Leo Strauss: On Hegel. Paul Franco, editor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Most readers of Strauss begin with Natural Right and History. There Strauss contrasts classical or ‘ancient’ political philosophy with ‘modern’ political philosophy. As Paul Franco remarks in his cogent introduction to On Hegel, “For Strauss the fear of violent death in Hobbes plays the same foundational role with respect to modern moral and political philosophy that radical doubt plays with respect to modern metaphysics.” Both radical doubt and fear of violent death derive “from distrust of nature”—to say nothing of God—rather than “grateful acceptance of it,” resulting in the characteristically modern philosophic attempt, instantiated in the technologies developed by modern scientists, “to actively control nature” instead of contemplating it.

In Natural Right and History Strauss remarks another contrast, one within the framework of this modern enterprise. Although the moderns would control nature, they nonetheless continue to appeal to nature, specifically human nature, as the source of moral and political right. In doing so, they also ‘lower’ the moral standard that human nature sets, inasmuch as they do not think very highly of human nature. Accordingly, thy replace the greatness of soul Aristotle upholds as the crown of ethical striving with the principles of self-preservation and acquisition. But these are still natural criteria for human conduct, down-to-earth though they are.

The tension between the attempt to conquer nature while upholding one part of nature, human nature, as the moral standard, heightens with Rousseau, in whom Strauss discerns a conception of human nature as being so malleable as hardly able to establish a usable standard at all. And so, Strauss argues, philosophers began to look elsewhere for a source of moral guidance. In the final section of Natural Right and History, Strauss finds in Edmund Burke’s celebrated denunciation of the French revolutionaries and their appeal to the natural “rights of man” a first attempt to derive right from “history”—meaning, the long course of human events which constitute the living tradition of a given people, or indeed of a given civilization. Strauss calls this new philosophic doctrine “historicism.”

Strauss’s selection of Burke as his specimen historicist may well puzzle his readers. Burke sometimes continues to profess natural-right principles and is in any event first and foremost a statesman rather than a philosopher. Just as puzzling, Strauss scarcely mentions G. W. F. Hegel, a philosopher par excellence, who elaborates an explicitly “historicist” doctrine in full and indeed systematic detail. [1]

Moreover, as Franco observes, there is a firm link between Hegel and Hobbes. “Hegel agrees with Hobbes on [the] foundational point” of modern political philosophy, locating “the origin of self-consciousness in the slave’s fear of violent death in his life-and-death struggle with the master”—the “struggle for recognition.” Hegel ‘historicizes’ the Hobbesian principle by putting it in the course of events, not in human beings as such. Under Hegel’s formulation, human nature can be as malleable as Rousseau said it was, without the consequent undermining of morality. Further, the modern project of controlling nature remains; indeed, the now-historical quest for human freedom from natural constraints makes possible not only (in Franco’s words) “the actualization of the best regime”—as Hobbes and Locke wanted to do—but (now going beyond Franco) makes his quest ‘nobler’ in its purpose than the low-but-realizable commercial monarchies and republics earlier moderns supposed possible. For Hegel, the modern state becomes not only useful but thoroughly rational to a degree even modern proponents of ‘Enlightenment’ though impossible.

Yet Strauss largely neglects Hegel in his published writings, with the exception of his exchange with the Hegelianizing Marxist and apologist for Stalin, Alexander Kojève, née Kojevnikov. That is, in the books and articles he published in his lifetime Strauss never addressed Hegel’s thought directly or in any detail. Between his accounts of Rousseau and Burke in Natural Right and History and his several engagements with Nietzsche, that grand historicist critic of Hegelian historicism, he leaves a hiatus, indeed a gulf. One wants to ask, ‘But Mr. Strauss, what about the master-historicist himself?’

We now have Strauss’s considered remarks on Hegel in the form of a well-annotated transcript of a graduate seminar on The Philosophy of History he conducted at the University of Chicago in 1965. Many of his classes were tape recorded by his students; typewritten transcripts of somewhat uneven quality have circulated for years as a sort of Straussian samizdat. In this seminar Strauss offered an interpretation of Hegel’s historicism remarkable not only for its acuity but for its equanimity. Far from a historicist himself, Strauss never descends to the level of polemical ‘critique’ so typical of latter-day adepts of ‘post-modernism.’ Indeed, he does not hesitate to correct students eager to judge Hegel too harshly and hastily.

An extraordinary caliber of students he did attract. We hear from “Mr. Shulsky”—Abram Shulsky, author of a study on Aristotle’s Politics and co-author of a standard text on the techniques of espionage; “Mr. Glenn”—Gary D. Glenn, long a mainstay of the political science department at Northern Illinois University; “Mr. Bruell”—Christopher Bruell, author of noteworthy treatments of Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle; and “Miss Heldt”—the redoubtable Catherine H. Zuckert, whose scholarship has ranged from Plato to Machiavelli to American novelists. On Hegel makes it easy to see why Strauss drew them to his classes. To l’esprit de géométrie and l’esprit de finesse he added l’esprit de politesse —a formal, old-world charm blended with witty use of American advertising slogans and news events in side-comments that obviously took his students by surprise, not expecting him to know about such things.

Strauss begins by asking: Why study Hegel “in our capacity as political scientists”? Because Hegel influenced Marx, whose latter-day disciples ruled a substantial portion of the world population at the time; because Hegel redirected intellectuals’ attention from the state to “culture” (and especially religion) “as the comprehensive theme of reflections of human society”; because The Philosophy of History consists of a series of lectures to university students, making its arguments “much more easy to follow” than those encountered in Hegel’s formal writings; and, above all, because “Hegel was the first to make the understanding of the history of political philosophy an essential ingredient of political philosophy itself.”

Strauss then introduces Hegel historically, without conceding anything to historicism as a philosophic doctrine. (“I am not a Hegelian, and I do not believe that one can say that history is rational.”) For example, he explains that “the simple formula of Hegel’s philosophy of history” is “order comes out of disorder without being intended.” In this he is obviously indebted to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” But Hegel “enlarged this” to encompass “the whole of history”; the moral sentiments Smith attributes to nature, and indeed nature itself, are reconceived by Hegel as part of a blind yet orderly movement, unfolding via rationally discernible laws, towards a fully “rational order,” one entirely conscious of itself as an order.

But how is it possible for the historically-determined philosopher to know that the ‘end of history’ has occurred? “Hegel was the first to face this difficulty: If the philosophy is the son of his time, how can he have found the eternal truth?” And Hegel’s general answer is: He can, if he lives in the moment “in which time as it were coincides with eternity,” if he lives in what Strauss calls the “absolute epoch” or “absolute moment” when the owl of Minerva not only takes flight but lands, the moment in which the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, has become wisdom itself. In this moment, the philosopher (it happens to have been Hegel, but that is of no importance) can solve the fundamental problem of Plato’s “dialectics of the ideas.” Platonic dialectic poses the problem of how the ideas, beings of a different order of being from the things we see around us, somehow generate those things? Hegelian dialectic, understood for the first time at the end of history, because of the end of history, reveals how this happens—why “the whole realm of ideas necessarily externalizes into nature on the one hand and mind on the other hand”—by the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit (which Hegel also calls “God), its dialectical work now completed. Hegel’s new theory of logic posits a dialectic that doesn’t merely catch opinionated folk in self-contradiction but rather works through contradictions, through the clash of contradictory opinions and actions (such as wars and factions) toward ever-grander syntheses of opposites, culminating in the final synthesis, the end of history. [2] With Hegel’s new logic, reason doesn’t simply discern contradiction; “reason thinks through contradiction.” In this, Strauss says, “Hegel surely is the most radical rationalist that ever wrote,” the one who understood reason as “something which is not merely a faculty of man” but instead subsumed all of being under the rubric of a reason not ‘above’ empirical reality, as in Plato, but as immanent in it, and immanent in the course of events in the empirical world. “God” isn’t transcendent but immanent. “There is nothing outside of reason, nothing which is not rational.” 

Politically, this means that political life is no longer architectonic, as Plato and Aristotle maintained. “The political life is part of a larger whole,” the life of the “collective mind, folk-mind”—a “culture” consisting of language, religion, arts, and (on the material side) natural descent, climate, and geography. “The folk-mind is the mediation between nature and mind.” No folk-mind dies but instead “becomes the matter for a higher principle embodied in another people”—a rational process in Hegel’s sense of the dialectical, namely, the clash of opposites leading to a new synthesis. In turn, “each folk-mind is a part, or facet, or stage of the mind, the world-mind” or Absolute Spirit, “and this is therefore a reconciliation between the universal and the particular.” It is also a reconciliation of good and evil, inasmuch as both are necessary elements of the world-historical dialectic. In this, Hegel satisfies himself that he has solved the theologians’ ‘problem of evil,’ while at the same time vindicating the religions, especially Christianity, as philosophically necessary steps toward full human self-consciousness or wisdom. His new dialectic also solves the philosophic problem posed by Hume, the problem of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ Contra Hume, at the end of history one can indeed see how the ‘ought’ derives from the ‘is,’ because what is has worked toward what ought to be, what must be, namely, the end or purpose of history.

These matters being so, after his philosophic introduction Hegel divides his lectures on the philosophy of history into four parts, each corresponding to a culture, a folk-mind: the Oriental world; the Greek world; the Roman world; and the Germanic world, wherein the historically-unfolding Absolute Spirit or World Mind has reached its culmination in Hegel’s comprehensive rational system. Even in ‘pre-history,’ in Africa, we already see the human intention to oppose itself to external nature in the practice of sorcery and even of cannibalism, which form parts of African religion. But Asia is where history proper began. In Africa and elsewhere, the sorcerer assumes that the world around him “remains subject to arbitrariness”—manipulable at his command; he is a radical ‘subjectivist.’ The Chinese were the first to understand the world around them as ‘objective,’ as having a stubborn reality of its own. But in making this advance, Chinese civilization (and Asian civilization generally) run to the opposite extreme. They lack “an inner sense, pointing in the right direction,” instead obeying the Emperor’s commands “as a matter of course” because they are supposed to be the “Mandates of Heaven.” this paternalism and its accompanying rule by administration, leads finally to cultural-political ossification, as “there is no life, so to speak, in the state. it all depends on the man at the top.” In such civilizations as China, India, or ancient Judea there can be no “science and political liberty” because while there is an understanding that the world has an objective integrity of its own, there is no sense of rational opposition of human beings to this given order. This (Strauss emphasizes) has nothing to do with biological racialism; he quotes Carl Schmitt as saying that “the moment Hitler came to power…Hegel died” in Germany.

India is superior to China in that for the Chinese the highest thing is “a visible heaven,” whereas Hindus “go beyond and peer through heaven, as it were, and discover a spiritual principle—nothingness as the ground of everything—and this is an act of liberation.” It is not a liberation of reason, but it is a precondition of reasoning. In Persia we see another advance. The Persians “view the whole historical process as a fight” between opposites, between light and darkness, goodness and evil. “The point is that this highest, the light, does not absorb the individual things or human beings but lets them be what they are; whereas for the Hindu, nothingness leads to the negation of the particulars, Nirvana.” The Persian insight provides a foundation both for dialectic and for individuation—not yet understood rationally, but posited.

Notice that as Hegel uncovers these gradual advances in human thought in Asia, he moves geographically closer and closer toward the West. Phoenicia is the next step, where a a people goes to sea, trading as far away as the British Isles, and therefore needing a plan, needing to engage in practical if not theoretical reasoning about how to survive at sea, pursuing an active way of life, industrious and not merely agricultural or ‘vegetative.’ what is more the Phoenician god, Adonis, dies: “The death of God is the highest point of Phoenicia, and Hegel implies that there is some connection between this concept of the death of God—that the negativity belongs to the spirit itself—and what he had said about the industrial character of Phoenicia.” Neither commerce and industry nor a religion in which God dies bespeaks a way of life settled in a condition of changelessness. It prefigures Christianity and the Cross. “In the Old Testament there is indeed for the first time the primacy of the spirit,” the Persian light now the first sign of a Creator -God, a god of freedom, superior to material ‘givenness.’ In this, Hegel takes up Burke’s distinction between the beautiful—the harmonious, the natural, the created—and the sublime—the creative, but also the suffering, the sacrificial, the dialectical—and this may be the link Strauss sees between Hegel’s progressivism and Burke’s traditionalism. “For Hegel, the true is radically distinguished from the beautiful and higher than it,” while for “Plato and Aristotle, somehow the true and beautiful coincide on the highest level, the ideas.” But they did not set out to conquer nature, only to contemplate and apprehend it.

Yet Asia still does not produce the rational. The rational came to light “in the free, joyful spirit of Greece,” in the Apollonian command, “man, know thyself.” In answering the riddle posed by the Asian sphinx, Oedipus “overthrew the sphinx from the rock,” liberating the Oriental spirit, “which Egypt had advanced so far as to propose the problem.” “The answer is “that the inwardness of nature is the thought that has its existence only in the human consciousness.” In the realm of historical action, the same transition occurred when the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis, marking the limit of Persian imperialism, an imperialism that could never form itself into “a harmonious whole” and which now retreated against “Greek organization,” itself an expression of the liberated human spirit.

Hegel ignored the Greek understanding of art as imitation. Greek art, preeminently Greek poetry, is in his view rather a form of religion. “That is its peculiar greatness and freedom,” seen in the triumph of the Olympian gods over the old cthonic gods, Chronos and Ouranos. The freedom implied in art is not yet the full, modern freedom, as it retains what Hegel calls “an essential relation to some stimulus supplied by Nature,” something external to the human spirit. “Nevertheless,” Strauss says, “the freedom of the mind is recognized within these limits, and therefore Greece is higher than the Orient.” Among the arts practiced by the Greeks was rhetoric, the art of debate, the art of democratic politics, the nucleus of Socratic debate or dialectic. In negating traditional opinions and practices (and getting himself killed for it) Socrates and his dialectic still come from them, in some sense express them.

The defect of the Greek world is seen in the slavery that undergirds its democratic politics. For the Greeks, freedom consists of controlling the passions; they do not see that innate freedom of the human mind “by virtue of which every man is by nature free,” responsible, “and therefore an object of respect.” There is reason in Greece, but no “right of subjectivity,” no conscience—only the virtue of the self-governing citizen. The self-governing citizen shares in ruling the tiny polis; there is no central state, no sense of “a distinction between the people and the government,” and thus no realm of privacy, of personal subjectivity, and therefore of individual rights. Socrates provides the beginning of the salutary corruption of the Greek folk-mind by causing “the awakening of subjectivity.” But a fuller freedom of spirit, of conscience, and of individual rights must await the founding of Christianity.

But first came the conqueror of Greece—its dialectical opponent, Rome. Rome would eventuate in Christianity, “the complete break with naturalness” and its replacement (or at least displacement) in the Christian soul with Spirit. Before this though could occur, there needed to be a midway point; classical Rome provided this with the concept of personality. “Personality,” Strauss remarks, “is not individuality.” “The concept of personality is a legal concept”; in Rome, all men were understood to be “legal persons,” human beings with ‘standing’ in court. “Out of the full person of formal law there will grow the fuller individuality later on.” At the same time, legal standing in court implies conventionality, artificiality. The emphasis on the Roman citizen as a legal person comports with the fact that “Rome was from the outset not natural in any way; nor did it have the originality going together with naturalness.” On the contrary, it originated in fratricidal violence, the story of Romulus and Remus—a story, Strauss emphasizes, that the Romans told about themselves. “A nation which can tell this story about its own origin thereby reveals its soul,” whether the story is factually true or not.”

Rome “constitutes a progress beyond Greece” because “there is no longer the tutelage of nature which is in Greece,” no longer “the charming union of nature and mind which is charming and therefore also deceptive and untrue.” Rome’s origins were ugly and it ended in the ugly rule of emperor-tyrants. Rome had a civil religion but according to Hegel (following Machiavelli) it was a sham. The emptiness and misery of classical Rome was called ‘sin’ by Christians. And the sin it lived by—especially its unending, unjust imperial wars—aspired to universality, to worldwide empire. In attempting to save the old republic, Cicero wasted his time.” “Looking at this thing in hindsight,” Hegel “sees what wonderful things came out of this terrible Caesarism, namely, the emergence of Christianity and the modern world.”

Hegel’s “section of Christianity…is in a way the most important part of the whole work.” Roman imperialism brought the Romans to Transalpine Gaul, Germany, and Britain—to the Europe which would become the center of Christendom and then the center of modernity. Rome also prepared for Christianity by its universality of thought as well as action, by “purif[ying] the human mind and heart from all particularity because it recognized only the individual as an abstract legal person.” Christianity would take the Jewish claim that man is sinful, “wholly alienated from God and yet to be redeemed by God,” combine it with Roman universality while rejecting Rome itself as sinful, and finally give all of these themes a “visible, sensual certainty” by worshipping Jesus, “God’s son…incarnated as man.”

The final step will be the “spiritual” understanding of Jesus “as opposed to the carnal understanding,” that is, a fully rationalist form of ‘Christianity’ now purged of the miracles and the doctrine of sanctity or holiness. Science will replace miracles, mastering nature; immanence will replace the separation of Spirit and human nature. “The recognition of the rights of man, the recognition of the infinite value of the individual…this is the full realization of Christianity” according to Hegel. The rational Absolute Spirit replaces the Holy Spirit.

Strauss distinguishes Hegel’s philosophy of history from political philosophy. Political philosophy “was based from the very beginning on the difference between the good and the ancestral; the agathon and the patrium,” as seen in the second book of Aristotle’s Politics. To Plato’s Socrates, inquiring after the good in the Athenian marketplace by rationally testing the opinions of his fellow citizens, “the various forms of the ancestral” to which men characteristically appeal when struggling to define the good “are divinations or fragments of the good, and even souled fragments of it.” “Hegel says: No, there is an order among these ancestrals”—indeed, “an ascending order,” as they appear over the centuries. “Not only is the end toward which they point…rational, the way towards the end is itself rational” and therefore as necessary in its progress as a logical proof. “At the end there is complete reconciliation of reason and tradition” in the fully rational administrative state.

Classical philosophy was “cosmological,” “concerned with men within the cosmos,” with natural beings within the natural order. Changes in “human thoughts and human societies” were understood “within the cosmic context,” within nature as a whole. Well before Hegel, modern philosophy had rejected this. Hobbes asserts that “we understand only what we make, i.e., if we merely discover something, it is essentially unintelligible”; Descartes agrees, as for him “the beginning is the thinking ego, not the cosmos.” For the moderns, “the thinking, understanding subject is the origin of all meaning,” and the rights of man are “subjective rights.” As early as Machiavelli, one sees disdain for the “imagined commonwealths” of the ancients, pagan and Biblical—commonwealths said to be outside and indeed above men. Modern ‘subjectivity’ is, Strauss maintains, “the necessary but not sufficient condition of the discovery of history.” Modern ‘subjects’ or ‘selves’ consult their own desires and reach out to grasp, to manipulate, to control external nature, not to guide themselves by its laws or by some idea of the good discernible in it. This project of the conquest of nature is understood to be progressive.

“All of these kinds of things came together and made it compelling for man in the eighteenth century to say that the human mind necessarily progresses and its results necessarily spread. And then by the spread of knowledge the people become enlightened and opinion is changed; and if opinion is changed, power is changed, because power will now move in a different direction than it moved before it was enlightened.” This “altered the nature not only of political philosophy but of political life very profoundly.” Hegel synthesized all of these elements into his philosophy; this synthesis was the “absolute speech” in which Christianity, itself predicting the advent of a new heaven and a new earth, “becomes completely secularized,” instantiated by human rationality. “Christianity has become fully understood, i.e., religion has been transformed into philosophy by Hegel at the University of Berlin.” Similarly, the arts that once depicted the gods—whether Athena or Christ Pantocrator—are replaced by “philosophy, including science,” and especially the scientific art, technology, and by “the rational state, revealing itself in reasonable laws,” implemented in accordance with the principles of scientific administration. This is no longer political philosophy because it is no longer political—no longer an interplay of ruling and being ruled but instead a matter of consensual obedience to rational regulation. And it is no longer philosophy, either, but the wisdom for which philosophers had long searched but never found until the dialectic of the Absolute Spirit rested in Hegel’s fully rational and comprehensive system of thought and of action, now unified.

How would Hegel reply to what now calls itself ‘postmodernism,’ the refusal of the authority of the administrative state and indeed of reason itself? Hegel as illuminated by Strauss makes this quite clear: The ‘end of history is the peak of the roof, but the owl of Minerva which takes wing from it descends to catch rodents. From the heights, history has nowhere to go but down, or perhaps around. And so it has, into a democratized Nietzscheism for the Last Man.

 

Notes

1. For a step-by-step exposition of The Philosophy of History, see the five articles posted in the “Philosophers” section of this website.
2. See Stanley Rosen: G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), discussed in “Historicity and Reason: Two Studies,” on this website in the “Philosophers” section of this website.

 

Nicholas Maxwell: In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life. Montreal: McGill-Queens University, 2017.

 

Before Socrates, philosophers attempted to understand nature by direct observation. In doing so, they ignored the reputation of philosophy and of philosophers—soon considered at best odd and laughable, at worst dangerous to the city and deserving of exile or death. They also ignored the distortions to their own quest for wisdom imposed upon them by the opinions and customs of their political communities—unexamined assumptions that they had never considered philosophically. The polis endangered philosophy in two ways, one ‘external’ the other ‘internal.’ Externally, it threatened the lives and way of life of philosophers. Internally, it interfered with self-knowledge and therefore with the philosophic quest for wisdom; nonetheless, if considered carefully, political life might prove ‘epistemologically’ useful to philosophers. [1] By turning to political philosophy as the gateway to philosophy, by showing how philosophy might be both ‘politic’ and political, Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon showed how philosophers might better guard themselves from persecution while enhancing the philosophic way of life, refining its understanding of the nature philosophers had characteristically inquired into.

For more than a century, philosophy as practiced in academia has eschewed both political philosophy and the natural philosophy it corrected. Politics has been consigned to the realm of the irrational (‘values’) and sub-philosophical ratiocination (‘facts’ uncovered by ‘political science’). Nature has been consigned to ‘science,’ consisting of theorizing founded upon mathematics and of practical, empirical experimentation intended to test the theories mathematics generated and, when confirming them, to put meat on their bones. Maxwell sets out to redeem philosophy as originally understood, as natural philosophy. “The central thesis of this book is that we need to reform philosophy and join it to science to recreate a modern version of natural philosophy; we need to do this in the interests of rigor, intellectual honesty, and so that science may serve the best interests of humanity.” “The best interests of humanity” suggests politics, although not the real politics of existing political communities; it suggests the politics or quasi-politics of some future ‘world state,’ the politics of ‘globalism.’ At the same time, the task of defining “the best interests of humanity” might well lead some academic philosophers to a renewed version of the Socratic turn, once they see that there is no such things as “humanity” as a politically organized entity. Maxwell himself hasn’t quite seen that, yet, looking instead to an imagined future wherein “our immense global problems” can be addressed “in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, thus helping us make progress towards a good world—or at least as good a world as possible.” This best of all possible worlds might leave little room for politics as such, and, if so, might not be the best of all possible worlds. Or so a Socratic philosopher might suspect.

Maxwell does see this latter point when he looks around his own setting in a university—universities being eminently political institutions, where ‘ruling’ and ‘being ruled’ go on all the time. “We urgently need to reorganize universities so that they become devoted to seeking and promoting wisdom by rational means—as opposed to just acquiring knowledge, as at present” or, one might add, just advancing ideological dogmas, as at present in so many of them. This means regime change for the academy. “Academic inquiry needs to be reorganized so that its basic task becomes to seek and realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, thus including knowledge, technological know-how, and understanding, but much else besides.” The regime of the modern university remains Weberian, affecting “our very psyches” by “the way we split off reason and intellect from feeling and desire, fact from value, science from art.” As Socrates might put it, modern academic philosophy has taken the philo out of philo-sophia.

Modern science emerged from modern philosophy, and not always by turning away from political philosophy, as any reader of Francis Bacon will attest. Yet some of modern science at least seemed apolitical. Maxwell thus can assert, “Modern science began as natural philosophy,” as “one mutually interacting, integrated endeavor” aimed at “improv[ing] our knowledge and understanding of the universe” and “improv[ing] our understanding of ourselves as a part of it.” Natural philosophy made “profound” and indeed “unprecedented” discoveries then, in the seventeenth century, beginning with Galileo and Kepler, reaching its peak with Newton, ending with Locke. “And then natural philosophy died,” splitting “into science on the one hand, and philosophy on the other.” “But the two fragments, science and philosophy, are defective shadows of the glorious unified endeavor of natural philosophy.” This is “at root, a philosophical blunder” or series of such.

What made modern natural philosophy modern? Galileo affirmed the atomism of the ancient natural science of Democritus, founded on “the key metaphysical tenet” that “the universe is made up of atoms in motion or, more generally, of physical entities in motion whose physical properties can be depicted in mathematical terms.” By so doing, Galileo “invok[ed] a key paradox inherent in the new natural philosophy: on the one hand there is an appeal to observation and experiment, while on the other hand, the new (or revitalized) metaphysical vision of the universe—atomism, or the corpuscular hypothesis—tells us that perception is profoundly delusive,” since we can’t see atoms with ‘the naked eye.’ “This paradox, unresolved, played an important role in driving science and philosophy apart.” Where the ancient atomists were sure of themselves, the modern atomists were not. Perhaps with a glance over their shoulders at revealed religion, eminently sure of itself, modern atomists saw in their atomism a claim that rested too much on faith to be quite scientific but too much on observation of nature to be religious.

The sundering of philosophy from natural science did not and could not happen quickly because modern science needed philosophy; “natural scientists disagreed about crucial questions of method,” of how to go about the quest for knowledge, which is what ‘science’ means. “Should evidence alone decide which theories are accepted and rejected, or does reason play a role as well?” Like the ancient natural scientists, the moderns looked to the heavens rather than to the political regimes immediately before them, but in doing so they understood that “mathematics had an important role to play in science, along with observation and experiment.” Since “mathematical truths can be established by reason alone,” reason must “have an important role in science.” Modern natural scientists disagreed on what role that should be. Some held that “all knowledge comes through the senses, via experience”; reason plays the role of handmaiden to such ’empirical’ knowledge. Where, for example, does mathematics fit into Locke, that admirer of the eminently mathematical Mr. Newton? “Others—most notably Descartes and Leibniz—held that reason plays a vital role in natural philosophy,” developing new and powerful mathematical ways of knowing such as the calculus. 

These controversies had both intellectual and moral implications. Given atomism, “how is it possible for human beings to acquire knowledge of the universe”? And “how is it possible for people to be conscious, free, and of value if immersed in the physical universe,” a universe consisting of nothing but “colorless, soundless, odorless corpuscles which interact only by contact”—that is, randomly? In sum, how can I know? And how can I choose? 

Aristotle had answered these questions by positing four causes of natural effects: efficient, material, formal, and final. In his theory, “change comes about because objects strive to actualize their inherent potentialities, much as an acorn strives to actualize its potential to become an oak tree”; “purpose, goal-seeking,” ‘final’ causation “is built into the constitution of things.” Aristotle additionally claims that the earth, located at the center of the universe, exhibits “imperfection, change, decay,” none of which “observe precise, mathematical laws,” in contrast to the heavens, where “perfection, no decay,” prevail and “the motions of heavenly bodies” do observe precise mathematical laws.” In this sense the heavens are ‘above’ the earth both literally and in the sense of full self-realization. The new astronomy removed the earth from its cosmic centrality, seeing it as only “one planet among the others that encircle the sun,” partaking both of the mathematical precision observed in orbiting bodies. This means that “apparently wayward, haphazard terrestrial phenomena such as weather, growth, and decay, all occur, perhaps, in accordance with unknown, mathematically precise law.” At the same time, this also “may be taken to imply that since the earth is a part of the heavens, and imperfection, change, growth, and decay are everywhere apparent on earth, all this obtains on other heavenly bodies too.” ‘They’ are no better than ‘we’ are; as Tocqueville might have put it, modern science discovered that there is more democracy in the universe than Aristotle had thought. Begun by Copernicus, the culmination of the astronomical revolution culminates in Newton, via Kepler and Galileo (who, “more than any other single individual, was responsible for the demise of Aristotelianism”) and the adoption of the ‘mathematical’ understanding of nature, “or what we now call modern science.” If the moon has mountains and craters, if Jupiter has four moves revolving around it, where does that leave Aristotelian physics? [2]. No thoroughgoing empiricist, Galileo insisted that “physical objects and natural phenomena exhibit mathematical structure.” While appealing to “observation and experiment,” he equally insisted that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” and ultimately of simple mathematics, especially geometry. Empiricism and reason, experiment and mathematics: natural science. 

For his part, with the help of the calculus—the geometry not of stable forms but of changing ones—Newton “put forward the first fundamental dynamical theory of physics ever,” the theory of gravitation. His Principia of 1687 “demonstrated how his universal law of gravitation was able to predict and explain the motions of the planets, moons, and comets of the solar system, together with a wealth of other phenomena as well.” Universal: the law of gravitation prevails on earth as it does in the heavens, and it explains why “the motions of the moons and the planets must deviate slightly from perfect Keplerian motion due to mutual gravitational attraction—the final, devastatingly convincing evidence in support of Newtonian theory.” 

Newton made another natural-philosophic ‘move’ that had serious effects on subsequent philosophy. Asserting that he had derived his theory from observing the phenomena, he admitted (as he wrote) that he had “not been able to discover the cause of [the] properties of gravity from the phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.” In experimental philosophy, “particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.” The subsequent Enlightenment movement, advanced most notably by the French Encyclopedists, taught that “no longer do natural philosophers need to engage in fruitless debate about metaphysics, philosophy, epistemology, and methodology.” Indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth century ‘metaphysics’ had become something of a byword for fruitlessness, and not incidentally a means of dismissing revelation even as it narrowed the scope of scientific reasoning. Under this dispensation, “new theories, in order to be acceptable, must meet two requirements: they must accord sufficiently well with the new metaphysical view of the universe” (namely, an atomism whereby the behavior of atoms conforms to “precise mathematical laws”); and “they must meet with sufficient empirical success, as tested by “the empirical method of careful observation and experimentation.” Only by meeting these requirements will science be “an endeavor that seeks to make progress in knowledge,” although (as Maxwell cautions) this progress must not to be taken as inevitable or even good.

It is noteworthy that Maxwell himself pays no attention to the moral and political foundation of modern science in Machiavelli, namely, the invitation to conquer Fortuna or, as his follower Bacon put it, to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate. Even on his own, strictly ‘natural-scientistic’ terms, however, Maxwell shows that modern science makes a metaphysical assumption, an assumption that underlies its physics. “A central concern of this book is to demonstrate that empiricism is not enough. Science needs evidence and metaphysics.” And if so, “we need a new conception of science which acknowledges explicitly metaphysical assumptions of science so that they can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved.” He calls this new conception of science “aim-oriented empiricism,” a term which suggests that some form of teleology must be brought back into our understanding of nature and of science or knowledge of nature. The very notion of a scientific method itself suggests that there must be some telos the method aims at, and that there might be madness in one’s method, or sanity, because of that.

Maxwell next considers modern natural science in more detail. As noted, Newton “makes the amazing claim to have derived his law of gravitation solely from the phenomena by induction,” a claim that led eventually to the abandonment of natural philosophy, its split into ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ begun in the eighteenth century and effected thoroughly by the nineteenth. But Newton has a method, his “rules of reason,” all of which “concern simplicity or unity” and “in effect make implicit metaphysical assumptions concerning the simplicity or unity of nature.” That is “a big assumption,” and a metaphysical one at that. So, for example, Newton’s first rule of reason tells us that “Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes” (very democratic, Tocqueville would smile)—obviously “a big, highly problematic metaphysical assumption about the nature of the universe.” What is more, despite his avowal of strict deduction of the law of gravitation from observation of the phenomena, elsewhere “Newton is quite explicit himself that metaphysical hypotheses are involved and required” in his science. “Could it even be that Newton here knowingly practiced something like a confidence trick?” Was he an ‘politic’ writer, after all, a practitioner of exoteric writing, including the art of deliberate self-contradiction, at the service of an esoteric teaching? Is Newton’s natural science more Socratic than it seems?

As Maxwell remarks, in subsequent editions of the Principia he replaced his rules of reason with “nine propositions, all baldly entitled hypotheses.” “Newton had powerful motives for attempting to convince his readers that his law had been derived solely from the phenomena,” at least in the first edition of his book, being “fully aware of the fact that his law of gravitation, apparently postulating the existence of a force operating across empty space, without any agency to convey it, would be found by some to be thoroughly objectionable”—some and perhaps most, being theologians committed to the notion of divine providence, others being natural scientists committed to atomist-empiricist induction. “Newton hated controversy,” and “may have hoped that his claim” in the first edition “to have derived his law solely from the phenomena would mean that the law [of gravitation] would not become a matter of controversy.” At the same time, Newton also rejected the metaphysics of the new science, that “the universe has a harmonious mathematical structure, and that all natural phenomena are the outcome of particles interacting in accordance with precise physical law.” Newton professed to affirm the theologians’ well-known ‘argument from design,’ that (as he put it) “this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Maxwell quotes a letter Newton wrote in 1692, saying, “When I wrote my treatise about our [solar] system, I had an eye on such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.” In sum, Newton engaged in “a conscious cover-up,” first seeming to accept the Baconian, empiricist-experimentalist understanding of science as “derived by induction from the phenomena, solely from evidence,” and then following this revision of modern science with a revision of Christian theology whereby certain natural phenomena really are thoroughly natural—not providential in any immediate sense but nonetheless derived from the deity’s initial rational act of creation. 

This might have led to a debate over what Newton’s real method was. What actually happened was a debate in which Newton’s putative empiricist inductivism was ranged against the ‘rationalism’ of Descartes, a contrast (one might add) that eventually broadened into the familiar claim that the English are empirical, practical, soberly down-to-earth, and that the French are abstract, theoretical, and dangerously utopian. “No one thought to distinguish Newton’s physics from his [self-advertised] methodology.” Instead of comparing and contrasting Newton with Kepler and Galileo, contemporaries focused on “the great battle” between Newton and Descartes. As is well known, Descartes answered the question of skepticism by the method of skepticism itself, by doubting “everything it was possible to doubt,” including both his own senses and his reason. “But he could not doubt that he was doubting, or, in other words, thinking”; ergo, “I think, therefore I am.” “Having established beyond doubt that his conscious mind exists,” Descartes went on to claim that because he can “entertain the idea of a Being more perfect than himself,” such a Being “must exist, since, if He did not, He would lack perfection.” This second claim, the dubiousness of which Maxwell hints at, contrasts noticeably with Newton’s argument from design, which is perhaps no more demonstrable but rather more plausible. In any event, Descartes then argued that because such certain and distinct ideas as “I think, therefore I am” form the basis of knowledge, this royal road to knowledge leads us to acknowledging the clear and distinct science of geometry as the master science. In turn, the empirical phenomena may, must, be understood geometrically, insofar as we can attain any certain knowledge of them. This in turn led to him to claim that nature consists of atoms—invisible, intangible “corpuscles”—which are “whirling about in space in vortices,” that is, in geometrically measurable patterns. Descartes puts natural-science atomism firmly under the rule of geometric patterns In his own exercise of doubt, Maxwell observes that “the difficult and profound mathematical structure of modern theoretical physics hardly seems to bear out” the reduction of physical laws to clear and distinct ideas. However, whereas the Cartesians’ insistence that any empirical success in scientific discovery which contradicts “the Cartesian idea that natural phenomena are the outcome of the motion and impact of extended particles” must be invalid partakes of dogmatism, they “were absolutely correct to demand that physical theories must comply with metaphysical principles (in addition to empirical considerations) in order to be acceptable.” That their metaphysics was false is no objection to metaphysics itself.

Nonetheless, the French Enlightenment did just that. Voltaire, for example, in his Lettres Philosophiques sided with ‘England,’ “praised Bacon, Locke, and Newton at the expense of Descartes,” promptly earning himself condemnation by the French Catholic Church and what would have been a prison term in the Bastille, had he not exiled himself. “Voltaire cast Bacon as the founding father of English empiricism, and even claimed he had anticipated Newton’s law of gravitation.” The Church knew a competing set of saints when it saw one. “With the defeat of Descartes and the triumph of Newton, and Newtonian empiricism, in France around 1750, modern science was well on its triumphant way,” beginning to act independently of philosophy, even if its practitioners refrained from declaring that independence, still calling their task “natural philosophy.” Metaphysics was scrupulously ruled out of rationalism, “empiricism dominated subsequent scientific developments, and authentic natural philosophy became all but invisible.”    

But Einstein brought on his revolution in modern physics not by following the method of experimentation but with mathematics. His discovery that space-time itself is curved by matter, and matter by space-time, shows that there is no force of gravity at all, but rather a set of necessary pathways along which matter travels—at the same time without necessarily colliding, as in modern atomism. Quantum theory took this even further, proposing that particles of matter “exhibit wave-like features, and wave-like entities such as light exhibit particle-like features too.” Quantum theory replaces the Newtonian and Einsteinian deterministic theories with probabilistic ones. 

Well and good, empiricists will reply, but how can you seriously question the spectacular real-world success of the experimental method in science? And how do you explain the failure of philosophy, or what is left of it, to make any noticeable progress at all? The Apostle Paul’s mockery of philosophers as men who are ever seeking but never finding finds its parallel in the critique of philosophy by defenders of modern science. The endless and often trivial wrangles that characterize ‘analytic philosophy,’ dominant in many Anglo-American philosophy ‘departments’ to this day, seems to confirm that critique. [3].

In a sentence that may surprise and delight contemporary defenders of political philosophy, Maxwell contends (in language almost identical to that of Leo Strauss) that “the proper task of philosophy is to keep alive awareness, in the public domain, of our most fundamental problems, our fundamental problems of knowledge and understanding, and our fundamental problems of living, personal, social and global—especially those that are most important and urgent.” To this, Strauss would replace “global” with “political,” and remark that a philosopher will seek criteria by which to define the important and the urgent. He would nonetheless surely endorse Maxwell’s claim that “philosophy has the task of keeping alive awareness of the important role that fundamental problems, and our attempts at solving them, have in all aspects of life and thought.” Strauss doubts that philosophy should “encourage everyone to become philosophers,” but he would undoubtedly concur with Maxwell in maintaining that philosophy “does not have its own particular intellectual territory, its unique field of expertise.” Philosophy orients itself by “the fundamental problem of all of thought and life”: “How can our human world, and the world of sentient life more generally, imbued with perceptual qualities, consciousness, free will, meaning, and value exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?” From this question flows other “slightly less fundamental problems, ranging from “the fundamental nature of the physical universe,” to the connection (if any) between free will and physical determinism, and to questions concerning justice, friendship, and love. In a paraphrase of Weber’s lament about specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, Maxwell writes, “relentless, unmitigated specialization has produced a situation such that our fundamental problem is scarcely considered at all in the university,” or in education and research generally.

It was David Hume, Maxwell sees, who called attention to the unclothed condition of the emperor, Induction. According to the doctrine of “standard empiricism,” evidence “decides what theories are accepted and rejected in science”; “in science, no factual thesis about the world, or about the phenomena, can be accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independently of empirical considerations” as established by careful observation and experimentation. Hume argued that “for all we know, the course of nature may suddenly change, so as to falsify any or all” existing scientific theories, however well established they may be. “It is not evidence that rules out” any alternative theory “but some kind of underlying assumption of uniformity or unity.” That underlying assumption amounts to “some kind of assumption about the nature of the universe”—what Karl Popper would call a “conjecture,” “no more than a guess about that of which we are most ignorant, the ultimate nature of the universe.” “Rationality requires that assumptions that are influential, problematic, and implicit be made explicit so that they can be subjected to imaginative and critical scrutiny, in an attempt to improve them.” Like Socrates, scientists need to be brought to the knowledge that they do not know. But this means that they need to become more like philosophers, less like ‘knowers,’ that is, ‘scientists.’

The grand assumption of science, and of philosophy generally, is what Maxwell calls “physicalism,” which he may mean literally as “naturalism” (‘physis-ism), as distinguished from ‘spiritualism’ or the belief that “spirits, demons, gods, or God govern the way natural phenomena occur.” Given the latter assumption, it’s “quite rational to adopt such methods as prayer, sacrifice, consultation of prophets, oracles, omens and dreams.” Absent that assumption, one will prefer to deploy mathematics, experimentation, and thinking generally governed by reason, by thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. This means that “metaphysics determines methodology.” Choosing the wrong metaphysics will likely result in ineffectual methods of attempting to produce desired results. Witch doctors typically enjoy less discernible success than medical doctors, even if good results sometimes follow from incantations, bad from prescriptions. This fact doesn’t necessarily faze us, as “humanity has found it extraordinarily difficult to accept that mere impersonal regularities govern natural phenomena.” Hence Babylonians “failed to develop astronomy” even as they took “very precise astronomical measurements,” and China “made a wealth of technological discoveries” without developing science. Both of these regimes were quite ’empirical,’ but in both cases, “the one element missing was the vital metaphysical view of physicalism,” the concept of nature.

Given this “big, persistent, metaphysical assumption,” the next questions are: “What ought this metaphysical thesis concerning the unity of nature to be? How can we best go about improving it?” Maxwell proposes “aim-oriented empiricism” as the way to reestablish natural philosophy. Aim-oriented empiricism consists of a hierarchy of seven assumptions. They are:

1. That the universe is partially knowable. “If this assumption is false, we will not be able to acquire knowledge whatever we assume.” Just because, as Aristotle says, man wants to know doesn’t mean he can. Nonetheless, to say we know that we do not know is itself knowledge, and would mean that the assumption must be true. If instead we say we don’t even know that, then we are claiming to know that we don’t know that we don’t know—the regression is infinite.
2. That the universe is meta-knowable. By this Maxwell means that “there is some rationally discoverable thesis about the nature of the universe which, if true and if accepted, makes it possible progressively to improve methods for the improvement of knowledge.” By “rationally discoverable” he means that the thesis “is not an arbitrary choice from infinitely many analogous theses.” “Not only can we acquire knowledge; we can acquire knowledge about how to acquire knowledge.” 
3. That the universe is comprehensible. This means “that the universe is such that there is something (God, tribe of gods, cosmic goal, physical entity, cosmic program, or whatever), which exists everywhere in an unchanging form and which, in some sense, determines or is responsible for everything that changes (all change and diversity in the world in principle being explicable and understandable in terms of the underlying unchanging something).” Maxwell additionally claims that this “something” is “present throughout all phenomena,” although that may imply an additional assumption of ‘pantheism,’ the denial of a Creator-God, separate from His creation.
4. That the universe is physically comprehensible. That is, “the universe is made up [of] one unified self-interacting physical entity (or one kind of entity), all change and diversity being in principle explicable in terms of this entity.” This means “that the universe is such that some yet-to-be-discovered unified physical theory of everything is true.” “Physicalism” is the name Maxwell gives to this thesis.
5. The best current specific version of physicalism. Maxwell’s term for this is “the blueprint,” and, like all blueprints, it is subject to alteration or to rejection and replacement.
6. Accepted fundamental physical theories. Currently, they are general relativity and quantum mechanics.
7. Empirical data.

Far, then, from being the most certain of all, empirical data are the most subject to change, whereas the thesis that the universe is partially knowable could only be revised if we obtained a sort of God-like knowledge, albeit quite likely without God-like power, and could therefore assert, ‘The universe is not only partially but entirely knowable, and we know this because we have attained thorough knowledge of it.’ As it is, however, every one of these categories is open to revision, revisions being increasingly more difficult as one goes up the scale.

Maxwell considers aim-oriented empiricism to provide physics “with a meta-methodology which facilitates improvement of the metaphysical assumptions and associate methods as physics advances…. As knowledge in physics improves, so metaphysical assumptions and methods improve as well, or, in other words, knowledge about how to improve knowledge improves.” An example of this might be the discovery of an impasse, an aporia, as seen in Socratic dialogues. Consideration of such a logical impasse, or an empirical impasse, can lead to improved understanding of what the problem is, and eventually to a possible rational resolution of it. 

Maxwell takes his example from physics, as befits his natural-philosophy approach. “Einstein first discovered general relativity in the form of a metaphysical idea: gravitation is the variable curvature of space-time induced by matter and energy. He then had to work hard to turn this into a precise, testable physical theory.” With Newton, however, “not only did the then-current metaphysical ideas not lead to the new theory—they actually obstructed the correct interpretation of the new theory once it had been formulated.” The “standard empiricism” of Bacon, which Newton initially claimed as his own, “is refuted by its abject failure to solve the problem of induction,” as standard empiricism can’t even explain “the way theories are selected in physics.” “In physics only unified theories are ever accepted, with endlessly many empirically more successful disunified theories invariably being ignored: this means physics makes the big, implicit assumption that the universe is such that all disunified theories are false.” An assumption Newton shared with all physicists—this being an ’empirical fact’ about physicists, so to speak. Aim-oriented empiricism, by contrast, “faces no such contradiction” because “it openly acknowledges that persistent preference for unified theories in physics means that physics accepts a highly problematic metaphysical conjecture concerning the underlying unity of the universe,” part of the “hierarchy of conjectures” Maxwell has itemized. “What is really decisive is that aim-oriented empiricism succeeds in solving the problem of induction,” a problem fatal to the standard empiricism that denies the empirical reality of what physicists actually do. “Far better to adopt the view that physics does accept a substantial metaphysical thesis about the nature of the universe, even if this thesis is a pure conjecture.” “The key argument for authentic natural philosophy” is the need to acknowledge that this assumption, that there is an underlying unity of the universe, “may be critically assessed, developed and, we may hope, improved.” Aim-oriented empiricism enables natural philosophers to discover their self-deceptions “because it requires us to explore the widest range of possible metaphysical conjectures, and associated methods, at different levels” of Maxwell’s ‘assumptions’ hierarchy. 

There are two grounds for accepting such meta-knowability. First, throughout “the human endeavor to improve knowledge” there has been “a positive feedback between metaphysical conjectures and associated methods, on the one hand, and the growth of empirical scientific knowledge.” Otherwise, “we would still be stuck with Aristotelian science, or even the practices of witch doctors and shamans.” Inquiry into nature “becomes more rigorous intellectually if implicit assumptions are acknowledged explicitly,” whether or not such rigor results in empirical successes. Second, “as a result of accepting meta-knowability, our pursuit of knowledge may have much to gain and little to lose” because in that acceptance “we decide, in effect, that it is worthwhile to try to improve knowledge about how to improve knowledge.” Is it possible “that in the future intrinsically unpredictable changes in the laws of nature may occur which render our current knowledge obsolete”? Yes, but one gains nothing from “foregoing the attempt to acquire knowledge” for that reason.

“Hume famously argued that what exists at one moment cannot necessarily determine what exists at the next moment”—the application of the critique of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to the idea of physical causation. But the argument does not show that such necessary causation is impossible. The assumption of such causation is less absurd than its denial, given the observable regularities we find in the sequence of events. “Meta-knowability implies that, if we have no experience of them,” apparently causeless events “do not occur.” This is the empirical part of aim-oriented empiricism. The “aim-oriented” part of it acknowledges the act that “even our most modest items of common sense knowledge” imply major metaphysical and physical assumptions—that, for example, some undetected cosmic fire will not engulf me before I finish writing this sentence, an event that might make my effort to do so vain indeed. “Practical certainty has this usually unacknowledged conjectural and cosmological dimension inherent in it.” “If the success of science is illusory in a way we could not in principle discover, then this is a possibility we face whatever we assume; it is not something we can do anything about, and deserves to be ignored. If, on the other hand, the success of science is illusory in a way which can in principle be discovered, then aim-oriented empirical science provides us with the best means of unmasking the illusion. Either way, physicalism deserves to be accepted even in practical contexts.”

What, then, of the most practical “context” of all, ethics? Our “most fundamental problem of all” is the question, “How can our human world, and the world of sentient life more generally, imbued with perceptual qualities, consciousness, free will, meaning, and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?” Descartes “quite clearly attempts to solve this problem” of the apparent contradiction between the human world and the physical universe by embracing it—by positing a dualism of morality and nature founded upon the distinction between the mind understood as wholly immaterial and nature as wholly material; the mind imposes its forms upon inchoate matter. But if so, how can the immaterial mind and the physical brain interact? “Given Cartesian dualism, there can only be free will if physical laws are violated in the brain,” but how can this be so? Worse, how can the clear and distinct ideas we conceive in our minds tell us anything about “the universe around us”? “How can experience deliver knowledge about the real world around us” to a mind that has no physical nature? From Locke to Berkeley to Hume to Kant to the analytic philosophers, the dilemma has persisted. The ‘analytics’ finally dismissed the problem as meaningless.

But no one really thinks that it is. To solve it in terms of aim-oriented empiricism, Maxwell has recourse to a form of historicism. Being an empiricist, he cannot adopt the ‘idealist’ version of historicism propounded by Hegel. He instead invokes Darwin’s evolutionism, which “helps explain how and why purposeful living things can evolve—have evolved—in a physicalist universe.” Maxwell corrects Darwin’s Darwinism (or perhaps simply emphasizes the teaching of The Descent of Man, in which Darwin himself extends the claims of The Origin of Species) by saying that “the mechanisms of evolution themselves evolve as life evolves, purposive action playing an increasingly important role, especially when evolution by cultural means comes into play as a result of learning and imitation.” In this way “Darwinian evolution merges seamlessly with human history.” The mind-nature dualism of Descartes troubles itself with the false assumption “that physics could be in principle comprehensive and complete about the world around us,” whereas in fact physics “seeks to depict only a highly selected aspect of all that there is—the causally efficacious aspect, as it might be called, which determines how events unfold.” That is, theoretical physics “seeks to depict that which everything has in common with everything else.” That “does not mean that a complete physics would tell us everything factual about the world around us”—i.e., “what things look like, sound like feel like, or what it is like to be a certain kind of physical system (such as a living person.” A person blind from birth doesn’t know what redness is, but is not “debarred thereby from understanding all physics, including optics and the theory of color perception.” Physics “must omit these experiential qualities,” as to attempt to do so “would destroy the unity and explanatory power of physical theory.” Maxwell traces this distinction between the physical and the experiential to Spinoza, and then to Darwin, whose theory of evolution tells us what common sense also tells us, that “animals which could not see aspects of their environments, but only the contents of their own minds, would not last long in the real world.” The philosophers who follow Descartes “made a bad mistake” by supposing that “we really, most directly see, not aspects of the things in the environment around us, but rather the contents of our minds.” This subjectivist “blunder, perhaps more than any other, has condemned so much philosophy to irrelevance, and triviality.” This “initial blunder” severed philosophy from science. But “the insoluble consciousness/brain problem is created by the failure to formulate it properly in the first place.” This has led to what amounts to a political problem, the problem of the regime of modern academia, which restricts inquiry “to specialized research…ill-equipped to help humanity resolve problems of the real world.” Thus “humanity suffers from the failings of modern philosophy—failings most philosophers, even today, seem entirely unaware of.”

Modern philosophy makes a mistake in abandoning modern science to scientists. But does modern science really need philosophy? Maxwell argues that it does because aimed-oriented empiricism can improve science in ways the standard empiricism scientists typically adopt cannot. Among other benefits, aim-oriented empiricism can tell scientists what the greatest scientists (Isaac Newton, James Clark Maxwell, Albert Einstein) actually did, which was not ’empirical’ as that term has come to be defined by modern scientists. As the term implies, aim-oriented empiricism raises the question of what modern science is for. Following Machiavelli, Bacon assigned science the task of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate. But is that what science should be for? And is the answer to that question outside the realm of science. It is, but only if science is conceived as sundered from questions of ethics and politics, only if science is ‘value-free.’ But is it? 

Maxwell isn’t out to return to pre-modern science. “If Aristotle’s view of the cosmos had led to a much more empirically successful research program for physics than Galileo’s Aristotle’s vision would be today accepted…instead of physicalism” in the modern sense. Modern physicalism is “empirically fruitful.” What does it mean to say that? “A metaphysical thesis, B, is empirically fruitful if a series of theories, T(1), T(2), [etc.], each more empirically successful than its predecessor, can be regarded as drawing every closer to capturing B in the form of a testable theory,” that is, if the series of theories can be unified. “The demand that a theory must be unified to be acceptable is thus a quasi-empirical demand. It commits physics to accepting the hierarchy of theses” outlined in Maxwell’s seven-level list, “all of which could be false, and could, in increasingly extreme circumstances, require revision.” Standard empiricism, strictly applied, can’t establish such hierarchical differentiation. Aim-oriented empiricism can. 

Maxwell illustrates this point by arguing that Newtonian physics might have been led to Einsteinian physics more rapidly, had it been undertaken in the spirit of aim-oriented empiricism. That form of empiricism would also have quickly suggested that “the apparent contradiction between ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ in quantum theory must be addressed by “develop[ing] a version of quantum theory which specifies precisely what electrons, atoms, molecules may be when not undergoing observation.” In both of these cases he suggests ways in which scientists might have proceeded, both of which involve the thesis that “nature might be fundamentally probabilistic,” not deterministic in the strict way in which determinism is typically conceived. His point is not to prove such a hypothesis (he readily concedes that he isn’t a physicist or a mathematician) but that such matters “cannot really be discussed within standard-empiricism physics” at all. “The correct interpretation of Newtonian theory, Maxwellian electrodynamics, and quantum theory have all been delayed, for several decades, because persistent attempts have been made to interpret these theories in terms of outdated metaphysics.” 

Consider, he suggests, cosmology, and think of a pivotal event in ancient natural philosophy. “Parmenides held that the universe is an unchanging homogeneous sphere” in which “all change and diversity is…an illusion” because change and diversity involve contradiction. Democritus rejoined that change and diversity do exist, but so does nothingness. The cosmos consists of atoms in motion, each surrounded by nothing, their collisions and combinations accounting for change and diversity. “Physicalism as I have formulated it” in its modern sense “emerges from Democritus’ reply to Parmenides.” But what if we “declare that Parmenides’ homogeneous sphere is a state of the entire universe, exhibiting unity, at a very special time, namely the moment at or just before the big bang,” that “state of extreme unity” that preceded the atomistic world (considerably revised from that of Democritus) that we now accept? The ‘big bang’ was then “an instant of spontaneous symmetry-breaking: the outcome is a multitude of virtual prior-to-big-bang states, virtual Parmenidean spheres, as it were,” from then on “unfolding” by means “of the interactions between these multitudinous virtual prior-to-the big-bang entities.” The cosmos “is composed of billions upon billions of fleeting virtual big-bang cosmic states of supreme Parmenidean unity.” Whereas Democritean atomism posits a dualism of empty space in contrast with solid, un-splittable atoms, “cosmic atomism” holds that being and nothingness inhere in everything, that change and diversity inhere “throughout all phenomena,” determine, perhaps probabilistically, the evolution of all phenomena. Maxwell does not claim that this conjecture is true, but rather that it is an atomism more consistent with Einsteinian physics, which posits space as curvilinear, and therefore not empty or shapeless. And he adds that standard empiricism rules out such conjecture, to the disadvantage of physics theorizing.

More generally, “there is no agreed, acceptable, unproblematic metaphysical blueprint for physics today.” Contemporary physics confronts “four fundamental problems”: 1) Is nature deterministic or probabilistic? 2) How “is justice to be done to the quantum domain without any appeal being made to measurement? 3) How are general relativity and quantum theory to be unified? 4) How, and to what extent, is matter-and-force on the one hand, and space-time on the other, to be unified? Maxwell contends that metaphysics will form the prelude to new physical theories that address these problems, as indeed metaphysics did in the thought of Newton and of Einstein, whether they admitted it or not.

What about the natural sciences—chemistry and biology, among others? Each division of natural science “needs to articulate and implement its own version of aim-oriented empiricism.” Not only will this acknowledge that scientific methods will vary from one division to another, and not only will this acknowledge that the aims of each division will differ somewhat from the aims of the others, but, “and most important,” aim-oriented empiricism “facilitates positive feedback between improving scientific knowledge and improving aims and methods (improving knowledge about how to improve knowledge” because aim-oriented empiricism is hierarchical, thereby enabling the scientist to ‘classify’ each step of his thinking in a coherent order.. “This positive feedback feature is, in my view, the nub of scientific rationality.” 

Take, for example, scientific aims. Standard empiricism cannot say what scientific aims should be. Yet, ’empirically’ or as a matter of fact “all branches of natural science seek truth that is of value, either intrinsically or intellectually because of its inherent interest to us, or in a amore utilitarian way in that it can be used to obtain other things of value—health, prosperity, travel, entertainment, that is, the whole technological panoply of the modern world.” “We want science to discover that which is significant or of value”; “values, of one kind or another…pervade all of science.” Maxwell cautions that this doesn’t mean that “considerations of value can be permitted to influence judgments of truth”; “that it would be desirable or of value for something to be true does not, in itself, make it more likely to be true,” and we are better off not with wishful thinking but with skeptical thinking, with rigorous testing of happy-sounding claims of truth. We need to know what we don’t know, but we also need to know what we need to know, while never confusing what we suppose we know about what we need to know to be genuine knowledge. “Standard empiricism prohibits all this, in demanding that metaphysical ideas, and ideas about what is of value, are excluded from the intellectual domain of science.” If modern science “cannot determine what is just, or good” then it is intrinsically aimless, unable to distinguish trivial knowledge from important knowledge and therefore unknowing. This is why “we need to see science, ultimately, as a part of , or as contributing to, philosophy, rather than see philosophy as something that needs to be excluded from science.”

How can modern natural science be better integrated into philosophy overall? Here is where Aristotle’s idea of teleology re-enters, although Maxwell is too shy to say it that way. “All living things are purposive in character”; they pursue goals. “Darwinian theory tells us what the basic goal of living things is: to survive and reproduce. All other goals pursued by living things contribute to this basic goal.” This doesn’t mean that evolution itself is purposive; Darwin regarded it as determined by “random inherited variations and natural selection,” factors “devoid of purpose.” Nor does this mean that all living things are conscious in pursuing survival and reproduction, that a living thing “knows what it is doing.” It only means that that’s what they do. Now, (and again unacknowledged by Maxwell), Aristotle would regard such a claim as too narrow. Living things do not necessarily act as if they ‘treat’ goals other than survival and reproduction as subservient to (as he puts it) mere life. They rather act, consciously or not, to fulfill their own nature, to flourish in accordance with their nature. Maxwell might or might not admit this, but he would quite likely say, ‘That is why the natural sciences need aim-oriented empiricism—precisely to enable such an Aristotelian considerations to be entertained.’

Among those organisms that are conscious, observers notice “an enriched form of purposive explanation, which I shall call personalistic explanation,” explanations “enriched by imaginative identification with the person, or being, whose actions are being explained and understood.” Conscious beings are capable of “evolution by cultural means,” by “something like Lamarckian evolution,” whereby behavior becomes inherited, and habitual, inherited traits might eventuate in physical changes via ‘cultural’ selection. “Darwinian theory must itself make use of both kinds of explanation, physical and purposive—or, when sentient and conscious beings are involved, physical and personalistic.” This, Maxwell argues, might “help us understand how purposive, and personalistic, life has come to be in an ultimately purposeless universe.” Purposiveness evidently enhances evolution, in that sexual selection (“typically [by] females”) has the effect of enhancing “certain characteristic features” in a given species; Maxwell gives as his example the peacocks’ “splendid tails,” which have become more splendid over time because peahens have preferred peacocks that are endowed with them. And in the most self-conscious and ‘cultural’ being, the human being, language has developed, endowing human beings and human beings alone with “art, science, democracy, justice, elaborate technology, planned social progress, even wisdom.”

That doesn’t show how purposiveness originated, only that it was evolutionarily useful when it did. Maxwell can only go so far as to suggest that “we need a new version of Darwinism which interprets the theory to be about life, not genes, which recognizes that all life is purposive in character, and which holds that the mechanisms of evolution themselves evolve so as to incorporate purposiveness in increasingly substantial ways until something like Lamarckian evolution emerges with the arrival of evolution by cultural means.” 

The cultural means he has in mind primarily is education, which should be reoriented to encourage the “mammalian instinct” of “inquisitiveness.” Without it, “the fundamental impulse behind science has been lost.” To prevent this from continuing to happen in the schools, Maxwell recommends a “problem-oriented approach to scientific education” whereby teachers would set students to attempt to solve a “genuine, even unsolved scientific problem.” This would “cause curiosity to flourish and not die” in part by having students follow up on their “own questions—to transform feeling of stupidity and bafflement into articulated questions” and thus to bring them not only to science but to natural philosophy, to an awareness of the fundamental problems.

More generally, can aim-oriented empiricism be “exploited by the general human endeavor to make progress towards as good a world as possible,” in personal life as well as public life? In terms of public life, under aim-oriented empiricism “social science emerges, not primarily as a science devoted to improving knowledge about social phenomena, but rather as a social methodology or social philosophy, devoted to helping humanity learn from, and exploit, the methodological methods of natural science in order to make social progress towards as good a world as possible. We especially we need a revolution in academic inquiry so that the basic intellectual aim becomes to promote wisdom—wisdom being construed to be the capacity and active endeavor to realize (apprehend and create) what is of value to life, for oneself and others.” [4] In terms familiar to readers of Aristotle, this would entail sophia or theoretical wisdom—culminating in a glimpse of human nature—and phronēsis or practical wisdom, which aims at real-world actions that will induce that nature to flourish.

Modern science has decisively informed modern philosophy from Descartes onward; “natural science creates the problems philosophy seeks to solve,” the problems addressed by “political philosophy, moral philosophy, aesthetics.” Modern science “has major and very alarming implications for questions about what is of value,” seeming to show that “all of human life” amounts to nothing more than physics, that free will and consciousness are illusions. “Do arguments concerning rival political systems make sense if everything is governed by physical law?” Since “our moral, political, and artistic life takes place in the real world, and it is science that tells us what sort of world this is, what it tells us cannot just be ignored.” Does modern science tell us that “moral nihilism” or moral relativism is true? “Or can we make sense of the idea that value qualities exist in the real world—some people objectively possessing moral qualities such as friendliness or courage, some works of art being objectively beautiful, graceful, passionate, profound? Is our world imbued with value features, or does science prohibit the existence of such features altogether?” It is philosophy which must give aims to aim-oriented empiricism, since standard empiricism rules itself out of so doing. What modern science tells us will set limits to our practical sense of how to realize our aims, but it cannot tell us what they are. That is, instead of reading the morally, politically, and esthetically nihilistic implications of modern science into our aims, it is necessary to see that modern science by its character rules out teleology, and therefore in principle cannot tell us anything about aims. This is a limitation on modern science, not a limitation on philosophy, and philosophic nihilists merely register a category mistake. What is more, the modern “philosophy of science” “helps to undermine the very thing it seeks to understand” by preventing itself from addressing why science is good, in the first place. “Only when science and the philosophy of science join together in creating aim-oriented empiricist science—thus recreating natural philosophy—can we have a genuinely rigorous kind of science.”

For its part, the rational method of science will “help us improve problematic aims.” One’s “basic aims often are bad choices,” but if we consider our aims in the light of reason we will make fewer such choices. This means that “the whole character of philosophy needs to change” by “ceas[ing] to be a specialized discipline alongside other disciplines, obsessed with its own esoteric, specialized puzzles,” but rather “become again what it once was, that endeavor which seeks to keep alive awareness of our most urgent fundamental problems,” problems that concern “humanity as a whole and planet earth.” “Philosophy needs to become again what it was for Socrates: the attempt to devote reason to the growth of wisdom in life.” 

Maxwell therefore titles his final chapter “Implications of Natural Philosophy for the Problems of Citizenship.” These implications, he maintains, are “profound and revolutionary,” leading, “potentially, to a new kind of academic enterprise–wisdom-inquiry.” “Humanity faces two great problems of learning: learning about the nature of the universe and our place in it, and learning how to create as good, as wise, as civilized a world as possible.” The first task is a theoretical problem, the second a practical one. “We cracked the first problem in the seventeenth century” with the discovery of modern natural philosophy,” with its “method for progressively improving knowledge and understanding of the natural world”—the “famous empirical method” which Maxwell has attempted to rescue from those who have obscured or misunderstood it along the lines of standard empiricism. “As long as humanity’s power to act was limited, lack of wisdom, of enlightenment, did not matter too much: humanity lacked the means to inflict too much damage on itself or the planet,” but now that the method, so misconceived, has succeeded to the extent that human beings actually can conquer nature—if hardly all of it, enough of it to transform the planet earth and humanity itself— then “wisdom has become, not a personal luxury, but a global necessity.” Having solved the first “great problem of learning,” it has become crucial to solve the second. What is more, we can “learn from our solution to the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one,” to “apply these general, progress-achieving methods to social life—to the unending task of creating a better, wiser world.” Unending: although human beings aim at ends, there will be no ‘end of history.’ Sensibly enough, Maxwell concedes that “the aim of creating global civilization is inherently and profoundly problematic.”

Indeed so. Maxwell criticizes the Enlightenment for seeking to apply a “generalized scientific method, not to social life, but merely to social science.” It helped social scientists “improve knowledge of social phenomena” without “helping humanity learn how to become more civilized by rational means.” “This is the blunder that is at the root of our current failure to have solved the second great problem of learning.” By “civilized” Maxwell mean “a state of affairs in which there is an end to war, dictatorships, population growth, extreme inequalities of wealth, and the establishment of a democratic, liberal world government and a sustainable world industry and agriculture.” 

Well, that’s quite a mouthful, and some if it tastes like mush. Here is the problem with Maxwell’s solution to the problem. First, in addressing the problem of how to learn about the nature of the universe, “we” didn’t actually crack the problem. Natural philosophers did, and those natural philosophers lived in the West and nowhere else, indeed in certain countries in the West and not, initially, others. This suggests that Socrates was right: that political philosophy comes before natural philosophy in order of rank, in priority, if not in chronology. If the modern political-philosophic enterprise begins with Machiavelli, then reaches into natural science with Bacon, then ‘we’ in the twenty-first century are looking at a ‘global’ problem of the nations and their political regimes, not simply at a problem for ‘the planet’ or for ‘humanity,’ neither of which exist under one regime. Maxwell tacitly admits this in a “world government” with a particular regime, liberal democracy. Second, this means that the problem of “learning how to create as good, as wise, as civilized a world as possible” can only be addressed, let alone solved, at the level of nations and their political regimes. That is (for example) the problem of education cannot be severed from the problem of regimes as it manifests itself within each nation, but especially the most powerful nations, and as they defend and advance their regime interests and their regime principles in competition (sometimes violent competition) with one another. Why would the rulers of China, of Russia, or of Iran cooperate with the rulers of the United States? As a matter of fact, they don’t, as the cacophony of the ‘United Nations’ attests, to say nothing of cyber warfare, control of information flows, and other forms of conflict so obviously demonstrate. 

Maxwell sees this, in the end, at least to the extent that he writes, “Politics, which cannot be taught by knowledge-inquiry, becomes central to wisdom-inquiry, political creeds and actions being subjected to imaginative and critical scrutiny.” Indeed, “economics, politics, sociology, and so on, are not, fundamentally, sciences, and do not, fundamentally, have the task of improving knowledge about social phenomena.” They rather “articulate problems of living,” propose and assess policies, ranking those problems and policies into a hierarchy of aims. In this, they share with the humanities the task of “enhancing our ability to enter imaginatively into the problems and lives of others,” especially (one might add) when presented in the literary form of dialogue, as Socrates is portrayed to have done. 

What can these inquiries into politics learn from natural-science empiricism as Maxwell understands it? Several things. Although human civil societies can scarcely be subjected to the double-blind experimental method—for starters, controlling the variables is a dauntingly balky task—some “proposals for action can be shown to be unacceptable quite decisively as a result of experience acquired through attempting to put the proposal into action.” The attempt to act in accordance with the proposal sometimes wrecks the aim of the proposal, as for example the many attempts to impose civil-social equality by empowering a centralized state charged with enforcing it, a regime change which more or less universally succeeds in instituting a new ruling class, and the civil-social inequality that goes with that institution. Given the difficulties of rigorously-controlled social experimentation, aim-oriented empiricists will need to resort to thought experiments and to ‘comparative politics’ (whereby they consider the results of regime paths actually taken); the sloppiness inherent in such inquiries counsels the virtue of patience, especially inasmuch as “humanity does not have the aptitude or desire for wisdom that scientists have for knowledge,” as Maxwell drily remarks. 

What institutional reforms could be attempted? Maxwell ends by thinking about the regimes he knows best, those of the modern universities. “Every national university system needs to include a national shadow government, seeking to do virtually, free of the constraints of power, what the actual national government ought to be doing. The hope would be that virtual and actual governments would learn from each other.” This may strike one as a wan hope. At present, it is as likely that virtual and actual governments would corrupt each other, primarily because that is what they have been doing, lately. Modern university administrators are anything but “free from the constraints of power.” Almost all of them depend upon monetary support from governments, support that quite understandably comes not with strings but often with chain attached. Further, they have increasingly accepted constraints imposed by militant student groups, often egged on by faculty, to bend the educational purposes and methods of the universities in directions not suggested by aim-oriented empiricism. 

“The world’s universities need to include a virtual world government which seeks to do what an actual elected world government ought to do, if it existed,” “working out how an actual democratically elected world government might be created.” But why would this happen? Why would a consortium of the world’s universities instead replicate that other world-government experiment, the woebegone United Nations? More fundamentally, would a world government, even one (somehow) democratically elected, be a good thing for humanity to have? 

The good thing about “aim-oriented empiricism” is that it does allow the intellectual leg-room to walk into and around such a question, and many others. In this, Maxwell is a good Peripatetic. 

 

 

 

Notes

1. On the philosophic necessity of political philosophy, see Delba Winthrop: Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science (2019), reviewed on this site under the title, “What Good Is Democracy?” and Heinrich Meier: “Why is Political Philosophy?” in Meier: Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion (2019), discussed on this site under the title, “Chateaubriand and Political Philosophy.”
2. For a defense of Aristotelian physics in light of modern physics, see David Bolotin: An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to His Manner of Writing (1997), reviewed on this site under the title, “Aristotelian Physics.”
3. See Stephen Schwartz: A Brief History of Analytical Philosophy (2012), reviewed on this website under the title, “What Is Analytic Philosophy?” For critiques of analytic philosophy, see Henry B. Veatch: Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (1969), reviewed on this site under the title, “Is Logic ‘About’ Anything?” and Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis (1980), reviewed on this site under the title, “Delimiting Philosophy.”
4. Maxwell elaborates this point in two books: From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (London: Pentire Press, 2007) and Science and Enlightenment: Two Great Problems of Learning (Cham: Springer, 2019).

 

 

 

 

 

 

François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand: Atala/René. Irving Putter translation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men. In Victor Gourevich, editor and translator: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

 

In the second Discourse, Rousseau sets his task: How to discover what “Man” is, “as Nature formed him,” before he had been “altered in the lap of society” (R124). In society, “all one still finds is the deformed contrast of passion that believes it reasons and the understanding that hallucinates” (R124). The self-obscuring of Man has occurred because “the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all,” self-knowledge (R124). Indeed, “in a sense it is by dint of studying man that we have made it impossible to know him” (R124), since study itself, resulting in the accumulation of knowledge, not only distracts us from attending to the core of human nature but contributes to the mass of conventions in which it is enmeshed. “It is no light undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature” (R125); to do so, experiments will be needed, experiments in which philosophers and sovereigns collaborate. Rousseau offers a thought-experiment to this project, a project that carries on the original philosophic attempts to distinguish nature from convention.

Why bother? Because the ideas of both natural right and natural law depend upon the nature of Man; that right and that law undergird conventional law, the law by which a sovereign might condemn a philosopher or exile a prince. An exile himself, Chateaubriand knows the stakes, and in his Essai Historique, Politique, et Moral, sur les Révolutions Anciennes et Modernes he follows Rousseau in questioning the moral value of civilization. 

Rousseau identifies two principles “prior to reason” in human souls: the instinct for well-being and self-preservation; and repugnance to human death or suffering, that is, “the force of natural pity” or compassion (R153), as distinguished, evidently from the conscience that receives the divine grace of caritas, of agape. Natural right derives from these two principles, “rules which reason is subsequently forced to reestablish on other foundations, when by successive developments it has succeeded in stifling nature” (R127). Man is not by nature political or even social, nor is he naturally rational; Aristotle is all wrong about that, as he is when he contends that man naturally desires to know. 

How could such a being fall into the state of civil society, with its artificial/conventional hierarchies? There are two types of inequality: natural or physical inequality, which includes qualities of Mind or Soul; and moral or political inequality, which “depends on a sort of convention” and rests on “men’s consent” (R131). In this, Rousseau obviously follows previous modern natural rights philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, but these philosophers, he contends, didn’t get to the core of the matter, as they “spoke of Savage Man and depicted Civil man” (R132). Rousseau’s inquiry will eschew empiricism and “the uncertain testimonies of history” (R142), offering instead “hypothetical and conditional reasonings better to elucidate the nature of things than to show their genuine origin” (R132). If, say, scientists could conclusively demonstrate the theory of Darwinian evolution with unquestionable empirical evidence, that would matter little if at all to Rousseau. Why not? Because his task is to identify the moral origin of inequality, not its physical origin. As he instructs himself and his reader, “You will look for the age at which you wish your Species had stopped” ‘evolving’ (R133). 

If human beings originally do not differ from other animals in their capacity to reason, how do they differ? They differ in their capacity to imitate other animals. Man has “the choice of fleeing or fighting” (R136). This flexibility or adaptability makes it easier for him to find his subsistence in nature. Original man is hardy, vigorous; what the ascetic laws of Lycurgus’ regime did for Spartans, nature’s ‘regime’ did for original man, who needs no tools, no inventions, to aid in his well-being and survival. Pace John Locke, the state of nature—and Rousseau regards it as the alternative to all political ‘states,’ a state with a regime of its own—is not a condition of scarcity. Nor is original man a fearful being, as per Hobbes, as he surpasses other animals in skill (skill learned from observing and imitating those animals) “more than they do him in strength” (R136). Living dispersed in nature, he has no fear of other men, either, as he seldom encounters them. Rousseau takes as his example the Caribs of Venezuela, secure in the forest.

Natural man never agonizes over death—or life, for that matter. No French or German ‘existentialism’ for him: “the immoderate transports of all the passions, the fatigues and exhaustion of the Mind, the innumerable sorrows and pains” that “constantly gnaw away at men’s souls” are ills “of our own making” within civil society, where we have consented to live packed together, envying, lusting, fighting, and thinking altogether too much (R137). “The man who meditates is a depraved animal” (R137). “As he becomes sociable and a Slave, he becomes weak, timorous, groveling,” in his “soft and effeminate way of life” (R138-39). Machiavelli accuses Christianity of effeminizing modern man, but Rousseau accuses civil society itself, of any kind. Civilization is savagery in the conventional sense of the term: not solitary or poor (except for the exploited lower classes), but nasty and short. Would that it were brutish! Would that men were still savage in the way they once were. His paradox, “the noble savage,” itself recalling Socrates’ paradox, the noble lie, finds its explanation there. Given Rousseau’s rejection of empiricism, the noble savage himself exemplifies a sort of noble lie—a lie if one defines truth exclusively in terms of ‘facticity,’ a truth if one does not. 

“Self-preservation being almost his only care,” original, natural, savage man’s “most developed faculties must be those that primarily serve in attack and defense” (R139-40). Those faculties are sight, hearing, and smell, not touch and taste, those senses most refined in civil society. Beyond these physical attributes, unlike other animals, natural man “contributes” to his machine-like natural “operations” as “a free agent” (R140). As long as he employs his freedom to choose between fleeing or fighting, hunting or gathering, and similar actions that contribute to his well-being and self-preservation he remains a good animal. But freedom also enables him to deprave his senses. Man has a moral as well as a physical nature, by which Rousseau means that in man, “the will continues to speak when nature is silent” (R140). Other animals have ‘ideas’ in the Lockean sense of sense-impressions, and can even combine those ideas, but in man not only has freedom but is conscious of his freedom. “It is mainly in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul exhibits itself,” a spirituality not explicable by “the laws of Mechanics” (R141). 

With this self-conscious freedom, man has “the faculty of perfecting oneself,” a faculty “distinctive” to his species and “almost unlimited” (R141). Here is “the source of all of man’s miseries,” as the self-perfecting faculty “eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant” (R141). The Machiavellian attempt to conquer Fortuna, the closely related Baconian attempt to conquer Nature, seen in those philosophers who take man’s emergence from the state of Nature as a human triumph to be extended and completed, leads instead to Man’s self-denaturing in a very bad sense, his misery in civil society. Had he lived to see them, Rousseau would have looked upon the invention of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility of human extinction by ‘environmental’ cataclysm as inevitable results of civil society, itself the result of man’s free, but wrong, choices.

We civilized men only seek to know because we want. The more we know, the more we want. The desires of Savage man, by contrast, “do not exceed his physical needs” for food, a female, and rest; his aversions do not go beyond pain and hunger (R142). This being so, “Who fails to see that everything seems to remove from Savage man the temptation as well as the means to cease from being savage?” (R142-43). There are five reasons for this. “His imagination depicts nothing to him; his heart asks nothing of him,” as he has “neither foresight nor curiosity,” never wondering, centering himself in “the sole sentiment of present existence” (R143). He has no need to work and does no sustained work; agriculture (for example) can occur only when the human population has increased, families formed, and settlement instead of natural roaming becomes attractive, attractive because necessary. Savage man engages in no sustained thinking, having no language, only signaling cries; this is Rousseau’s answer to the Biblical claim that the First Man spoke with God. Savage man of course mated, but otherwise led a solitary existence, not forming families. Finally, Savage man experienced no misery, as he was a free being in mind, peaceful at heart, and healthy in body. Civil society has produced exactly the opposite effect. “Almost all the People we see around us complain of their existence and some even deprive themselves of it as far as they are able, and the combination of divine and human Laws hardly suffices to stop this disorder: I ask whether anyone has ever heard tell that it has so much occurred to a Savage, who is free, to complain of life and to kill himself?” (R158).

“Nothing, on the contrary, would have been as miserable as Savage man dazzled by the enlightenment, tormented by Passions, and reasoning about a state different from his own” (R150). In Atala, Chateaubriand will present Chactas, a noble savage who experiences exactly this dazzlement and torment. But for the Savage still in the state of nature, still ruled by nature’s regime, “in instinct alone he had all he needed to live”; today, “in cultivated reason he has no more than what he needs to live in society” (R150). In neither the natural nor the civil state, Rousseau silently suggests, does man need divine revelation. Rousseau does assent to a teaching of the Book of Genesis, that Man’s original condition was a condition of innocence. “Savages are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good” (R151). But this has nothing to do with obedience to God’s command, expressed in words incomprehensible to a being without language. Rather, it is the calm of the passions and the ignorance of vice that “keep them from evil-doing” (R152). Morally, Savage man recognizes his fellow humans as akin to himself and pities them, “a sentiment that is obscure and lively in Savage man, developed but weak in Civil Man,” the being in which reason, initially supported by natural pity, “turns man back upon himself,” causing him to separate himself from “everything that troubles and afflicts him” (R153). Reason isolates men after human beings in their natural freedom choose the civil state over the natural one, choosing ‘society,’ by giving Man the prudence he needs to protect himself when others are in peril from the very conditions civil society entraps them, and him, in. Natural pity says, “Do your good with the least possible harm to others”; unnatural reason says, “Do unto others as you have them do unto you”; natural pity is the “less perfect but perhaps more useful standard” (R154). Rousseau thus suggests that Jesus’ Golden Rule, presented as divine revelation, really amounts to an abstract and therefore practically unattainable command proposed by the reason which has its origin in natural pity but subverts and revolutionizes the regime of the state of nature in which the sentiment of pity is both right and attainable. 

Of the passions Savage man experiences, sexual passion is the most dangerous, as even in his condition of isolation his natural desire for a female might lead to a fight with some competitor. At the same time, this passion is obviously the one most necessary for species preservation and, although the individual Savage man scarcely conceives of species preservation the human species would not have survived without the passion that has neither justification nor prohibition in the mind of the beings that experience it. Savage man experiences sexual passion as a purely physical love; insofar as it is, this passion is natural and good. Civilized man, however, in the grips of unnatural imagination, experiences “moral” love—in fact unnatural and bad—an instrument whereby women “establish their rule” over men, “mak[ing] dominant the sex that should obey” (R155). Once again, Rousseau points to the Caribs, “the most peaceful in their loves and the least given to jealousy” (R156).

What about the “savages” Chateaubriand will present in the Atala and the René? In his first Discourse, the Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau observes that the savages of the Americas are “impossible to tame.” “What yoke could be imposed upon men who need nothing?” (R7n.). They are peoples of “simple and natural polity,” rightly admired by Montaigne (R11). Consistent with his portrayal of Man in the state of nature, Rousseau writes, in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, that “the Savages of America almost never speak except when away from home; in his hut everyone remains silent and speaks to his family by means of signs, and these signs are infrequent because a Savage is less restless, less impatient than a European, because he has not as many needs and takes care to attend to them himself” (267n.). Savage man’s roaming issues not from restlessness but from ease, from freedom from the self-exaggerated passions of man in the civil state. In his Essay, Chateaubriand had already diverged from Rousseau, locating restlessness in the natural condition of the human heart. He does not need to ask himself how free, untroubled Savage man chose civil society. Rousseau explains this by citing natural disasters and natural population growth as altering the natural state in such a way as to tempt Savage man to make choices that seem correct to him at the time he makes them, but concatenate into civil societies and their attendant miseries. 

Slightly over a year after Chateaubriand published his Essai, he experienced a religious conversion described in his Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe. His brother and sister-in-law had been killed by the Jacobins, a few years before he wrote the Essai. But after his mother died in 1798, followed by a sister, Julie-Marie, in 1799, “I wept and I believed.” The exact character of his conversion has remained a matter of speculation—following as it did from his understanding of religion as a matter of moral sentiment—but it is undeniable that his subsequent writings bear ‘a Christian mark.’ Published propitiously in 1801, the beginning of a new century, his novella Atala was seen immediately as a sign of a literary conversion as well, inspiring a turning of the French intellectual class away from France’s Enlightenment rationalism and toward what would be called Romanticism, a movement often considered to have been inaugurated in European literature by the publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774. Atala made Chateaubriand an intellectual celebrity; he followed it a year later with the equally influential René. He rightly brought out them out in one volume in 1805, emphasizing their complementarity. 

He presents Atala as a story told by a Natchez Indian to a young European, René, then re-told by “the Indians” to himself, “a traveler in far-distant lands” (76). In the Epilogue the narrator identifies the elements of the story: “a portrayal of the people of the hunt and the people of the plow”—Indians living their traditional way of life and Indians living the European way of life, respectively; a portrayal of “religion, the supreme lawgiver to men”; of “the perils of religious ignorance and all consuming fervor set against the light, the charity, and the true spirit of the Gospel”; of “the struggles of passion and virtue in an innocent soul,” the soul of Atala, a Muskogee princess; and of “the triumph of Christianity over the most ardent feeling and the most terrible fear—love and death,” the triumph of agape over eros and Thanatos (76).

Having learned from Rousseau that the state of nature has a regime, the narrator begins by recalling France’s state and France’s regime, its “vast empire in North America” “in days gone by” (17). Louis XIV ruled, somewhat nominally, a portion of an even vaster continent, dwelled in but not yet truly ruled by men. The central feature of North America’s natural regime was the Meschacebe River (pronounced as ‘Mississippi’ by the French), flowing through the center of the center of the continent, “which the inhabitants of the United States call New Eden, while the French have bequeathed to it the gentle name of Louisiana” (17). The Meschacebe is central not only to the land but to the waters of North America: “A thousand other rivers, all tributaries of the Meschacebe…enrich it with their silt and fertilize it with their waters” (17). Flowing past “the forest colonnades and the pyramids of Indian tombs,” the Meschacebe “is the Nile of the wilderness” (17), the cradle not so much of a unified civilization as of a set of hunting-and-gathering tribes, often at war with one another. Chateaubriand’s state of nature is not Rousseau’s state of nature. Human beings live in families and tribes within that state. Nature itself consists of tensile dualities. Its heartland river has two currents, the main current flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico, “pushing dead trunks of pines and oak trees down to the sea,” and the two side currents flow upstream carrying “floating islands of pistia and water lilies, their yellow blossoms rising like little banners” (18). The river banks also contrast with one another. On the western side “savannahs spread out as far as the eye can see”; thousands of bison “wander about aimlessly,” one occasionally will find its way to a river island, “his brow crowned with twin crescents,” his jaw decorated by an “ancient muddy beard”; “he might be taken for the god of the river, casting a satisfied eye over the grandeur of his waters and the wild abundance of his shores” (18). Against the “silence and calm” of the prairies, the eastern shore features “trees of every shape, of every hue and every odor” and vines which form “a thousand bowers,” supporting “a host of animals placed by the Creator’s hand”—all “radiat[ing] gladness and life” (18-19). “Everything stirs and murmurs,” and the bears, “drunk with grapes, and reeling on the branches of the elm trees,” celebrate in Dionysian contrast to the Apollonian bison of the west (19). 

To the dualities of these “primeval fields of nature,” men have added their own dualities. The French settled in Biloxi and New Orleans, allying with the Natchez, “an Indian nation with formidable powers in those territories” (19). Chactas is a survivor of those times, now an elder of 73 “whose age, wisdom, and vast knowledge of life made him the patriarch of the wilderness beloved of all” (19). As “a primitive and tender harmony” fills the west bank of the Meschacebe, so ‘Chactas’ means “harmonious voice”; at the same time, “like all men, he had acquired his great virtue at the cost of suffering” (19); for Chateaubriand as for Burke, there is the beautiful but also the sublime, and for Chateaubriand the beautiful comes at the cost of the struggle of sublimation. In the wars between the French-Natchez alliance and the “the powerful Muskogees of the Floridas,” the young Chactas had lost his father and himself was wounded (22). “Oh, Why could I not then have descended to the land of souls! I would have avoided all the sorrows awaiting me on earth. The spirits willed it otherwise.” (22). He would go on to be “held prisoner in the galleys of Marseilles through a cruel injustice,” never specified, then “set free and later presented to Louis XIV” at Versailles (20). “He had spoken with the great men of the age and had been present at the celebrations of Versailles, the tragedies of Racine, and the funeral orations of Bossuet”—a “savage [who] had beheld society at the pinnacle of its splendor” (20). 

Having long since returned to his homeland, Chactas tells his story to René, a young Frenchman who arrived in Louisiana in 1725, “impelled by passion and sorrow,” by his own experience of the sublime (20). René asked to be admitted to the Natchez as a warrior; “Chactas questioned him closely, and, finding him unshakeable in his resolution, adopted him as his son and gave him as a wife an Indian girl” (20). He does so in honor of the French, for “in spite of the many injuries” he had suffered at their hands, “he loved them,” remembering Fénelon, “who had once been his host,” and wishing to “render some service to the countrymen of such a righteous man” (20). No Christian, Chactas instead exhibits the classical virtue of magnanimity and the Indian (and Homeric) virtue of hospitality, which Chateaubriand had described in the closing chapter of the Essai. On his first hunt with the Natchez, René asks Chactas to relate “the story of his adventures” (21). The story has four parts. The first centers on the Indian way of life and is titled “The Hunters.”

Chactas tells René, “I see in you the civilized man who has become a savage; you see in me the savage whom the Great Spirit has (I know not for what purpose) chosen to civilize” (22). This duality sets up a sort of Rousseauian thought-experiment: “Having entered life’s path from opposite ends,” “we must have had a totally different view of things” (22). “Which of us has gained or lost more by this change of position?” (22). That question will be answered, insofar as it is answered, only at the conclusion of René.

After fighting that losing battle to the Muskogee, Chactas arrived as a refugee in St. Augustine, where an old Castilian named Lopez befriended him, sparing him the fate of being shipped to a mine in Mexico. But, as Rousseau would have predicted, “after spending thirty moons in Saint Augustine, I was overcome by a strong distaste for the life of the city” (23). At the age of 20, in the year 1672, he “was wasting away”; he tells Lopez, who has been a father to him, “You can see for yourself, I shall die if I do not go back to my Indian life” (23). In tears, knowing the danger the young man will face if he falls “into the hands of the Muskogees,” Lopez replies, “Go, son of nature! Go back to man’s freedom. I do not wish to rob you of it”(22). With that, “Lopez prayed to the God of the Christians, whose faith I had refused to embrace, and we parted sobbing” (23). Like Chateaubriand, Lopez understands nature as Rousseau understands it, as the Eden of human freedom, while knowing that nature’s dualities bring forth war, sublimity, realities in need of Christian sacrificial grace. The story of Chactas encompasses all three of the ‘races’ then living in southeastern North America: the Indians (themselves divided into two principal nations), the French, and the Spanish. Early in that story, it is the Spaniard who speaks and acts as a Chateaubriand. 

Chactas was indeed captured by the Muskogee and condemned to death by burning. A Muskogee woman, Atala, befriended him; although Chactas initially mistakes her for the “Maiden of Last Love,” the one in Indian practice who was “sent to the prisoner of war to charm his grave” (25). She is no such person but a Christian, wearing a golden crucifix, a maiden of agapic love who takes pity on him and falls in love with him, regretful that “my religion separates me from you forever,” but choosing to aid the “wicked heathen,” nonetheless (25). 

Chactas is a savage, but no Rousseauian savage. “What enigmas men are when they are buffeted by passions! I had just abandoned the kindly Lopez, I had exposed myself to every danger for the sake of my freedom, and now, in an instant, a woman’s glance had changed my desires, my intentions, my thoughts! Forgetting my country, my mother, my cabin, and the horrible death awaiting me, I had become indifferent to all that was not Atala. I was powerless to rise to a man’s mature reason, for I had suddenly sunk into a kind of childishness,” needing “someone to take care of my sleeping and feeding needs” (29)—a sort of return to nature experienced not as independence, as freedom, but as infantile dependence. The encounter of Savage man with woman results not in mere mating but in love; Rousseau would of course reply that Chactas is no true Savage, having already been exposed to civilization by the Spaniard, and indeed by the Natchez’s French allies before that. 

The lovers escape into the forest, and to “some vague far-away harmony permeating the depths of the woods,” “as though the soul of solitude were sighing through the entire expanse of the wilderness” (29). They overhear a young Seminole singing a song as he goes to ask a girl to marry him, and then a Seminole mother weeping over the grave of her infant child, saying, “Happy are those who die in the cradle, for they have known only the smiles and kisses of a mother!” (31). Love and motherhood: Atala herself seems to be “yielding to nature,” but prays “a fervent prayer to her mother and to the Queen of Virgins” to counter its spell (31). As Chateaubriand had written in the Essai, Chactas now tells René: “I have marveled at that religion which, in the forests, in the very midst of all the privations of life, can lavish untold blessings on the unfortunate. It is a religion which sets its might against the torrent of passions and alone”—alone—suffices “to subdue, though they be stirred by every circumstance,” which in the case of the lovers includes “the seclusion of the woods, the absence of men, and the complicity of the shadows” (31). Atala, a “simple savage girl,” seemed to him not so much noble as “divine” as she “offer[ed] prayers up to her God for an idolatrous lover,” “radiat[ing] immortal beauty” (32).

The Muskogee recapture them. Christianity nearly saves Chactas, anyway. Christian missionaries to the several Indian nations had persuaded them “to substitute a rather mild form of slavery for the horrors of the stake,” and while the Muskogee “had not yet adopted this custom,” some of them “had declared themselves in favor of it” (32-33). The tribal council deliberates. One side wants him tortured and executed, so as not to “alter the customs of our ancestors”; a matron, speaking for the women, rejoins, “Let us change the customs of our ancestors when they are destructive,” since we can use Chactas as a slave to “cultivate our fields” (34). The Muskogee are hunters, but agriculture, along with Christianity, has begun to filter in. This duality of savagery and civilization stays his execution but would not have prevented it, as the men, guardians of tradition, prevailed.

Atala breaks with the tradition, rescuing him. To Chactas’ grateful attempt to deify her (“You are a spirit, you have come to me, and I am speechless before you”), she demurs with a simple and naturalistic explanation: She bribed the medicine man and got his would-be executioners drunk (38). She has acted with justice more than charity: “I had to risk my life for you, since you had given up your own for me,” effectively delaying his escape from his captors by bringing her along in the forest (38). This time, they exercise natural prudence, heading north, not west to the Meschacebe in the direction of his nation, where the Muskogee will expect them to go. 

In their flight they cannot escape the dualities which divide both of their souls, and each from the other. To be sure, they “bless Providence,” which “places hope deep in hearts sore with sorrow and makes virtue spring from the bosom of life’s miseries” in Christians and heathens alike (40). But “the constant struggle between Atala’s love and religion, her unrestrained tenderness and the purity of her ways, the pride of her character and her deep sensitivity, the loftiness of her soul in essential things and her delicacy in the little ones—everything made her an incomprehensible being” to Chactas (41). She prays to God but also sings “of the lost homeland,” a song whose refrain is “Happy are they who have never seen the smoke of the stranger’s celebrations and have sat only at the festivals of their fathers!” (42). But to the pull of agapic, patriotic, and familial love (“she seemed anxious to appease” the “angered shade” of her Christian mother), she feels the push of a love that strengthened “with every passing moment” (43). “Atala’s strength was beginning to fail her, and the passions weakening her body seemed about to overcome her resistance” (43). She nonetheless holds out, appealing not to Christian chastity, a virtue issuing from a religious sentiment Chactas cannot be expected to feel, but to his patriotic honor, adjuring him to remember that “a warrior is bound to his country” (43). “What is a woman beside the duties you must fulfill?” (43). 

It is at this point of stasis that Chactas interrupts his story to advise René with some decidedly un-Rousseauian wisdom. “If you dread the agitations of the heart, beware of solitude. Great passions are solitary, and when you take them out into the wilderness”—as René evidently has done—you “are setting them into their very own sphere” (43). For all its beauty, its harmony, the state of nature has its torments. “O dreadful, sublime Nature, were you no more than a device contrived to deceive us, and could you not for an instant conceal a man’s joys in your mysterious horrors?” (46) The lovers’ sorrows in nature ended only “by chance,” as pagan Chactas puts it (43). 

Before that happens, Atala answers a perplexity. Her mother had given her Christian witness to Atala, but who had brought Christianity to her? Her father, she tells Chactas, was not a native of Florida, “the land of the palms” (45). Pregnant with both Atala and the Holy Spirit, Atala’s mother had returned to her people, and her mother had “obliged her to marry the magnanimous Simaghan,” the king of the Muskogee (45). Again, the ‘ancient’ and in this case Indian parallel to Christian charity is magnanimity: to Atala’s mother’s offer to suffer punishment for adultery, Simaghan correctly observes that she hasn’t committed adultery against him. “You have been sincere and have not dishonored my couch,” and so “the fruit of your body shall be my fruit” (45). She knows only that her natural father was named Lopez, whom Chactas at once recognizes as the man who had been a father to him in St. Augustine. They are in this sense brother and sister.

“The fraternal affection which had come upon us, joining its love to our own love, proved too powerful for our hearts” (46). They embrace, and “I held my bride in my arms by the light of the flashing thunderbolts and in the presence of the Eternal” in a “nuptial ceremony, worthy of our sorrows and the grandeur of our passion”—a wedding solemnized under the regime of “sublime Nature” (46). But “an impetuous bolt of lightning, followed by a clap of thunder, furrowed the thickness of the shadows, filled the forest with fire and brimstone, and split a tree apart at our very feet”—sublimity indeed, a suggestion of Hell within nature itself (46). 

Christianity then intervenes. “There in the ensuing silence we heard the ringing of a bell,” which can only betoken a church, a mission church. “An aged recluse,” bearing a lantern, emerges from the shadows (47). This Christian Diogenes has been seeking persons no abstract philosophic truth. His dog had picked up their scent when the storm began and he has been trailing them. “God be praised in all his works!” he exclaims. “His mercy is great indeed, and His goodness is infinite!” (47). Atala venerates him, telling him that she is a Christian, that “Heaven has sent you to save me” (47). As for Chactas, “I could scarcely understand the hermit,” as “such charity seemed so far superior to mortal man that I thought I was in a dream” (47). As an Indian, however, he praises the man’s courage in braving the lightning strikes. “‘Fear!” replied the father with a kind of intense fervor, ‘shall I fear when men are in peril and I can be useful to them! Surely I would be a most unworthy servant of Christ!'” (47). When Chactas admits that, unlike Atala, he is no Christian, Father Aubry admonishes him: “Young man, have I asked you your religion? Christ did not say, ‘My blood shall wash this man and not that one'” (47). Atala has gone from a natural father to an adoptive father to a Christian father; Chactas has gone from a natural Indian father who was killed in battle to an adoptive Spanish father whom he left to return to his fatherland, into the presence of a Christian father, whose Father is in Heaven, the Kingdom of God that the settlement named for St. Augustine prefigured. 

The lovers now emerged from the regime of the hunters and the regime of nature to the regime of “The Tillers”—the second part of Chactas’ story. He begins with a portrait of its founder. With his “simple and sincere” face—passing Rousseauian muster—Father Aubry “did not have the lifeless, indistinct features of a man born without passions: plainly his days had been hard, and the furrows on his brow revealed the rich scars of passion healed by virtue and by the love of God and man”—Christlike (49). “Everything about him possessed something strangely calm and sublime,” as Christian sublimity culminates in peace (49). “Whoever has seen Father Aubry, as I have, wending his solitary way in the wilderness with his staff and his breviary, has a true idea of the Christian wayfarer on earth” (49). He lived in a cave with his crucifix and “the book of the Christians,” solitary except for a symbolic, “tamed snake” (49) and perhaps, unnoticed by Chactas, the Holy Spirit. To the scars of passion “heathen Indians” had added scars to his body, but “the more they made me suffer the dearer I held them” (50). As pagan Chactas had responded to unjust punishment with the crown of the classical virtues, magnanimity, so the Christian Father Aubry responded to it with agape.

Father Aubry’s solitude is purposeful, no burden forced upon him by Providence or by Fate. “When I arrived in this region,” he told Chactas and Atala, “I found only wandering families with fierce customs and a pitiful way of life” (50). Without settlement, they had no state, no political community; they had a regime—customs and a way of life—but it was miserable, not idyllic, no state of nature according to Rousseau. “I have given them an understanding of the word of peace, and their customs have gradually grown gentler” (50). With the Word replacing the sparse sign language of Indians, he did not neglect their material well-being; “I have tried to teach them the basic arts of life, not taking them too far, and still preserving for these good people the simplicity which brings happiness,” as Rousseau recommends (51). But like many other founders, “I have been afraid of hampering them by my presence, and so I have withdrawn to this grotto, where they come to consult me” (51). The founder must leave, or at least distance himself, lest the people for whom he has founded a new regime come to depend excessively on him, fail to learn to think and act in accordance with their rulers, their institutions, their way of life, all in accord with its purpose. 

Leaving Atala behind, the men leave the grotto to visit the mission village. On the way they pass oaks carved with verses from “an ancient poet, named Homer, and a few maxims of an even more ancient poet, called Solomon” (52). “There was a strange and mysterious harmony between this wisdom of the ages, these verses overgrown by moss, this old hermit who had engraved them, and these aged oak trees which served as his book” (52). It is the harmony of ‘Athens and Jerusalem’—but really of Greece before Athens, the Greece of the old religion, the old gods and heroes, and of Jerusalem before Jesus. The verses show that wisdom transcends times and places, written as it is in the book of Nature and embroidered by living nature. This is how Chactas understands Father Aubry, at this point. But in the village itself, at mass the next morning, “I cannot doubt that the great mystery was fulfilled when we prostrated ourselves, and that God descended to earth, for I felt him descend in my heart” (54). He experiences this not as an occasion for weeping but as joy.

The village of “the tillers” includes not only farms but property (with surveyors to delineate it and arbitrators to settle disputes over it), forges to shape the inorganic fruits of the earth, and wood-choppers who clear the land to be farmed and mined. “I wandered in delight amid these scenes, and they grew even lovelier with the thought of Atala and the dreams of joy gladdening my heart. I marveled at the triumph of Christianity over primitive culture. I could see the Indian growing civilized through the voice of religion. I was witnessing the primal wedding of man and the earth, with man delivering to the earth the heritage of his sweat, and the earth, in return, undertaking to bear faithfully man’s harvests, his sons and his ashes” (55). Chateaubriand answers Rousseau by recalling the curse of Adam and showing the way to a Christian Sparta, not the Lycurgian Sparta Rousseau prefers but the only Spartan regime that can civilize without the harshness of the warrior ethos. “I have given them no law,” Father Aubry explains. “I have taught them only to love one another, to pray to God, and look forward to a better life, for in these simple teachings are all the world’s laws” and, one might add, all God’s laws, according to the Founder of the Christian Regime. Father Aubry calls it “this kingdom of God” (56). As for Chactas, “I felt the superiority of this stable, busy life over the savage’s idle wandering” (56). “How joyous my life had been could I have settled with Atala in a hut by those shores!” (56).

But “fortune” or “fate” has played with him in a different way (56). The third part of Chactas’ story, titled “The Drama,” recalling the colliding dualities of nature in its mode of sublimity, recounts the end of Chactas’ “dream of happiness” (57). Returning to the grotto, they did not see Atala “hasten[ing] out to greet us” (57). Stricken with “a strange terror,” Chactas dared not enter the grotto. “How weak he is whom passions buffet, how strong the man who rests in God!” (57). Father Aubry entered the cave. Chactas could only find “my strength again” when he heard Atala’s moaning; natural pity overcame natural fear. Atala was seriously ill. “Transfixed as though by a thunderbolt”—parallel to the thunderbolt that interrupted the lovers in the forest—Chactas stood motionless before her (57). The thunderbolt therefore betokened God’s or nature’s warning, setting a barrier to eros, a passion which does not limit itself.

Father Aubry then made a mistaken diagnosis and spoke a mistaken prophecy; priest and kingly founder, he was no prophet; Christlike, he was no Christ. “This is probably nothing more than a fever caused by fatigue. If we resign ourselves to God’s will, He will take pity on us.” (57). Atala knew better. She now made her confession. No one had expected her to survive for long after a painful childbirth. “My life was given up for lost, and to save me from death, my mother vowed to the Queen of Angels that, if I were spared, my virginity would be consecrated to her. That was the fatal vow which is now forcing me to my grave!” (58). When her mother lay dying, she asked and received Atala’s vow of obedience to that vow. She consoled her by saying that in accepting “the virgin’s veil, you give up only the cares of the cabin and the mortal passions which distressed your mother’s bosom,” and warned her that “I gave my word for you in order to save your life, and if you do not keep my promise, you will plunge your mother’s soul into everlasting woe” (58-59). The Christian religion therefore has proven “at once my sadness and my joy”: “O Chactas, you see now what has made our fate so grim!” (59). She could neither keep her vow nor abandon it. This is the sublimity of Christianity, which demands of its converts unattainable perfection of a new set of virtues beyond those of the ancients, a sublimity nature itself shows forth when it is not beguiling men and women with its beauty, its harmony. 

Chactas evidently had converted to Christianity, but Atala’s confession turned him to a crisis of faith. “A curse on the oath which robs me of Atala! Death to the God who chokes off nature! Priest man, why did you ever come to these forests?” (59). Father Aubry had the Christian answer for that. “To save you, to subdue your passions and prevent you, blasphemer, from drawing down on your head the wrath of Heaven!” (59). How much have you really suffered, compared to me, much less to Christ? “Where are the marks of your suffering? Where are the injustices you have borne? Where are your virtues which alone could give you some right to complain? What service have you rendered? What good have you done?” (59-60). To these unanswerable questions he added an observation: “You offer me but your passions, and you dare censure Heaven!” (60). Only having suffered as long as I have done, only having worked as I have worked, will you understand “that you know nothing, that you are nothing, and that there is no punishment, however severe, no suffering, however terrible, which the corrupt flesh does not deserve to suffer” (60). To the one thing Socrates says he knows Father Aubry added the one thing that Job learns. Chactas could only ask forgiveness, which Father Aubry immediately granted, as God grants forgiveness for human sins.

He turned to attend Atala’s spiritual suffering, what she described to Chactas as the “terrible contradiction” in her soul between obedience to her mother and “remorse for not having been yours” (61). Father Aubry taught her that this “extreme passion” is “not even natural, and therefore it is less guilty in the eyes of God, because it is an error of the mind, rather than a vice of the heart,” a product of her “impulsive imagination,” which “has given you needless alarm about your vows” (60). This means that Christianity answers Rousseau’s critique of the imagination, which he considers an excrescence of civilization, with its own kind of correction. “Religion does not exact superhuman sacrifices,” even if it does command superhuman perfection of virtues (61). Christianity’s “genuine feelings and temperate virtues are far loftier than the impassioned feelings and extreme virtues of so-called heroism” (61). Here Father Aubry could offer recourse to the formal ruling institutions of the Catholic Church regime, whose priests can, in the name of the forgiving God, “absolve you of your vows which are not permanently binding,” enabling Atala to “end your days beside me with Chactas as your husband” (62). 

This only sharpened Atala’s suffering. It was too late. She must die “the very moment I learn I might have been happy” (62). She wasn’t sick; she had poisoned herself, and Indians know which poisons have no anti-toxins. As Chactas raged “with bursts of frenzied fury known only to savages,” Father Aubry, “with marvelous tenderness, hurried between brother and sister, lavishing on us infinite care” with a “faith [that] lent him accents even more tender and burning than our own passions” (63). Throughout the day into evening, “Spreading numbness gripped Atala’s limbs, and her hands and feet began to grow cold” (63). Why is it that Chateaubriand makes Atala’s death by poison reminiscent of Socrates’ death by poison? She is young; Socrates is as old as Father Aubry. She is a faithful Christian, Socrates a philosopher who never heard of Christianity. Her “primitive education and the lack of necessary teaching [had] brought on this calamity, as “you did not know that a Christian may not dispose of his life as he wishes” (64). She had the one thing most needful to her salvation, the Christian Spirit, but had lacked the Christian civilization offered by the Christian regime on earth, the Christian ecclesia or assembly, the Church. Atala has now learned a wisdom that, in Christian eyes, must far surpass both that of Socrates and of Rousseau, knowing not only herself as a child of God but knowing the wisdom of God. To know the wisdom of God is not of course to have divine wisdom in its entirely; a Christian will therefore remain humble in a way unlikely in a philosopher, ancient or modern. The ancient philosopher’s humility rested in the natural self-knowledge expressed in the confession, ‘I know that I do not know.’ The modern philosopher is considerably less humble, insisting, ‘I know that I can know, and someday will know.’ Rousseau’s proud humility says, ‘I know that knowledge itself is an impediment to knowledge, but I can overcome it.’

For Atala’s sake, Father Aubrey refined Atala’s Christian wisdom with additional knowledge. God “will judge you for your intention, which was pure, and not for your action, which was guilty” (64). And as for her “mortal life,” “how little you lose in losing this world!” Although you have lived in solitude, you have known sorrow; what would you have thought had you witnessed the evils of society, had your ears been assailed, as you set foot on Europe’s shores, by the long cry of woe rising out of that ancient land?” (64-65). Both Rousseau, with his critique of civilization, and the Christian apostles’ critique of ‘this world,’ concur. But why does Father Aubry suppose that Atala would ever see Europe’s shores? It may be that he considers the French and the Spaniards as constituting Europe in the New World. Or it may be that this is Chactas’ own interjection, placed in Father Aubry’s mouth but reflecting the course of his own life, which would bring him to Europe, to the civilization Rousseau abominated.

Perhaps it isn’t the world but “your love you regret losing?” (65). If so, “you might as well weep over a dream” (65). The “heart of man” is full of desires, and desires change; you cannot rely on them (65). The “most beautiful love of all was doubtless that of the man and woman formed by the hand of the Creator,” who provided them a paradise better even than the New Eden of the New World (65). “If they were unable to abide in that happy state,” if they could not tame the snake, “what couple after them will ever be able to do so?” (65). The marriages of “the first-born of men” too were troubled, incestuous marriages whereby “love and brotherly affection were blended in the same heart and the purity of one swelled the delight of the other”; these too were troubled by jealousy, these “holy families from which Christ chose to descend” (65). This is the restlessness Chateaubriand identified in the human soul in the Essai. “If man were ever constant in his affections, if his feelings remained eternally fresh and he could strengthen them endlessly, then solitude and love would surely make him God’s equal, for those are the Great Being’s two eternal pleasures” (66). This is why Man is not God. We see this also in man’s mortality, his life soon forgotten by his family and friends as they get on with their own lives. “So natural is man’s infidelity, so trivial a thing is our life even in the hearts of our friends!” (66). She can now be a bride of Christ, the only trustworthy bridegroom and, one notices, as her mother had desired. Atala became calm, and now could pass the Christian message to Chactas. “Heaven may be trying you today,” she told him, “but it is only to make you compassionate for the sorrows of others,” as “the human heart,” like “the trees of the forest,” “do not yield their balm for the wounds of men until they themselves have been wounded by the axe” (67). And she answered the question of Nietzsche, decades in advance of his asking it, the question of whether you would will to live your life over again: “If I were to begin life anew, I would still prefer the joy of loving you a few moments in the hardship of exile to a whole life of repose in my native land” (68). 

“I have one last request of you” (69). Since “there is after this life a longer life,” “how terrible it would be to be separated from you forever” (69). Therefore “if you have loved me, learn the lessons of the Christian faith, and it will prepare our reunion” (69). That is, she wanted him to confirm his salvation, of which she was unsure. Chactas’ reply was remarkable, given his apparent prior conversion. “I promised Atala that I would one day embrace the Christian faith” (69). Father Aubry exclaims, “It is time to summon God hither,” and “scarcely had he pronounced these words when a supernatural power forced me to my knees and bowed my head down at the foot of Atala’s head”; “I thought I saw God Himself emerging from the mountainside” (69). 

Again interrupting his story, Chactas took out Atala’s crucifix and asked René, more remarkably still, “How can it be that I am still not a Christian?” (70). “What petty motives of politics and patriotism have kept me in the errors of my fathers? No, I will not delay any longer.” (70). He will go to the priest.

In the fourth and concluding part of his story, Chactas relates how Father Aubry consoled him before Atala’s funeral, saying simply, “It is God’s will” and embracing him (71). “Had I not experienced it myself, I would never have believed there could be so much consolation in those few words of a Christian resigned to fate” (71). Chactas promised, “I shall endeavor to grow worthy of the eternal wedding promised me by Atala” (71). Father Aubry prayed to God to “restore peace in this troubled soul, and leave with him only humble and useful memories of his sorrows!” (71). After her burial, he advised Chactas not to stay in the village but to return to his people. “You owe your life to your country” (74). For him, and for Chateaubriand, Christianity need not mean withdrawal from the life of politics in one’s fatherland. It may be that a Christian mission will take a Christian away from his fatherland, as it did for Father Aubry. But Father Aubry founded a new, Christian regime when he arrived in the New World. It may also be that a Christian mission will bring a Christian back to his fatherland, as it does for Chactas and as it did for Chateaubriand himself. 

As for his Chactas’ passions, now sorrowful, the same inconstancy that makes eros unreliable, impermanent, causing sorrow, also ends sorrow. Sorrows “must come to an end, because the heart of man is finite” (74). Father Aubry’s answer to Goethe’s sorrowing young Werther, to German Romanticism, is that “we cannot even be unhappy for long,” and therefore ‘Romantic’ suicide is not noble but foolish and wrong. “Such were the words of the man of the rock”—the man of the grotto carved into the mountain and of the Rock of God; “his authority was too great, his wisdom too profound to be questioned” (74). With experience, Chactas has come to know what he then accepted only on authority. “I have never yet met a man who has not been disappointed in his dreams of happiness, nor a heart without its secret wound. The heart most serene in appearance is like the natural well of the Alachua savannah; its surface seems calm and pure, but look down in its depths, and you will discern a great crocodile, nourished in the waters of the well” (75). 

In his Epilogue, the narrator relates the sequel to the story of Chactas, told him at Niagara Falls by a descendant of the Natchez who survived the French massacre in 1730, found refuge among the Chickasaw, only to be exiled again by British colonists. The granddaughter of the man she calls “René the European” (80), she confirms that Chactas did receive baptism in the Catholic Church. Both men died in the massacre, René having joined the tribe, marrying a Natchez woman. Father Aubry in his turn died at the hands of the Cherokee, “enemies of the French, [who] invaded his mission, guided by the sound of the bell as it rang to succor travelers” (80). The peaceable Kingdom of God on earth flourished in isolation, perished in its first war, a war brought on precisely by its evangelizing welcome to all passersby. Such are the worldly limitations to the Christian Rousseauian founding.

The founder was captured, tortured, and burned. “Not once could [the Cherokee] draw from him a single cry reflecting shame on his God or dishonor on his country”; on the contrary, “he never ceased praying for his torturers or commiserating with the victims”—the other captives—in “their plight” (80). “To prevent him from talking, the enraged Indians forced a red-hot iron down his throat” and, “no longer able to be of consolation to men, he yielded up his ghost” (80). To suffer torture “stoically” was no novelty to the Cherokee, who had seen many other captives do the same, and whose warriors had themselves done the same under torture. But “they could not help admitting that there was something in the humble courage of Father Aubry which they had never before known, something which went beyond all earthly courage. A number of them were so impressed by his death that they became Christians.” (81). To those who would argue that his founding ended in predictable catastrophe, Father Aubry would likely remark the souls saved as the result of that catastrophe. His kingdom was in, but not of, this world; its purpose pointed beyond this world.

Chactas visited the burned-out village a few years later. The tame snake was the only living survivor; it “came out of the nearby bush, and curled up at his feet” (81). He found the ashes of Father Aubry and Atala, gathered them; the Natchez woman who tells the story has been carrying them with her, and the narrator, Chateaubriand, venerates them as saints’ relics. “Thus passes all that is good and virtuous and sensitive on earth! Man, thou art but a fleeting vision, a sorrowful dream. Misery is thy essence, and thou art nothing save in the sadness of thy soul and the eternal melancholy of thy thought!” (82). 

Chateaubriand’s final sentence recalls the last chapter of the Essai. “Hapless Indians whom I have seen wandering in the wildernesses of the New World with the ashes of your ancestors, you who showed me hospitality in the midst of your misery, today I could not return your kindness, for, like you, I wander at the mercy of men, and less fortunate than you in my exile, I have not brought with me the bones of my fathers!” (82). 

The Epilogue to Atala leaves unanswered questions, questions about René. Why was René self-exiled in the New World? How did he live during the years between Atala’s death and his own death at the hands of the French? 

René at first lived among, but not truly with, the Natchez. “His melancholy nature drew him constantly away into the depths of the woods,” “a savage among savages” (85). His only companions were Chactas and Father Souël, a missionary based at nearby Fort Rosalie. “These two elders had acquired a powerful influence over his heart, Chactas, through his kindly indulgence, and Father Souël, on the contrary, through his extreme severity” (85). Both men “desired to know”: specifically, to know how René had come to live among them. For years he refused to say, but a letter from Europe arrived, and its contents “so increased his sadness that he felt he had to flee even from his own friends” (85). They come to him, “and so great was their tact, so gentle their manner, and so deep the respect they commanded, that he finally felt obliged to yield” (85).

They met on the bank of the Meschacebe. “Tents, half-built houses, fortresses just begun, hosts of negroes clearing tracts of land, groups of white men and Indians, all offering a striking contrast of social and primitive ways in this limited space” (86) betokened the regimes of the New World, past regime conflicts, and regime conflicts yet to come. These conflicts also occur in the human soul, and René told of them in his. “The peace in your hearts,” in his friends’ beautiful souls, mirroring “the calm of nature all about me,” put him to shame, given “the disorder and turmoil,” the sublimity, “of my soul” (86).

He expected them to pity him, “a young man with neither strength nor moral courage, who finds the source of his torments within himself, and can hardly lament any misfortunes save those he has brought on himself” (86). Having “already been harshly punished,” he begged that they temper their condemnation with mercy as they listened to his story.

His mother died in childbirth. His father bestowed his estate to the eldest son, not René, who “was soon abandoned to strange hands,” returning to the family château only once a year (87). “Spirited in temper and erratic in nature,” he “found freedom and contentment only with my sister Amelia,” with whom he shared “tender affinities in mood and taste” (87). In youth he turned to poetry, as befits “a heart of sixteen” (87). His father died, and René tended him on his deathbed; “it was the first time that the immortality of the soul was clearly present before my eyes,” as “I could not believe that this lifeless body was the creator of my thought; I felt it had to come from some other source,” and too, “I hoped one day to join the spirit of my father” (88).

He and Amelia went to live with “some aged relatives,” and he considered entering a monastery, as indeed many younger sons of the aristocracy did (89). But “whether it was my natural instability or a dislike of the monastic life, I do not know, but I changed my plans and decided to go abroad” (90). He did not understand Amelia’s “almost joyful gesture” when she saw him off; “I could not repress a bitter thought about the inconstancy of human affections” (90).

He embarked on an extended Wanderjahr, visiting “the ruins of Rome and Greece, those countries of virile and brilliant memory, where palaces are buried in the dust and royal mausoleums hidden beneath the brambles,” testimony to the “power of nature and weakness of man” (90). Wearying “of searching through graveyards,” he turned to “living races” to see if they “had more virtue and less suffering to offer than those which had vanished” (90). They did not. Workmen building monuments to recently-deceased great men scarcely knew the name of those heroes, and, having “discovered nothing stable among the ancients” he found “nothing beautiful among the moderns,” only the “endless agitations” of his fellow Europeans (89, 92). Even, now, among the Indians, living in the Rousseauian state of nature in which “your needs [are] our only guides,” he had found no rest (93), having brought his modern-civilizational cares with him to the woods, cares that exacerbate the already restless nature of all human beings. 

Chactas offered him the advice of the ancients: “You must try to temper your character, which has already brought you so much grief” (93). To moderation he added the appeal of magnanimity; “a great soul necessarily holds more sorrow than a little one” (93). He intended to calm René’s passions and to elevate his soul telling him of greatness, the France that Chactas remembered, the France of Louis XIV. René cannot comply. “Alas, father, I cannot tell you about that great century, for I saw only the end of it as a child; it had already drawn to a close when I returned to my land. Never has a more astonishing, nor a more sudden change taken place in a people. From the loftiness of genius, from respect for religion and dignity in manners”—from the France of Corneille and Racine—everything “suddenly degenerated to cleverness and godlessness and corruption”—to Voltaire and Diderot (94). Upon returning to France, his sister continued to avoid him. “I found myself lonelier in my native land than I had been on foreign soil”; “everywhere I was taken for an impractical dreamer” (94). He retreated again to solitude, this time in half-deserted churches. He eventually found even solitude intolerable; “weary of constantly repeating the same scenes and the same thought…I began to search my soul to discover what I really sought” (95). Longing for a woman companion, “a mysterious apathy” gripping him, “I resolved to give up my life” (98). Like Atala, “I was imbued with faith, and I reasoned like a sinner; my heart loved God, and my mind knew Him not” (99). 

Amelia, “the only person in the world I had ever loved,” the only one “who could understand me and to whom I could reveal my soul,” returned to him when he alarmed her with a letter telling her to make “arrangements about my worldly goods” (99-100). She stayed with him, but her health began to decline and she left a few months later, writing him of her intention to take the veil. She requested his pledge never to kill himself: “Is there anything more pitiful than thinking constantly of suicide? For a man of your character it is easy to die. Believe me, it is far more difficult to live.” (102). René now suspected his sister harbored a secret, for “Who was forcing her into the religious life so suddenly?” (103). He agreed to stand in for their deceased father at the altar on the day of her profession, inwardly raging that he would disturb the service, stab himself in the church. But at the ceremony, “so beautiful was she, so divinely radiant her countenance,” that, “overcome by the glorious sorrow of her saintly figure and crushed by the grandeur of religion, I saw my plans of violence crumbling” (106). Feeling himself “bound by an all-powerful hand…instead of blasphemy and threats, I could find in my heart only profound adoration and sighs of humility” (106). 

Wrapped in a funeral shroud, Amelia laid herself on the marble slab, an action symbolic of her death to this world, and “the priest began the service for the dead” (107). From under the shroud “a confused murmur emerged”; leaning over her, only René could hear her sister’s confession: “Merciful God, let me never again rise from this deathbed, and may Thy blessings be lavished on my brother, who has never shared my forbidden passion!” (108). At this, “I lost control of my senses”; upon reviving, he learns that his sister, “taken with a violent fever,” had asked that he never “try to see her again” (108). 

This time, for the first time, he “knew what it meant to shed tears for grief which was far from imaginary,” no longer self-imposed and self-exaggerated (109). “I even felt a kind of unexpected satisfaction in the fullness of my anguish, and I became aware, with a sense of hidden joy, that sorrow is not a feeling which consumes itself like pleasure”; “now that my sorrows were real, I no longer wished to die” (109). If “in every land the natural song of man is sad, even when it renders happiness,” the true return to nature must be sorrow, as only in it can man find beauty in sublimity, satisfaction in his natural restlessness (109). Amelia learns this too, in the convent. She writes to him that the regime of the convent—the regular chime of the church bell, the hymns, the waves of the ocean nearby, “the simplicity of my companions, the purity of their vows, the regularity of their life”—all act as “healing balm over my days” (110). Christianity “substitutes a kind of burning chastity in which lover and virgin are at one” (111). The religion of burning chastity parallels the nature of joy in sorrow, stability in restlessness. 

The letter René had received came from the Mother Superior at the convent, informing him of Amelia’s death, “a victim of her zeal and charity,” as it was incurred while caring for her sisters, afflicted by a contagious disease. Chactas comforted him in his grief. Father Souël did not.

He had expected pity, and Chactas had wept for him, but in Father Souël’s judgment “nothing in your story deserves the pity you are now being shown” (112). You are in love with your own illusions, dissatisfied with everything, “withdrawn from society, and wrapped up in idle dreams” (113). Melancholy does not make you superior to the world; “only those of limited vision can hate men and life” (113). As Father Aubry had told Atala, your griefs are “absolutely nothing” and your self-isolation in the woods consists only in neglect of your duties (113). Yes, saints have retreated to the wilderness, “but they were weeping and subduing their passions, while you seem to be wasting your time inflaming your own,” a “presumptuous youth” who thinks “man sufficient unto himself” (113). But “solitude is bad for the man who does not live with God,” increasing “the soul’s power while robbing it at the same time of every opportunity to find expression” (113). You have talent, but unless you “devote it to serving [your] fellow men,” you will “first [be] punished by an inner misery,” and eventually by God (113). Father Souël’s love for René evinces the toughness of agape but does not extend to a call for conversion. He may have judged this premature.

At this, Chactas smiles, recalling Father Aubry’s rebuke of his own sorrows. “My son, he speaks severely to both of us; he is reprimanding the old man and the young, and he is right…. Happiness can be found only in the common paths” (113). He tells a story of the Meschacebe, which overran its banks, destroying everything around it in a show of its power, only to become troubled at the solitude it had made for itself. “It longed again for the humble bed which nature had prepared for it, and it pined for the birds and the flowers, the trees and the streams which were once its modest companions along its peaceful course” (114). It is a Christian parable, a lesson in humility against ambitions of self-sufficient pride, and also a Rousseauian one, as man’s civilization evidences exactly such an attempt to master nature. The Meschacebe is the human heart.

“René returned to his wife, but still found no happiness. Soon afterwards, along with Chactas and Father Souël, he perished in the massacres of the French and Natchez in Louisiana” (114).

In Atala and René, Chateaubriand attempted to correct the French Romanticism he unintentionally spurred on by those very writings. They answer Rousseau, and even more immediately Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. The Sturm und Drang of the thunderstorm in the forest; the ennui and self-torment, which tempt René to suicide and which goad Werner to commit it; the retreat to village life (for Werther, among German peasants, for René, American Indians); the love triangle (Werther rivaled by a man, Chactas rivaled by a man of God): these are the marks of Rousseauianism turned in on itself, finding misery in souls either too civilized to feel the natural moral sentiments of the savage or perhaps finding that even human nature purged of civil society’s cares can find no rest. 

And like Goethe, Chateaubriand came to regret writing in this vein, for the same reason. The natural human capacity for imitation, noted by Rousseau, prevailed in their young readers. Werther touched off the “Werther Fever” in European youth, complete with merchandise and copycat suicides. Goethe denounced the “sickness” of the Romantic movement he had initiated, turning instead to a manly and measured classicism. Chateaubriand eventually wished he had never written either of the books, but especially René, which fostered an affectation of ennui in French youths that, well, bored him. But he also found the ‘ancient’ or ‘classical’ moderation and magnanimity of his Chactas and of the mature Goethe an insufficiently powerful antidote to the sorrows of the modern human soul and its psychic mirror, the rage of murderous revolutionaries. Chactas smiles once, but never laughs, and neither does any other person in these books. There is copious weeping, and a Mississippi forest of exclamation points at the end of sentences, indications of passion. In keeping with this, and again following his thought in the Essai, he would next extend his consideration of the answer offered by religion, writing The Genius of Christianity.

With regard to Rousseau, Chateaubriand endorses several of his principal claims. With him, he holds that civilization, and especially the accumulation of knowledge, obscures the nature of man from men. He also regards the state of nature as a condition of fecundity and abundance, not scarcity; men in the state of nature enjoy freedom of will and hardiness of body. Sexual passion is dangerous, not liberating but enslaving. Savages endure few or none of the agonies civilized men experience; they do not commit suicide. (Atala does so, but only because the contradiction between her love and her religious vow to her mother seems irresolvable; she has been touched by civilization.)

Philosophically and as an artist, Chateaubriand shares Rousseau’s conviction that facticity is not truth, or at least not the whole truth. In his eyes, his fictions are as true as his histories, and his Mémoires combine facts with fictions. A noble lie can be a true reflection of the nature of man.

Chateaubriand departs from Rousseau in placing his savages within civil society, albeit primitive ones. They follow religion, there—worshipping many gods and one Great Spirit—also unlike Savage man according to Rousseau. Chateaubriand’s savages live poorly within the abundance of nature; they see the advantages of agriculture and, when shown how to do it, adopt it. They are not exactly poor in spirit, and indeed rich in natural spiritedness, in war-ready courage, even to the point of enduring torture. Yet they also see the difference between their courage and Christian courage, which goes beyond the endurance of one’s own agony and reaches out to bless the torturer. Some of them esteem that difference, accepting Christianity for their souls along with agriculture for their bodies.

Chateaubriand insists that they need to do this because the physical and psychic ills of man inhere in his nature, even as they are exaggerated by civilization, and especially by modern civilization. Dualities, even antimonies, pervade all of nature, which is both beautiful and sublime, harmonious and stormy. This affects the question of natural right. For Rousseau, natural right consists of bodily well-being and self-preservation along with freedom of the mind and the natural sentiment of pity or compassion. If nature is sublime as well as beautiful, natural right as so conceived will not suffice. Divine right and divine law must supplement natural right and natural law, if human beings can be made to resist destroying one another with envious rage or ruining the foundation of the family with incestuous love, family love carried to its extreme because the passion of love knows no limits—the love seen symbolically in the souls of Chactas and Atala and literally in the souls of René and Amelia. 

Chactas wonders, who gains more? The savage who becomes civilized or the civilized man who retreats to the savage life? He, the savage who became civilized, suffered greatly, steadied his soul with the morality of the ancients, took up the responsibilities of civil life. René, the civilized man who yearned for natural simplicity, found solitude miserable; after Father Souël’s reprimand, he too returned to civil life. Both resist the agapic appeal of Christianity. Chactas has experienced the Holy Spirit and received baptism; he seems to have been saved. René, although moved by Christianity, finds no happiness in the civil life he returns to. It may be that Chateaubriand does not think Christianity offers happiness in this life. It surely does not offer life in this life: René, Chactas, Atala, Father Aubry, and Father Souël all die violently, Atala by her own hand, the men by the hands of other men.