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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Note

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Notes

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

Eric Voegelin: Hitler and the Germans. Edited and translated by Detler Clemens and Brendan Purcell. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

 

In the summer of 1964, a generation after the conquest of Nazi Germany by the Allied troops, Eric Voegelin gave a series of lectures at Munich University on the question of German responsibility for the rise of Hitler’s tyranny. After all, the Nazi Party won a free and fair election in 1933, even if without a majority of the votes. And Germans increasingly supported the new regime Hitler installed, their enthusiasm peaking in the middle of 1940, with the successful blitzkrieg on France. How could these things happen? And once the war was over, Hitler and Nazism defeated and rejected, a new republican regime founded in the western section of Germany, had Germans truly come to terms with themselves? Or did the trials and convictions of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg leave the average German feeling exonerated? What about ex-Nazi functionaries who found government jobs in the apparatus of the new republic? Were not the hundreds of anti-Jewish acts of vandalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s profoundly troubling evidence that Nazi ideology still had its adherents among Germans?

Voegelin advises his students to begin their study of political science not with abstract principles but with “the concrete political events you’re familiar with,” basing “your investigation on the political experiences and knowledge you have in daily life, in order to ascend from there to the theoretical problematic.” “Hitler’s rise to power [is]the central German experiential problem of our time. How was it possible? What consequences does it have today?” Hitler’s rise to power must be understood “in connection with the disposition of the German people, which brought Hitler into power.” What was that disposition and, “concretely, what happened in the different classes of the population?” 

These historical questions mattered now because anti-Jewish sentiments persisted and because major German industrial firms, including IG-Faben, Krupp, and Siemens, used the available slave labor in the concentration camps, in which people “were completely worked to death and then incinerated.” Many of the top executives in those firms now were top executives then. 

Voegelin tells the students that impeding your task of understanding of German complicity in the Hitler tyranny, then and, in a subtler way, now, stands a pile of “ideological junk.” Not only Nazi ‘race science’ and Marxist ‘class struggle’ but the principles of positivism, progressivism, and modern liberalism can prevent you from seeing matters clearly. These ideologies derive from “German philosophical language” first developed in the eighteenth century by Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant. Such words as ‘intellect,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘reason’ do not mean what they meant in the philosophical language of Plato, Aquinas, or today in the Anglophone world. The word ‘reason’ in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason does not mean the same thing as Platonic logos; Hegel’s Geist isn’t the Holy Spirit you meet in the Bible. The Greek philosophers’ nous or intellect and the Bible’s ruach (in Greek, pneuma, in English, soul) have a very different resonance than their apparent equivalents in modern German philosophy.

How so? To understand the change, Voegelin argues, you must first overcome “a whole series of clichés” or shibboleths you have likely picked off the ideological junk pile. One such cliché is the phrase, “the unmastered past,” referring to Germans’ failure to come to terms with Nazism. “There is no unmastered past. What is past, is past. There are only unmastered presents.” ‘The present’ means “two different things”: the moment between past and future “on the line of time in the world”; and “the present in the sense of presence under God,” life as lived sub specie aeternitatis. When action isn’t judged “as action in the world under the orientation of its presence to God,” the present is unmastered. Germans have yet to master the present, have yet to judge their actions in the past as they have played out in the present as witnessed and judged by God. To master the present in this sense means that one can neither transfer guilt from you who are young onto your fathers, or (as seen in some ancient peoples) transfer the sins of the fathers to the sons, punishing the sons for the sins of the fathers. God tells His prophet, Ezekial, “all souls are mine”; each soul is responsible to Me for itself. “Each one of us is obliged to be just.” There is no “collective guilt,” in the sense of intergenerational guilt.

There is, however, another quite valid meaning of collective guilt. Human beings live in societies; societies act through their representatives; if those representatives do evil, “even those who have nothing to do with the representatives’ misdeeds, have to bear, along with them, the consequences of these misdeeds, whether they are guilty or not.” If a society “chooses criminal imbeciles and crooks as representatives, then the society as a whole is in a very unpleasant situation.” Are Hitler and his political party solely responsible for genocide and for triggering the Second World War? No, and that leads to a further problem, very much a present reality in the Germany of 1964: the partitioning of the country into the republican West and the Communist East. Surely, “no responsible statesman in the East, whether Polish, Czech, or Russian, can, after all that this country has done, contemplate with equanimity that Germany should again become a great power.”

Therefore, “our problem is the spiritual condition of a society in which the National Socialists could come into power.” Nazi rule reflected the souls of Germans, “among whom personalities of the National Socialist type can become socially representatives.”

In the nineteenth century, in the wake of the philosophic revolution initiated by Wolff and Kant, German society “moved politically under the shadow of power politics,” as Bismarck moved to unify some 37 sovereign German states. Kant himself was a republican, as were many “intelligent people” in Germany, but after the failure of the revolution of 1848 those people “withdrew from politics” and Germans generally became politically passive. German liberalism, such as it was, became “nationalistic and chauvinistic.” This pseudo-liberalism died with Kaiserism at the end of the First World War. But the Weimar Republic that replaced the Kaiser Reich also failed. A genuinely liberal society, a society consisting of citizens who took on the responsibility of liberty, did not develop, although “it could have developed if the people had been a bit more intelligent than they were.” And today, in still another republican regime, Germans live “in the shadow of the occupation by the American and Russian armies,” the shadow of Cold War power politics. As a result, we Germans still lack any empirical, any experiential, “knowledge of what free Germany, in the sense of a Germany that gave itself a representation without being in the shadow of power politics, would look like.” Such representation would be twofold: “existential,” with a ruler or rulers who act(s) for the society in external and internal matters, the actual ruler(s) of the people; and “transcendental,” the degree to which the ruling element or politeuma “represents the transcendent order of the divine.” 

Given this dual classification of “the sources of authority”—human and divine—three “propositions” arise, propositions “which are in contradiction with one another.” First: “Whoever has the power to shake the world, as Hitler did, is not contemptible” in his accomplishment, however contemptible he is as a man. Authority includes power, although it isn’t reducible to it. Power can’t be waved away, dismissed as a triviality. Second, “whoever shakes the world, even though or because he is irrational, is not contemptible.” He is dangerous, a destroyer of something better than himself. Third (and “most painful[ly], for us”), “a world that allows itself to be shaken by an irrational man is contemptible.” Paradoxically, then, “by the success of his contemptibility,” Hitler “has unambiguously proved the contemptibility of the world in which he had success”—an “eminent achievement.” Not only German society, unaccustomed to democracy in the sense of self-government, of political liberty, but “the surrounding Western democracies, have begun to rot spiritually and rationally in such a way that they are taken in by a man like Hitler and make possible his success.” Hitler’s success in this regard surprised even Hitler himself, confirming in his own perverse soul the rightness of his estimate of the world and his actions against it. The previous year, Percy E. Schramm had published Hitler’s Table Talk, an account of Hitler’s conversations (mostly monologues) with his inner circle. “They reveal in a completely open way his contempt for the people he had to deal with,” and his contempt was not ill-founded. “That is why Hitler’s remarks on this very point are of the highest value in a critical analysis of the period; and it is just for that reason that they are not welcome.” They point to uncomfortable truths about the Germans, who followed Hitler.

To the clichés of “mastery of the past” and “collective guilt,” Voegelin adds “the State” as defined by Hegel. Hegel regards the State as the supreme manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, and thus the supreme authority on earth. Voegelin brings his students down to earth. When you consider the State, what you really want to know is whether its officials know what they are doing, whether they are energetic in the performance of their duties, whether they have at least some minimal degree of moral probity, not “whether the state is the reality of the moral idea.” That is, “in politics we have to do with human things,” indeed human beings, persons. “If in place of the men who are the representatives, we put the state as cliché” the way Hegel does, “then we have already got completely away from political reflection.”

Then there is the matter of the regime, the form of government prevailing in the state—in West Germany, democracy. Here, Voegelin rejects what he calls Aristotle’s regime theory, classifying regimes into the rule of the one, the few, and the many, with democracy of course being the rule of the many. In fact, Aristotle also defines regimes into moral categories: good and bad rules of the one, the few, and the many. Voegelin does that, too, but with a continued focus on bringing his students to see reality. He first quotes George Santayana, who wrote that “Democracy is the unrealizable dream of a society of patrician plebeians,” a regime in which the many are themselves good, as (genuine) aristocrats are. He then quotes Winston Churchill, who “defined democracy as the worst form of government with the exception of all the others.” That is, realistically speaking, democracy will not be “patrician” or virtuous because democrats are not especially good; this notwithstanding, monarchs and ‘the few,’ neither genuinely aristocratic, behave even more badly than the people do. For his third quote he turns to Mark Twain, who said that democracy depends on three factors: “freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”

In Voegelin’s rendering, the consequence of these three mots is the need in politics, very much including democratic politics, for courtesy, compromises, concessions to others. “Whoever has a fixed idea and wants this to be carried into effect, that is to say, whoever interprets freedom of speech and freedom of conscience to the effect that the society should behave in the way that he considers right, is not qualified to be [a] citizen of a democracy.” By contrast, genuinely “political interplay,” which Voegelin calls patrician (the Greeks, the Romans, and the English would say ‘gentlemanly’), may be seen specifically in Aristotle, who defines politics itself as ruling and being ruled in turn. “It is based on the fact that one thinks a lot about what the others do, but does not say it; that one is always aware that in the society there is more than one good to achieve, not only the good of freedom, but also the good of security, the good of welfare, and that if I specialize in one or other of these good, I could thereby bring the whole society into disorder, because I could destroy the balance between the realization of good on which the society is based.” Such single-minded concentration on one good leads to irreconcilable factions, as in reaction to my hard single-mindedness you will engage in “counterhardening,” bringing about the impossibility of social cooperation.” No democratic regime can endure without prudence, practical wisdom. Voegelin is teaching the new generation of Germans how to think politically, a way of thought occluded by both the prevalent philosophic theories and the political practices prevailing in Germany for nearly two centuries.

It is only with a sense of ‘the present’ reality in this concrete sense that one can ascend from practice to theory. Voegelin now turns to the pre-modern and Biblical understanding of humanity and its enemy, “radical stupidity”—the sort of stupidity that permits tyrannical rule. What is man? And “what are the symptoms of the falling down and the derailment of man?” Once again, in asking these questions he directs his students to pay attention to concrete circumstances in which these questions arise.

Concretely, then, “When was man as such discovered? and “What was he discovered to be?” In Hellenic society, philosophers “experienced” man as a being constituted by nous or rational intellect. In Israelite society, man was experienced as constituted by pneuma or spirit, as a being “to whom God speaks his word,” “a being who is open to God’s word.” “Reason and spirit are the two modes of constitution of man.” This means that “man experiences himself as a being who does not exist from himself” but rather lives within “an already given world,” a world mysteriously given, present, a world that raises the question. Where did this world, and I, Man, within it, come from? “Dependence of existence [Dasein] on the divine causation of existence [Existenz] has remained the basic question of philosophy up to today.” In Leibniz’s formula, Why is there something rather than nothing? and Why is the something as it is? 

Man has wants. Most distinctively, he wants to know. To want is to love, and “the loving reaching out beyond ourselves toward the divine in the philosophical experience and the loving encounter through the word in the pneumatic experience” amounts to a “participation in the divine.” “Insofar as man shares in the divine, insofar, that is to say, as he can experience it, man is ‘theomorphic,’ in the Greek term, or the image of God, the imago Dei, in the pneumatic sphere.” This is what is meant by the claim of “human dignity.” In abandoning this quest, man stops participating in the divine, gives up the distinctively human activity, and so this “dedivinizing” of man invariably causes his “dehumanizing,” the loss of his dignity. Whenever an individual or group of individuals closes himself, itself, to the rationally divine or the pneumatically divine, they also close themselves to reality, to the ground of being which supports the beings, including human beings.

And so we read in Novalis, “The world shall be as I wish it!” In that phrase, “you have the whole problem of Hitler.” The world is not as we wish it, and is highly unlikely ever to be such. As human beings, we are as much ‘givens’ as the world is. To take the classification of human types Aristotle proposes, a classification first set down by Hesiod, the best man “considers or thinks through all things,” teaches himself; the second-best man “listens to the best,” learns from them; the least impressive man neither thinks for himself nor learns from those who do. The best man is truly free because he “lets himself be led by his own nous.” The second-best man is partly free, inasmuch as he follows reason without fully exercising it. The ‘last’ man (to borrow a later philosopher’s term) Aristotle calls the natural slave, Hesiod calls the useless man. Voegelin rejects these terms because the Greeks tied these terms to what they took to be a natural social hierarchy, although not necessarily the conventional one. To avoid confusion, to acknowledge the fact that slavish, useless men exist “at all levels of society up to its highest ranks, including pastors, prelates, generals, industrialists, and so on,” he deploys the term “rabble.”

The rabble are stupid and illiterate. By stupidity, Voegelin means the condition in which “a man, because of his loss of reality, is not in a position to rightly orient his action in the world in which he lives.” Not guided by intellect or spirit, consequently out of touch with reality, this man “will act stupidly.” In Hebrew, this man is the nabal, the fool, who causes “disorder in the society” because he refuses to obey God’s revealed Law. For Plato, this is the “irrationally ignorant man, the amathes (literally, the unknowing one), who either “does not have the authority of reason or who cannot bow to it.” For Aquinas, he is the stultus or fool, combining the Hebrew nabal and the Greek amathes. He is an illiterate man, not in the sense of being unable to read or write but a one who lacks the language needed to characterize “certain sectors of reality,” the things that require either theoretical or practical reasoning. “They do not get it.” 

In Germany, such illiteracy “runs through the elite.” It lends itself to manipulations of language—lies and propaganda. Such was the way of the Nazis, who employed the tactic of telling the truth once, thereby gaining credibility, then lying believably ever after. For example, “in the Thirties, in Germany, there was a saying, in constant use, that the National Socialists had never touched a hair on anyone…. But that was about the only thing they did not do,” and it wasn’t long before they were touching plenty of hairs on plenty of heads, too. Nazis did that in their diplomatic ventures, too, beginning with their just complaints about the real damage the Treaty of Versailles had caused Germany, then fabricating a series of false justifications for acts of aggression, all of them supposedly taken to redress Germany’s just grievances. Even in postwar Germany, courts have excused “various concentration camp murderers” on the grounds that “under the given conditions of German society it was not possible for a man to recognize a crime as a crime.” 

“How does a man bring himself to commit crimes, and at the same time dispute he ever committed them, and still be honest?” It is quite possible, thanks to stupidity. It is surely true, Voegelin concedes, that under circumstances of extreme disorder, “qualities such as cunning, craftiness, and violence are indeed necessary in order to preserve one’s life and to prevail, and whoever lacks them is incompetent and perhaps may perish.” And under orderly conditions, such qualities become symptoms of stupidity, since “a man who behaves in this way will be socially boycotted.” As Aristotle would teaches, “stupidity is always to be understood in relation to the social and historical context” in which you think and act. 

In his 1937 essay, “On Stupidity,” Robert Musil identified here two kinds of stupidity: simple stupidity or lack of understanding and the higher stupidity, intelligent stupidity. The more interesting, higher, stupidity comes from hubris or “spiritual arrogance.” “The spirit now becomes the adversary, not the mind.” Much earlier, Schelling had called this “pneumopathology”—not psychopathology or madness but “sickness of the spirit,” a closing off of the mind from God (from “the ground of Being,” as Voegelin likes to say) caused by a refusal to train the intellect on what it naturally wants, the truth. The opposite spiritual quality, Anstand, quite often appears not in the elites but in the middle classes (the class Aristotle wanted in the polis because it moderates the greedy few and the envious many). Honesty, diligence, cleanliness, reliability, moderation: these are the modest virtues of a regime within the overall regime, a way of life that keeps intellects open to reality. These virtues can be misdirected, however, as a Nazi functionary, the man who ‘only follows orders,’ may exhibit them. This is “the problem of the simple man, who is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order but then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere, and the society is no longer holding together.” As a ‘second-best’ man without the best men to guide him (whether in the form of living persons or in the written words of wise teachers and lawgivers), this “citizen par excellence” will careen into evil, without intending any such thing or recognizing that that is what’s happening to him.

As for the higher, intelligent stupidity, it is the province of the elites, the educated, the sort of people who served in the German parliament and gave Hitler the power to enact laws without their consent. Such persons are sophisticated in the literal sense of the word—entangled in their own sophistries. They lack prudence, deceiving themselves. 

“There is no right to be stupid.” German elites have indulged in stupidity in part because German philosophers have deranged the philosophic quest, and German theologians have joined them in their derangement. Stupidity issues from derangements of the spirit. Deranged spirits revolt against God, revolt against the ground of Being. “In the classical and Christian sense,” the will is the voluntas of Aquinas, “always and only the rationally ordered will.” The “classic Christian” term for human intention that separates itself from reason and spirit is libido as in Augustine’s libido dominandi or Aquinas’s concupiscentia. This “existence-powerful desire” is, however, what German philosophers, notably Fichte and Nietzsche, call the will. When people call Hitler a strong-willed man, they take on the now-characteristic German definition of the term. But in classical and Christian terms, “there is no willpower in Hitler at all,” no “existence that was ordered by reason or spirit,” only “an extraordinary existence-intensive libido,” which “he maintained up to the end.” In him, “reality and experience of reality are replaced by a false image of reality,” one he insisted was reality, and which came into “constant conflict” with reality itself, culminating in his suicide beneath the rubble of the capital city. [1]

How, then, did Hitler come to tyrannize the Germans? Some, he simply misled. Cut off from the teaching of the churches, many Germans responded to what later generations would call Hitler’s ‘charisma’—itself a perversion of a religious term. Such persons are analogous to those who understand the wise at second hand, but instead of heeding right reasoning they heed the only thing that can replace right reasoning: the libido. “The one who reacts only to power succumbs to the aura of the existence-power that radiates from Hitler.” Those who retain “a certain spiritual rank” do not succumb. Voegelin recalls the women who sat in the front row at the Nazi rallies, fascinated by his sheer energy and by “the aura of the blue eyes.” It is not a uniquely German phenomenon, as in the America of the Forties girls swooned at Sinatra concerts, although in those instances they may have been paid. The example of later ‘rock concerts’ may be a more just analogy, although even that stupidity is often enhanced by drugs.

“The tragedy of the German character,” so to speak the birth of tragedy in Germany, comes into relief “when this filthy rabble comes into power” and “the culture is finished.” Against genuine intellectual and spiritual culture arises the cult, the Hitler cult. Voegelin describes Hitler’s ideas on religion as “those of a relatively primitive monism”—a set of beliefs based not on God but nature ‘scientistically’ understood. In this, it resembled the positivism of Auguste Comte, except that the science was biology, not sociology. The German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel—a distinguished zoologist but wretched theorist—founded the Monist League near the beginning of the century, calling it “the monistic church,” whose underlying doctrine was “the omnipotence of the law of matter.” He adhered to a version of ‘race science’ which held that the several human ‘races’ evolved separately, a claim which he appended to Social Darwinism. Hitler drank it all in. Looking at him, and also the likes of Lenin and Stalin, Thomas Mann wrote, “Never before have the powerful, the makers and shakers of the world’s affairs, taken it on themselves in this manner to act as teachers of a people, indeed of mankind.” Napoleon and Bismarck, for example, founded new states with new regimes, but they didn’t think of themselves as beings marching in History’s vanguard. Hitler wanted “to get his own way,” no less than they did, but in all areas of human thought and practice. He never read philosophy or great literature, but why, in his mind, would he? In principle, he already knew everything, so reading was only a matter of extracting information or ideas that could be fitted into his “world-view.” “There is absolutely no question of learning from reality,” as he already had his ‘values.’ A book is, “so to say, a rubbish heap from which one pulls out relevant things”; “the entire area of the spiritual and rational, which is based on meditation and reproduction of meditative experience, is systematically excluded from perception.” And so, for example, in reading (or much more likely, reading of) Heraclitus’ aphorism, “War is the father of all,” he took this to be an early statement of Social Darwinism, the ‘survival of the fittest,’ and said so in a 1942 speech to young officers of the Wehrmacht. Adding Haeckelian ‘race science’ to this, Hitler had his imperative to make war against Jews and Slavs. 

Where, in all this, were the real churches? They, too, had allowed themselves to sink into pneumopathology. Voegelin begins by distinguishing the several meanings of the term, ‘church.’ First, it means the Evangelical and Catholic Churches of Germany “as social institutions”; it also means churches in other countries, also as such institutions. There are also supranational institutions, such as the Roman Catholic Church. There is “Christ’s Church,” a “collective term for all ecclesial institutions that confess themselves as Christian, and there is finally the corpus mysticum Christi, which includes all human beings “from the beginning of the world to its end.” In terms of the first definition, in the 1930s almost all Germans were ‘churched.’ These churches were intended to be “nothing other than the representation of the spiritual transcendence of man.” In this sense, there could be no separation of church and state because church members and citizens were the same people, the same Germans, “only with different representations, temporal and spiritual.” This means that Germans’ “spiritual and intellectual disorder” afflicted both churches and the state. 

“Loss of reality had already taken place within the church itself,” as “contact with the reality of man in his individuality as theo-morphes, and thus his real human nature, had got lost.” This happened, initially, because the churches in Germany no longer (in some instances, never had) recourse to classical philosophy, with its understanding of human nature as noetic. “This picture of man in classical philosophy was never available in Germany because of the parallel decline of university philosophy,” which had taken up Wolff, Kant, Hegel and the Romantics instead of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas. Practically, this meant that the churches, since they did not uphold the right understanding of man, inclined to defend their own “institutional, cultural-political interests” while remaining “indifferent to the interests of man.” Their criticisms of National Socialism remained on this superficial level. 

For this reason, the churches were also blind to the character of Nazism and Communism. “It was characteristic for Germany that contact with the temporal reality of politics was not established by humanism, Renaissance, natural law, and Enlightenment, but through German Romanticism and irresponsible chatter about Volkstum,” as seen in the writings of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. The nationalism or ‘folkishness’ of the German Romantics had closed German churches to the universality of the Christian teaching. 

Voegelin finds this pathology more readily among the Evangelical churches because their theologians are entitled to interpret the Bible freely, and so their teachings are not “disguised by the iron discipline of the organization,” as they are in the Catholic Church. With only rare exceptions, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, evangelicals in Germany quite openly mixed Christianity with ‘race science,’ and particularly anti-Semitism. “This is why…from the ecclesiastical side, Hitler was able to come to power: because the very ones the people relied on for their spiritual guidance told them to vote for Hitler and obediently voted for Hitler themselves,” having “no spiritual organ for perceiving the problem posed by National Socialism.” Moreover, and ominously, “this situation of decadence, predating Hitler and National socialism, has not essentially changed since Hitler.”

Intending to preach from the Bible but blocked from understanding this by the pile of intellectual and spiritual detritus that had accumulated for more than a century, Evangelical pastors in Thirties Germany often cited Romans 13, in which the Apostle Paul tells Christians to obey the divinely ordained powers of Caesar. Voegelin recognizes this command as a borrowing from Stoicism: “The idea is that of a hierarchy of authorities in the cosmos, where God is in the highest place, in the lower places are the authorities in society, in the lowest place is man himself.” It implies that the imperial government “in fact obey[ed] and sanction[ed] the moral law in the Stoic sense.” It does not imply “that one should be subject to any authorities whatsoever, let alone…that one should have to be subject to the authorities even when they do evil.” Voegelin suggests that Martin Luther, in basing his understanding of the Gospel on the words on the page alone, missed the political circumstance in which Paul wrote, inadvertently distorting his meaning. Paul was writing to “persons in the Christian community” of his time “who misunderstood the freedom of the Christian under God as meaning that one no longer has to obey the ethical order of society”—antinomians. But if, as Paul goes on to say, the fullness of the law is love, in social terms love of neighbor, then this “is not very different from Aristotelian politics,” which identifies “the fundamental ethic of the political community as the philia politike in the spirit, the homonoia, the noetic virtue,” as constitutive of the right political order. The Christian addition to this order is agapic love, love of the person ‘unconditionally,’ as one says nowadays, as a fellow creature made in the Image of God. To those who complain that this is too ‘unselfish,’ that it neglects the need to protect oneself and the political community from evildoers like Hitler, whom Christians must also love, the Christian may well reply that I can hate the sin while loving the sinner, and therefore must oppose the sinful acts of the sinner out of love for the sinner. At any rate, “all of this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with one having to be subject to any kind of authorities—above all, naturally, nothing to do with having to comply with the Hitler laws,” as Evangelicals and Catholics alike commanded.

Whereas German Protestantism tends to be open to science—or rather to opinions about science, including race pseudo-science—Catholicism tends to be open to philosophy. As a result, the German Catholic Church denounced Nazism before the Nazis took power but accommodated it afterwards, in a show of false prudence, but not a theoretical capitulation, as with Protestants. “Under the pretext that the church as against neopaganism but had really no objection to an authoritarian regime the matter dragged on for some time.” The Gestapo became suspicious: Might not the Catholic Church be doing what it had done in other countries, “adapt[ing] itself to the outer forms and thus use camouflage to work its way in,” going so far as “speak[ing] of Jesus as the Führer”—a horrifying apostasy in the eyes of any dedicated National Socialist, who held there to be only one Führer, Adolf Hitler, with none before him.

The Catholic Church in Germany tread lightly, opposing Nazi policies of sterilization, euthanasia, attacks on baptized Jews, but “not in a very intense form.” To make sure that his students would not be tempted to suppose that the concentration were ‘not so bad,’ Voegelin read passages from Karl Kraus’s uncompromising 1933 anti-Nazi satire, Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht, which accurately anticipated the enormities the new regime would commit. [2] Among the very few Catholic clergymen who diagnosed the underlying problem was Father Alfred Delp, who wrote, “We are somehow lacking the great courage that comes, not from hot blood and youthfulness nor unbroken vitality”—the ‘vitalism’ or life-worship of Nietzsche, vulgarized by the Nazis—but “from the possession of the Spirit and the consciousness of the blessing we have received,” the courage that comes from knowing that we act “before the sovereign God.”

For his part, Voegelin sees that today “there is no revival of philosophizing in the church.” Attempts to supplement Catholic Church doctrines with such current intellectual fashions as “positivistic sociology or psychoanalysis or existentialism” fail to recover the Church’s “intellectual order” because these fashions partake of the reality-denying ‘philosophy of freedom’ that shouldered Thomism aside. Instead, the Church should return to its fundamental principles, abjuring pride, recognizing that it is “by the grace of the Word man will be elevated above his nature,” not from anything he does himself. Thus, “Christ is the head of the corpus mysticum” and “not the president of a special-interest club.” Further, the Christian’s elevation above his nature by grace “does not relieve one of the duty of being a human being”; it does not make you into a god. Nor does it elevate those who wield state power into gods, contra the misreading of Romans 13, or make rulers into the fathers and mothers God commands us to honor. Similarly, the nation isn’t a god and German Romantic nationalists aren’t fathers of the Church. In all, when Jesus tells us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” He does not say, “Blessed are the weak in the head.” Only the weak in the head and the arrogant of spirit will imagine that Jews are less than human; only they will fail to say with the prophet Ezekial, “If you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life.” Voegelin cites Aquinas, who understands Christ as the head of all men, not only of Christians. Moreover, “the presence under God, and the presence of God in the world,” means that “all of mankind is a member of the corpus mysticum in the sense of inclusion in God, as he realizes himself in history.” No one church, not even the one that calls itself catholic, can set itself up “as the one and only corpus mysticum.” “This ghettoizing tendency,” Voegelin writes, recalling the mistreatment of Jews in Germany, and elsewhere, with Kraus-like satirical intent, really ought to be resisted by every Christian church, given the creation of Man as the imago Dei. Philosophers are not exempt from this stricture, either, as the human being as characterized by intellect and spirit, “the one who is immediately understanding” reality, “is always only one individual human being, and whether he is a prophet or a philosopher makes no difference.” Theologians and philosophers, clergy and laity, need to think about politics, but this time with intelligence.

Thinking intelligently about politics is hard for modern men. The greatest political philosopher, Aristotle, thought about politics within the polis, a small political community in which political speech and political actions were more easily heard and seen. We moderns “do not have a polis anymore” but a large and complex nation-state. As for the spiritual life, the first giving of God’s Word occurred in one nation, now scattered, with no “determinations of any kind about how a society should be organized, not even that of the chosen people.” [2] Nor did Jesus leave instructions on how to organize His ecclesia. 

Early Christians met the problem by inserting Ciceronian natural law “into the Christian idea of order in the world.” Political order therefore entails not only the Covenant at Sinai or the Sermon on the Mount “but also the philosophic insight into the nature of man and the ideas of human and social order arising from it, as they were taken over from the pre-Christian philosophic complex.” But this caused the Catholic Church to take on “the role of guardian of natural law,” a role clergy are not “particularly suitable” to undertake. “For all the propositions of the natural law derive from the noetic experience, whereas within the church the noetic experience is not the primary source of experience and truth for clerics and theologians, but is replaced by the pneumatic experience of revelation.” This circumstance inclines clergy to denature and deform “a very considerable stock of knowledge of order coming from philosophy…because it had to be inserted into a complex of pneumatic symbols of revelation not intended to establish the order of temporal society.” In contemporary Germany, this led to the well-meaning but risible attempt by Social Democrats who wanted to get rid of Marxism, replace it with natural law, but had no source of information on natural law than the Catholic Church. 

Having offered his critique (and not in the Kantian or Marxist sense) of German philosophers and churchmen, Voegelin turns his attention to the German lawyers. Their faults also predated Hitler and also “are still here today.” Their faults result from the doctrine of legal positivism, which locates right not in God or in nature but in human laws. Legal positivists claim that the law is the law, and that is all there is to say. But “if the question about who makes the law is eliminated, then you again have the situation of rabble-like demoralization,” which ignores the question of the order that frames the law, the criteria of justice. This makes it “psychologically impossible to rebel, if the content of the positive law, that is to say, of the laws, is criminal.” If the sociopolitical order, the regime, itself becomes corrupt, you will need good laws more than ever but be even less capable of framing them. “If the men are corrupt and not capable of law and justice, or if they proffer some kind of ideology under justice, then, of course, one cannot have any legal order.” 

The history of law in modern Europe ranges from Jean Bodin’s argument in favor of putting all legislative power in “the hand of the prince”—thereby excluding authorities outside the state (pope, Holy Roman Emperor) or inside it (legal guilds) from lawmaking—to the replacement of monarchic regimes with republics, with popular sovereignty, to the separation of powers that prevents any branch of government to make a law “without the others.” This history confirms that it is the ethos, the character of the political society, and it alone, that finally determines whether laws will be just, and whether good laws will be justly enforced. But under legal positivism, that point is fatally obscured. Even in the Federal Republic, where law is said to be based upon the “dignity of man,” described as “inviolable,” one can find no suggestion within the legal code regarding what that dignity consists of, how a legal violation of it might be identified, were one to occur. “It is very fine if one protects the dignity of man, but what happens if men degrade themselves? There is no protection from the state against that.”

As the arch-surrealist, Lenin, once pointedly asked, What is to be done? Voegelin summarizes his main theme. There is a “first” reality, the actual moral, social, and political condition human beings face, the one he had directed his students to consider in his opening lecture—reality here and now. There is also a “second” reality, a mythical condition that seeks to replace it. Sancho Panza sees the first reality, Don Quixote imagines and wants to impose the second. “If there are enough people who believe some tomfoolery then this will become a socially dominant reality, and whoever criticizes it moves into the position of the buffoon who must be punished.” “I believe that what I imagine is in fact really so,” and, on the receiving end, so to speak, if the authorities say it, it must be so. Thus, language becomes “a second reality within which one operates, without having the relation to the first reality.” Voegelin sees this in the writings of Heidegger, devotee of what he called the inner truth and greatness of Nazism. Although “it is certainly not Heidegger’s intention thus to characterize language as second reality…he has in fact done that.” That is why he and his followers are “no longer thinking in relation to reality.” Under such circumstances, “words acquire their own existence; language becomes an independent reality in itself,” as seen in German Romanticism. A century later, ‘modernist’ literature (he has in mind Gottfried Benn, among others) partook of this “highly concentrated imbecility.” And after Heidegger, beyond Voegelin’s critique of Heidegger, thinkers calling themselves ‘postmodernists’ have performed much the same trick on themselves, although the more cynical ones have limited the con to those they intend to subordinate. Under the aegis of the second reality, “political conviction is understood as a kind of slit in an armored car through which one glimpses only arbitrary facets of reality.” Instead of noetic perception, one adopts a ‘worldview.’

“Aristotle had defined nous as the core of personality. If man doesn’t love his core, and thus his own self, he has lost contact with reality.” This kind of self-love in no way conflicts with Christianity, inasmuch as “Love your neighbor as yourself” means you are right to love your self, insofar as it partakes of you as an imago Dei. And love of your self as an imago Dei implies love of “the divine.” 

The philosophic revolution effected by Hegel was followed by four German thinkers “of world rank”: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber.  They shared three traits, regarding man in terms of passion and conflict, not reason and political order, unmasking moral principles, now demoted to the status as ‘values,’ as masks for interests and instincts, and an aversion to the ordinary citizen, especially the bourgeois. But “even if Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche thoroughly murder God and explain him away as dead, divine being remains eternal and man must still get on with living his life sealed by his creatureliness, and by death.” All such attempts “to transform [man] from the imago Dei into an imago hominis” conflict “with the first reality, whose order continually exists.” The “world-immanent apocalypses of history created by Kant, Condorcet, Comte, and Marx” never quite happen. When these false apocalypses of the gods that fail, “there arises the phenomenon of disillusionment,” the “suffering of Godforsakenness” experienced by Nietzsche, who grasps not for reality but for yet another surreality, the Superman. And even this brings no final consummation, only the endless cycle of Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Return.’ 

Among these thinkers, Voegelin thinks best of Weber, who has at least the sense to despair at the condition of modern man. For Weber, since there no genuine purpose of human life, and no “dimension of the vita contemplativa” that could discover one, “the life of reason has sunk to nonreality, replaced by the world-immanent activism of science”—Voegelin-speak for the fact that science progresses, new discoveries “superseded in thirty to forty years at most,” but the progress is pointless. True, Weber “thought he possessed the recipe for the solution of evil: The sights of a value-free social science should and could educate the revolutionaries to a sense of responsibility by making them aware of the consequences of their action.” This hope makes Weber un homme sérieux. He nonetheless “suffers from the false attitude” of one who wishes for moral responsibility without asking, ‘Responsible to whom? To what?’ “As a result we find in him an extreme spiritual sensitivity, which recognizes the falsity and wishes to resolve the tension, but no definitive breakthrough.” In the end, he cannot “break through the closure and turn back to openness toward transcendence.”

 

 

Notes

1. On the highest level, Nietzsche, in valorizing the ‘will to power,’ suffered because “he knew what reality was” from reading Pascal. “The constant debate between Nietzsche and Pascal is stimulated precisely by his recognition of genuine reality in Pascal and his knowledge of himself as having a false idea of reality and that he constantly lived in this tension between the image of the swindle he is pursuing and the reality he admires in Pascal.” To assuage the tension, he lied to himself, since “it is necessary to lie constantly” in order to cover up the truth. Far below Nietzsche, in between Nietzsche the philosopher-tyrant and Hitler the ideologist-tyrant one finds the “swindling petty bourgeois” man, in the Nazi regime the orders-following bureaucrat, unaware of the swindle, lying in “good conscience” to himself and to others.
2. This is an unusual claim, given the very extensive legal code Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Voegelin probably means that the Mosaic Law aims primarily at fixing moral limits and rites of worship for Israelites, not ruling institutions as such. 
3. The Third Walpurgis Night wasn’t published until 1952, as Kraus, an Austrian Jew, feared retaliation by the Nazis against German Jews, few of whom had had the chance to flee the country. Among many other thrusts, Kraus called the language deployed in Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda, “Germanogibberish,” and wrote of the Führer himself, “Hitler brings nothing to my mind”—a succinct remark on the tyrant’s nihilist core.