John Guillory: Professing Literature: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Part Two: “Organizing Literature: Foundations, Antecedents, Consequences.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.

 

From his discussion of the purposes of literary study in the first part of his book, Guillory turns to the matter of how literature has been defined. An “epochal change” occurred at the beginning of modern life, and he intends to show what it was and what its effects have been, not only on literary study but on the humanities as a whole. The objects of study themselves have changed, and along with them the ways in which those objects have been taught.

He begins with art historian Erwin Panofsky’s 1940 essay, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline.” Panofsky distinguishes between “documents” and “monuments.” Documents are “all those artifacts or traces of human making, action, or thought surviving into the present.” Monuments are the subset of documents that “have the most urgent meaning for us at any present moment, that most demand our recognition of study.” In literary study, documents range from Shakespeare’s Last Will and Testament to The Tempest. But only The Tempest is monumental. What has this to do with ‘the humanities’? It has to do with them because to study in a field called ‘the humanities’ one ought first to consider what a human is. Man is “the only animal to leave records behind him,” Panofsky writes, “for he is the only animal whose products ‘recall to mind’ an idea distinct from their material existence.” Such “records left by man” are often, though not always, intended to last beyond the lifetime of the man who made them. The “humanistic disciplines” belong “in the field of a long temporality, not that of memory but of memorialization,” as Guillory summarizes: “the domain of ‘culture.'” 

Panofsky then establishes a second distinction, that between the humanities and the sciences. Scientists make their observations by using “instruments which are themselves subject to the laws of nature” they investigate. What they investigate is “the cosmos of nature,” something not constructed by man. Humanists use documents as instruments for the investigation of other documents, studying the notebooks of Leonardo to better understand his sculptures and paintings (or vice-versa). Humanists often then produce their own documents, recording the results of their investigation into the documents they have studied. Thus, humanistic study differs in its objects from scientific study, ‘ontologically’: “If documents existed in the natural world, it would be as though light could report on its own speed.” But that report might be false. Documents “do not bear with them the assumption of truth telling, as do scientific instruments, which are designed to say only what they must say,” assuming the scientist really wants to know, not to distort or conceal. Panofsky can see the difference between the sciences and the humanities as a radical one because modern science has redefined ‘matter’ as something “that eludes natural languages altogether and bears little relation at all to the perception of matter on the macro scale of the human sensorium.” In the higher, or at least the most obscure reaches of science, words fail us.

As mentioned, some documents are also monuments. The word ‘monument’ derives etymologically from the Latin monera, which means “calling to mind.” They “make a particular demand upon us, whenever in human experience, past or present, that says ‘Remember me!'” Admittedly, one scholar’s monument is another’s document, “and vice versa”; “the condition of reversibility between document and monument obtains for all the objects of study in the humanities,” as a historian of the Renaissance might use Michelangelo’s Pieta as a document, while an art historian might use the historian’s history as a document that aids in understanding the Pieta. It should be noticed that this reversibility can deceive, as seen in Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. There, the historian so to speak ‘folds Machiavelli into’ the Renaissance, obscuring the fact that Machiavelli aims at revolutionizing the Renaissance, not only by undermining the Catholic Church and Christianity itself but by undermining Renaissance humanism, including the way in which the literary classics beloved by the humanists were studied. [1]

Treating a document as a monument implies a choice, since monumentality “crowds out other contenders to the margins or to obscurity”; Medusa-like, one statue might seem to turn another statue into mere stone, although in fact we are the ones who select the one over the other for our attention. (Critics can act as Medusas.) Whether considering documents or monuments, whatever the interchange we choose to make among them, “the humanities have an institutional home.” To have an institutional home is to have a regime, and the regime also ‘chooses’ what it holds up as a monument, and what it classifies as a document, as when it orders the removal of Robert E. Lee from his pedestal and places him in a warehouse, consigning him to documentary status, only.

What, then, do the documents, whether monumental or ordinary, tell Guillory about the epochal change undergone by literary study? That change saw “the demise of rhetoric” as the centerpiece not only of literary study but of education generally, a discipline undertaken principally in Latin. Classical rhetoric consisted not only of speaking with force and elegance but of “the full array of pedagogic techniques for raising language to the level of a formal practice, what in Greek culture was called a technē and in Roman an ars.” While rhetoric had its critics among the philosophers, even they did not regard it as bad in itself, as Aristotle and Cicero show; education in Latin (and to some extent Greek and Hebrew) amounted to a words-centered education that comprehended both what we now call the arts and the sciences. “The rhetorical system must be seen as a total program of cognitive-linguistic training, whose parts, though conceptually distinct, were thoroughly interconnected in the actual rhetorical practice of the premodern world.” Central to it was inventio, which wasn’t ‘invention’ in our sense of the term, a form of devising, but a feature of Aristotelian logic described in his Topics, “support[ing] rhetoric as a form of reasoning,” not merely as beguiling sophistry. This suggests that the pedagogy of rhetoric had absorbed some of Plato’s critique of rhetoric. In strengthening the distinctive human capacity to reason, the art of rhetoric was understood to cultivate (‘culture’ in the older sense) human nature, to bring it closer to its telos.

In this system of pedagogy, the ‘monumental’ registered in the practice of memorializing. For the ancients, memoria formed the basis of education, of rhetoric. Memoria was part of cognitive training. Moderns denigrate memorization as “rote”—that is, of mere parrotlike recitation. But under the pedagogy of classical rhetoric, memory was an art aimed at developing the human intellect, an art of mindfulness, an art that made human beings more human.

The epochal break came with the promotion of reading and writing at the expense of speaking in the curriculum and the reconception of reading and writing as ‘basic skills,’ a reconception that democratized reading and writing, enabling them to be extended “to the populace as a whole.” This democratization also required that the vernacular languages displace Latin as the means of education, since the populace more readily learned to read and write their own language. “Vernacularization is a condition and a cause of the demise of rhetoric, a force undermining the ‘dead languages’ of antiquity that could not be resisted forever.”

“But why was rhetoric not capable of vernacularization, leaving Latin behind?” It might have been; after all, oratory in English during the nineteenth century saw Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln among its practitioners, both trained under the auspices of a democratized but still largely traditional curriculum, including the King James Bible. But a verbal education did not serve the purposes of the ‘New Class’ of professional managers, who implemented what Woodrow Wilson (himself no mean orator) called the science of administration. “The new scientific and technical disciplines and vernacular language study together displaced the classical curriculum”—democratization for the populace, but underneath a new ‘aristocracy’ that based its claim to rule on the prestige of modern science. True, a part of rhetoric remained: oratory, “an elaborate program for training voice and gesture.” But this was turned to the service of education tailored to the new political regime. As early as the eighteenth century, oratory conceived not only as a means of delivering a speech but as developing a topic, arranging a speech logically and in an elegant style, was being replaced by ‘belles lettres,’ a pedagogy centered on writing, not speaking. Under the belletristic dispensation, speaking consisted of reciting “passages from works of literature”; that is, speaking was increasingly distanced from thought. Public speaking, the art of saying something one’s fellow citizens can judge, began to give way to polite speaking, which meant that speaking was increasingly relegated to civil society, to private life. This may well register modernity’s Machiavellian turn to statism, in which the prince wants to hear no ‘back-talk.’

“It was only in the later nineteenth century,” however, “when an increasingly writing-based pedagogy converged with the new vernacular curriculum of literary, scientific, technical, and vocational subjects,” a coincidence in which “the complementary relation between speaking and writing was irrevocably altered and speaking ceased to be a mater of any but the most rudimentary instruction.” Speech has become informal, not part of the formation of students. 

Guillory doesn’t know Machiavelli very well and does not appreciate his importance in the founding of modernity. But he does see the importance of several influential readers of Machiavelli. For René Descartes, memory is a “gift of the mind,” not a capacity to be developed as an important element of educating the human person. (Is there a ‘human person’ for Descartes?) Descartes rejects the art of rhetoric, turning instead to mathematics, to numbers not to words. And in his Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke denies that reasoning is aided by rhetoric or even (primarily) by logic, which he associates with the Scholastics. “Locke envisions a pedagogical scene in which the effects of rhetorical persuasion are produced by an intuitive practice”—his ‘simple ideas’ or sense impressions, the building blocks of the complex ideas—and “that rests upon a theory of human nature rather than a notion of language art or technē.” This isn’t quite correct, however. The distinction isn’t so much between nature and art as between rival claims about human nature. Classical rhetorical education understood human nature as teleological, art as a means of ‘imitating’ nature and, in the case of education, getting students to imitate the best examples of human being, to get them to grow into full humanity. Locke founds his educational system upon a non-teleological conception of human nature, a materialist conception that aims at getting students to come down to earth, to avoid the word-nets of rhetoricians, whether clerical or statesmanly. Finally, Adam Smith reduced rhetoric and belles lettres to the expression of moral sentiment—again, pushing moral theory away from reasoning.

But not quite finally. “The most sweeping critique of rhetoric” came at the hands of Immanuel Kant, who called rhetoric “the art of using the weakness of people for one’s own purposes.” Not art but “vigor” and sincerity were what Kant wanted in speech. The anti-Machiavellian Kant thus accepted the Machiavellian conception of rhetoric, the language of the fox, and rejected it for its Machiavellianism.

“If the Western school was rhetoric, what is it now?” Modern pedagogy centers on a particular kind of knowledge, namely, “information.” Information is “knowledge detached from individual knowers,” stored or transmitted “in symbolic form,” whether as words or numbers. Information informs; it bypasses teaching by one person of another person. It is “knowledge in disembodied form,” depersonalized. One only need access to it. Technē as the imparting of knowledge from master to apprentice becomes limited to the ‘fine arts,’ on one end of the scale, and ‘craftsmanship’ (carpentry, bricklaying) on the other end. It is true that “the very practice by which information is generated, transmitted, and manipulated is itself an art which, by definition, cannot be reduced to information.” But in general modern education, following Descartes, attempts to teach by means of method, not technē in the classical sense. The very term ‘technical’ has come to be defined as methodical. “Always in our society there is an effort to reduce the transmission of an art to the transmission of information.”

Modern pedagogy replaces comprehension in the sense of comprehensiveness—any “knowledge expressed in language, about any subject,” including both moral and natural philosophy—with “differentiation”—knowledge acquired by learning and applying methods “specific to different kinds of object.” “The emergence of new sciences in the early modern period was contingent on the differentiation of knowledge discourses and the development of new information technologies, such as the algebraic geometry,” the calculus. With this, mathematics became “a language for representing and intervening substantially into this world, not an ideal or Platonic realm of numbers and shapes.” Math became Machiavellian/Cartesian/Baconian, adapted to the conquest of nature. [2] Modern thinkers transformed logic, as well, shunting aside “the old formal logic of the syllogism” as well as the practical reasoning esteemed by Aristotle and Cicero, central to political life, for logics reducible to mathematical symbols, probabilities that could be calculated. This enterprise sharpened the difference between mathematics and what we now think of as the ‘hard’ sciences and ‘the humanities,’ now scarcely considered rational at all. In the classical sense, the humanities have been dehumanized, as seen in the title of José Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art. This brings a characteristic feature of the modern university, and of the modern way of life generally, its specialization of knowledge(s). “Many discourses we now think of as distinct disciplines, such as psychology or poetics or political science,” which once could be understood “within and through rhetoric, as belonging to technē” broadly defined, fit into bureaucratic ‘departments’ because they have become epistemologically compartmentalized.

Guillory acknowledges one important advantage moderns enjoy over the ancients. The rhetorical system, “rigorous and comprehensive” though it was, “was limited as a means of developing new knowledge.” The ambition to conquer nature, made desirable by the re-conception of nature as manipulable matter with no stable form and no inherent purpose, and therefore unfriendly to man, spurred an effort to learn more about matter itself, a practical interest in knowing one’s enemy. Such knowledge of matter can be accumulated, as Bacon recommended, discovered by experimentation instead of formal reasoning. Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning marshals the techniques of the old rhetoric in order to persuade one of the supreme use of non-rhetorical, non-verbal learning. Bacon specifically redefines inventio as the discovery of “what we know not” instead of “recover[ing] or resummariz[ing] what we already know.” “Knowledge in the form of accumulated information seems to stand outside of the body, as a ‘body of knowledge.'” Disembodied knowledge is knowledge readily manipulated, an “art of devising methods.” Masters of the art of devising methods are the “experts,” the members of the professional-managerial “New Class.” “The new class of knowers was in possession of greater knowledge than all the generations of its predecessors, but at the price of understanding less well than ever the process, of learning, the relation between art and information,” the verbal arts that “stretch beneath and across all the fields of knowledge as their common cognitive foundation.” No amount of information, and no mathematical formula, can teach a student why he should learn.

With modern research universities establishing themselves, literature professors struggled to find a place in the new regime. Two such attempts enjoyed only fleeting success: belles lettres and philology, which “belong neither to the older curriculum of the arts nor to the current system of the disciplines.” (“The history of Western education can be summed up” in the phrase, “From arts to disciplines.”) Guillory identifies the origin of belles lettres to the 1746 publication of The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle by the philosophe Charles Batteux. In that book, Batteux classified poetry, painting, sculpture, music, and dance as the fine arts, arts which “have in common the intention to give pleasure”—Batteux had Epicurean leanings—which he distinguished from the utilitarian “mechanical arts” and the partly utilitarian, partly pleasurable arts of rhetoric and architecture. G. W. F. Hegel later lent his considerable philosophic heft to this classification. A generation earlier, the French historian and educator Charles Rollin popularized the term ‘belles lettres’ in a work translated from the French into English in 1734, thereby “establish[ing] the idea of belles lettres as a course of study in England.” For Rollin, belles lettres included not only the fine arts but philosophy and rhetoric, too, making it into “a comprehensive system of education,” albeit one heavily weighted to the esthetic genres, those that give “pleasure.” For example, Adam Smith delivered a series of lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburg in the 1762-63 term and his former student Hugh Blair published an influential book based in part on those lectures twenty years later. Blair brought the term ‘taste’ into vogue in English literary study (“Latin had no word corresponding” to it), a term then allied with ‘criticism,’ which included the discriminations concerning poetry (John Dryden, the essayists Addison and Steele), of ‘moral sentiments’ (Smith), and civil society (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson). Such thinkers made belles lettres “a way of systematizing judgment across a range of writing genres.” In the commercial and industrial regime late nineteenth-century America, however, such an attempt could not sustain itself as a mode of university study, given the ever-increasing prestige of the sciences.

Enter philology, which claimed scientific status—an import not from France but from Germany. German Kultur centered on the study of vernacular languages, consonant with the nation-state the Hohenzollerns and Bismarck had built. “The German university successfully transmitted” an even “more powerful ideal to its Anglo-American counterparts: research.” This was indeed congenial to the notion of ‘discipline,’ and also to the sharp division between moral and natural philosophy, inaugurated long before by Hume but institutionalized in Germany as the division between the humanities and the sciences. Philology attempted to mediate between the two. “By giving nations a cultural origin in a common language, philology effectively fused the philosophical [German idealist] concept of culture with that of ethnos” in a discipline that could be understood as empirical. Philology could bring study of the classics, history, philosophy, and literature “into a close relation to current standards of scientific knowledge at the same time that it unified scholarly enterprises within a total view of the history of civilization,” as propounded by such historicists as Hegel, but now within a positivist framework. “In England and the United States, the philologists who trained in the German universities of the later nineteenth century returned to their home institutions with a conception of their discipline more than ever prescribed by norms of scientific investigation, as well as by the turn to vernacular languages.” This put philologists squarely into conflict with belletrists.

As Hegel might have predicted, the two disciplines did not so much kill each other off as ‘synthesize’ into ‘literary history.’ “By the 1890s, the curricular structure of literary study in the university was organized according to the period concepts of literary history the same period concepts that organize the discipline today.” But in institutional terms, the synthesis was far from complete, as belletrists and philologists stuck to their lasts, continuing to compete with the new literary historians and even the remaining teachers of rhetoric, now reduced to teaching composition classes. The problem for philologists, whose discipline might have seemed the most compatible with the new university regime, was that literature “resisted scientific treatment,” “yield[ing] diminishing returns when applied to literature.” What can philology tell me about Paradise Lost that Milton wants me to know? As a consequence, philology “open[ed] space for a new science of language: linguistics,” which eventually “traveled very far indeed from philology” into the realms of such ‘harder’ sciences as biology and psychology. As for belles lettres, the criticism it fostered now inclined to resist utilitarianism, industrialism, and ‘scientism’ generally, arguing that such disciplines may at best serve but never rule human beings, never support the civility of civil society, never lend prudence to politics. But given the universities’ esteem for the sciences, this has caused literary study to become more marginal to academic life. Tocqueville might well have nodded with approval at the reading clubs that arose in the nineteenth century and continue to this day.

The reading clubs, consisting of ‘lay readers,’ evidently follow Tocqueville’s understanding of democratization, being democracy’s equivalent of the aristocratic salons. Thus, “the word literacy did not become current until later in the nineteenth century, when the ability to read one’s native tongue was becoming universal” and the study of classical languages declined. Guillory recalls that the Latin word literatus referred “only to someone who read Latin”; one who had no Latin was a laicus, a layman. Initially, this distinction characterized clergy from non-clergy, but also those practicing the professions of medicine and law. Even as the elevation of vernacular languages to professional status began, professionals developed their own specialized ‘languages’ or jargon, deploying vernacular terms in ways incomprehensible to outsiders, as readers of medical and legal ‘literature’ quickly discover. In universities today, this has led to the establishment of ‘composition’ courses intended to teach students to ‘write for business,’ or, as one observer has put it, to “teach students how to write the kind of utilitarian prose they will be asked to produce in their other college classes and later on in their jobs.” Boswell has triumphed over Johnson.

Even the reading of poetry and imaginative prose became ‘professionalized,’ with the rise of literary “modernism.” James Joyce and Ezra Pound aren’t easy to read. Both polemicized against rhetoric, against writing and speaking that aims at being understood by laymen. Guillory cites Wallace Stevens, who called poetics “the imagination’s Latin,” the new demarcation line between the learned and the unlearned. “A defense of modernism such as we find in Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s important Survey of Modernist Poetry projected a reading public that was rapidly bifurcating into those who were receptive to the experiments of the modernists and those who were resistant, those Graves and Riding called ‘plain readers.'” The adoption of literary modernism by academics subordinated judgment of texts to the interpretation of them, a task that was manifestly more difficult when dealing with the new vernacular literature. Interpretation soon extended to earlier literary works (as seen in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity), which were discovered to have difficulties of their own, difficulties insufficiently clarified by literary history. “This movement gave birth to a discipline of reading even as it rescued older vernacular literature in English from oblivion.” 

Today, professional and lay reading divide along four lines: professional reading is work, lay reading leisured; professional reading is disciplined by certain accepted techniques and procedures (which, however, change over time), lay reading undisciplined in that sense; professional reading scrutinizes the pleasure readers take in reading, lay reading simply enjoys the ride, which may or may not include moral edification; professional reading is of, by, and for members of the literary profession, university professors, lay reading solitary or within a reading group, that is, among friends. Guillory regrets that “lay reading so often falls to the level of ephemeral consumption, with no other end than pleasure or distraction”; he also regrets “the mutual incomprehension of these two practices of reading.” Neither of these conditions need be, if professionals will begin to think of reading as an “ethical practice,” that is, the development of character, an ethos reinforcing, and reinforced by a way of life, a Bios ti, itself one element of a regime, a politeia. Guillory distinguishes classical ethics from Christian morality, the former being “a cultivation of the self”—actually, the soul, inasmuch as the ‘self’ is a modern, Montaignian invention—unburdened by “notions of salvation or damnation.” “Lay reading is best understood as a practice that belongs to the ethical domain,” a domain Guillory tends to conceive of in terms of a democratized Epicureanism including “physical exercise, cooking, conversation with friends, sexual activity, or any number of other pleasures which enlarge our experience and enrich our sensibilities,” a “practice of pleasure” that makes pleasures both more intense and “better for us.” Professionals, too, experience such pleasure, albeit in “rarefied” form. To reconceive reading as an ethical practice might have “political consequence,” although it must be remarked that the original Epicureans shunned politics and the first modern political Epicurean was Hobbes, that great despiser of literature, followed by Locke, who advised the father who detected any literary inclinations in his son to move decisively to stamp it out. Admittedly, the American Epicureans amongst the Founders, Franklin and Jefferson, were less unrelenting.

Guillory isn’t thinking of the American Founders, however. He has his critical sights on New Left literati of the past few decades, who defend pleasure “only when it comes dressed in the garb of a transgressive politics,” only when it has been politicized—that is, moralized, reduced to separating moral sheep from sinful goats. “If the failure of both lay and professional readers to recognize reading as an ethical practice underlies their mutual antagonism and miscomprehension, I have, alas, no program for reconciling these practices.”  Still, “many lay readers very much desire the improvement of their reading experience, a desire that is widely expressed in lay engagement with the other arts as well.” Indeed, but perhaps this receptivity might only be answered by professionals less bent on proselytizing transgressive politics?

The professoriate is unlikely to reform itself anytime soon. One problem, quite possibly intractable, is what Guillory calls “the democratization of the educational system,” by which he means the refusal of graduate program administrators and indeed of undergraduate program administrators to restrict access to higher education when fewer non-academic institutions want to hire the graduates. Ordinary businesses respond to flagging market demands by reducing supply, by lowering prices, and/or by attempting to (as economists say) ‘creating’ greater demand. Colleges and universities succeeded in persuading potential students and their parent that what they offer is valuable—people still want to ‘go to college’—but the resulting oversupply of graduates devalues the degrees themselves in the eyes of the marketplace. This might turn out to be a good thing: “I would like to think that the devastation of the job market might liberate students to pursue whatever mot interests them.” I would like to think so, too, but, as a critic once said, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

The European model of the research university makes sense if you run your university as the Europeans do—by being undemocratic, restricting admissions to students who are ready to learn, thus freeing professors to teach good students and conduct research, as well. Otherwise, one gets a two-tiered faculty; senior, tenured researchers with a few good students combined with part-time people who do the grunt work of teaching the masses. Guillory holds up the example of the “composition course,” wherein junior faculty teach writing in the “new professional, managerial, bureaucratic, and technical settings,” which has largely jettisoned the inventio of the old rhetoric instruction, “the finding of arguments.” But students learn how to write by reading good books, by following the reasoned thought of writers who know how to think. Not enough of that gets done, anymore, and the composition courses are reduced to the application of rules—that is, to the managerial, the bureaucratic, and the technical. Guillory supposes that removing grades from freshman composition courses might “de-inhibit writing,” get it away from the dreary grind of such pedagogy, although it might also (probably would?) de-inhibit working, too. He also wants English departments to reach out to the field of “communications studies,” to widen their ‘market’ by allying with those who teach the non-written ways in which human beings signal one another. That might work as a business model, but in doing so it blurs the distinction Aristotle sees between human beings, who speak to one another, and birds, which merely call.

And this isn’t what Guillory really wants, as he shows in his concluding chapter. What is literary study for? Once settled, how shall that purpose be attained? What sort of curriculum is needed? And how shall teachers balance the various elements within that curriculum?

“The study of literature is a rational procedure for establishing what can be known about an object,” a “discipline,” not “an ineffable expression of taste or the intuitive cultivation of sensibility.” Its purpose is knowledge, presumably about things worth knowing, as identified by the rulers of the university regime. (As with all regimes, there are better and worse.) A discipline or way of life in a regime requires a plan, in the case of the university a plan of study or curriculum, as outlined in a variety of thinkers, including Erasmus, Bacon, and Vico; the contrast between the curricula of Erasmus and Bacon reflects the difference in the regime purposes of each. In language, “the knowledge that was foundational for this structure was the ability to read, write, and speak Latin (or sometimes both Latin and Greek”), but “this linguistic coherence disappeared from the educational system with the venularization of learning”—fortunately, not quite an Ivory Tower of Babel, in part because Latin remained de rigeur (as we vernacularists might say) in the sciences for a long time, and partly because mathematical science began to tie the system together, across national boundaries. Given vernacularization, literary study can no longer be unitary but it can be coherent if its practitioners think in an orderly way. 

Guillory begins by identifying five “rationales” for literary study: linguistic/cognitive, moral/judicial, national/cultural, esthetic/critical, and epistemic/disciplinary. Linguistic/cognitive literary study establishes a parallel between writing and speaking, with writing being speaking’s “companion art,” a means of formulating an rational argument, or at least a persuasive one, before you open your mouth. The Greeks understood arts to “refer to cognitive abilities and not to the objects that such abilities might bring into existence”—forming a plan for your statue and a rational means of realizing that plan. Teachers of literature “no longer see what we do, even though we have always been engaged in the transmission of this art.” Since “no one can deny the importance of language arts among the modes of cognition,” of reading before we write, listening before we speak, and thinking while we do all of those things,” an effort to recover the way of the ‘ancients’ might yet regain momentum, energeia. 

“The moral/judicial rationale is as old as the linguistic/cognitive, but it subjects the accumulation of writing to greater selection; the judiciousness of its designers gives students a praxis to emulate.” “The occasions of rhetoric in ancient Greece—the forensic, the deliberative, and the epideictic—largely involved moral judgments, expressed in highly structured arguments.” It is the purpose of presenting moral/judicial arguments to students that discourages mindlessness or, as Guillory more courteously puts it, “defaults” to judgment’s “intuitive base, where it often echoes contemporary norms and biases.” As “teachers know,” or once knew, “the impulse to judge characters in literature is difficult to resist and that it often precipitates judgment of the work,” making readers “heavy-handed,” inducing them to indulge in “an overwriting of the literary work by unexamined moral attitudes.” Guillory hopes that the (to us) immorality of the “moral norms” that informed the earlier societies which characters in that literature often exemplified will prove “the motive for a deeper inquiry into the historicity of moral precepts.” But if historical relativism prevails, what good does it serve, and why is that putative good not itself an artifact of ‘history’? And if current “moral norms” are historical artifacts, how would one justify changing them, as Guillory evidently wants to do, regarding literary study? 

The national/cultural rationale for literary study obviously addresses politics, regimes, more directly than any of the others, although all of them have political implications. Vernacularization of literary study went with the formation of modern states, particularly of ‘nation-states,’ as seen in (for example) Machiavelli and Montaigne. “The notion of the ‘transnational’ that literary scholars favor at present”—notice that the question of historicism persists—is “at once a repudiation of the ‘national’ and at the same time an invocation of it.” That is, it might decline toward a universal ‘culture’ under a world state or a demand to treat all ‘cultures’ equally, or a claim that one ‘culture’ is superior to all the others (yesterday, Germany, today, China, in practice if not in theory, America). “Literary study can only liberate itself from its bond to national languages” (again, because that’s the current fashion?) “by thinking through its own origins.” This returns Guillory to Panofsky’s distinction between documents and monuments, preservation and canonization. “Let us admit that cultural production today is no longer principally constituted by works of literature”; this notwithstanding, there is a new universal language, English. “To whom does Shakespeare belong?” To anyone who can learn English and then learn in English but ‘making it his own’—but there’s the rub. Ezra Pound appropriated Confucius in the service of Italian Fascism. That is, the liberation of literary studies from its bond to national languages, or the universalization of one of those languages, will not settle the regime question.

Can literary study attempt to float above the regimes altogether? Guillory recalls the origin of ‘aesthetics’ in a study by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, who flourished in the eighteenth century. In his Aesthetica, Baumgarten took the Greek word, aisthesis, meaning sensibility as “sensory experience,” and elevated it to our contemporary meaning, the refinement of such experience, setting standards for it, in relation both to nature and to works of art. Esthetics shifts judgment from an appreciation of form as it relates to ethics to an appreciation of form alone. In the hands of Kantian ‘epistemology’ (another coinage derived from Greek, appearing a century later), this “sacrifice[ed] the objective status of aesthetic judgment” by asserting that esthetic judgment is “without concept.” Such a conceptless conception militates against Guillory’s argument for the rational practice of literary study, unless he recurs to historicist doctrine as the authoritative framework for rationalism. Recent history tells him that “the waning of literary culture is a ‘media situation’ that is probably irreversible,” turning literature into yet another form of “entertainment.” And to view literature as entertainment, alone, means that there is little point in reading anything that takes effort to understand. This again suggests that the democratization of literary study proceeds apace.

Guillory’s fifth and final rationale for literary study, the epistemic/disciplinary, pushes against the reconception of literature within the limits of entertainment alone. “Literary scholarship is most definitely a form of knowledge,” but it is knowledge quite different from that pursued by modern scientists. Literary knowledge does not accumulate, except insofar as it is knowledge of literary history. For this reason, “scientists do indeed wonder whether disciplines such as literary study produce knowledge” at all. In their terms, it doesn’t, or doesn’t produce much. “Arguments in literary study” not only contradict each other, as scientific hypotheses do, but they cannot be confirmed “in the manner of scientific hypotheses,” by experimentation. In reply, Guillory “want[s] most to bring to light…that the articulation of understanding can be communicated a knowledge but not as fact.” Accumulating facts is one thing, understanding them another. By understanding, Guillory means the kind of knowledge that says, “I know what you mean.” “The proof of that knowledge is the ability to articulate understanding—to say, in other words, what you mean.” That is, literary scholars and all students of literature intend “to express their understanding of literary works in other words, that is, their own words.” In doing so, they integrate those works into their own souls, first by understanding them as their authors intended them to be understood (the proper understanding of ‘historicity’) and only then by subjecting them to assessment, to judgment, to ‘critique.’ In this, literary study can contribute to what the litteratteur/philosopher/scientist Francis Bacon calls “the advancement of learning.”

 

 

Note

1. See Harvey C. Mansfield: Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023. For discussion, see “What Is ‘Effectual Truth’?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. On the philosophic significance of the calculus, see Jacob Klein: Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. New York: Dover Publications, 1992 [1968].

 

 

John Guillory: Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Part One: The Formation and Deformation of Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.

 

A skeptic might wonder if, by “professing criticism,” Professor Guillory means that professing criticism is all English professors really do, without ever getting around to criticism itself. But he doesn’t mean it that way, exactly, and it would be odd if he did, since criticism sometimes seems to be about all many such professors now do, using their authority, such as it is, to issue ‘critiques’ of modern societies, critiques informed by a variety of egalitarian sentiments. 

Guillory rather intends to consider “an unresolved problem in how literary study understands its purpose.” Should works of literature be studied at university or criticized? Or both? To study, one must first establish a “discipline,” “identify[ing] objects of study by differentiating these objects from others, by specialization”; a discipline is a discipline by virtue of its implied command, ‘Stay in your lane.’ Study requires no university framework, nor indeed an institutional framework of any kind. A student of literature or of physics might even prefer to be a lone wolf. A profession does require such a framework because a profession sets “the requisites and perquisites common to all the disciplines,” with the expectation that all members of that profession will adhere to them. Readers of Plato will understand this as a political-philosophic question, the exigencies of political life (reverence for the gods of the city, deference to the rulers and the laws) versus philosophers’ desire to know and therefore to inquire, to question human rulers, gods, and laws. In modern tyrannies, this tension becomes acute; modern commercial republics have attempted to resolve the matter by establishing liberty of speech and the press, but universities—regimes within the larger regimes—have their own set of rulers and ruling institutions. To “profess” literature, to speak and write within the ruling institutions of a university, may be to collide with the university’s regime, which may want to define scholarship in ways some scholars do not want to follow. 

To this perennial problem, literary study has added another, a problem of self-definition. Literary study, the discipline, has become a profession, but it didn’t start out that way. In earlier modern centuries, those who studied literature thought of themselves as literary critics. And before that, those who studied literature considered themselves rhetoricians, or philosophers, or sophists. “The discipline’s enthusiastic embrace of professionalism” in the past hundred years or so “betrays an ambivalent relation to its amateur past.” “The essays in this book consider how literary study has been organized, both historically and in the modern era, both before and after its professionalization.” After all, if literary scholars cannot clearly define what they do, how shall they defend their position within the university regime? In the early twentieth century, scholars labeled what they proposed to do in the university with “a surprising array of names: philology, belles lettres, rhetoric, literary history,” before finally settling on “a new name,” “literary criticism,” after the Second World War.

This is, then, a political question. Guillory addresses it sociologically, however. Sociology focuses on subpolitical categories, while inevitably bringing political considerations in, albeit with insufficient clarity. In this book, one hears about Weber and Veblen, but not Aristotle (except for the Poetics), Tocqueville, or Machiavelli. Tocqueville would be especially helpful, since his analysis of democracy as the ruling condition of civil society remains unsurpassed and supremely relevant to what literary scholars have been doing in modernity. But this caveat should not deter anyone from learning from Guillory’s immense erudition and formidable analytic strength. He knows what he studies and professes, better than just about anyone else. And he does use at least one political term, calling “the perpetual churn in literary study” a “constant revolutionizing of its methods and objects.” Regime change, indeed.

“Literary study in the past did not take the form of a professional activity at all; for most of its history, literary study was a set of practices with many different sites, both within and outside the university,” ‘professionalizing’ itself only in the late nineteenth century, “and then only fully after the First World War”—that is, with the rise of Progressivism, a movement addressed by and in large measure to, the expanding class of persons who thought of themselves as ‘professionals.’ “The theory and practice of professionalization was a hallmark of the Progressive Era, when the university gathered an extraordinary number of disciplines and professions within its pale, organizing them in the bureaucratic form of the ‘department'”—bureaucracy (somewhat contradictorily) at the service of historical movement toward ever-increasing social egalitarianism being Progressivism’s signature. By professional, Guillory doesn’t mean, merely, someone who gets paid for what he does—a professional wrestler, for example. Earlier specialists in literature “achieved great visibility and influence without depending upon academic credentials”—in England, Carlyle, Arnold, and in America Emerson; “they were in that sense truly amateurs, representatives of the common reader,” possessing “a kind of expertise that was self-authorized,” founded on public recognition. Later scholars and critics committed themselves to “the ideal of professionalism,” that is, recognition within the institutional setting, the regime, of the university, which requires credentials. 

To be accepted within such a regime, literary criticism needed redefinition. No longer a “practice of judgment”—how shall a bureaucracy assess that?—it became a “method of interpretation” focused on a “proper disciplinary object,” in this case “the verbal work of art.” As a method, it made sense, at least marginally, to the university administrators; interpretation sounded sort of scientific, or at least something that could make a claim to know. Famously, the kind of knowledge claimed by post-World War II literary scholars proved unsatisfactory to administrators after the administrators’ student population deemed it ‘irrelevant’ to the social and political controversies of the late 1960s: sexual liberation, psychedelic drugs, and fear of getting shot in a rice paddy in Southeast Asia (a fear dignified by the term ‘anti-imperialism’). In response, “the discipline and its institutional structures, especially the curriculum, were reimagined as surrogates for the social totality,” an ambitious claim indeed, which Guillory kindly calls “the profession’s overestimation of its aims.” But at this same time, not only the well-calculated irrationalism of the New Left but “the proliferation of new media” has “displaced literature itself from its historical position as the premier medium of entertainment and edification.” Guillory cogently remarks, “It does not matter how politically ambitious the aims of literary study might be if literature itself continues to contract in social importance.” The ‘social-activist’ turn in literary study brings the discipline to the bar of its “real effects in the world,” a “position of justification by faith,” which he doubts to be “either warranted or likely to sustain the discipline in the future.” This may then be what educationists call a ‘teachable moment’ for teachers of literature, and Guillory undertakes “to give an account of the profession’s formation and deformation according to a guiding principle of what the Greeks called parrhesia, or speaking the truth freely.”

Every regime features a way of life that tends to produce a characteristic human ‘type.’ In Guillory’s preferred sociological terms, “all professional formation is also, by necessity, deformation,” not necessarily in a pejorative sense but indeed as a necessity of mastering the task. The hand of the dyer gets stained; the back of the scholar, leaning over the book on the table, gets hunched. And of course these habitual behaviors form and deform minds at least as much as bodies. This is true of scholarship pursued in solitude or within the university bureaucracy, that “highly organized, even byzantine form of collectivity.” Bureaucracies ‘compartmentalize’ human activities, thoughts, habits; “the fact that the division of knowledge during the nineteenth century into ever more specialized disciplines necessitated the reorganization of university faculty into departments, the most conspicuous feature of our institutional geography.” A type of human being called a ‘clerk,’ closely aligned to ‘clericalism,’ could be described by Nietzsche as zealous, serious, and even furious; this character hasn’t gone away but it has adapted itself to the universities’ turn “away from the church.” “Literary study is not alone among the humanistic disciplines in its struggle to define a social mission that would justify its corporate identity as a profession or to resort to overestimation as compensatory response to uncertainty of aim.” And as Nietzsche well knows, scholars are not philosophers; they are oxen, plodding over the field of knowable things, at best directed by philosophers or, as likely, followed by philosophers who harvest their gleanings. In Nietzsche’s formulation, however, philosophers imitate life itself by partaking of life’s universal will to power, a doctrine that distorts Plato (Guillory cites the superficial Hannah Arendt on this, with altogether too much credence) and deformed Heidegger (fair enough). The problem of deformation, Guillory maintains, in philosophy or in any other discipline, must be “redressed by a better estimation of philosophy, as of any scholarly discipline.” (Yes and no: a better estimation than Nietzsche’s, to be sure, but not an estimation that fails to distinguish philosophers from scholars—in this instance, from professors of philosophy or, to use an older word, philosophes.) 

Returning to the Progressives and their distinctive kind of bureaucracy, Guillory cites the “new professions [that] both displaced and transformed the system of the three ‘ancient’ (that is, medieval) professions” of law, medicine, and divinity. As Plato almost says of the idols of the cave, “it is difficult to see through the professionalization of literary study to its long prehistory”; “almost” because the Platonic ascent rises to nature, not to history. Guillory presents an “epochal break” whereby “claims to professional identity b a proliferation of new technical and managerial workers effectively entailed a reconceptualization of cognitive labor itself,” a reconceptualization “expressed in a great burst of theorizing that lasted from the later nineteenth century until the Second World War.” That theorizing, it should be seen, consisted precisely of a shift in political thought that mirrored a prior shift in philosophy, the shift called ‘historicism,’ replacing both Biblical commandments and natural right as the source of moral and political principles. Guillory here cites Kenneth Burke, who, although no Edmund Burke, understands clearly enough that “a society’s ways of life affect its modes of thinking, by giving rise to partial perspectives,” which both form and deform citizens. Guillory provides the necessary application: in “much Progressive Era theory, the professional organization serves as a model for society itself.” As both Burkes, Aristotle, Progressive stalwart John Dewey, and many others acknowledge, “all education can be understood as a process of habituation, the embodiment of knowledge,” and “what one learns changes one’s behavior, but it can also induce a maladaptive hardening of behavior over time.” Progressives especially concerned themselves with inculcating expertise, wielded by (in Woodrow Wilson’s phrase) “experts in the relations of things,” prepared to coordinate the relations of those “things,” including persons, in the march toward social justice as they conceived it. “This ideology of professional expertise is in some ways as constitutive of modernity as the rise of the natural sciences,” and indeed conceives the ‘social sciences’ and at times the humanities along the model of experimentalism at the service of the mastery of nature and of ‘fortune.’ Dividing intellectual from manual labor, professionalism animates “a new class” of professional managers, which “arrogates ‘intellectual’ labor to itself,” and thus moral and political authority to itself. Although Guillory finds “the explosion of professions in the Progressive Era” “difficult to explain,” that may be because he considers neither Machiavelli (and following him Bacon), whose prince knows how to “master Fortuna” by the means of the lion and the fox, nor Tocqueville, who traces the longue durée of democratization. If the professions valorized by Progressivism as instruments of historical progress toward egalitarianism have proliferated, this registers the modern philosophic attempt to rule nature combined with the modern philosophic esteem for equality; the ambition to rule according to the dictum, ‘Knowledge is power’ and to ‘democratize’ the ruled, simultaneously, requires the expansion of professionalism to disciplines well beyond the medieval trinity.

For literary scholars, the problem has been that their discipline “was not an easy fit for the university,” so reorganized. “The establishment of new disciplines in the university system, and their ultimate bureaucratic organization into departments, was premised on a normative conception of knowledge identified with what the age called science.” Science meant not only natural science but “other forms of empirical investigation, such as history and philology,” both of which had to do with the study of literature. As scholarship generally became increasingly institutionalized within universities, “many nonscientific professions came increasingly to imitate the scientific form of knowledge production through disciplinarization, that is, by the strategy of locating the production and reproduction of their expertise in the university,” as universities “brought the professions into permanent fusion with the system of the disciplines, which in turn transformed the university itself.” In the United States, in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, colleges had trained clergymen and coated the sons of commercial and industrial entrepreneurs with “the veneer of European civility.” American gentry, so formed, returned to the enterprises of their fathers, or invented new ones, but had no substantial bureaucracy to enter and so needed no education to fit them for it. When philosophic doctrines of historicism, democratized as a reader of Tocqueville might anticipate, turned the universities away from Bible-based theology and natural rights-based civic life, there was no political class to resist them, to guide democracy away from them, as Tocqueville had hoped his own aristocratic class would do. Thus, “in the era of the great university presidents—Charles William Eliot of Harvard, Danield Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins, Andrew Dickson White of Cornell” (one might add Wilson at Princeton)—the “Latin and Greek curriculum was replaced by the system of electives, which permitted specialization directed toward a career” and also permitted professors not only to teach but to do research. “These professors acquired sophisticated new conceptions of research in part as a consequence of study abroad, primarily in the German universities.” The American universities (and, under Dewey’s influence, high schools and elementary schools) taken together amounted to “a new kind of school,” one committed not to transmitting the principles of the existing regime to subsequent generations but to move toward a new regime altogether, one founded upon the new, historicist principles. Under this new dispensation, literary study could thrive in the universities under the rubric of philology, the scientific study of language. “But this was only a temporary rapprochement” between literary study and the ‘harder’ sciences.

Fortunately for the status of literary studies in the university, not science itself but professionalism became the authoritative criterion for inclusion in the new regime. “Social authority” “came to be based on the very institutional and cultural forms science had helped to establish: the professional association, the academic discipline, the department, professional and graduate schools, the higher degree”; “in the end, professionalism triumphed even over science.” “Knowledge workers” have become “a new ruling class,” and as that class invents more new technologies that enhance their rule, more wealth, prestige, and political power accrues to them. All regimes have rulers; all rulers make claims to rule, upholding some idea of justice and maintaining that they know how to obtain it. Rule by experts maintains its authority by defining professionalism in terms of cognitive or abstract work, by asserting a specialized knowledge that excludes non-experts from the work of rule, by organizing ruling institutions, including publishing enterprises that make their principles and practices known to one another and to the general public, along with professional organizations and educational institutions, by establishing bureaucracy as a main arm not only of government conventionally defined but in education and in ‘private enterprise’ (the business corporation), and finally by “ideologies of social presentation or legitimation” such as “public service” (a nod to democracy by the undemocratic) or, even more pointedly, by means of such locutions of ‘being on the right side of history’ and indeed on the ‘cutting edge of history,’ and the now-familiar ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’—all within the bureaucratic institutional framework peopled by the new ruling class. Commerce and industry can thus be brought to heel—more readily than one might suppose, thanks to their own bureaucratic structures peopled by university graduates saturated by historicist ideologies.

Within those universities, given the material difference between “a new and potentially lucrative discovery in chemistry” and “a new reading of Joyce’s Ulysses,” “much depends on the maintenance of professional identity” among those who produce the latter sort of thing. Such professionalization “insulates some kinds of knowledge work to a certain extent from the volatility of the market,” seldom kind to new readings of Joyce’s Ulysses. To keep literary studies in the same institutional setting as chemistry, physics, and biology requires not only a claim to professionalism, however, but an additional claim not to commercial or industrial benefit, which would be supremely implausible, but to social benefit. And this, too, is only somewhat less tenuous. To the rescue comes the ‘market’ within the universities themselves, where the humanities have competed fairly well with natural and social sciences in terms of ‘customers’ and ‘products’ —the “number of students taught or books published and, ultimately, to a measurable index of institutional reputation.” Three consequences follow from these circumstances: “standardized, universalized, ritualized, and above all compulsory” professional standards such as academic degrees, attendance at academic conventions and conferences, and publications; the attempt to innovate (fitting well with Progressivism); and the “professional profile,” most notably “the ability to analyze or make complex arguments, in spoken or written form.” For professors of literature, this has issued in “desires to effect change directly through the critique expressed in literary criticism.” And this leads back to the problem of “overestimation” of the value of literary studies and criticism, or what an advertising man would call ‘puffing.’ Among academics, however, puffing is very close to professing, and may often be done with considerable sincerity, if not naivete. This can be a problem, since literary study now calls itself literary criticism, and “no other discipline” than literary criticism “incorporates the concept of criticism into its name.” Puffing and criticism rest uneasily together, given the inclination of the criticized to answer with critiques of their own, and given the occasional inclination of critics to criticize themselves. “If criticism is a kind of Archimedean lever by which literary critics hope to move the world, it must be a wonderful device indeed, wherever one stands in order to push down on this lever.”

Where, then, shall the literary critic stand? What is “the particular field of professional expertise” where he “plants his flag”? After all, the professional training of literary scholars “by no means confers upon literary scholars the authority to speak on social and political matters in public venues,” a point about which no less an eminence than Joseph Schumpeter groused about back in 1942, calling literary criticism the “profession of the unprofessional”—a palpable hit, indeed, if one makes much of one’s professionalism, as literary scholars and social scientists like Schumpeter must alike do, if they profess within a modern university.

Criticism came to sight in the late seventeenth century as “the name of a genre of writing” in which writers judged plays and poems, usually in prose but occasionally in poetry, as Alexander Pope did. As the eighteenth century saw Enlightenment philosophes coming to the fore, and as the nineteenth century saw the acceleration of the movement toward ‘democracy’ or social equality, criticism ranged afield, eventually to critiques of “society itself.” This attracted no stern objections until literary criticism “competed for territory among the academic disciplines,” as it was compelled to do in the decades before Schumpeter published his riposte. Guillory hastens to say, “I do not believe the criticism of society is the province of any particular discipline, much less that it can be institutionalized in departments of literature”; “criticism is the privilege of no one discipline and the obligation of all.” Other university denizens are less ‘inclusive.’ Yet criticism implies a criterion or set of criteria for judgment. What will that be, for literary scholars?

At the time literary criticism had established itself outside the universities, formidable Samuel Johnson had defined its task as “to establish principles,” thereby “improv[ing] opinion into knowledge” with his essays in The Gentleman’s Magazine. Although Guillory does not mention it, Johnson was speaking in Platonic terms, the ascent from opinion to knowledge of nature being the philosophic ascent, the ascent from the Cave. A ‘discipline’ indeed, as Plato himself makes plain in his Letters. [1] In a sense, the ‘caves’ of Europe had multiplied by Johnson’s time, as many clergy and statesmen alike had separated their regimes from the Catholic Church, causing Bibles to be translated into vernaculars; literary critics, for their part, wrote in the vernacular on literary works written in the vernacular. The reign of Latin had weakened and would weaken still more. 

Johnson’s life ended shortly after the United States of America gained independence from his sovereign. As in England and in Europe generally, American literary critics operated outside of academia for the next century, but when the study of literature gained entrance into the universities, “the classically trained teaching corps of the university system had to be recommissioned for the new vernacular curriculum.” Between the world wars, universities welcomed many of the literary critics to their faculties, “whatever their credentials.” This meant that literary criticism “became an academic profession before it became a discipline.” The critics professionalized themselves by formulating a method of interpretation, the most successful being the New Criticism of John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt, later at Kenyon. Ransom “made the stakes of the procedure explicit: ‘Rather than occasional criticism by amateurs, I should think the whole enterprise might be seriously taken in hand by professionals.'” This amounted to a challenge to the scholars, by now primarily literary historians; the New Criticism insisted that a literary work be interpreted within the framework of the text itself, not as a token of the ‘time’ in which it was written. Although Guillory describes the literary historians as positivists, one might more cogently describe them as historicists, meaning historical relativists—having derived their intellectual assumptions from the several neo-Hegelian doctrines then taught in the graduate schools, the philosophic framework of Progressivism. Ransom and his allies often resisted Progressivism not only in literary study but also in politics, as seen in their collection of essays on social and economic topics, I’ll Take My Stand.

By the years subsequent to World War II, literary and social critics independent of the universities had dwindled in number, the “New York Intellectuals” being the most conspicuous holdouts. Historians and textualists papered over their differences and proceeded to school the Baby Boomers. But “the postwar settlement was fragile: the merger of criticism and scholarship drove the criticism of society underground, as the cost of compromise.” Pressured by the New Left, and at the same time getting a bit bored with what they were doing (“endlessly repeated celebrations of great literature”), the literary professoriate welcomed “the reassertion of criticism,” and indeed of criticism of topics well beyond literary forms. If neo-Hegelianism galvanized the professors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, neo-Marxism or ‘cultural Marxism’ galvanized the younger scholars in the universities, soon joined by the New Leftists who had escaped conscription by going to graduate school. (New Leftists began as critics of academic professionalism, as seen in Tom Hayden’s 1962 Port Huron Statement, but quickly adapted to university forms upon getting gainful employment—tenured employment, at that.) New methods were needed to maintain this professional status, and there was no shortage of those, thanks to prior efforts by European leftists, among whom Jacques Derrida, armed with ‘deconstructionism,’ was perhaps the most popular initially, although feminism to some extent eclipsed it. “At present, theory is disseminated largely by means of anthologies that offer theoretical approaches to interpretation, like choices on a menu (I invoke the banal simile to underscore my point).” As a result, in literature departments today, “criticism is what we really profess,” “claim[ing] to wield an Archimedean lever,” “want[ing] to rule the world.”

As Guillory satirically puts it, this combination of university requirements and perquisites—a quasi-aristocratic status—and taking one’s stand on the Left, for ‘democracy,’ means that “the professional career of the scholarly critic today functions simultaneously as a covert prophetic career.” Guillory hastens to remark that this is indeed literary criticism is “a spurious form of prophecy, the religious trope by which Weber grasps the politicization of the lecture hall and of scholarship,” warning, as Weber put it, that “the prophet and the demagogue have no place at the lectern,” that they belong out on the street, haranguing passersby. In Weber’s Germany, things of that sort would get noticeably worse before they got better, a point one may take when considering the universities today, although for the moment Guillory considers academic prophets to be animated by “the scholarly imaginary.” Taken by themselves, yes, but when backed by the administrators, they influence the people who go on to find jobs in the ruling professions, do they not? Yes, he soon observes: “It seems reasonable to suppose…that teaching in humanities disciplines has had a significant impact on political attitudes in the demographic of the ‘college-educated.'” But this doesn’t “mean that the college-educated fully understand the structural bases of social injustice or see clearly what must be done politically to transform these structures.” In fact, your reviewer has encountered distinguished professional political scientists who have never read Aristotle’s Politics. 

What is more, lit-crit attempts to address politics via such subpolitical, social and economic categories as “black, Chicano, or female studies,” or such polemicized political categories as “Revolutionary Literature,” “Imperialism,” or “The Antislavery Struggle” have achieved results less than satisfactory to the ideologues who teach in accordance with them. This brings “renewed uncertainty about the justification of the discipline,” as well it might. In today’s academe, “the system of rewards encourages us to imagine that we are being rewarded for the criticism of society. I think we might expect such rewards in heaven.” (Or not. Heaven reportedly declines to reward hubris.) “The absurdity of the situation should be evident to all of us: as literary study wanes in public importance, as literature departments shrink in size, as majors in literature decline in numbers, the claims for the criticism of society are ever more overstated.”

With its excess of “rebarbative” jargon and its failure to identify a “proper clientele” for the multisyllabic and bloodless words it has on offer, academic literary critics have ignored “readers of literature.” “To name our clientele as the readers of literature argues rather for…the reestimation of aim, a better understanding of how literary works are read, both in the schools and without, and what literary study might do to improve the reading of literature, even reading as such.” As implied by the adjective itself, “amateur readers” “love what they read” (or sometimes hate it—are engaged by it, at any rate). “I would like to believe that the value of criticism inheres in its discovery of a truth in literary or other cultural works, whatever feelings of affection or disaffection the critical reader might have about a given work.” Dr. Johnson and his guide, Aristotle, were right: Man does indeed want to know.

The regime of the university, with its departments of literary study, thus need a new purpose. “The criticism of the text can also be the criticism of society,” but this criticism needs “to move beyond the phase of manifesto.” “Long ago, literary education was the chief requisite for a voice in the public sphere; that day is over.” Get over it and move on. One way to do so (if I may so bold as to suggest) would be to assume that the ‘canonical’ authors are often smarter than the professors and students who study them, then take things from there, both in class and in the journals.

Note

1. See Ariel Helfer, ed.: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life. For commentary, see “Plato’s Politic Practice” and “What Is Politic About Political Philosophy?” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”

 

 

 

 

Tzvetan Todorov: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak translation. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.

 

In his account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the Caribbean, Todorov, a self-described moralist, deployed the instruments of ‘postmodernism’ to arraign the Spanish Crown and the Spanish Catholic Church. Upon examination, postmodernist instruments proved a weak reed. Serious moral critique needs more than ‘deconstruction’ in the service of ‘intersubjectivity.’ [1] By the time he turned to the Nazi genocide, Todorov may have reached the same conclusion, as he now engages in more straightforward moral reasoning, based on Kant—using a German against the Germans, as it were.

He begins not in Germany but in Poland, with books on the Warsaw Ghetto revolt of 1943, in which Jews attacked the Nazi occupiers, and the Warsaw Rising of 1944, when Poles attempted the same thing in an attempt to seize control of the city before the oncoming Red Army could take it. Both attempts failed, heroically.

Warsaw 1944 consists of interviews conducted by Jean-François Steiner with survivors of the Rising. “I was actually reading a reflection on heroism,” but “what exactly is heroism, I asked myself.” He associates heroism with the exercise of free will in defiance of “the status quo.” Further, the hero is an ‘idealist’ in the sense that he tends to believe that if he can dream it, he can do it. Poles fought the Nazis not for the sake of saving the people of Warsaw or Polish territory but in defense of “an abstraction called Poland” or, more accurately, an idealized person, for Poland conceived as the sister of the Blessed Virgin. More concretely, “it was not the Polish people who had to be saved but, rather, certain qualities of theirs: their will to freedom, their desire for independence, their national pride”—without which Poles would have risked, in the words of one resister, “a terrible moral collapse.” And not only Poland: the invading Russian communists threatened the West, civilization, humanity itself. Polish self-sacrifice can “stir the conscience of the world,” resisters believed. In Todorov’s estimation, “nothing less than the absolute can satisfy these heroic spirits.” 

The cardinal virtues of heroes are fidelity and courage. The hero stands alone because “family and friends, by their very existence, make him vulnerable,” threatening to make his self-sacrifice a sacrifice of others. Before going to war, he must kiss them goodbye or bid them farewell with one last drink at the bar. He may well miscalculate. In Poland, the Soviet forces held back from supporting the rebel Poles, allowing the Germans to quell the insurrection at the price of 200,000 Polish lives, the deportation of 700,000 more, and the destruction of Warsaw, later rebuilt along the lines of the squalid, Soviet-style architecture which comported with a squalid, Soviet-style regime. But “for a Pole,” one survivor declares, “it is better to die than to be a coward,” and better to be dead than Red. Todorov doubts that such heroism can extend very far, since if everyone is dead, who will remain to live for Poland? He exaggerates somewhat, however, when he claims that “to the hero, death has more value than life” because one can attain the absolute, a humanly unrealizable ideal, only by dying. Rather, most of the Poles who rebelled regarded their sacrifice as a way, under the circumstances the only way, to Polish freedom. Still, it is true that at least one fictional hero, and not a Polish one, can cry, “Prize me no prizes, for my prize is death.” [2]

Todorov prefers the more cautious and (at least many times) saner route. After all, “one can act like a hero for fear of seeming a coward,” feeling “a particular kind of fear, the fear of being afraid,” along with the fear of being shamed by the heroic ones. Critics of the insurrectionists described them as suicides, men “who sought refuge in a glorious death because they didn’t have the courage to face the difficulties of life”—life, it must be added, under Soviet tyranny. Todorov stands for prudence, although he never uses the word: “One needs to anticipate the consequences of one’s decisions while keeping in mind the actual course of events, not merely what one wishes would happen.” If you would be a hero, emulate wily Odysseus instead of raging Achilles.

Todorov distrusts the hero’s Manicheanism. “In Warsaw of 1944, it was not simply the forces of good and evil that confronted each other but the Russians and the Germans, the Home Army and the People’s Army, the government in exile and the civilian population. In circumstances this complex, reaching the best solution—in this instance, unfortunately, merely the lesser evil—requires a careful consideration of all sides rather than unswerving loyalty to an ideal. The values of life are not absolute values: life is diverse, and every situation is heterogeneous. Choices are made not out of concession or cowardly compromise but from a recognition of this multiplicity.” The weakness of such prudential thought and action is that “it does not lend itself well to stories,” by which Todorov means the stories of heroism that inspire faithful and courageous action, which is needed (one should add) if prudence is not to devolve into mere pragmatism or self-interested calculation. The ideal may unrealizable but it serves as a standard, and quite possibly not a dispensable one.

The Jewish Ghetto Rising occurred in a different set of circumstances. Here, Todorov avails himself of the account in Shielding the Flame, a conversation between survivor Marek Edelman and Hanna Krall. Although at the time Edelman thought of himself as heroic in the classic sense, he now saw that “All it was about, finally, was our not letting them slaughter us when our turn came.” The Warsaw Jews know they are going to be killed by the Nazis, so they might as well go down fighting, taking some of the enemy down with them. Todorov calls this second stance an instance of “ordinary virtue,” as distinguished from “heroic virtue.” Ordinary virtue vindicates human freedom. It is animated not so much by fidelity and courage as by a sense of “dignity,” the “capacity of the individual to remain a subject with a will,” confirming his “membership in the human race.” “For the hero, death eventually becomes a value and a goal, because it embodies the absolute better than life does. From the standpoint of the ordinary virtues, however, death is a means, not an end; it is the ultimate recourse of the individual who seeks to affirm his dignity.” Todorov thus partakes of the modern philosophy of freedom, regarding the free will rather than reason as the distinctively human characteristic. [3] The second anchor of ordinary virtue is “caring,” the attempt not only to respect oneself but to help others—not generalized or ‘abstract’ others (nation, civilization, humanity) but other individuals. Hiding the refugee, shielding the body of a child. 

Why did the Polish Home Army not reinforce the Ghetto rebels? The Jewish witnesses ascribe this not only or even primarily to Polish anti-Semitism but to “the pro-Soviet position of the Jews,” many of them socialists but almost all of them (quite understandably) hating the Jew-hating Nazis more than the bourgeois-hating Soviets. For its part, the Home Army “was just as hostile to Stalin as it was to Hitler”—also understandably, as Stalin no less than Hitler intended to destroy Polish independence and subordinate the Poles in his empire. The Soviets acted the same way during the Warsaw Uprising, knowing that it “was directed as much against them as against the Germans.” Calling this “the logic of resentment,” Todorov asserts that in both instances “ideological conviction took precedence over concern for protecting human lives.” The problem with this argument is that the ideological convictions of the persons endangered, the persons calculatedly not helped, were themselves murderous. Jewish preference for Soviet tyranny as against Nazi tyranny remains readily understandable, but was it good for Poland (Jewish and non-Jewish alike)? Polish detestation of both enemy regimes was justifiable. This may be seen in the fact Todorov cites: “the anti-Soviet forces” in 1944 did not really threaten the Soviets. But the Soviets refrained from intervening because they wanted to weaken the Poles, the better to take over Poland in order to advance their ideological cause. That “the anti-Soviet Polish forces were not really threatened by the Jewish rebels” in 1943 is much more likely true, although the Poles surely would have been threatened had the Jewish rebels sided with the Reds, opening a dangerous second front after the Nazis had been defeated. And had Polish Jews welcomed the Soviets at the expense of the Poles (whom they had little reason to trust), who is to say that the Soviets would not have turned on them, once the Poles had been brought to heel?

Todorov’s prudential reasoning rests on more solid ground when he considers the logic of Warsaw Jews in rebelling. This was indeed “a sane reaction to a policy of systematic extermination”; “every day, the Nazi occupiers of Warsaw sent a trainload of victims”—most of them Jews—to the Treblinka concentration camp, “to be killed on arrival.” Warsaw Jews chose the manner of their deaths, being sure to die, one way or another. “The uprising in the Warsaw ghetto must be respected not so such because of its display of heroic virtues but because it was the right political answer to desperate circumstances.” Exactly so.

Aristotle would recommend against examining such an extreme circumstance in order to understand ordinary virtue. Todorov insists that one can learn about such virtue precisely when it is under the most pressure. “My intent is to use the extreme as an instrument, a sort of magnifying glass that can bring into better focus certain things that in the normal course of human affairs remain blurry.” One might go farther still: the egalitarianism of democracies lends itself to moral relativism, to blurriness in principle. Democrats incline to be ruled by their desires, by neither logos nor thumos.

As “the extreme of our political life, modern tyranny or “totalitarianism” puts the now-characteristic European regime of democratic republicanism into sharper relief. Totalitarianism’s animating sentiment is terror, the sentiment modern liberalism, beginning with Hobbes, seeks to guard against. In both the totalitarian regime as a whole and its concentration camps in particular, the enforced confinement under pain of death, the reign of secrecy, the strict social hierarchy (in the name of egalitarianism), “the implication of everyone in the functioning of the machine,” the “corruption of the soul under constraint,” and the “constant presence of violence and death” all serve the intention of ruling by means of terror. 

Todorov is a moralist, but hardly a self-righteous one. On the contrary, “any reflection of mine on the subject of the extreme that did not implicate me personally and draw on my own experiences was likely to be a futile exercise.” He had himself lived in Bulgaria, under a communist regime in the Soviet empire, until his mid-twenties. This “gave me my first intimate encounter with political evil, but as something done by me, not to me.” Like the subjects of tyranny everywhere, he too had walked the walk laid out by the regime in “mute acceptance of the status quo.” “For this interpretation of the lessons of totalitarianism and the camps, I alone will be responsible.”

In the extreme circumstances within these extremist regimes—heroic in their own perverse way, aiming at the realization of such unrealizable if malignant ideals as racial purity or worldwide communalism—in the concentration camps, many victims struggled only to survive, abandoning all moral convictions. But others did not. “Matters of conscience are not at all rare in extreme situations, and their very existence attests to the possibility of choice, and thus of moral life”; the regime or way of life of the camps did not obey “only the law of the jungle,” as much as its rulers wanted it to. Free will continued to exert itself, and with it the ordinary virtues. The tyrants organized the camps in particular and their regimes in general according to “the principle that the behavior of the individual depends not on his own will but on the conditions surrounding him, that life is a war of all against all, that morality is no more than a superficial convention.” Marx and Nietzsche alike had subscribed to such moral fatalism, and even some of the survivors of the camps continued to think they were right. But on the contrary, the endurance of ordinary moral virtue in the camps proves “that moral reaction are spontaneous, omnipresent, and eradicable only with the greatest violence.” Hobbes’s state of nature is not natural but must instead be forced upon us. “Except under extreme constraint, human beings are prompted, among other things, to communicate with one another, to help one another, and to distinguish good from evil.” The ordinary virtues remain the middle ground between the desire for self-preservation at any cost and the heroic choice of death at the expense of life. It isn’t so much that “moral life was superior in the camps” but that “it was more visible and thus more telling there.” “I examine both sides of moral life—the virtues, ordinary and heroic, and the vices, ordinary and monstrous. Finally, I attempt to analyze our responses in the face of evil.”

Todorov identifies the ideal of the hero as excellence—seen in Achilles, who embodies “the model of heroic perfection,” but not so much for the purpose of the war, which is to avenge the theft of Helen by the Trojans. Physical strength, physical and moral courage, and energy comprise this ideal; glory is its reward—a name that will not die when the hero does. For Achilles, “the choice is between a life without glory and a glorious death.” In “choosing death over life,” he elevates himself above ordinary mortals, who cringe at the prospect of dying. The Christian equivalent of the hero is the saint, a person of “spiritual strength” who, “like the hero, rejects compromise.” Todorov goes too far in claiming that the saint’s love of God “leav[es] no room” in his heart “for a comparable love of his fellowman.” If Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend tells us of saints who push family members aside in order to martyr themselves, it does so because de Voragine would inspire us, too, to love both God and children; his saints set an example for their children as well as for us. Combining the heroism of the ‘ancients’ with the saintliness of the Christians, the knight of the Middle Ages lived by the code of chivalry, indeed “a very different model from that of Achilles” but still animated by “the aristocratic virtues and the concept of honor.” 

Against all of these high-toned human types we see Benjamin Franklin. “With the triumph in Europe of the ideology of individualism toward the end of the eighteenth century, the heroic model falls rapidly out of favor,” replaced by the man who “aspire[s] to personal happiness or even, quite simply, to a life of pleasure.” Less impressive examples than Franklin include such fictional characters as Julien Sorel and Emma Bovary, figures who have, as Todorov drily remarks, “little in common with Achilles and Antigone.” “For the world of the Greek heroes is the opposite of modern democracy.” 

Todorov identifies “two ideological models” which “preside over the sphere of human interactions” today: public figures will point to military careers, fine ’causes’ fought for in war or in peace—heroic virtues for the middle class; in the private sphere, the ordinary virtues—including but not restricted to what are now called ‘family values’—constitute the ordinary virtues of life lived in the quotidian. Although Todorov has deprecated the heroic virtues, he recognizes that they have their place, as when a war really is just. “From the minute it became clear that there was no other way to contain Hitler, going to war against him became the right choice,” and in such a war, “I prefer Churchill to Chamberlain, de Gaulle to Daladier.” But since “war is not the continuation of peace by other means,” and “the fact that many people believe otherwise is one of the major proofs that the history of the world does not obey the laws of progress,” “sending heroes into retirement once the war is over may be less an expression of ingratitude than a mark of lucidity.” Oddly, he gives Churchill and de Gaulle as examples of such sensible conduct: “left in power” after World War Two, “they might have become dangerous.” In fact, both returned to power after the war, Churchill not dangerous but ineffective, probably a bit too old for the job, de Gaulle not dangerous but (for the most part) beneficial, the founder of the Fifth Republic. At any rate, he prefers the heroism of Sacha Pechersky, the Odysseus-like leader of an escape from a Nazi extermination camp, and the saintliness of Father Maximilian Kolbe, who offered himself as a substitute for a man designated for death by starvation in Auschwitz. “Sometimes, heroic behavior” has been “subordinated to the welfare of real human beings.” Todorov is more comfortable with the defense of persons than with the defense of England or of France, while continuing to respect the defenders of England and France.

With respect to the ordinary virtues of dignity and caring, totalitarian regimes seek to eradicate both. “We decide how long you stay alive and when you die, and not you!” the guards shouted at the prisoners in the camps. They sought to sever the connection between the dignity of human freedom and the dignity of actions supporting freely chosen moral principles. In this sense, then, the ‘philosophy’ of modern tyranny counters the modern philosophy of freedom. Something more than freedom alone suffices to make a conviction moral, however. While it is true that the Nazi, too, may act “in accordance with his convictions,” his convictions themselves are rotten. “Moral behavior requires more than harmony between acts and ideals; it requires also that those ideals not work against the good of humanity.” 

Caring in the camps sometimes took horrifying forms, as when nurses killed newborn children to save the mothers from execution by the Nazis for the ‘crime’ of giving birth (the children would have been murdered, anyway). Women generally “survived the camps better than men did” because caring was the virtue tradition had instilled in them. “The women were more practical, more likely to help one another than were the men,” whereas “the men were more likely to deaden themselves, to become hard and indifferent, to turn on one another.” Todorov distinguishes caring from solidarity, which he associates with caring only for ‘one’s own’—family, friends, countrymen. In this way, he separates politics, the realm of solidarity, from morality, the realm of caring for human beings as such. With caring, “the choice is made according to criteria other than nationality, profession, or political persuasion; each person who is cared for is deserving in an of him- or herself.” Nor is caring charity, which cares even for those one does not know, one who can never reciprocate the gesture. Nor is caring sacrificial, as heroism or charity can be: “the giver can hope to receive benefits in return, should the roles be reversed.” Caring entails mutuality in a way that heroism and charity do not. 

Todorov knows that moral life consists of more than sentiments alone, whether heroic, saintly, or ‘ordinary.’ There is also the life of the mind, whether it aims at the search for truth, the search for the beautiful, or both. Even in a concentration camp, one might seek out the truth “not simply because it can help one survive or because it can help others fight a hateful system but because unearthing the truth is an end in itself.” In law, in philosophy, and in religion alike, there is merit in being a witness. “This is the paradox: stories of evil can create good” because “to observe, to remember, and to pass on to others what one has seen is already to take a stand against inhumanity,” “one way of remaining human and, for that reason,” to commit “an act with a moral dimension.” It is of course true that the single-minded pursuit of the life of the mind can go wrong, as in the seriocomic example of Todorov’s father, whom Todorov suspects of welcoming the Communists’ takeover of Bulgaria because, as a librarian, this would mean “the modernization of Bulgaria’s libraries.” At least the old man’s purpose wasn’t harmful in itself, as everyone is familiar with Werner von Braun’s rocket science in the service of Nazi Germany. In such extreme cases, Rousseau’s well-known complaints about the corrupting influence of the arts and letters actually make some sense. 

In considering the heroic/aristocratic, intellectual/philosophic, and democratic/’ordinary’ virtues, Todorov ranks them not according to the ‘postmodernist’ categories he once upheld, but in terms of the categorical imperative. Unlike the other virtues, “caring is by its very definition coincident with the moral stance that hold other people to be ends in themselves, whereas for the life of the mind this engagement with others is optional, and when dignity is at stake, the subject’s welfare can be an altogether extraneous issue.” He thus distinguishes “the morality of sympathy” from “the morality of principles.” A principle abstracts from the particulars, something “by definition universal,” but sympathy “is a sentiment one feels as a direct result of someone else’s experience,” whether it takes the form of compassion at the sight of suffering or of “vicarious joy” at the sight of another’s triumph. The quest for justice is a quest to act in accordance with a principle or perhaps a set of rules. The ‘social justice warrior’ may in practice rescue people or run them over with a truck. Indeed, moralism, as distinct from morality, “consists of practicing justice without virtue, of simply invoking moral principles without feeling that they apply to oneself,” of demanding justice without being just. “To say that one is in favor of morality is not a moral act; most of the time it merely signifies conformity or a desire to live at peace with one’s conscience.” Subscribing to morality is like subscribing to a magazine; it doesn’t mean that you read it. Unlike principles, “action cannot be generalized.” It always affects specific persons and things. 

And so, it’s easy “to denounce slavery” when and where it no longer exists. “There is nothing moral in speaking out against slavery today; all it proves is that I’m in step with my society’s ideology or else don’t want to find myself on the wrong side of the barricades,” and “something very similar can be said about condemnations of racism, although that would not have been the case in 1936 in Germany.” When pursuing justice, one does well to think less of one’s moral perfection, more of what is right for the others. Moral perfection in matters of justice may at most number among the side effects. 

What can happen when ordinary people, with their ordinary virtues, find themselves plunged into the extreme condition established by the extreme regime, modern tyranny—the concentration camp? “In the literature of the concentration camp, evil is the main character.” Arendt was right: the evil of the camps was indeed “banal” in one sense. The guards were mostly not sadistic or fanatical; “they followed the rules.” In the words of Vasily Grossman, “The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.” “To call this evil banal is not to trivialize it; precisely what made this evil so dangerous was that it was so easy, that no exceptional human qualities were required for it to come into being.” Its very enormity was possible only because its component parts were small, easily assembled and maintained. The ordinary virtues had been countered by ordinary vices, by what one writer calls “the cold, systematic manner of the military ‘categorical imperative.'” To explain the camps, one needs not a psychological but a political explanation, an account of the regime that established them. “The societal trait that allows such crimes to be carried out is totalitarianism, the only attribute that Nazi Germany shares with the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and China.” The human beings within those regimes were “no different from any others; what sets them apart is the political regime under which they lived.”

The characteristics specific to that regime are: identifying ‘regime enemies’ not only in foreign countries but ‘from within,’ whether it be the race enemy of the Nazis or the class enemy of the Communists; establishing the state as “the custodian of the society’s ultimate aims”; and (consequently) establishing state rule over “the totality of the individual’s social existence.” The enemies held up by modern tyrannies are not simply critics but “absolute” enemies, “embodiment[s] of evil,” elements against whom one is said to have a moral obligation not merely to criticize but to make war against. By “making itself the sole arbiter of which ends are to be pursued,” the totalitarian regime enables its subjects to “take comfort in being relieved of personal responsibility for their decisions” while “demand[ing] that [they] restrict themselves in thought and deed to instrumentality,” treating “every action as a means to something else rather than an end in itself.” This enables ordinary people to pervert their ordinary virtues to the service of evil ends. The concentration camp guards “were not deprived of a moral sensibility but provided with a new one.” A regime change always does that, for evil or for good. Todorov recalls that in Bulgaria the exercise of ordinary virtues at home and among friend seemed an escape from “totalitarian control over at least one part of our lives,” but in doing so Bulgarians gave “the state free rein to regulate our social existence, which is to say, our lives as a whole.” “We were consolidating the power of the regime itself.” 

This explains not only why most Jews didn’t revolt against the Nazis—they were a minority trapped among Germans who were hostile or indifferent to their calamity—but also why “a billion Chinese [are] not in revolt right now.” “Once the totalitarian system is in place, the vast majority of the population—people like you and me—are at risk of becoming accomplices in its crimes,” “fall[ing] into behaviors they understand are evil.” We “prefer to forget Kolyma and Auschwitz…because we fear discovering that the evil of the camps is not alien to the human race” or, more uncomfortably, to ourselves. “Evil is not accidental; it is always there at hand, ready to manifest itself. All it needs to emerge is for us to do nothing.”

What of the persons ruling in the regime? On the lower level, “there was no guard who was wicked through and through,” as all “seemed subject to constant shifts in attitude and temperament,” cruel one moment, kind the next. This suggests no mental illness, no clinical ‘split personality,’ but rather the absence of the rule of reason—an absence itself the effect of the overall regime, founded upon pseudoscience and animated by terror. True, as everyone has noticed, a guard might torture a prisoner while listening to Bach—people “with university educations could be every bit as cruel as the illiterate”—but “a sense of morals” is hardly “something one learns at universities.” And again, famously, many of the guards were good ‘family men.’ “My impression is that these individuals needed to fragment their lives in this way so that no spontaneous feelings of pity might hinder them in their ‘work,’ and also so that their admirable private lives might serve as a counterweight, at least in their own minds, for the things that may have troubled them about their professional activities.” At the top of the regime, Todorov remarks, Lenin was the same way, a man of “sensitivity, delicacy, gentleness, courtesy” with those he did not deem his ‘class enemies.’ Even Stalin is said to have had his jovial side and Hitler loved his dog. In Germany, “it was up to the Führer to decide an objective, and for everyone else to mind his or her own area of expertise. This is the totalitarian subject’s standard way of thinking.” Each person concerned himself “with only one small link in a vast chain and seeing their task as a purely technical problem.” The bureaucratic structure of the totalitarian state gave institutional form to this way of life, reinforcing “this absence of feelings of responsibility” and the workings of conscience. James Madison emphasized exactly the critical importance of responsibility in government, holding up the American regime as reformed by the 1787 Constitutional Convention as a model of a set of institutions that enforce strict responsibility upon the persons who occupy public offices. Hitler’s regime, all of the modern tyrannies, aim at exactly the opposite effect: Give your soul to me and get on with your assigned tasks. It is easy to see why so many Nazis regarded themselves as innocent of all wrongdoing. And insofar as the republics have given themselves over to bureaucratic rule, one sees some of the same moral effects.

Chief of those effects is depersonalization. Crucify not your body for the sake of the souls of others; crucify your soul for the sake of the nation, or of communism. “Totalitarian doctrines can thus properly be called antihumanist,” anti-Kantian. Do not act as if a person be used as an end in itself, but always as a mere means. “Far more than any sadistic or primitive instincts, it is depersonalization, of the other and of oneself, that is responsible for totalitarian evil.” In this sense, the policy of stripping prisoners naked and starving them was a way not only of subordinating the prisoners but of getting the guards to treat them like animals. Similarly, give them numbers to replace their names; kill them en masse, not in small groups or individually; identify them in terms of some impersonal category (‘Jews,’ ‘kulaks’); herd them into gas chambers, so as not to see them die. Hitler wished that Germany had a religion like the Japanese “who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good,” or Islam, which “would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity.” 

I was only following orders, was the famous excuse. “Someone who only follows orders is no longer a person. The originality of totalitarian crime resides precisely in this possibility.” As the Nazi governor-general of Poland phrased it, “Act in such a way that if the Führer knew of your action he would approve it.” Hitler is your new god. On the Soviet side, Pravda means ‘truth’; if the newspaper Pravda says so, it must be true. The truth is spoken into reality, parodying the Book of Genesis. Husbands and wives believed the ‘Word’ of the ruling Party more than they believed the testimony and character of their spouses. Joined with bureaucratic compartmentalization, ideological indoctrination transformed persons so much “that they could suspend their usual responses to fellow human beings.” And although Nazis and Communists alike valorized honor and loyalty in words, “what the totalitarian regime calls loyalty is really nothing other than the ordinary vice of submission.” Courage? “Totalitarian pseudoheroes know only one form of sacrifice, that of others, while they themselves take pride in having enough fortitude to watch the ordeals of their victims without trembling!” Hitler knew it, too, “never miss[ing] an occasion” to sneer at old-fashioned Prussian rectitude and to scorn the chivalric tradition. The tyrant is no aristocrat but a ‘democrat’ in the Tocquevillian sense, one who intends to level all others beneath himself and his ruling ‘apparatus.’

If all that need be done to permit such a regime to emerge is to do nothing, what shall one do? Democratic regimes in the ordinary, non-Tocquevillian sense—democratic and commercial republics—do help. They foster “ideological pluralism,” lessening the danger of “fanatical indoctrination.” Religious conviction, too, can thwart ideology, although Todorov draws the line at Christian pacifism. He cites the example of the Dutch pacifist, Etty Hillesum, who acted under “two imperatives: forswear hatred of the enemy and fight evil in oneself rather than in others—that is, with moral, not political means.” If I see “no resemblance” between myself and my enemy, I am “destined to resemble [my] enemy.” While such “moral action can perhaps be more effective than we think” (he cites some impressive but limited examples), “there are times when taking up arms is the only appropriate responses,” as when “Hitler’s armies are streaming across borders.” “In fighting Hitler (and hence for justice) we are not imitating him: he is fighting for injustice.” Indeed, “might a position like Hillesum’s even facilitate the spread of evil”? True, Jesus tells us that His Kingdom is not of this world, that His followers will join Him in it, someday. But while we remain in this world, we need the prudence of serpents as much as the innocence of doves. “The most effective barrier to the political fact of totalitarianism is itself political: an active democracy concerned with both individual freedom and the advancement of the common good, tolerant of criticism and transformation from within but at the same time intransigent toward democracy’s real enemies.” Moral actions are indispensable for the maintenance of republics, but republic give moral intentions freedom of action.

Resistance to tyranny in combat carries moral risks. “If the only change is that those who were hunted become the hunters, then the new kingdom,” the regime that emerges after the war “will not be so new after all.” (This was precisely the problem de Gaulle addressed, successfully, and is the theme of one of Churchill’s best books, The Aftermath.) “Persecuting the persecutors does not erase the debt; the debt in fact is increased.” Here again, the very justice Todorov had said is no virtue returns, as he tells his readers, “Take a stand against evil and fight it out of a sense of justice, not hatred.” When it comes to postwar trials begin by distinguishing “between legal guilt and moral responsibilities,” between those who “actually committed the crimes and who alone are properly the concern of the judicial system” and “the passive spectators who are responsible at most for not coming to the aid of those in danger and thus who need answer not to the courts but to history or their own consciences” or, one might add, to God. True, under totalitarianism “all are involved in maintaining the status quo and thus all are responsible,” but “at the same time, all are subjugated and act under constraint.” When regime “pressures are truly great, our judgment of the individual must take them into account.” As for the criminals, the main thing is to delay judgment, whether stern or lenient, until the truth of the accused’s conduct has been fully brought out. “There is a vast difference between leniency and concealing the truth”; as the great jurist Francisco de Vitoria understood, “justice is not just a question of meting out punishment” but “also involves bringing the truth to light.” 

Those whose business it is to bring the truth to light bear a unique responsibility. Heidegger, Schmitt, Jünger, Benn: “one cannot ignore the role, and hence the responsibility, of certain currents of thought in the rise of totalitarian regimes,” such currents as “anti-universalism” (i.e., exalting one race, class, or nation above all others), “hyper-determinism” (the claim that ‘race’ or ‘class’ or ‘gender’ or, animating them all, ‘History’ determines character and conduct), and “conflictualism” (the exaltation of warfare as ‘the supreme law of life”). Todorov engages in no ‘more-virtuous-than-they’ finger-pointing, here. “If I had stayed in Bulgaria, I would have spent the next thirty years writing half-truths,” inasmuch as “one of the most striking characteristics of totalitarian regimes” is that “everyone becomes an accomplice,” everyone “both inmate and guard, victim and executioner.”

Nor should those still further removed from direct responsibility for tyrants’ crimes exonerate themselves. The peoples conquered by the Nazis during the Second World War and those conquered by the Soviets afterwards at times “show[ed] a marked complacency toward what was taking place on their soil.” The French, for example, who provided a safe haven from Communism, “ought to be grateful to Eichmann and his colleagues for having chosen Poland as their extermination ground.” Had they chosen France as the site for the camps, “we might have learned yet again that, as Napoleon said, the word impossible is not French.” Those countries that did shelter Jews (Denmark and Bulgaria) or at least did not turn them over to the Nazis (Greece, Yugoslavia) combined “the absence of deep-seated anti-Semitism in the population” with “the willingness of a few politicians to make courageous decisions and stand by them.” As for the citizens of the free countries that remained unconquered, they did very little to oppose the tyrants in the years before the world war. “News of the Nazi death camps leaked out early on,” and “there was never any lack of information” about the Soviet gulags, “even as early as the 1920s.” Shamefully, both Great Britain and the United States feared that Hitler might expel ‘his’ Jews instead of killing them, throwing them onto their own shores. And of course, one must not discount the fear of war, both in the aftermath of the First World War and in the aftermath of the Second. Too, there was no shortage of intellectual and journalistic apologists for the tyrants, especially for the Communists. Men like Albert Camus, who “dared to mention a network of concentration camps as the very foundation of a presumably Socialist system, were vilified and ostracized by their colleagues.” In all, “most onlookers, whether close or distant, let events take their course.” “They knew what was happening and could have helped but did not.”

It being “beyond human strength” to “take upon ourselves all the suffering in the world, ceasing to sleep peacefully so long as there remains somewhere in the world even the slightest trace of injustice,” we will need to confine ourselves to more modest efforts. One of these is to listen to the witnesses of modern tyranny, “so that the truth can be established,” but more than that to understand: “Our memory of the camps should become an instrument that informs our capacity to analyze the present,” to “recognize our own image in the caricature reflected back at us by the camps, regardless of how much this mirror deforms and how painful the recognition is,” a recognition that “contains lessons for us, who think we live in a completely different world.” It isn’t completely different, since human nature hasn’t changed and since tyranny is still with us, as seen in China and ‘post-Communist’ Russia. 

Does such understanding preclude just judgment? “I couldn’t disagree more. If I try to understand a murderer, it is not to absolve him but to prevent others from repeating his crime.” The law is impersonal, justice framing good laws an abstraction, but “the impersonality of the law must not lead to the depersonalization of those it condemns.” We cannot not judge. It is rather to judge without falling into the Manichean wrong of ignoring or excusing the evil in ourselves. There is telling or witnessing; there is understanding; there is judging. None of them can be sacrificed if we are to acknowledge our responsibility, which is to say our humanity morally understood. Whereas in his book on the conquistadors Todorov confined morality to ‘intersubjectivity’ and deprecated teleology, he now sees that we need both. Not only are moral judgments “not arbitrary,” they “can be argued rationally,” with reason the human guide toward “seek[ing] the good of specific individuals” in action and not only in words. “Morality cannot ‘disappear’ without a radical mutation of the human species,” one that removes its capacity to reason and to care for the good of one another. As a modern liberal, wary of statist tyranny, Todorov doubts that morality in his strict sense can be had in political life, which he confines to the establishment and increase of a just framework for moral life. Nor can philosophy make us moral, being an act of “reflection on morality, which is a search for truth more than a search for goodness” (he includes his own book in this category). Again, like politics, philosophy can lend itself to a moral way of life.

What does modern tyranny or totalitarianism, in its extremism, teach? It teaches that “a code of ordinary moral values and virtues, one commensurate with our times, can indeed be based on the recognition that it is as easy to do good as to do evil.” The “banality of evil” seen in the Nazis finds its counter in “the banality of good.” We need neither imitate saints nor fear monsters, as “both the dangers and the means with which to neutralize them are all around us.” 

 

 

Notes

1. See “Spanish Conquistadors Through a ‘Postmodernist’ Lens,” on this website.
2. As Lancelot declaims in Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King.
3. See “The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny” and “The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom,” on this website.