction,” which transcended class struggle, narrowly conceived. Under Mao, this did indeed broaden the killing field.

The lesson Laclau and Mouffe would rather draw is much more benign. The variety of egalitarian “agents” needs “political construction and struggle” to realize revolutionary potential; unity is “not the expression of a common underlying essence” that crystallizes of its own accord, like the chemicals in a children’s chemistry demonstration. This is where Gramsci intervened, “broaden[ing] the terrain of political recomposition and hegemony, while offering a theorization of the hegemonic link which clearly went beyond the Leninist category of ‘class alliance.” In one way, Gramsci re-Hegelianizes Marxism by insisting that political organizing requires not only “a coincidence of interests” that make alliances possible—alliances that are likely here today, gone tomorrow—but shared moral and intellectual principles. (Not without reason: the long list of Communist betrayals eventually made prospective allies rather wary of any coalition. Principled collaboration likely provides a strong bond.) “Thus, everything depends on how ideology is conceived.” For Gramsci, “ideology” is neither a mere epiphenomenon, reflecting the material interests of a given class, nor a pattern of abstractions. It is “an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles.” Nor is ideology the result of “ideological inculcation by a hegemonic class of a whole range of subordinate sectors,” relieved of their ‘false consciousness’ by an enlightened vanguard. All the partners contribute. “For Gramsci, political subjects are not—strictly speaking—classes, but complex ‘collective wills’.” That is, many “dispersed wills with heterogeneous aims are welded together with a single aim, on the basis of an equal and common conception of the world,” and many of those wills have little or nothing to do with the economic class of the ones who will. Politically, this means that Gramsci, unlike Lenin, does not recommend seizing the power of an existing state but the formation of a state ‘from below,’ within a civil society; this new-formed state will displace the ruling state. 

The authors demur on one point. Gramsci retains the assumption that the working class is the fundamental driver of egalitarian revolution. “This is the inner essentialist core of Gramsci’s thought, setting a limit to the deconstructive logic of hegemony.” That is, taking a social entity to have an essence, and indeed to take society itself to have one, puts a limit to the capacity to deconstruct it in a sufficiently radical manner, preparatory to making it thoroughly egalitarian. As a result, Gramsci also retains the Marx’s military metaphors, with the “war of position” only partially displacing “class warfare.” True, Gramsci’s “war of position” runs deeper and wider than that of Marx and Lenin, working toward “the progressive disaggregation of a civilization,” not a mere economic system, “and the construction of another around a new class core.” This means that “the identity of the opponents, far from being fixed from the beginning” (capitalists) “constantly changes in the process”—civilizational opponents in what would later be called a ‘culture war’ are numerous and diverse. Gramsci would unify a diverse Left, which would then divide, and eventually defeat, a diverse but increasingly disunified Right. Yet Gramsci’s insistence on valorizing a working-class core for the Left leaves his dilution of Marxist militarism incomplete. What is needed is a genuinely radical historicism (it must be said, likely drawn from Heidegger, not Hegel or Marx), in this case one that remains true to egalitarianism of a certain kind, namely, “democratic plurality.” The authors evidently expect this combination of democracy with pluralism, thoroughly institutionalized, to prevent both tyranny and eventual bureaucratic ossification— a vindication of democratic socialism against Bolshevism and its imitators. Institutionalized pluralism will block any tyrant from dominating the state while bringing contestation into the state apparatus itself, making bureaucracy political, not ‘scientific’-geometric, liable to rigidity.

Social-democratic parties after the First World War exhibited a “narrowly classist mentality,” incapable of “hegemoniz[ing] the broad range of democratic demands and antagonisms resulting from the post-war crisis.” They became “a mere parliamentary instrument of trade unionism.” Such classism made the tyrannical regimes and parties of the Left strong, bringing one of them to power in Russia and threatening the ‘bourgeois democracies’ elsewhere. Lacking the tyrannical devices of the ‘hard’ Left, democratic socialists remained weak. They lacked the political heft needed to achieve regime change, revolution. This left them with alternatives: “either to participate in bourgeois cabinets in order to obtain the maximum number of social measures favorable to working-class sectors; or else, to enter into opposition and thereby to double [their] impotence.” Further, their continued faith in the ‘iron laws of history’—specifically, economic determinism—inclined them to neglect the serious political organizing needed to forge the needed links to groups outside their own milieu. 

Mugged by the reality of the Great Depression, democratic socialists changed strategy. The Depression put the working classes under pressure, making the ‘classism’ of socialists more cogent and politically effective. The ‘planned economy’ began to seem a sensible alternative to the increasingly sharp ups and downs of capitalism. “The ‘planism’ of the 1930s was the first expression of the new type of attitude,” an attitude known as Keynesianism in the Anglosphere, but which Mouffe in particular understandably associates with her fellow Belgian, Henri de Man. President of the Belgian Labor Party and eventually Minister of Finance from 1936 to 1938, de Man successfully implemented the nationalization of bank credit while retaining capitalist enterprises—much to the fury of his fellow social democrats, who accused him of fascism, a charge his collaboration with the Nazis after the 1940 invasion did nothing to deflect. The authors prefer to point to de Man’s “attempt to recast the objectives of the socialist movement in a radically new, anti-economist” direction.” “He was one of the first socialists seriously to study psychoanalysis”; he criticized “class reductionism” and understood “the necessity of a mass bloc broader than the working class,” the “need to put forward socialism as a national alternative” (again, raising the then-lively specter of fascism in the minds of his colleagues), and the need of a Sorelian “myth” as a means of “cement[ing] the diverse components of a collective socialist will.” “The ‘Plan’ was, therefore, not a simple economistic instrument; it was the very ais for the reconstitution of a historical bloc which would make it possible to combat the decline of bourgeois society and to counter the advance of fascism.” If so, Nazism, to say nothing of de Man’s own shortcomings (of which the authors do in fact say nothing), aborted the effort.

Democratic socialism remained self-handicapped in the decades following the Second World War. “Planism’ remained very much in vogue, aiming “to establish a mixed economy in which the capitalist sector would gradually disappear”—a “road of transition to socialism.” This aim was vitiated by “a more technocratic variant” aiming at “merely to create an area of State intervention which would correct—particularly through the control of credit—the imbalances inherent in the course of capitalism,” with no intention of eliminating capitalism itself. In both variants, “social democracy became a politico-economic alternative within a given State form, and not a radical alternative to that form.” 

In all of this, economic life remained, “the last redoubt of essentialism” on the intellectual map of the Left, the last driver of a supposed march of ‘History’ toward socialism. Along with other economic determinists, Marxists posit laws of socioeconomic motion which “exclude all indeterminacy resulting from political or other external interventions.” Further, “the unity and homogeneity of social agents, constituted at the economic level, just result from the very laws of motion of this level.” And finally, “the positions of these agents in the relations of production must endow them with ‘historical ‘interests,’ so that the presence of such agents at other social levels…must ultimately be explained on the basis of economic interests.” The problem with this is simple enough: the Greek word economia means the management of the household but ‘the economy’ in the modern sense means political economy, the way goods and services are managed within a state. But political life is, as the authors like to say, contingent, subject to public choices. Indeed, Aristotle remarks that the three fundamental forms of ruling—husband-wife, parents-children, master-slave—are already easily discernible within the household, which forms the basic unit of the political community. 

Marxism takes these assumptions and draws from them three “theses”: the noncontingent “neutrality” (politically speaking) of productive forces in the economy; the inevitability of increasing “homogenization and impoverishment of the working class”; and that class’s “fundamental interest in socialism.” All of these claims are false. Labor-power isn’t politically neutral because it isn’t a commodity. “The capitalist must do more than simply purchase it; he must also make it produce labor.” He must rule the workers in the workplace. This makes the labor process “the ground of a struggle,” in which the vigilance, technical control, and (in larger firms) bureaucratic control of the bosses confront workers who do not necessarily want to be watched and controlled. At the same time, the workers “of the world” do not necessarily unite, as Marx and Engels would have them do, being divided by social conditions having nothing directly to do with labor such as race and sex. Neither homogenization nor impoverishment of the workers has occurred, nor have they universally flocked to socialist parties—themselves divided between social democrats and Leninists. “In our view, in order to advance in the determination of social antagonisms, it is necessary to analyze the plurality of diverse and frequently contradictory positions, and to discard the idea of a perfectly unified and homogeneous agent, such as the ‘working class’ of classical [Marxist] discourse.” 

“Since Kautsky, Marxism knew that the socialist determination of the working class does not arise spontaneously but depends upon the political mediation of intellectuals.” And with Gramsci, “politics is finally conceived as articulation and through his concept of historical bloc and profound and radical complexity is introduced into the theorization of the social.” It remains to take the final theoretical step, to recognize that “the logic of hegemony,” which, as a political logic requires articulation (speech, especially definition) and contingency or choice, and behind choice, strategy, should result in what socialists now call ‘identity politics’—struggle over the definition of the many social groups itself, and over demands for ‘recognition’ or power broadly conceived not only as physical force but as ideology, ‘myth,’ ‘values.’ As a consequence, “unfixity has become the condition of every social identity,” since identities are self-defined and “relational,” fluid as they interact with other self-identifying groups. Identity politics is genuinely political in the authors’ sense of the word, inasmuch as it consists not of scientifically discernible laws, as if the course of events were like the course of a river, governed and also rationally governable by the laws of physics, but of free wills. Democracy or egalitarianism comes in because such a politics insists that all identities are equal; there are no more “privileged” subjects with superior access to historical laws, inasmuch as no such laws exist. “There are no privileged points for the unleashing of a socialist political practice; this hinges upon a ‘collective will’ that is laboriously constructed from a number of dissimilar points.” This practice cannot be defined at the outset but will rather become defined, and redefined, as the social-group wills whose interaction constitutes the collective will confront opposition forming and reforming political bonds with one another, and with newcomers. Indeed, “the very notion of ‘hegemony’ should be put into question, although the authors will come to affirm it in the ‘theoretical’ chapters that follow.

In these opening chapters of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe thus provide an instructive critical account of the “Crisis of Marxism” that began in the late nineteenth century but continues to this day. Their own theoretical justification for socialism occupies the book’s third chapter.

 

 

Jan Patocka: Plato and Europe. Petr Lom translation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

 

A student of Husserl and a friend of Vaclav Havel, Jan Patocka became one of philosophy’s martyrs, dying of a heart attack in 1977 after a police interrogation. Czechoslovakia was ruled by the Communists in those days, and, as everywhere else, they had little patience with dissidents. His book consists of lectures delivered in friends’ homes; barred from teaching in Czech universities, he spoke as a citizen in good standing in what Havel famously called “the parallel polis.” Is a philosopher fully a citizen only in a parallel polis? 

Patocka contends that “philosophical reflection…should somehow help us in the distress in which we are; precisely in the situation in which we are placed, philosophy is to be a matter of inner conduct.” Under the tyrannical Communist regime, it can hardly be a matter of outer conduct; for decades, Athenian democrats tolerated Socrates in the agora, but Czechoslovakia’s ‘totalitarians’ were hardly so patient. Patocka concurs with Aristotle’s judgment, that “our reality is always situational.” The simple act of reflecting upon our situation changes it, although one might then ask “whether by reflection reality is improved.” It is, at least, clarified. Any human situation begins with opinion; those who reflect upon it may be moved to a critique of it, in the hope of approaching the truth of the matter. How, then, shall we reflect? First, look at the situation—the “reality in which I am, in which others are, and in which things are.” “The most interesting and most characteristic thing about situations is precisely that we have not given them to ourselves, that we are placed into them and have to reconcile ourselves with them.” They may in part be humanly made, but not, at least initially, by us. These givens include material things, our mortality (“We are a ship that necessarily will be shipwrecked,” and the universe itself is entropic), consciousness, and the overall “human situation,” the situation not only of ourselves and of those we know but of our species. “To philosophize, I think, means to meditate within the entire situation and to be its reflection.” Contra Marxism, philosophy “is not established in the way that scientific truths and scientific systems are: philosophy is not established objectively.” This includes the social sciences. 

This is because “the situation is not totally an objective reality.” It consists of our reflection upon it, as well as its reflection in us. It also comprehends not only the present but the non-present, namely, the future. “A situation is a situation precisely because it has not yet been decided.” True, to think is to objectify; “we do not have any other means, we cannot even think otherwise,” since we always think about something. But this is not yet knowledge. For example, in thinking about “the times” in which we live, one might consider the art of the time, “the sense of life” portrayed in, say, a novel by Milan Kundera or a speech by Eugene Ionescu. In so considering, we will need to attend “to what is new in contrast to what used to be, something that is not just repetitive, that expresses something that is its very own.” Ionescu “tried to put into words this entire spirit of the times,” arguing that helplessness and alienation characterize it most distinctively. He refers to lack of human control over human affairs, the sense that large forces carry us along and away, explained by “contradictory prophets” who by their contradictions give us no firm guidance. Impersonal and unstoppable, these forces resemble the “will to power,” but it is a ‘will’ without a subject. In this situation, art is no longer joyful, as it was for Mozart or for the builders of Chartres Cathedral. Such a situation, such a “spirit of the times,” invites philosophic reflection, as thinkers long for the clarification such reflection might bring. 

“But the question is, when we go to the roots of our contemporary disequilibrium, whether we do not need to go to the very origins of Europe and through these beginnings to the very relation between mankind and its place in the world; or rather, whether the disequilibrium we are positing today is not something that concerns solely European man in a particular historical period, but rather regards man sui generis today in his relation with the planet.” Why the planet? Because not very long ago, “Europe was the master of the world,” bringing it to capitalism, “the network of world economy and markets,” controlling world politics thanks to its “scientific-technological” power, developed by its uniquely rationalistic or modern-scientific civilization. While Europe “wrecked itself” in the world wars, the rest of the war inherited its powers and “will never allow Europe to be what it once was.” Europe arrived at this condition because it combined such “enormous power” with political disunity, leading to wars among its sovereign states. “The internal logic of the European situation” played out in modern technology being deployed in massively destructive wars, wars made possible by political disunion. This Europe of sovereign states in turn arose from the ruins of the Roman empire, destroyed by the estrangement of the people from the Roman state—a point that neither Patocka’s friends in the “Underground University” nor his enemies outside of it would have failed to connect to the prospects of the then-regnant Soviet empire. Medieval Europe maintained a less worldly union, “the project of the kingdom of God,” which Patocka associates with Hellenistic Greece’s universalism; when that spiritual-civilizational source of union crumbled under the assault of modern philosophers and the statesmen they instructed, Europe was set both to conquer the world and to lose it. But it must nonetheless be said, Europe under its several iterations lasted a long time, and it survives, if in truncated form, today.

Having identified the sources of Europe’s disequilibrium, Patocka asks two questions: How did the longstanding equilibrium arise, “keeping humanity at the same time in a state of spiritual elevation and in balance with the natural ecological situation on this planet”? And could a new equilibrium come about, “so that we could again find hope in a specific perspective, a specific future,” unlike that of Europe in the ongoing ‘Cold War’? 

It is true that “in a certain sense,” the world is always in decline. Things come into being, then pass away. “But philosophy says: no, the world is not in decline, because the core of the world is being, and being has no beginning and will not perish, being can neither begin nor end—it is eternal.” From “the perspective of modern science,” this “discovery of eternity” is “incomprehensible,” inasmuch as modern science experiments, examines changing and indeed effects change as the means examining those things. But the metaphysics of the philosophers resists modern-scientific claims. In resisting the ‘inevitablism’ of modern science, its claim to discover natural-historical laws that are not only irresistible but all-encompassing (Marxian ‘dialectic’ being a specimen thereof), Greek philosophers exert human freedom. They did so by thinking about the human being, the being who thinks, insisting that, as philosophers, as lovers of wisdom, they must attend to “the care of the soul,” care of the thing that thinks, the distinctively human thing. 

Why care for the soul? “Because man, or the human soul—that which knows about the whole of the world and of life, that which is able to present this whole before its eyes, that which lives from this position, that which knows about the whole and in that sense is wholly and in the whole within this explicit relation to something certainly immortal, that which is certainly eternal, that which does not pass away beyond which is nothing—in this itself has its own eternity.” Animals perceive parts of the whole, but not the whole, not Being. Philosophers justify care of the human soul as the way to fulfill the good of that distinct human nature, even as animals seek to fulfill the good of their own, quite unreflective, natures.

Beyond the formidable powers of modern science, then, “Can the care of the soul, which is the fundamental heritage of Europe,” prior to modern-scientific Europe, “still speak to us today? That is, “speak to us who need to find something to lean on in this common argument about decline, in this weakness, in this consent to the fall?” Why is it necessary to care for the soul? What is its significance?

He begins with a discussion of Husserl’s Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology. Husserl begins with a discussion of appearance. To appear, something must be ‘here’; and it must not only be present, but it must show itself to us. Appearance is preliminary to knowing. It is also preliminary to acting, and when we act, we want to know what is good and what is evil. Whatever a person “marks as good and evil has to show itself to him.” Since “good and evil are something that regards us, at the same time we show ourselves to ourselves.” If Satan says, “Evil, be thou my good,” he is showing himself to himself (and to others, if they hear him say that). “Phenomenon, then, in this sense means the showing of existence: things not only are but also they are manifest.” Notoriously, however, appearance is not necessarily reality. How are appearance and reality related to one another? “How are they distinguished and how to, do they overlap, how do they meet?”

Evidently, if something manifests itself “it manifests, appears to someone.” Mind usually occupies itself “with something other than itself,” but is “also an existing thing,” a part of being. For ordinary purposes, we have a sense of knowing them so long as we perceive them with “something like clarity,” that is, without confusion. “We work with the concept of appearing; yet at the same time this concept itself is not clear to us.” In knowing a thing, in this modest way, we also sense that there are things that are not present, not manifest. “The nonpresent also shows itself here,” sending us from our immediate surroundings to more distant ones,” “further and further away,” finally “encompass[ing] everything there is.” To see a part is to acknowledge, implicitly, the whole. Any particular thing “is within the framework of this universal showing,” and every “individual thesis” or opinion “is a part of the universal thesis”—of my more or less certain opinion of the character of the whole. “All our life takes place within the very showing of things and in our orientation among them.”

“We have two theses before us: on the one hand, in what manifests itself we always have, in some way, the whole, and manifesting itself equally constantly points to some kind of whole.” These two kinds of manifestations are given; we did not choose them. “The manifesting world in its whole has always already engaged us and has always already imposed its law upon us” “existence shows itself, something that is not our creation, a matter of our free will.” Because we have minds, themselves parts of the whole, we judge the things we perceive, telling ourselves “whether they are or are not, that they are probable or doubtful and so on,” and moreover “every judgment of this kind takes place within the framework of the general thesis, the thesis of the whole.” If, for example, the framework or thesis of the whole that orients you excludes the possibility of angels, if an angel appears before you, you will be inclined to judge it to be illusory. “All our cognitive activity takes place in systems of judgment and is thus the product of our conscious action, directed toward an end.” 

Returning to manifestation at the simplest level, the situation in which “I have things at the tip of my fingers, here, in their sentient actuality,” it is the case that if I go away from those things, when I no longer see them, except in ‘my mind’s eye,’ I have no reason to suppose that they have changed. They are still what they were when I left them. They are the same, but in a different way. This means that manifestation itself, showing, is not “any of those things that show themselves.” Manifesting itself “forms a certain solid interconnected system,” unifying our experience of sense perception and memory of things perceived. This unity of experience is prior to experience; it structures experience. 

In ordinary life, we don’t concern ourselves with this point. “We are interested in things after all. They interest us in what, which, and how they are.” To know in the sense of ‘science’ is to know the things. “Showing, phenomenon, that on the basis of which things are for us what they are, is itself constantly hidden from us.” Science tells us nothing about manifesting. Yet “nothing has been such a cause and axis of human questioning about the nature of things as manifesting.” How do we distinguish appearance from reality? Here is where ‘Europe’ comes in—specifically, ancient Greece, and even more specifically, Greek philosophy. “The conception of the soul in philosophy from its Greek origins consists in just what is capable of truth within man, and what, precisely because it is concerned about truth, poses the question: how, why does existence in its entirety, manifest itself, how why does it show itself?” Although philosophy originated in ancient Greece, it is neither a narrowly Greek or European, since “manifesting, light in the world,” is “something that distinguishes man from all else”: a tortoise does not think of the whole. This being so, this “human privilege” also “places duties before man,” endows him with responsibilities that go with his capacity to think of the whole. If the human soul is unique, distinctive, in this way, “care of the soul,” the human soul that so thinks, “follows from the proximity of man to manifesting, to the phenomenon as such, to the manifesting of the world in its whole, that occurs within man, with man.” 

Husserl argues that this means that our thoughts are not merely instrumental, “ready-made tools to acquire more and more experiences.” We are interested in the things, in the experiences of them, but we are also interested in “determining how various manners of givenness are connected,” the “structure of the phenomenon as such.” If, for example, I think of the present, I see that “the present is possible only so long as there is also the past and the future,” things “present as not-present.” “In the presence of the past…the past is present like that which no longer can be present: and the future is present as such, like something which has not yet gotten to presence in the eminent sense of the word.” There is, then, “the world of existent things” but also “the world of phenomenal structures,” the “world that is” and “the world that shows itself.” Phenomenology “looks for the presuppositions of the structures of individual showing.” Science knows the human being “from the natural development of this physical universe.” Phenomenological philosophy investigates “something that is the proper concrete base of the physical universe.” It seeks to understand “the nature of the fact that things in their entirety manifest themselves to us, and what this means.” Contrary to Marxian historicism, “this is not a matter of some kind of immanent teleology or some kind of real factor that the phenomenon would realize with some kind of immanent purposiveness.” 

The moral dimension of this human capacity to investigate, to care for this “phenomenological domain,” this “awareness of man as a creature of truth,” is presented in what Patocka calls myths. In “the biblical myth of the tree of knowledge,” man is damned by his attempt to seek knowledge of good and evil; so too in the Sumerian myth of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, in the Greek myths of Hercules and of Oedipus. “All these myths have the same meaning: man is at the same time a creature of truth and this truth is damnation for him” because “it shows his own precariousness, his place in the universe, which is overpowering in his regard.” But “the greatness” of Greek philosophy, what “made Greek philosophy what it is” and what “made it the foundation of all European life” is that it “developed a plan for life, one that stated” that knowledge “is not damnation, but human greatness.” Philosophers contend that the man who makes clarity, truth, “the law of his life, and with the help of this law in every domain in which man is involved,” can point the way to “make at least the human world a world of truth and justice.” Thus, the soul, the thing that “is capable of truth on the basis of a peculiar, untransferable, only-in-man-realized structure of the phenomenon as such,” deserves the utmost care. “Man can either capitulate and degenerate into mere existence,” or he can “realize himself as a being of truth, a being of phenomenon.” “The history of Europe is in large part, up until, let us say, the fifteenth century, the history of the attempt to realize the care of the soul.”

Given his task of understanding the situation of Europe now, in the mid-1970s, Husserl concerns himself not “with the Platonic ascent from the cave,” which would entail a further investigation of manifestation, but “with that second Platonic act—the return back down to the cave.” We want to understand “our reality.” That reality has been “deeply determined by philosophy.” We are philosophizing within the cave, and the modern cave has philosophic markings engraved on its walls. 

This means that Europe as it now exists partakes of the philosophic ascent from the cave, its departure from a pre-existing “mythical framework.” Myth is manifestation that has yet to be reflected upon. It is therefore truthful, in a sense. The truth of myth is the fact that human beings live in a world that both accepts us and “crushes and constantly threatens us.” This latter, “horrible” reality is not only outside us but “within all of us.” Madness “can break through in life everywhere. Like Oedipus, “we are left to blind wandering.” Like Adam and Eve, we are punished in our quest for knowledge. Like Gilgamesh, we would build a city in the face of “everything instinctive and elementary,” which must be “broken and tamed” if the city is to be built and sustained. “This duality is at home in all myths,” this “polarity of that other, the strange, belonging to the night,” in contrast to “the domestic, held fast, the daily.” The myths register “the natural world as the world of good and evil.” They make us aware of both good and evil. Myth does not console, it does not support; it is the “harsh revealing of our revealedness/nakedness.” 

Oedipus, “this two-sided creature, of dual-meaning, a creature who is both damned and sacred,” is truly human, a human presented mythically, poetically. “The uncovering of the whole world by Greek philosophy is the continuation of this myth,” at attempt to “penetrate behind the ordinary blind wandering, or behind the ordinary unclarity and unawareness in which we move.” The execution of Socrates by the Athenians is itself a sort of sacrifice of the one who, like Oedipus, looked in, sought and found truth. At the same time, Socrates is also the philosopher of The Republic, the philosopher of ‘The Regime,’ the just regime, the one in which “those like Socrates can live and do not need only to die.” Europe “grew out of this” quest for a just regime.

The mythical framework in which Plato and his Socrates philosophize “both helps and hinders [philosophy’s] origin and development.” But “it hinders before it helps.” This is because to question, as philosophers do, “means precisely to find an explicitly empty space, to find something that in a certain sense is not there.” Myth gets in the way of that because it is already there. It presents itself as “something like a picture of the world in its entirety,” “occup[ying] in some manner the whole world.” Those who accept the myth do not see the need for, do not like the practice of, questioning. They already have the answer. At the same time, “philosophy does not begin ex abrupto.” It needs something to question, and myth is that something. Philosophers need myth, opinion, to get started in their philosophizing, even as myth or prevailing opinion restrains them, threatens them with punishment if they look at it with a questioning eye. In myth, “man is the being that dares to penetrate into the domain that is not his, it breaks into somewhere, where from its origins it was not really at home.” The philosopher dares to compare one myth to another, seeking the meaning beneath the meaning each myth imposes. Myths are enunciated by prophets. A prophecy gives a people “clarity about what is,” representing “that which reality is,” revealing what “is not the domain of man but rather of the gods.” Unlike man, the gods know everything. They know what blindly wandering man knows not. Myth or the revelation of the gods is a kind of founding, drawing out a system of morals from nature, morals that are a part of that reality but need accentuation, emphasis, in order to serve as guides to blindly wandering man. Myth founds “a certain custom, a way of life,” a pattern by which it tells us to live—a regime, as the political philosopher, Socrates, would say. The myth “determines the meaning and the path of this wandering in a way that is for us at first unfathomable.” Philosophy attempts to fathom it.

In doing that, philosophy brings “an entirely new possibility of the human spirit” to light, “a possibility that also did not have to be realized and in fact the majority of peoples, even the highly cultured, do not know it at all.” Myth takes “the manifest” as “the sphere of the gods,” related to human beings in the past by their prophets, and makes it present but only in imagination, “a deficient form” of presence. Philosophy wonders; it “asks its question face to face with the amazing primeval fact of the manifestation of the world.” It looks not to manifestation as image but to the archē, the principle of things. There is no wonder or amazement in myth, which provides answers ‘not to be questioned.’ Philosophy begins with “amazement” “not about particular real things, but rather about this primeval reality,” seeking clarity “about the fact that things are,” seeking their existence and structure. “Myth does not even dream that it would be possible to justify something, explain it, answer the question ‘why’ in any other than through some kinds of stories.” Fundamental to philosophy is that it sees two things: “something shows itself” and “this showing itself.” “Philosophy can begin to look for the structure of things only as long as the question of the structure of discovering has already first emerged.” The structure of discovery exists within the soul, which must be cared for, for that reason.

Patocka notices this care in the thought of the earliest philosophers, the ‘pre-Socratics.’ Aphoristic Heraclitus, he of the ‘dark’ or hard-to-understand sayings, imitates the Delphic oracle, “tak[ing] on the function the god had” at Delphi: “he is the one to whom belongs the function of manifestation in its entirety,” dividing each thing “according to [its] nature.” His “lightning” or “fire” means “the flash, manifestness.” Once thig have been divided, logos or reason collects them, putting them together in order to see them as parts of a whole. ‘Everything moves,” he famously says; motion is the passage of objects through spatial and temporal phases; at the same time, “motion is also manifesting,” of “approaching and receding, coming into presence and leaving from presence.” Philosophy “from this primeval beginning” bears “a dual movement of thought,” as seen in two philosophers, the ‘nature-philosopher,’ Democritus, and the political philosopher, Plato. 

Democritus “set out on a quest for the whole, that means after what is eternal,” by means of mathematics and especially geometry. In so doing, “Democritus erected the concept of philosophy as science,” as a set of “scientific explanations.” He discovers two principles; “the unlimited”—empty, homogeneous geometric space—and “the indivisibles”—the atoms, which move within that space but “in themselves are completely unchangeable, eternal, and for this reason form the foundations for possible constructions.” In so doing, he “penetrate[s] beyond the region of what is visible in the ordinary sense of the world,” thanks to one form of reasoning, geometry, which shows us the characteristics of the space in which the atoms move, and another form of reasoning, which shows us that the infinitude suggested by geometry cannot be the whole of reality because geometry would take the matter that is manifestly present in the world and keep on dividing it forever. Hence the need for atoms, which cannot be divided. 

None of this seems to leave any place for care of the soul. If the soul is an unusually refined structure of atoms in space, why care for it? Democritus begins by noticing that “the human spirit thirsts after explanation,” an explanation of the divine, the eternal, begging the question, “Where does this thirst originate?” It originates in the soul, and in his soul more than in most. The soul “wants to see the truth,” wants to see “the unconcealment of things.” It can only succeed if it “maintain[s] absolute purity of sight and purity of its internal substance. This “impulse to the eternal leads in Democritus to the discover of one’s soul, to the care of one’s soul.” Such purity, he contends, requires shedding the bonds of family and polis, turning away from the passions that lead the soul to becoming preoccupied with ‘one’s own.’ In the tradition, in myth, the soul appears as a form—as seen, for example, in Egyptian tomb paintings. That is, it is seen from the outside, “from the other’s point of view.” “Form is something I see, it is the soul for the other, not the soul that I am.” Democritus understands his soul from within, as that which “lives in contact with the eternal.” True, it lives briefly, it is not an immortal soul, “but this does not matter, because this contact with the eternal is the same in man and in god”; “that is why the soul is in its own way eternal, even if dissolves into atoms” in death. 

“For this peculiarity, there is created something in European life that has never been created anywhere else in the world,” a new “human possibility” that “steps into the radius of all other human possibilities.” “Europe as Europe arose from this motif, from the care of the soul.” “It became extinct” when “it forgot about it.” Its decline into dogmatism—so evident in the fascism of Patocka’s youth and the communism which prevailed in his country after the Nazis were expelled—also betokened the extinction of the philosophic quest for the concealed “something upon which stands” the unconcealed. The soul must remain awake; to remain awake, it must be cared for; if not cared for, it is no longer fully human, it no longer undertakes the philosophic quest; and Europe is no longer Europe. 

To recover the practice of caring for the soul, Patocka explains “the method of care.” The soul is not a thing to be cultivated in the way one cultivates a garden. It discovers itself only in seeking the truth about what it does not know and being truthful, whether or not truthfulness happens to be to the advantage of the person whose soul it is. “In Democritus, to care for the soul means to care for it so that it might be able to live near what is eternal, so that it might be capable of a life in that grand presence”—that “will naturally be a life of thought.” Knowledge is “the presence of what is,” as distinguished from what he calls “bastard knowledge,” which is obscure and unclear—hence its ‘illegitimacy’ or ‘bastardy.’ 

Plato, too, cares for the soul, but he reverses Democritus’ intention. Plato commends care for the soul “not so that the soul might journey through the universe just as what is eternal,” but “so it will be what it is supposed to be.” The quest for understanding, rightly undertaken, improves the soul, makes it “what it can be.” Plato is a political philosopher, not a natural philosopher. He considers, first and foremost, not the cosmos but his fellow Athenians, “invit[ing] people to think.” In so doing, he reveals their ignorance; in revealing their ignorance, he reveals “their secret dispositions for tyranny,” despite their purportedly freedom-loving affection for the regime of democracy. The soul achieves its best condition, its right order, not in contemplating the heavens but in dialoguing with fellow citizens. “The soul that really cares for itself takes on a solid force, just as every though worthy of the name is a defined thought, specifying ideas, having a specific thesis about those ideas.” This is no “pallid intellectualism” but an “attempt to embody what is eternal within time, and within one’s own being, and at the same time, an effort to stand firm in the storm of time, stand firm in all dangers carried with it, to stand firm when the care of the soul becomes dangerous for a human being”—not only in ancient Athens but in modern Prague. “The care of the soul in a lawless city endangers a human being,” the “kind of human being that stands for the care of the soul, just as that being endangers the city,” which is built on ignoble lies, not truth. The “whole existence” of Socrates “is a provocation to the city,” as he “is the first who, face to face with =secret tyranny and the hypocritical remains of old morality, poses the thought that the human being focused on truth in the full sense of the word, examining what is the good, not knowing himself what is the positive good, and only refuting false opinion, has to appear as the worst of all, the most irritating.” Philosophy begins in wonder, but there can be very little wonder at the effect Patocka’s talks must have had among his listeners, gathered in someone’s apartment, in a city under the rule of a Communist oligarchy which based its claim to rule on having ‘all the answers.’

The regime of Plato’s Republic is the regime “where Socrates and those like him will not need to die.” “This is that singular thing about Europe”: “only in Europe was philosophy born in this way, in the awakening of man out of tradition into the presence of the universe.” From Greece to Rome, where “the Stoics really did educate mankind about the universal human tasks of a universal empire,” philosophy took its way. Rome fell, like the Greek polis, because it could not “convince its public that it was a state of justice.” Europeans regrouped and continued their quest, attempting “to bring the city of justice into reality, a city to be founded not on the changeability of human things as Rome was, but rather on absolute truth, so that it would be the kingdom of God upon earth.” The Roman Catholic Church “would not even be possible” without the Platonic thought. Nietzsche was right to say that Christianity is Platonism for the people, but right in the wrong way. He said it with a sneer because he “overlooks what is most fundamental about the phenomena of Socrates and Plato, that is, the care of the soul.” Christendom fell, not because it was too weak and unworldly but because the care of the soul “became pretty much unrecognizable under the weight of something, something that might be deemed a concern, or care about dominating the world.” That is, in turning from Plato and Christianity to Machiavelli, Europe stopped caring for the soul. And “is not Nietzsche’s search for eternity, his attempt to leap from history into what is beyond time proof that it is absolutely necessary to reiterate care for the soul even under new circumstances?”

“Philosophy is the care of the soul in its own essence and its own element.” Political philosophy undertakes this care in dialogue among citizens. Patocka understands the philosophic stance as zetetic—not “the suspension of all judgment,” much less an endorsement of the dogma of moral relativism, but as the quest for truth with the knowledge that one knows one doesn’t know. So understood, philosophy proceeds from one way station of “provisional hypothetically fixed opinion” to another, more coherent way station. “In the end we want only what we can answer for in this manner, what we either see with such clarity that it withstands every kind of imaginable inquiry.” This implies that philosophy never rests in one soul only, or in “some kind of system” (Hegelianism, Marxism, utilitarianism, pragmatism) but continues on, among many thinkers, dialoguing with one another, over space and time. The philosophic quest requires more than intelligence; it requires courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom. Courage, because the philosopher puts himself at risk in the city; moderation, because the passions interfere with clear thinking; justice, because it remains true to itself, rejecting sophistry, especially self-sophistry; wisdom, “in knowing not knowing in the form of temperate and disciplined investigation, because it submits all other human affairs to this thinking struggle.” Philosophy gives itself “a certain standard for its own being,” one that is “unified, constant, and exact,” and therefore almost surely to be at odds with the standards of the city, which are seldom well-reasoned and may well resist the provisional character of philosophic opinion, being based on law, which accepts provisionality at its own risk. The city knows a rival regime when it sees one.

If philosophy is “living in the truth,” how much truth can a city, a political community, withstand? After all, the city’s population consists mostly of non-philosophers. They can surely see through the blatant lies of, say, their communist rulers, but to what extent can they live in the truth? Christianity teaches that they can, but only with God’s grace to guide them. Can modern Europe, post-Christian Europeans, do any such thing?

If they were to attempt this, Europeans would have human nature on their side. Man is “by nature a being to whom the world shows itself” and in attending to the world we “form ourselves in some kind of way.” Patocka identifies “three currents of care of the soul.” He calls the first current “ontocosmological,” that is, ontological and cosmological. He is thinking of Plato’s theory of the ideas. The philosopher looks at the many opinions in light of the principle of non-contradiction, the principle of logos or reason, seeking the “unity” behind those opinions. An idea is free of contradiction; ideas “serve to give us clarity about things,” show us the shape of things, enable us to think of nouns. Tom, Dick, and Harry are seen to be men, and therefore a certain kind of human being. “Things cannot manifest themselves to us other than on the basis and through the mediation of the ideas,” and “that manifesting is something other than what manifests itself,” an “entirely different kind of structure.” “Men” and “human” are other than Tom, Dick, and Harry, yet they group those guys into discernible categories, clarifying our thought about them, showing them to be of a different nature than, say, Fido, Rex, and Spot, a trio of dogs. The word ‘trio’ suggests number, but the ideas are “the most fundamental, most elemental numbers,” as they do not ‘add up’: indivisible (and more so than atoms, which turned out to be quite divisible, and with interesting consequences), “they are accessible only to our logos.” ‘Ontocosmologically,’ being has limits, seen in the ideas. Logos, which perceives the ideas, is the core of the human soul. To live in terms of logos is to be most distinctively human, to be caring for the soul in the right way.

To live in those terms “poses the question of the lawful arrangement of life in the community from the point of view of the thought of the just life,” since human beings live in political communities. Each polis has a set of beliefs held in common by those who live within it, part of its regime. “The common way of seeing and the way of seeing of the philosopher are inevitably in conflict.” This is the second “current” of care for the soul, “the care of the soul in the community as the conflict of two ways of life.” To say that the care of the soul forms “the essential heritage of Europe,” what “in a certain sense made European history what it is,” does “not mean that these thoughts were realized here,” but only “that they were a certain ferment, without which we cannot conceive of European reality.” Hence the other sense of ‘political philosophy,’ namely, the need for a ‘politic’ or prudent philosophy. 

“The community itself does not see that the philosopher, who is the thorn in its side, is in reality—mythically spoken—the envoy of the gods.” (Ironically enough, Socrates’ accusers call him an atheist, but not so ironically inasmuch as they mean the gods citizens worship.) To kill the envoy of the gods is “the peak of injustice” which “at the same time…always seem[s] just.” Socrates “performs the constant task of unselfish caring for the community, in the sense that he is constantly thinking only about its good,” and takes the hemlock as his reward, while a perfectly unjust man, one who conceals the tyrannical longings of his soul throughout his life, “will succeed in life.” From appearance, then, the unjust man is better. This brings Socrates to induce his dialogic partners to construct a ‘city in speech’ that accords with reasoned speech, with logos, as an illustrative parallel of the soul, which is much harder to see than a city, even one made only of words. Socrates takes Adeimantus and Glaucon up a rational ladder, from the subhuman ‘city of pigs,’ which aims at satisfying the needs and desires of the body, to the courageous city of the guardians, their spiritedness moderated by careful education so that they guard, rather than attack, their fellow citizens. The educators of the guardians are the philosophers, citizens of “the sharpest insight,” the ones “who decide what the community will do.” Reason ruling, spiritedness guarding, the appetites obeying: “Here we have a picture of what each of us individually is within himself”—what each of us is ‘in idea,’ insofar as we conform ourselves to the idea of ‘human.’ Reason discovers the ideas, which are defined, limited, and therefore limiting if heeded by the spiritedness that has the capacity to overcome the appetites. Without the rule of reason, spiritedness and appetites have no limits, incline to swell “into infinity.” “Care of the soul is that which Socrates does, constantly examining our opinions about what is good,” keeping them within the limits of the ideas. 

This leads back to the third “current” of care of the soul, which flows in the individual. Why would an individual care for his soul? In other words, why philosophize? Because “the soul that is cared for is more, it has a higher, elevated being.” It is more—what? More what it should be, more what its nature is, more fully satisfied in its own being. This is why Socrates says that a philosopher must be compelled to return to the ‘cave,’ the polis, the community ruled by unexamined opinion. In so returning, he will not want to rule, as philosophers do in the city in speech, but he may want to find a way to reform the city in some modest but crucially important way, making it a place both safe for philosophers and from philosophers. (Philosophers, too, need to reform themselves, as a part of their ongoing soul-discovery and concomitant soul-reform, their philosophizing.) If no one in the city does this, they city declines, and “we”—we Europeans, we humans—are “responsible for our decline.” Decline usually wins because the “general tendencies of our mind and all our instinctive equipment” incline toward materialism, toward caring for our bodies instead of our souls. To fortify the reasoning part of the soul against its powerful appetites, and especially to tame the spirited part of the soul, to make it into reason’s guardian, not its enemy, Plato’s Socrates proposes a religion, but a new kind of religion, the world’s first “purely moral religion.”

What is a moral religion? Judaism has moral elements; the Decalogue contains “moral precepts.” “But the Jewish God is the wrathful god who punishes in a manner beyond all human measure.” His thoughts are not your thoughts, He tells His prophet. Unlike the ideas, he partakes of infinitude, spiritedness without limit, or at least without humanly measurable, humanly understandable, limit. To reach Christianity, Judaism “passed through Greek reflection,” thereby becoming “the ferment of the new European world.” “In Christianity, the moment of insight occurs in that Christian dogmas are not considered as something to be accepted blindly.” [1] In rejecting Christianity, modern Europeans turned toward materialism, toward a science animated by “quantitative progress,” toward a ‘mass’ society in that sense, and in the sense of ‘mass’ or majority rule, democracy without rational limits—the sort that worried Tocqueville, thrilled Stephen Douglas, repelled Abraham Lincoln. Morality implies freedom. “We are free because we always stand between…two alternatives, in the question of good-evil, truth-untruth.” Hence Lincoln’s argument, that Douglas, in saying he ‘didn’t care’ whether slavery was voted up or down in the territories, was “blowing out the moral lights around us”—first and foremost the unalienable rights of liberty and equality.

“Philosophy today, in today’s world, is nothing” because “the world is still obsessed by the thought of seizing reality, as far a possible, the most intensive, and as far as possible greatest extent, and to draw from it as much and as quickly as possible.” We do not adequately care for our souls, concentrating our minds instead on our machines. Science, technology, “and this whole modern, emancipated an enlightened world” has “an enormous significance and its own justification,” but “who is going to reflect upon this justification and its limits?” Thomas Masaryk called this condition “discouragement in the field of philosophy,” the confinement of academic philosophy to modern positivism and linguistic inquiry, “where the task of philosophy consists in showing the impossibility of traditional philosophical questions and answers.” The merit of Heidegger is that he at least concerns himself with the “ancient thinkers like Aristotle,” again, philosophers who thought about nature, “the foundation of existence, what makes existence existence.” The “guiding theme” in Heidegger’s philosophy is manifestation, of Being “showing itself,” of things “dis-covering themselves.” Also like the ancients, he looks inward, considers how it is that the soul cognizes, “why interpretation is interpretation in the light of being,” how we attempt to discover the “internally meaningful structure” of things and of Being. “I can only get to the problem of being through the problem of showing,” “put[ting] together what belongs together in the thing and separat[ing] what does not belong together.” Heidegger differs from Plato, Patocka sees, in his historicism: “In Plato being is the great whole,” which “unfolds in a kind of grand topography,” whereas “in Heidegger it is such that being in its own essence is the surfacing of something hidden and coming into manifesting into the manifest” in an unending dynamic. Nonetheless, they share one important thing: both philosophers want “to live in truth.” 

As indicated, Plato develops the principle of the care of the soul in three directions: a “systematic ontology,” which “brings the soul into connection with the structure of being”; a “teaching about the state,” whereby “the care of the soul is both possible and is the center of all state life and also the axis of historical occurrence”; and “the individual fate of the soul,” the soul’s confrontation with death and the question of the meaning of “individual human existence.” Without Platonic philosophy, including Platonic political philosophy, “Europe would have an entirely different form” than it has. Platonic philosophy isn’t only logic, dialectical thought; he also maintains that “philosophy begins where something begins to be seen, where meaningful speech leads us to the thing itself,” an intellectual eros for understanding what is, seen in the ideas, “the measure of what is.” Plato is “the philosopher of radical clarity,” even as he knows that “the cave does not cease to exist,” that no comprehensive ‘enlightenment’ is possible for human beings. The soul “stands at the boundary of the visible and the invisible.” It thinks; it judges. “Judgment means to say something else about something,” to ascend from the cave of opinion, the visible, into the realm of the ideas, invisible in the cave, to discover “the internally meaningful structure” of nature. The philosopher cares for the soul because the soul, “that which moves by itself,” which “constantly lives the [erotic] impulse to get to existence either through thinking, to unity with it itself, or through irrationality to fall into not-existence.” In thinking, in the life of thinking, the soul seeks “to be in unity with one’s own self”—the “work of a whole life.”

Aristotle retains a suggestion of the Platonic ideas in his ‘formal’ causes. Human life, including philosophy, moves not so much ‘up’ from the cave of political life and its conventional opinions as ‘horizontally’ toward the human ‘end’ or telos. That is, man remains a political animal, at home in the cave; the political philosopher finds a place in the polis. “The movement of the human being—qua human—lies in the human capability to comprehend the movement of all other beings, that he can take them into himself and give them, in his own mind, in his own proper existence, a certain place.” Properly placed within the polis, the human soul is the place in which “things show themselves to be that which they are.” This, too, requires care of the soul. In this, despite his disagreements with Plato, he is also “the continuator of the path of philosophical movement.” At the same time, he puts more emphasis on human action, which “is also comprehension of its own kind,” a prudential understanding which is not clarified by the Platonic ideas. “For the Platonic idea regards what is always, what already is, but we need principles for the realization of something that is not yet, that does not exist.” Human beings aim at happiness, which is not bliss (“this is utterly false”) but “doing well.” Doing well consists not of experiencing pleasure (animals do that) nor even of honor (which depends upon others’ opinions, which may be mistaken). In practice, happiness or doing well, fulfilling the distinctively human nature, inheres in political life, in ruling and being ruled by deliberation, whereby persons decide “what people in the whole, everyone together, is permitted and is not permitted, how their life goals are to be harmonized.” This is not the highest human life—the philosophic life is even more self-sufficient, closer to the divine, the permanent, the finest harmony. “It is the life of constant spiritual discernment.” 

“Aristotle’s thinking is that against which the European tradition leaned and from which it nourished itself for one thousand years.” Marx dismisses all that as “ideologists’ illusions.” Within the Marxist cave, in the apartments where his Underground University met, Patocka dissented. “What is at stake and what was at stake for philosophers from the very beginning—and this we are trying to comprehend—is to analyze the very ground upon which human acting unfolds as the acting of a being that understands itself—even in deficient modes.” Contra Marx, “Aristotle sees that human action is not blind causality.” In moral insight—insight attained in the course of exercising human freedom—what is “uncovered” is “that which I am.” 

Just as this core of European civilization differs from Marxist (and other forms of) determinism, it also differs from the character of other civilizations. Paraphrasing Husserl, Patocka remarks that all other civilizations uphold myths, traditions “with which a human being has to identify with his life, essence, [and] custom; that they have this peculiar stamp that you must immerse yourself in them, step into the continuity of their tradition.” Europe differs from this because “everyone understands European civilization”; “the principle of European civilization is—roughly spoken—two times two is four.” That is, European civilization is general in its particularity, capable of becoming universal, “while those others, should they be generalized, would signify the swallowing up of all others by a particular tradition, but not by the principle of insight into the nature of things.” In Europe, “all human problems are defined from the perspective of insight.” European civilization “cannot be understood except from this point of reference that we call the care of the soul,” cannot be understood without ‘Plato,’ without the philosophic quest and especially the thoughtful care which makes that quest possible and inheres in that quest. “I maintain that history in this understanding—not history as the substantial history of man in every civilization and every tradition formed by peoples somewhere—is the history of Europe.” The tension between “the tradition of insight” and European traditions that are conventional gives rise “to the sentiment that something is not quite right” with Europe, a sentiment Romanticism, among other movements, has registered. “This problem is not any less urgent than it has always been, indeed, it is more urgent now.”

 

Note

1. It is true that Christianity includes provision of eternal, infinite, punishment, a point Patocka overlooks.

 

 

 

Tzvetan Todorov: Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism. Carol Cosman translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

 

For more than a century, humanism both Christian and ‘secular,’ has come in for a thrashing. Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, decidedly lesser lights such as Sartre and Foucault, to say nothing (well, as little as possible) about clamoring ‘postmodernists’—the most fashionable thinkers have despised it, leaving it in the hands of a few redoubtable defenders: England’s Christian ‘Inklings,’ Malraux and Camus in France, Havel and his fellow Central European dissidents. And in America, aside from Saul Bellow, has there been a recent humanist who was not rather dull? The Bulgarian-born expatriate Tzvetan Todorov has now raised the honorable old flag once more, adding to it an even more controversial vindication of the Enlightenment, also much mauled by his fellow men, along with the women and several other ‘genders,’ of the Left.

Todorov sketches the current intellectual atmosphere in terms of three “hidden pacts” with Satan. Satan offered Jesus rule of the world in exchange for submission to himself; Jesus declined the offer, but His Church surreptitiously accepted it, leading to ecclesiastical corruption, religious warfare, and other worldly sins. Satan next offered Faust supreme knowledge in exchange for the same submission, and Faust accepted, although by the time Goethe revealed the pact it had been in place for two centuries. Satan finally offered modern man the third pact—thought and action freely willed, with no authority “superior to the will of men,” individually or collectively. With no more God, “you will be a ‘materialist,'” Satan announced; you will no longer love your neighbor, being an ‘individualist’; and even the ‘self’ that you now so prize will give itself over to “subterranean forces”—Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s libido—conceiving itself as only “an anomalous collection of impulses, an infinite dispersal,” “an alienated, inauthentic being, no longer deserving to be called a ‘subject.'” Once again, modern men only understood the pact’s fine print after they’d signed it.

A profoundly unsatisfactory condition, this modern ‘human condition.’ In response to it, four “intellectual families” have gathered: conservatives, humanists, individualists, and proponents of “scientism.” Conservatives seek to recover the intellectual and moral life enjoyed before the “pacts.” In the West, this often means the return to the Christianity of Christ. The individualists despise conservatism, saying, “You believe that our freedom entails the loss of God, society, and the self? But for us this is not a loss, it is a further liberation,” a liberation to be defended and furthered. The scientists reject both of these stances, insisting that when it comes to the freedom of the will, there has been no loss and no gain, since “there never was any freedom, or rather, the only freedom is that of knowledge,” which enables us to conquer natural necessity. Finally, the humanists “think, on the contrary, that freedom exists and that it is precious, but at the same time they appreciate the benefit of shared values, life with others, and a self that is held responsible for its actions; they want to continue to enjoy freedom, then, without having to pay the price” Satan would exact. Todorov counts himself among the humanists, a thinker in the line of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, men of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the aftermath of the French Revolution, respectively. “I will turn to them to seek tools for thought that can serve us again today,” tools with which he can “build a model of humanist thought,” a “type” of the humanist.  

He claims that the modern world emerged from and replaced the ancient world, “a world whose structure and laws were preexisting and immutable givens for every member of society.” This crucially ignores the importance of prudential choice in certain pre-modern thinkers; tradition alone did not prevail absolutely, “without one’s consent.” This notwithstanding, it is more or less true that both Jerusalem and Athens “require that human beings should submit to an authority external to them,” namely, God and/or nature. This is more true in the sense that human souls were understood to exist within a spiritual and natural order larger than themselves; it is less true in the sense that this order pervaded human souls themselves in the form of speech and reason. Still, “it was revolutionary to claim,” as the moderns did, “that the best justification of an act, one that makes it most legitimate, issues from man himself: from his will, from his reason, from his feelings”—a shift of “the center of gravity…from cosmos to anthropos, from the objective world to the subjective will.” Individuals reconceived themselves as responsible for themselves, and so did “the modern nation-states,” jealous of their sovereignty. 

The conservatives do not attempt, futilely, to “lead us back to the world of the ancients, pure and simple,” but they do hope to lop off or at least moderate modern excesses. Todorov’s examples are Louis de Bonald and Alexis de Tocqueville. Bonald rejected what he took to be the underlying doctrine of the French Revolution, the rejection of Roman Catholic Christianity which began with Protestantism, with its valorization of the individual conscience, and found ‘secularized’ expression in Descartes and Rousseau. Because modern man “knows nothing external to himself,” and because souls are sinful and consciences weak, “we have come under the rule of personal interest,” sundering ties of family, friendship, and country. “Persons bound together by relationships,” he wrote, have become “individuals, each with their rights.” Add modern materialism to this, and you have a new form of atomism. Bonald wants to return European men to Christendom.

Tocqueville acknowledges the ineluctably “democratic” or socially egalitarian, anti-“aristocratic” character of modernity and sees resistance to it as futile and indeed undesirable. He seeks to moderate modernity by setting its passion for liberty against its passions for equality and well-being. He especially deplores democrats’ intellectual inclination to materialist determinism, which he considers compatible with or propaedeutic to despotism. Understanding that “the ultimate result of individualism” under the sway of modern egalitarianism “would be the disappearance of the individual” into the mass of humanity, “he wants to do through his work is to make modern man conscious of the dangers that threaten him and to seek remedies for them.” From the ‘ancients’ he takes the love of political liberty, which requires not the assertion of personal freedom but association and deliberation with others. 

The modern scientists, on the contrary, embrace determinism, whether socioeconomic, biological, or psychological, regarding “the freedom of the individual to be essentially an illusion.” Everything has a cause, and “modern science is the royal road to knowledge” of causes. They do not, however, accept the fatalism of the ancients or the providentialism of the prophets. “Opposed to the passive acceptance of the world as it is,” scientism “can envisage another reality, better adapted to our needs,” emerging from the laws of causality themselves. That is, in understanding natural causes scientists can then manipulate them, adapting them to human “needs.” If we understand genetics, for example, we can breed more nourishing plants and animals. And “there is a temptation to extend the same principle to human societies: since we know their mechanisms, why not engineer perfect societies?” This raises the question, What is perfection? Perfection in their opinion turns out, somewhat circularly, to be “the results of science,” science as “a generator of values, similar to religion.” “Having discovered the objective laws of the real, the partisans of this doctrine decide that they can enlist these laws to run the world as they think best”; “the scientific scholar is tempted to become a demiurge.” The urges of the demiurges incline toward modern utopianism, “the attempt to establish heaven on earth, here and now.” “We have seen the brutal consequences,” shown by Todorov himself in his book, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps [1]—genocidal tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’ In the milder, democratic-republican regimes one sees instead what Tocqueville calls the soft despotism of bureaucracy, wherein “the expert replaces the sage as purveyor of final aims, and a thing becomes good simply because it is frequent,” made so by the “technocratic collective” and decidedly not self-governing individuals. 

At this, individualists rebel. They proclaim self-sufficiency. Far from lamenting their aloneness, they rejoice in the freedom it brings them. “If they have one regret, it is that man is not even freer of those fictions consisting of morality, communal life, and the coherent self.” Their most extreme representative, the Marquis de Sade, maintains that man, born “in the image of other animals,” not in the image of the God he denies, “is a purely egotistical being who knows only its own interests.” “Are we not all born in utter isolation,” in “a perpetual state of war”? he asks, rhetorically. His notorious preoccupation with the body comports with this, as the body “belongs exclusively to the individual.” He takes no care of the bodies of others, “having discovered that the pain of others gives him more pleasure than their joy.” Such sadism makes him “the black sheep of the individualist family.” The utilitarians have been more moderate, but perhaps only because they have decided that sadism isn’t very useful.

Humanists take a different view from all of the other moderns. They share with Tocquevillian conservatives and the individualists the capacity and the right “of being able to act at one’s own will,” both initiating activities and carrying them through without undue interference. This right “implies that the ultimate end” of free human acts is “a human being, not suprahuman entities (God, goodness, justice) or infrahuman ones (pleasures, money, power).” This human being might be oneself or another, but always human; humanism is both human-centered and humane. Todorov summarizes the humanist claims as “the autonomy of the I, the finality of the you, and the universality of the they.” Therefore, humanism is no egoism, as individualism inclines to be. “What guarantees the unity of these three features is the very centrality granted to the human race, embodied by each of its members: it is at once the source, the goal, and the framework of its actions,” anthropocentric not theocentric. Politically, humanists prefer “regimes in which subjects can exercise their autonomy and enjoy the same rights.” The slogan, if not the practice of the French Revolution puts it, famously: Liberty, equality, fraternity.

This is not to say that the regime of liberal democracy excludes the other three modern “families.” But they tend to strain its limits—individualists working toward a-civism or even anarchy; conservatives toward ‘authoritarianism’; scientists toward ‘totalitarianism.’ For humanists, the individualists’ liberty is attractive, especially their esteem for consent to laws of one’s own making, but not “outside the human community.” The scientists’ demand that human beings figure things out for themselves makes sense to them, but not their dogmatic materialist determinism. They share the moderation of conservatives without framing that moderation by divine or natural laws. Todorov considers humanism “the most satisfying if not the only worthwhile response to the devil’s challenge.” Neither rationalists nor irrationalists, they seek knowledge but recognize that it “sometimes follows paths that elude rational analysis.” They need not be religious, but neither need they be atheists, inclining to leave “a somewhat vague space” for religious experience. As to one’s relations with nature, “humanists affirm that man is not nature’s slave, not that nature must become his slave.” In their estimation, human beings share power with God and nature. Accordingly, they refrain from worshipping man in place of God, since “man is neither good nor bad” but ‘can become one or the other, or (more often) both.” While not deriving “values” from divine or natural law, neither do they concede that they are arbitrary. By nature social, human beings need one another not only for survival and reproduction but “as conscious and communicative beings.” This natural sociality enables them to mitigate the harshness of physical nature, including “the laws of their biological nature,” without aspiring to master it. In political life, as the great humanist Montesquieu writes, their laws correspond to their existence as “reasonable beings, and not on the dispositions or particular wills of those beings.” 

Given the centrality of freedom to so much of modern thought, “just what does the freedom of modern man consist of?”  Modern freedom or ‘autonomy’ consists of “one’s choice to feel, to reason, and to will oneself.” In the higher ranges, this means Kantian autonomy in accordance with his ‘categorical imperative,’ but Todorov means more generally the right to take “action that finds its source in the subject himself.” Montaigne, “the pivotal figure between the old and the new, who read all the Ancients and whom all the Moderns would read,” claims, first, “a form of affective autonomy,” to “live with those he loves, not with those whom custom imposes on him,” first of the latter being his family, from whom he distanced himself every day in his famous tower. Montaigne rates friendship, which is voluntary, over family, which is given. Even animals love their children; “the fact that we tend to cleave to our blood relations is proof that we have not left the ‘animal’ condition, that we have not achieved a separate ‘humanity.'” And as a (mildly) individualistic sort, he also dislikes the aristocratic preoccupation with the past and the future seen in their concern for bloodlines; “one must live in the present rather than in the future, and in the self rather than in others.” Similarly, one should guard one’s freedom of mind, especially from the tyranny of books—evidently including the Book. His Essays are just that: essays, attempts at understanding, not revelations or dogmatic assertions. Montaigne writes “against scholastic knowledge and the submission to tradition, in favor of the autonomy of reason and judgment.” “Memory can be useful but it gives me a borrowed knowledge; reason is weak but it is mine; it is therefore the better of the two.” He shares with the Bible a certain humility, nonetheless, “hasten[ing] to show how human reason is weak, how men’s pride has little justification,” given their frailty and their too-frequent depredations upon one another. But neither is the individual “a simple plaything in the hands of Providence.” We can rule ourselves by reason—tentatively, knowing that our reason can fail us. Reason is the way to human freedom. Unlike the Ancients, who regarded reason as the distinctive human characteristic, Montaigne gives freedom this place.

Descartes views freedom similarly but exhibits more confidence in its power. He “sets off on the path of ‘proud’ humanism.” This, thanks to his celebrated “method” of rational thought. Regarding intellectual freedom as inalienable (“I think, therefore I am” replacing God’s “I am that I am,” at least for humans), he more clearly connects modern science to the immaterial than does Bacon’s experimentalism. In the realm of action, no such ‘abstraction’ can be had; political freedom requires the exercise of prudence within concrete, changing circumstances. Descartes as it were ‘brackets’ God, whose revelation, while “incomparably more certain” than human reason “teaches us nothing about a great part of the world,” leaving a very wide space for human thought to roam. “The domain of human knowledge has certain limits; but within these, the Cartesian method is sovereign.” This confidence, Todorov suggests, was likely to spill into the political world, sooner or later. Although “Descartes is not a defender of scientism…the total power he attributes to the will and the reason of the individual paves the way for the theoretical justifications the scientists will use to support their policies.”

The much more thoroughly political Montesquieu defends the humanist claim that “philosophical determinism does not exclude political will.” If materialist determinism takes the place of divine providence, Montesquieu makes himself the ‘secular’ equivalent of the Pelagians and Erasmus, holding man, not God, responsible for his own actions, adjuring the physician to save himself. He never goes so far as the scientistic utopians, claiming that politics can be conducted as a straight deduction from natural laws. Yes, climate is important, but “moral causes are more powerful than physical ones,” and the best way to learn how to deal with physical causes is education. By studying, traveling, discussing through considering received laws, religion, and customs, individuals and p0litical societies find it “possible to surmount the determining force of conditions that preexist [their] voluntary intervention.” Thus, Montesquieu writes, “We fashion for ourselves the spirit that pleases us, and we are its true artisans,” and “this interpretation of the human condition is found at the basis of Montesquieu’s analysis of political regimes.” This leads to his preference for regimes of liberty over despotisms. Only those political institutions “are good that do not hinder [man’s] autonomy of action.” These include republics and constitutional monarchies. The choice of one or the other depends upon the circumstances in which a people finds itself, very much including the kind of education it has received.

Rousseau pulls back from ‘proud’ humanism, maintaining the distinction between freedom of thought and freedom of action that Descartes maintained less than firmly. Human nature exists, but it is somewhat malleable by human beings themselves. “In all his reflections Rousseau will seek to articulate the given and the chosen: love of self and pity are in the nature of man, although they are equally the source of virtues, which depend on the will.” Given this ambiguity, with its inherent possibility of choosing wrongly, Rousseau teaches that individuals must obey the laws, although peoples may revolutionize. This is because the laws, customs, traditions of civil societies are necessary to constrain individuals, but they nevertheless “consecrate the triumph of might, not right.” Anticipating his contemporary, David Hume, he refuses to derive right from facts. “The only legitimate government of a country is the one chosen by the free will of the people of that country,” its “general will.” 

If peoples revolutionize, however, laws, customs, and traditions will no longer constrain individuals as they do in more settled times. To guard against rapine, Rousseau educates his Emile to become “an autonomous being,” self-governing and not prey either to the wills of others or to his own passions. Not for him will be the “servile submission to current opinions and absurd conventions, the habit of conducting himself according to the norms of the day even if they are constantly changing,” worries about what the neighbors will say. Emile will never hide his nature from others, giving up his natural autonomy and becoming “alien to himself.” He will stand as a loyal citizen in the nation of his own soul, ready to act as the head of his household and an example to his countrymen. With this, Todorov draws an important distinction: for Rousseau, “the notion of autonomy is no longer limited in scope; it intervenes in knowledge and in action, in public life and in private life; yet it is not absolute but limited.” That is, “humanists do not misjudge the power of the given, either of physical nature or of social custom,” but they do contend that “liberation is always possible.” “Human life is an imperfect garden,” no Eden then, no utopia in the future. Freedom is rather “a goal inscribed in us,” a goal which “can become the horizon of political institutions.” When it does, however, it brings with it “an unforeseen danger.” Benjamin Constant was the humanist thinker who recognized this danger and addressed it.

If Rousseau criticizes Enlightenment scientism and the social conventions ridiculed by the Enlighteners, and if his firm insistence on self-discipline would have moderated the French Revolution his superficial admirers carried out, Constant writes in that revolution’s aftermath, freedom of the individual “is now threatened” by “the very generalization of the idea of freedom.” Popular sovereignty may threaten individual self-government. Freedom of all may contradict the freedom of each one amongst the all.

With the French Revolution’s replacement of the ‘absolute’ rule of the one with the rule of the many, tyranny took a new and much more lethal turn: the Jacobin Terror. Constant rejects Rousseau’s insistence that the individual alienates all his rights in entering into the social contract, a claim that opens the way for a new and more lethal absolutism. Rousseau’s theory should never have been implemented directly; abstractions do not have good results in the real world, where his General Will must be wielded by real individuals. From moderate Montesquieu, he draws the lesson that neither the origin nor even the structure of political power makes it good; one must consider “the way it functions,” whether it is limited by law or, better, by balancing, countervailing powers. “How can power be limited other than by power?” Constant quite sensibly asks. Individual and political liberty depend upon such limitation. Only then can “what was described by Montaigne and Descartes as a personal practice” be “protected by law as an inalienable right.” In so arguing, Todorov rightly observes, Constant sides with Locke against Hobbes. “Constant thus sketches out, just after the Revolution, the only framework in which a politics in accord with humanist principles can be situated.”

To be sure, the garden will remain imperfect. The democratic side of the modern state, popular sovereignty, may still lean against its republican side, the side that features representative government and balance of separated powers, just as statism may still lean against democracy. Each side moderates “the other’s excesses.” [2]

Constant sees that this likely condition of instability needs moral ballast to maintain it. But with Christianity declining and Machiavellianism ascending, where will morality ‘come from’? Constant finds that source in humanity itself, in the ‘Rights of Man’ asserted but then cruelly violated in the Revolution. “These rights do not decide the politics of states”—that would introduce a pseudo-geometrical deduction into practice that invites the all-too-clearcut rule by guillotine—but they can and should be invoked as limits of political action, limits to the means by which rulers may rule. Constant reverses the approach to natural rights taken by the Jacobins. Instead of using natural rights, including liberty, as justification for the use of any means in order to obtain a perfect—and therefore impossible to realize—garden on earth, Constant invokes natural rights as limitations to the way of life of the democratic republican regime, limitations to the way it rules. As with Christian teachings before it, natural-rights teaching will indeed require teaching: an educational system devoted to its promulgation. 

For Constant, then, the philosophy of freedom turns away from the early moderns’ ‘state of nature’ teaching, without erasing natural rights. Those rights must be understood in a new way, however. “In the network of human interactions, no isolated entities exist but only relations; the very opposition between essence and accident has no place in the world of intersubjectivity,” a world in which “I love the being who is in a certain position in relation to me.” As Constant puts it, more politically, “Everything in life depends on reciprocity.” That is, ruling and being ruled, seen in the family and in the polis by Aristotle and defined by him as politics strictly speaking, can be reintroduced under conditions of modern statism if modern men design their regimes as democratic and republican both, and if they learn to respect natural rights in others with at least some of the concern with which they insist on them regarding themselves.

Despite their emphasis on human sociability and indeed the political character of man, the humanists have not ignored the aspect of human being that at times craves solitude. “Isn’t Rousseau one of the first to have understood this, describing himself as a solitary walker?” And Montaigne, if not a solitary walker, could surely be described as a solitary sitter. Fundamentally, is there “a tenable difference between humanists and individualists?”

Rousseau seeks solitude “to escape the weight of social obligations in order to live freely,” Todorov proposes. He did not cut himself off from all social ties. As seen in the Confessions, he maintained “constrained communications” with others. In The Reveries of a Solitary Walker his solitude serves a purpose, the experience of “a pure feeling of being.” Rousseau thus does not claim that human nature as such is solitary. He rather implies that he differs from the human norm. Todorov describes this as his acknowledgement of his own special “fate,” the condition of being persecuted. This, however, raises the question of why Rousseau suffered persecution. Could it be that he, like Socrates, was a philosopher? “The philosopher was wisest when he preferred the solitude of his desert and written communication of the result obtained by his search for truth. Rousseau understands this and readily admits that his own choice of solitude is hardly that of Descartes, or, one might add, of Montaigne.”

As for Montaigne, “he bases his way of being on his ‘dreamy way.'” Some men are social, some not. “We are no longer dealing with a matter of principle but with the way of life that best suits each individual. There is no single ideal conduct in this regard but several, and everyone has the right to act according to his penchant.” Montaigne sets limits on each of these polar choices: the life “exclusively devoted to the need for glory and honors” leaves no space for reflection; the life of “exclusive concern with the inner life and indifference to any aspect of the social order” neglects the social and political conditions needed to support it. And in both of these lives are indeed ‘exclusive,’ impossible for human beings to live. One is reminded of Aristotle’s remark, that the man outside the city is either a god or a beast; the hero seeks self-deification, the solitary individual lives like a bear or a mountain lion. Futilely, they deny their humanity, their nature as human beings. 

If humanism maintains a balance between freedom and sociality, how does it deal with love, which has taken an at times overwhelming prominence in modern ‘popular culture’? Todorov carefully excludes the more dilute forms of love—humanitarianism or philanthropy and patriotism—following Aristotle in understanding it as “affection pushed to its supreme degree,” eros “addressed only to a single being”—an irreplaceable you, as the song has it. Equality may enter into personal love regarding the relations of the two lovers, but no equality can enter into the relations of the lovers with anyone else. It isn’t “that we cannot love several beings at once, but that every love is defined by its particular object.” And unlike animals, human love consists of more than sexuality; eros or “love-desire” consists of longing, delights in possession, whereas philia or “love-joy” consists of reciprocity, delighting in “the simple existence of the love object,” taking “joy in presence” of it. In theological terms, philia “is a benevolent love, not a concupiscent love,” and its “goal is not fusion,” as with eros, as “I cannot rejoice in the existence of the other unless he remains separate from me.” Philia accords with humanism, eros not. Rousseau tells his readers why: “Love, which gives as much as it demands, is in itself a sentiment filled with equity.”

Here Todorov brings in the moral principle of his favored moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who replaced the postmodernists as his guiding star sometime between his book on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and his book on the Holocaust. [3] With philia, the you is no longer a means, it becomes the end; in addition, [the lover] must reserve the autonomy of his will.” “These two characteristics relate love-joy to humanist doctrine.” My beloved isn’t the means to my satisfaction; more, she is free to be herself, even as “the beneficiary of my love.”

This humanist conception of love differs from those of both classical philosophers and of Christians. For Plato and Aristotle, love of a person forms a rung on a ladder or scale, as seen in Plato’s Symposium and in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the beloved (including the beloved friend) embodies something beyond the person who is beloved: beauty, virtue—a fine principle or abstraction. Genuine philia cannot exist except “between virtuous and worthy individuals.” Christian love (as Milton says of Eve’s love of Adam) is love of God in him. “This explains why, in love-charity, the substitution of the object is possible; I must not attach myself to this or that person, but bring the same love to everyone.”

Not so, for the pioneering humanist, Montaigne. He loves “the unique character of [his] friend,” La Boétie. Montaignian philia “celebrates the achievement of individual identity,” not the person as the embodiment of either virtue or the image of God. “Love of the creature does not lead here to love of the Creator.” “The person of the friend is the sole justification for his choice.” This is why Rousseau’s Héloïse is the new Héloïse. Being loved for her humanity, the humanist’s beloved cannot be perfect, although it is permissible, even laudatory, to imagine her so. Again, “human life is an imperfect garden,” making the act of imagining perfection in the loved one “the most precious feature of human love,” an act of “putting our capacity to fabricate the real in the service of our relations with concrete human beings.” Rousseau Kantifies love before Kant came along to Kantify morality. Philia “promotes the other man [or woman] as the ultimate end of my action, as humanism would have it.” Humanism cherishes the human.

Philia strictly limits the modernist tendency toward making the human will triumphant. Love does not subject itself to the will; therefore, “will cannot govern everything.” After all, “being what one is, one can choose to act according to one’s will, and this justifies the demand for political autonomy, but can one choose to be what one is?” Freedom of the will exist, but within the framework of one’s individual nature.

Obviously, in humanism “the human takes the place of the divine.” Humanism nonetheless avoids tyranny—as scientism does not—by limiting itself in its love to individual persons, by not directing itself toward ‘the state’ or ‘the leader’ or all humanity (as in, for example, communist doctrine). Nor is it conservative in Todorov’s sense of the word, refusing to view human beings as “means in view of a transcendent end,” whether divine, natural, or simply abstract.” Constant wrote in a letter to Annette de Gérando, “A word, a look, a squeeze of the hand have always seemed to me preferable to all reason, as indeed to all earthly thrones.”

If, then, humanism counters Satan’s pacts by showing that life without God need not result in the loss of free will (materialism) or the loss of friendship and love (Machiavellian lives spent jostling for self-interest), does it mean that the soul, now reduced to the self, has no real nature, that it is “in reality impressionable, fickle, distracted”—prey to subconscious forces? Having given up the proud dreams of modernists, does the self dissolve in the acids of postmodernism? “For if the individual is merely a bundle of multiple characters over which he has no control, if he is merely the label haphazardly slapped onto a series of discontinuous states, if he can never take advantage of any unity, can we still speak of his autonomy?” Can the real condition of the self sustain a philosophy of freedom?

Todorov recurs to Montaigne, that adept of self-knowledge. Montaigne addresses two problems in considering himself: his inconsistency over time; his multiplicity in space. He more than concedes, he insists upon, the fact of “human changeableness.” He goes so far as to deny that the human self has an “essence that would resist the vagaries of existence.” “But this does not mean, on another level, that this individual has no stability or that one can never generalize from one individual to another.” How so?

The facts of time and space, he argues, within which we witness our own changes, mental and physical, themselves limit his freedom to change. He has his own unique history, his life over time. And he is born within a framework of custom, a space in which certain customs prevail, which forms habits; habit is a second nature, “no less powerful” than physical nature. “The outcome of a life is the identity of the person.” A life lived rightly “converts form into substance, fortune into nature, habit into essence.” This is why the faces of mature men and women differ from one another far more than the faces of infants. The ‘nature’ so developed “consists precisely of our indeterminacy, of our capacity to supply ourselves with an individual and collective identity: nature has put us into the world free and unfettered,” allowing us to give “unity and meaning to [our] life.” What much later comes to be called ‘history’ becomes, in the hands of humanists, “the place for the constitution of being.” 

Todorov seems unsure whether Montaigne proposes self-creation in a strong sense, or whether, as he puts it, “the course of human life leads everyone to discover his ruling quality, and to stick by it,” as he engages in dialogues with himself and with others. For Montaigne, the dialogues with others range over an array of thinkers, ancient and modern, whose writings he discusses as a means of achieving self-knowledge, self-revelation. As he reads them, he judges one opinion sound, another wrong, gradually forming his own opinions, settled by capable of being unsettled by a better argument.

This apparent plasticity sat on epistemological bedrock. “Montaigne drew all of his conclusions concerning the human race from the nominalism of William of Ockham, which he embraced there are only particular objects in the world; where humanity is concerned, only individuals exist.” And along with William of Ockham stands Niccoló of Florence, who taught his readers “how to separate…the ideal and the real,” discarding the former for the latter. Montaigne claims to present himself as he is, further claiming that he is worth the trouble you take to know him, in his long and complex book. In this, Montaigne too becomes a ‘prince,’ a ruler in the sense of a leader of human thought and sentiment. I am worth knowing, but so are you, since you and I are equally human. Humanism saves itself from narrow individualism, however, because self-knowledge requires others, both those one meets in books and those we meet as friends. Plato, yes, but La Boétie even more. Not just any friends, evidently. “The best friendship and the best dialogue between two men are animated by the impulse to know: ‘The cause of truth should be the common cause for both.'”

This self-knowledge, valuable in itself, also result in knowledge of human beings generally, since in order to acquire it, one must pay attention to others. If “the individual exists only in relationship” with other individuals, there must be some commonality among interlocutors. They “resemble on another,” although they “cannot be reduced to one another.” Montaigne’s “person becomes an instrument for interrogating,” if not an essence, a human nature, then “the human condition.” In this way, Montaigne brings together “all the basic of ingredients of humanist doctrine”: individual freedom, “the autonomy of the authorial I“; the “finality” of the you, the fact that you are unique, with nothing beyond yourself; and “the universality of the they,” all individuals living within “the same human condition.” “In the objective world, everyone is a member of the same species; in the intersubjective universe, everyone occupies a unique position; in communion with oneself, everyone is alone, and responsible for his actions.

But (as Satan insists, and many Christians fear) does humanism inevitably result in the death of God, and the death of God in nihilism, as the God-substitutes men propose are rejected, one after another? And does nihilism result in societal collapse or the rule of force, in anarchy or the renunciation of freedom? Todorov denies these things. Looking first, however, at the other modern “families” of principles, he finds each defective. Conservatives, he claims, do “believe in the existence of common values fixed by the society in which we live,” but define morality as conformity to “the current norm.” (This is obviously an absurd assertion, since “the current norm” is precisely what modern conservatives reject, but let it pass as a literal definition what ‘conservatism,’ for now.) Scientism rejects morality as meaningless, but exempts itself and its activities from that stricture.

Todorov is more concerned with the challenge of individualism, which transforms the Ancients’ “aspiration to the good life” into “the cult of authenticity,” which effectively means doing as one likes. His concern is that the founder of humanism in France, Montaigne, inclines toward Epicureanism. He pretends to Christianity, dividing his life “into two parts: his knees bend, his public actions conform to custom, but his reason and his judgment remain free, and he chooses for himself an art of living that suits him personally, with no concern to impose it on others.” This “paves the way for the individualist attitude,” although it doesn’t go all the way there. In their own ways, both La Rochefoucauld and Hobbes show similar inclinations. Individualism achieves its fullest flower in the esthetes, particularly Baudelaire, who rejected moral principles altogether in favor of “aesthetic values.” Their dandyism parodied the old Platonism, “asking life to be beautiful rather than good”—sundering what Plato had seen together. 

These “families” of moral principles are either do result in nihilism or fail to block its surge. How does humanism fare?

Todorov begins with Rousseau. Between the state of nature and the rule of social convention, Rousseau seeks a “middle way.” The key text here is the Emile. [4] Emile’s education proceeds in stages, the first intended to develop his natural capacities, the second intended to develop his social capacities. That is, he first learns how to defend his physical and moral independence, his liberty, then (upon reaching puberty) his “social virtues,” which will enable him to love a woman and raise a family in civil society. Rousseau avoids nihilism by pointing to the natural “voice of conscience” in every human heart. He firmly rejects the materialism he finds in the Enlightenment, which would indeed bring on nihilism and the destruction of social life. In this, Rousseau ‘secularizes’ Christianity. “He does not seek to establish an art of living that would lead every individual separately to the ideal of the good life”—the path of Montaigne—but “places himself in the perspective of benevolence, a relation that presupposes sociability.” In Rousseau’s political philosophy, there is no divine-law foundation of morality, pity or compassion replaces charity or agapic love (that is, sympathy for the other as human, not as a sufferer), and no sharp distinction between the good as a manifestation of a holy Spirit and evil as ‘the flesh.’

But in locating morality squarely in human nature, acknowledging man’s freedom either to accept the promptings of conscience or to reject them, Rousseau thereby rejects the notions which led to the excesses of the French Revolution. His famously astringent condemnation of the hypocrisy of the aristocratic society of his own day registers his understanding that any society, society as such, can go wrong. A new society will not necessarily improve the existing one; it could even be worse. “No one who proposes to reform society in order to make all men good and happy can legitimately claim affiliation with Rousseau, as the revolutionaries of a later generation (or more recently) have done. It is not the fault of this or that society if men are wicked: they are so because they are sociable beings, free and moral—in other words, because they are human….Man discovers good and evil only in the state of society and through society; but his discovery does not determine him one way or another, it simply offers him the possibility of becoming good or evil.” No utopianism need apply.

What does apply is the voice of conscience, “the true capstone of [Rousseau’s] moral theory,” one of the distinctive features of human nature. It is “the capacity to separate good and evil and therefore the counterpart of human liberty, without which morality has no meaning.” It exists only in the individual soul, not in civil society. It is neither reason nor feeling; it requires no complex logical thought to arrive at, but unlike feelings which vary “according to individuals and circumstances,” it “is the same in everyone”—written, Rousseau writes “by nature with ineffaceable characters in the depth of my heart.” Without it, “reason is mute.” He who follows it is good; he who follows it only after overcoming his vices is virtuous—virtue denoting strength. To be good is to be happy; to be virtuous is to be dutiful. 

Can the dutiful, virtuous man find his way to the happiness goodness brings? Yes, through love—through love of oneself (as Montaigne saw, and practiced) and through love of others, as the Christians saw and as Emile was brought to understand. Moral duty constrains, but “love is joy.” Since love or benevolence “consists of cultivating what is already inside us,” through right education, “love and friendship are therefore constitutive of man.” Loving another does “not sacrifice one’s being, it completes it.” Rousseau writes, “The eternal laws of nature and of order to exist. For the wise man, they take the place of positive law,” rather as Christ’s law of love takes the place of the Mosaic law for the Gentiles. For the philosopher, for a Rousseau, inquiry into those laws continues throughout his life; for him as for Plato’s Socrates, philosophy is zetetic and dialogic. But non-philosophers, the attachments of friendship and love, “with their inevitable freight of illusions and disappointments,” will prevent the founding of any utopia, any Eden, while preventing them from falling into nihilism, whether a nihilism of violence or a nihilism of listlessness.

For the humanist view of politics, Todorov turns not to Rousseau, however, with his ever-problematic Contrat Social, but to more down-to-earth Constant. Constant was what was beginning to be called a liberal in politics and economics, but he rejected the utilitarian form of liberalism then propounded by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, itself derived from the Machiavellian line, seen in Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld. Self-interest alone cannot explain a considerable part of human behavior, as seen in religion, love, and war. And it can be dangerous, as seen in the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Constant described as “self-interest personified.” That is, self-interest may usually motivate peaceful, commercial relations, but not in the tribe of the lion and the eagle. Fortunately, self-interest on the Napoleonic scale defeats itself, as Napoleon’s career in fact illustrated. But why tempt future would-be Napoleons by valorizing self-interest? “The Napoleonic tyranny was at least partially due to the success of philosophic theories that reduced man to a being subject to the reign of interest.” Lions and eagle will never go extinct; it is wiser to redirect their ambitions to things beyond themselves.

Constant concedes that “valorizing individual interest was liberating” at the beginning of modernity, as was popular sovereignty, which seemed to promise that the people really would “act in their own interest.” The Revolution had dampened the latter hope as surely as Napoleon had dampened the former. What is needed then, is a more capacious sentiment, not to replace but to supplement and restrain self-interest, which Constant calls “enthusiasm.” Reason alone won’t suffice because reason alone is weak; it is “an instrument not a force.” Nor is enthusiasm Christian or Rousseauian conscience. It is a moral sentiment, directed at the good of the other, whether the other is a human being, a nation, nature, or God.

Of these kinds of enthusiasm, religious enthusiasm is the most dangerous. (Constant hadn’t seen the truly virulent nationalisms that would come later.) If directed toward the Deity or Supreme Being, it is ennobling; if directed by the “positive religions,” it can lead to persecution, a policy of a religion whose priests use the enthusiasm of the faithful to serve their self-interest. Positive religion “cannot serve as the basis of morality, and it should be as isolated as possible from political authority,” but “though religion cannot be the foundation for morality, morality will be the measure of how we evaluate particular religions,” as “each of them comes closer to religious feeling the less interest in and farther removed it is from political power.” To ensure that positive religions hew to this standard, Constant reaches for what had become the familiar religious solution: church disestablishment and the resulting multiplicity of sects, competing amongst themselves to perfect “religion itself and its action on society.” In Constant’s metaphor, if religion divides into a thousand streams, “they will fertilize the ground that the torrent” of enthusiasm released by one or two religions alone “would have devastated,” and in fact had devastated in Europe’s religious wars.

Todorov optimistically claims that the same might be said of moral systems themselves. Multiply them and let them compete. This, he stipulates, ought to be “the credo of the state,” not of humanists. He seems hopeful that humanism will win the battle of moral ideas and sentiments, in the long run, and he obviously intends his book as a soldier in that battle.

In differentiating politics from morality while at the same time refusing to divorce them, Constant ventured to criticized Kant’s dictum, drawn from Christian thought, that one must do right even if in so doing the world perishes. Specifically, he regards the obligation to tell the truth as applicable only among decent persons. A murderer sets himself outside of civil society; as previous thinkers had held, they put themselves in a state of war with their intended victims. Since, as Constant writes, “no man has the right to truth that injures another,” Socrates is right to say that one may lie if a man in a murderous rage demands to know where you keep the knives. Kant took this criticism unkindly, devoting a long essay, On the Claimed Right to Lie Out of Humanity, to refuting it. In Kant’s rigorously deductive analysis, lying contradicts the truth which, for Enlightenment rationalists as much as for Christians, alone sets you free. He is simply “not interested in the practical consequences of acts.” Constant replied that the true moral goal is “to do no harm to another,” which usually comports with truthfulness, but not always. When it doesn’t, “love of neighbor must win out…over the love of truth,” since the aim of morality is the ‘you,’ not the Kantian ‘I’ who wants to maintain his integrity. In this, “led by his infallible sense of the concrete,” Constant is the better humanist. “If there were an ultimate conflict between truth and humanity, Constant would choose humanity.”

And in the public realm, “truth is not the main thing, but being able to seek it.” A government may surely lie to deceive its enemies and protect citizens; it may not suppress freedom of speech and of the press. “”For Constant, the real virtue of liberty consists precisely in that it allows the examination of all opinions, the pursuit of all arguments.” This practice ensured, the better opinions will prevail, in the long run. Pluralism will do the work Providence does in Christianity.

In a thoroughly Montaignian move, Todorov immediately extends Constant’s dialogue beyond current opinions to past thinkers. “To make [the past] intelligible is also to begin to know ourselves,” since we cannot trust the rhetoric of “our contemporaries,” who often lack the clarity of judgment perspective offers. Having passed from aristocratic or oligarchic civil societies to democratic ones, ‘we moderns’ think and act exactly as Aristotle said democrats do: “claim[ing] allegiance to the principle of equality and cherish[ing] the choices of one’s own will.” “This transformation generated many new sufferings” for the nations of the twentieth century. European moderns split between “conservatives,” who attempted to save some of the old regimes, especially the Catholic Church, under neo-aristocratic or ‘authoritarian’ regimes, and pseudo-scientists, whose claim to rule consisted of their alleged knowledge of “impersonal and implacable laws” of history. Invoking ‘science’ as justification for their “revolutionary utopianism,” they imposed ‘totalitarian’ regimes, modern tyrannies. Their counterparts in more genuinely democratic regimes eschewed rule by terror, relying instead on bureaucracy; “politics then becomes a domain on which we consult experts, and the only debate is over the choice of means, not ends.” Except that ever-more-powerful means often suggest ends, as “capability becomes wish, which is transformed in turn into duty.” As in Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” “the oppression here is not violent, as in the totalitarian states; it is indirect and diffuse, but as a result it is more difficult to circumscribe and reject.” Once “the technicians of democratic societies” have “master[ed] the code of living species,” “humanity will be capable of making itself conform to its own wishes”—or, rather, the technocratic oligarchy will.

To avoid this, Todorov urges recourse to the “humanist core” of modernity. As he has stated, that core consists of understanding human beings as one “biological species”; sociability, by which he means “mutual dependence” for nourishment, reproduction, and self-understanding; and “relative indeterminacy,” that is, the capacity to choose among the many varieties of thought and courses of action. Thinking in a non-utopian way about morality and politics requires us to acknowledge these core human facts—this “‘human nature,’ if you will.” The humanist morality that recognizes “equal dignity for all members of the species,” that elevates the other person rather than myself as “the ultimate goal of my action,” and that prefers “the act freely chosen over one performed under constraint” comports with that humanist anthropology. “Humanism asserts that we must serve human beings one by one, not in abstract categories.”

Human nature, then, provides a capacious standard for human conduct. There are actions which are good for it and actions which are bad for it. The free will inherent in that nature also ensures that human beings can choose good or evil; “men are not necessarily good, that they are even capable of the worst.” “But it is precisely in living through the horrors of the war and the camps that modern humanists, men like Primo Levi, Romain Gary, and Vasili Grossman, have made their choice and confirmed their faith in the human capacity also to act freely, also to do good.” Todorov’s books on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Holocaust, along with his own life in Bulgaria under the Communist regime, also confirm that faith.

Politically, this means that “the democratic regime has affinities with humanist thought, as authoritarian regimes have with conservatism, totalitarian regimes with utopian scientism, and anarchy with individualism.” But modern democracy in Europe does not mean majority rule, simply; it is ‘liberal,’ restraining itself from “choos[ing] among conceptions of the good” held by its citizens, “provided that these do not contradict its ultimate principles.” Humanism in morality and in politics makes a wager not entirely like Pascal, only for it the wager isn’t on the existence of God but on the capacity of human beings to choose what is good for beings such as they are, against the determinist doctrines who deny that this is possible. Todorov quotes the Christian humanist, Erasmus: “What good is man, if God acts on him as the potter acts on the clay?” And he asks modern determinists, “If everything is played out in advance, what good is man?” On the contrary, we can “prefer the imperfect garden of humankind to any other realm, not as a blind alley, but because this is what allows us to live in truth.” And of course the maxim, “live in truth,” galvanized the dissidents of Central Europe under the Soviet empire, men and women to whom Todorov remains faithful to this day.

 

 

 

Notes

1. Tzetan Todorov: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. See “The Holocaust Reconsidered,” on this website under the category “Manners and Morals.”
2. Oddly, Todorov claims that “it is with Constant that humanism leads to a political structure, the structure of liberal democracy.” His ignoring of the American founding, which did exactly that, may register his earlier, mistaken, claim that the authors of the Declaration of Independence secretly signed on to Satan’s third pact, the one that struck down the principle of obedience to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. If so, he may be taking the Freemasonry of many of the Founders a bit too far. It is also possible that he is restricting his field of inquiry to Europe and especially to France.
3. See “Spanish Conquistadors Through a Postmodernist Lens,” on this website under the category “Nations.”
4. For a discussion of the Emile, see the several articles on this website under the category of “Philosophers.”