Diana J. Schaub: Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. Lanaham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 24, Number 1. Republished with permission.

 

“Sex is a theme hardly mentioned in the thought underlying the American founding,” the late Allan Bloom complained. [1] America is ‘Lockeland,’ and John Locke was not a notably sexy man. The education of his young gentleman includes no hearty recommendation of a jaunt to Paris. Preservation, not procreation; fear, not love; a leveling shove to a deadening common denominator where men and women remain upright with both feet fully on the ground: these features comprise the Lockean heritage in America for Bloom, who could not bring himself to love it. America’s gallant defender might point to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Maria Cosway, or to the gleam in Ben Franklin’s eye; or even to the startling pace at which Americans populated most of a continent in the decades subsequent to the founding; the defender might deny that America is ‘Lockeland.’ The larger question remains: Can modern liberalism, so considerably shaped by Locke, Smith, Bentham, Mill, challenged and supplemented by a phalanx of stern and dutiful Germans beginning with Kant, all issuing in the decidedly unerotic consummation that is John Rawls—can this liberalism account for eros in any way superior to Darwinian population studies or some other low Victorianism?

But then there are the French. They, too, have their bores, the ones who want to ideologize sexuality in some misguided imitation of German system-building (Jean-Paul de Beauvoir, the grim Foucault), or mechanize it, in a misapplication of Newtonian mechanics (Voltaire, the philosophes generally). Still, liberalism is also Montaigne, Montesquieu, Tocqueville.

Montesquieu is among the sanest of the moderns, one who never lets one nation, or one obsession, dominate his thought. The first thing he does, when he wants to write of France, is to introduce his readers to Persia. Two Persians have lived in his home, he tells us. This was an opportunity for him to learn, because persons transplanted from distant lands “no longer have any secrets” (The Persian Letters, Preface). They regard their host as so foreign that they have no need for the usual social caution, the white lies and dark concealments, that society invites and compels its members to make. Secrets are the obverse of the public, social bonds; secrets assert liberty and bespeak vulnerability. The Enlightenment would make what had been secret public, in the names of equality and liberty. Montesquieu contributed to a great Enlightenment project, the Encyclopédie, but with his own pointed correction. He contributed an article on “taste,” which he knew the project needed, rather than the articles on despotism and liberty which the editor had supposed it needed.

That telling anecdote is one of many brought to light by Diana J. Schaub in Erotic Liberalism. She brings to her task a mind well matched to her subject: stocked with useful learning; sensitive to details, but with a strength that never lingers too long on the surface; not unfamiliar with the uses of both secrecy and display, indirection and flourish. The Persian Letters has found a reader of esprit.

In Montesquieu she finds “a liberalism responsive to circumstances, history, and national differences, while avoiding the perils of relativism and historicism” (Erotic Liberalism, xii). A genuinely erotic liberalism would never love humanity but hate people, as some philosophes were wont to do. Sexuality reminds of the particular even as a universal trait. Montesquieu writes on subjects much in vogue now: diversity, sexuality and ‘sexual politics,’ the multiplicity of cultures. But he never gets lost in mere différence, nor allows his readers to give themselves over to self-righteous thumotic passions. Schaub shows herself to be alert to the political atmosphere of her own times, using the ‘Montesquieu our contemporary’ motif to invite, charm, attract those readers now marching to the brassy notes of the regnant conform-anarchism. Like her man, she wants her readers not only to read but to think. Thinking imperils orthodoxies; Schaub is a very subversive writer. At the same time, and just as pertinently, she shows how critic of current orthodoxies might proceed in a manner less direct, less overtly challenging, less ‘masculine’ and gadfly-like than that of Bloom—in a more serpentine and indeed Lockean manner. In this she has recent precursors, Mary P. Nichols and Catherine H. Zuckert. Against intellectual tyrants with powerful foreign regimes behind them, some combination of Socratism and Churchillian statesmanship makes sense. Against the high priests and priestesses of egalitarianism, backed not by armies but by a deus semi-absconditus called modern bureaucracy, a less manly approach may in the end prove more effective—at least in some circumstances and in some respects, as Montesquieu would not hesitate to add. Strategically, we are all Gramscians now.

Montesquieu, Schaub writes, carefully distanced himself from “the younger philosophes” and their “polemicization of philosophy” (EL, p. 8). Such polemicization, she invites readers to see, can only defeat the tolerance that ‘multiculturalism’ seeks to encourage. “The prosecutorial method”—shared by thumotic personalities always and everywhere—”may not be the best way to ascertain Montesquieu’s intention” (EL, p. 8), or indeed the best way to open anyone’s mind, including one’s own.

Politically, the “erotic foundation” of Montesquieu’s liberalism affords a place for the building blocks of the polity, family and property, both “rooted in a particular disposition of sexual passion” (EL, p. 9). “Montesquieu’s poetry may be in the service of the bourgeoisie,” the class that gives modern politics its energy and stability, “in a way that Rousseau’s does not” (EL, p. 9). This is nonetheless every bit a form of modern poetry; the epistolary novel is “a new vehicle for the new philosophy,” one that organizes the drama less around arguments (and, by implication, reason) than the dialogue forms does, and more (though not exclusively) around the passions of the characters and of the reader. Montesquieu rejects the supposed Platonic notion that ideas are “positive things” (“Essay on Taste,” quoted in EL, p. 161, n. 41). He is anti-‘abstraction,’ more ‘bodily,’ concerned with the “feminization of philosophy” (EL, p. 11) for the new, predominantly female audience of novel-readers. The Montesquieuian political philosopher rejects the ‘masculine’ approaches to “the philosopher’s relationship to the political community” (EL, p. 11), whether Platonic (the ideas, the triumph in speech over the city’s destruction of Socrates’ body) or Machiavellian (the entirely non-abstract, but regrettably tyrannical ambition to master the woman, Fortuna).

An epistolary novel is as dramatic as a dialogue, as much an imitation of conflict. Contradiction first requires separation, and the Persian Letters is nothing if not a study of separation—of the separation of self-exiled Persians from their country, of the Persian Usbek from his wives, of Usbek’s Enlightenment head from his possessive heart, and even the philosophic part of his head from the social-emulative-political part of his head. Not only does Usbek’s professed reason for leaving Persia, “a desire for knowledge” (PL, no. 1), contradict his more physical and political reason, the need to evade his enemies, but the very word he uses for “desire,” “l’envie,” may hint that his desire is not pure eros for knowledge as such, but mixed with a certain concern for social status. Too, there is the separation of the creator from the created, in this sense, the disappeared god, Usbek, from the eunuchs he has created (PL, no. 2) and from the women the eunuchs are to guard. Why should a genuine creator-god need to seek knowledge? This deus absconditus has not merely disappeared; he does not really exist as a god, at all. As the sixty-fourth letter shows, the priests secretly rule ‘god,’ that is, they rule in place of a god who effectually does not exist. The Persian Letters deserves its reputation as a masterpiece of atheism, an attack on “the claim common to the three great revealed religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” (EL, p. 17). “Montesquieu’s overarching purpose in the Persian Letters is to disorient—to dis-Orient Christianity, France, and the patriarchal family” (EL, p. 17), to  get them away from the ‘Oriental’ ethos of absolutist monarchy, of despotism, and of an abstracted but still commanding god (whose priests are ventriloquists), and to reconnect human beings to nature.

To do so, Schaub observes, Montesquieu understands just as acutely as Hegel that philosophy can no longer begin with nature, or with political conventions that are so simple that they still reflect nature, as they did in antiquity. Philosophy must begin “amidst human history and human convention” (EL, p. 20). Hence Montesquieu’s reputation as the father of sociology. Political liberty at best will still be a somewhat looser, more comfortable unfreedom, because men are fish caught in nets made up of laws that either chafe irritatingly (despotism) or give them sufficient room to ignore their capture. Despotism is a certain pattern of law-nets, not so much a reflectionof the tyrannical soul, a natural soul perverted, as seen by the ancients. Despotism is a net woven from the fabric of doctrines, not of soul-types. It is woven of such doctrines as Biblical religion and Hobbesian natural right. These doctrines share an appeal to fear, whether fear of God as the beginning of wisdom or fear of violent death, threatened by the ‘absolute’ monarch who settles all controversies in order to impose a peace that precisely and pointedly does not pass all understanding (or even the meanest understanding).

Why not a renewal and adaptation of that estimable moderate, Aristotle, then? Montesquieu remains a modern, a man of impassioned individuality. Moderation and prudence are recoverable (perhaps the better word is ‘simulated’) “not on the grounds of classical virtue but on the grounds of security and liberty for the individual” (EL, p. 25). This is moderation ‘from below’—from the passions—not ‘from above’—from a reason that rules through thumos. (Usbek’s Enlightenment rationalism is impotent as it attempts to rule the passionate wives by means of the thumotic eunuchs; Montesquieu satirizes Plato’s tripartite regime of philosopher-kings in this, as well as his claim that reason can rule the passions by allying itself with thumos within the human soul.) The fundamental human passions are capable of such ‘moderate’ or tamed expression because they are not thumotic. Unlike absolute-monarchist Hobbes’s war of all against all, Montesquieu’s state of nature is peaceful. Men are naturally timid and needful. “The prayers of natural man are directed not to God but to natural woman” (EL,p. 26); it is not clear to whom natural woman prays, or if she does. Warlike passions arise in Persia or in Paris, in fear-based despotism or honor-bound monarchy-aristocracy. Warlike men do not pray to women; they seize and incarcerate them in harems or nunneries of various sorts. The harem, the regime of castration of guardian-eunuchs and claustration of women-possessions shows “most starkly the results of an attempt to realize virtue in the face of natural opposition” (EL, p. 38). Schaub pauses to remind readers that “Montesquieu turns individuals away from such life-denying ethics as ancient manliness and Christian martyrdom, but not, like Hobbes, by directly advocating cowardice. An at least residual admiration for human high-heartedness may be quite indispensable to political life” (EL, p. 39). The wives at last rebel, openly, after years of discreet rebellion.

In sum: Socrates the manly, the gadfly, yes. But also Socrates the midwife, who “swears by Hera rather than by Zeus,” anthropos rather than aner, human rather than manly (EL, p. 42). Still, Montesquieu’s Socratism goes only so far. Montesquieu’s woman-oracle is Roxane, who speaks of her desires and the laws of nature, the passions, not Diotima, who “speaks of eros and immortality” (EL, p. 43). The ruling passions of the noblest Montesquieian minds aim at bodily pleasures, although not bodily pleasures basely understood. “[N]ature is body, not the sunlight of truth” to be seen outside the cave (EL p. 47). And—one hopes the ghost or esprit of Foucault listens—such pleasures are ruined by the introduction of despotic power-politics into the harem by the excessively manly Usbek. This brings out counter-despotic thumos in the women (they are not “entirely creatures of the body,” Schaub notes [EL, p. 54]) and defeats the purpose of the family, which is procreation and the rearing of progeny. “Under the dynamic of despotic jealousy, Usbek gives no thought to either the continuance of life or the commodiousness of life” (EL, p. 53). In Europe, this critique of infecundity would result in the liberalization of divorce laws, and far less frequent recourse to the cloister and the monastery. In this, English Protestantism is wiser than French Catholicism, producing Jane Austen heroines instead of Eloise or Emma Bovary. Tyranny (and here Schaub says tyranny, not despotism) of fathers heavenly and earthly—the separation of men from women, the possession of other property by central state and central church, insufficiently separated—yields population decline, the prevention of life by celibacy and the destruction of life by unnecessary poverty and wars. (Whispered to feminists: abortion is no more to be encouraged, for the same reason [EL, pp. 67-68]).

To say it another way, Montesquieu is a philosopher of esprit. He commits a sin against the Holy Spirit by making Him an ‘it’ and identifying it with the proselytizing spirit, thus the imperial spirit, thus the attempt to conquer nature. Nature returns to break the priestly pitchfork by revolutionizing the despotic, ‘Oriental’ regimes, animated by the ‘spirits’ of the Bible and the Koran. But note: Satan’s pitchfork will also break. Machiavelli’s militant, proselytizing, imperialist atheism, to say nothing of the Hegelian spirit to come, with its insane tyrannical deformations ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ will fail for the reason Charles de Gaulle identified: They are unnatural, unattractive, finally impossible to maintain. De Gaulle thought of the statesman not as a conqueror but as a farmer. Montesquieu, Shaub recalls, made his living from vineyards—a sort of farming that suggests the symposium of philosophy more than sober statesmanship, but farming nonetheless. Montesquieu’s moderated Machiavellianism entails, among other things, an atheism that does not contradict itself by deifying itself. It does not fall victim to the disease Schaub calls impotence tyrannus. Just as eunuchs are alienated from the generative part of their own nature (and as monks are so alienated by their celibacy, anticipated in much milder form by the Jewish practice of circumcision [EL, p. 79]), rechanneling their desires to domination, so the despot alienates himself from his own nature as a man even as he strives thumotically for ‘manly’ dominance. The power-man is the man of impotence; the jealousy of the jealous god or husband is really impotence, ungodliness, unmanliness. With a perhaps too-cruel pun, Schaub writes, “Usbek cuts rather a sad figure” (EL, p. 88). Enlightenment alone will not do.

Fecundity results in wealth and variety. “The importance Montesquieu attaches to the need for variety cannot be underestimated” (EL, p. 98). There is one bad regime, despotism, but many good regimes, in the many circumstances in which human beings live. The non-holy esprit of Montesquieu is “the spirit of laws and the general spirit of nations” (EL, p. 98). Again, one might note the contrast with the Bible, where the chosen nation [and later, the individuals chosen by the Holy Spirit] is separated from the mere nations, the gentiles.) Esprit is “a capacious word” meaning with and wisdom, spiritedness and mind; the human at its best (EL, p. 98. Montesquieu’s other Persian, Rica the one who readily adopts to things Parisian, tells the story of a philosopher-queen who refounds the regime of a despotic husband in the spirit of “spiritedness in defense of political liberty” (EL, p. 103), the regime of variety. Such stories are satirical, but this is a satire of a non-Juvenalian kind, inviting readers to smile at themselves. “Ridicule becomes a goad to self-examination, rather than an instrument of scorn and separation” (EL, p. 103), too easily an instrument of despotic narrowing of the range of human possibility. In another enlightening story, one of Montesquieu’s writers has recourse to the original religion of Persia, Zoroastrianism, a natural religion “in which the sacred law affirms the inclination of nature” (EL, p. 105), including marriage of equal partners and, not incidentally, the fecundity of commerce. Nature brings persons and things together, unlike the ‘founding separation’ seen in both Biblical creationism and classical philosophy, with its ascent from the cave and its talk of idea. These myths, Montesquieu implies, are dangerous, as is entropic Hobbesian physics. Montesquieu’s “dis-Orienting” is a remixing; nature mixes, blurs, presents distinctions whose edges are not clear cut. Story-themes of incest and androgyny, cross-cultural fertilization, and procreative sex, of commerce in the most comprehensive as well as the usual sense of the word, all convey this claim. Republicanism is part of it: Rica writes to Usbek that fear, the foundation of despotism, has only one language, whereas nature is multiform. This conception of nature is a ‘feminine’ insight. Rica, though a young man, has a woman’s name (EL, p. 113); he is receptive, not dominating, and one wonders if his mother, who misses him and accuses Usbek of stealing him (PL, no.8), suspects that her son has been made Usbek’s catamite. At any rate, “Despotism, it seems, exaggerates or absolutizes sexual differentiation; liberty, by its encouragement of individuality, erodes it. The facts of nature doubtless remain, but their social bearing is far from ossified” (EL, p. 119). Eros takes different shapes in different regimes. Under despotism, where women are objects of luxurious accumulation, eros is pleasure, that is, a kind of selfishness that separates while coupling. Under despotism, not only fear but eroticism itself divides men so as to make them conquerable. In republics, with their reciprocity or commerce, and their taste in literature for the pastoral romance (seen in Hellenistic Greece, Renaissance Italy, and England), eros is love. In monarchies, where women rule behind the scenes as orderers of luxury, eros is gallantry. Montesquieu’s France moves toward republicanism from its current combination of monarchy and despotism; this may be seen in its taste for badinage, boudoir talk in public, “the opening up of the private to the public” (EL, p. 119). (The use of this practice in today’s commercial republican regimes may be seen on television; philosophers who would understand contemporary America may start their day with breakfast with Regis and Kathie Lee and their embourgeoisement of badinage.) “Women are consummate consumers” (EL,p. 121); to please their consuming women, aristocrats must learn to work for a living, and thereby step toward a new regime, leaving warlike pride or machismo (Greek thumos or Machiavellian virtù) for productive pride or vanity. “[P]erhaps France is salvageable,” even if Persia is not (EL, p. 135).

“Vanity is a kind of socialized fear—not the natural, dissociative, Hobbesian fear that culminates in despotism, but a man-made, communicative, opinion-based fear that renders human beings interdependent” (EL, p. 136). Nature fluctuates as water can; the attempt to restrict it too rigidly, too despotically, leads to broken dikes and dams. Respect it, and it can become tamer, rechanneled into, and by, formal institutions that will not break. Commercial republicanism and despotism both rely on the passions, but commercial republicanism does so intelligently, effectively. Liberty replaces virtue. Virtuous republicanism self-destructs because a regime founded upon public opinion cannot at the same time adhere consistently to virtue conceived as self-renunciation (a problem unseen, one might note, by such American progressives as Woodrow Wilson). Commerce will satisfy human passions, pacifying as well as stimulating them. One of Montesquieu’s more attractive characters lives in Venice, the commercial republic that governs water liberally. “[I]t is commerce not religion”—variety, not oneness—”that effectively inspires good faith,” by observing contracts among men “rather than the covenant with God” (EL, p. 140).

As in his politics, so in his writings: “The disjointed and open-ended quality of Montesquieu’s writing is a call to self-government,” to his reader’s reasoning capacities,to the ability to make sense of the writer’s complex universe (EL, p. 145). Montesquieu is not a deus absconditus; he is present in every line he writes. But, like nature, he wants to intermingle with his readers. “In Hobbes, reason panders basely to the passions; in Montesquieu, passion is the divine consort of reason,” the most perfect, the noblest, the most exquisite of the senses (EL, p. 144).

Perhaps any liberalism based upon Enlightenment, the bringing of reason to the many, requires eros of some sort, not only because it involves liberty conceived as the liberation of the passions, but because reason is itself erotic, desirous. A philosopher who wants only an Enlightened despot may take nature, and human nature, as entropic; human beings are atoms, colliding, separating fearfully, made to cohere by the one man who artfully and forcefully consolidates them, who pulls the net tight. But if nature is erotic, or at least more erotic than entropic, the net can be looser. Montesquieu evidently differs from Plato not so much in his eroticism but on the issue of sensuality or materialism. Materialism appears to lend a more egalitarian cast to his thought; the despotic materialists of this century unwisely tried to mix thumos with their materialism, spawning ‘leaders’ who dreamt of master races and vanguard classes. The newer, post-‘totalitarian’ ideologues commit the same error, incoherently wanting uniformity of opinion amidst diversity of ‘cultures,’ bodies, and bodily combinations. Can the pharmakon of Montesquieu cure them of their illusions, enlighten them?

Taken by itself, the Persian Letters cannot. It is not clear how erotic liberalism could defend itself, except over the very long run, and then only intermittently. Perhaps that is all Montesquieu hopes for. But perhaps not: He went on to write The Spirit of the Laws. As the writer of letter 86 suggests, law can settle the very thumotic disputes that disappointed love provokes. True law is the law of reason, and must be administered by the few who are reasonable. The few who are reasonable and who administer the law are judges. They are an anomaly within the commercial republic (unless they are bad judges of the sort who ‘follow the election returns’). Nonetheless, a commercial republic needs more than good laws and wise judges. It needs, in terms Montesquieu uses, executive dispatch and resolve. This involves thumos. De Gaulle and others have seen that commercial republicanism needs more than a moderated Machiavellianism to defend it. There is a need for thumotic republicanism, too, in some complex mixture with the erotic kind.

 

Endnote

1. Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 187.

 

“Setting off from idealism… I hit upon seeking the Idea in the real itself.”
–Karl Marx (1837)

 

Maybe Marxism hasn’t gone wrong. When asked why Christianity hasn’t ‘succeeded,’ Christians offer two responses: (1) It hasn’t really been tried, and (2) Just you wait, sinner. Marxists too have the right to hunker down and wait for the apocalypse.

Still, they have less right than Christians have. Christians, after all, await a divine intervention. God’s thoughts are not our thoughts; God’s time is not our time (or, more accurately, our time is God’s time, not ours). Marx’s proudest claim is: I give you the first scientific socialism, not a prophecy but a means of making rationally demonstrable predictions and, more, a means of making those predictions come true. Marx offers not only a social physics but a social engineering, a synthesis of theory and practice. Like any philosophic argument, Marx’s does not reject but invites rational inquiry and criticism. The ‘bourgeois’ regime of commercial republicanism has delivered on most of its promises; it does a fairly effective job of securing the unalienable rights it holds to be self-evidently true. The ‘proletarian’ regime of state socialism ruled by those who claim to be in the vanguard of history has failed to deliver on most of its promises, whenever and wherever it has been tried. Most conspicuously, it has failed to end class struggle.

Why is this so? Perhaps the criticism is merely premature. The worldwide advance of capitalism may not yet have gone far enough. Perhaps a world-state backed by international corporations is the necessary, but still uncompleted, first step toward a genuinely revolutionary circumstance, prefigured by the Great Depression of the 1930s. This possibility notwithstanding, it is surely fair to say that Marx (rather like the Apostles) expected the apocalypse to come much sooner than it has; in Marx’s case, it isn’t enough for the pious apologist to point to the mysterious ways of Providence. A critical reexamination of Marxism turns up problems. To say that they are fatal problems would be to substitute one prediction for another, a move I have learned not to make.

“The modern state is an accommodation between the political and the unpolitical state,” Marx writes. Machiavelli had said this, thinking of Christianity; Rousseau had said this, thinking of the bourgeoisie. Marx too claims that freedom, “the feeling of man’s dignity,” “with Christianity vanished into the blue of heaven,” leaving earthly life open to bourgeois egoism. Marx too wants to ‘de-feminize’ or re-thumotize the world: the Manifesto ends with a conspicuously ‘manly’ and spirited peroration. Unlike the Declaration of Independence’s manly and spirited peroration, the Manifesto predicts victory, relies on no Providence, refuses to moderate its spiritedness. Commercial republicanism doesn’t go far enough; it is a merely formal liberation, “the negation of alienation within alienation,” the final order of liberation within the prevailing order of things. In America, the State is free but men are not; the tyrannical relations of employer and employee remain. Modern natural right is egoistic/individualist, yielding a society based on the inhuman cash nexus. Money is the “alienated essence of man’s labor and life,” a social relation disguised as a thing, a ‘thingification’ of social relations, the externalizing of a social practice, labor, such that the labor looks at his own work as a thing to be sold, a mere means to get money, rather than an authentic life activity. We get money in order to buy ‘goods’ to consume and time in which to lay about: Human means aim at animalistic ends. Hobbes’s state of nature reappears within society itself, a war of all against all pitting men alienated from their own humanness and from their fellows. Godlike, the bourgeoisie has created a world after its own image, moving like a (decidedly unholy) world-spirit, ever-changing, destroying old life-ways in order to create anew. This is the penultimate, deformed but necessary, movement in human history which is the story of the self-creation of human being through labor, including the Machiavellian/Baconian conquest of external nature. Self-creation makes man the free/universal being, the only species that remakes/synthesizes all of nature, bending it to his (collective) will, humanizing it. Freedom is power, “the principle of politics is will.” With international capital comes an international proletariat as disenchanted and dis-enchanting as the bourgeoisie, but more numerous (90% of the population, according to Marx), more productive, and potentially far more powerful than the bourgeoisie. The international proletariat, once fully conscious of its own power of the ways of power, will expropriate the expropriators, establish its own brief dictatorship, abolish private property, and thereby abolish politics as we have known it—that is, politics as the instrument of class domination.

What is wrong with this impressive critique and prediction? Nietzsche predicts, famously, not class war but national war, not economics but politics, because the will to power will endure. Marx might accuse Nietzsche of ‘reification’: “Is Achilles possible when powder and shot have been invented?” Marx fails to see that the real answer is ‘yes.’ The thumotic man remains alive in the modern world, not only as a physical warrior but as a mind-warrior. He is no longer named Achilles or Odysseus; he is named Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche, V. I. Lenin or Adolf Hitler. Marx, Hegel-as-materialist, is deficient precisely in self-knowledge.

The warrior-spirit, the man of dialectical polemic, remains a man-of-war. He will remain (as Nietzsche sees, and Marx does not) a man tending not to stop at freedom and dignity but to run to tyrannical rage, like Achilles dragging the corpse of Hector. To run to tyrannical rage is to ignore or despise the natural right (to say nothing of divine commandments) that sets limits to the exercise of human will or ambition. Marx makes two important criticisms of natural right and natural law: (1) Modern natural right puts the individual before society, but in fact ‘the individual’ develops after society does; (2) modern economists confuse particular social circumstances with ‘natural’ laws of production, smuggling natural law into conventional social relations. Marx sensibly concludes that one must always look at the particulars of social relations within any given society in order to understand and to improve it. Look (as Aristotle did) at who rules, and how they do it, to understand how a society works.

Unfortunately, the excessively spirited man is unlikely to be sufficiently ‘erotic’ or receptive to study concrete circumstances patiently, without giving way to moral indignation or bending what he knows to polemical purposes. In Marx, one sees the most remarkable conflict between eros and thumos, a conflict that, in his disciples, saw the unqualified victory of thumos, precisely because Marx eschews all natural right in his critiques of a particular kind of natural right and a particular misapplication of natural law. This lack of a moderating standard led to as series not of supermen but of super-Robespierres, who told the workers they had nothing to lose and a world to win. Instead of recognizing each social class as a potential faction, as the natural-right commercial republicans did, Marxists treated a particular class as religionists often think of themselves, as the God-bearing (or ‘History’-bearing) class. Whereas religionists teach the God-fearing nation that God’s law is a yoke, that God is the greatest imposer of responsibilities, the Marxists ‘realistically’ speak of power, of ‘laws’ inhering in social relations, of self-made and ’empowering’ laws, not laws untouched by what human beings think or do. So far, this has turned out to be unrealistic and destructive.

“All mythology subdues, controls and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; it disappears when real control is established.” To which Publius replies: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and tin the next place oblige it to control itself.” To oblige anyone to do anything, you need a standard beyond his own will and yours; you will also need institutions so arranged to check him from doing as he or you will if, in a state of libido dominandi or even honest moral indignation, one or both of you inclines to violate that standard. Marxism is deficient on both counts, in theory and practice. It is more thumotic, and less genuinely scientific, than it knows. Even if the Marxian analysis turned out to be right—the progressive, ‘dialectical’ enrichment of the haute bourgeoisie and the proletarianization of everyone else, with the ‘vanguard’ in the lead, poised to strike back—Marxism would remain an inadequate guide to government. Marxism claims that government exists only or mainly as an instrument of class domination, rather than as an  instrument of class domination and a great many other things, which functions would not necessarily disappear if, per impossible, classes one day disappeared

Dewey and Freud wed biology to history, producing doctrines of ‘growth.’ In this they follow Darwin—Freud doing so less directly, more soberly.

Dewey begins The Public and Its Problems with some silly polemics on religion. Claiming that “religious emotions… attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it”—a charge that ignores the impact of, for example, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism to name a few—he asserts that there has been no “large idea about the world… independently generated by religion,” overlooking that little matter of creation ex nihilo. One may also pass over the nonsense about static philosophic ideas necessitating political stasis, inasmuch as such ideas might as easily serve as measures of how far one needs to go.

More seriously, Dewey argues that Darwin “conquered the phenomenon of life for the principles of transition,” freeing it from ancient Greek ‘idealism’ and teleology rather as modern astronomers, physicists, and chemists had done in their fields, earlier. This liberation in turn freed the new, empiricist logic “for application to mind and morals and life.” As a matter of fact, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke had done this already, as Dewey acknowledges elsewhere in his vast corpus, but in one sense Dewey’s claim may be defended. Earlier empiricisms, with their crude, atomistic reductionism, fail the plausibility test for most people. Dewey may mean that Darwin was the first empiricist to give a plausible account of biological complexity, and to link this with the contemporary fascination with historical change. Darwin changes biology into natural history, and incidentally enables Dewey to construct a comprehensive historicism does not depend upon Hegel’s Absolute-Spirit/’idealist’ dialectic or upon its Marxist/’materialist’ derivative, centered on socio-economic class struggle. He retains the Hegelian and Marxist claims for a historical teleology (as Darwin does not), but a gentler form than any of his predecessors.

If intelligence can plausibly be made to arise out of things, if things and intelligences reciprocally shape each other, if both divinity and natural teleology are discarded as elaborate tautologies, and if the grander ‘German’ forms of historicist teleology are to be feared as ‘totalizing’ invitations to tyranny (Dewey was an early and honorable critic of Bolshevism), we are left with an empirical historicism of social experimentation, with “verifiable and fruitful” results expected—any day now. Dewey’s neo-Darwinism (a democratic-socialist Darwinism, though emphatically not Social Darwinism) does posit an end of sorts, although it is an endless sort of end: growth. It isn’t clear that Dewey can show what constitutes social ‘growth,’ inasmuch as Dewey’s moral distinction between ‘positive’ social interaction and a life of crime—which may be seen in Experience and Education (New York, 1939, p. 29)—is merely risible, leading to his own indulgence in tautology: “When and only when development in a particular line conduces to continuing growth does it answer to the criterion of education as growing” (ibid., p. 29).

As for Dewey’ social-experimental method, it curiously combines pride and humility. In one paragraph he promises what Machiavelli promises in plotting the mastery of fortune, and what Bacon and Descartes promise in proposing the conquest of nature: a method. In the next paragraph he speaks of humbling philosophy’s pretensions, particularly its supposed claims to answer large and, by Darwinian lights, rationally unanswerable questions. This combination of pride and humility will issue in “responsibility,” Dewey says. As with any social experimentalism, Dewey’s is vulnerable to the critique Madison (that earlier advocate of responsibility in politics) makes of Jefferson’s proposal for constitutional convention cycles—the same critique Aristotle makes of the Greek reformer who offered a prize to anyone who thought of a legal innovation adopted by the city: laws require obedience; obedience requires respect; respect requires stability; legal tinkering breeds a casual attitude toward the laws, injuring respect and inducing lawlessness. Reformism defeats the purpose of the very rule of law the reformer seeks to refine. This is especially true when the reformer denies from the beginning that there is any set end to human life. In the actual course of history—by which any historicism must be judged, if it is to be judged in its own terms—Deweyism has issued in the current American public school system, of whose current ills a Deweyan might say, as Dewey says of American democracy, the cure of the ills of Deweyism is more Deweyism. Or not.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud subtracts the puerilities from progressivism, without denying that progress is possible. Human beings retain a nature, in Freud, and a recalcitrant, ‘discontented,’ cussed thing it is. He too conjures away religion with empiricism—a move that usually presupposes the falsehood of what it wants to disprove—but does not supposed that social science, or even his psychoanalytic techniques, can replace it with complete success, despite his Baconian rhetoric about “subjecting” nature “to the human will.” Freud is a Hobbesian, albeit one who leave room for eros as something more than a power-relation. “The essence of [civilization] lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their possibilities of satisfaction, whereas the individual [in the state of nature] knew no such restrictions,” but lacked the power to master nature. Freud rejects the Rousseauian and Marxist claim that property causes aggression; assumption of natural human gentleness and of the possibility for a community of sexual partners are chimerical. In entering community life, the individual trades a portion of natural freedom and happiness for security. He will never get those things back in their pure form, without trading back his security.

Productive of association and therefore of civilization, eros exists in a state of tension, sometimes war, with the Ego, which would preserve the body but also contains a contradictory instinct toward destruction. “The evolution of civilization” consists of “the struggle between Eros and Death.” The Super-Ego, consisting of authoritative customs, beliefs, and laws, constitutes the third term that mediates between these natural instincts. When the Super-Ego becomes too powerful, when human beings ‘over-compensate,’ imposing excessive guilt upon their fellows by setting impossibly rigorous standards, the science of psychology can relieve the pressure that induces alienation and increased violence by lowering the individual’s felt need to meet the Super-Ego’s demands, and conducting the psyche toward a more orderly development or growth that will result in happiness. With this, Freud provides a new variation on a characteristic modern theme, as may be seen in Chapter XV of The Prince, and in Bacon’s aphorism on the stars (they give us weak light because they are too high). But Freud must not be understood to usher in an age of sexual license, or indeed of any kind of license. Like any good Hobbesian, he criticizes democracy (“America”) for failing to develop adequate leadership (the book was published during the Hoover Administration), and, while insisting on the need to liberalize public opinion concerning diverse sexual drives, he could hardly be said to tout a society founded upon the ‘polymorphous-perverse.’ This was a task adopted by intellectuals who wanted to combine psychotherapy with Marxism in yet another failed attempt to ruin the bourgeoisie.

Freud’s doctrine stands or falls on his conception of Eros. His psychological framework of Super-Ego, Ego, and Id resembles to some degree the structure of the soul described in Plato’s Republic: logos, thumos, and eros. The differences are important. Freud leaves no well-demarcated natural place for his own scientific enterprise. In Plato, reason causes the philosophic soul’s ascent from the ‘cave’ of conventional opinions, enabling the philosopher to discover natural right. In contrast, Freud rejects the idea of transconventional justice, saying that there is no standard of “normalcy” to appeal to, from one society to another. It is not so much that psychotherapists can only ‘adjust’ individuals to existing social conditions but that Freud cannot account for his own scientific enterprise. If psychoanalysis is an advance in modern science, what is the source of scientific knowledge, and indeed of the capacity to analyze anything, in the human psyche? How does the Super-Ego ‘attach’ to the human mind? Where does the human capacity to reason fit in?

Freud claims not only that individual Egos and Ids can be adjusted to existing Super-Egos, but that Super-Egos and their norms can also be adjusted. Perhaps because he cannot arrive at any standard of conduct that transcends the demarcations between one Super-Ego and another, Freudian psychology provides no basis for addressing the problems of war. This point becomes evident in his 1932 letter to Einstein, in which he can only recommend somehow diverting destructive impulses by getting people to pursue shared interests. His unacknowledged mentor Hobbes has more interesting things to say on the issue of war and peace than that.

In addition to criticizing Freudianism from the standpoint of Platonic-philosophic eros and logos, one might also note that Freud’s misunderstands love as understood in Judaism and Christianity. Freud associates Christian love with eros; to him, Christian charity is only humanitarianism—an attempted, and dubious expansion of affective love to social relations. But, as Anders Nygren had shown around the same time Freud wrote, Christian love is not eros but agape, not affectionate at all but a kind of stern goodwill found not in Greek philosophy but in the Jewish thought from which Christianity derives. Given the Jewish and Christian teaching on shalom or peace—a clear-cut alternative to the Hobbesian and Platonic views—Freud’s misconception is disappointing.

In both Dewey and Freud, developmentalism inadequately answers the question of exactly what constitutes ‘growth.’ Neither solves the typically modern problem of subjectivism. Take the ‘end of history’ away from history (including ‘natural history’) and you begin to see the makings of ‘relativism’ or nihilism.