Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex. H. M. Parshley translation. New York: Bantam Books, 1964 [1949].

Sonia Kruks: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

 

Although it may seem so, The Second Sex was not all Simone de Beauvoir wrote. An experienced scholar who knows her business, Sonia Kruks invites readers to see Beauvoir’s political writings as a whole. She also wants to bring Beauvoir into contemporary debates on liberal rationalism and poststructuralism, showing that Beauvoir staked out a position critical of the former without succumbing to the arbitrary nominalism of the latter As an existentialist, Beauvoir held that political judgments involve the whole being of the individual who makes them—not only the pure mind of the rationalists but that stubborn fact, the body, with its instincts, vulnerabilities, and powers. Human beings find themselves situated not only in one mind and one body (one life) but also in concrete social milieus that tend to disclose and to foreclose moral and political choices, empower and weaken the scope for political action Beauvoir thus insisted upon the ambiguity of all political judgment and action, their complex incompleteness. Oddly, and unlike her contemporary Simone Weil, Beauvoir never seems seriously to have engaged the writings of philosophers much before Immanuel Kant—precisely those who turned to political philosophy in the first place. Aristotle makes a brief appearance in The Second Sex, but only to get slapped on the wrist for having failed to understand human embryology.

Writing in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger—all of whom rejected nature as a source of right and defined freedom as the absence of natural constraint—the existentialists called for “active engagement in the world.” Beauvoir distinguished herself from Jean-Paul Sartre, however, by thinking more carefully about the body, “at once the site of both freedom and constraint,” and by giving greater emphasis to social relations. These concerns caused her to emphasize the ambiguity of human life, its “irresolvable antinomies,” most especially the ways in which our embodied sociality opens us both to “reciprocity” and “violent harms.” She resists all Hegelian and Marxist attempts at some grand synthesis or ‘end of History’ which would resolve these antimonies. Most interestingly, and unknowingly, she came upon something very like the Platonic and Aristotelian distinction between theoretical and practical reasoning, now approached via the existentialist notion of liberty. There is an “ontological freedom [la liberté] and the practical, or effective freedom that is required in order to act in the world [la puissance],” the latter “requir[ing] the presence and support of others.” Ignoring classical political philosophy, she soon began “to incorporate a non-reductionist Marxism within her analysis.” I am reminded of Nietzsche’s remark on Ralph Waldo Emerson: With Emerson, we lost a philosopher.”

This moral and social thinker found herself confronted with politics by 1939. But, and again understandably in view of her intellectual formation, she described this experience in historicist terms: “History seized me and never let me go again.” Very much to her credit, she continued to resist the determinist side of historicism. After the war, which she spent in occupied Paris, the French Communist Party beckoned, especially since “there appeared to be no middle ground between unqualified support for the Soviet Union and a pro-American position, which aligned one with the exploitative forces of capitalist domination and imperialism” (as distinguished, of course, from the exploitative forces of communist domination and imperialism). To her credit, she could not quite bring herself to join the party, which “demanded an unquestioning discipline from its members which Beauvoir could not accept” (that ‘freedom’ issue, again), “espous[ing] the highly deterministic, orthodox version of Marxism (or, more precisely, Marxism-Leninism) that Stalin had formulated.” With Sartre, although never merely imitating him, she would develop an existentialist form of neo-Marxism, some of which entered the thought of the American New Left a generation later. Meanwhile, and in line with a French tradition dating back at least to Chateaubriand, she toured America in 1947. In her book, America Day by Day, she displays her by now well-honed capacity for the ambiguous and indeed ambivalent response: America was “the belly of the imperialist monster,” a land of “shrill anti-Communism” and “chauvinism,” itself conflicted with its “high-flown rhetoric of freedom” and its conditions of racism and poverty; “but she is also in love with the vibrancy of America, its sheer scale, its physical and social diversity, and its lack of stuffy European formality.”

Her most influential book, The Second Sex, elaborates on the question of the relation of freedom and the body. The argument is now familiar: “Women’s material dependence on men and their lack of control over their own fertility constitute fundamental elements of their oppression,” an oppression that Marxian economics alone cannot come close to relieving. Under current social conditions, a woman lives “continuously divided against herself”: both “an active subject,” a free person, and one “who is obliged to make herself both ‘object and prey'” in the mating game. Beyond the socioeconomic ‘class’ dialectics of Marx, she insists upon an underlying sexual dialectic centered on the body. Kruks doesn’t leave it there, however, showing how Beauvoir went on to criticize French imperialism in her 1954 novel The Mandarins, subsequently bringing sexual politics, imperialism, and her ‘existentialist’ preoccupation with the ultimate limit on freedom, death, all together in her substantial memoirs, weaving the personal with the political. “Simone de Beauvoir lived her philosophical orientation to the world.”

What blocked Beauvoir from having recourse to classical philosophy was her historicist rejection of the notion of human nature, and especially the idea that the distinctive human characteristic is the capacity to reason—which, however, she identifies with Kant’s “autonomous, rational will.” “Whatever there may be that is universal to human existence does not preexist particular lives and their specific projects and is brought into being only through them.” “Projects”: There is the modernist assumption that “freedom” consists of freedom from the physical; modern materialism puts this freedom in a precarious place, in a condition (as Beauvoir would say) of ambiguity and indeed of existential threat. She accordingly rejects contemporary ‘humanism,’ including the affirmation of ‘human rights,’ denying all remnants of human nature conceived as rational in the manner of Enlightenment thinkers and the historicists who followed. Beauvoir sees, however, that to throw the ‘human rights’ baby out with the ‘humanist’ bathwater can only lead to nominalism or even nihilism, as Hitler had so forcefully demonstrated. “A critical politics does still need to be anchored in some portrayal of what it is to be human.” (To put it in the language of a later notion of ‘deconstructionism,’ if we assert ‘the death of the subject’ how can the personal be the political?) Again, Beauvoir runs up against a problem well known to the classical philosophers she ignored, the distinction between ‘human being’ as an idea and ‘human being’ as a way of life. Unlike them, she assumes that rationality cannot be the source of freedom, as indeed it cannot if rationality’s most important discovery are ‘iron laws of history.’ She settles on understanding the human being as an “embodied subject”; “the lived body [is] ‘the radiation of subjectivity.” “No exterior reality determines our choices”—as in Hegel and Marx—”yet situations that we cannot but assume may so powerfully predispose us to act in particular ways that freedom may, in practice, be significantly curtailed.” Freedom comes not from the culmination of a rationally-determined historical dialectic but in strengthened social relations “chosen, built, and sustained in the here and now”—existentially, as it were.

Aristotle finds in the reciprocal rule of husband and wife in the household the nucleus of political rule in the polis. In her own way, so does Beauvoir: As subjects, the ‘otherness’ of others “is rapidly tempered by the reciprocal realization that each one of us is an object for the other, who is thus, like us, a subject.” Unlike Aristotle, she requires that such reciprocity meet the standard of egalitarianism; in this, she registers the democratic sociopolitical regime described by Tocqueville, although unlike Tocqueville she allows it to determine her moral and political doctrine. In this sense, she is no philosopher, having never ascended from the ‘cave’ of her time and place.

In considering oppression, Beauvoir doubts that Hegel’s ‘master’ in the ‘master-slave’ struggle for recognition truly esteems his masterly status because it exacts recognition from ‘his’ slave. Upon reflecting on Beauvoir’s work, Kruks identifies three kinds of oppression: asymmetrical recognition, indifference, and aversion. Dehumanization is the most extreme form of oppression. As seen in the Nazi extermination camps—where human beings “were just so much material to be processed efficiently”—to the old-age or (as they are called) retirement homes, where “the aged are frequently viewed as nothing more than pure objects,” dehumanization means treating the subject as object, as in Hegel. But of course there is a difference between dehumanization motivated by extreme aversion, as in the ‘camps,’ and the milder aversion seen in our attitudes toward the aged, as in the ‘homes.’ Sexual politics, in distinction to both of these, derives from asymmetrical recognition; it isn’t that men don’t recognize the subjectivity of women but rather that they subordinate it by the deployment of self-satisfying myths about ‘The Woman.’  In Beauvoir’s witty formulation, The Woman is “the mirror in which the male Narcissus contemplates himself,” or, as Kruks more prosaically puts it, “the object of male fantasies.” Such ‘objectifying asymmetrical nonrecognition also describes the ways in which Europeans (mis)understand Africans, Asians, even Americans. In America itself, dehumanization manifests itself most usually in an indifference fortified by complacency in contemplating the abstract principles of the Declaration of Independence and of constitutional law.

There is a difference between the dehumanization of the aged and the other kinds. The others are remediable. Although the attitudes toward the aged taken by their relatives and caretakers may be changed, aging itself cannot. Kruks remarks that, unlike The Second Sex, Beauvoir’s late book, The Coming of Age, does not conclude with a section on liberation. To borrow a Sartrian phrase, there is no exit in this life from the coming of age. “With the approach of old age one makes the startling discovery that one’s body, in its brute physical facticity, is itself ‘Other.'” Aging kills not only our bodies but our “projects,” our freedom, along with them. The old man does nothing: “He is defined by an exis, not a praxis.” She blames capitalism for this, inasmuch as “for many, a prior life of alienated labor also means that they have no existential resources to enjoy the enforced ‘leisure’ of retirement.” Old age “exposes the failure of our entire civilization,” Beauvoir writes, hyperbolically. She does not explain why socialism, as distinguished from, say, religious convictions, could help, and Kruks has nothing much to suggest, either.

Unlike many socialists from middle- or upper-class backgrounds, Beauvoir confronted her own privilege. Drawing upon Beauvoir’s thought but also supplementing it, Kruks insists on the limitations of “a politics of self-transformation” often seen among contemporary leftists, including feminists. She blames this on “a tacit neo-Kantianism” which centers on recognition of ‘the Other’ as “an autonomous rational will.” But as Beauvoir argues, and as Kruks agrees, rationalism, however well-intentioned, won’t bring us to a condition of fully egalitarian practice. “It may be preferable to acknowledge that one is privileged but then to act from one’s privileged location: to deploy one’s privilege as effectively as possible.” Beauvoir herself began to see her own privileged position as the Algerian war of independence from France intensified in the late 1950s. In the face of French brutality in Algeria, she could not deny that she was not French. But neither did she attempt to reject “her own privileged culture, or her privileges as an intellectual” within it. “Aware of her privileged status, she instead learned to deploy it as a basis for effective, public, political intervention.” Against French nationalism vis-à-vis the Algerians, she in turn deployed an appeal to patriotism, to France as the vindicator of The Rights of Man. “In actuality, Beauvoir supported a project of decolonization that did bring very significant changes in the world (not all of them perhaps for the best).” Indeed: As Kruks observes, the Third-World ‘liberation’ movements included the 1979 Iranian revolution, itself a denial of the rights of women Beauvoir had championed for so long; she broke with such French leftists as Michel Foucault, who foolishly and unjustly supported the mullahs when they “demanded that women wear the veil.” In her own way still a child of the Enlightenment, Beauvoir didn’t like veils on anything or anyone.

Such conflicts bring Kruks back to Beauvoir’s theme of the ambiguity of politics, and of human life generally. Beauvoir rejected reason as the standard of political judgment. As “acts of situated freedom,” political judgments are and should be made “with our entire being,” including our bodies, emotions, and “personal history.” Hence she treats political judgment most thoroughly in a novel, The Mandarins, not an essay. There, the main character arrives at the same political judgment Beauvoir espoused in the late Forties: alignment with a ‘third way’ democratic-socialist party in France but geopolitical support for the Soviet Union, which, “for all its deformations,” remains “the greatest force for progress and, as such, must be given support” against capitalist, imperialist America. Such judgments must always be open to revision, however, given exactly the self-knowledge they require, and also the limitations of our knowledge, both of our situation and our selves. “A political judgment is, even at its best, but an informed and reasonable guess, one made by a particular, ‘idiosyncratic’ self in a particular situation—and like all human action it is subject to failure.” (As indeed Beauvoir’s assessment of the Soviet Union so obviously was.)

“That these personal elements play a role does not mean, however, that reason is absent,” but rather that “political judgment must be understood as an existential choice.” Although Kruks doesn’t emphasize this point, she should, inasmuch as in the absence of reason, which is really nothing more than the principle of non-contradiction, judgments and choices would descend to incoherence or, when coherent, they would be so by chance, at random.

Prudential reasoning informs political life, but its end is justice, the topic of Kruks’s final chapter. Given Beauvoir’s socialism, one expects a discussion of distributive justice, but Kruks makes the more interesting choice, turning to the question of punitive justice. In her 1946 essay, “An Eye for an Eye,” Beauvoir considers the case of French Nazi collaborator Robert Brasillach, who had publicly identified Jews and Resistance members during the Occupation, effectively guaranteeing their “deportation, torture, or execution.” An opponent of capital punishment before the war, Beauvoir admitted that her heart wanted Brasillach dead. She distinguished punishment, defined as “the purely retaliatory treatment that revenge demands,” from sanctions, “those penalties that have intended purposes other than revenge,” such as deterrence or reform. “Revenge as a response to atrocity is almost always a failure on its own terms” because it cannot erase the effects of the crime. Nonetheless, true to her contention that judgment is not and should not be wholly rational, she finds hatred of “those who commit absolute evil” and “appropriate response”—a passion but not “a capricious passion.” This especially pertains to bystanders, those not directly injured by the wrongdoer; their response expresses “the inherent sociality of individuated existence,” the “intense personal bonds” we feel for those unjustly and cruelly injured and killed. Human sociality constitutes part of “who I am.” “For our world is suffused, our existence shaped, by our participation (often unchosen) in various anonymous social collectivities.” Although Kruks herself doesn’t approve of it, Beauvoir refused to sign a petition asking for clemency for Brasillach. Brasillach deserved to suffer the death penalty, in Beauvoir’s judgment, “as an expression of society’s extreme revulsion at [his] violation” of “the values that his crimes [had] violated.” Kruks prefers our contemporary ‘truth and reconciliation’ committees, whereby societies turn to a sort of therapeutic response to atrocity. She concedes that many members of those societies find reconciliation as unsatisfying as she (and to some degree Beauvoir) find punishment and sanction. As Beauvoir concluded at the end of her essay, “failure haunts all human action, love as much as vengeance.” The persistent ambiguity of human thought, sentiment, and action did not impede her “struggle for greater freedom in the world.”

Kruks’s helpful, comprehensive view of Beauvoir’s political thought shows a thinker who, beginning and remaining entirely within the horizon of ‘late-modern’ or post-Kantian political thought, with its valorization of freedom in opposition to ‘nature’ conceived as brute matter, nonetheless can be seen as struggling with the same considerations of prudence and of justice seen in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. Never having studied them carefully, she ties her own thought into unnecessary knots. Given the seminal character of her best-known book, The Second Sex, her argument there should be considered in light of the handicap imposed by her own intellectual formation.

As an advocate of freedom, Beauvoir begins with critiques of the three most prominent determinisms of the time: biology, Freudian psychology, and Marxism. “The fact is that the individual, though its genotypic sex is fixed at fertilization, can be profoundly affected by the environment in which it develops.” She concurs with Hegel’s judgment that biology enables men to act as ‘subjects,’ as individuals well adapted for activity, “while the female remains wrapped up in the species.” By this she means that after copulation the male mammal is free to leave whereas the female is stuck with pregnancy. Men create; they “strike out from temporal unity in general.” Women maintain; “in the female it is the continuity of life that seeks accomplishment” in her. “The individuality of the female is opposed by the interest of the species; it is as if she were possessed by foreign forces—alienated.” This begins well before pregnancy in menstruation and continues after it in nursing the child. The woman’s individuality remains “the prey of outside forces” until another ‘outside’ force, menopause, relieves her of these natural cycles; throughout her life, “there are many times when she is “not in command” of herself. “In comparison with her the male seems infinitely favored: his sexual life is not in opposition to his existence as a person, and biologically it runs an even course, without crises and generally without mishap.” Beauvoir resolutely overlooks the satisfaction that women take in their womanhood, and especially in child-rearing.

What she does insist upon is that although these “biological facts… are one of the keys to the understanding of woman,” they do not “establish for her a fixed an inevitable destiny” and remain “insufficient for setting up a hierarchy of the sexes.” “Woman is weaker than man” (not for her the absurd claim of some later feminists, that opening up sports for girls will result in women competing on an equal basis with men on the athletic field), but her weakness “is revealed as such only in the light of the ends man proposes, the instruments he has available, and the laws he establishes”—seen particularly in violent competition. “Thus we must view the facts in of biology in the light of an ontological, economic, social, and psychological context”; “the nature of woman has been affected throughout the course of history.”

Turning then to one of those elements, psychology, she observes that “all psychoanalysts systematically reject the idea of choice and the correlated concept of value, and therein lies the intrinsic weakness of the system.” (Decades later, feminists who argued in favor of the right to abortion ‘on demand’ framed the issue in exactly Beauvoir’s existentialist terms, as a matter of free choice.) Freud, for example, “endeavored to replace the idea of value with that of authority; but he admits in Moses and Monotheism that he has no way of accounting for this authority.” In contrast, “I shall place woman in a world of values and give her behavior a dimension of liberty,” with “the power to choose between the assertion of her transcendence [of biological and other determinisms] and her alienation as object.”

The same goes for historical materialism. Contra Marx, Beauvoir contends that the aforementioned “course of history” is not destiny. Although “the theory of historical materialism has brought to light some important truths”—notably, that “humanity is not an animal species” and “human society” arises against nature, “tak[ing] over the control of nature in its own behalf” by its “practical action.” But the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate also relieves woman’s estate, beginning to “annul the muscular inequality of man and woman.” It also liberates women from much household drudgery (without the need to enslave other human beings) and even liberates them from multiples pregnancies and from some of the burdens of child care. Marx and Engels misunderstood gestation and childbirth as ‘labor’ in the sense of artificial production; gestation and labor, and especially the sexual impulse that leads to them, register more than “productive force” in the manner of carpentry or welding. Woman “is for man a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic object—an Other through whom he seeks himself.” Even under the democratic socialism Beauvoir advocates, after the abolition of social classes, “sexual differentiation would keep all its importance” (emphasis added).  “Underlying all individual drama, as it underlies the economic history of mankind, there is an existentialist foundation that alone enables us to understand in its unity that particular form of being which we call human life.” For Beauvoir, for existentialism, the modern conquest of nature and the freedom it gives to the conquerors, relativizes all determinisms that modern scientists and philosophers have held up in its wake.

Indeed, history amounts to the story of this progressive conquest redounding to the favor of women. In the earliest societies nature bound women down with pregnancy and children; the true curse laid upon Eve was her exclusion from the “warlike forays” of men, “for it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal,” thereby “transcending” mere life by inventing tools (including weapons) and generally “shaping the future.” If this sounds very much like Hegel, Beauvoir acknowledges that indeed it does: “Certain passages in the argument employed by Hegel in defining the relation of master to slave apply much better to the relation of man to woman.” “Doomed to immanence”—the opposite of manly transcendence—for centuries, women slowly began to benefit from the victory of “Spirit” over “Life,” of “technique over magic, and reason over superstition.” Because woman instantiates the larger immanence of nature itself (more tellingly, ‘nature herself’), “the devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity.” But this is only a dialectical stage, not a permanent condition, and it too shall be transcended. There are even foreshadowings of future equality in some historical moments, such as ancient Egypt, where the goddesses lived on equal footing with the gods and “woman had the same rights as man, the same powers in court,” and the same property rights. Although Beauvoir doesn’t say so, this means that the exodus of Jews from Egypt was a dialectical reversal of that early, just social condition, for which humanity as a whole was not yet prepared; in fact she will go on to excoriate Judaism and Christianity for their masculinism.

“Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of women,” subordinating them under its legal code and banning abortion as a result of “endowing the embryo with a soul”; abortion thus “became a crime against the fetus itself,” which it never had been under the preceding Roman law. In “demand[ing] a new status,” today’s women “wish that in themselves, as in humanity in general, transcendence may prevail over immanence.” She avers that “it is in Soviet Russia that the feminist movement has made the most sweeping advances,” citing as evidence the constitution of the Soviet Union—not necessarily the most reliable reflection of the realities of the Soviet way of life.

As in history, so also in myths, which persist into modern times. “The cult of the leader, whether he be Napoleon, Mussolini, or Hitler, excludes all other cults.” Bizarrely (given the status afforded to Lenin, Stalin, and soon to Mao Zedong), she claims that “socialist ideologies, which assert the equality of all human beings, refuse now and for the future to permit any human category to be object or idol: in the authentically democratic society proclaimed by Marx there is no place for the Other.”

Leaving aside her pro-Communist niaseries and looking at the core of her argument, one notices that Beauvoir has a problem to solve. The earliest religions, matriarchies, valorized Woman but also identified her with nature, with immanence. Ultimately, Man must rebel against her. “It was Christianity, paradoxically, that was to proclaim, on a certain plane, the equality of man and woman” in its renunciation and indeed hatred of ‘the flesh’ along with the world and the devil. Women are equally invited to renounce the flesh, which they (in Beauvoir’s terms) live in and through. “If she agrees to deny her animality, woman—from the very fact that she is the incarnation of sin—will be also the most radiant incarnation of the triumph of the elect who have conquered sin.” However, she can only do this by worshipping and serving Jesus as the Christ—a male god. “This is the supreme masculine victory.” It can only be overturned dialectically by valorizing eroticism as the new spirituality, by a sort of Hegelian synthesis of body and spirit, immanence and transcendence, all expressed in social egalitarianism. This is possible because human life itself consists not only of the bodily but of a tension between body and spirit, necessity and freedom. “The bond that in every individual connects the physiological life and the psychic life—or better the relation existing between the contingence of an individual and the free spirit that assumes it—is the deepest enigma implied in the condition of being human, and this enigma is presented in its most disturbing form in woman.” “What is she?” For her answer Beauvoir again calls upon Egypt: Woman is “a sphinx,” the riddle, “a fundamental ambiguity” who—and that—must be addressed.

In the second half of The Second Sex Beauvoir accordingly abandons consideration of history and mythology, turning to “woman’s life today.” The modern world is the world of human transcendence, of nature-conquest. To be sure, men have led the way so far, but their victories have readied the world for the ascent of woman, that is, for full human liberation. In terms of this non-deterministic version of historicism, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” a being produced by “civilization as a whole,” a civilization that aims at such liberation by the means of conquering nature. Even in the course of nature itself, the pre-pubescent girl is physically and mentally equal to her male cohort; such feelings of inequality she may entertain result from social indoctrination, especially from bans on risk-taking—climbing trees, fighting. But with puberty, nature imposes restrictions. The girl finds herself now “consumed in waiting, more or less disguised.” “She is awaiting Man,” daydreaming of “the liberator,” the “rich and powerful” Prince Charming. To attract him, she must cultivate “grace and charm,” appearing “weak, futile, docile.” Whereas “the young man’s journey into existence is made relatively easy by the fact that there is no contradiction between his vocation as human being and as male,” the young woman becomes “divided against herself,” “doomed to insincerity and all its subterfuges.” On the other hand, this conflict, this ambivalence, causes her inner life to “develop more deeply than that of her brothers”; barred from action, she must think. Her eroticism is, because it must be, much less unsubtle than the man’s. Also, despite her natural inclination to maintain rather than to create and transcend, the woman’s life cycle manifests itself in “crises—puberty, sexual initiation, the menopause—which are much more decisive than in the male.” Natural reality stares the woman in the face more intently. Oddly, Beauvoir additionally contends that these facts makes the woman less socially conformist than men; she could only be thinking of herself, and not the generality of women, who are surely no less conformist than men.

Already, in 1949, the conquest of women has transformed marriage into a contract between “two independent persons.” Marriage for the woman is “a more advantageous career than many others,” inasmuch as most jobs are still closed to her, but it is nonetheless a career choice, not a necessity. “Today the house has lost its patriarchal splendor,” having become merely “a place to live in,” no longer the locus of ancestor-worship, as it was in ‘the ancient city’ described by Fustel de Coulanges. Middle-class women who “lack outside interests” will busy themselves with make-work projects, “just to have something to do.” (Indeed, one of the ‘moms’ in my old neighborhood would clean the house every day, topping this off by a weakly waxing of the patio tiles, and then prohibit her husband and their three sons, as well as the rest of us, from entering her spic-and-span domain without removing their shoes.) And when she does find something to do outside the home, typically her activities amount to good-works civic associational activities, undertaken again for the sake of warding off boredom—Tocquevillian civil society gone pretentious and silly. (To some extent, Beauvoir needs to denigrate women’s ‘clubs,’ given her commitment to a statist socialism that would absorb such things into its all-encompassing egalitarian embrace.)

In her drive to liberate women from what has been considered necessity, Beauvoir does not hesitate to attack the continued valorization of motherhood. Returning to abortion, she claims that laws against abortion rest on “the old Catholic argument” that “the unborn child has a soul, which is denied access to paradise if its life is interrupted without baptism.” But, she objects, the Church does not oppose capital punishment or war; indeed the Holy Wars were launched against the unbaptized. In this she ignores the obvious point that murderers and marauding anti-Christian soldiers deliberately oppose Christian principles and practices, unlike unborn children. And of course by rejecting natural right she can simply avoid the question of a natural right to life. As for the mother who gives birth, she “is almost always a discontented woman” who attempts “to compensate for all [her] frustrations through her child,” spanking her child as a means of “taking her vengeance on a man, on the world, or on herself.” It is again difficult to resist the thought that Beauvoir takes a jaundiced view toward mothers and their supposed discontentedness. She also overlooks the maternal love of one’s own, which explains the ambitions mothers entertain for their children at least as well as displaced frustration. Admitting the strength of the love of one’s own would throw both her eroticism and her socialism into serious question.

Summarizing her analysis, Beauvoir writes that “Woman does not entertain the positive belief that the truth is something other than men claim; she recognizes, rather, that there is not any fixed truth,” a recognition based on the decided changes in her own body that occur at certain junctures in her lifetime. In denying the fluidity of truth, man is the one who is finally the greater hypocrite, “pompously thunder[ing] for his code of virtue and honor” while secretly inviting woman “to disobey it” and confidently expecting her to do so. “Man gladly accepts as his authority Hegel’s idea according to which the citizen acquires his ethical dignity in transcending himself toward the universal, but as a private individual he has a right to desire and pleasure,” marrying one woman and frolicking in a whorehouse with another, or others. Under these circumstances, woman consoles herself with religion, “the mirage of some form of transcendence.”

Beauvoir assures her readers that a forthrightly atheistic if not materialist democratic socialism will change all this. Equal work, equal pay, “erotic liberty,” consensual marriage which can be broken “at will,” free contraception and abortion, State-paid pregnancy leaves, State-sponsored child care (children will not “be taken away from their parents” but “would not be abandoned to them” by society): “Only in a socialist world” can these dreams be realized. The Hegelian dialectic will be consummated in mutual recognition of man and woman, but without any permanent ‘synthesis’ or ‘end of History,’ inasmuch as “sexuality will always be materialized [in] the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence.” Nature, conquered, will also be redeemed as fully human, as Marx promises. By sexualizing Hegel and Marx, Beauvoir corrects them, relieving their theories of excesses of masculine ‘transcendence’ while making socialism more humanly satisfying, less Heaven-like.

Having remained entirely within the horizon of modern philosophy, Beauvoir underestimates nature both as a physical entity and as a source of right. (It almost goes without saying that she rejects God as the ultimate source of right.) Accordingly, she assumes that she can maximize freedom and equality at the same time, a circle not so easily squared if one respects the integrity of circles and the principle of non-contradiction. In presenting laws of change as an account of Being as a whole, Hegelian logic aims at overcoming that principle, of incorporating it into a larger movement. Beauvoir’s version of Hegelian and Marxian dialectic partakes of the dubiousness of its forebears, but it has succeeded in bringing modern feminism along with it.

 

 

Ross Abbinnett: Politics of Happiness: Connecting the Philosophical Ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida to the Political Ideas of Happiness. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

 

Aristotle understands happiness as the exercise of the distinctively human virtues, not as a mood or a feeling. The small polis, where fellow-citizens knew one another, might be conducive to the cultivation of character. The large, modern state, with its impersonality and the mass-life that lends itself to fleeting satisfaction of their conjuring by entrepreneurs public and private, makes Abbinnett long for a less atomized, more “collective pursuit of the good life.” Yet how can such a collective pursuit succeed if conducted within the framework of the modern state? Abbinnett sensibly rejects the modern ideologies that promise happiness wrongly understood, but nonetheless stays entirely within the philosophic parameters set by those who substituted ‘History’ for natural right and the God of the Bible for its moral standard. He concludes by eschewing the grander promises of modern utopianism while remaining hopeful for some other, more modest socialist proposals.

He begins by objecting to defining happiness in exclusively individualist terms. “The experience of happiness… is essentially related to ideas of the good society and to the forms of individual life that are appropriate to it.” He defines such ideas not as discoveries about human nature—an idea he rejects—but as the products of historical formation; indeed, the ‘individual’ itself is such a product. Availing himself of the jargon of neo-Marxist thinker Theodor Adorno, he describes the modern individual “cut off from the satisfactions of God and ethical life, and subjected to a regime in which work and desire have been synthesized into modalities of the commodity form.” That is, the Enlightenment valorization of rationality, especially of instrumental rationality, has been combined by the modern regimes with a ‘work ethic’; this strategy alienates human beings from their own natural sense of happiness in order to “maximiz[e] the efficiency of production.” Under capitalism, “The original ethos of Enlightenment philosophy, which was the emancipation of humanity from its subjection to the gods and to nature, is transformed into a regime of control in which every aspect of human particularity is expressed as a quantum of productive potential.” Our ‘happiness’ now consists of effects “controlled by the standardized aesthetics of the culture industry”—Hollywood films, music, and so on.

Abbinnett, however, would ‘complexify’ Adorno’s analysis. The “politics of happiness” that has emerged under the thought-regime of Enlightenment and the political-economic regime of capitalism derives from “three different, opposed, but essentially related versions of what Enlightenment is, and what its moral, ethical, and political consequences have been.” These versions are stated by Hegel, with his ethics of ‘recognition’; Nietzsche, with his “critique of metaphysics”; and Derrida, “the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘other’ that has arisen from Enlightenment ideals of transparency and calculability,” including the Hegelian Enlightenment.

The sensible side of Abbinnett’s project may be seen in his insistence that “political ideologies are attempts to realize impossible regimes of happiness” because there remains “an essential difference between practical and philosophic politics.” Such ideologies as utilitarian liberalism, Marxism, and fascism fail to see and accept this difference, which consists in the distinction between “a reflective consideration of the questions of freedom, solidarity, and well being posed by the contestation of ideologies”—that is, the contradictions among political opinions—and “the attempt to solicit the support of the masses through representational techniques”—rhetoric, broadly defined. Abbinnett’s own commitment to a form of ‘postmodernism’ in philosophy wedded to a form of socialism in practice may be seen in his preference for ideologies capable of opening themselves “to the experience of difference as a possible source of education or desire”; for example, he prefers ‘multiculturalism’ to more strictly defined understandings of what an ethically sound ethos is.

He begins with liberalism—not the natural-rights liberalism of Hobbes or Locke but the utilitarian liberalism of Bentham. Bentham grounds happiness in a human nature that does not itself have moral content, but simply must be accommodated because its core, pleasure and pain, is ineluctable. For Bentham, “any practical, theoretical, or moral principle that violates the capacity of human beings for the enjoyment of pleasure is, by definition, perverse and sophistic.” By his account, moral obligation arises not from duty but from a sentiment, sympathy—itself pleasurable. “The sheer immediacy of the physical sensation of pleasure… is the one true source of human happiness,” the “ultimate good for which all human beings exist.” Rejecting the moral claim of the ‘ancients,’ who integrated “enjoyment into the economy of sacrifice and deferral that is proper to the moral community of the Polis,” Bentham subordinates all political and social institutions to the pleasure of individuals. His successor, John Stuart Mill demurs to the extent that he insists that “not all pleasures are equal” (famously, in Mill’s words, “it is better to be a human being satisfied than a pig satisfied”); nonetheless, Mills also subordinates the modern state to the happiness of individuals, thus redefined and ranked. But this, Abbinnett argues (following Mill, as it happens) undermines the legitimacy of unbridled capitalism, leading at very least to welfare-state liberalism or to democratic socialism.

Hegel moves in for the kill, rejecting utilitarian individualism for the social-political concept of ‘recognition.’ For Abbinnett, the crux of Hegel’s refutation points to the inadequacy of any notion of happiness that refers only to the individual and its physical satisfaction; human satisfaction filters through our social relations, how we understand ourselves in large measure by our exposure to the opinions of others, very much including their opinions of ourselves. For his part, Nietzsche attacks even this wider conception of happiness or satisfaction, although he shares with Hegel a disdain for “the proliferation of desires that takes place through the modern market economy,” whose ‘consumerism’ collides with the inevitable fact of death. Famously, Nietzsche analyzes human life not in terms of the dialectics of recognition but in terms of the will to power, which Hegelian ‘recognition’ merely exemplifies. Hegel’s rational, administrative state is only another example of the modern state itself, that “cold monster,” as Nietzsche calls it.

To counter the modern dilemma, Nietzsche proposes self-overcoming, including the rejection of the terms of utilitarian pleasure seeking and of Hegelian (and Marxist) sociality. Overcoming physical appetites and aversions and also social ambitions and worries requires fearlessness, risk, living dangerously. Abbinnett contends that liberalism under Nietzsche’s influence becomes the ‘neoliberalism’ or libertarianism of Friedrich von Hayek (unjustly, he should rather have said Ayn Rand), with its esteem for entrepreneurial risk-taking and innovation, a “quasi-Nietzschean vitalism.” But this only returns us to capitalism’s “constant expansion of desire” in the individual, again subject to the ultimate limitation of death, and of the fear of death. Abbinnett implausibly attempts to tie this form of neoliberalism to Francis Fukuyama’s argument in The End of History, at the price of ignoring the Platonic dimension of Fukuyama’s argument, which grounds his thought in an understanding of human nature well beyond utilitarian pleasure and pain, and also beyond Nietzschean spiritedness, and not simply in ‘History.’ He goes on to charge Fukuyama with “conceal[ing] the modes of violence and subjection through which global-technological capitalism operates.” Abbinnett needs to do so because he rejects the idea of human nature as a ‘constant,’ whether so conceived as an existing ‘constant’ (as in natural-rights and also utilitarian thinkers) or as a future one (as in the Hegelian-Marxist ‘end of History’).

Abbinnett charges liberalism and its capitalism (or, as he might say, capitalism and its liberalism) with a self-contradictory “demand for the constant expansion of the market” “completely uncoupled from the moral economy of collective wellbeing,” and thus with “the ethical questions that are implicit in the concept of happiness.” Can ‘postmodernism’ help?

No, at least not in its aestheticist forms. There can be no escape from modernity into, for example, music, as Schopenhauer urges. Here Abbinnett has recourse to Marx, for whom “the ‘happiness’ produced by the ideals of heroism, romantic love, freedom, and redemption that have come to dominate the artistic imagination can be no more than an illusion imposed upon the experience of alienation,” an experience produced by capitalism. Once again, however, Abbinnett wants to complicate matters, regarding Marxian materialism insufficient and recalling the seriousness with which Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida treat “the aesthetic dimension of modernity.” Hegel recalls “the aesthetic unity of the Polis,” which Romanticism, for all its irrationalism, nonetheless sought to recover for the modern world. True, the “beautiful soul” of Romanticism can never suffice by itself, but it forms a necessary part of Hegel’s dialectical synthesis. The “crude utility” of bourgeois life seeks escape into “Romantic fantasies,” but both utility and aesthetic satisfaction may be found in the craft and trade guilds that give modern civil society—otherwise restless and atomistic under conditions of capitalism—the stability human beings would otherwise lack under those conditions. Abbinnett takes the point, while deploring the “conservatism” of such “corporate” structures.

Nietzsche is no ‘conservative.’ He takes Schopenhauer’s analysis of music and removes its merely contemplative component, contending that “the choral accompaniment to the [Greek tragic] drama provokes feelings of ecstatic unity with those tragic individuals who have tested the authority of the gods.” The “transformative power of the tragic arises from a feeling of sublime unity with the primordial force of creation.” Such force never rests. Therefore, “the truth cannot be presented in a form that is free from stylistic configuration,” from the current but not lasting state of reality or ‘Being.’ ‘Being’ “has no objective existence that can be expressed independently of the mythological powers of Dionysus and Apollo,” that is, of irrational energy and rational form, both in constant flux. Modern ‘culture’ fails to cultivate; “the means of cultural dissemination”—serving the ‘many,’ the ‘masses,’ the demos—has “all but stripped the aesthetic of its relationship to the tragedy of ethical life, and transformed it into the medium of homogenous desire,” of egalitarianism. Democracy, socialism make “the highest end of humanity” nothing better than “the alleviation of all contingency in the mode of production,” the “alleviation of suffering” which simultaneously would amount to “the end of the possibility of happiness.” Without tragedy, no possibility of joy can survive. Socialism is only another power-relation, deriving from and not really overcoming “bourgeois culture.” Against this, Abbinnett recurs to “the cautious precision of Adorno’s negative dialectics,” which “remains suspicious of such solicitations of individual will and creative conflict” as theoretical invitations to fascism in practice.

Derrida to the rescue. At least partially. Derrida questions the “Socratic hegemony,” by which he means “the claim that the fundamental concepts deployed by philosophy as such are unaffected by the languages in which they are expressed.” But according to him, language is both conventional and to some considerable degree untranslatable; he offers a new and more sophisticated form of classical conventionalism, itself a form of pre-Socratic philosophy. Even Heidegger’s attempt to recover pre-Socratic thought is “contaminated by the abstract categories through which it is presented”; it gives insufficient weight to the vagaries of language, of convention. The vast quantity of conventions, of ‘differences,’ results in “constant transformation,” whereby (for example) “fascism re-emerges as the good defender of the homeland against immigration” and “socialism becomes the reactionary voice of the white working class,” all attempts at “conjur[ing] an experience of unity from an illimitable play of difference.” It is enough to make Abbinnett turn to Marx, as he does in his central chapter.

As is well known, Marx came to reject Hegel’s Absolute Spirit in favor of dialectical materialism. “Bourgeois ideals” have no existence independence of their economic base, that is, the means of production. Marxism persists, Abbinnett maintains, because it offers a “critique of the economics of waste”; it promises “the overthrow of the bourgeois state”; it proposes a “theory of the immanent purpose of human history” in the classless or egalitarian society; it provides a “theory of radical democracy and distributive justice” based upon that egalitarianism; and it offers “a theory of human flourishing.” But Derrida observes that Marxism, too, remains vulnerable to a “plurality of contestations” or contradictory opinions “through which the fate of Marxism is constantly redetermined.” As technology redefines our social world it also redefines Marxist categories; for example, the bourgeois-proletarian relations Marx saw no longer exist, at least not in anything resembling the modern societies of the mid-nineteenth century. Accordingly, there is always, and must always be, a ‘New’ Left, absent the ever-receding ‘end of history.’ Marx’s central ‘moral’ doctrine, the “labor theory of value,” comes into question under the very socio-economic change that Marx himself considered the energy and stuff of ‘History.’ Abbinnett nonetheless concedes to Marx that “any neo-Hegelian politics of happiness must… begin with Marx’s characterization of the bourgeois epoch as ‘everlasting agitation'” or dialectic. But it must not end there, given the violence of Marxian practice, which is “bound up with a mythology of natural happiness” or “species-being” (emphasis added), despite Marx’s historicist ambitions. “The programmatic liquidation of classes deemed to be reactionary elements of the old order makes no sense unless it is understood as an attempt to purify society of everything that could be considered acquisitive, individualistic, or bourgeois”; under such an ethic, ‘freedom’ “becomes utterly idealized and utterly destructive.” Given this grim fact, is it “possible to be a happy socialist”? Evidently not, inasmuch as “there is a tension between the ultimate satisfaction of man’s species-being under the conditions of socialized production and the power of capital constantly to transform the intellect, sensibility, and desire of human beings.” Accordingly, Abbinnett rejects Marxian “historical teleology” altogether.

Nietzsche, then? Abbinnett rightly observes that Nietzsche would regard Marxism as a result of democracy or egalitarianism and of embourgeoisement, and assuredly not of their overcoming. To Nietzsche, Marxism would offer only another “unitary regime of calculative materialism.” Marxism offers “the constant vacillation of workers’ movements between the utopian promise of universal creativity and the Sisyphean labor of equalizing the of all in the means of subsistence.” This notwithstanding, Abbinnett tries to redeem socialism in Nietzschean terms—a characteristic move of the ‘postmodern’ Left. He attempts to reconcile socialism with Nietzsche’s will to power. This, he sees, would entail “a total transformation of what ‘socialism’ means.” This will require “the power of those who have disciplined the chaos of their own organic nature to impose order on the formlessness of ‘the herd,'” the actions of “those ‘free spirits’ who are capable of enacting their desires.” “Can this Nietzschean genealogy of socialism be mapped onto the ethical, political, and epistemic assemblage of Marxism?” Abbinnett bravely asks. Yes, he answers (against those of us who would say, ‘Not really’): Marxism offers “the possibility of a radical transvaluation of the social covenant that comes with each new generation”; Marxian Nietzscheism would jettison Marx’s teleological scientism, Marx’s proud claim to have formulated the first scientific socialism. “New categories are required to understand both the experiences of suffering and exploitation that arise from the global networks of capitalism, and the technological integration of mind, organism, body, and life into the expanded regime commodification” seen in those networks. Abbinnett makes lemonade of the bitter lemon of the pursuit of happiness: Socialism’s “pursuit of universal happiness can neither be realized nor, as an inherently ethical demand, given up.” But if so, why does this not simply reproduce the Platonic and Aristotelian insight that theory is not practice, albeit at the service of a dogmatic egalitarianism?

Abbinnett devotes his final two chapters to disposing of two rivals to this highly attenuated Marxism, a Marxism in which the ‘neo’ overbalances the Marxism. In the first, fascism, he finds its “appeal” in an “aesthetic solicitation of suprahuman powers which exceed the commonality of human suffering,” an amoral and “destructive” culture which, in its purest form, Nazism, broke with the Christian Church and the regime of monarchy by determining “to colonize the feelings of sacred devotion that were inspired by the church” in a form of “volkish militancy” expressed by “the mass aesthetics of broadcast technologies” deployed in the service of “a politically transformative power.” On Nazism or national socialism, Abbinnett suddenly becomes much more concrete and political in his analysis, much less ‘spiritual’/philosophic than he was on neo-Marxian socialism. He can then claim, with Adorno, that “Nazism is essentially a politics of scapegoating” (emphasis added—an attack on Jews and other ‘others’—even though in practice Marxism has been no less ‘essentially’ that, with the target being socio-economic classes instead of ‘races.’ Although fascism in its Nazi form obviously derives from modern ‘race science,’ he describes it as “an ideology that promises happiness through the complete rejection of modernity, and the return to an archaic community of ‘blood and soil.'” But the Nazi community of ‘blood and soil’ would have nothing archaic about it. Aryan blood will extend throughout the soil of the earth, availing itself of modern technology as its legitimate tool of ruling those ‘inferior’ races Nazis choose not to exterminate.

Abbinnett offers this critique of fascism because he needs to turn Nietzsche into an egalitarian channel, a move that can only be pushed behind a very heavy plow. Nietzsche, he remarks, anticipates fascism with his hierarchy of the strong over the weak and his ‘biologist’ materialism. His valorization of “overcoming” “inevitably and necessarily lends itself to the intensification of life through the spectacle of violence,” which it would indeed, if Nietzsche were the straightforward materialist Abbinnett takes him to be. But Nietzsche despises anti-Semitism, biological or other, and his materialism entails a far more refined life of the mind than anything offered by the crudities of Marxism, ‘neo’ or Karlite. This is not to endorse Nietzscheism; it is to defend it against the likes of Adorno, Derrida, and other apostles of an uncritical egalitarianism.

Fascist pseudo-religiosity puts Abbinnett in mind of the real thing, to which he devotes his final chapter. Except he doesn’t write about the real thing, focusing instead on religion as conceived by Hegel and Nietzsche. For Hegel, he rightly observes, “revealed religion should act as an allegorical expression of spirit”—that is, the Absolute Spirit—”within the relations of civil society.” The separateness of the Holy Spirit from all created things, including man, distinguishes the Holy Spirit from Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, but the Christian teaching that God took human form, along with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit upon conversion, brings Christianity closer to Hegel’s doctrine than any other major religion. Abbinnett’s “principal concern” here “is the return of religion to the increasingly abstract, disenchanted, and antagonistic relations of modernity” after Nietzsche’s radical challenge to Hegelian rationalism. If the Enlightenment project has failed, then why would religion not return, as registered in (for example) Gilles Kepel’s The Revenge of God? Indeed, “as the world becomes increasingly abstract and technocratic, so the yearning for the experience of the sacred grows stronger.” Heaven forfend, Abbinnett in effect exclaims. “We must ask if the happiness of humanity will always depend on the power of sacrificial violence” (including the Crucifixion) “and the hope of transcendental unity with the divine” (which isn’t exactly what Christians hope for, but Hegelianized ex-Christians do). Abbinnett wants the answer to be ‘No.’

“From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, Nietzschean materialism is nihilistic because pure will, freed from its responsibilities to a transcendent God, has no concrete relation either to other human beings or to its own essence as a created form. From a Nietzschean perspective, on the other hand, Christianity is nihilistic because of its denial of the creative forces that brought form and vitality to human civilization.” Abbinnett declines to adjudicate the matter, preferring to address the sociopolitical consequences of Nietzsche’s challenge to Christianity and to the Enlightenment. “First, we are forced to reckon with the necessary involvement of religion with the secular forces that have formed the regime of domination that is peculiar to each different culture.” Second, “the death of religion that Nietzsche envisages” will end in its resurrection, a “reversion to orthodoxy” “within the globalized relations of modernity.” Third, the return of religion presages a return to the religious wars the Enlightenment hoped to end. Abbinnett hopes to turn this return to a more narrowly moral path: a politics of compassion, of “alleviat[ing] the suffering of the Other.” The political ramification of this morality is, of course, socialism.

For this purpose, he again appeals to Derrida, who “argues that there are two sources of the word religion, both of which are irreducible, and each of which is contaminated by the other”: religiere, derived from legere or harvest, gathering; and religare, derived from ligare, meaning to tie or bind. The ‘binding’ element consists of “blind faith in the sacred”; the ‘harvest’ element consists of a “discursive community of the book” which discloses the sacred. Abbinnett knows that fascism’s symbol, the Roman fasces, denotes binding, and that Hitler’s Mein Kampf amounts to an attempted Bible-substitute. This enables him to assert that fascism and religion bear resemblance to one another, issuing in similar calls for confessional purity and “holy war.” He ignores that Marxism operates exactly the same way; the modern tyrannies of the Right and the Left gather men together in bonds requiring self-sacrifice in violent struggle. He prefers a kinder, gentler Marxism, but one might as well prefer a kinder, gentler ‘authoritarianism’ of the Right. In this he follows Derrida, who finds “the essence of all religious faith” in “the original promise of religiere,” that the faithful “should seek the truth of God in whatever, or whomever, confronts the sacred community.” This reinvents Enlightenment religious toleration (while avoiding Enlightenment rationalism) under the rubric of ‘diversity.’

Abbinnett concludes with an inconclusiveness that follows from his argument. While “each of us experiences our own particular moments of joy, love, and ecstasy,” “contingent and unsustainable,” a politics of happiness cannot exist because political life, for all its turbulence, requires some degree of stability and sustainability—as suggested by the quintessential political term, ‘regime.’ The radical historicism Abbinnett shares with Heidegger and Derrida prevents  him from endorsing any real political order. His socialism is exactly that: a course of social relations, fluid and ever-changing, resistant to structure and duration, a thing founded (if that is the word) on egalitarian “mutual recognition.” In this it resembles the commercial capitalism he deplores. Like it, it would require defenders in order to survive those who are not egalitarians, but that would spoil it. “We must recognize that happiness is a moral experience that can only be approached through the presence of others, both familiar and unfamiliar, to whom we must respond without the expectation of requital.” But what if those others requite us the wrong way? Christianity says, Turn the other cheek. But Christianity has God as the final requite. Abbinnett’s endless ‘History’ does not.

 

Steven Forde: Locke, Science, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 41, Number 2, Fall 2014. Republished with permission.

 

During his lifetime, Leo Strauss enjoyed conversations and correspondence with several philosophic friends who disagreed sharply but intelligently with him. It is nonetheless fair to say that the intelligent scholarly responses to his work—apart from those by men and women who have modeled their work on his own—remain rare. While Strauss has never lacked scholarly critics of serious and even well-nigh deadly intent, they have inclined toward polemics.

How refreshing and instructive to read Professor Forde’s book, which strikes me as exactly the sort of non-Straussian scholarly work that Straussians (and every other stripe of political-philosophy scholar) can study with pleasure. He writes in a good cause, bringing clarity to the writings of John Locke, that philosopher of supreme discretion and even indirection.

By “non-Straussian,” I mean that Forde departs from the main line of Strauss’s account of Locke, namely, that Locke presented himself as a respectable, Christian writer along the lines of “the judicious” Richard Hooker, but in fact took his philosophic bearings from the decidedly un-Christian Thomas Hobbes. Forde dissents, arguing that although Locke considered himself both a philosopher engaged in the modern-scientific project of Francis Bacon—as was Hobbes—and a literary defender of that project, he rejected Hobbesian materialism and founded his version of natural right on a version of divine right—not, to be sure, the divine right of kings, but rather a natural right divine in origin. Further, Locke’s ‘god’ endowed rights to humanity as a whole, not simply or even primarily to individuals; Forde thus challenges or at least qualifies what has come to be called Lockean individualism—a rubric that Strauss, and not only Strauss, endorsed. Forde also dissents from Strauss’s interpretive approach to Locke. He does not regard Locke as a writer with an esoteric teaching protected by an exoteric shell; he contends that Locke’s argument, though convoluted, can be discovered by allowing for different emphases in his different books. Just as Locke contends that the human mind classifies most of the things it encounters according to the use it wants to make of them, so did Locke present his teaching somewhat differently in different books, depending on the purpose he intended each book to serve. Locke’s true teaching is not so much secret or disguised as elaborately nuanced.

In his introduction, Forde identifies as “the foundation” of Locke’s philosophy not individual rights, but natural law “that exists, and can only exist, as divine command” (1). Nature consists of atoms in motion, as Locke’s friend, the chemist Robert Boyle, had maintained, and as Aristotle and the Scholastics, who took their bearings from Aristotle, had denied. Aristotelians understood nature not as a concatenation of atoms, and perhaps not primarily as material at all, but as formal and teleological—to be understood as “ordered into species or kinds” (4), each aiming at a telos or purpose. Locke follows his new-science colleagues by saying that species or forms do not exist in nature at all, but “are pure products of the mind” (5). Applying this claim to human beings, Locke argues that natural right must be completely revised to conform with the epistemology of the new science. The Is/Ought problem, so memorably identified by David Hume, already preoccupies Locke, who offers an answer to it. But his answer cannot be found in its entirety in any one of Locke’s books, which collectively form a sort of network or system, each making its own indispensable contribution to the whole.

Forde’s four substantive chapters address the scientific foundations of Locke’s doctrine, its moral dimensions, its political dimensions, and his teaching on education, respectively. He begins with the Essay concerning Human Understanding. “Locke will essentially wipe away all the traditional forms of knowledge, including moral knowledge”; “the new original of knowledge” will, “perhaps above all,” promise “results that will be useful to mankind (14-15, italics added). In so doing, Locke follows the lead of Francis Bacon, whose empiricism and experimentalism yield “only probable knowledge,” not certainty. But mere probability will not suffice, “in Locke’s own view, for morality,” and “empirical investigation, in any case can never yield moral insight” (17). Before showing how Locke meets this dilemma, Forde steps back to describe the thought of Locke’s relevant antecedents.

Aristotle “had confronted arguments similar to those later made by Baconian empiricists, weighted them, and rejected them” (19). He, too, propounded an “approach to knowledge [that] was resolutely empirical at its root,” an approach deriving from “Socrates’ turn away from airy abstractions to a more common-sense approach to reality, as reflected in ordinary human speech” (19). The empirical matter in question was speech, which leads quickly to consideration of the noun—that is, to ideas or forms, “the patterns or templates for the concrete objects we encounter in experience” (19). The Socratic/Platonic answer to Heraclitus’s claim that all is flux is that all could not be flux because we detect relatively stable entities all around us, entities that moreover can be seen to fall into identifiable kinds or species. “It makes sense to call these patterns ‘forms,’ to reflect the empirical, even visual, roots of the theory” (19). To know nature is to know the forms in which it manifests itself. In distinction to Plato’s Socrates, but not simply in contradiction of him, Aristotle maintained that although “the particulars are prior” to the forms, the forms “have independent being”; although the forms we see in the particulars exist only in those particulars, they serve as causes of the particulars—causes independent of material causes (21-22). Without an appreciation of form, one “cannot account for the order of nature, or for the fact that there is qualitative as well as quantitative change” observable in it (22-23). In particular, one cannot account for the capacity of what we now call organic beings to grow towards aa form, to perfect themselves, to move towards a telos. Things or substances “are compounded of form and matter,” both (24), with form the same in each individual within a species and matter the source of individuation. To know, “we must always begin with sense experience,” but then “get beyond it or behind it, to a grasp of the forms and permanent realities that will alone allow us to understand the world” (25). As the senses receive sensations that detect objects, the mind receives the forms that permit us to understand those objects.

Some of this fits the Biblical account of Adam, charged by God with the task of naming—that is to say, classifying—the objects in the Garden of Eden in accordance with their “kinds.” On the basis of this and other congruities between Scripture and Aristotelianism, Thomas Aquinas achieved his impressive synthesis of the two lines of thought. Although the Bible precludes the Aristotelian claim that the cosmos is eternal, it does allow for the existence of forms, now understood as “creations of God, or more precisely…part of the divine mind or essence” (27). God also implanted in His highest creation, man, both the capacity to do good—syndaresis—and the capacity to fail, willfully and therefore culpably. “Aquinas follows Aristotle and Plato in holding that the forms or species are real entities—all three are ‘realists’ as modern philosophical terminology has it,” considering species or kinds as “templates according to which nature is organized” (28). Led by William of Ockham, the realists’ opponents, the ‘nominalists,’ maintain that forms have no status ‘out there’; they “are concepts by which we organize our experience,” with “no existence outside of our minds” (28). Our only way to perceive the world outside our minds is sense perception of particular objects; therefore, Aristotelian/Thomistic formal causation is unnecessary to understanding nature. If nature is in fact directed by a final cause, Ockham accepts this “only as an article of faith,” not as a result of “natural reason” (30). What replaces the forms for Ockham is the divine will, a will unconstrained by forms, templates; to think otherwise, as Aquinas does, amounts to a sort of sacrilege—the theological equivalent of a restraining order on God’s freedom. “True knowledge such as God has, is knowledge of reach and every particular, in its particularity”—of every sparrow that falls, of every hair on every head (31). The human resort to universals betrays the weakness of our minds, their finitude; while in our feebleness we need such concepts, they do not convey reality as God created it.

This leads Ockham to distinguish between God’s ordinate power and God’s absolute power. “God’s absolute power consists in the fact that he was free to create the world in radically different ways”; but once He decided upon creating this world He manifested his “ordinate” power, “remaining within the ambit of this created order” (33). This is why Ockham himself relies on species (although as mere concepts) to describe the world as God has established it. The world “remains somewhat conditional,” dependent on God’s continued will to keep it the way it is (33). Jewish and Christian faith entails our acknowledgment of this dependency. Moral law is the same way: “In this creation…God has condemned adultery and murder, and commanded love of himself,” but in some other creation He might not have done so. We need divine revelation of His moral law for that reason, inasmuch as we cannot know God’s reason or reasons for setting it down the way He did. However, in considering God’s creation as “grounded in God’s ordinate power,” we may “arrive at some understanding of moral law,” as indeed Aristotle had done, unaided by Scripture (34).

Nominalism will look quite different if God disappears. Forde offers an illuminating account of the background of Locke’s thought in the Baconian project. Bacon took over the nominalists’ empiricism but, “unlike them, indeed in complete opposition to their spirit…conceived a sweeping plan for the mastery of nature by human power, rooted in a new empirical science” (37). The regularities seen in nature derive not from forms but from matter itself, motion, and the laws of matter and motion. Intellectual intuition or noesis supplemented by logical deduction from supposed noetic insights will get us nowhere; empirical observation of particulars, aided by the inductive logic of experiment—torturing nature to reveal her secrets, in Bacon’s phrase—will obtain the only knowledge of nature we can have, which turns out to be enough for the project of mastery. We need to torture nature because nature consists fundamentally of atoms ; not only is an atomistic nature too complex to understand adequately by noetic apprehension of forms (as Ockham understood), but atoms themselves (unlike hairs) are too small to see. Both our minds and our senses are inadequate to understand nature, unaided by the method of torture. to the obvious question—Why are there atoms in the first place?—Bacon replies, simply, that’s the way it is; it is “one of the follies of the human mind to seek an explanation beyond this, a ‘why'” (42). One might as well ask a theologian why God exists. In any philosophic or theological system, there must be some ‘given.’ For Bacon, atoms are as far back as we can get.

Because matter is always in motion, so are forms. What we call kinds or species are the shapes in which atoms now manifest themselves. As in Ockham, natural reality consists of two levels: ordinary or regular, mechanical nature—”nature in its species and activities as we find them today”—and “metaphysical,” nature’s “fundamental and universal laws which constitute forms” (44). God has disappeared from the picture. We will know that we know nature insofar as we can control it; this, not noesis and not divine revelation, is the new source of intellectual certainty for human beings, insofar as we can reach certainty. Such a project will “require the labor of many hands, and many minds” (45)—hence the formation of the Royal Society in England in 1660, the institutionalization of the Baconian project.

Locke’s friend Robert Boyle became a charter member of the Society, and remained one of its most distinguished. Aristotelianism does not—the new scientists maintain that it cannot—tell us “how exactly…form exert[s] its influence” over matter (51). How does the form of the oak actually cause the acorn “to develop properly” (52)? Boyle defends atomism by claiming that the “corpuscles” or atoms can cause forms to exist because they differ in their “texture”—that is, in their size and shape. Form derives from the texture of the corpuscles that combine to make the object; “when an object changes color, or becomes liquid, this is not the supervention of a new Aristotelian form, but merely a change in the body,” a rearrangement of the corpuscles. Crucially, the sizes and shapes of material corpuscles are not Aristotelian forms but “modes of matter”: “modifications of a single underlying material or stuff” with “purely physical or material variations.” “There is no such thing as a change in kind in Boyle’s material nature” (57). Boyle calls nature a “cosmical mechanism” or “great automaton,” with no mind or purpose of its own. Any purpose it has it owes entirely to God. The teleological nature of the Scholastics ‘”verges on pantheism,” and thus on impiety, by making nature “a subaltern deity, carrying out God’s plan” (60).

Two problems arise. First, there is the matter of gravity, which “seems little better than the neo-Aristotelian ‘appetite to fall'” as an explanation for how it is that things do fall when “gravity” is present. To say that a horse is a horse because of its horseness may not help us much, but neither does saying that things fall because it’s grave around here. Forde observes that this problem remains unsolved for modern scientists to this day. Second, there is the persistent problem of accounting for species in terms of corpuscular “modes of matter.” How do atoms get to be differentiated in size and shape? Here Boyle makes an un-Baconian move, bringing God back. “Boyle makes God the first mover” (62)—again, in the manner of Ockham, distinguishing between the ordinary operations of nature and its origin. This frees science from the charge of impiety while freeing scientists to concentrate their minds on the mechanisms of nature as we now experience it. Whereas Bacon accounted for species by a process of natural selection, Boyle simply contends that “in the beginning God created the ‘seeds’ from which the species sprang” (63), imposing the modes upon matter. “An unbaptized Epicurean,” Forde notes, “might accuse Boyle…of taking the easy way out” (64). Be this as it may, Boyle carefully shifts scientific terminology away from speaking of the nature of a thing and toward speaking “of a thing’s ‘constitution’ or ‘individual mechanism'” (66). This causes a further problem, however, when the scientist considers such phenomena as natural disasters or defective specimens or “monsters.” If the existence of these calamities requires us to question the Scholastics’ teleology (does nature really produce nothing in vain?), then do they not also pose questions for Boyle’s providentialism? “Boyle mentions this difficulty, only to say that dealing with it is not part of his present topic. It never seems to have been part of his topic” (67). True to his eschewal of exotericism, Forde suggests that Boyle might argue that calamities arise because the divinely ordered sees or corpuscles “operate from the ground up, as it were,” not through divine supervision, and that this accounts for imperfections and occasional mishaps (68). Locke would propose a more radical solution.

Locke has yet another difficulty to address: the origin of morality. “The theory of forms allowed morality to be built into nature, so to speak, by the same means that the species were built into nature” (69). Subtract the forms as independent causes, and where does that leave morality? Boyle “simply relies on the presumptive validity of Christian morality and the Christian revelation.” “This is the point at which Locke ceased to be guided by him” (70).

Forde turns to Locke’s “moral epistemology” in his second chapter. In the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues that “there are no species, in the sense of a class of things brought into being according to a pattern, each of which shares certain ‘essential’ traits by virtue of being a number of that species”; “monsters” are as natural as any other specimen of a putative kind. Species are useful concepts “of our own devising,” but particulars are the only beings that actually exist (73). Neither biological science nor moral science can regard man as a real being—an essence or template to which individual specimens may be compared. Our concepts or categories, including man, depend (in the Baconian way) “on the purposes for which we are making the distinction” between the thing we are thinking about and all the other things we perceive. Analogously, our moral principles are “mixed modes,” “concepts that are not grounded in nature, but, like species concepts…constructs of the mind” more or less useful to whatever our purposes may be (74). Locke posits no innate moral ideas—no syndaresis with or without God. “Locke’s almost macabre fascination with the barbarism that human beings, and indeed entire cultures, have displayed puts a point” on this claim (74-75).

The human mind begins as a tabula rasa, or better, a camera obscura: “a dark room, into which light can enter only through the portals of sense” (75). Without innate ideas and with no way of transcending these sense impressions or “ideas” in the direction of forms, the mind receives only the most elementary signals from outside itself—”hard,” “white,” and so on. “Our entire mental universe, including ideas seemingly far beyond experience, is constructed in camera, as it were, using elements acquired only from (internal and external) experience.” Thus Locke’s empiricism actually maintains that we cannot really know the empeiria directly; “we begin with sensory information, but we do not know how objects stimulate the senses, nor how the senses transmit their reports to our minds.” In this, Locke concurs with both Descartes and Hobbes; “the anti-Aristotelianism of this approach is complete” (76). This does not generate skepticism for Locke because “it is not reasonable, or even psychologically possible, to deny” the existence of external reality (77). Epistemological sensualism comes to its own rescue, one might say. “To one who argues all is a dream, Locke asks derisively whether he would rather dream of being in a dire, or actually be in it.” This does not of course commit Locke to claiming that every sensory report accurately reflects external reality. Locke explains sensory error by first distinguishing between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. Primary qualities—solidity, extension, shape—come to us infallibly through our senses; “our senses reveal to us attributes that really do inhere in objects” (78). Secondary qualities—color, smell, taste—are not intrinsic to the object perceived by vary with our own senses; one person might perceive colors differently than another, for example. Hence the wise monition not to dispute matters of taste. Thus far, Locke follows Boyle.

A further complexity arises in Locke’s distinction between “simple” and “complex” ideas or sense perceptions. Simple ideas, such as yellow, white, hot, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, “merely signify that some external quality is having the effect in question on our senses” (79). Complex ideas, however, are “compounded of simple ideas” and therefore involve the mind in the active arrangement of the impressions it has received. From the simple ideas of brown, hard, rough, and cylindrical, our mind forms the complex idea, tree trunk. Such “bundles of qualities do appear together regularly in our experience; there really are tree trunks,” but “we must not imagine that we will ever have fully adequate ideas of them”—only ideas more or less adequate “to our purposes” (79-80). Our minds “create” them, assembling them out of preexisting materials, calling certain sorts of order out of our perceptions without every fully knowing if we’ve got it right. As we now say, the mind ‘abstracts from’ sensory experience to construct its concepts. To “know” is not to perceive a formal template but “to say that we have grasped something of the different modes in which matter may exist, and the regularities observed by matter in those modes” (82). This is not (yet) ‘postmodernism’ or a form of conventionalism; we are indeed perceiving something, or some things that are out there. We are not creating ex nihilo. And of course reason remains unchallenged; the sense impression white is not the sense impression black. There is no whiteblack in Locke’s world any more than there is in Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s. We may, without contradiction, define man as a rational animal, a political animal, or a featherless biped, but we cannot run it together with donkey—at least, in any non-metaphorical way (85). On the other hand, these species concepts remain only concepts; “those brought under a single species name often differ more among themselves than they do from individuals nominally of another species,” as the example of monstrosities shows (86).

If so, how does Locke found a morality on any of this? [1]  Some of the complex “ideas” assembled from the simple ones are what Locke calls “modes.” Unlike the other kind of complex idea, exemplified by the tree trunk, modes are at three removes from physical reality; the tree trunk is our mental abstraction from a number of simple ideas or sense impressions. A mode refers not to any physical object—they are not ideas of things; “they carry no implication that they correspond to real objects” (87). When forming a simple mode, the mind “conceptualizes modifications of a single idea.” For example, the mind takes the simple idea of motion and modifies it to conceive of sliding, rolling, rising. It takes the simple idea of thought and conceives of memory and contemplation; the simple ideas of pleasure and pain “include live, hatred, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, and many others.” “None of these notions is innate; they are all the product of mind working on the simple ideas of sense.” Mixed modes are “more complex versions of the same mental abstraction and combination,” a combination of two or more simple modes. Wrestling and fencing serve as Locke’s examples: “complex forms of physical activity, the parts of which have no natural connection to one another, whose unity exists only in the term and the mental concept describing it,” concepts “constitut[ing] the activity as a whole” (88). The mixed mode gives the constituent parts “a meaning they do not possess inherently.” Most such activities “exist by convention and not by nature” (89).

“All moral concepts are mixed modes” (88). “Murder” consists of a set of acts that have no intrinsic moral significance; the “moral meaning” of such acts as murder and rape, rescue and liberation, “is given to them, or imposed upon them, only by the application by mind of the moral code.” “After all, has not the line between killing and ‘murder’ been drawn very differently at different times and places?” “Locke draws attention to the immense power that would accrue to one who succeeded in defining or redefining mixed modes for a culture or civilization. It is past doubt that he aspires to play this role himself, with his new understanding of natural law, natural rights, limited government, religious toleration, and the like” (89). One is reminded of Machiavelli’s musings on such great lawgivers as Moses and Romulus, which are not unrelated to his project of mastering Fortuna, a project itself somewhat reminiscent of Bacon’s conquest of nature. But I digress.

Having refused the Aristotelian/Scholastic “leap” from “the empirical world to the realm of forms” (90), Locke also refuses the Cartesian claim that our ideas are innate. He agrees that mathematical ideas are certain, but only because they refer strictly to relations among abstractions and have no empirical content. But—here is the novelty he introduces—this also applies to moral ideas. Far from producing moral relativism, the purely abstract character of moral mixed modes gives the mind the possibility of attaining “ironclad certainty” about them (92). Mathematics and morality are the mental realms of certainty, even as science is the mental realm of empiricism and therefore of nothing more than probability. “Euclid’s geometrical proofs are paradigms of demonstrative knowledge,” but so, Locke writes, is the existence of God—”the only being external to ourselves of whose existence we can be absolutely certain.” Further, God’s commands, the laws of morality, are as non-empirical as God is. If the laws of morality had empirical content, if they were linked in any way to physical nature, “they could not be absolute,” they could not be commands at all (93). Morality would indeed look more like what Aristotle said it was, a matter of prudential reasoning aimed at securing the good—that is, the best possible fulfillment of the natural form of a human being, family, or political community. In recommending Cicero’s De officiis as a moral handbook, Locke does not endorse the ontological foundation of Cicero’s moral philosophy; he endorses the abstract, universal validity of his ideas as abstractions, as “mixed modes” of thought.

All of this raises hard questions about how much such abstractions relate to the world, very much including the world of human relations that morality governs. On some level, morality must engage practice. To better understand Locke on this point, Forde considers the writings of Locke’s contemporary Samuel Pufendorf, whose works Locke recommended in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. What Boyle did with “modes” in the realm of physical science, Pufendorf did in moral philosophy. Certain modes, Pufendorf teaches, “added to physical things or motions, by intelligent beings,” direct us and “secure a certain orderliness and decorum in civilized life” (98). Such modes are not descriptions, as in physical science, but prescriptions, commands, precisely knowable. “Aristotle correctly identified certainty with sciences that proceed deductively from axioms, but incorrectly identified ethics or morality as a field incapable of such precision,” precisely because he founded his morality on human nature and not on modes (100). In Pufendorf, as in the Bible, “all morality takes the form of law, a binding rule that serves as the measure of right and wrong” (100); such law is “the free creation of God, who could have ordained that law differently” (101). God is “the only agent with the capacity, and the authority, to impose moral modes upon humanity in a universally valid way”; this authority comes “not from his overwhelming power, as Hobbes had supposed,” or “from his superior perfection, as Cicero had supposed,” but from human consent or else by some “special service” done by God to human beings. This special service was the act of creation, which put human beings in God’s debt. The relation between moral law and reality runs from God to man; God gave us not only the commands He reveals in His Bible but also the rest of His Creation. We can “devise ways” of “achiev[ing] the goals of peace and civilization” that God has given us by thinking about our experience. Such “empirical observation” gives us “signposts” that point beyond “the empirical realm” that we observe; “nature is an indication of the law God has imposed on us” (103). This is how moral law can nonetheless be described as “natural” law; although modern science has revealed “material nature” to be “morally vacuous,” God must have made our nature such that these signposts are consistent with His moral law. In other words, like Ockham, Pufendorf distinguishes God’s “absolute” power from His “ordinate” power. God could have done things differently, but having done things the way He did, what He did serves as a moral guide for human beings. “Natural reason is sufficient to the task of discovering the moral law” (104), although those favored with having received God’s revelation will be greatly aided in that discovery.

“Locke embraced Pufendorf’s approach to morals in its fundamentals”—morality as one of the mixed modes, the modes of “creations of intellect, which superimposes them on the material world,” an object of “a demonstrative science.” “The resulting theory, as both Pufendorf and Locke emphasize, cannot dispense with divine legislation.” Here Forde dissents from Strauss, Pangle, and Zuckert, who regard “Locke’s appeals to God” as “a rhetorical ploy, cover for a completely secular moral and political theory” (105). “It is only through divine legislation…that Locke can combine his very prominent account of moral concepts as ‘arbitrary’ fixed modes, with his equally prominent account of the moral law as ‘the eternal law and nature of things'” (108). Nonetheless, Forde almost immediately asks, “What is the flawless moral demonstration that the theory of moral modes promises us?” and observes that “notoriously, Locke never provided this demonstration” (108). One might also wonder what Locke means by “divine.”

Man is subject to moral law. By “man” Locke here means a creature, both corporeal and rational. We need say no more because for this particular purpose, the consideration of morality, other features we might include in the concept man (his featherlessness, for example) are irrelevant. But if man is corporeal as well as rational, how can we relate the empirical fact of corporeality to rationality in order to give a coherent account of a law relating the one aspect of man to the other? Forde mentions that in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke addresses this problem in two chapters: “Of Power” (2.21) and “Of Identity” (2.27). There, Locke identifies three senses in which “we speak of a human being”: person, man, and substance. “Substance” is the human being as a material object among others; “man” refers to its shape or form; “person”—the only one of moral significance—means, in Locke’s words, a “thinking intelligent being” with “reason and reflection.” This “self”—which need not be an immortal “soul”—has “consciousness,” without which it could have no moral responsibility, inasmuch as “no one may be held responsible for acts which he is not conscious of having performed” (112). (“It is easy to see how [this rule] applies to the doctrine of original sin,” Forde notes, “as [Locke] does not point out” [113]). “The critical divide between man and beast is not reason per se; it is rather the ability to abstract, to create general terms, and mentally to manipulate those terms” (113). To explain the existence of such a composite being, Locke has recourse to a version of the argument from design. Because “the mechanism of nature, as the new science has uncovered it, is incapable of producing a conscious, ‘cogitative’ being,” “any such beings must therefore be the workmanship of God.” Forde doubts that this proof carries much water; even if it convinced us of God’s existence, it would not prove His (its?) eternality, omnipotence, perfect wisdom, or perfect goodness, “as moral demonstration requires” (115). “At any rate, Locke proceeds with his philosophical project as though it has foundation enough to support it” (116). A cool customer, that Locke.

In addition to moral responsibility, consciousness also entails “self-concern.” Locke posits “no strict dualism between body and soul”; “our bodies are part of our conscious ‘selves.'” Appetites, pleasure and pain stem from our bodies, but like other manifestations of the corporeal they point to “god”—in this case serving as “dispensations of divine wisdom that spur us to perfect ourselves” but which also can “lead us astray” (117). Moral reasoning empowers us to judge and bridle the appetites, guiding us to “true and proper happiness” (118). This mental self-direction is what we mean by our freedom. Unlike Hobbes, Locke regards will and appetite as distinct, because the will can act “in defiance of appetite”; “the essence of moral volition in Locke is the control of appetite by reason.” This sounds much like Aristotle, with this difference: Although in Locke as in Aristotle “happiness is reason’s goal,” for Locke happiness “is compounded of pleasure and pain”; for Aristotle, pleasure and pain amount to what we might now call ‘indicators’ of happiness, not happiness itself. [2]  “Locke sounds quite like Hobbes…when he says that we call ‘good’ what causes us pleasure, ‘evil’ what causes us pain, and that these are different for different individuals” (119). But Locke departs from Hobbes, who puts morality to the service of self-preservation, “the one appetite universally shared” (120). Locke instead looks to the longer term, encouraging us to live with a view to future as well as immediate pleasure and pain. The drunkard allows present pleasure—or at least the relief of present unease—to overcome his knowledge that his overindulgence will ruin his health, causing him pain and even death. Happiness is pleasure, in Locke—his psychology does not make it possible to “foresak[e] appetite for reason”—but pleasure must be understood reasonably, as a sort of lifelong coordination and discipline of the appetites and of their satisfaction (120-121). To be maximized over a lifetime, our pleasures must be calibrated. Locke significantly broadens Hobbesianism.

But does he abandon it? Strauss and his followers deny that he does. Forde regards Locke’s morality as too closely associated with a non-corporeal moral law, and too far beyond the pursuit of self-preservation, to qualify as Hobbesian at its core. Although Locke “concur[s] with the Hobbesian dictum, that the human appetites are neither good nor evil in themselves, until they know a law to judge them”—in this, both philosophers hew closer to the book of Genesis than to Aristotle—Locke “differs with Hobbes on the nature, and perhaps the source, of that law” (123). Locke lists three kinds of law: divine, civil, and reputational—the second of these being what we think of as human legislation, the third being the informal “law” set by public opinion. Although the Questions concerning the Law of Nature and the Essay on Civil Government make much of a “natural law,” “natural law, in the old sense of a law ingrained or embedded in nature, cannot exist for Locke,” any more than it can for Ockham or Pufendorf; what we call natural law is really divine law promulgated by “the light of nature” (124). But, Forde argues, this does not signal a shift from moral law to “individual natural right” 9126), despite the language of the Essay. “Locke nowhere says that he, or anyone, has a ‘right’ to pursue happiness as he sees fit. He, and we, have not so much a right to pursue happiness as a duty to pursue happiness aright”—a duty we can only find in the moral law; “the priority of law to right separates Locke’s philosophy from that of Hobbes” (127). At the same time, although Locke holds up happiness as the human summum bonum, he is no Aristotelian because Aristotelians vainly sought the purpose of human life in human nature rather than on “its true ground, which stems fro mixed modes not devised by nature” but by “divine intelligence” quite “outside of material nature” (132). This teaching also distinguishes Locke from Immanuel Kant, who likewise rejected nature as a moral standard but at the same time rejected happiness as the moral purpose of human life (133). Kant retains the moral law while rejecting eudaimonism, replacing it (and Locke’s “god”) with the categorical imperative, a sort of rule of pure reason.

Forde’s third chapter elaborates on Locke’s understanding of moral law and spells out some of its social and political implications. Far from commanding any narrow self-regard, Locke insists on the importance of “civility,” a virtue praised by a Catholic writer he esteemed, Pierre Nicole. But although for Nicole civility rests squarely upon Christian charity, for Locke things are not so simple. He begins with his version of natural law; “the only comprehensive explanation” of which he places in chapter 2 of the Essay on Civil Government. the natural law, divine in origin, prescribes not “only my own preservation” (as in Hobbes) but “preservation of all mankind.” This law enjoins me “not to harm others” or even myself, and thus serves “the common human good” while reflecting the bedrock “equality” of human beings, no one of whom may be sacrificed for the pleasure of another, and who may only be harmed if he threatens to harm me or other persons (139). This makes self-preservation first of all a duty prescribed by law; the right derives from the duty, and the duty derives “from the common good of mankind rather than the primacy of the individual per se” (140). This principle—the duty to preserve humanity itself—is “the key to understanding much” in Locke’s thought (141). Locke goes so far as to insist that each individual may “punish violations of the natural law on behalf of mankind, whether he is directly affected by the violation or not” (143).

What Forde calls the “communal” character of Lockean natural law manifests itself also in his treatment of the family. The “mutual and reciprocal obligations” of parents and children come not from any social contract “but directly from the laws of nature” (144). Children, for the most part lacking in reason, lack the full moral status of persons; they have no rights that do not derive from parental duty. Forde acutely observes that Locke takes the Genesis command “Be fruitful and multiply” to mean something rather more extensive than Scripture appears to suggest: a general command not only to generate more human beings but to improve the arts and sciences and “conveniences of life.” “This god might be dubbed ‘nature’s god,’ and Locke makes clear, even in the First Treatise—his critique of Robert Filmer’s divine-right based defense of monarchism—”that he is not relying exclusively, or even primarily, on Scripture to discern his intent.” Locke calls reason “the voice of God in” man; “this is true Locke pointedly informs us, whether God ever literally spoke to anyone on this subject or not”—revelation, “in this matter at least,” being “redundant, or perhaps even subject to correction by reason” (146). Forde also observes that “the chapter on family in the [Essay on Civil Government] relies more prominently upon God as legislator than does most of the rest of the work,” that the conventional and limited character of the larger civil society leads him to allow “the figure of the divine legislator to recede into the background” (145). It might be added that this move serves at least two functions: first, it keeps “god”—even the god discerned primarily by reason not revelation—at some remove from politics, where claims about divinity can work against the preservation of mankind by fomenting wars of religion and persecution in God’s name; second, it addresses the problem of the mighty Leviathan, the modern state, empowered to wage war and enforce laws in accordance with the systematic laws of modern science, including the technologies invented under the auspices of that science, but which, by that very power, may threaten the lives and liberties it is intended (by Hobbes most especially) to preserve. In the Lockean state, religious men will tolerate one another and all will be ruled by consent, understood as rational assent.

Similarly, the natural law prohibits spoilage—wasting the natural goods provided to all—and requires charity. Locke’s account of property in chapter 5 of the Essay on Civil Government serves as the locus for those who regard Locke as the most influential philosopher of modern individualism, and Forde agrees that individual rights come to the forefront here. We may accumulate property without limit and have a duty merely to refrain from plundering the possessions of others; we need offer no charity to the needy This contradicts the teaching of the First Treatise, however, which not only enjoins us to exercise charity but gives the needy title to the excess property of others, without even the duty to repay their benefactors at some later time (149-150). The contradiction disappears, however, when one notices that the right to property derives from the right of men to self-preservation; Locke employs the plural form because natural goods originally belong to mankind in common. Private property comes later. “A purely individualist theory would not likely begin this way” (151), inasmuch as the individual property right “is not an absolutely original or fundamental right” but instead arises in order to preserve mankind (151-152). Even our ownership of ourselves stops at the right to kill ourselves—a clear signal that human beings are above all “the property of God” (153). Our property rights, on Forde’s reading, are therefore only use-rights, “absolute within the human sphere, but not absolute simply.” Forde maintains that such an interpretation of individual rights better accounts for the apparent contradictions in Locke’s several writings that the Straussian exotericism/esotericism interpretation does (155).

Forde argues that Locke follows not Hobbes but, to some degree, Aquinas, Grotius, and Pufendorf in these matters, particularly with respect to the existence of common property at the origins of human life and the authorization of private property “by a principle of the common good” derived from the original condition (162). But Locke “makes [private] property more fundamental than it is for his predecessors,” inasmuch as “natural and divine law” established it, not human consent or convention; in a well-known passage, Locke describes how human beings “mixed their labor” with natural objects, thereby not merely acquiring them but acquiring a right to them, by don’t of that effort (163). Further, the state of nature was a state of scarcity—”the original provision was necessarily inadequate”—so human beings needed private property not merely for “social progress, but for human survival” (174). In a fascinating teaching derived partly from Scripture, Locke claims that “God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labour” (175). (In Genesis, God does indeed do those two things, but at different times and in different circumstances—one before and one after the humans sinned.) The standard set by the common good remains, but the right of the individual is unalienable—as it is not for Grotius or Pufendorf. As Forde puts it, “God is aware of basic economic principles. He is aware that if the love of money is the root of many evils, it is also the source of general good. In all its honest forms, therefore, he smiles on this love. He knows that the pursuit of one’s own interest is not the expression of a corrupt or fallen nature, but a benign, indeed useful attribute” (176). Accordingly, while the First Treatise recommends charity, the Second Treatise or Essay on Civil Government makes justice a matter of protecting property, broadly defined to include natural rights. he “does not provide us with any systematic account of how ‘justice’ and ‘charity’ relate to one another” (184). “Many Christians of Locke’s day, and for ages past, would be surprised to learn that the biblical injunction ‘be fruitful and multiply’ signifies, among other things, God’s approval of the limitless acquisition of wealth”—with, to be sure, a concomitant moral if not political duty to share the wealth acquired. Locke’s advocacy of religious toleration as a duty (“the chief characteristical mark of the true church”) must have been similarly surprising, Forde ventures to say (196). This underlines the importance of the one “who defines the mixed modes by which others live” and who thereby “sets the moral horizon for them” (197).

The “twin foundational principles” of that horizon are, first, that “personal happiness is the necessary and proper motive of all human beings” and, second, that “the preservation of mankind as a whole imposes moral duties on all” (198). Given the possibility that these imperatives might conflict, Locke “minimiz[es] the demands of duty,” “building politics (and economics) on the broad common ground between private and public interest” (199). To smooth any rough edges that may remain, Locke turns to the education of leading citizens in Some Thoughts concerning Education, the topic of Forde’s final chapter.

The Thoughts makes obedience to the moral law more likely by upholding the “rational control  of the appetites”—what Locke himself calls “the art of stifling [one’s] desires”—as “the essence of virtue” (201). Because infants and small children have yet to acquire that art, parents need to bring them to it. He does not foolishly suppose that this can be accomplished by simple instruction; the way to the head is through the heart—specifically, the part of the heart that desires esteem and dreads disgrace. As Hobbes sees, children love dominion, but esteem and disgrace, appealing to the spirited element of the child’s self, can be used to tame this dangerous propensity to tyranny. The road to the rule of reason runs through “pre-rational habituation” (203). Part of early childhood education will consist of a kindly catechism, holding up the thought of a liberal benevolent God Who seems not to punish the wicked. Indeed, “the word ‘sin’ appears nowhere in this work” (206 n.9). “This simple creed, of course, has nothing that is distinctively Christian” (205). Exceptionally naughty children will be punished by having something of their own taken from them, but most children will respond powerfully to social rewards and punishments. These can be deployed to teach charity, too, particularly by parental compensation of their child when he exhibits liberal and charitable behavior, thus “ensuring that their children always profit by being liberal” (208). This should not be viewed too cynically; Locke is confident that children will soon find pleasure in liberality itself, after which the training wheels of compensation may be removed. “Locke believes that a true liberality, and a true regard for others, will emerge from his education” (209).

True liberality culminates in civility. Civility for Locke means a stance between the selfless love commended in the Gospels and the sort of teaching popularized in the twentieth century by the American writer Dale Carnegie, who taught that an other-regarding attitude pays off. Lockean civility combines the ‘no harm’ principle of justice with toleration and considerateness. Our “pleasure cannot be had unless [our] benevolence is heartfelt”; at the same time, the moral law does aim at pleasure (218). Locke endorses “what could almost be described as an extension of the self to share in the pleasure of others” (219). Although Forde does not say so, this expansion of pleasure to some degree links the individual to the original “god”-ordained condition of commonly held rights, including property rights. Forde emphasizes that Locke understands happiness differently than Aristotle does. In Aristotle, happiness means the full exercise of virtue; “Aristotle famously identified beauty or nobility as the heart of morality, as well as the motive for moral action, but this is not, and cannot be, Locke’s view,” which stays within the bounds of pleasure and pain, reward and punishment (220). What is more, Aristotle grounds his claims about happiness on his “analysis of human nature,” which has a hierarchy; “although Locke’s virtue is also based upon a rational screening of the appetites, and is also designed to lead to happiness, Locke makes no equivalent arguments to bolster his claim” (220). His “epistemological foundations make…an [Aristotelian] appeal to human nature impossible”; appetites are better or worse “only in comparison to a rule”—a “mixed mode”—”imposed from without” (221). This mixed mode, ordained by “god,” rests first of all upon the equality of human beings as human; but again, “human” cannot mean a species in the Aristotelian sense because no such thing can be apprehended noetically, according to Locke’s understanding of human understanding.

Forde concludes with an engaging discussion of the relationship between Locke’s thought and that of Benjamin Franklin, “Locke’s great American disciple” (222). He shows how Franklin adapted Locke’s teachings—most particularly his teachings on education—to American conditions. Whereas Locke’s education centers on the task of inculcating civility in the young gentleman—scion of the English/European gentry class—Franklin writes in a much more egalitarian social and political regime, one in which most children will be educated in public schools, not at home by fathers and private tutors. “It is Franklin who systematically undertakes to educate the poor to industry” (226-227); Franklin also takes a somewhat more lax view of moral self-discipline, and he writes as if more skeptical that human beings can be brought to unselfish charitableness, no matter how carefully habituated they may be. But in his esteem for civility and for works of public service, Franklin joins hands with the philosopher. “Liberalism, as these two authors see it, does not confine itself to a narrow and merely economic understanding of individual self-interest, but opens up to a broader field off sociable human fulfillment” (242).

Strauss’s response to Forde’s criticisms can be at least partly conceived, inasmuch as Strauss himself is fully aware of at least some key points Forde advances, as seen in the section on Locke in Natural Right and History and the chapter on Locke in What Is Political Philosophy? [3].  Scholars influenced by Strauss who have published on Locke—Michael Zuckert, Thomas L. Pangle, Peter Myers, Thomas G. West, and others—may well proffer their own responses. What might also prove instructive would be a study of Locke modeled on Catherine Zuckert’s study of the Platonic dialogues [4], consisting of exegeses of all the key texts showing the relations among them. Such a difficult and massive undertaking would be the work of many years. In the meantime, the serious study of Locke continues to accelerate, especially in the United States and England, where his political as well as his philosophic importance endures.

 

Notes

1. Additionally, remaining on the ‘epistemological’ level, one might wonder why, or at least how, the mind tends to assemble sense impressions into concepts. Locke might have recourse to Boyle’s differently shaped and sized corpuscular “givens” as an explanation of brain function.
2. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics 1.5, 7; 2.3; 7.11-13.
3. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 202-251; “Locke’s Doctrine of Natural Law,” in What Is Political Philosophy? (Westport: Greenwood, 1973), 197-220.
4. Catherine Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).