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    Malraux and ‘Diversity’

    by

    Claude Tannery: Malraux, the Absolute Agnostic: or, Metamorphosis as Universal Law. Teresa Lavender Fagan translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

    Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 16, Number 2, October 1992.

     

    In the United States, where recent calls for ‘diversity’ amount to little more than a multicolored cloak for a thin ideological monism, any good study of André Malraux’s work deserves more than welcome—it deserves thoughtful attention. From first to last Malraux sought to understand the plurality of civilizations and to make that understanding address the spiritual crisis of the West. If ideologues reject Malraux because he was on the ‘wrong’ side in May ’68—on the side of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic against the New Left—perhaps they need a stronger dose of their own diversity. Politically and culturally,, Malraux was there first, with far superior mind and heart.

    Claude Tannery is a novelist, encountering Malraux not to classify and analyze but to sympathize and build. The merit of this book derives from Tannery’s commitment to read Malraux as Malraux wanted to be read—as a man challenging readers to change their lives, not as a literary aroma to be inhaled and ‘appreciated,’ exhaled and ‘deconstructed.’ Tannery treats an homme sérieux seriously.

    Tannery considers central Malrauvian themes, metamorphosis and agnosticism. He shows more emphatically than previous commentators have done (if not always more clearly) the extent to which Malraux integrates the Eastern delight in plurality, its charmingly relaxed attitude toward contradiction, with the Western insistence on unity, on logical rigor. Malraux does this by transforming Nietzsche’s concept of creativity. Like Nietzsche, Malraux finds in the will-to-create a cross-civilizational universal, a feature of ‘the human condition’ everywhere and always. Unlike Nietzsche, Malraux finds fraternity in this will, not self-isolating dominance. Nietzsche’s thought remains firmly within the modern Western framework, the attempted conquest of fortune and of nature. Malraux’s fraternal (but not egalitarian) creative will can open itself to the plurality of cultures, relax its individuality, without lapsing into some indiscriminate moral and political anarchism. Whereas Nietzsche finally must either rule or ruin, tyrannize or go mad, Malraux can govern—rule and be ruled, in Aristotle’s phrase. Hence the association with de Gaulle. Tannery formulates this well, calling Malrauvian fraternity “a fellowship of differences” (232).

    This shows why the New Left could never accept Malraux, any more than the Old Left had done. The old, Communist-Party French ‘Left’ had denounced Malraux for his refusal to accept the supposedly iron law of economic determinism; indeed, Malraux opposed fatalism in all its forms. The New Left had to reject Malraux just as vehemently, but on different grounds: on the way they used not Marx but Nietzsche. The New Left took the Nietzschean will-to-power and made it not so much fraternal as egalitarian, a non-royal road toward communalism without so much Marxian dialectical signage. The New Left incoherently sought to maximize egalitarianism and freedom. But the New Left retained the core of Nietzsche’s will-to-power, seeking dominance over all other political contenders, seeking rule simply rather than ruling and being ruled. This has remained the case as the New Left has marched diligently through the institutions of academia, government, and the media in the half-century since the évènements of 1968.

    If members of one civilization can admire other civilizations by fraternal recognition of the will-to-creation in all, then the question of human creativity arises. Agnosticism comes in because we cannot know much about the source of the artist’s creative metamorphoses. There exists a “metalanguage of art,” a “language of forms that transcends civilizations,” a set of form-generating archetypes inaccessible to reason. Responding to this unknowable realism as the artist does constitutes neither submission to destiny nor transcendence of it, but “the highest form of fellowship with destiny”—a reconciliation, a participation with forces ascribed to gods and to nature. Tannery does not mention the resemblance of this account of Malraux’s thought to Nietzsche’s amor fati, but it is noteworthy. It is also a mistaken resemblance, as Malraux insists on the self-consciousness of the artist’s metamorphoses of previous traditions. Picasso knew what he was doing, and so did his predecessor, and so will his successors.

    Tannery’s generous ardor brings with it some weaknesses as well as strength. At times he exclaims and defends too much, persisting, for example, in treating the butcher Mao Zedong and his vicious ‘Cultural Revolution’ with undeserved respect. (In some respects this parallels Malraux’s own mythologized Mao, presented as a Chinese Charles de Gaulle.) It is too much to say that Malraux regards “every revolution” as a lyrical illusion (91); Malraux is both less ‘disillusioned’ and less utopian than Tannery, more genuinely political. Tannery does share one weakness with Malraux: the failure to distinguish sufficiently the classical from the modern form of reason. In Plato reason yields transcendence, a possibility Malraux, following Nietzsche, too hastily rejects. For them, creativity replaces reasoning, although in both the concept of ‘consciousness’ supplements creativity lends some rational content to creativity.

    Tannery insists too much on the development, the metamorphosis, of Malraux’s thought, underestimating its continuity. He discusses The Walnut Trees of Altenburg without fully considering Malraux’s integration of that novel, its chapters largely unchanged, into his vast ‘anti-memoir’ memoir-novel, The Days of Limbo, published some three decades later. This happens because Tannery sometimes does not attend closely to the texts as Malraux presents them, making it difficult to see exactly where Malraux’s thoughts end and Tannery’s begin. This is especially and most regrettably true of Tannery’s penultimate chapter, treating his principal theme, metamorphosis as universal law. Here he brings in a plethora of writers from Goethe (quite informatively) to Stephen Jay Gould. There’s just not enough Malraux.

    We who admire Malraux and find nourishment in his writings would betray what he has given us were we to use such occasions as this for multiplying un-fraternal complaints. Tannery has written a book to learn from, and to build with.

     

     

    Jeffersonian Empire

    by

    Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson: Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 20, Number 2, Winter 1992-93.

     

    The American regime promotes what the British call ‘pacificism’—not pacifism, the rejection of all war in all circumstances, but pacificism, the intention to establish civil and international peace by peaceful means when possible, by warlike means only when necessary. (Predictably, the delimitation of necessity has proben controversial.) Unlike Rome, even republican Rome, America seeks no military empire. French boys once gazed at the silhouette of Napoleon and murmered, “son ombre m’a guide.” American boys imitate soldiers they see in the movies, as one of the games they usually leave behind; of them one cannot say, as André Malraux said of the French, “There is not one of us who has not conquered Europe in his dreams.”

    The American Founders designed our institutions to nurture pacificism. They saw that war would swell the government, threatening republicanism. They channeled Americans’ ambitions into commerce and politics, anticipating that future ambitions would not exclude the sciences, arts, and letters. Nonetheless, the universalism of American principles—all men are created equal, with unalienable rights—could also lead to a certain messianism, an inclination to intervene militarily on behalf of a self-interest deemed universally wholesome. And worldwide free trade may at times require military defense. While “one part” of Thomas Jefferson’s mind “feared contamination” from the world, the authors write, another “wished genuinely to reform” the world, a task that required some sort of contact with it.

    Jefferson hoped to overturn the regnant doctrine of ‘reason of state’ in international politics. With Machiavelli, his contemporaries in European capitals believed that “The political community’s security, independence, and continuity took precedence over all other interests, private or public. The supremacy of foreign policy, of the state and its necessities over civil life, was the inevitable consequence of this ordering.” (13) Jefferson “rejected the whole apparatus of the modern state that had emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century”—funded debt, executive power, heavy taxation, government-supported manufactures, and a standing military—which he feared as “the very essence of tyrannical government” (16). Still, he did not “renounce the ambitions that normally led to the use of these means”—economic and technological progress, territorial expansion (18). Jefferson wanted the best of both Romes, “both empire and liberty” (20). It is no wonder that Alexander Hamilton, a man with far fewer reservations about modernity, viewed Jefferson with scant patience, or that Jefferson suspected Hamilton of monarchic ambition.

    “‘To conquer without war’—that objective, the French diplomat Turreau observed in 1805, was ‘the first fact’ of Jeffersonian politics” (18). Threats of war, threats of making hostile alliances, and the “peaceable coercion” of domestic commercial legislation designed to help friends and harm enemies were Jefferson’s preferred means. The United States shall, he wrote to Thomas Pinckney, “endeavor so to form our commercial regulations as that justice from other nations shall be heir mechanical result” (19).

    The authors recall Jefferson’s well-known defense of agrarianism, which he supposed would cultivate the virtues and spirit of independence needed for upholding republicanism, and his hostility to manufactures, which he regarded as the foundation of modern despotism. They see that Jefferson understood that agrarianism wedded to ‘progress’ required territorial expansion and free trade. Territorial expansion and the defense of free trade would lead to war, state aggrandizement, and finally despotism. But strict isolationism would require Americans to provide their own manufactures, equally yielding despotism in the long run. Jefferson hoped to break into European markets by threatening to withhold American agricultural produce in “a contest of self-denial,” a nonviolent contest of American virtue with corrupt and corrupting Europe (35-36). The authors notice that this blend of the ‘republican’ principle of virtuous citizen-spirit with the ‘liberal’ preference to avoid war “suggests that the tendency among historians to set these ideas in opposition—at least in the realm of foreign policy—is more misleading than enlightening” (36). They rightly describe Jefferson as “closely identifying the pursuit of the national interest with the vindication of natural right” (62).

    The first and more successful of the two Jefferson administrations secured the Louisiana Purchase, “one of the great political windfalls in American history” (98), giving the United States control of the outlet for the Mississippi River. In doing so, Jefferson evidently violated the strict-construction constitutionalism he had designed his policy of peaceful coercion to defend (94). But at least (one is inclined to add) he strengthened the social and economic conditions of agrarianism, which served as much a means to liberty as his constitutionalism did; the Mississippi River, and indeed the whole Mississippi River system stretching from the upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, runs through the largest area of rich farmland in the world. The authors do not quite convey Jefferson’s dilemma here, which was to coordinate three different means—peaceful coercion, constitutionalism, and agrarianism—in order to obtain the ends of liberty and virtue. That these means might not always be maximized simultaneously, that they might at times conflict, and that the Jeffersonian statesman could reluctantly but in good conscience sacrifice one of them temporarily, deserves full recognition and appreciation. It is not a problem of excessive “moralism,” as the authors claim more than once, but of moral judgment, of the adjustment of rival moral goods. The authors return to sounder criticisms in describing Jefferson’s subsequent attempt to acquire the Florida territories from Spain. The United States had no legal claim to these, and the advance of the claim only irritated Spanish pride. The methods of peaceful coercion failed; with Spain they failed outright, and with France they succeeded only by the accident of Napoleon’s military blunders in both the New World and Europe.

    The second Jefferson administration saw the failure of peaceful coercion in the maritime crisis with Great Britain. Severely threatened by Napoleon’s ambitions, the British undertook the impressment of American seamen and restricted American neutral trade. Jefferson was not merely unsympathetic; he was morally outraged. “The administration’s sense of American power was so extensive and its conception of American rights and interests so unbending that no negotiated settlement with England was possible” (202). Jefferson imposed a net of draconian embargo laws, abridging American rights to jury trial and due process, in an “attempt to find a substitute for war in settling disputes between nations” (205). At the same time, he threatened war; as Gandhi understood a century later, the prospect of violence sets off nonviolence like a dark background does a polish diamond. (Gandhi, however, enjoyed the luxury of brandishing his threat without needing to ready himself to carry it out; he could present himself as the rational alternative to dangerous men.)

    Fortunately, none of this worked. The British rejected American protestations and defeated Napoleon, whose victory would have injured American interests far more radically, establishing a Europe united under despotism, closed to free trade. Jefferson stubbornly insisted on the moral equivalence of Napoleon, “the tyrant of the land,” and Great Britain, “the tyrant of the sea” (245), effectively tilting American policy against the latter. As would occur more than once in the centuries to come, embargo alone did not work. “It was not to be expected that the British political nation, having steeled itself against the hardships of war for many years, would concede the issue in dispute merely from fear of economic distress. It had endured far worse at the hands of an enemy far more powerful, yet its will had not been broken” (223). Moreover, the embargo “could not have been enforced save by a veritable war against the violation of the embargo at home,” a war for which Jeffersonian America was of course unprepared, given its distaste for military establishment. Had Jefferson “publicly recognized that England was in truth engaged in a contest for public liberty and international order,” he could have compromised on the lesser issue of neutrals’ rights (227). Again, this is not so much a failure of “moralism,” as the authors would have it, as a failure to arrive at a reasonable moral judgment given competing moral and political claims.

    “Taken to escape the humiliating alternatives of national humiliation or war, [the embargo] led first to humiliation and ultimately to war”—the War of 1812, fought by the Madison administration. Professors Tucker and Hendrickson show that modernity seeks peace through economics but cannot escape the imperatives (and the charms) of politics. They are less successful in acknowledging that those imperatives and charms are often moral, not mere effects of force, measured by ‘realism.’ Moralism may be unreal, but moral judgment isn’t.

    Leftist Lit-Crit, Revised

    by

    Patrick Colm Hogan: The Politics of Interpretation: Ideology, Professionalism, and the Study of Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

    Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 15, Number 2, October 1991.

     

    Don Quixote ‘proves’ the existence of his chivalric heroes by imagining their faces. Academia today provides safe haven for many such knights of woeful countenance, unhappy warriors whose political battle-cry, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it!’ echoes harmlessly from distant, unmoved windmills.

    Patrick Colm Hogan seeks a literary criticism guided by political principles “closer to the political concerns of real human life” (viii). He aims not at the ‘deconstruction’ or the ‘construction’ of political-literary ‘theories.’ Poorly disguised assertions of arbitrary will and politically correct attitudinizing fail to impress him. As a man of the ‘Left,’ he sees that the political victory and moral legitimacy of the ‘Left’ require the congruence of its doctrines and insights with the real world. To change the world, one must understand it.

    In Hogan’s view, political criticism should combine evaluation of ideological aims, beliefs, and actions, the examination of how literary works foster these, and an answer to the perennial question, Cui bono?—the examination of what interests or “power relations” the inculcation of a given ideology “might serve” (30). Deconstructionism and some forms of feminist criticism impede these activities by condemning “logical inference and empirical investigation” as “patriarchal and repressive” (31). “A denial of the Principle of Non-Contradiction makes all of one’s claims into dogma, brooking no dispute” (35), ending with the substitution of “intimidation for dialectic” (49). This kind of criticism is political in the worst sense: partisan in tone and substance, coercive in spirit—in a word, tyrannical.

    Against Derrida, Hogan observes that definition need not entail oppressive hierarchies, that “logocentrism” has no necessary historical connection to “phallocentricism.” “Clearly, the ordinary guarded and skeptical methods of rational enquiry—so disparaged by deconstructionists—are far more germane to forging an anti-Leninist and anti-Stalinist left, especially if these are combined with a Kantian ethics which grants to individuals their rights as ends in themselves” (86).

    Against certain varieties of feminism, Hogan questions the attempt to make womanhood prior to a woman’s individuality, as when “women are encouraged not to develop their own capacities, but the putative capacities of their gender-essence” (98). Even as Voltaire twitted earlier philosophers for defining a tree by its ‘treeness,’ Hogan rejects claims that, say, Simone de Beauvoir could be adequately defined or explained by ‘femaleness.’ No empirical or logical evidence sustains such claims, which are little more than the photographic negatives of long-existing stereotypes, valorized to serve the interests or, more accurately to caress the vanity of new photographers.

    To subvert ideologies of domination ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ Hogan urges empirical and dialectical criticism along with action to “dismantle all those structures which establish or reinforce” ideology, including such institutions as religion, the state, and capitalism (171). In academia this would require “a massive anarchist or libertarian restructuring of the university” (193), including the abolition of such “feudal, guild structures” as academic departments (176). Tenure, tuition, and the exploitation of teaching assistants and part-time instructors would also need to go. He offers amusing remarks about the influence of the commercial ethos on literary scholars, each generation of whom makes work for itself, “creates a demand,” by seizing upon new theories of interpretation. “It all has to be done over!” I heard one literary feminist exult; just so.

    Hogan is a sane man. It is helpful to have his leftist and feminist critique of certain surreal elements of the lit-crit ‘Left.’ I admire his common sense, lucidity, and civic courage. He himself, however, departs from realism from time to time. From the book’s dedication to the Nicaraguan revolutionaries (all too many of whom turned out to be self-serving farceurs) to the concluding pipe dreams about an “Anarchist University,” there is here more than a touch of what Marxists rightly deride as utopian socialism. David Hume’s sound remark on other-worldly men of his day speaks even more pointedly to this-worldly activist-utopians of our own: “A delicate sense of morals, especially when attended with a splenetic temper, is apt to give a man a disgust of the world, and to make him consider the common course of human affairs with too much indignation.”