Bernard Semmel: John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1985. Republished with permission.

 

John Stuart Mill may understand the problematic character of modern reason better than any subsequent liberal. He faults both Jeremy Bentham and Auguste Comte for inclining toward despotism, for misusing reason in ways that undermine liberty.

Semmel reports that Mill’s father impressed upon his son the lesson of a story from Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The Sophist Prodicus relates that the young Hercules met two beautiful young women at a crossroads. Hercules rejected the advances of one, called “Happiness” by her admirers, “Vice” by her detractors. He preferred “Virtue,” who taught that true happiness comes from exertion, particularly exertions in the service of others. According to Semmel, this lesson “shape[d] at the root the character of John Stuart Mill’s liberalism.” Far from choosing the easy way of false “Happiness,” Mill was animated by the “spirit” of “Hercules and the Christian-Stoics of the Renaissance.” “We live by myths, sometimes without being fully aware that we do,” Semmel writes. “The choice of Hercules may be seen as Mill’s personal myth,” a myth he “translated… into a public myth as the necessary basis of a good society.”

To say that Mill lived by a myth is to question—perhaps without being fully aware of it—Mill’s status as a philosopher, as one capable of transcending myth. Semmel never suggests that a third, ‘middle’ way between private vice and public virtue might have been available to Mill. (See Leo Strauss: Xenophon’s Socrates, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 35-38). He does not remark that the man who tells the story of Prodicus telling the story of Hercules is the philosopher, Socrates. This confirms Semmel’s own observation that he does not “adopt the approach” of “political theorists and philosophers” in seeking to draw close to Mill’s thought but rather takes the approach of “the historian of ideas.” But if that approach forecloses the possibility that Mill really is a philosopher, then the ‘history of ideas’ turns away from the virtues of history and towards the false satisfactions of mere erudition.

This notwithstanding, Semmel does provide a good introduction to Mill’s principal concerns and to the ethos in which Mill operated. Perhaps without being fully aware of it, Semmel shows that the young Mill was no philosopher but an intellectual who could sympathize, up to a point, with the antics of the Saint-Simonians. Semmel retells the amusing story of B.-P. Enfantin, the “Père Suprême” of the group, who called for a “female messiah” to save women from marriage on the one hand and from prostitution on the other—from both Lady Virtue and Lady Vice. “Enfantin an forty of his disciples retired to a monastic retreat at his Paris estate of Menilmontant, where they took up a celibate life” in anticipation of the feminist redeemer’s arrival. Understandably enough, this austere way of life soon gave way to a more active one. “[C]onvinced that this new messiah would soon be found in a Turkish harem,” they departed on a pilgrimage to Constantinople “Pour chercher la femme libre.” Viewing these incidents from the other side of the English Channel, “Mill’s patience was exhausted.” He “could suggest only that such was the inevitable consequence of a good idea [the equality of the sexes] fallen into the hands of Frenchmen.” Sober Virtue was better loved in England.

To strengthen the case of Mill’s “Stoicism,” Semmel quotes remarks praising the Stoics and criticizing the Epicureans. He omits remarks praising the Epicureans and criticizing the Stoics. In his post-1840 writings, Mill never hesitated to make use of divers allies—as he did, for example, in Utilitarianism, wherein the young Socrates, Epicurus, Bentham, and Jesus are all commended as exemplars of utilitarian ethics. “Mill’s mind was essentially illogical,” the unreconstructed Benthamite W. S. Jevons charged. Alternatively, one might wonder if Mill was a philosopher who had mastered rhetoric. (See Paul Eidelberg: A Discourse on Statesmanship, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974, pp. 402-403). The latter possibility implies an interesting Mill. It deserves more extended investigation by someone who understands the issues.

Meanwhile, we have Semmel’s essay, which says things worth saying about a neglected aspect of Mill. Semmel reminds contemporary liberals of several facts: Mill opposed the practice of paying government debts with inflated currency; he opposed the abolition of capital punishment; he endorsed a wartime government’s right to seize enemy goods in neutral ships; he praised the Swiss practice of universal military conscription. “Mill saw himself countering the tendencies of a weak-willed, commercial, modern democratic society and providing a basis for a virtuous one.” Semmel traces this spiritedness to Machiavelli, perhaps without being full aware of all the issues involved.

Semmel regards the unsystematic nature of Mill’s writings as deliberate, but not rhetorically deliberate. System-building “would merely confirm the tendency toward liberticide” seen in Bentham and Comte. As noted previously, Semmel does not sufficiently reflect upon possible additional motives for apparently unsystematic presentation. However, the avoidance of intellectual despotism and the consequent insistence that the reader think for himself surely explain some of what Mill is about. Intellectual and moral activity guard against tyranny. Passivity does not. “Like the ancient philosophers whom he admired, and their Christian-Stoic disciples of the Renaissance, as well as the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the humanists Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, Mill understood that a good society could not long survive the eclipse of a freely chosen virtue.” On the basis of that sentence, Semmel may be said to be wiser than he is learned.

Douglas J. Den Uyl: Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1985. Republished with permission.

 

“Spinoza’s approach to political issues is decidedly modern,” by which Den Uyl means “scientific or positivistic.” That is, Spinoza’s “fundamental concepts” are “devoid of normative content” although some of his other, non-fundamental “principles” do have “normative content.” This foundation presents a difficulty. Modern science at least appears to begin with the “normative”: an invitation to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate. At the same time, its proponents insist on ‘realism,’ by which they mean, among other things, the rejection of teleology. What is the relation of the modern ‘norm’ to the modern ‘freedom’ from ‘values’?

In five chapters and two appendices Den Uyl explores the dual character of Spinozist modernity. In the first chapter he discusses Spinoza’s version of natural right. Spinoza regards human law as ‘normative’ and nature as non-‘normative.’ He regards right and power as “co-extensive terms.” “[O]ne has the right to do whatever one can do. Den Uyl claims that according to Spinoza “it cannot be said that the man who acts according to reason is acting more in accord with natural right than the man who acts exclusively from passion or appetite,” but he also sees that Spinoza considers rational men more powerful than impassioned men. Den Uyl does not explicitly draw the conclusion: if right and power are co-extensive terms and rational men are finally the most powerful, then he who acts according to reason does act more in accord with right. Den Uyl claims that Spinoza differs from Hobbes in that Hobbes does not equate right with power but with “right reason”; thus Hobbes was “clearly tied to the older normative traditions.” But if right reason does yield power, then those ties do not bind. “Spinoza’s equation of right and power is perhaps the most novel feature of his political theory. Perhaps—but one might consider not only Hobbes but Bacon, Descartes, and Machiavelli.

Making right and power co-extensive gives “normative” human law a tenuous moral status. In subsequent chapters Den Uyl considers Spinoza’s version of the state, the nature and foundations of political authority, and the relation of power to liberty. Den Uyl somewhat incautiously assumes that any teaching not found in the Political Treatise cannot be Spinoza’s final teaching, even if it is found in the Theologico-Political Treatise. He makes this assumption because Spinoza tells readers that “he will discuss what is relevant to his task in the [Political Treatise] without requiring the reader to consult his other works.” Fortunately, Den Uyl sees that the two books share “a remarkable similarity in their theoretical foundations.” Nonetheless, some readers may wish for a more careful consideration of Spinoza’s literary devices. Although Den Uyl reads Spinoza with intelligence, it is difficult for him to prove his usually stimulating interpretations. Den Uyl may be even more right than he realizes when he suggests that “casting off prejudices is perhaps the most difficult task facing the reader of Spinoza; for it is not uncommon for Spinoza to attach unfamiliar meanings to familiar terms.” To understand those meanings, their context must be considered; to understand a book by Spinoza, its context, namely, Spinoza’s works as a group, must be considered.

Den Uyl’s interpretations include the suggestion that “fear and love are the two basic passions by which one may fall under the authority of government.” Thus “the government has no authority over the reasonable man,” who is “his own master, his own authority.” Thus, the distinction between citizen and slave is rendered problematic by the political philosopher sometimes regarded as the founder of modern liberalism. Spinozist “political authority” is “norm-giving” but “determined by power.” Spinoza’s “is a philosophy of liberty only to the extent that liberty can be equated or shown to be consistent with a theory of power.”

Spinoza reconciles power and liberty by contending that reason liberated from passion and superstition is the source of power. The state is most powerful when acting rationally. Perhaps because reason requires the elimination of contradictions (Den Uyl does not say), peace “is the political expression of reason or rational action.” Because true power aims at, even yields, peace, the Spinozist state allows fairly substantial individual liberty. True power does not concern itself with regulating private vices. Tyranny depends too much on fear instead of “willing obedience to the law”; it is inefficient largely because of its irrational deployment of power.

In Spinoza one sees many of the elements of modern liberalism. Difficulties now well known to us, most particularly those concerning the character of reason, come to light in the writings of this conspicuously daring philosopher. If reason is a means of action instead of the best means of contemplating truth, it seems to be reconciled with politics in a way rejected by the ancients. But if reason is essentially ‘active,’ what can it serve but the body? And does not service to the body eventually corrupt reason and empower the passions? Will such corruption eventually yield the destruction of the liberal order, then despotism?

Ernest L. Fortin: Dissidence et Philosophie au Moyen Âge: Dante et ses antécédents. Montreal: Bellarmin, 1981.

Review published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 12, No. 1. 1984.

[Two decades after its publication, this book was translated into English and republished under the title Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Dante and His Precursors. Marc A. LePain translation. Lanham: Lexington Press, 2002.]

 

Artful self-contradiction and even syllogisms left incomplete enable philosophic writers to suggest unpopular thoughts to some readers. but poetic writing poses a dilemma for careful readers. Is the self-contradicting poet rational? Does he aspire to reason? Or does he believe something “because” it is absurd? (Walt Whitman put it with equanimity: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself….”)

Dante appears to bring fewer problems in this respect than, for example, Shakespeare. Dante celebrates reason. But he also celebrates Christianity, founded in part on the teaching that philosophic wisdom is folly. Does the poet who celebrates reason and Christianity subvert Christianity or baptize reason? How can anyone find out?

Fortin opposes the majority of today’s medievalists, who regard Dante as a poetical Aquinas. More than one-third of the pages here consist of firm scholarly assurances that such a thing as “the politic mode of philosophy” exists. (Although contemporary scholars readily accept the existence of mystical esotericism, rational esotericism seems much more improbable to many of them). Fortin discusses al-Farabi, Averroës, and Maimonides, tracing their kind of writing to Plato. He recounts the condemnation of Aristotle’s works in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier. He prudently observes that Siger and Boethius, Aristotle’s ill-fated medieval apologists, “had not sufficiently reflected upon the human and social conditions of philosophy”; their excessive candor almost invited the Bishop’s revenge. If Dante was indeed an Aristotelian, he had every reason to proceed with caution.

In Paradiso, Dante represents Siger’s sole wrong as the teaching of “truths susceptible to stirring up the malevolence or envy of his contemporaries.” This is one of several Dantean teachings that might stir malevolence or envy against Dante, were they not seemingly overwhelmed by far more numerous pieties. Fortin refuses to be overwhelmed—even to the extent of writing that Dante regarded political philosophy as “this master discipline” less than twenty pages after quoting Dante’s slightly different assertion that political philosophy is the “master of public things.” Such well-shaded imprecision, coupled with the necessarily selective approach to evidence that the brevity of his interpretation requires, will surely not force “apologists for the orthodox Christianity of the poem [to]…. admit their impotence before this opaque residue that ceaselessly comes to trouble our [!] repose and puts all in question.” Those apologists have their own reservoirs of ingenuity. That notwithstanding, one may say with some certainty that Fortin instructively follows an observation by one of his teachers, Leo Strauss, who noticed that when most readers come across a passage in a long and complex book which contradicts the overall argument the author seems to be making, they tend to overlook, ignore, or explain away the anomaly. Fortin is not such a reader.

Fortin’s strength will force some readers to look at the Commedia with more care, and more skepticism. At the very beginning of his commentary he observes that he does not intend to offer a comprehensive interpretation of the poem, only to spur the curiosity of others. He recognizes that a conclusive interpretation would have to show how the whole poem works.