Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. John O’Neill translation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

 

In 1947 France, the Communist Party faced a crisis. Arthur Koestler’s novel, Darkness at Noon, published in 1940, had sold some 400,000 copies in France, many of them after the war, as the Cold War was beginning. With his main character, Rubashov, and obvious stand-in for Stalin’s former ally, Nikolai Bukharin, Koestler advanced the persuasive claim that the false confessions extracted from Soviet Communist Party officials during the show trials of the late 1930s derived from the defendants’ acceptance of the premises of Soviet ideology, especially from the claim of vanguardism. According to the ‘Party line,’ the leader of the Communist Party, Josef Stalin, marched in the forefront of inexorable historical forces; ergo, he must be right; ergo, if he accuses me of crimes against the Soviet state, the accusation must be right, and I must confess. The French educated classes being nothing if not devotees of logic, such a false syllogism, once exposed, offended their sensibilities, undermining the prestige of Marxism and of the Communist Party in France. With parliamentary republicanism now reinstated, including an anti-fascist, anti-monarchic Rightist party, Charles de Gaulle’s Rassemblement du Peuple Français, the Fourth Republic seemed poised to leave the Communists in history’s dustbin. More, U.S-Soviet relations had broken down, and the American Marshall Plan threatened to enhance American prestige in Europe: What was to be done? Merleau-Ponty sought to revivify a Marxism in peril. To do so, he (and even more famously, Sartre) mixed with it elements of the most fashionable doctrine of the time, Existentialism. “Existentialist philosophy, they say, is the expression of a dislocated world. Indeed, and that is what constitutes its truth”—its recognition of “radical contingency,” of “the human world [as] an open or unfinished system.”

Merleau-Ponty begins with a ‘You’re another’ argument. Liberalism is just as violent as Communism. The European commercial republics practice imperialism; the American commercial republic imposes ‘law and order’ upon its underclasses. Thus, “there is mystification in liberalism”—the attempt to cover violence with high-seeming principles, exemplified in France by the neo-Kantianism that had animated the Third Republic and now animated the Fourth, which had merely returned many of the old pre-war parliamentarians to power. But “the purity of principles requires violence” because reality resists ideals. 

Marx, he writes, provides “a formula for the concrete study of society which cannot be refuted by idealist arguments” such as those favored by the neo-Kantians of the noncommunist French Left. “Machiavelli is worth more than Kant,” as both Marx and Engels saw. Marxists evaluate a given society by the criterion of “the value its places upon man’s relation to man”—a ‘concrete’ rather than an abstract or ‘idealist’ relation, to use Marxist language, a relation of economic and social equality. Merleau-Ponty regards Marx’s materialism as “debatable,” but the attempt to look beyond “the temple of value-dolts”—where devotees idolize their paper constitutions, their monuments, their fine ideals—stands as crucial to understanding politics. What one scholar of Marxism has called “the unity of theory and practice” overcomes mere idealism, and rightly so, since “principles and the inner life are alibis the moment they cease to animate external and everyday life.” Anticipating Herbert Marcuse’s notion of liberalism’s “repressive toleration,” Merleau-Ponty charges that “a regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality,” whereas “a regime which acknowledges its violence might have in it more genuine humanity.” Therefore, “any serious discussion of communism must therefore pose the problem in communist terms, that is to say, not on the ground of principles,” those excrescences of bourgeois idealism, “but on the ground of human relations.” To “brandish liberal principles in order to topple communism” doesn’t “establish among men relations that are human.” The problem with this argument is obvious: what is the criterion for human relations? If it isn’t abstract, distinct from ‘praxis,’ then must it not be ‘the end of history,’ the final state of historical development, as historicist philosophers, including Hegel and Marx, proclaim? And indeed, for Bukharin to have dissented from the accusations leveled at him at trial would have “endanger[ed] the revolution,” “betray[ed] the gains of October 1917,” Merleau-Ponty avers. Marx claims that the final state of historical development will be communism, not because communism conforms to an idea or an ‘ideal,’ but because the conflicts or ‘contradictions’ between socioeconomic classes will cease and no subsequent revolutions will occur. But no subsequent revolutions will occur only if no critical mass of people become dissatisfied with communism. If so, ‘history’ isn’t ‘progressive’ but cyclical. And it isn’t clear whether that is good, either.

But, as one says, concretely, “if one wants to understand the communist problem it is necessary to start by placing the Moscow trials in the revolutionary Stimmung of violence apart from which they are inconceivable.” Merleau-Ponty distinguishes a historical “period”—from a historical “epoch”—a time of revolutionary change. An epoch is “one of those moments where the traditional ground of a nation or society crumbles and where, for better or worse, man himself must reconstruct human relations.” Such an epoch usually entails violence. The violence is necessary if “capable of creating human relations between men.” This formula requires a definition of “human.” “Marxism looks toward the horizon of the future in which ‘man is the supreme being for man.'” This principle cannot be turned into “the first principle of political action” because an atheist pacifism under capitalist conditions “reinforces established violence or a system of production which makes misery and war inevitable” At the same time, he rejects Trotsky’s lauded “permanent revolution”—violent transformation without end—because it is anti-humanist, destructive of men, inconsistent with the supremacy of man for man. “Thus the essential task of Marxism is to find a violence which recedes with the approach of man’s future”—in Marx’s view, “proletarian violence,” the only kind that can produce the universal peace of communism. This being the case, Koestler and other (so to speak) premature humanists disregard Marx’s point, that “cunning deception, bloodshed, and dictatorship are justifiable if they bring the proletariat into power and to that extent alone.” In terms of its ruling offices or institutions, “Marxist politics is formally dictatorial and totalitarian.” By contrast, republicanism under present conditions only represses and does violence to the proletariat and so must be terrorized into oblivion. A true “universal ethics” will be “restored in the new universe of the world proletariat,” but only then. Until that consummation, the cutting edge of history must cut. Or, in a phrase much invoked by Communists at the time, if you want to make an omelet, you must break some eggs.

Regrettably, Soviet Communism under Stalin no longer embodies this proletarian consciousness, although Trotsky goes too far in condemning it. “Terror no longer seeks to advance itself as revolutionary terror” (emphasis added). Whereas the “Marxist critique of capitalism is still valid,” the “Revolution has come to a halt,” for now. Merleau-Ponty calls for a new Popular Front, a coalition of Communists and Social Democrats in France, an end to the internecine vituperation among Leftists. In what looks very much like a far-Left appropriation of Gaullism he avers that French “cannot confound our future either with that of the USSR or the American empire.” To counter the critique of Communism by Social Democrats, he replies that “we have never said that any policy which succeeds is good” but rather “that in order to be good a policy must succeed.” Ideals that go perennially unrealized are false ideals, given the Marxist aim to unite theory and practice. The problem is that “to govern is to foresee,” and in Marxism at least “the politician cannot excuse himself for what he has not foreseen,” even though “there is always the unforeseeable.”  Yet the (historicist) politician’s claim to govern is based on his position at history’s cutting edge. “There is the tragedy”: “the curse of politics is precisely that it must translate values into the order of facts” and it cannot do so without a violence that may turn out to be worse than useless.

While we Marxists “have never subordinated the state of validity to the existing state,” we have also “refused to locate it in a nonexistent”—that is, ideal—state, as Socrates seems to do in Plato’s dialogue or as Augustine seems to do in The City of God. “The gravity of politics” is that “it obliges us, instead of simply forcing our will, to look hard among the facts for the shape they should take” (emphasis added). That is, Merleau-Ponty seems to come close to advocating what the classical philosophers called phronēsis or prudence. But not so, because he embraces Marxist historicism, a framework for prudential reasoning that ultimately deranges prudential reasoning, lending itself to Stalin’s purges. Without Marxian dialectical materialism, without ‘History’ marching towards a future in which the ideal of man will be realized materially on earth not in Heaven, “the contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives those acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents.” That is, rulers command violent acts, acts of terror, because they don’t know what the future will bring, and they want to shape it; yet that holds for all rulers and for all acts of violence. Violence can only be vindicated if it really moves humanity toward the end of violence seen in genuine humanism, communism. In the meantime, “the most honorable causes prove themselves”—demonstrate that they are indeed possible, not utopian—by “means that are not honorable.” ‘Idealists’ who pretend otherwise defend “the irresponsibility of political man.” Unlike strict Marxists, Merleau-Ponty concedes that “the human condition may be such that it has no happy solution,” that “political man” in any epoch must suffer “an unhappy consciousness,” as suggested by Socrates’ bad end and by Oedipus Rex. That is, both philosophy and tragedy may point to the ruin of Marxist hopes. Merleau-Ponty’s heterodoxy on this point and others, eventuated in his break with his friends Sartre and Beauvoir, who tried to be loyal advocates of communism throughout the post-World War Two decades until they died.

This notwithstanding, “communism does not invent violence but finds it already institutionalized”; “for the moment the question is not to know whether one accepts or rejects violence, but whether the violence with which one is allied is ‘progressive’ and tends toward its own suspension.” Violence itself “is only appealing in imagination in art and written history”; intrinsically, it causes only anguish, pain, and death. The “exalted sympathizer” of violence “refuses to see that no one can look violence in the face,” while anti-communists like Koestler refuse “to see that violence is universal.” Merleau-Ponty would escape the dilemma by denying that Marxism is thoroughly materialist/mechanistic, as both Koestler and the Stalinists claim, that it regards man as a mere reflection of his socioeconomic status, that it holds history to be a science explained authoritatively by the Communist Party. On the contrary, Party leaders deliberate and therefore may commit errors. Marxist history is “the living element of man, the response to his wishes, the locus of revolutionary fraternity,” not “the sheer force of fact. “Marxism discovered, apart from scientific knowledge and its dream of impersonal truth a new foundation for historical truth,” namely, “the spontaneous logic of human existence,” which consists of “the proletariat’s self-recognition and the real development of the revolution.” To confirm this, he quotes Marx: “History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends,” a citation that doesn’t really confirm what he wants to show but at least does not refute it. His Marxism, at any rate, rests “on the profound idea that human perspectives, however relative, are absolute because there is nothing else and no destiny. We grasp the absolute through our total praxis, if not through our knowledge—or rather, men’s mutual praxis is the absolute.” He calls this “intersubjective truth,” “subjectivity and action committed within a historical situation.” “Intersubjectivity” would have a fairly long life among subsequent historicist thinkers. 

Crucially, Merleau-Ponty claims that “the only history we are entitled to speak of is one whose image and future we ourselves construct by means of equally methodical and creative interpretations.” Outside “the movement of history,” so defined, ‘dialectically,’ “values remain empty words and have no other chance of realization.” This points to the ‘Nietzschean’ or ‘existential’ dimension of his version of Marxism as in part a philosophy of creativity, lauding “man’s creative force in history.” History as the past, including such matters as whether or not Bukharin/Rubashov actually did any of the things he was accused of doing, must sacrifice itself, must sacrifice the likes of those accused, on the altar of a conjectured future. Unlike Nietzscheism, however, “the Marxist revolution is not irrational because it is the extrapolation and conclusion of the logic of the present” as (allegedly) perceived concretely by the proletariat.

“We have left Plato’s dialectical universe for the fluid universe of Heraclitus.” If mutual praxis among human beings is the absolute, not God, ideal Platonic or Kantian, or any other standard outside of ‘history’ so defined, but Marxian history isn’t a materialist version of Hegelian dialectic either, if Koestler is wrong, and the communism that now really exists is not true Marxism, “is there in reality any alternative between efficacy and humanity, between historical action and morality?” (emphasis added). That is, is true Marxism as Merleau-Ponty conceives it true? He now considers the Moscow Trials and the case of Mikhail Bukharin.

Bukharin had been a Stalinist, supporting the Man of Steel against Trotsky in their 1920s power struggle. He fell out of favor for advocating the continuation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy after Stalin had turned against it, then was rehabilitated a few years later. His trial and execution on obviously trumped-up charges of treason against the Soviet Union turned Koestler, and not only Koestler, against Stalin and the Party. Merleau-Ponty admits that the Moscow Trials, which “are in the form and style that belong to the Revolution,” “never approach what is called ‘true’ justice, objective and timeless.” That is because there is no such thing. The trials, in his formulation, “bear upon facts still open toward the future, which consequently are not yet universal and only acquire a definitively criminal character when they are viewed from the perspective” of the revolutionary, who “judges what exists in the name of what does not yet exist but which he regards as more real.” Whereas “bourgeois justice adopts the past as its precedent”—asking, did Bukharin and the other defendants actually commit the crimes, as alleged?—communist or “revolutionary justice adopts the future,” judging “in the name of the Truth that the Revolution is about to make true.” The proceedings of revolutionary justice “are part of a praxis which may well be motivated but transcends any particular motive,” a praxis that asks, ‘Is the accused’s conduct revolutionary or not? ‘ “They posit the absolute validity of the Stalinist perspective on Soviet development.” Since history isn’t “steered by the will of determined individuals” but by the concatenation of all thoughts, wills, and actions, “political man would be wrong to decline responsibility for the movements he makes use of, just as it would be wrong to impute to him their detailed direction.” Therefore “it is possible to have to answer for acts of treason without having intended them,” since the revolutionary judge hands down not “a judgment of a person but the appraisal of an historical role, ” attempting “to act in such a way that in all this confusion the forces of progress might prevail.”

In each individual person, there is “a dialectical relation” between “what a man is for others and what he is for himself,” a tension which “the true nature of tragedy” consists of. Tragedy invokes terror and pity. Such terror exists “in each of us,” and this “split between the man and himself” is “the whole secret of the Moscow confessions.” Elaborating on the thought of that man of the French Terror, Louis Saint-Just, he writes that “in a period of revolutionary tension or external threat there is no clear-cut boundary between political divergences and objective treason.” Under such conditions, the conditions of an epoch, “humanism is suspended and government is Terror,” a form of violence that, by forthrightly calling itself violence instead of hiding behind “the judicial dream of liberalism,” will, perhaps, be driven “out of history,” not institutionalized as it is under liberal regimes. Merleau-Ponty’s choice of Saint-Just to make this point must be deliberate. Saint-Just was Robespierre’s close ally and most prominent ‘theoretician’ of the Terror. Bukharin had been that to Stalin. Merleau-Ponty uses Saint-Just as a surrogate Bukharin to refute Bukharin and his defender, Koestler. Translated into Marxism, “man’s creative force in history” refutes the liberal claim that the social contract “enunciate[s] an immutable truth of Human Nature.” On the contrary, the social contract is “nothing but an historical product” to be scrapped when man’s creative force pushes beyond the property rights asserted by liberalism. And beyond the legal rights posited by liberalism, legal rights justified by the natural rights that historicism refutes.

“All legality and reason” have “passional and illegal origins” at the moment of revolution. For example, in World War II and after “men condemned one another to death as traitors because they did not see the future in the same way.” This ‘historicizes’ the conflict not only between historicists (the Nazis and the ‘progressivist’ liberals in alliance with, then opposed to, the Soviet Communists) but the conflict between historicists and the non-historicist defenders of natural right, or Kantianism, or some form of Progressivism—all of whom Merleau-Ponty regards as deluding and self-deluded bourgeois idealists. Those who uphold natural rights as the foundation of justice do not oppose the historicists because they see the future differently but because they see nature differently. But Merleau-Ponty, as a historicist, regards ‘History’ as the “tribunal,” when it comes to judging guilt. If liberals say ignorance of the law is no excuse, for him ignorance of the historical outcome is no excuse. You do indeed have “freedom and judgment”; that is why you are responsible for your acts before History’s “tribunes.” The “dialectical relation” between what a man is for himself (innocent) and what a man is for others (guilty of anti-progressive, anti-revolutionary conduct), this “split” “between the man and himself,” is “the whole secret of the Moscow confessions,” which partake of “the true nature of tragedy.” “History has not ceased to be diabolical.” It will cease to be someday, perhaps, but only at the ‘end of History,’ communism. Meanwhile, “History is Terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace, but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation that is changing,” entering a “dialectic of the subjective and the subjective, which is not a simple contradiction which leaves the terms it lays on disjointed” but a circumstance which “makes political divergencies irreducible and cunning, deceit, and violence inevitable” as revolutionaries make a humanity that does not yet exist. On this point, “Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin are all opposed to the liberal ethics because it presupposes a given humanity whereas they aim at making humanity.”

Merleau-Ponty adds a swipe at Trotsky, another Bolshevik rival Stalin put to death, albeit without the legal fiction of a trial. Trotsky had complained about the trials. But Trotsky’s acquaintance with the individuals concerned in the trials “hides from him the historical significance of the events.” Fundamentally Kantians, not Marxists, Trotsky and his kind “have such a tenacious belief in the rationality of history that when it ceases for a while to be rational, they throw themselves into the future they seek rather than having to deal with compromises and incoherencies.” They are utopians. They diverge from Lenin, for whom “the Party leads the existing proletariat in the name of an idea of the proletariat which it draws form its philosophy of history and which does not coincide at every moment with the will and sentiment of the proletariat at present”; Marxist science clarifies their revolutionary praxis but it does not replace it, since the Marxist understands that “history is not comparable to a machine, but to a living being.” It is not simply organic, either, instead being a living being that makes. “Our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed”—echoing Marx’s famous dictum in his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways,” while “the point…is to change it.” “History is Terror because we have to move into it not by any straight line that is always easy to trace but by taking our bearings at every moment in a general situation that is changing.” All revolutionaries believe that “the contingencies of the future and the role of human decisions in history makes political divergencies irreducible and cunning deceit, and violence inevitable” in order to make a humanity that does not yet exist. Bukharin, Trotsky, and Stalin alike regarded Terror as a form of action to be used in “realiz[ing] a genuinely human history which had not yet started but which provides the justification for revolutionary violence.” “There is a great deal of distrust”—to say the least—among Marxists, “but at the same time a fundamental confidence in the spontaneity of history.” They oppose “the liberal ethics because it presupposes a given humanity”—a human nature—whereas “they aim at making humanity” (emphasis added) a project that “provides the justification for revolutionary violence.” “There is a meaning to such violence—that it is possible to understand it, to read into it a rational development and to draw from it a human future.” (This elides the difference between understanding, on the one hand, and “reading into” and “draw[ing] from,” on the other, precisely the difficulty with a philosophy of ‘creativity.’) They differed only in terms of the decisions resulting from their several deliberations about specific means to that justified end. How, then, to distinguish among them, among their chosen means? “If Marxism is a theory of violence and a justification of Terror, it brings reason out of unreason, and the violence which it legitimates should be a sign which distinguishes it from regressive forms of violence.”

In his attempt to ‘humanize’ Marxism, Merleau-Ponty asserts that Marx doesn’t reduce “philosophical and human problems to problems of economics”; he “draw[s] from economics the real equivalents of these questions.” Merleau-Ponty would downplay the determinism of Marxism, mixing it with Husserlian elements in the manner of Sartrian existentialism. The “element of violence and Terror” in Marxism derives from its agreement with Hegel, who writes, in The Phenomenology of Spirit, that “each self-consciousness aims at the destruction and death of the other.” But to aim is not to achieve, and Merleau-Ponty quotes Lenin saying that socialists do not promise that communism will be achieved. Instead, recalling Lenin’s critique of ‘bourgeois’ imperialism, he writes: “The Revolution takes on and directs a violence which bourgeois society tolerates in unemployment and in war and disguises with the name of misfortune. But successful revolutions taken together have not spilled as much blood as empires. All we know is different kinds of violence and we ought to prefer revolutionary violence because it has a future of humanism.” It is simply a matter of choosing “between different kinds of violence,” since “inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.” “Violence is the common origin of all regimes.” To those who would grant that but reply that what kind of regime you aim at matters, he has his reply ready to hand: Marxism “accords a privilege to the proletariat,” taking them as “the only ones in a position to realize humanity.” This valorization of the proletariat is “the core of the doctrine” of Marxism, distinguishing Marxist politics from “all other authoritarian politics.” 

What gives the proletariat the exclusive privilege to good violence? The proletariat is “the objective premise underlying the revolution.” Economics is now worldwide, making everyone dependent upon everyone else. Both capitalists and proletarians are worldwide classes, but the proletarians are far more numerous, and they do the real work. This new economic condition “induces the proletarian to become conscious of his condition, the very act of living that way motivates the awakening of consciousness,” recognizing his alienation from capital in a way the old noblemen and the new bourgeoisie have not. Proletarian universality is therefore a universality that is lived, not merely conceived, as with ‘humanitarianism.’ As Marx puts it, proletarians are “world-historical, empirically universal individuals,” not ‘abstractly’ universal, like the capitalists who exploit their labor while preaching compassion and scattering crumbs to the poor. Thus, the proletariat, in partaking of the universal intersubjectivity of humanity, enjoys “the sole authentic intersubjectivity because it alone lives simultaneously the separation and union of individuals.” A revolutionary leader may undertake Terror or work for compromise so long as the choice he makes raises, intensifies this proletarian consciousness. “Marxist Machiavellianism differs from pure Machiavellianism inasmuch as it transforms compromise through awareness of compromise, alters the ambiguity of history”—the dialectic clarified but not generated by Marxian science—through “awareness of ambiguity, and makes detours consciously—calling them detours.” Marxist Machiavellianism knows “where one is going and why”; its dialectics may reverse course, even reverse ‘values,’ but always for a reason, “the cause of the proletariat.” But even with the Machiavellian windings of Marxist leaders, that “cause” is “so universal that it can tolerate truth better than any other. Why else would the Russian Communists call their primary newspaper Pravda, which means Truth? (One might think that they are ‘making’ propaganda, but let that pass.)

“It is the theory of the proletariat which radically distinguishes Marxism from every so-called ‘totalitarian’ ideology.” The term ‘totalitarian’ was coined by Mussolini. Fascism in its Italian and even in its National Socialist manifestations, “retains everything of Bolshevism except what is essential, namely, the theory of the proletariat.” Fascism substitutes “race” or nation for the proletariat. Its goal is a “military state,” not a universal society. It is commendable in its anti-liberalism, detestable at its core. Marxism will achieve “the values of liberalism” but in the only effective way, by the means of “the concrete vehicle of values,” the proletariat. The proletarian life, the life of production upholding (as does liberalism) the labor theory of value and the other principles of utilitarianism, embodies “a style of coexistence at once of fact and value, in which the logic of history joins the forces of labor and the authentic experience of human life.” It removes the contradiction, the dualism, if ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ because it is the “working logic” of history, neither rejecting the core of liberalism like fascism, or flailing futilely (or hypocritically) in an impossible attempt to secure the core of liberalism in real life, an attempt liberal regimes themselves have failed to achieve. Indeed, it is “through the historical activity of the proletariat that Marxism resolves the famous problem of ends and means.”

For all his talk about proletarian intersubjectivity, in the end Merleau-Ponty doesn’t stray too conspicuously from Communist Party loyalty. “At present the revolution relies less upon the development of a national and world proletariat than the clairvoyance of the Party, the effectiveness of its plans and the discipline of the workers”—disciplined, of course, by the Party because socioeconomic conditions have yet to ripen into full humanity, full consciousness, among the proletarians themselves.  Given “the actual state of affairs” in 1947, “today’s Communists are unlike those of yesterday” because “they have fewer illusions” about the prospect of near-time success. “They are working for a more distant result, they expect all sorts of mediations”; they are for the moment “unable to believe in that historical logic according to which the construction of a socialist economy and the development of production rests upon work-class consciousness which [historical logic] reinforces.” And so, the Communist Party has indeed become “a new class,” one that downplays “working class consciousness” in favor of embodying the working class’s “permanent interest.” Absent the right consciousness in the working class, “from all evidence only the leaders possess information necessary to determine the long-run interests of the workers.”

None of this, Merleau-Ponty assures his readers, makes Marxism “outdated.” Marxism “cannot be surpassed” as a “critique of the present world and of alternative humanisms.” Its doctrine of historical materialism, “the idea that morals, concepts of law and reality, modes of production and work, are internally related and clarify each other” will never be superseded. In both Kant and Hegel, there exists “an a priori or inner structure of life and history”—for Hegel, the Absolute Spirit, for Marx, historical materialism—of which “empirical events are the unfolding” and “man is the agency.” Even if it is incapable of shaping world history,” Marxism “remains powerful enough to discredit other solutions.” It is “the only humanism which dares to develop its own consequences,” namely, the revolutionary need for terror. He concludes with a bit of astonishing drivel, worthy of Pravda: “Within the USSR violence and deception have official status while humanity is to be found in daily life. On the contrary, in democracies the principles are humane but deception and violence rule daily life.” There came a time when even he couldn’t believe those things, anymore. “One is either for Communism or against it. For a long time to come, at least, there can be no third position.” With that allusion to Jesus words, now phrased as an atheist prophecy, Merleau-Ponty replaces God with himself, providence with ‘History.’ In the end, his strained loyalty to the Communist Party parodies Christians’ disappointment in the delay of the parousia, with its consequent elaborate institutionalization of the Church. Since Christianity understands divine providence to operate on God’s time, while Marxist apocalyptic operates on human time, Christians are likely better to sustain their patience.

Some years later, after Stalin’s death and the ossification of the Communist Party bureaucracies in Russia and its satellites, Merleau-Ponty would distance himself further from ‘orthodox’ Marxism, in his book Adventures of the Dialectic. There, he would also offer a critique of the revision of Marxism offered by the most famous French ‘intellectual’ of his time, Jean-Paul Sartre.

 

Hugh of St. Victor: Disdascalicon: On the Study of Reading. Jerome Taylor translation. Preface, Books I-III: Liberal Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

 

Saint Victor was a third-century Roman soldier who converted to Christianity and was martyred for his evangelical work in the army, work that attracted the malign attention of the Emperor Maximilian. The Abbey of St Victor was founded in Paris in the twelfth century. Hugh of St. Victor arrived there in the 1120s, quickly earning a reputation as an excellent lecturer. He wrote the Didascalicon as a guide for his students.

He begins by distinguishing several kinds of students: those whom “nature has left them so poor in ability that they can hardly grasp with their intellect even easy things,” some of whom do learn because they work hard and some of whom refuse to learn anything, ruled by “contempt of knowledge” derived from their “wicked will”; among those who do have ability, the most excellent are hard workers who become learned men, the others sluggards who do not. 

One learns in two ways, principally: by reading and by meditation. This book is on reading: what to read, in what order it should be read, and in what manner it should be read. Books being divided into secular and sacred, Hugh instructs the reader on how to read both. The first three parts address the origin of the arts, their description and division, identifying their authors. He ranks the works in order of importance and indicates the proper sequence of reading them, concluding by “lay[ing] down for students their discipline of life,” without which they will make little progress in their studies. The second three parts address Sacred Scripture, identifying and sequencing them, identifying their authors and explaining the titles of the books. These parts conclude with an explanation of “how Sacred Scripture ought to be read by the man who seeks in it the correction of his morals and a form of living” and how they ought to be read by “the man who reads in it for the love of knowledge.”

“Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed.” This Form is Jesus, through whose wisdom God the Father created the world, including man. Jesus is “the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things,” but one that inheres in the divine Person, not independently, as some Platonists conceive the Idea of the Good. Unlike animals, who do not “understand that they have been created of a higher order than they,” man, created in God’s image, must learn to know himself as the ‘god’ Apollo advises: to “recognize himself” by examining himself. Whereas Plato in the Timaeus describes an “entelechy” or “World-Soul,” Hugh, understanding that the God of the Bible created the world out of nothing, redefines the entelechy as the human soul, which, like Plato’s entelechy, is partly “dividual”—divided into parts—and partly in-dividual—unitary. As a human being, I possess understanding, which “comprehends the invisible causes of things,” and particulars, which I perceive through sense perceptions, “picking up the visible forms of actual objects.” In this way, whether my soul “goes out to sensible things through its senses or ascends to invisible things through its understanding, it circles about, drawing to itself the likenesses of things; and thus it is that one and the same mind, having the capacity for all things, is fitted together out of every substance and nature by the fact that it represents within itself their imaged likeness.” The soul should not therefore be understood as being composed of the physical things; it ‘is’ them by its manner of understanding them. “The soul grasps the similitude [to all things] in and of itself, out of a certain native capacity and proper power of its own.” “Imprinted with the likenesses of all things,” the mind “is said to be all things.” That is “the dignity of our nature,” distinguishing humans beings the animals. However, “all do not equally understand” this, their minds having been “stupefied by bodily sensations and enticed out of itself by sensuous forms,” forgetting “what it was”—a condition also described by Socrates in Plato’s Meno. [1] “But we are restored through instruction, so that we may recognize our nature and learn not to seek outside ourselves what we can find within.” In one of his excellent notes to his translation, Jerome Taylor observes that Hugh’s “educational theory rests” on these “two postulates”: “the rational creature’s exclusive assimilation to the divine Wisdom, and its natural capacity to contain the rest of creation” in terms of ideas (p.187 n.42).

Philosophy is the pursuit of Wisdom. Philosophers not wise men, sophia, but lovers of Wisdom. “The whole truth lies so deeply hidden that the mind, however much it may ardently yearn toward it or however much it may struggle to acquire it, can nonetheless comprehend only with difficulty the truth as it is.” As Boethius has it, philosophy calls man’s mind back to itself, back to “the proper force and purity of [human] nature.” The soul has three powers: appetite, which forms, nourishes, and sustains bodies; sense perception, and reason, the distinctively human characteristic. Reason enables men to pursue Wisdom, which acts as “a kind of moderator over all human actions.” Whereas “brute animals, governed by no rational judgment,” guide their movements by sense impressions alone, “driven by a certain blind inclination of the flesh,” man’s reason empowers him to perceive Wisdom, God, albeit imperfectly, and regulate his morals and reach theoretical understanding “of all human acts and pursuits,” inasmuch as they partake of Wisdom, the image of God after which man alone was created. “Philosophy is the discipline which investigates comprehensively the ideas of all things, human and divine.” Hugh offers an example: “the theory of agriculture belongs to the philosopher, but the execution of it to the farmer.” Accordingly, human acts as governed by Wisdom have two dimensions: “restoring our nature’s integrity” and “the relieving of those weaknesses to which our present life lies subject.” That is because man has two things in him: “the good and the evil, his nature and the defective state of his nature.” The good “has suffered corruption” and so “requires to be restored by active effort.” The evil, which is “not our nature, requires to be removed” or “at least to be alleviated through the application of a remedy.” These two efforts constitute the entire human task.

The “integrity of human nature” may be attained in knowledge and in virtue, “and in these lies our sole likeness to the supernal [i.e., angelic] and divine substances,” the element in us that truly is, that remains eternally. The other part is transitory, subject to change and eventually to death. In the world overall (and by “world” Hugh means all of creation, not only the physical universe), there are “three things that are”: the eternal, which has no beginning or end—God; the perpetual, which has a beginning but no end—corporeal and incorporeal nature; and the temporal, which has a beginning and an end. Nothing that has true being, true esse, suffers destruction; it is rather the forms of things that pass away, the being of them enduring change but not extinction, rather like what we would call the law of the conservation of matter and energy. “All of nature has both a primordial cause,” God, “and a perpetual subsistence.” While the human soul partakes of God’s likeness, likeness isn’t identity; for one thing, man lacks the power to create out of nothing. There is a certain parallel, if not an exact analogy, in the structure of the cosmos. The “superlunary” world contains the heavenly bodies above the moon, which “stand fixed by primordial law.” Astronomers call this “nature” proper. The sublunary world, our world, is “the work of nature” because “the varieties of all animate beings which live below by the infusion of life-giving spirit, take their infused nutriment through invisible emanation from above,” moving “in accordance with the movements of the superior.” Their term for the superlunary world is “elysium”; their word for the sublunary world is “infernum.” This is why man is subject to necessity with respect to that part of him that partakes of change (he must, for example, grow old and die), “whereas in that in which he is immortal, he is related to divinity,” free to make choices. His right choices are to “restore in [him] the likeness of the divine image” and to “take thought of the necessity of this life,” which can easily “suffer harm from those things which work to its disadvantage.” That is, a human being ought to choose those things that reorient his spiritual nature toward God, his physical nature toward healthful self-preservation.

Two things “restore the divine likeness to man: the contemplation of truth,” which connects him to wisdom and justice, God’s preeminent characteristics, and the practice of virtue. As to ministering to physical necessities, he must feed himself, fortify himself “against harms which might possibly come from without” and against those that “already besiege us.” “Every human action, thus, is either divine or human. Divine action, which “derives from above,” is intelligentia or understanding, a purely spiritual activity that can comprehend God with God’s graceful help, His revelation and the Holy Spirit. This has two parts: “speculative,” directed toward God Himself, and “practical” or “moral.”  “Human” action or scientia, knowledge, “a certain practical counsel,” “derives from below,” from sense impressions directed to the sublunary world of physical necessity, corporeal objects. Knowledge “pursues merely human works” and “is fitly called ‘mechanical’ ” or ‘adulterate'”—impure, clever and often hidden, as in the phrase, ‘tricks of the trade.’ To put it another way, God creates out of nothing, nature brings to actuality what was hidden (in morality, it brings out man’s potential for goodness), while artificers put together or disjoin already existing things in imitation of nature. While human art is lower than divine creation or nature, “man’s reason shines forth much more brilliantly in inventing these very things than ever it would have had man naturally possessed them,” and we rightly “look with wonder not at nature alone but at the artificer as well.” Mechanical work thus partakes of human dignity. Wisdom overall governs “all we do deliberately,” whether by understanding or by knowledge.

Nature has four dimensions. There is, first, “that archetypal Exemplar of all things which exists in the divine Mind, according to the idea of which all things have been formed.” Nature is “the primordial cause of each thing, whence each takes not only its being (esse) but its ‘being such and such a thing’ (talis esse) as well.” “Nature is that which gives to each thing its being.” Second, nature means “each thing’s peculiar being (proprium esse),” that is, “the peculiar difference giving form to each thing,” its own nature. That tree over there has being, but it also has its own being as a particular species of tree. Third, nature is a begetter, “an artificer fire coming forth from a certain power to beget sensible objects”; “all things are procreated from heat and moisture,” the sun and the ocean, symbolized in Virgil’s Georgics as Jupiter and Oceanus. Finally, there is logic, “the last to be discovered” by men but the first to be taught, since it is “essential” to understanding the first three. Hugh again cites Boethius, who remarks that the ancients often erred before they discovered logic because “real things do not precisely conform to the conclusions of our reasoning as they do to a mathematical count.” Mathematics is precise; words are not. What was needed was a way of making words more accurate, more nearly descriptive of nature—what Hugh calls “linguistic logic.” The natural human capacity to reason needed refinement in order for human beings better to understand the rest of nature. “The man who brushes aside knowledge of argumentation falls of necessity into error when he searches out the nature of things,” inasmuch as must first “come to know for certain what form of reasoning keeps to the true course of argument,” as distinguished from “what form keeps only to a seemingly true course, and unless he has learned what form of reasoning can be depended upon and what form must be held suspect, he cannot attain, by reasoning, the imperishable truth of things.” He must distinguish between logic and sophistry. 

“All sciences…were matters of use before they became matters of art,” taking “their rise in use” but “excelling it.” Each branch of knowledge consists of a right relation between a human ability and some aspect of reality, whether divine, natural, or mechanical/artificial. Theoretical knowledge “strives for the contemplation of truth”; practical knowledge “considers the regulation of morals”; mechanical knowledge “supervises occupations of this life”; and logical knowledge “provides the knowledge necessary for correct speaking and clear argumentation” about the other three branches of knowledge. Numerologists thus have ascribed the number four to the human soul.

Hugh now turns to a more detailed discussion of the several arts, beginning with philosophy, the love of Wisdom, meaning God, in whom “a single and simultaneous vision beholds all things past, present, and future.” God’s Mind forgets nothing and “is called ‘the primordial Idea or Pattern of things’ because to its likeness all things have been formed.” The arts aim at “restor[ing] within us the divine likeness, a likeness which to us is a form but to God is his nature.” The more we practice the arts the more “we are conformed to the divine nature,” possessing Wisdom, “for then there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Idea or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God.” Philosophy is “the art of arts and the discipline of disciplines”: the art of arts because it knows the rules and precepts of all the other arts; the discipline of disciplines because it “investigates demonstratively the causes of all things, human and divine.” Philosophy aims at theoretical/speculative, practical/moral, mechanical/adulterate, and logical/linguistic. Theoretical knowledge in turn divides into theology or “intellectible” knowledge, mathematics or “intelligible” knowledge, and physics or natural knowledge. Theology or the intellectible knowledge is knowledge of what endures “of itself, one and the same in its own divinity,” apprehended by mind and intellect, never by the imagination or the senses.” Theology “contemplates God and the incorporeality of the soul.” Mathematics or intelligible knowledge “considers abstract quantity,” quantity separated from matter or “other accidents.” The objects of mathematics “once consisted of [the] primary intellectible substance.” But, “by contact with bodies,” mathematical objects have “degenerated from the level of intellectibles to that of intelligible,” “less objects of understanding than active agents of it.” The intelligible “does not itself perceive only by means of intellect” but “has imagination and the senses,” thereby “lay[ing] hold upon all things subject to sense.” It draws the visible forms of bodies “into itself through imagination,” thereby “penetrated by any qualities entering through hostile sense experience.” Nonetheless, given its connection to the intellectible, “it gathers itself into one,” becoming “more blessed through participating in intellectible substance.” 

To illustrate how this works, Hugh discusses the number Four, which “teaches us the nature of the going out and the return of the soul.” Here numerology is a key to understanding not a text but to understanding nature. If you multiply 3×1 you get 3; 3×3, 9; 3×9,27; and 3×27, 81. “See how in the fourth multiplication the original ‘one,’ or unity, recurs”; this will happen at every fourth stage of the ‘3x’ process, on to infinity. Since “the soul’s simple essence is most appropriately expressed by ‘one,’ which itself is also incorporeal,” and since the number three stands for Plato’s three ‘parts’ of the soul (reason, spirit, appetite), 3×1 indicates that the monad or essence of the soul “receives different names according to its difference powers.” This differentiation is the first “going out” or “progression” of the soul. The multiplication 3×3 or 9 is the second progression, the soul’s control of the body by its powers. The third progression, resulting in 27, sees the soul, having “poured itself out through the senses upon all visible things,” rules them by bodily actions. “But finally, in a fourth progression,” eighty-one, the soul, freed from the body, returns to the pureness of its simplicity” after death which is designated by the number eighty. QED.

A similar Pythagoreanism applies to the body, which also has the number four assigned to it. In its case, the number two fits the body because it, unlike the number one, is divisible, like the body and unlike the essence of the soul. Multiply 2×2, you get 4; 2×4, 8; 2×8, 16; 2×16,32—once again, the number you started with reappears at the end of the quaternary series, infinitely. The number four is divisible by two, the first divisible number. 

“And now you see clearly enough, I should think, how souls degenerate from being intellectible beings” in their essence “to being intelligible things when, from the purity of simple understanding clouded by no images of bodily things, they descend to the imagination of visible objects; and how they once more become more blessed when, recollecting themselves from this distracted state back toward the simple source of their nature, they, marked as it were with the likeness of the most excellent numeral, come to rest.” Imagination “is sensuous memory made up of the traces of corporeal objects inhering in the mind; it possesses in itself nothing certain as a source of knowledge.” Lastly “sensation is what the soul undergoes in the body as a result of qualities which come to it from without.” We learn from all of these sources, but less surely at each stage. This is exactly the opposite of what a materialist—whether an ‘ancient,’ Epicurus, or a ‘modern,’ Hobbes—would claim.

Hugh’s account of the soul fits the quadrivium, the second part of the liberal arts. Mathematics consists of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. “Abstract quantity” is form, “visible in its linear dimension, impressed upon the mind, and rooted in the mind’s imaginative part.” There is “continuous” quantity, “like that of a tree or a stone”; this is called magnitude. There is also “discrete” quantity or multitude, as seen in a flock or a people. A multitude might stand “wholly in itself,” such as any number does, or it might stand “in relation to another number,” as when we multiply or divide it. A multitude might also be “mobile,” like the heavenly spheres, marked by the orbits of the planets, or “immobile,” such as the earth, which Hugh took to be the stable center of the cosmos. Arithmetic concerns abstract quantity, numbers, magnitudes that “stand in themselves”; music concerns numbers that stand in relation to other numbers; geometry “holds forth knowledge of the mobile” (we are a few centuries away from the discovery of calculus); “astronomy claims knowledge of the mobile.” 

Considered in more detail, the etymology of the word ‘arithmetic’ recalls that ares in Greek means power and that numerus in Latin means number; “‘arithmetic’ means ‘the power of number.'” Number has power because God, the supreme One, created nature with number. That is the link between numerology and nature, why numerology explains nature.

The word ‘music’ “takes its name from aqua, water, because no euphony, that is, pleasant sound, is possible without moisture.” Music flows. There are three kinds. The kind that “belongs to the universe” characterizes the elements (their mass, number, and volume), the planets (their situation, motion, and nature), and the seasons (days, months, years). The kind called “the music of man” can characterize the body, the soul, or “the bond between the two.” The body’s music consists of its growth or “vegetative power,” its “fluids or humors,” and its activities, whether “mechanical,” shared by all “sensate beings,” or those of human, rational beings—actions that are “good if they do not become inordinate so that avarice or appetite are not fostered by the very things intended to relive our weakness.” “Music is characteristic of the soul partly in its virtues, like justice, piety, and temperance; and partly in its power, like reason, wrath, and concupiscence.” This indicates that there is “music between the body and the soul,” a “natural friendship by which the soul is leagued to the body, not in physical bonds, but in certain sympathetic relationships for the purpose of imparting motion and sensation to the body.” Good soul-body music “consists in loving one’s flesh, but one’s spirit more; in cherishing one’s body, but not in destroying one’s virtue.” True virtue or strength is less physical than soulful, since the soul rightly controls the body. The third kind of music, “instrumental” music, refers to bodily actions directed by the soul in relation to physical objects outside the body—whether touched, like strings and drums or blown into, like pipes—or in relation to the body itself, the voice. Musicians consist of those that compose it, those that play it, and those that judge it.

‘Geometry’ means earth-measure; it was invented by the Egyptians for measuring land, flooded periodically by the Nile, which obscured all physical boundaries. There are three kinds: planimetry, aiming at knowledge of flat surfaces, planes; altimetry, which measures vertical extensions, heights; and cosmetry, which aims at knowledge of spherically shaped things, like the cosmos, which is immobile when considered as a whole, related to no other physical thing because it encompasses all of them.  ‘Astronomy’ means “law of the stars” or “discourse [logos] concerning the stars”; the discourse can be true insofar as it aims at understanding nature (health and illness, calm and storm) but runs to superstition when it becomes astrology, attempting to understand chance and choice—which would make the indeterminate determined. These are all mobile magnitudes—the “spaces, movements, and circuits of the heavenly bodies at determined intervals.” 

All four elements of the quadrivium are ways of investigating nature, physis. Narrowly defined, the science of ‘physics’ “searches out and considers the causes of things as found in their effects.” More broadly, however, it is “the same as theoretical science,” philosophy, which consists not only of the study of natural causes but of ethics and logic. “All the arts tend toward the single end of philosophy,” although “they do not take the same road.” As already remarked, mathematics concerns abstraction from things, inasmuch as a real line isn’t the same thing as a mathematical line—the former being divisible but not infinitely so, the latter being infinitely divisible. Physics strictly defined “analyze[s] the compound actualities of things into their elements.” By “elements” Hugh does not mean elements in the modern sense, material entities,” but “the nature of each in itself.” There are four elements (fire, earth, air, water) but these material things are considered by ‘physicists’ not so much in their material appearance but in their pure essences. Finally, logic is “concerned with the species and genera of things,” classification, which in turn provides the basis for the principle of non-contradiction. Of these three elements of the quadrivium, “physics alone is properly concerned with things,” whereas logic “employs pure understanding on occasion” and mathematics “never operates without the imagination.” “Logic and mathematics are prior to physics, in order of learning and serve physics, so to say, as tools”; they “base their considerations not upon the physical actualities of things, of which we have deceptive experience, but upon reason alone, in which unshakeable truth stands fast.” (A modern example of this would be Einsteinian physics, which is anything but commonsensical.) Notice that Hugh mentions ethics but does not elaborate on it here as a theoretical matter. That is because ethical theory, as distinguished from practice, is part of theology, and he defers his consideration of sacred Scripture to Books IV-VI. He classifies matters of theology under the category of the intellectible, whereas mathematics is under the intelligible, and physics concerns bodies, initially perceived by sensation, but studied with the assistance of the quadrivium. All theory “studies the truth of things,” knowledge of which is wisdom.

In addition to theoretical wisdom there is practical wisdom, prudence. Logic aids it when it serves as a handmade to rhetoric. Ethics concerns moral practice, “mechanics” what we would call technological practice. As in Aristotle, practice features ethical, economic, and political dimensions. Ethics consists of care for the soul, the “solitary science,” in which one “raises, adorns, and broadens” oneself “with all virtues, allowing nothing in life which will not bring joy and doing nothing which will cause regret.” Economics (literally ‘law of the household’) “assigns the householder’s tasks”; it is private. Political science “tak[es] over the care of public affairs, serves the welfare of all through its concerns for provisions its balancing of justice, its maintenance of strength, and its observance of moderation.”

There are seven “mechanical” sciences: fabric making, armament, commerce, and agriculture are the “external” or protective ones; hunting, medicine, and theatrics are “internal, providing, respectively, food and cures for the body and entertainment for the soul.” Hugh draws an analogy between the mechanical and the liberal arts, with the “internal” ones corresponding to the quadrivium—to concepts, things internally perceived—and the “external” ones to the trivium—to words, things that can be heard by others. “Every human activity is servant to eloquence wed to wisdom”; that is where logic comes in, even with respect to the mechanical sciences. His accounts of the seven mechanical arts need not detain us, except to note that he considers “the pursuit of commerce” as an activity that “reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and commutes the private good of individuals into the common benefit of all.” Modern liberals did not discover that effect. And unlike the later Calvinists, he regards theatrics with indulgence, again for Aristotelian reasons, since “by temperate motion natural heat is stimulated in the body and by enjoyment the mind is refreshed.” In addition, and “as is more likely, seeing that people necessarily gathered together for occasional amusement,” the ancients “desired that places for such amusement might be established to forestall the people’s coming together at public houses, where they might commit lewd or criminal acts.”

“All knowledge…is somehow contained in philosophy.” Some kinds of knowledge are contained within a particular branch of philosophy, now enumerated, and others are common to any and all forms of cognition, to cognition simply. 

Hugh ends Book Two with a more detailed description of linguistic, as distinguished from mathematical, logic. Grammar, “the knowledge of how to speak without error,” is one branch of linguistic logic. Rational or “argumentative” knowledge consists of demonstration, probable argument—itself divided into dialectic, “clear-sighted argument which separates the true from the false”) and rhetoric, “the discipline of persuading to every suitable thing”), and sophistry, which misuses logic to persuade others to unsuitable things.

In sum, “philosophy is divided into the theoretical, the practical, the mechanical, and the logical.” Given these divisions and their subdivisions, Hugh now turns to their founders and developers in Book Three. Among theologians, Linus was the founder of the discipline among the Greeks, Varro among the Romans, John the Scot (Scotus Erigena) among the British. Pliny founded physics, Pythagoras and Nicomachus arithmetic. Geometry came to the Greeks thanks to Euclid, to the British thanks to Boethius. Bubal founded music among the Hebrews, Pythagoras among the Greeks. The Hebrew, Cham, founded astronomy, which was revived by Ptolemy in Egypt. As for dubious astrology, Hugh regards its origins as murky, suggesting Abraham, the Chaldeans, Nemroth the Giant, and Atlas, according to Greek myth. Socrates and Plato founded ethics in Greece, while Cicero brought it to Rome. Logic owes its founding in Greece to Plato and Aristotle, with Varro and Cicero winning that honor in Rome. Demosthenes “devised rhetoric among the Greeks, Tisias among the Latins, Coryx among the Syracusans”; it was then systematized in written works by Gorgias, Aristotle, and Hermagoras in Greece and by Cicero, Quintilian, and Titian. Overall, “Egypt is the mother of the arts, and thence they came to Greece, and thence to Italy. Parmenides and Plato studied the liberal arts in Egypt.

Both ‘trivium’ and ‘quadrivium’ signify viae or ways; “a quick mind enters into the secret places of wisdom” ‘via’ them. Although some among the ancients “studied these with such zeal that they had them completely in memory,” so that “they did not thumb the ages of books to hunt for rules and reasons which the liberal arts might afford for the resolution of a doubtful matter,” the “students of our day, whether from ignorance or from unwillingness, fail to hold to a fit method of study, and therefore we find many who study but few who are wise.” Philosophy and Christianity are ways of life.

Hugh therefore undertakes to recommend books to read and ways to read them, addressing students and also teachers. He much prefers philosophy to poetry, taking Socrates’ side in that old quarrel. “The man wishing to attain knowledge, yet who willingly deserts truth in order to entangle himself in these mere by-products of the arts, will find, I shall not say infinite, but exceedingly great pains and meagre fruit.” Jerome Taylor explains that Hugh positions himself against the school at Chartres, whose scholars were “much given to elaborate commentary on poets, fables, and histories, exclud[ing] from philosophy the entire trivium.” On the contrary, Hugh insists, “it is in the seven liberal arts…that the foundation of all learning is to be found” as “without them the philosophical discipline does not and cannot explain and define anything” (212 n.44). Indeed, “if only one of the arts be lacking, all the rest cannot make a man into a philosopher.” 

One needs to attend, first, “how one to treat of the art itself,” and second, “how one ought to apply the principles of that art in all matters whatever.” That is (for example) first learn grammar, then use it correctly. “Do not strike into a lot of byways until you know the main roads.” This again counters the approach of the Chartrians, who taught grammar and the other liberal arts by having their students read poets and historians (212-213 n.48), skipping formal study of the arts themselves.

As for the study itself, Hugh identifies three necessary characteristics: “natural endowment” (the “ability to grasp easily what they hear and to retain firmly what they grasp”), practice or the cultivation of that endowment, and discipline, “combin[ing] moral behavior with their knowledge.” One must take care not to allow one’s natural endowment to be “blunted by excessive work,” work that consists of “reading and meditation.” Reading “form[s] our minds upon rules and precepts taken from books.” Teachers read to the student; students read ‘under’ the teacher; they then read by and for themselves. Meditation means “sustained thought along planned lines,” considering the cause or source of each thing, its manner or way, and its utility. There are, potentially, three levels of every reading: “the letter, the sense, and the inner meaning,” that is, grammatical construction of senses, the “ready and obvious meaning” of the work being read, and “the deeper understanding which can be found only through interpretation and commentary.” These three inquiries should be undertaken when studying any text, secular or sacred. Only then should the reader meditate upon what he has read; “the start of learning…lies in reading, but its consummation lies in meditation, which, if any man will learn to love it very intimately and will desire to be engaged very frequently upon it, renders his life pleasant indeed, and” (with a nod toward Boethius) “provides the greatest consolation to him in his trials,” and giving “a kind of foretaste of the sweetness of the eternal quiet,” life with God. Meditating on morality, God’s commandments, and “the divine works” brings man “the greatest delight” to be had on earth. 

Do not, then, “my student,” “rejoice a great deal because you may have read many things but because you have been able to retain them,” to integrate them into your soul via memory. “Morals equip learning,” Quintilian writes, “joining rules for living to rules for study, in order that the student might know both the standard of his life and the nature of his study.” The scholar’s prime moral virtue is humility, “the beginning of discipline.” “Hold no knowledge and no writing in contempt” and “blush to learn from no man”; having attained learning, do “not look down upon everyone else.” Arrogance impedes learning because it tempts students to “appear wise before their time,” “break[ing] out in a certain swollen importance” and “simulat[ing] what they are not.” Do not preen yourself for having studied under a great thinker. In third-century Athens, such a student would “glory in having seen, not in having understood, Plato.” “Good for you! You have drunk at the very fount of philosophy—but would that you thirsted still!”

Humility should animate reading itself. “If some things, by chance rather obscure, have not allowed” the student “to understand them, let him not at once break out in angry condemnation and think that nothing is good but what he himself can understand.”

Generally speaking, the ancients’ “love of wisdom,” their philo-sophia, “was superior to ours.” When someone told a philosopher of those times that men were laughing at him, the philosopher replied calmly, “they laugh at me, and the asses bray at them.” In the soul of the true student and the true teacher, Wisdom rules, carried by Love and Hard Work (“because they bring a task to external perfection”) and Concern and Alertness (“because they inspire interior and secret reflection”). The four servants of Wisdom parallel the four elements: “masculine” fire and air, “feminine” earth and water. 

The modern philosopher, Emer de Vattel, longs for a world in which a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on earth and say, “This is my country.” The Christian-classical philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor, insists on the contrary, “All the world is a foreign soil to those who philosophize.” Vattel has reached only the first stage of philosophy, “to change about in visible and transitory things.” But philosophy (and Christianity) would have us leave those things “behind altogether.” “From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant’s hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and paneled halls.”

 

 

Note

1. On the Meno, see “Teaching Virtue?” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws. “Author’s Foreword” and “Preface.” Anne Cohler, Basia Miller, and Harold Stone translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

 

The 1757 “Author’s Foreword” to The Spirit of the Laws constitutes a brief reply to his critics, the most formidable of these being the Vatican, which placed the book on its Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1751, three years after its publication. The “Preface” appears in the first edition.

The “Author’s Foreword” consists of three paragraphs, the first of these beginning with the sentence:

In order to understand the first four books of this work, one must note that what I call virtue in a republic is love of the homeland, that is, love of equality.

What Montesquieu calls virtue is, then, not necessarily what Montesquieu’s reader calls virtue, although it resembles a sentiment Machiavelli invokes at the end of The Prince, when he praises Italy and calls for its redemption. (What Machiavelli calls redemption is not necessarily what the Vatican calls redemption.) But why is the love of the homeland the love of equality? It could be that although human beings are not equal in the classical virtues of justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom, nor in the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, they are, or usually are, equally citizens of their country.

Why the first four books? In them Montesquieu addresses, respectively, “laws in general,” “laws deriving directly from the nature of the government,” republican or monarchic, “the principles of the three governments”—that is, the passions animating republicanism (love of country), monarchy (love of honor), and despotism (fear), and “the laws of education,” which “should be relative to the principles,” the passions, “of the government. (In the United States, educator and dictionary author Noah Webster would cite Montesquieu on this point.) [1] Understanding the definitions Montesquieu offers in these preliminary books, his use of old and new words, first and foremost virtue, may clarify his critics’ minds or, perhaps, lead them to think more carefully. Elsewhere, he will announce that he writes his long book not to make people read but to make them think.

It is not moral virtue or a Christian virtue; it is political virtue, and this is the spring that makes republican government move, as honor is the spring that makes monarchy move.

Montesquieu separates political virtue from moral and Christian virtue; in describing it as a spring, he implies a mechanism. Virtus in Latin means strength; love of the homeland strengthens republics physically, as honor strengthens monarchies physically. Montesquieu makes political science first and foremost a physical science, a form of physics, not of ethics. Political virtue is political strength or power. This enables him to separate both politics and knowledge of politics from the Church. Church and State had been distinct but not separate in the sense of, for example, the United States Constitution; European states, feudal and modern, featured established Christian churches. Montesquieu lays a foundation for disestablishment while defending himself against charges of impiety by the Vatican, ruler of the established church of France. I am speaking of a different sort of virtue than the type you uphold, he replies; hold me harmless. In politics, love is a mechanism, not spiritual; political love is not agapic love.

Therefore, I have called love of the homeland and of equality, political virtue.

The republican kind of virtue is political, Montesquieu writes in this central sentence of his first paragraph. This suggests that love of honor, the monarchic virtue, is not political, strictly speaking. In this, Montesquieu follows Aristotle, who defines the political as ruling and being ruled in turn, while identifying monarchic rule as either parent-child rule (kingship) or master-slave rule (tyranny). However, unlike Aristotle, Montesquieu identifies honor, often associated with the rule of the few, especially the aristocracy, with monarchy. Machiavelli denigrates the rule of the few, ‘the great,’ in favor of the regimes of the many (‘republics’) and the one (principalities). Montesquieu here simply ignores the few, silently accepting Machiavelli’s basic regime dichotomy, although he does add a refinement, alluded to above, between two types of the rule of the one: monarchy and despotism. In this, he also departs from Machiavelli’s admirer, Thomas Hobbes, who famously proclaims that tyranny is only “monarchy misliked.”

I have had new ideas; new words have had to be found or new meanings given to old ones.

Hence your confusion, my censors. But hence also a danger to you. If I replace the old meanings of old words with new meanings, I might brush aside the meanings you want those old words to have. And what are these new ideas? I have already suggested one: that one form of virtue, what I have called virtue, is a spring, a mechanism, quite distinct from your virtues, and that it is equally a spring in the republican and the monarchic regimes. More radically, what might this suggest regarding the human soul?

Those who have not understood this have made me say absurdities that would be outrageous in every country in the world, because in every country in the world morality is desired.

To use the word virtue in the mechanistic, political sense elides morality. In itself, love of homeland elides morality. In every country in the world, morality is desired (perhaps most of all by priests?), although this leaves open the question not only of the contents of morality (following Montaigne, Montesquieu will describe a great variety of moral code in a great variety of countries) but of whether those who desire morality desire it primarily for themselves, primarily for others, or both for themselves and for others. 

The second paragraph begins:

It should be observed that there is a very great difference between saying that a certain quality, modification of the soul, or virtue is not the spring that makes a government act and saying that it is not present in that government.

A spring is a cause. It is a mechanism that puts something in motion. The mechanism in which it is contained, or which it puts in motion from the outside, may have other features. A “certain quality,” “modification of the souls,” or “virtue” (in your sense of the word) might still be present in a republic or a monarchy, without being its spring, its motivating cause. This may imply that the moral and Christian virtues are less ‘effectual’ than the political virtue in a republic or than honor in a monarchy. 

If I were to say that a certain wheel, a certain gear, is not the spring that makes this watch move would one conclude that it is not present in the watch?

Surely not. But if I were to say that, would I also not say that the wheel or gear that you care about is not what makes the watch move, that neither moral virtue nor Christian spirit really motivates political movement? And would this not make both classical and Christian moralists, and classical-Christian moralists, profoundly uneasy about Montesquieu’s political science?

And centrally: Far from excluding moral and Christian virtues, monarchy does not even exclude political virtue.

Not at all, but monarchy, the regime of the regnant Bourbons, does exclude those virtues from the status of what Aristotle would call the ‘efficient’ cause of monarchic regimes, and of republican ones, too. They do not set regimes in motion.

In a word, honor is in the republic though political virtue is its spring; political virtue is in the monarchy though honor is it spring.

Christian virtue has disappeared with this sentence. It seems to have nothing to do with politics or with monarchy, in and of themselves. In this, Montesquieu concurs with Machiavelli. Honor in republics and love of homeland in monarchies are virtues set further down the causational chain than love of homeland in republics and honor in monarchies.

In conclusion, the third paragraph states:

Finally, the good man discussed in Book 3, chapter 5, is not the Christian good man, but the political good man, who has the political virtue I have mentioned.

The title of that chapter is “That virtue is not the principle of monarchical government.” There, Montesquieu “begs” his readers “not to be offended” by this claim. He wants to assure them that he simply means that because in a monarchic regime “the state continues to exist independently of love of homeland,” of virtue as he has defined it, “in a monarchy it is very difficult for the people to be virtuous.” Honor goes to the king (the “Sun King,” in Louis XIV’s formulation); “desire for true glory, self-renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients and know only by hearsay” are replaced by laws fitted to the monarchic regime. This does not preclude good Christian men from existing among the people. In other words, Montesquieu gives and takes from his critics at the same time. He takes from them their charge of atheism or ‘Spinozism’ while silently indicating Machiavelli’s critique of Christianity—that it ruins politics in both republics and principalities by leaving no place for the spirit of the city, which Machiavelli redefines not as the ancient Roman’s virtus but as his own virtù—the desire to acquire made effectual. Montesquieu will refine Machiavelli’s teaching on this point, too, pointing republics and monarchies not to conquest, as in the ancient Rome of republican Cato and monarchic Caesars, but to commerce, the more effectual and lasting means of acquisition.

He is the man who loves the laws of his country and acts from love of the laws of his country.

It is the modern republic, the commercial republic with laws that support peaceful acquisition, that Montesquieu esteems the most. The passion of love for such laws is an effect of the love of peaceful acquisition.

The “Preface” to The Spirit of the Laws consists of sixteen paragraphs; consequently, there is no central paragraph. 

If, among the infinite number of things in this book, there is any that, contrary to my expectations might give offense, at least there is none that has been put here with ill intent.

An infinite number of things, indeed! Much information is provided in the course of it, through nearly 800 pages in the two-volume French edition I own and the 700 pages in one-volume the English translation. [2] The translator notes that he has translated espoir and its variants as “expectation” or, here, “expectations” rather than hope. Montesquieu is nothing if not a writer who prefers the concrete to the airy, in the case of espoir the expectation of something rather than some vague, idealized hope, mother of wishful thinking. On the other hand, it may also be that Montesquieu in this case does not really expect that he will not give offense but that he does hope that he won’t, given the malign consequences of offending the French regime and the Catholic Church. No “ill intent,” messieurs. It is quite possible that ill intent as defined by Montesquieu is quite different from ill intent as defined by the French regime and the Catholic Church, even as virtue means something quite different to him than it does to them.

By nature, I have not at all a censorious spirit.

The first mention of nature refers to Montesquieu himself, the individual. It is a Montaignian gesture, not Aristotelian and most assuredly not ‘churchy.’ This is also the first mention of spirit, again referring to Montesquieu the individual. Montesquieu’s “spirit” has a “nature.” What, then, is nature? Is it spiritual in the Christian sense? The references to nature and spirit, whatever they may mean, begin a bit of a joke and a jab. Those who take offense very often incline to censoriousness. I, Montesquieu, intend no ill to anyone. My critics, those honor-loving monarchists (or are they courtiers of a fear-inspiring despot?), those Christian-spiritual denizens of the Vatican, evidently do have censorious spirits. It is not I who acts with ill intent.

Plato thanked heaven that he was born in Socrates’ time, and as for me, I am grateful that heaven had me born in the government in which I live and that it wanted me to obey those whom it had me love.

That individual, Plato, piously thanked “heaven”—not exactly the gods said to dwell in that part of nature—that he was born in Socrates’ time, that is, in the time of the philosopher who brought philosophy down from the heavens, away from the cosmologically-centered philosophy that preceded him, to the polis, to consideration of human nature, a less speculative but crucially important topic for philosophers, since philosophers, being human themselves, must understand themselves, know themselves as one oracle famously put it, before they can soberly undertake the (then) necessarily speculative investigation of the heavens. Montesquieu’s gratitude (a passion neither ill-intended nor censorious) springs not from the presence of a philosopher in his time and place but from the government of France and those it wanted him to obey and love. This sentence might assuage any feelings, any passions or springs of offense that might have been taken by sensitive readers of the joke-jab immediately preceding.

I ask a favor that I fear will not be granted; it is that one not judge by a moment’s reading the work of twenty years, that one approve or condemn the books as a whole and not some few sentences.

Fear is the passion of despotism. Censorious men incline to, as one now says, ‘cherry-pick’ passages in building their case against authors. Censorious men have, by nature, a spirit of impatience as well as a certain libido dominandi. Don’t be that way, Montesquieu hopes without really expecting. At the same time, he offers sound and well-intended advice to serious judges: consider the argument I make as a whole argument. Just as Montesquieu will consider the laws not in isolation from one another but as they relate to one another, consider the words and sentences in my book as they relate to one another.

If one wants to seek the design of the author, one can find it only in the design of the work.

The Spirit of the Laws and other authorial works have a design, a design indicative of the (true) design of their authors. In this way, books resemble buildings; they are architectonic, designed with “design,” with intent. My book will tell you what my intent is, enabling you to come to a just judgment as to whether its design, a reflection of my design, is ill- or well-intended. It may even incline you to redefine what you mean by the words good and ill.

I began by examining men, and I believed that, amidst the infinite diversity of laws and mores, they were not led by their fancies alone.

Individuals have natures and it may be that human beings taken as a group, despite the infinite diversity they exhibit in their laws and mores, have certain commonalities. It may be that there is an underlying nature to human beings as such.

I have set down the principles, and I have seen particular cases conform to them as if by themselves, the histories of all nations being but their consequences, and each particular law connecting with another law or dependent on a more general one.

The principles are the passions, of which there is a finite number of politically relevant ones. The histories or stories of all, not some, nations follow from those passions. Laws do, too, and systems of laws, connections or relations among the laws which help to constitute a regime amount to such consequences, complicated by the complex relations among the particular laws so caused. It seems likely that the Montaignian/Montesquieuian individual also enters into complex relations with other individuals and the laws caused initially by the passions and to some extent sustain by them.

When I turned to antiquity, I sought to capture its spirit in order not to consider as similar those cases with real differences or to overlook differences in those that appear similar.

Spirit, again, still undefined, although a clue to its meaning may have been offered in the mention of relations. Laws have a spirit, according to the book’s title, and a period of time, antiquity, may have one, too. The way words change meaning anticipates the way the spirit of a set of laws or of a time may change and thereby deceive those who inquire into other systems and earlier times.

I did not draw my principles from my prejudices but from the nature of things.

“The nature of things”; a glance at Lucretius, that great counter-Roman Roman, that Roman philosopher? To identify passions as “principles” surely partakes of no ‘idealist’ philosophy, although philosophy of any kind will attempt to clear away prejudices, unexamined or unreasoned opinions. Lucretian Epicureanism finds no favor with Churchmen, at least in their public writings, or in the Bible.

Many of the truths will make themselves felt here only when one sees the chain connecting them with others.

More advice on how to read this book. The book itself is ‘relational,’ its elements related to one another in the manner of laws and mores. What is the “chain” connecting the truths to one another? What is the general principle or passion animating the book and its author, the forger of the chain? The truths, whatever they turn out to be, will be felt—a way of knowing distinct from sight (associated with knowing things that cannot be touched, ideas) and from hearing (associated with things that can be neither seen nor touched but revealed by speech). Machiavelli prefers knowledge by touch, felt knowledge, to either the philosophic knowledge offered by the ancients or the spiritual knowledge offered by the Bible. Montesquieu evidently concurs, to some extent, the reader will only feel the truths after seeing the chain, first. But what he means becomes clearer in the following sentence.

The more one reflects on the details, the more one will feel the certainty of the principles.

Reader, pay attention to the details, the particular truths. Then, reflect upon them, thinking rather than merely reading. See the chain that links those truths together. You will then feel those facts, really know them. And in such seeing and feeling, you then feel something beyond the particular truths, namely, the certainty of the principles of the nature of things that Montesquieu has discovered and now presents to you.

As for the details, I have not given them all, for who could say everything without being tedious?

You may be able to supply your own corroborating particular truths. You might even discover some principles of the nature of things not explicitly stated by the author but implied by him. To be too explicit with regard to principles might encourage unphilosophic thoughtlessness in readers, making them prey to prejudices, dogmas. And wouldn’t that, too, be tedious?

The salient traits that seem to characterize present-day works will not be found here.

The translators identify “salient traits” as a term from architecture. The architectonics of my book are not those of contemporary books. How so?

As soon as matters are seen from a certain distance, such salient traits vanish; they usually arise only because the mind attaches itself to a single point and forsakes all others.

The salient traits of present-day works—books to be sure, but perhaps others?—amount to mirages. Mirages emerge in the mind when it fixes on one point, rather as censorious persons fix on one or a few sentences, distorting an author’s intention. The principles drawn from the nature of things, too, might well be distorted by such fixations, a failure to consider the whole of nature because one has selected one or a few of the things. And to be sure, Montesquieu again eschews censoriousness:

I do not write to censure that which is established in any country whatsoever.

This, in marked contrast to the practice of Church-directed, Church-inspired conquests, inspired by censorious writings. Is the Bible itself censorious, in Montesquieu’s estimation?

Each nation will find here the reasons for its maxims, and the consequence will naturally be drawn from them that changes can be proposed only by those who are fortunate enough to fathom by a stroke of genius the whole of a state’s constitution.

Despite the infinite variety of laws and mores, which may find their abridged expression in the term “maxims,” all maxims have underlying “reasons,” which are, as Montesquieu has insisted, are passions. For the first time, Montesquieu suggests that one might wish not only to understand but to change laws and mores, redirect or even change the passions that underlie them. Not anyone can do this, however. Only those “fortunate enough” to “fathom”—to probe deeply—”the whole of a state’s constitution”—the system of its laws and mores but also its still-undefined “spirit”?—will be able to propose such changes—sensibly, at any rate. That is, the reformer or ‘founder’ of new modes and orders will need a mind capable of both probing deeply and ranging widely. A man like Montesquieu? Surely not men like his censors.

It is not a matter of indifference that the people be enlightened.

Surely not, given despotism’s preference for rule by fear, aided by ignorance, and republicanism’s need for an education that offers genuinely salient reasons for loving one’s country, for loving equality instead quailing in subservience.

The prejudices of magistrates began as the prejudices of the nation.

Censorious rule by fear arises not from rulers but from the people they rule. The spring of prejudice, so to speak, may be seen in the people, a particular people, whose prejudices then become the secondary springs of the rulers who keep them prejudiced, ruled by fear, censored. Enlightenment must then reach the people, spread among them first, perhaps by the means of a book written by one fortunate enough to fathom by a stroke of genius the whole of the existing, despotic state’s constitution, or whatever constitution may prevail in a given state.

In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils; in an enlightened age, one trembles even while doing the greatest goods.

An “age,” which might or might not be distinguishable from a “time,” but evidently has some relation to one. Antiquity, the age of republicanism or love of homeland, might or might not have been a time of ignorance. Neither is an age of enlightenment, an age in which the people lose many of their prejudices, a ‘democratic’ or republican age in which a people or perhaps many peoples love their homelands and equality. Montesquieu now ventures a moral contrast that differs sharply from the moral contrasts in the minds of the ignorant and censorious. In times (and, no doubt, regimes) of ignorance, of rule by fear, one may do “the greatest evils” with the certainty of those who fixate on one point in nature, obedient to the mirage that such fixation conjures. But in an age of enlightenment, one feels as it were a salutary fear, questioning one’s actions even when they bring great goods. What will eventually be called ‘liberalism’ should be animated by this hesitation.

One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself.

The felt truths, the truth that the abuses are indeed abuses—very often felt as bruises and bleeding wounds—lead to a truth of sight, of perceiving the chains of a system that will end the felt abuses. But the reformer or founder of a new regime, a new set of laws, will see, perhaps even foresee, bruises and wounds inflicted by the new regime and especially those inflicted when the correction is being put in place. Montesquieu understands that if you want to make an omelet you must break some eggs; he is no ‘idealist.’ But neither is he a Jacobin (and much less a Stalinist) avant le lettre. He is a liberal, a liberator from regimes of fear, not a fomenter of regimes of ‘Terrors.’ He remains a liberal of mesure. Accordingly,

One lets an ill remain if one fears something worse; one lets a good remain if one is in doubt about a better.

Neither religious nor Cartesian certainty bodes well for political life. Thinking while you read is a habit well adapted to other kinds of action, as a measured caution leads to thoughtful moderation, away from fanaticism in thought or action.

One looks at the parts only in order to judge the whole; one examines all the causes in order to see the results.

There is a purpose to attending to the particular truth: to see the whole and only then to judge it. That goes for reading Montesquieu’s book and to reading regimes. Parts are related to other parts and the chain which draws them together makes them a whole. If philosophy means love of wisdom, then to philosophize will mean an ardent inquiry into the nature of felt things understood only when seen as parts of a whole. To philosophize requires the virtue of love of homeland understood as love of the whole, attention to the whole.

If I could make it so that everyone had new reasons for loving his duties, his prince, his homeland and his laws and that each could better feel his happiness in his own country, government, and position, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals.

“If”: it may not happen, the prudent philosopher acknowledges. The newness of the reasons means the replacement of the old meanings of words with new meanings, the virtues of the ancients and the Christians with new virtues, at least in the political realm, the realm of laws and the regimes constituted in part by laws. To introduce new reasons, especially in the political realm, endangers the one who introduces them. He must measure the risk and act, specifically write, with practical as well as with theoretical wisdom. 

If I could make it so that those who command increased their knowledge of what they should prescribe and that those who obey found a new pleasure in obeying, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals.

“If,” again. This too may not happen. The people may be the source of the magistrates’ prejudices but the magistrates, the ones who rule, who command, are the ones who read such books as The Spirit of the Laws, with its extensive descriptions and recommendations respecting laws and regimes. They are the ones capable of knowing, if secondarily, from reading works of philosophers. Those who obey do not often read such books, unless they are philosophers who obey out of practical wisdom and in a way that accords with that wisdom. The ruled are, however, capable of pleasure if not knowledge, and they, who most immediately feel the abuses of misrule, may find pleasure in obedience. That may be what Montesquieu means by the consent of the governed. Such consent surely would make the duties of rulers easier to perform. They would need to depend far less on fear.

I would consider myself the happiest of mortals if I could make it so that men were able to cure themselves of their prejudices.

Whether rulers or ruled, those who command or those who obey, men will be “able” to “cure themselves of their prejudices” only if they consent to understand what the philosopher, this philosopher among others, discovers for them. All must consent to be ruled by the new philosophers, Montesquieu very prominently among them, if they are to live happily, a condition that will itself make the new philosophers happy in their own way.

Here I call prejudices not what makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself.

That is, as with Socrates, for whom Plato was grateful, one needs to know oneself, to know the nature of one’s spirit but also the nature of human beings as such and the nature of the spirit of interactions among individuals living together in their homelands and according to their laws, laws rightly framed by men enlightened by the new philosophers.

By seeking to instruct men one can practice the general virtue that includes love of all.

Montesquieu is such an instructor, soon to present his thoughts on the nature of education in the several regimes. But his book as a whole will resemble the love of all, the charitable or agapic love seen in Christianity, which attends both to Jew and to Greek. Yet this charity may differ from Christian charity in its foundation; we have seen the word “divine” in these pages but not the word “God.” When we do see it, Montesquieu will write “god,” more or less as Spinoza inclines to do. Charity will become ‘secularized.’

Man, that flexible being who adapts himself to the thoughts and impressions of others, is equally capable of knowing his own nature when it is shown to him, and of losing even the feeling of it when it is concealed from him.

Man’s nature (as distinguished from the natures of plants and of beasts), founded on passions, partakes of the flexibility of passions, by their nature not usually steadfast, even if sometimes quite stubborn. Man’s natural flexibility gives the philosopher and the ruler reason both to hope and to fear. Such men undertake a task which will require a sort of Sisyphean persistence combined with patient mesure. Censoriousness and violence will not prevail in the long run because they attempt to fix a nature that is not readily fixed, and never permanently fixed. The fixations that comport with attempts to fix the ‘unfixable’ are mirages, prejudices that cannot prevail forever.

Many times I began this work and many times abandoned it; a thousand times I cast to the wind the pages I had written; every day I felt my paternal hands drop; I followed my object without forming a design; I knew neither rules nor exceptions; I found the truth only to lose it.

Hesitation, despair, futility, aimlessness, ignorance, confusion: Montesquieu has shared the dilemma of all men so far. Casting pages to the wind, the editors note, alludes to the Aeneid 6.75, when Aeneas, having escaped Troy, having wandered Odysseus-like throughout the Mediterranean, seeking safe landing at Latium, implores the Sybil not to write her prophetic verses “on the leaves, lest they fly, disordered playthings of the rushing winds.” With no prophetess to guide him, Montaigne himself threw his preliminary work to the wind. The paternal hands that drop allude to the Aeneid 6.33, where Aeneas recounts the story of Daedalus, father of Icarus, builder of the labyrinth in which the monster, the Minotaur, is imprisoned, now seeking to escape the prison of the Cretan tyrant Minos, “attempts to fashion” wings for himself and his son, so that they may fly to freedom. Daedalus succeeds in making the wings, famously to see his son disobey his advice to “take the middle way” between the sun and the sea, fly too high, too close to the sun, fatally. In seeking to free men from tyranny, intending them to take the middle way, avoiding both soaring fanaticism and lowly subservience to despots, Montesquieu’s hands faltered. His labyrinthine work, intended to confine political and clerical monsters, his set of wings, intended to liberate humanity from the prison of prejudice, his philosophic quest, nearly failed.

But when I discovered my principles, all that I had sought came to me, and in the course of twenty years, I saw my work begin, grow, move ahead, and end.

Latium found. Pious Aeneus’ journey took seven years; it was Odysseus’ journey that took twenty. Guided by the Sybilline prophecy, Aeneus found the ‘principle’ that enabled him to discover and settle Latium in the golden fruit of the Golden Bough; guided by his intellect, Odysseus returned home. The way of the intellect takes longer than the way of prophecy. But it is steady, like nature, with its beginning, growth, progress, and culmination. 

If this work meets with success, I shall owe much of it to the majesty of my subject; still, I do not believe that I have totally lacked genius.

Montaigne does not wish to be thought lacking in humility, even if that humility is not thoroughgoing. The spirit of the laws has majesty; it rules the laws. It attracts the attention of readers because they want to understand such a majestic thing. Genius, too, attracts.

When I have seen what so many great men in France, England, and Germany have written before me, I have been filled with wonder, but I have not lost courage.

Who might these be? In France, Bodin? In England, Bacon, Locke? In Germany, Leibniz? That is, philosophers of the modern state, of commercial republicanism, of modern science? Wonder is the beginning of philosophy; nature as a whole and the philosophers who, each in his own way, seek to master nature, surely induce wonder, not the fear inspired by despotism. They strengthen one who would join them in philosophic inquiry, even if they might intimidate the one who seeks to philosophize, initially. 

“And I too am a painter,” have I said with Correggio.

So Correggio is said to have said, by the Correggio-obsessed art collector and historian Sebastiano Resta, in his Series of the Work of Eminent Painters, published in 1739. Correggio had been contemplating The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia by Raphael. In the painting, the martyr holds a lyre; of the five figures, she is the only one with her eyes fixed on Heaven. She is the saint who protects musicians. So, even in elevating himself to fellowship with philosophers, Montaigne strikes a faint note of piety, albeit piety toward a saint who loved the Muses along with God.

 

Notes

1. See “Educating the American Mind: The Founders’ View” on this website under the category “American Politics.”
2. De L’Esprit des lois. Two volumes. (Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1949).