Rémi Brague: Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.

 

Brague argues that certain “premodern ideas” have been “made to run amuck” by modern philosophy. If God is rational and He created the material universe, then human beings, themselves rational creatures of God, should be able to understand that universe. But if modern thought denies the existence of God, then it “severs the link between the reason supposedly present in the things and the reason that governs or at least should govern our doings.” This leads ‘we moderns’ to a sharp dualism, one that can find no natural support for morality in nature, and ultimately in human nature; morality becomes a matter of convention or of will, with no rational content. Similarly, removing God removes divine providence; it too becomes “‘secularized’ and warped,” redefined as ‘History,’ the validation of whatever happens to happen. Removing God additionally removes divine grace; we are left without any real criterion for mercy or forgiveness. And if so, why bother to repent of one’s wrongful acts, except under social pressure?

Put simply, “the modern worldview can’t furnish us with a rational explanation of why it is good that there should be human beings” to enjoy such things as “health, knowledge, freedom, peace, plenty.” “The culture that flatters itself with the sovereignty of sober reason can’t find reasons for its own continuation.” 

The worldview in question conceives of human thought and activity as a project. “What the etymology of the word suggests” is throwing, “a motion in which the mobile body (missile) loses contact with the mover and forges ahead”—the “very phenomenon that ancient physics failed to account for.” Newtonian physics and, in mathematics, the calculus (the geometry of moving points along a curve) are two manifestations of this philosophic shift, seen in Machiavellian conquest of Fortune and Baconian conquest of nature—conquest being a movement aimed at rule. A project also “implies a new interpretation of the three dimensions of time: (1) toward the past it implies the idea of a new beginning, of a beginning from scratch, so that whatever came before will be forgotten; (2) toward the present, the idea of a self-determination of the acting subject; (3) toward the future, the idea of an environment that will yield further opportunities for action and that pledges that that further action will be rewarded with achievement,” that is, with “progress.” This contrasts with Biblical providence, whose subject is “a personal and loving God who cares for His creatures” and can do so rightly, being not only loving but supremely wise or prudent. Jesus tells his disciples to imitate him, innocent as doves and prudent as serpents. Providence and prudence (in Latin, the two words have the same root) form a bond between human beings and a Person who is ‘above’ them, who enters them, when He so chooses, from ‘outside’ them. Many of the non-Biblical ‘ancient’ philosophies conceive of theoretical and practical wisdom operating in the same way, albeit with nature rather than God acting as the impersonal but still supportive surrounding home of man. Thus, “Providence and project are the two poles that could roughly define the difference between the premodern and the modern outlook.”

In Biblical religion and premodern (pre-Machiavellian) philosophy, it is the task that concerns human activity and prudential-practical reasoning. In undertaking a task, “I am entrusted to do something by an origin on which I have no hold, and which I don’t always even know and must look for”; therefore, “I must ask myself whether I am equal to my task, agreeing thereby to be dispossessed of what was, all the same, irrevocably entrusted to me”; further, “I am the only one responsible for what I am asked to fulfill, and I can’t possibly off-load it onto another who could pledge for the success of my action.” So, while “we inherited from the book of Genesis the idea of the domination of nature,” in Genesis this is a task assigned by God, with limits assigned by Him in His wisdom and justice.

A second “basic idea of modernity” is experiment. One’s projects test the limits of progress. In the Bible, by contrast, there is the trial or test, judged not by man but by God. The experiment not only seeks to extend the limits of human rule over nature outside man, it “conceives of man as being not a fully achieved being but a sketch of sorts”; “mankind as a whole is an experiment of life.” Human nature itself may be surpassed, as Zarathustra’s Overman replaces Man, and most especially the ignoble Last Man. This suggests that man might be “a failed attempt” of the life forces, an experiment gone wrong, an evolutionary botch who deserves to die, either by blunder or by suicide. And indeed, if mankind “can determine itself, by itself and only by itself,” then “why should it choose to be rather than not to be,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet asks himself, early on in the modern project? Indeed, self-destruction is the easier path, a path that weapons of mass destruction, human-produced biological catastrophe, and low birthrates might bulldoze and pave.

And so, “modernity can’t answer the question about the legitimacy of mankind unless it gives up its own project,” which has caused us to be “at a loss about how to explain that mankind as a whole has to be.” To be sure, modernity produces more goods, for more people, than premodern action guided by premodern thought could do. That is a good thing, in and of itself. But “the modern project is unable to tell us why it is good that there are people to enjoy those goods.” Put more bluntly, “atheism has failed, hence it is doomed to disappear in the long run”; “the majority of our contemporaries are unwilling to face either this fact or its consequences.”

Modern atheism has achieved some remarkable successes. Modern physical science gives us “a very accurate and fruitful description of reality” without any need for bringing in God to explain things. “In order to orient ourselves in the material world” and even “in social organization” animated by religious toleration, “we need no religion.” If not atheism in the sense of denying the existence of God (which would be unscientific) then agnosticism or ‘bracketing’ God when doing scientific work or getting along with one another, is quite feasible. The question is, can it be sustained by the human beings who have founded modernity?

Brague doubts it. “If we admit that there is on this earth a being, known as Homo sapiens, that is able to give an account of the universe that surrounds him and to live peacefully with his fellow human beings, in both cases without having to look up toward any transcendent reality—would it be good that such a being should exist and keep existing?” Science does not and cannot answer that question.

Modern atheism is intended to liberate man from God and, to the extent possible, from nature. “Man was to decide his own destiny; he had to give his own law to himself, which we somehow loosely call ‘autonomy.'” As Marx put it, “the root of man is man himself”—man is quite literally ‘radical.’ But this “humanism”—a word redefined to register this autonomy—cannot “pass judgment on man’s value or lack of it as such.” As Rousseau’s Savoyard Vicar already sees, the principles of atheism “do not cause the death of people, but they prevent them from being born,” given the narcissism implied by ‘self-creation.’ It is true that some atheist ideologies additionally killed a lot of people outright, as well, with all the fanaticism the early modern atheists attributed to religiosity, but Brague doesn’t need that argument. It is enough for him to look at the peaceful liberal societies of today and observe that “man is no longer convinced that he has the right to conquer and exploit the earth,” that “man is no longer convinced of his superiority over against the other living beings,” and that “man is not even sure that he distinguishes himself from other living beings by radically different features.” Here, Tocqueville supplements Brague nicely, as each of those contemporary doubts expresses what Tocqueville calls “democracy” or civil-social egalitarianism. Atheism lends itself to egalitarianism, claiming or at least not affirming that there is a being superior to man, unless it is the whole of nature, whose superiority consists in its greater mass. In the supreme democracy of the cosmos, nature has man outvoted.

Modern science is expert as discovering causes of things, explanations of “what is the case already.” It cannot discover the ground of things, “what we can bring about in the future” and why it would be good if we brought it about. “If the project of Enlightenment is to be successful, man needs a ground for man to go on existing, and to exist in the full meaning of ‘man,’ as a rational and free being, not only as a biped without feathers.” For this, there are any number of religions that offer us a serviceable god or set of gods, but “Christianity distinguishes itself” from its predecessors by imposing no laws on human beings “other than the ones that natural, unaided reason either discovered or could have discovered”—prohibitions against murder, incest, theft, and so on. “It leaves the content of the moral rules untouched and adds a further dimension only where morality can’t save us,” as in the ‘theological virtues’ of faith in God, hope in his willingness and power to deliver us from evil, and charity or agapic love towards one another. “God gives the creatures whatever is necessary for them to reach their own good by their own exertions,” revealing Himself “only when such a disclosure is necessary for a creature to do that.” Brague here quotes Irenaeus: “The life of man is the vision of God.”

Premodern philosophers, a-theistic regarding the God of the Bible, nonetheless discovered standards for human action beyond the simple assertion of the will. Aristotle finds in the “Idea of the Good” remarked in some of Plato’s dialogues—which is indeed a standard ‘above’ and beyond human beings themselves, to be “useless for ethics,” except perhaps in the discouragement of utopian ambitions. For Aristotle, it is the prakton agathon, the good that can be practiced, which makes sense for real persons in the real world. He distinguishes between life and living well, both for individuals and for political communities. Life’s opposite is death, whereas the opposite of living well is living badly, living in a way that contradicts the nature of human beings as such. The fact of the existence of an Aristotle, but even of the not-so-bright interlocutors of Socrates (one of whom is described as making a serious effort to think, albeit fruitless) shows that human nature isn’t the same as a dog’s nature, or a stone’s. To be a good human being in this philosophic sense is not to obey a higher Being but to activate one’s nature. This a-theistic good can decline into Machiavellianism, to the claim that to be practical morality must concentrate simply upon acquisition for the sake of self-preservation or self-aggrandizement, and that is why Brague prefers the Christian God to the sober humanism of the ancient philosophers.

“What if the Good is a condition of life, and an absolutely necessary one into the bargain?” God creates all beings other than Himself, then judges them to be good. “If every being, as such, is good, then the presence of the Good is necessary wherever there is something, that is, everywhere.” The human freedom, the exercise of free will, that modern philosophy so often posits is indeed necessary if morality is to be possible; one must choose, as Existentialists say. Choosing requires a subject who chooses. This subject is “a rational being” and its actions have purpose, inasmuch as its actions are not simply movements but movements toward something or someone. “The proud self-image of modern thought puts freedom in the center of the human,” as seen in Hegel, who in his Philosophy of History writes, “the history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” As human beings, although we cannot create ourselves, we can “choose ourselves”; we cannot choose whether we are born as humans and as ourselves, as individuals each in his own body with its own unique genetic code. The point “on which freedom as the condition of action and the radical unfreedom of birth meet, or even clash against each other” is generation, the “free decision” of human beings to procreate, to perpetuate existing human pairs in other related but never identical individuals. Such a choice, if it is indeed a choice and not the result of some accident, benign or malign, can only assume that an additional human being is a good thing. While Aristotle observes that human beings generate only other human beings, with “the help of the sun,” Brague takes this biological or causative explanation and gives it a ground as “a metaphor for the necessity of the Good for the survival of man.”

“How,” then, “can we articulate to each other the physical world and what singles out man, that is, the moral dimension and the sensitivity to values?” “We badly need” a “philosophy of nature” to counter the modern philosophy of history that seeks domination of nature for purposes that that philosophy is powerless to justify. Modern science can trace what Aristotle identifies as the efficient, material, and formal causes in nature; it cannot identify ‘final’ causes or purposes but instead reduces human intentions to a concatenation of the first three. “Final causes have no place in the study of the physical world”; in that, the moderns are correct, seeing that “scientists are perfectly right to do without them” as anthropomorphist. Yet that leaves anthropos himself only partially understood and human beings as “strangers in the cosmos,” a cosmos in which we are manifestly not strangers but members. Conceiving ourselves as strangers, we begin to think that we really should be somewhere else, justly self-exiled. But to where? If man is captive and stranger in the earthly city, he might find a home in the City of God—except that modern science rejects the Kingdom of God as a myth. 

“My claim is that what we need in order to meet the challenges of our time is something like the medieval outlook,” the experience of the world not as nature “but as creation,” sustaining St. Bernard’s distinction between a creature “in general” and a “creature of God.” A creature of God is designed purposefully, by God as Logos, as speech and reason. In the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, God creates beings “that have a stable nature of their own.” This understanding of creation contradicts the claim of (for example) the Muslim thinker al-Aš‘arī, who contended that there are no stable natures, that all beings are created, sustained, and held together (when they are) by the inexplicable will of God. As it happens, “the idea of stable nature set into being by the creative being was at least a necessary, if not a sufficient condition of natural science,” ancient and modern. Aquinas maintains that “studying nature gives us an inkling of God’s attributes, his wisdom and power.” Such a “sober view of nature prevents us from yielding to the temptation to lower the level of our own being” as creatures made in the image of God, which lowering is precisely what Machiavelli and his philosophic progeny have proposed.

Modernity posits the malleability of things and persons—the malleability of Fortune (Machiavelli), of nature (Bacon), and finally of human nature itself (Hegel, Marx). What Aristotle identifies as the specifically democratic definition of freedom, “doing as one wants,” pervades modern thought on morality and (therefore) on politics. Brague finds this view simpliste. He identifies eight kinds of freedom, each fitting the various dimensions of nature, including human nature. There is the freedom of energy released from matter in fire or in nuclear fission; “matter is bound energy,” as Einstein formulated. For the material elements themselves, freedom is “the removal of an obstacle that thwarts a spontaneous tendency,” as when an object falls to the ground without interference from any other object that would ‘break its fall.’ For plants, freedom is growth unimpeded by lack of water or sunlight. For what Aristotle calls the parts of animals, and especially internal organs, freedom is “release,” the emission of the chemicals inside them. For animals considered not as parts but as wholes, freedom is escape, deliverance, as from a trap or a jail. For rational beings, freedom is choice, which implies reasoning, not mere autonomic movement. For slaves, freedom is a “legal act” releasing them from bondage to others, and for social and political beings freedom is liberty ensured by their citizenship, their share in rule within a community. 

All of these freedoms might be seen by persons who reason. “The basic new idea introduce by the Bible is the idea of a radical new beginning,” as seen in Genesis (God’s creation of the cosmos), of a people (Exodus), and of the choice between good and evil. And when human beings choose evil, they are not only free to change their minds, to repent, but they are offered God’s forgiveness, “a new beginning in moral life,” which men may offer to one another, as well. It is “faith in creation” that ‘makes freedom understandable as freedom for the good” because the God of the Bible is benevolent, not “the bogey imagined by ancient or modern Gnosticism.” “Conversely, the experience of freedom makes faith in creation a meaningful choice,” since we can ascribe this experience either to “inanimate matter”—and if so, it must be illusory, finally a determined thing—or to God’s own free choice to endow us with freedom as creatures in His image. The latter choice has two consequences: creation becomes “less opaque and unintelligible,” a matter of “find[ing] in ourselves an equivalent of the creative act whose presence we suppose” in God; it also enables us to “become the dialogue partners of a rational Being,” as seen, among other places, in the Book of Job. And because that rational Being is more rational than we are, wiser, He can guide us to right choices without compelling us, then graciously strengthening us if, in our weakness, we turn to him for aid. Brague contends that “there is no concept of freedom of the will in pre-Christian antiquity.” The Greek, Roman, Hebrew, and Arabic words translated as freedom or liberty “all designate the social status of whoever is not a slave, and nothing more.” In Christianity, “freedom is the unfolding of what we really and essentially are, in the core of our being”; it is what “enables us to reach the Good,” although not fully in this life. It might be added that in Aristotle and in some of the other ancient philosophers, human beings can also “unfold” or grow into what they really and essentially are—in this life, but seldom if ever completely and never eternally. Natures are limited by their ends but also by their finitude in time, even if nature as a whole may be eternal.

Reason is not the only distinctive characteristic of human beings. Man wants to know, as Aristotle observes, but he also wants to take in beauty. “Beauty is lovable, but the love of beauty is of a special kind; it doesn’t aim at getting its object, but keeps the distance that enables enjoying by contemplation.” Brague cites C. S. Lewis, who remarked that “man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals,” as it were, neither having nor desiring leisure. This helps to explain the task medieval monks set for themselves, preserving the writings of pagan culture, especially Latin culture. To be sure, having jettisoned the bulk of Jewish law, Christians sought help from the Roman jurists and the more sober Greek philosophers, but why else would monks preserve “the historians, or the bawdy Catullus, or the lewd Ovid, let alone Lucretius the Epicurean atheist,” if not for the beauty of their literary style? This lent an additional freedom to Christendom. “Christianity never claimed to produce a full-fledged culture,” instead leaving “huge chunks of human experience…entrusted to hu man intelligence,” “unaided by a special revelation.” Judaism and Islam ordain dietary laws and dress codes, but “there is no Christian cuisine” or “Christian fashion.” Christianity retains the Jewish command to love God and neighbor, but this is the sum of God’s law, not a determination of its details.

Modernity pushes moral freedom into the domain of licentiousness. Human beings are now said to have ‘values.’ Values, a term borrowed from economics, registering demand, appetites, has colonized moral thought. Whereas virtues “are grounded in the nature of things,” the nature of human beings, “bringing out what most decidedly expresses what kind of beings we are,” value morality “rejects the grounding of the good on God’s will and wisdom” while rejecting its grounding “on any natural properties of beings.” Ultimately, values are generated by the will to power, as Nietzsche asserts. Nietzsche intended the values he lauded to counteract modernity’s nihilism, but unlike God’s will, human wills waver, covering that underlying nihilism slightly. “We need to come back to the two premodern notions,” virtues and commandments, bringing them into coordination. We will not need to “construct” such a coordinated system: “It already existed in the Middle Ages in three religions.” 

From the ancient philosophers, the men of the Middle Ages took the idea of virtues “as the flourishing of the human as such, regardless of the diversity of cultures and religions,” an idea that “implies acknowledging something like a human nature,” something within each person. As for the divine commandments, they are scarcely the expressions of “the whims of a tyrant, foisted upon a fold of slaves,” as the moderns incline to claim. “All the Biblical commandments stem from a first basic and utterly simple commandment, namely ‘Be!’ ‘Be what you are!'” “Deuteronomy summarizes all the commandments to be observed under the heading of ‘choose life.'” 

Not only a child’s biological but also his moral life typically begins in a family, “the first place in which people are taught virtues and commanded to obey a benevolent being,” “introducing them into the sphere of what transcends the biological level”—morality and also language, literature, religion, art.  The modern state and its commercial markets “can’t help trying to break the family and to recast it according to their own needs,” as “the family doesn’t fit into the inner logic that pushes the state and the market forward.” Indeed, the word ‘society’ initially referred to companies, trading enterprises; its transfer to human groups signifies the commercialization of those groups in modernity. Those ruling modern states prefer dealing with individuals, who are weaker, more easily governed, than families; the modern market inclines to treat persons as commodities and/or consumers. “The family is a space inside of which people are accepted for what they are, and not for what they do,” a space that states and markets dislike. At the same time, states and markets need persons who have been ‘well brought up.’ Hence the push for public education, whereby the state takes over familial and ‘churchy’ functions. And, as Brague notices, Christianity challenges the family, too: “The Bible is not that sweet on the family,” as Jesus “has harsh words against people who prefer their family to the kingdom of heaven.” The family “is a very good thing, but it is not the Good.” 

With their valorization of heredity, traditional aristocracies especially prized the family, and for centuries resisted modern state-building monarchs while looking down on commoners engaged ‘in trade.’ Admittedly, such “aristocratic societies belong to the past.” Still, “their view of life should be kept as a precious treasure if we want to avoid the dire diagnosis of Edmund Burke that ‘people will not look forward to posterity, who never look back to their ancestors.'” Aristocrats did something democrats seldom do: “They thought in the long run, not because of special moral qualities, but simply because they couldn’t do otherwise, and they had to think that way because the underlying model for their whole practice was the family.” That is why Alexis de Tocqueville, while understanding the triumph of democracy, called upon his fellow aristocrats to do their best to guide democracy, even if they could no longer rule it, and advised democrats to listen to their advice. Instead, the task of long-run thinking has fallen to what is left of the churches, tenured bureaucrats, and corporate boards—none of whom can be described, as the saying goes, of being ‘family- friendly.

The family is where we learn to speak. Brague defines civilization as conversatio civilis, a phrase whose origin he attributes to Aquinas, who criticized Averroës’s “thesis of an immediate communion of all minds in the Agent Intellect,” a claim that tends to deny that understanding is “a task to be fulfilled by undertaking some sort of work,” not a spontaneous and effortless affect. Aquinas wants political life, the life of the city, where speaking with one another is “possible, even easy” to initiate if not to maintain well. Aquinas concurs with Aristotle in defining man as a political animal, a being whose nature flourishes in civilization. The give and take of conversation suggest “some sort of dialectics,” which may lead to reasoning. Unfortunately, modernity has at times inclined in the opposite direction, with Herder’s enthusiasm for the barbarian invasions of Rome (“new blood flowing into the aging body”), Nietzsche’s “blond beast,” and Heidegger’s nonsense about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. Brague answers, if the barbarian invasions “had a positive effect on the culture of late antiquity,” it was “because the Germans and other invaders wanted to enter the Roman Empire not to destroy it but to share in its benefits,” to “become part of the Roman nobility.” In exchange, they eschewed human sacrifices, as is “very much to their credit.” Thoroughgoing barbarism unrepentantly seeks to destroy civilization, since barbarism wants to cut off conversation, sever the continuity among generations—very often by ‘severing’ the persons who constitute one or more generations of the peoples they target. 

This can be done violently but also peacefully, as when “reforms in the educational system give evidence of a deliberate attempt to get rid of whatever constituted the reference points of our identity. Destroy what made us ourselves, the peaceful barbarians say, and we can create ourselves anew. “Western Civ has got to go!” chanted the students, half a century or more back. Once they became the teachers, they did a fairly thorough job of that. 

Brague is no simple traditionalist, however. “What has led to us is older than history,” “even older than the whole human adventure.” Nature predates humanity. But modern historicism negates “the boundary that separated history and nature, the transitory sublunary and the eternal,” claiming that “Nature herself” forms part of “an evolutionary process.” Augustine new better, praising agriculture not as an abrogation of nature but as its measured use for human purposes through cultivation, “a metaphor for culture at large.” “Is there a greater spectacle,” he asked his readers, “and more worthy of our wonder, or where human reason can more somehow speak with nature, than when the force of the root and of the seed is asked about what it can do and what it can’t?” This means that agriculture “consist[s] in some sort of dialogue with nature,” answering “the questions we ask her.” “Reason in us has its echo in the reason that is buried in the world.” Agriculture shows us how we can “steer a middle course between two excesses, one that sees [nature] as a corpse that we can cut up as we want and another that sees in her a goddess, like the Nature of the eighteenth-century philosophes or the Gaia worshipped by some deep ecologists o of the present time.” In this, again, the medieval thinkers were better, understanding that “Nature has her laws because things have a stable nature.” They added that this was so because God created it that way, for reasons He reveals in His book. “It is mankind as a whole, the speaking animal, the conversing animal, that doubts of its own legitimacy and that needs grounds for wishing to push further the human adventure.”

 

Aurel Kolnai: Privilege and Liberty and Other Essays. Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999.

 

Modern political thought inclines to associate equality closely with liberty. That assumption needs scrutiny, not necessarily with a view to denying it but with a view to making it more precise, more accurate. Kolnai undertakes this critical task.

Born in 1900, the Hungarian Jew and Catholic convert Aurel Kolnai witnessed the technologically brilliant, politically catastrophic first three-quarters of the twentieth century. In his excellent introduction to this collection, Daniel J. Mahoney calls him “one of the greatest thinkers of the century to place the restoration of common-sense evaluation and philosophical realism at the very center of his philosophical and political itinerary”—a distinction that makes Kolnai a very rare specimen indeed. He was especially critical of the fashionable ideologies of Existentialism and Marxism, which twisted political life in malignant directions throughout the period, each holding out the utopian prospect of human perfection without God. As Mahoney writes, “Kolnai’s deepest, most original contribution to the understanding of the utopian mind is his recognition of the ‘utterly fundamental contradiction’ at the heart of the ideological enterprise,” which promises “a new world without human alienation and divisions of any kind” while “the attainment of such a new reality is impossible without a radically unprecedented ‘revolutionary’ schism between the old humanity and the new—a schism that cannot ever be surmounted.” Instead of realizing perfection, regimes animated by utopian ideologies crush liberty, murder innocent people, and achieve social equality under conditions of political tyranny because their rulers cannot understand, or stand, that they are not forming new human beings out of formless clay.

In his substantial 1949 essay, “Privilege and Liberty,” Kolnai takes up the question of aristocracy and democracy addressed variously by Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville. In the postwar years, with Stalin still securely ensconced in the Kremlin, his regime having made colonies of a half-dozen countries in eastern and central Europe, and Mao completing his conquest of China, the Western commercial republics were on the defensive. Kolnai sees that the moral and intellectual defenses of those regimes were weak because they share the egalitarian claims of the Communists, seen in their mutual espousal of what he calls “the cult of the ‘Common Man,'” “a construct of subversive sophists and seekers for power” who, although “dread[ing] Communism as the blighting tyranny it is,” incline “to submit to it half-heartedly,” lacking any serious argument against the Communists’ stated aims. Communists could stage their claim to power on the right of the “great multitude of people as such, in regard to its rights, interests, welfare, security, perfection, and so forth” to overthrow “Privilege.” 

Kolnai identifies three fallacies in both Marxism and, crucially, ‘Progressive’ egalitarianism: the notion of class conflict, which assumes that life is a zero-sum game; the notion that egalitarian distribution of goods and services by the state is just; and the notion that the common good is the same as sameness, that “collectivism is only individualism raised to the high power of an absolute monism,” that ‘society’ resembles a person. In both of these ideologies, “Privilege is not merely an ‘injustice’ which favors ‘the few’ to the detriment of ‘the many’ but above all, a symbol of the imperfection of Man as compared with God…a symbol of the ‘irksome,’ ‘irritating,’ ‘humiliating’ transcendence of the Good in relation to human Will.” A comical example of this was the undergraduate in an English class who complained that the problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He has a holier-than-thou attitude. But in politics the mindset of egalitarian resentment can prove lethal.

Egalitarianism runs up against “the fact that a few or rather, very many men in different ways transcend the ‘common level’ of mankind.” Egalitarians war against reality, even as Milton’s Satan wars against God. In both instances, the rebellion looks like a campaign for liberty but ends in tyranny, however temporary that regime may be. In opposition, Kolnai “propose[s] to envisage Privilege most of all in its close interrelation with Liberty”—indeed, as Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, and Tocqueville saw the European aristocrats as liberty’s defenders against excesses committed by both the rule of the One and the rule of the Many.

By “Privilege,” Kolnai means distinction: to be set apart from others but not above the laws. He does not mean a hierarchy of ruling offices (the Communists had that) or the sort of ‘Platonist’ regime that veers into utopianism (if taken literally). He means, under modern conditions of ‘statism,’ a civil society in which dissimilar and distinct persons and classes, ‘privileged’ and ‘underprivileged’ alike, participate in civic life, the former as trustees for the latter because their participation occurs on the private or civil-social level and aims at the good of the latter. Such a civil society is reasonable without being rationalist, without expecting reason to rule outright. That is, in such a society, reasonable persons will recognize the limitations of reason as a means of civil-social and political organization—which may indeed be the point of Plato’s Republic.

Rationalism operates on “the principle of Identity,” the express hostility to anything that is not the same as itself. ‘Identity politics’ homogenizes. (Today, it might be added, what is now called identity politics homogenizes under the guise of ‘diversity,’ with the ‘New Left’ proposing the same egalitarian socialist regime as the ‘Old Left’ of Communism and Progressivism.) “The new Caliph Omar will not content himself with having the library of Alexandria burnt but cause most of the books to be ‘edited’ so as to form ‘future’ chapters in the progressive Koran.” Without confusing human regimes with God’s regimes, Kolnai insists that those who deny that there are some people who by their very nature orient their souls to the cultivation of “a certain set of higher values,” incline also to deny the existence of a holy, that is, separate and superior God. “The ideal of Identity precludes the reality of Participation: in other words, Pantheists or Anthropotheists cannot realize, or live by, their status as children of God.” It is true that “every high value is ‘meant for me,'” no matter who I am, “not only in the sense of benefiting me as a recipient of its causal effects but of perfecting me through an appreciative response on my part,” but it is meant for me as something ‘above’ me, “not as an immanent function of the unfolding of my volitions, needs or capacities.” Privileges persons and classes are not intrinsically better in some metaphysical sense; all men are in “bondage” to “what is intrinsically better than they, tow what essentially transcends their scope yet enters into the constitution of their goal.” As a Catholic, Kolnai identifies the Pope as one whose holiness and fatherliness exists because he serves God. Some persons may indeed by “more saintly personally than the Holy Father,” but they properly approach in with reverence as “the symbol and guardian, not so much of human saintliness as of our corporate super-natural ‘subjectness'” to God. “Hierarchy stands for the submission of man to what is highest in man and higher than man but claiming his attention: ultimately, along with many necessary or completive avenues of approach to God; whereas ‘Emancipation’ stands for the subjection of man to man, and his bondage to what is lowest in him; or again, ultimately, to the Spirit that seeks to destroy him.” While Participation registers “the basic truth that response, not fiat, is the prime gesture of the human person,” ‘Emancipation” and ‘Equality,” in “proclaiming the equal and joint sovereignty of men, speak the idiom of Identity,” “supplanting or, indeed, ‘creating’ God.” In Aristotelian terms, Participation is reciprocal, political in the strict sense, whereas Identity is the principle of a command-and-obey relationship, not merely camouflaged by egalitarianism but animated by it in “a pledge of (sham) perfection”. Egalitarianism intends to override human reality because although human beings are all equally human and equally under God, they are not equally gifted or positioned, and the attempt to make them so requires a decidedly inegalitarian regime to enforce the equality it demands. It “aspires to surmount the individuation, plurality and contingent inequality of men, inherent in the specific imperfection of man and his position in the order of being.” Such a regime “will insist not only on enforcing the allegiance” to itself “but on determining the wills and creating the souls of all”—an ambition that distinguishes modern tyrants from “the comparatively harmless tyrants of old who contented themselves with being obeyed.”

Communism redefines liberty in terms of egalitarianism. According to the regime of the Soviet Union, real, as distinct from bourgeois freedom consists of the unlimited rule of “the supreme power” because it supposedly “embodies the power of ‘every one and all,'” with the exception of those who refuse to go along, which it deems “outside the pales of humanity.” That is, “government shall be omnipotent” and “it shall represent the identical thought, will and power of all.” Unlike the republican regime as understood by (for example) James Madison, in which elected officials can be voted out of office if their constituents decide that they no longer represent the sovereign people who put them there, modern tyrants lead the people, posing as the vanguards of an unfolding, immanent dialectical process that progressively and in the last inevitably shapes humanity into a homogeneous mass whose constituents will be capable of communitarian life. Because this amounts to a form of Pantheism, “Communism is nothing but the determinate attempt to take seriously, and to actually realize the one true and ultimate Freedom of the Common Man: man’s ‘Freedom from God.'” “Man as such is elevated to the rank of god head” and rightly so, according to the ideology, because “universal Matter” is ultimately identical to “rational humanity”: matter is evolving according to rational, dialectical laws toward a fully rational, communitarian worldwide society. “Man’s ’emancipation from God’ is coined out, as it were, in the concrete scheme of his emancipation from his ‘self-forged chains’: from the ‘natural law’ and ‘moral order’ on the one hand, from the limiting and paralyzing fact of his substantial dividedness and his multicentric will on the other.” After all, “if I recognize any valid law and authority over and above my will…I cannot be God.” But in reality, Communism betokens not liberation but “the self-enslavement of man.“

As for Progressivism in contemporary liberal democratic regimes, it makes them increasingly less liberal, less free. President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” and especially his “Freedom from Want,” amounts to a demagogic appeal to the insecurity of industrial populations vulnerable to the ups and downs of a market economy. What is now called ‘welfare” is thereby made a part of freedom, no longer simply a good; as in the Marxist critique of ‘bourgeois liberalism’ and ‘bourgeois freedoms,’ real freedom is said to be the guarantee of material well-being. Similarly, “Freedom from Fear,” once named as a virtue, courage, now becomes “a boon” citizens can “demand from the State.” “It connotes the suggestion that people cannot be really ‘free’ so long as they are in any sense subject to fear: until, that is, the State has removed all cause for their being afraid of economic insecurity, or even made psychoanalytic treatment freely available for everyone suffering from ‘anxiety neurosis.'” Liberty now means not the “Constitutional State,” a state subject to “checks placed on public power, be it state-power as such or class oligarchy,” but the “Welfare State,” with welfare “including psychic ‘welfare,’ which opens up the perspective of the so-called ‘conditioning‘ of the citizen, and thus involves a tendency running counter even more fundamentally to the original meaning of civic liberty.” “Democracy has progressively come to look upon ‘freedom’ no longer a s a high good in itself, as the signature of the civic status of man, but as a title-deed to ‘real’ goods only, a mere ‘formal’ or promissory scheme which acquires its true value, indeed its actual meaning, by its ‘implementation’ with tangible need-gratifications also to be guaranteed by social organization…to be furnished by public power itself.”

Madison regarded what he called the “manly and vigilant” spirit of the American people as the final guard of their liberty. But in “the ‘common man’ world of silly matrons, meddlesome maiden aunts, vociferous viragos and literate wenches of both sexes—the world of a Puritanism sunk down to the morasses of pacifism, prohibitionism, psychoanalysis and milksop promiscuity—the ‘opposites interblend'” or ‘synthesize’ “not on the high plane of a tense revolutionary dialectic,” as in Marxism, “but in the sense of a paradise ‘available’ here and now, of an ‘ideal’ society designed to be at once a department store, a brothel and a nursery.” Freedom indeed—as defined by the Common, or perhaps the Last, Man.

This is why “totalitarian subversion” can “disguise itself under a cloak of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ within the liberal democratic regimes themselves. There is a “totalitarian aspect implicit in Liberal Democracy itself,” as it has been redefined by Progressivism. Only if the liberal democracies rests “on axioms, conventions, traditions and habits…which transcend the liberal-democratic framework itself”—as seen in the Declaration of Independence’s “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”—and “impose certain ‘material’ or ‘objective’ limits on both individual liberty and popular sovereignty, thus helping to maintain a kind of accord among the multiple individual ‘wills,’ between the between the free citizenship of the individual on the one hand, and the ‘General Will,” as monistically embodied in state power, on the other,” can real liberty be secured. One impediment to this security is the historical fact that the original liberalism arose as a response to the “pseudo-Christianity” of Machiavellian and Hobbesian statism; statism preceded liberalism in time, and inclines to usurp it because liberals too often share the philosophic assumptions of the statists, even as they attempt to resist them, just as Progressives today share many of the same philosophic assumptions of the Communists.

Considered historically, the “root” of political liberty as seen in constitutional democracy lies in “Privilege”—specifically, the privileges of titled aristocrats held against monarchs and only later extended to ‘commoners.’ The extension of liberty to citizens generally does not eliminate privilege or liberty; if anything, it arms it more formidably against the ‘monarch,’ the centralized modern state, ‘the Crown.’ But there is a danger. Aristotle’s politeia or ‘mixed’ regime, in which the few and the many balance one another, may easily become too democratic, too much the rule of ‘the many,’ and then incline toward tyranny “as the all but inevitable ‘next step.'” Kolnai sees one effective way of preventing that from happening, a way unavailable to Aristotle: Christianity, which resists tyranny because it considers all human beings equally children of God, equally persons not to be tyrannized. But “Christian society,” as distinguished from Christianity itself, also faces a danger, the danger of a “humanistic misreading of the Gospel as a promise of man’s terrestrial paradise and perfection (with a stolen flavor of true Heaven about it), as a divinization of man’s abstract ‘reason’ and ‘will’ (a travesty of the beatific vision), as a doctrine of supernatural grace being taken for granted and as a part of man’s natural constitution itself”—in sum, the false, pantheistic assertion of “man’s union with Divinity in the sense of Its expropriation and absorption by the autonomous ‘energy’ of mankind.”

Obviously, privilege too has its hazards, “necessarily open to abuses,” as is “every form of official power or of professional authority.” Anything that “reduces to making the entire order of society the function of One all-determining central consciousness, the object of One omnipotent arbitrary human will” endangers liberty. That is why privilege must be constitutionally limited; such limitation, but also Privilege itself, so limited, makes Privilege the guardian of liberty. And even then, some abuses will occur: “With privilege existing in society, the freedom of some men will inevitably be trespassed upon and unduly circumscribed of narrowed down by others; with privilege eliminated from society.” Nonetheless, without any privilege “there will be no one possessing any substantial kind of freedom—and capable of using it—at all.”

In terms of practice, Kolnai remarks that federalism alone does not suffice to guard liberty if all the ruling offices are elective because egalitarianism “always tends to centralization and uniformity.” And so, to take the example of the United States Constitution, it is a very good thing that the Supreme Court is appointed, not elected. Kolnai cites the Catholic Church and independent universities as examples of such undemocratic institutions in civil societies. The Church and the universities share the “salutary mission” of “inoculating the national mind with the seeds of objective value-reference, a vision of things ‘sub specie aeterni,’ of intellectual independence and moral backbone.” Without such institutions, “civic liberty” comes into “mortal peril.” The same is true of private property and its attendant inequalities. “Private property without ‘wealth’ is possible in pure logic but not in social reality.” By ‘socializing’ it, “we can get nothing but a monistic central power tending to omnipotence and compassing the death of liberty.”

In the same year, Kolnai elaborated on his critique of “the Common Man” in an essay titled “The Meaning of the ‘Common Man.'” The Common Man is common to communism, liberal democracy, and social democracy; if liberals in the West embrace undiluted popular sovereignty they will weaken themselves in their struggle against the communists.

It is simply not true that “all social superiority as such relates antagonistically to the Common Man.” It is one thing to say that we are all “born equal,” equally human, with certain unalienable rights we all share and properly intend to guard, but quite another to say that this must entail equalization of “material ‘conditions’ or ‘chances'” as well. Such an attempt to perfect civil societies (if indeed equalization of material conditions would perfect them) presumes Godlike power, wisdom, and justice in the human beings who would be in charge of the equalization. This means that imperfect human beings would be in charge of the perfection of everyone else—what gamblers would call a ‘long shot,’ to put it mildly.

Kolnai affirms that any two men “are presumed fundamentally ‘equal’—which in fact they are in regard to the natural rights of the person as such.” But “once we go beyond the wholesome and Christian principle of a limited equality, formal and material, as implied by Man’s basic dignity and rational nature as well as by the radical transcendence of the person’s ultimate value before God above his social, physical, intellectual and cultural, and even, in a tangible sense, moral, distinctions or shortcomings,” then “we cannot help sliding down the path that leads to the abyss of material equality, with its concomitants of an impoverishing, oppressing, suffocating and deadening uniformity,” seen in actual socialist regimes.

Socialists will protest, saying that egalitarianism is “hostile neither to the division of labor nor to personal genius, talents or accomplishments, but merely to the social hierarchy of artificial group privileges which perverts the division of labor and stifles rather than brings to fruition personal prowess or merit.” Creativity will flourish, even as acquisitiveness will disappear. Socialism will “liberate genius from the shackles of poverty and the handicap of a humble origin,” enabling “true art, true science, true individuality [to] flourish.” This was indeed the claim of Leon Trotsky in his unintentionally hilarious 1924 book, Literature and Revolution. [1] Kolnai contents himself with irony: “The Common Man, then, is a very mysterious, not to say a mystical fellow, who according to need is admirably fitted even to ascend the highest peaks, inaccessible to a privilege-ridden mankind, of Uncommonness.”

And then there are some egalitarians without such utopian dreams, who instead endorse a policy of “break[ing] down the high peaks of human worth” while “rais[ing] up the low levels of human existence to an acceptable average standard.” This aspiration rests on “the crude fallacy” that there exists “a constant ‘sum total’ of ‘goods,’ in the all-embracing sense of the term, which can be ‘distributed’ in more unequal or more equal ways.” This ignores the dynamism of real human societies and of reality itself. Peaks will arise, like it or not, and any comprehensive effort to prevent that, or to demolish them when they occur, can only stifle the enrichment of human life. Biology itself, but also “early education and coining influence of the family atmosphere” (more succinctly known as ‘good parenting’) will tell. Aristocracy defined as ‘titled nobility’ once reflected this, if roughly—such terms as ‘titled’ and ‘nobility’ indicate prominence, the fact of being known. Nobility in this sense “represents value intrinsic, distinctively ‘qualitative,’ pervading the essence of its bearer as it were, and as such directly underlying a claim to social prerogative or leadership,” a “quasi-natural, quasi-essential superiority that is necessarily not only in  society but also of society and so far inseparable from an aspect of artificiality not, however, by  or from society” because it “originates in supra-social, quasi ‘entitative’ human value.” This in no way suggests that those who are ‘in the aristocracy’ are less “liable to sin, sickness and ignorance as any proletarian.” It does more than suggest that conventional privileges recognize the existence, in civil society, of the natural inequalities that enrich civil society, in some respects making it civil—differentiated and thereby free from tyrannical centralized rule. “What matters is the humility displayed by society as a whole in accepting and elaborating a manifold pattern of ‘distinctions between higher and lower’ as part of its own vital constitution.”

Egalitarian ideology does not confine itself to government and relations among socioeconomic classes. It has spread to “the relationships of the sexes and the domain of parental authority.” “Its main theme with regard to the emancipation of women is really the superimposition of artificial similarity upon natural dissimilarity in the place of ‘artificial’ mores shaped in reverent awareness of the natural order and the elemental differences between the sexes which it implies.” As for “the destruction of parental authority, linked with the odd idea of the emancipation of youth” (odd because youth is “a necessarily transitory stage in human life,” unlike sexuality and class), it “strikes even more fundamentally at the root of the concept of a social order pervaded with natural bases of authority” and “is obviously inherent in the drive for totalitarian State regimentation.” 

Kolnai distinguishes between the “Common Man” and the “Plain Man.” The “Common Man” represents man absent custom, convention—an abstraction who does not exist in actual life. The “Plain Man” is man as most men actually exist in civil societies everywhere—unprivileged but not ‘underprivileged,’ an ordinary guy. He will differ from one country to the next because conventions vary from one country to the next. “He is not the ideologist of his own grandeur”; “the last thing that would naturally occur to him is to abolish ‘his betters,’ in the broadest sense of the term, and to actually step into their place.” And “though it is nothing but vulgar obscurantist mysticism to believe that the ‘plain man’ can ‘govern himself’ better than a Prince and a State aristocracy can govern society, it is indubitably true that a system of government in which the ‘plain man’ as such ‘has a say’ is intrinsically better than government by an esoteric caste of public officials no  matter how well bred, ‘cultured’ and ‘public spirited.'” The “sane sense” of democracy isn’t egalitarianism but participation, “at various levels, of the broad strata of the people in the shaping of public policy,” ensuring that a prince or an aristocrat is “reminded of his limits and of his duty of subordination to the whole of which he is a part.” 

The only real Common Man, “in the sense of being the Head and Representative of all Mankind,” is Jesus Christ. He is the sole embodiment of the “common good,” being “a universal Cause and End,” the one Person truly “common to mankind.” The Common Man as “molded and formed by the intelligentsia,” however, has no divinity about him, lacking either the wisdom, the justice, or the power to redeem human beings. This is why Kolnai calls “the war against nobility, that ostensibly righteous social rebellion,” actually amounts to a “metaphysical rebellion leveled at something that towers infinitely above kings, dukes, barons, squires, factory owners, generals and admirals, fops or usurers,” its proximate targets. The Common Man so conceived is “a robot sublimized into an angel,” “a man prepared and trained for slavery to that Power which is constituted upon the principle of his claim to sovereignty and in terms of his consciousness of unchecked selfhood” but fashioning “the yoke of a comprehensive scientific knowledge of necessity,” whether socioeconomic (Marxism) or racialist (Nazism). In order to impose such (pseudo-)scientific rule, human beings must be induced to suppose that their good is the satisfaction of their appetites, physical phenomena that can be satisfied empirically. “It is no accident that it should have been Spinoza, the ‘sublime’ and ‘pious’ rationalist, monist, and pantheist, not some unruly voluptuary, not an empirical or materialist epicurean, who first codified with classical rigor the great modern principle of the good defined in terms of the appetite.” The ‘low’ needed to be presented as if it were the ‘high,’ indeed the highest. Spinoza, it will be recalled, was neither a Marxist nor a Nazi but a ‘liberal’ of a new sort. The ‘progressivist’ liberalism he prepared the ground for (it needed the historicism of Hegel to complete it) constitutes “the primal form of the ‘Common Man’ world, instinct with an ‘ideology’ of its own.” And while Progressives typically oppose Communism and Nazism (they do not recognize the children of their own mother-assumptions), they often cannot separate themselves from them with sufficient rigor to really fight them in any thoroughgoing way, as Kolnai had seen in the 1930s, when appeasement of fascism and collaboration with Communism afflicted ‘the democracies.’

A decade after the publication of “Privilege and Liberty” and “The Meaning of the ‘Common Man,'” Kolnai offered a critique of utopianism, which he distinguished from utopias. Utopias, seen in such literary works as Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia, do not exist anywhere and are not intended so to do. “Every utopia suggests a human world (a society conceived as a whole) determined by one unitary and sovereign human authorship: sprung from one human mind with its peculiar vision, scale of preferences, habits of reasoning, and imagination, although calculate to carry a more or less universal appeal”—a world “analogous in some way to Divine creation” and characterized by an imitation of  the “streamlined perfection” seen in the world as God indeed created it. And as in Eden before evil crawled into it, “the things of Utopia are not right as opposed to wrong things but manifestations of the right way of being.” By contrast, utopianism claims that such perfection can be achieved in the postlapsarian world. This ambition rests upon a contradiction: “a Will operating on behalf of the total good, the total needs, the unitary mind of mankind, yet necessarily against most of what men really want and cannot cease to want.” Against this, Kolnai concurs with the German philosopher and follower of Husserl, Max Scheler: “Repentance, not Utopia, is the greatest revolutionary force in the moral world.” [2]

In the final essays in the volume, Kolnai turns from a critique of egalitarianism from an examination of conservatism, emphasizing “the pluralist trait of all true conservative thought,” thought not to be confused with “the inflexibility of archaic societies” with their lives of “unthinking habit” or, “above all,” the “counter-revolutionary or fascist-influenced conservatism of panic.” Conservatives uphold “public liberty, which rests on the fully realistic multiformity and mutual limitation of authorities, hierarchies and power relations, on the idea not of equality but of equilibrium.” Conservatives know how to defer, never assuming that they ‘know better’ than those ranked above them in society while readily guarding themselves against tyrannical encroachment. Kolnai gives as his example Tocqueville, who “could not have known Marx’s febrile dream of a ‘realization of the human race’—the real totalitarian ideal—or the ‘historical necessity’ of this operation, or of the Marxist vision, as highly revolutionary as it is reactionary, of the future abolition of the division of labor. Yet he saw, with piercing vision and fearful foreboding, the danger that the demand for ‘equal rights,’ with which he completely sympathized, leads with almost logically unavoidable necessity to the demand for an equal level of culture and welfare.” Tocqueville saw that aristocrats such as himself could no longer rule modern ‘democracy,’ but they could still guide it, advise it, temper its excesses. 

A genuine conservative is an ‘authoritarian,’ not in the sense of unthinking subservience to whoever happens to be ‘in power’ but in the sense of acknowledging the sovereignty of God in the manner of “the great Duns Scotus” and “certain scattered protestant theologians of the present day” (Reinhold Niebuhr, for example?) who define “the morally good as what is in accord with God’s will,” as distinguished from Hobbes and his epigoni, who derive “what is morally good from the will of the state, especially the undivided and unambiguous decree of one man, the monarch.” Conservatives incline to what Anglophone philosophers call an ‘intuitionist’ ethics and “the closely related doctrine of objective value,” against “any kind of ‘vitalistic,’ pre- or antimoral, defiantly immanent affirmation of the primary order,” which denies the transcendent character of what (indeed Who) sets the standard for flawed human beings. “Hegel’s historicist, emphatically developmental ‘dialectical’ theory of ‘absolute consciousness’ has imparted new impetus to the modern extremisms of the Right, but it is an even more important basis for Marxism’s egalitarian and all-human, ultra-revolutionary vision of perfection, which has in our own century legitimized a totalitarian state power which goes incomparably further than any earlier known form of tyranny.” “The more subtle virtue of patience is almost a natural prerogative of the conservative, something which the revolutionary in general—we might venture to add, necessarily—lacks.” Patience fortifies the conservative’s “innermost secret,” the “most puzzling of all virtues, hardest to analyze and to justify, trust in God.” Kolnai “gladly concede[s] that blind confidence is a neither advisable nor praiseworthy caricature of trust,” which “should be bestowed in the knowledge that one can be deceived” by men, including men who claim to speak for God.

Kolnai refines these distinctions still further, distancing himself somewhat from such sober conservatives as Michael Oakeshott and Jacques Maritain. “Professor Oakeshott is liable to overshoot the mark and attribute to habit, routine, tradition, casual expedients, the ‘skill’ and ‘know-how’ of the experienced and the ‘self-propelling’ virtue of activity once engaged in, both a larger space in human life and a more independent status than they really possess,” “inclin[ing] to underestimate the inherent spiritual stature of man and the intellectual claims it implies,” including the spiritual claim of reasoning. For his part, in his Man and the State, Maritain offers a confused mixture of Catholicism and modern progressivism. This consists of “a synthesis, suffused with all the religious afflatus of the soul, between Christ and the idol of modernity,” between “Christ and His modern caricature,” between “the true Crist of the faith and the substituted Christ of humanism,” “Christ and the Anti-Christ.” This “sentimental and romantic attempt” at “dressing poor Thomas Aquinas in the rags of a laicist apostle of democracy” overlooks the fact that “men only deified the state because they took to deifying man.” (One might also say that Maritain makes Catholicism look a bit too much like the Protestantism of Woodrow Wilson.) 

Daniel J. Mahoney concludes his Forward to this volume with the just observation that “Kolnai’s conservatism is undoubtedly too European, too attentive—for an American audience—to the role that socially recognized traditional institutions such as monarchy and aristocracy can play in supporting liberty and maintaining the larger equilibrium of the social order.” It is also likely that Kolnai’s hopes in that regard, plausible as they may have been in Chateaubriand’s and Tocqueville’s day, were much wanner in the decades following the Second World War. The European revolutions and the Napoleonic wars wounded the aristocratic class and hollowed out legitimist monarchies, but the two world wars of the twentieth century and the Communist regimes that followed them in Eastern and Central Europe eradicated them as political entities. European conservatives have instead turned to organizing the ‘plain men’ in national organizations that so far have resisted the excesses of Fascism, although Kolnai would worry that populism cannot long resist despotic tendencies.

 

Notes

1. See Leon Trotsky: Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1971). For a brief and decidedly unimpressed commentary, see Will Morrisey: Reflections on Malraux: Cultural Founding in Modernity (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996, pp.161-163).
2. This aphorism may well trace back to Scheler’s days as a Catholic, which he later repudiated, adopting none other than the pantheism Kolnai himself decries.

 

 

 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Adventures of the Dialectic. Joseph Bien translation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

 

In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty argues that political ideals commit politicians to the perpetual exercise of violence because real human life stubbornly refuses to be idealized; frustrated, political idealists attempt to force human beings to conform to supposed truths that exist nowhere other than in the heads of those who believe them. Marxism seemed to promise a solution to this dilemma, since it offered a way of radically improving real human relations, of ending the exploitation of one class of men by another, while remaining firmly in the real world. Admittedly, Marxist politicians would also need to deploy violence and its consequent terror upon their ‘class enemies,’ but this violence, and this violence alone, held out the prospect of a diminution and perhaps even an elimination of violence after socialist regimes equalized social and economic conditions and brought about the end of class conflict, the end of tyranny, with the ‘end,’ the achieved purpose, of history, namely communism.

By the mid-1950s, however, with Stalin dead, his reign of terror gone, and the bureaucratization of Soviet rule fully entrenched in Russia, Merleau-Ponty distanced himself still further from orthodox Marxism and in some respects from Marxism altogether. “We need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here.” Stalin’s Terror had failed to move Russia, much less the rest of the world, toward communism: “In the crucible of events we become aware of what is not acceptable to us.” At the same time, he opposed some of the radical revisions of Marxism proposed by his friend of university days, Jean-Paul Sartre, France’s most prominent celebrity ‘intellectual’ in the country that most esteemed such figures.

Merleau-Ponty begins with the pacifist philosopher Alain, the nom de plume of Émile-Auguste Chartier, who had died only a few years before, after a long and influential career of teaching and writing. “Alain spoke”—critically, as readers knew at the time—of “a politics of reason which totalizes history, ties all the problems together, orients itself on a future that is already written in the present and where all problems will be solved”; against this historicist optimism, Alain proposed “a politics of understanding,” something along the lines of a prudential politics, “which, unlike the other, does not flatter itself with having embraced all of history but rather takes man as he is, at work in an obscure world, resolves problems one at a time.” To Alain, “all our misfortunes come from a failure to practice the politics of understanding.” Raymond Aron, a man scarcely lacking in prudence, replied that understanding alone is insufficient, that “there is only one politics, that of understanding and reason” (emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty concurs but takes Aron’s remark in a decidedly non-Aronian direction, calling the politics of understanding and reason “an action in the process of self-invention.” That is, he adds an element of Nietzsche’s atheist version of ‘creationism.’

Contra Hegel, however, he rejects the notion of an “end of history,” which would require “an absolute purification of history,” “an inertialess regime without chance or risk,” a regime that would erase “our own anxiety and solitude,” founded on a false-revolutionary spirit “that is nothing more than a way of disguising the state of one’s soul.” This is little more than a sophisticated form of wishful thinking, misconceiving reality as “a landscape against which one develops one’s personal dreams,” “a masquerade for one’s personal inclinations.” Serious revolutionaries, “first of all Marx” as Merleau-Ponty interprets him, “are not revolutionaries in that sense,” understanding “that universal history is not to be contemplated but to be made.” The “true revolutionary…rediscovers what is to be done” (the phrase of Lenin); “he navigates without a map and with a limited view of the present,” “oscillat[ing] between values and facts.” We have learned in the first half of the twentieth century that “the false modesty of understanding does not get around the problem of the whole, nor does the self-confidence of reason avoid the problem of events,” as “each political act engages the whole of history, but this totality does not give us a rule on which we can rely, because it is nothing more than opinion.” Historicism (even Marxist historicism, as will become clear), insofar as it attempts to synthesize the dualities of subject and object, conscience and history, present and future, judgment and discipline—typically, at the expense of the subject, the conscience, the present, and judgment—only perpetuates the rule of terror that historicists expect to reduce or eliminate in the long run. 

“This book is an attempt to stake out experience, not on the ground of politics, but on the ground of political philosophy”—that is, a philosophy mindful of political practice but neither transcending it in an imagined realm of ideals nor reduced to practice or “understanding.” This staking-out or mapping of twentieth-century political philosophy, this set of adventures of the dialectic, begins with Max Weber, moves to Georg Lukács, then to Leon Trotsky, and finally to Sartre.

Following the historicists of the nineteenth century, Weber rejects divine and natural right, both as claims to freedom and as bases for truth. On the contrary, freedom and truth are “acquired in a struggle,” a dialectic; they “cannot exist without strife.” Weber is a liberal, however, not a Hegelian monarchist or a Marxian socialist; that is, he is “faithful to knowledge and the spirit of investigation,” of liberalism’s “open-mindedness.” History is not “predestined,” nor will its violence someday cease. Ideals exist but not as “keys to history”; they are “only fixed guideposts for determining the difference between what we think and what has been and for making evident what has been left out by interpretation.” Historical knowledge is “never categorical,” never Kantian; “it is always open to revision.” When looking at the past, one must be willing to suspend one’s judgment in preparation for accepting newly discovered facts. 

Action in the present is entirely different, since such a suspension of judgment “is here impossible.” In the present, one must decide, ‘make policy.’ Even the refusal to decide is itself a decision. “Knowledge and practice confront the same infinity of historical reality, but they respond to it in opposite ways: knowledge, by multiplying views, confronts it through conclusions that are provisional, open, and justifiable (that is to say, conditional), while practice confronts it through decisions which are absolute, partial, and not subject to justification.” In considering the past, the historian has, if not all of the facts at least many more of the facts in front of him; the past has happened, ‘over’ in the immediate sense, even if its effects continue into the present. The “man of action” has no such advantage. “History is a strange object, an object which is ourselves”; while “our irreplaceable life, our fierce freedom, find themselves already prefigured, already compromised, already played out in other freedoms, which today are past,” our lives in the present are still irreplaceable, our freedom still fierce because we are not yet past, not yet dead. Weber seeks to “go beyond the domain of the double truth, the dualism of the objectivity of understanding and of moral feeling, to look beyond it for the formula of this singular situation.”

In his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber thus describes “religious efficacy” and “economic efficacy” not as contraries but as “interwoven” phenomena, “exchanging positions so that now one, now the other, plays the role of tutor.” This being so, “history has meaning, but there is no pure development of ideas,” as “meaning arises in contact with contingency”—in the case of capitalism, the unpredictable interaction between two phenomena, both complex and variable, as “human initiative founds a system of life by taking up anew scattered givens.” “The historical understanding which reveals an interior to history still leaves us in the presence of empirical history, with its density and its haphazardness, and does not subordinate it to any hidden reason”; “such is the philosophy without dogmatism which one discerns all through Weber’s studies.” The overall tendency to ‘rationalize’ human life, seen in Protestant theology and in economic calculation, with their “elective affinity” (a phrase Weber borrows from Goethe), but even more in their interaction, can be discerned by the historian, “but only after the fact.” “History does not work according to a model; it is, in fact, the advent of meaning,” meaning something only after the historian sees what has happened. 

Merleau-Ponty sees two problems here. If this is the way history works, how could anyone offer a critique of the past? It was what it was—a set of unpredictable configurations. Does his philosophy not lead to cultural relativism, “giv[ing] the same degree of reality and the same value to all civilizations”? Second, isn’t “the decision to investigate all civilizations” itself “the act of a civilization which is different from them, which transforms them,” as André Malraux’s character, A.D., urges in The Temptation of the West? Weber puts his readers in the position of needing “to choose between a history which judges, situates, and organizes—at the risk of finding in the past only a reflection of the troubles and problems of the present—and an indifferent, agnostic history which lines up civilizations one after another like individuals who cannot be compared.” Weber would extricate his thought from this dilemma by observing “our interest in the past: it is ours, and we are its,” each potentially clarifying the other. This being so, “we have just as much right to judge the past as the present.” As Weber himself puts it, “we are ‘cultural men,’ endowed with the capacity consciously to take a position with regard to the world and to give meaning to it” by “abstract[ing] certain phenomena of human existence” and “tak[ing] a position (positive or negative) with regard to their significance.” Defining man as the being capable of bestowing meaning and judging is of course the Nietzschean element in Weber, although it emphasizes the element of rationality in this process more emphatically than Nietzsche does. For Weber, reason, not impassioned creativity, is dispositive, but reason’s power is limited. Knowledge can never exhaust the richness of being, which always generates “unexpected consequences,” “surprises,” including capitalism. “Weber’s phenomenology is not systematic like Hegels’s. It does not lead to an absolute knowledge.” Like Alain, Weber offers a “politics of understanding,” but unlike Alain, in Weber “understanding has learned to doubt itself,” inclining to pessimism, not to optimism. He is no pacifist, admitting that “all politics is violence—even, in its own fashion, democratic politics.” He remains a liberal, like Alain, “reject[ing] nationalism, communism, and pacifism” but “not want[ing] to outlaw them.” 

“If history does not have a direction, like a river, but has a meaning, if it teaches us, not a truth, but errors to avoid, if its practice is not deduced from a dogmatic philosophy of history, then it is not superficial to base a politics on the analysis of the political man.” This brings Weber to his famous notion of the “charismatic” man, the one who “animate[s] the political apparatus and makes [his] most personal acts everyone’s affair,” the man who exercising the “art of inventing what will later appear to have been required by the time.” What Merleau-Ponty affirms in Weber is that a genuine philosophy of history “does not break the circle of knowledge and reality but is rather a meditation upon that circle,” a meditation that show “under what conditions a historical dialectic is serious,” when revolutionaries might actually invent something new, make a real revolution. “There were Marxists who understood this, and they were the best.” One of them was Georg Lukács, the greatest thinker of “Western”—i.e., not-Russian—Marxism of his generation.

Theoretically inclined Marxists “found themselves confronted by a problem” at the beginning of the twentieth century, a problem “which had been hidden from Marx by the remnants of Hegelian dogmatism,” his confidence that “history” was moving toward a purpose, an end. Weber had seen that our ideas are “relative to our time,” having “an intrinsic truth that they will teach to us if we succeed in placing them in their proper context, in understanding them rather than merely suffering them.” That is, the study of history makes us “capable of self-criticism,” even if it does not point us to some supposedly inevitable rainbow’s end. But Weber “does not pursue the relativism of relativism to its limits.” he does not see the possibility of “recover[ing] an absolute in the relative, a criterion for critical judgment. 

Lukács takes up that challenge, undertaking a quest not for “all possible and actual beings” but for a “coherent arrangement of all the known facts.” “When the subject recognizes himself in history and history in himself, he does not dominate the whole, as the Hegelian philosopher does, but at least he engages in a work of totalization,” an ever-continuing work, “the knowledge of our world in a state of becoming,” a state that “embraces knowledge itself.” History thus becomes “philosophy realized, as philosophy is history formalized, reduced to its internal articulations, to its intelligible structure.” This is what Marxism should be. To say, with Marx, that materialism would “deduce all culture from economics” means “that the relations among men are not the sum of personal acts or personal decisions, but pass through things, the anonymous roles, the common situations, and the institutions where men have projected so much of themselves that their fate is now played out outside them,” as in ‘the economy’ and ‘the state.’ In this, Lukács follows Marx himself, who writes that capital is “not a thing but a social relationship between persons mediated by things.” Under capitalism, things, objects, and the persons who own them dominate the subjects who manufacture them, the proletarians. If this movement is reversed, that “will be the basis for the reintegration of the world with man.” Where Lukács diverges from Marx is when Marx attempts to “claim the very authority of Hegel’s absolute knowledge for his own antidogmatic criticism,” describing his materialist history as immanently rational, reason unformed. In this, Lukács follows Weber: the rational meaning of history cannot be anticipated, only perceived retrospectively. “Rationality is necessary neither in the sense of physical causality, in which the antecedents determine the consequents, nor even in the sense of the necessity of a system, in which the whole precedes and brings to existence what happens.” “Marxism cannot hide the World Spirit in matter” but must “justify in another way the meaning of history,” namely, “by conceiving a historical selection which eliminates the antinomistic realities from the course of history but does not have, in itself and without men’s initiative, the power to create a coherent and homogeneous system.” This type of Marxism is truly revolutionary “precisely because it refuse[s] to be a dogmatic philosophy of history.”

Knowledge or consciousness is already present in man before it becomes consciousness of the social. It is only after human beings have invented certain kinds of social structures that those structures can become “the cradle of the knowledge of society,” as it finally does in Marx, quite apart from his dogmatism. “When one says that Marxism finds a meaning in history, it should not be understood by this that there is an irresistible orientation toward certain ends but rather that there is, immanent in history, a problem or a question in relation to which what happens at each moment can be classified, situated, understood as progress or regression, compared with what happens at other moments,” “accru[ing] with the other results of the past to form a single significant whole.” Each event can teach us something that helps us “bring further precision to the permanent problem of knowing what man and his society are,” through considering “the paradox of a society of exploitation that is nonetheless based on the recognition of man by man”—the dilemma seen not only by Marx but by Hegel. It is the man-to-man politics of recognition that constitutes the criterion for judging whether progress or regression has occurred. “Even in considering the whole of a civilization, its progress is secure only when followed by further progress”; this avoids cultural and/or historical relativism. And it means that “revolution become institution,” revolution that brings with it new socioeconomic and political institutions, “is already decadent if it believes itself to be accomplished,” if it denies the Heraclitean flow. Marx sees this in regard to capitalism, arguing that the new class, the bourgeoisie, by “accentuating the conflict between the demands immanent in production and the forms to which the bourgeois society subjects its production,” proves that the bourgeoisie is not the universal class; the proletariat is. That is, “the capitalist forms are soon regressive or decadent,” although they were progressive in contrast to the feudal aristocracy they replaced, “when compared to the productive forces which capitalism itself has created.” What began as “a projection of human freedom” ends in bourgeois class dictatorship. In keeping Marx’s dialectic in the forefront, Lukács attempts “to preserve the philosophical marrow of Marxism,” its revolutionary meaning, in “a Marxism which incorporates subjectivity,” human freedom, inventiveness, “into history without making it an epiphenomenon” of a materialist dialectic that deprecates such human agency in favor of the supposedly inevitable march of events.

This is why Lukács esteems literary production far more than Marx did. To Lukács, a literary work doesn’t amount to some sort of excretion from economic forces. “Even illusions have some sort of sense and call for deciphering because they always present themselves against the background of a lived relationship with the social whole” as “the expression of a lived world,” not the narrow expression of one economic class, because it shows that class’s “meeting and eventual collision with other classes”—the historical dialectic. The writer of fiction thus has a different task than that of the militant revolutionary activist. If the activist dictates the conduct of literary production, it will become propaganda. It will fail to be what it should be, “the reflection of the whole.” Such activists, once empowered in the regime of their invention, make that regime decadent, ossified, incapable of continuing the historical dialectic in a manner that does not distort dialectical thinking and practice because it mistakes a part for the whole. It no longer truly recognizes fellow human beings as human, as beings capable of dialectical thought and practice.

Lukács identifies what he calls the “historical mission of the proletariat” as “the absolute negation of class, the institution of a classless society” with a “philosophic mission of the advent of truth.” “For the proletariat,” he writes, “the truth is a weapon that brings victory; and the more ruthless, the greater the victory.” The proletarian’s class consciousness, his self-understanding of his condition as an industrial worker, is “not a state of mind, nor is it knowledge,” and “not a theoretician’s conception.” “It is a praxis,” by which he means an “objective possibility,” a perception of what he can do to realize his status as a social being, a being recognized as a man by other men. This “critico-practical revolutionary activity” may be seen in the earlier writings of Marx, particularly in his Theses on Feuerbach. “It is the inner principle of activity, the global project which sustains and animates the productions and actions of a class, which delineates for it both a picture of the world and its tasks in that world, and which, keeping in mind exterior conditions, assigns it a history”—a “cluster of relations of an ideology, a technique, and a movement of productive forces, each involving the others and receiving support from them,” together “producing a qualified phase of social development.” The proletarians are “men who explain themselves to one another,” one—the proletarian— reporting his “contact with the apparatuses of oppression,” another—the Marxist theoretician—bringing “information from another source on this same life and a view of the total struggle”—an exchange between workers who also think and speak and theoreticians who also live, therefore capable “of collecting in their theses what other men are in the process of living.” “The profound philosophical meaning of the notion of praxis is to place us in an order which is not that of knowledge but rather that of communication, exchange, and association”—the “life of the proletariat in the Party,” a life that “carries the working class beyond its immediate reality” while requiring the Party to make itself “accepted by the working class” by “prov[ing] that beyond capitalist history there is another history, wherein one does not have to choose between the role of subject and object,” that one can lead a political life, the life Lukács defines not as Aristotle defines it, as ruling and being ruled, but as an exchange “in which no one commands and no one obeys”—the maximization of freedom. In Lukác’s view, “such a conception of the Party is not a corollary of Marxism—it is its very center.” Lukács’s Marxism registers modern political philosophy’s valorization of freedom instead of its recurrence to ‘ancient’ fatalism in the form of historical determinism.

That recurrence, when committed by the Party, makes the Party “no longer the laboratory of history and the beginning of a true society” but a dictator not by the proletariat over the bourgeoisie but a dictatorship of the Party over the proletariat. The Party’s claims “must not be imposed on the proletarians against their will, because their rejection signifies that subjectively the proletariat is not ripe for them and , thus, that these theses are premature and, finally, false,” in need of being explaining them anew, “once the teaching of events will have made them convincing”; “the only valid politics, is the one which makes itself accepted by the workers,” who should be “led, but not maneuvered, into “bring[ing] the seal of truth to the politics of the Party.” Lukács is careful to insist that “the truth of Marxism is not the truth one attributes to the natural sciences, the similarity of an idea and its external ideatum,” but “rather nonfalsity, the maximum guarantee against error that men may demand and get,” thus revisable when new experiences make such revision plausible. “One can never be sure that” a given political idea “will not be challenged at some future date”; “truth itself is then conceived as a process of indefinite verification, and Marxism is, at one and the same time, a philosophy of violence and a philosophy without dogmatism.” It is a philosophy of violence inasmuch as politics requires that decisions be made, choices for one thing, against another, and that those choices must be enforced. But those decisions are themselves subject to revision by a self-critical Party. “The essential feature of Lukác’s thought was no longer to put the total meaning of history in a mythical ‘world spirit’ but on a level with the proletarians’ condition in a provable and verifiable process without an occult background.” If “the coming-to-be of truth” is “the core of history,” Marxism conceived this way has “the validity of a strict philosophy,” a genuinely dialectical exercise. Indeed, “he very concept of man must be rendered dialectical,” since to posit ‘Man’ as “a positive nature,” as a set of “attributes,” loses the flow of being, “the principle of universal strife” discovered by Heraclitus and refined by Marx and further refined by Lukács. “If one goes deeply enough into relativism,” if one pushes further than Weber did, “one finds there a transcendence of relativism.” One finds that reality does not exist in the Platonic sense of permanence; reality becomes, “and it does not become without the collaboration of thought.” Humanism ‘freezes’ man as an essence, but “our task, rather, is to make the abstract fluid, diffuse it in history, ‘understand’ it as process.” History is a “permanent interrogation,” and Marxism properly interpreted “intensifies our questioning” instead of providing ‘the answer.’ 

All this notwithstanding, Merleau-Ponty cautions, “there was something justified in the opposition” Lukács’s Marxism encountered when the ‘Eastern’ Marxists, the Marxist-Leninists, took notice of it. Lenin had published Materialism and Empirio-criticism, very much to sustained applause among Party members, arguing that “thought is a product of the brain and through the brain and, through the brain, of the external reality.” Merleau-Ponty dismisses this as a slightly more sophisticated form of naive realism: “He forgot that an effect does not resemble its cause and that knowledge, being an effect of things, is located in principle outside its object and attains only its internal counterpart,” bringing Marxism back to “the pre-Hegelian” or pre-historicist “theory of knowledge.”  Lenin “never asks himself by what miracle knowledge carries on a relationship with a suprahistorical object, a relationship which is itself removed from history.” This amounts to a “new dogmatism, which puts the knowing subject outside the fabric of history and gives it access to absolute being, releases it from the duty of self-criticism, exempts Marxism from applying its own principles to itself, and settles dialectical thought, which by its own movement rejected it, in a massive positivity.” More interestingly, Merleau-Ponty remarks that Marx’s thought exhibits “the same discordancy between naive realism and dialectical inspiration.” The record of Marx’s genuinely dialectical thought occurs in his pre-1850 writings,” and Friedrich Engels’ much later Dialectics of Nature reduces dialectics to a way of describing history, including a historicized nature. “Engels does not concede to philosophy even the right of putting the results of science into an original dialectic,” making philosophy into “a particular science which is concerned with the laws of thought,” only. So, “the conflict between ‘Western Marxism’ and Leninism is already found in Marx as a conflict between dialectical thought and naturalism.” Merleau-Ponty finds some truth in Leninism, nonetheless: “dialectical and philosophical Marxism is suited to soaring periods, when revolution appears close at hand, while scientism predominates in stagnant periods…when the weight of infrastructures makes itself felt,” as they did in 1908, when Lenin wrote his book in exile, with revolution seemingly far away. This is the flaw of Lukács’s Marxism; it “lack[s] the means of expressing the inertia of the infrastructures, the resistance of economic and even natural conditions, and the swallowing-up of ‘personal relationships’ in things.” For his part, Lenin “preserves the dialectic but embalms it, outside ourselves, in an external reality.” Theoretically/philosophically, this prevents the thinker from self-knowledge; practically/politically, “it means replacing total praxis by a technician-made action, replacing the proletariat by the professional revolutionary,” himself ensconced in a bureaucratic apparatus.

In Leninism, “the conflict between dialectic and realism is therefore not overcome, for, as we have said, if communism gives lip service to the dialectic, it cannot bring itself to renounce it.” In the Moscow Trials, we saw “the revolution which no longer wanted to be a revolution, or inversely an established regime which mimics the revolution.” This, Merleau-Ponty argues, is a problem not merely with Leninist Marxism but with the Marxism of Marx: “It could not maintain itself at that sublime point which it hoped it could find in the life of the Party, that point where matter and spirit would no longer be discernible as subject and object, individual and history, past and future, discipline and judgment.” It could not achieve the dialectical synthesis, the end of ‘history.’ “There is no revolution which is critical of itself,” and “yet it is through this program of continual criticism that revolution earns its good name.”

Moving to the problem of the revolution in action, not in thought, Merleau-Ponty considers Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s ill-ended rival. The “theoretical equivocalness of materialism and of dialectic” appears there, too. Trotsky hoped to overcome this, however. He understood that “revolutionary realism” aims not only at “external results” (technology can do that) but in the understanding of those results by human beings. “Action is the pedagogy of the masses, and explaining one’s actions to the masses is acting again.” There is “no other guarantee against non-sense” than “the increasing participation of the masses in revolutionary politics and in the increasing transparency of history.” Trotsky compares “historical reason” to natural selection,” the elimination of “false solutions” in the face of conditions that extinguish them. As in natural selection, “nowhere is there an already written future”; “the Party neither knows nor sees all.” At the same time, it must maintain its absolute authority, enforcing its decisions precisely in order to test them in the external, material world. “History will become manifest on the condition that all that is lived by the workers is clarified by the politics which is proposed to them by the Party and which they then adopt as their own.” The Party concentrates “the proletarian forces scattered throughout the world”; without the Party, “truth ‘in itself’ would never become manifest or fulfill itself as truth” because “it is nothing less than the universal,” the proletariat, “on the march.” Given this claim, Trotsky’s actions against Stalin contradicted Trotsky’s thought, as his minority faction “kept its right to defend its ideas but not the right to act as a party within the Party,” which must decide, enforce—rule. (Stalin, of course, denied both of those “rights.”) Trotsky “had “no other procedure at his disposal to substitute for the methods of the Party”; “he must allow himself to be eliminated rather than to lack discipline.” “He hesitated to situate truth outside the Party because Marxism had taught him that truth could not in principle reside anywhere but at the point where the proletariat and the organization which embodies it are joined.” “As a Marxist, he was not able to foresee a derailment of the dialectic in the country of the revolution,” never coming “to consider the bureaucracy as a class,” a ruling class, not capitalist but not above exploiting the proletariat, either. Marx himself “never conceived of a collective and planned economy which was not for the benefit of the proletariat because” his dialectic “postulates that the end of private property is the end of exploitation.” How wrong he was. Marxist collectivism turned out to be “the fetish of fetishes.” “Passivity toward the Party is the stance that discipline and centralism take when the Party ceases to be democratic.” (But was it ever?)

At any rate, Marxian “scientific socialism” “grants itself the position of an absolute knowledge, and, at the same time, it authorizes itself to take from history by violence a meaning which is there but profoundly hidden.” To reveal that meaning, Lenin deems it necessary “to hit heads” in “an interminable effort…to form a classless society and to bring history by iron and fire to express its meaning.” That is, Marx’s dialectical materialism recapitulates the dilemma of idealism, and especially of Hegelian idealism, which conceives of history as a slaughterbench. “Bolshevik practice and Trotskyism are of the same lineage and are legitimate consequences of Marx.” In each of these cases, the possibility that “a Party born of the proletarian movement and brought to power by it might not only degenerate but might actually turn against the revolution,” since dialectical materialism supposed that “as soon as the barrier of private appropriation is done away with,” things will turn out well. In the Bolshevik organization and in any Marxist organization, “and perhaps…any revolutionary organization,” “revolution as continued self-criticism needs violence to establish itself and ceases to be self-critical to the extent that it practices violence.” Whether via Trotskyism or via some still newer Left, there isn’t “much sense in trying Marx all over again if his philosophy is involved in this failure,” if this failure is built into Marxism. What is needed is a conception of revolution as a “continued rupture with history,” never to be fully realized in a permanent regime change because permanence is impossible in the face of historical flux. To attempt to make the revolutionary regime permanent is only to return to the violence and terror of the revolution within the new regime, perpetuating exploitation, now exercised by a new ruling class, which turns out not to be the proletariat but the bureaucracy. In sum, “since the Marxist philosophy believes it possible to express the weight of social reality only by situating the dialectic wholly in the object”—in socioeconomic classes, not also within human beings themselves—the “dialectic in action responds to adversity”—to political and other setbacks, to victories by ‘reactionaries’—either “by means of terror exercised in the name of a hidden truth”—hidden, that is, from the consciousness of the ‘reactionaries,’ including proletarians who resist the Party line—or by “opportunism”—bureaucratic careerism, perhaps including corruption.

Sartre also offered a critique of Marxist orthodoxy and a substantially revised ‘Marxism’ decisively affected by his own democratized Nietzcheism and Heideggerianism, ‘Existentialism.’ Merleau-Ponty lauds the effort: “It was good that an independent philosopher attempted to analyze communist practice directly, without the mediation of ideology,” as Sartre had done in a series of essays published in 1952-53, later published as a collection under the title, The Communists and the Peace. [1]

“Sartre ‘understands’ communist politics, justifies it from the proletarian point of view” while “mak[ing] it his own for reasons quite different from those of the communists,” indeed “practically opposed to them” since “what Sartre contributes is a brief on the failure of the dialectic.” He replaces the ‘objectivism’ of the Marxists with “extreme subjectivism”; for him, revolutionary action is “the immediate result of our volitions,” regardless of external conditions. Marxist objectivism and existentialist subjectivism share one thing: both assume that radical change is possible, even if in Marxism society will be modified by “a sort of political engineer” while in Existentialism it can be modified by “pure creation” effected by individual wills acting together. Either way, “the Party’s action is not subject to the criteria of meaning”; “the philosophy of pure object and the philosophy of pure subject are equally terroristic,” agreeing “only about the consequences.”

Sartre is a “loner who incorporates communism into his universe and thinks of it with no regard for what it thinks of itself.” He is, however, an “ultrabolshevik” in the sense that he contends that “he who is not with the C.P. is against it and against the proletariat which surrounds it.” He wills this, rather than endorsing it on the ordinary grounds of the Marxian ‘scientific socialism’ guided by dialectical materialism. He wills Bolshevism because he negates capitalism. Proletarian violence may or may not bring revolution, but at least it isn’t capitalism. This negation is self-justifying, inasmuch as “the will believes only in itself, it is its own source”; it is pure freedom from what currently is. “If everything comes from freedom, if the workers are nothing, not even proletarians, before they create the Party, the Party rests on nothing that has been established, not even on their common history. Either the party of the proletarians never will exist, or, if it exists, it will be their continued creation and the emblem of their nonbeing, itself a pure act or relationship, like the categorical imperative from which it was born.” Without the Party, there would be no proletariat, since thinking of the proletariat ‘objectively,’ as a being ‘out there,’ compromises the will, as indeed does “everything that until now has been called nature and history.” Because in Sartre’s “intuitive philosophy” nothing must compromise the will, “any idea of controlling [Party] leaders is therefore out of the question.” 

“This regime without secret ballot, without a minority, without an opposition, calls itself ‘real’ democracy—not because it extends the formal guarantees of a bourgeois regime to the realities of government and production” (it surely does not) “but because it creates out of nothing the power of the powerless, an enormous undertaking which cannot afford contestation.” The militant obeys orders, experiencing as he does “ecstasy in the Party,” the ecstasy of “pure action.” As Sartre writes, “the Party is his freedom.” No standing back, no thinking of the Party or one’s fellow Party members as objects, no doubt, no uncertainty; such things, Sartre writes, “can only paralyze action.” “‘Facts’ are always circumvented by decisions,” against which there should be “no means of appeal,” since they are themselves not the result of discussion but of the leaders’ willing. This radicalizes Marx’s famous dictum, that the point of his philosophy is not to understand the world but to change it. But whereas “for Sartre conscious awareness is an absolute” which “gives meaning,” for Marx, “conscious awareness, that of the leader like that of the militants, is itself a fact” which “either answers to what the period expects, or it does not.” It is “the power that it either does or does not have to carry the proletariat along, to increase consciousness and power in it—these are the criteria of truth.” Yes, “truth is to be made, but to be made according to what the proletariat and its adversaries are and do in the same moment.” Sartre replies that the deliberation required to make this work is uncertain, all-too-uncertain, that action must be founded upon certainty, upon resolution uncompromised by assessment of probabilities. “Political time is atomized for him into a series of decisions taken in the presence of death.” “The Party manufactures meaning.”

Merleau-Ponty, well, doubts. “In order to struggle, it is not enough to know that capitalism is the enemy”; one must know a thing or two about it, a thing or two about whether a given action against it—say, a strike—will bring the masses along. Such an examination “knocks the wind out of pure action, because several estimations are possible and because the best one is subject to discussion.” “There is no action worthy of the name which is ‘pure action'”; “ultimately, pure action is either suicide or murder.” Put in biological terms, “in an organism there is no action without a nervous system, but the nervous system endows an organism with a life which it is not adequate to explain”; put in political terms, the Party must function as the brain of the working class, the organ by which it “accomplishes real work.” “The Party gives the militant something to will beyond himself: a line, a perspective of action, both established after an examination, not only of the relations of force, but also of the way the proletariat lives and interprets the situation.” Sartre refuses to give this give-and-take, this plurality, this capacity for dialectic, to the Party either in its thoughts or its actions. “He never evokes the basic Marxist hope of resolution in true action, that is to say, actions fitted to internal relations of the historical situation, which await nothing but action to ‘take,’ to constitute a form in movement,” a real revolution. “For Marx there was, and for Sartre there is not, a coming-to-be of meaning in institutions.” Sartre eschews the material, even a material conceived as dialectical. Merleau-Ponty regards this as senseless, in both senses of the term.

True, Marxism-Leninism denied the existence of any criterion for action ‘above’ history defined as the course of events. No God, no nature. “But there was a practical criterion: whatever can be explained to and be accepted by the proletariat”—which, recall, is the one universal class—not “through pure obedience but in conscience, is proletarian.” “Revolution, then, is not made all at once; it comes at the end of an endless purification, it demands a party of iron.” “But the underground reality of socialism,” the rule of the universal class, “guarantees these violences and grounds them in truth.” And here Merleau-Ponty also doubts. “The assurance of being the carrier of truth is vertiginous,” not clarifying. “It is in itself violence,” “authoriz[ing] a state of frenzy belonging to the leader alone,” a leader confident that if “the workers do not understand” his actions today, “they will understand tomorrow,” with gratitude “for having preceded them toward truth.” This is a dialectic of dogmatism. “Those who will be shot would understand that they did not die in vain,” but “the only problem is that they will no longer be there to understand it”; “such are the poisoned fruits of willed truth“: “In itself it is madness.”; “we sink into the revolution a into a delirium.” And this is why the Bolshevik in power “has to collide with Stalin someday,” a collision “prepared by the idea of a materialistic dialectic.” What could be more dialectical and material, at the same time, than the Great Purge? (Perhaps mass murder, classicide or genocide, a possibility that Merleau-Ponty does not mention? And, less importantly, does he not more than suggest that Koestler was right?)

Returning to Sartre and his rigid distinction “between the ‘certain,’ the meanings of pure consciousness, and the ‘probable,’ that which emerges from the phenomenological experience,” this is “the same philosopher who, analyzing the act of reading, saw nothing between scribbling, a book in its physical existence, and the meaning attributed to it by the reader’s consciousness,” nothing in-between, no “meaning ordinarily given to it,” which changes over time. Or, it might be added (as Merleau-Ponty prefers not to do, although his whole enterprise depends upon its possibility), that a reader might interpret the book in the terms the author intended. Sartre’s willed meaning of texts and indeed of everything else leads him “to a sort of systematic mythology.” For him, “there is no deciphering or truth of a society, because no deciphering ever expresses anything but a personal, more or less ample, perspective and because degrees of truth are worth nothing when it comes to deciding, that is to say, to presuming everything.” In politics, this makes the Party leaders, if not gods then priests; “no matter what they do, they are consecrated.” “When men wish to create things ex nihilo, then the supernatural reappears.” “We are far from Marxism,” Merleau-Ponty drily observes. 

And from reality, including the reality of the self-certifying will itself. What distinguishes Sartre from Marxism is “his philosophy of the cogito,” which “perseveres in its claim to be everything that we are.” “But in the end it is the cogito itself which demands its own disavowal and puts itself in question, first by the clarity of thought and then by the obscurity of devotion.” Willing cannot be pure, cannot avoid thought, since only autonomic responses are devoid of thought. Willing cannot be pure when it commands action, either, since by itself it does not know to whose orders it wills itself to obey. That is, pure willing, if it existed, would be random, revolutionary only by accident. 

Merleau-Ponty quickly adds that this ‘Marxian’ critique of Sartre does not endorse Marxism itself. He has not turned away from his earlier critique. Sartre’s “antidialectic” well describes “existing communism,” the communism of the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. “If in fact, as we believe, communism is what Sartre says it is, what attitude can and should one have toward it, and how can one evaluate Sartre’s attitude?” Sartre’s position on communism makes sense for those who live in the capitalist world, not for someone who lives in the communist world. The Soviet Communists haven’t given up, and so when Sartre “transmutes” communism “into Sartre,” that simply won’t do. “A philosopher’s temptation is to believe that he has really joined others and has attained the concrete universal when he has given them a meaning in his universe, because for him his universe is being itself.” It might be more accurate to say this of a philosopher living in a democracy, inasmuch as few earlier philosophers were especially tempted to “join with others,” only with fellow philosophers and potential philosophers. Merleau-Ponty may see this, if a bit obscurely, when he observes that “literature and politics” are “distinct activities,” that to maintain this distinction is “perhaps finally the only way to be as faithful to action as to literature.” “To propose unity of action to a party when one is a writer is perhaps to testify that one remains in the writer’s world,” which remains in the realms of theory and imagination. Previous philosophers had spoken of philosophy itself, which becomes literature only when the philosopher chooses to write. Such philosophers took on the responsibility of choosing to write guided by prudential, not theoretical reason. Merleau-Ponty inclines to substitute ‘history’ for prudence, likening literature and politics to “two layers of a symbolic life or history.” But he does suggest that when “the conditions of the times are such that this symbolic life is torn apart and on cannot at the same time be both a free writer and a communist, or a communist and an oppositionist,” “one must then go back, attack obliquely what could not be changed frontally, and look for an action other than communist action.” Some sort of exotericism, then? No joining with many others, then.

Dialectic exists “at the junction of a subject, of being, and of other subjects: between those opposites, in that  reciprocal action, in that relation between an inside and an outside, between the elements of that constellation, in that becoming, which not only becomes but becomes for itself, there is room, without contradiction and without magic, for relationships with double meanings, for reversals, for opposite and inseparable truths, for sublations, for a perpetual genesis, for the plurality of levels orders.” Neither Marxist dialectic nor Sartrian existentialism registers this, and “nothing is more foreign to it than the Kantian conception of an ideality of the world which is the same in everyone.” The dialectic remains, but not the dialectic that serves “the pretension” of its termination “in an end of history [Marx, Lenin], in a permanent revolution [Trotsky], or in a regime which, being the contestation of itself, would no longer need to be contested from the outside and, in fact, would no longer have anything outside it [Sartre].” It may rather be that there may be “more of a future in a regime that does not intend to remake history from the ground up but only to change it” without “once again entering the cycle of revolution.” A regime exists “in the realm of the probable,” not in the ‘absolute.’ The Soviet regime of 1955 “holds to the miracle that the dictatorship [of the proletariat] may use the bourgeoisie’s weapons without becoming something like a bourgeoisie,” but that is what it has done. “There would be something healthy in this disillusionment if it were lucid,” but it can’t afford to be lucid, as lucidity on that point would mean abandoning its claim to rule, its self-description as “the fatherland of the revolution,” its “fiction of proletarian power, of direct democracy, and of the withering-away of the State.” This might be described as a noble lie, if only it were noble. What remains in it of the noble, of “the revolutionary point of honor,” is its opposition to capitalism.

And so Merleau-Ponty calls for “the birth of a noncommunist Left,” a “new left” that dismisses the claims of legitimacy uttered by both communists and capitalists (Marxism, ‘free enterprise’)—the “philosophies they claim are clearly mere ornaments”—and works to avoid their collision, which “would be the greatest of catastrophes, since those who would die” in a Third World War “would not even know why they were dying.” This new Left will “not believe in the solution of the social problem through the power of the proletarian class or its representatives.” Not dictatorship but parliamentarism and “democratic action” should be the pathways taken, since they leave room for “self-criticism,” the avoidance and indeed the critique of “dogma.” “The defects of capitalism remain defects; but the critique which denounces them must be freed from any compromise with an absolute of the negation which, in the long run, is germinating new oppressions.” This sounds rather like some form of democratic socialism in the European sense of ‘social democracy.’

Merleau-Ponty’s version of ‘intersubjectivity’ ought to be preferred to the other stances taken by the Left. But to leave morality and politics on the level of intersubjectivity, denying not only a God ‘above’ the subjects recognizing one another but a nature, some sort of innate character in human beings that makes the subjects worth recognizing, one to another, may not make much sense in theory, however much better it would be in practice than the several ‘Leftisms’ he criticizes.

 

Note

1. Originally published in 1964, translated into English and published in 1968 by George Braziller.