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    Sade: Laclos for the Lackluster

    by

    Maurice Lever: Sade. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993.

    Originally published in the Washington Times, September 26, 1993.

     

    Democratic nations can’t get the hang of aristocracy. Ask an American to name an aristocratic family and your likely to hear ‘the Kennedys’ (who, being not only American but Irish, are doubly disqualified) or perhaps ‘the English royals,’ whose Windsor line has served as one of this century’s most prodigious sources of rich, white trash. Better still, consider the phrase, ‘Hollywood royalty,’ when referring to famous movie actors—an oxymoron comparable to ‘Coney Island champagne,’ or ‘Duluth chic.’

    By contrast, the French are a nation for whom democracy, aristocracy, and despotism remain live wellsprings of conflicting currents. One of the most powerful whirlpools among French intellectuals results from the collision of the aristocratic passions and pretensions with those of democracy. Aristocrats, impelled by what the ancient Greeks called thumos—the part of the soul that gets angry, waxes righteously indignant, quarrels at a straw when honor’s at the stake—detest modern democrats—peaceable bourgeois who pride themselves on being down-to-earth. But perceiving that there is no honor in being undemocratic in a democracy, aristocrats (nowadays more likely to be disaffected bourgeois) quickly learn to pose as plus démocratique que la démocratie—thundering against the modest inequalities of bourgeois democracies while deploring the vulgarity, the complacency, the selfishness, in a word the populism of the populace.

    The modern aristocrat wants to be above the law and protected by it; he wants to despise the vulgar while exacting their adulation, or at least their obedience. The Marquis de Sade represented these contradictory inclinations at their pathological extremes. Maurice Lever’s biography exhibits a pedestrian French intellectual’s confusion with respect to this mélange of arrogance and servility, too like his own prejudices to condemn, yet too obviously absurd and nasty to praise.

    Something of a literary courtier himself, Lever begins by flattering the Sade family, who cooperated with his research efforts. “The house of Sade distinguished itself over the years through important service to church and state… [producing] men who helped to make the France of the Ancien Regime what it was and whose feudal pride our hero would cherish throughout his life,” and producing as well many nuns, whom our hero did not much cherish. It quickly became clear that the Marquis’s immediate family did not provide young Donatien (as Lever chummily calls him) with a home fit for heroes. His father, a bisexual courtier-littérateur, his uncle, “the very type of the libertine priest,” his mother, absent, his grandmother and aunts, who “welcomed the child as a veritable Jesus—and immediately created a kind of cult around him,” and even his best friend’s guardian, a count whose “favorite amusement was to fire a musket at workmen repairing nearby roofs” (“When he hit one, he jumped for joy”), bent the young twig in decidedly roué directions, unfitting him for life in any of the several political regimes France saw in Sade’s lifetime. “At the age of four his despotic nature was already formed.” By the age of ten he had been moved from Provence to Paris, where a Jesuit grammar school developed his taste for theatrics, whippings, and sodomy. “Let the show begin!” Lever loopily exclaims.

    And a wretched show it was. Given to arranging orgies at which he would perform obscene acts with crucifixes while bellowing such challenges as “If thou art God, avenge thyself!” Sade soon came to the attention of civil and religious authorities, who, acting in the name of God, did indeed revenge Him. Lever tries to explain Sade’s antics as the result of bad upbringing and mental imbalance, while allowing that “To whip a defenseless woman is an ignoble act, whatever the torturer’s inner drives.” On the one hand, under the Ancien Regime such acts, when committed by the unnatural aristocrats, were mere misdemeanors; on the other hand, Lever intones, “noble birth was an unfair advantage.” And then again, Sade was made a scapegoat for a public outraged at the ‘aristoi’s’ excesses. But remember, “the torture [Sade inflicted] was more cerebral than actual,” as he preferred to terrify than to cut prostitutes (though he did a bit of both) and, by the way, didn’t the religion of the time exalt flagellation?

    The description of Sade’s usual living quarters—ranging from a prison-like château designed for “the sole purpose of protecting pleasure from outside attack” to the real jails and lunatic asylums—affords Lever the irresistible chance to prattle in Foucaultian terms about “carceral space” and to indulge in French lit-crit chitchat about how “existed in language only,” replacing “the hazards of life” with “signs” (portentous emphasis in the original). For the ‘aristocrats,’ the prisons of the Ancien Regime allowed one to surround oneself with excellent books at the price of enduring bad food, tedious or insane fellow-inmates, and intrusive authorities who pestered him with silly rules and red-penciled his prose. That is, an old-fashioned prison resembled nothing so much as a small, mediocre American liberal arts college of today. It being easy to earn a reputation for derangement living in such circumstances, Sade did, acting out the familiar pattern of the undergraduate: spending his considerable idle time writing home with requests for food (he put on weight), alternatively raging at and cajoling the administration, seeking relief in sexual fantasizing and autoeroticism. To top off the parallels, upon his release he found himself “with no idea where to go, where to stay, where to eat, or where to find money.” An American lad would, of course, head home to mom and dad, but Sade, aged 50, had outlived his parents and alienated his pitiably bovine wife of 27 years. He sank to the dregs. He became a writer.

    This sets Lever off on some more nonsense about how “Sade may have written masterpieces without knowing it”—his novel Justine being “one of the most powerful and striking creations of French literature.” To Lever, as to Sade in solitary confinement, no device is too squalid: he quotes Barthes, calls Sade’s prose subversive, and shamelessly compares the old hack to Laclos.

    The sovereign isolato, who nonetheless gassed up at the slightest affront, careened on, from porno potboiler to potboiler, from jail to mental hospital, ending up, under the Napoleonic regime, as the director of theatricals starring his fellow-inmates at Charenton, the Paris asylum where the saner ‘aristocrats’ were allowed in to gawk and giggle at woebegone thespians, whose performances were deemed therapeutic by the ‘progressive’ director. “Long before Nietzsche, Sade showed that dramatic art was not the fruit of Apollonian clarity alone but also the progeny of Dionysus,” Lever scribbles, having seen that the Marquis is best employed as the intellectual’s equivalent of an inflatable plastic woman, malleable for any sodden pleasure of mind or heart. This is the Marquis’s fitting legacy.

     

     

    Property Tax Law and the Passion for Equality

    by

    2018 Note: Mr. Geraldo Rivera has enjoyed a long career as a television journalist, initially in the New York City area and eventually on nationally-broadcast news programs. He quickly established a reputation for impassioned ‘advocacy journalism’ in the longstanding ‘muckraking’ tradition. By the 1990s, he had amassed a personal fortune sufficient to purchase a substantial residence in Locust, New Jersey, overlooking the Navesink River. He purchased controlling interest in a struggling local weekly newspaper, The Two River Times, founded by Claudia Ansorge, saving it from bankruptcy. He also contributed a column to the paper, and in September 1993 he published an article condemning New Jersey’s Farmland Assessment Act of 1964, which provided a property tax reduction to farmers. In the nearly three decades since the enactment of the law, clever accountants had discovered that landowners could qualify as ‘farmers’ if they could show they produced a small crop of some sort—for example, an annual harvest of timber from several acres of woodland.

    Mr. Rivera was not amused, and I was amused by his failure to be amused. The following article was published under a pseudonym in the paper on October 20, 1993.

     

    Mr. Geraldo Rivera’s condemnation of the Farmland Assessment Act must be admired on at least one point. Behind Mr. Rivera’s indignation—seen in his exclamation that “a law designed to help one of our most disadvantaged classes of citizens, the family farmer, has instead been twisted, misused, and corrupted over the years, until now it bears no resemblance to the original”—looms the benevolent face of Judge Robert Bork. Although Mr. Rivera did not number among Bork’s conspicuous defenders at the time of the judge’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court, it is refreshing to see such an energetic brief filed on behalf of the doctrine of “original intent,” scorned by Bork’s enemies. As Mr. Rivera clearly sees, to abandon the original intent of the framers of any law is to open all our laws to manipulation, whether by the self-interested or by the self-proclaimedly ‘idealistic.’

    I fear, however, that Mr. Rivera may now be attacked with all the venom once aimed at his soul-mate in Constitutional probity, Robert Bork. Moral reductionists who inflate ad hominem vindictiveness into pseudo-principles will say: ‘Rivera is cynical and self-interested. In complaining that his neighbor, who enjoys a farmland assessment, pays “perhaps 1/10 as much” in taxes “for the same size property,” Rivera merely betrays his envy for those whose accountants and tax lawyers are more expert than his own. Rivera could solve his problem by buying a couple of beehives, but no—he has to make a federal case of it.’

    Such critics may continue their vituperative assault along these lines; ‘Rivera is not only cynical, he is sophistical. He demonstrates that residential and farmland assessments are indeed unequal. But “unequal” hardly means unfair. By conflating inequality and unfairness, Rivera deliberately subverts the rules of logic for his own advantage, a shocking travesty of the fair-mindedness he pretends to espouse.’

    And yet, we all know that such charges must be calumnies. Mr. Rivera’s justice and wisdom are widely acclaimed, nowhere more often than in The Two River Times. All of his readers must jump to his defense against those who would blacken his reputation. It is an honor for me to go first.

    Let us begin by consulting the principles of the United States Constitution with respect to property. As it happens, the issue is addressed by James Madison in a famous passage from the tenth number of The Federalist. As you will recall, Madison here discusses the need “to break and control the violence of faction”—the tendency of all governments, even popular ones, to be divided conquered by those who, in their blind ambition, declaim against the rich or oppress the poor. In order to avoid the self-destruction of republican government and to arrest the slide toward anarchy and despotism, Madison recommends the encouragement of many different kinds of property. “The diversity in the faculties of men [Madison writes], from which the rights of property originate, is… an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of those faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties…. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government…. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice.”

    There is, for example, a temptation for the majority party to boost its power by decrying certain tax deductions as constituting a “welfare program for the rich,” in Mr. Rivera’s uncharacteristically ill-considered and factitious phrase. (After all, a tax break means you keep your own money; a welfare check means you’re getting somebody else’s.) Famously, Madison argues that the Constitution will lessen the dangers of political demagoguery by enlarging the territory and population governed by republican institutions. The United States will be a large country whose citizens will exhibit diverse interests and virtues—a country whose citizens, on account of the very diversity of their property, will not easily combine to enable “any one party to outnumber and oppress the rest.” The “rage” for any “improper and wicked project” such as “an equal division of property” would require, for its satisfaction, a despotic government that would at once enforce economic equality while destroying the political equality that could continue to enforce economic equality. This rage can be frustrated only by the deliberate encouragement of diverse property.

    The Farmland Assessment Act evidently was intended to foster such diversity. It has succeeded rather too well, in Mr. Rivera’s opinion. He wants the law amended to restrict eligible property owners to “family farmers,” a category he leaves tantalizingly undefined. He assumes that such restriction will lower his own property taxes, and generally conduce to liberty and justice for all.

    It is more likely that the effects of the Rivera amendment will be mixed. Some property owners will take the hit, or sell to others who will, thereby lowering taxes on the Rivera estate. Others will deed their land to a non-profit conservation trust, or to a government, or engage in some other tax-reducing scheme, removing property from the tax rolls altogether and raising taxes on the Rivera estate. Still others will sell their property to developers who, depending upon the density of the development, may or may not incur government expenses greater than the tax revenues generated. The net result will be increases in developed lands privately owned and in undeveloped lands publicly owned or owned by non-profits. The class of property most endangered—undeveloped or lightly developed large parcels privately owned by individuals—will continue to decline. And this may or may not result in any increase in property tax revenues. It cannot result in increased equality of taxation, unless owners passively accept the higher assessments. This they have already proven themselves disinclined to do.

    The TRT editorial printed next to Mr. Rivera’s essay observes, “the general public would be better served by careful deliberation and thoughtfully crafted legislation than hasty, election-year patchwork and posturing.” Such caution contrasts favorably to expression of moral indignation, especially since these so often leave the polemicist open to charges of tu cocque. As a reward to his staff for its superior prudence, and as a happy solution to his property tax woes, Mr. Rivera might consider moving his newspaper operations to his Locust property. After all, judging from Mrs. Ansorge’s recent description of your operations, TRT offices are a veritable beehive of activity; if beehives are an accepted agricultural activity deserving of farmland assessment status, the move would satisfy tax authorities. Better still, the move would elevate TRT staff to the quality of life to which they deserve to become accustomed. Mr. Rivera’s neighbors will remain free to cut their timber in peace, and sell it to their relatives, or any other willing buyer. The purposes of the U. S. Constitution will be served, the judgment of its Framers vindicated once more. All will be well.

    Admittedly, in vindicating Mr. Rivera’s justice and wisdom, I am compelled to call upon him to sacrifice his opinion, and to douse the coruscant flame of his passion for equality, a passion which, paradoxically, has raised his reputation so far above the common herd. It is a small sacrifice, one that will only burnish the bright escutcheon of his fame—which, as Madison’s colleague, Alexander Hamilton, wrote, is “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.”

    Imagination, Reconsidered

    by

    Eva T. H. Brann: The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.

    Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 17, Number 1, April 1993.

     

    Imagining takes up so much of our mental life, yet so little of the ‘philosophy of mind,’ that Eva T. H. Brann calls it “the missing mystery of philosophy” (3). Understandably so: How can the ‘mind’s eye’ look at itself? She undertakes to clarify if not to ‘solve’ the mystery by examining six topics: the cognitive nature of the imagination, the psychological function of imagery, the logical status of the image, literary imagining, pictorial imaging, and the way imagination works in the world, i.e., in the practices of religion, politics, and private life.

    With Aristotelian deliberateness, Brann canvasses an extraordinary range of learned opinion without ever losing sight of commonsense opinion. (The book is “dedicated… to the salvation of the obvious” [5].) Her learning is so wide and her thoughtfulness so unflagging that her book at the very least can serve as a comprehensive reference work on each topic—as a guide to and of further study. But it is much more than that, as the sum of her erudition does not confuse the substance of her argument.

    In classical philosophy imagination is a faculty of the mind. Imagination is indispensable to cognition because images “have a middle status between the being proper to a form in matter and the being proper to a form that has come into the intellect through abstraction from matter” (62). In its work of abstracting ideas from perceived materials, the intellect needs images. By contrast, according to Descartes and his successors, willing motivated by the passions is the preeminent attribute of the human mind. Imagination loses its function as an aid to understanding nature, and becomes an incitement to the conquest of nature. In Kant, for example, the human self is as hidden and unknowable as the Biblical God, and in its own way as creative—its mental faculties imposing forms upon appearances. Modern philosophy tends either toward dismissing imagination as useless for this constructive task (Locke, Hume, modern rationalism generally) or, at the other extreme, exalting it above all other faculties (Romanticism).

    Modern psychology reflects this difficulty. Psychologists try to “extract measurable evidence” (209) from interior experiences that are “behaviorally inaccessible and formalistically inarticulable” (222). “Claiming that the brain imagines is like saying the mouth eats—a suggestive metonymical figure but not a sufficient account” (266). Still, recent psychologists have turned up evidence that the imagination does indeed exist—a point denied by many of their predecessors.

    Brann’s consideration of the relation of images to logic reinforces the psychologists’ discovery. She discusses Plato’s Sophist, showing how an image, the product of the imagination, is even while it is not the original of that which it is the image. Even a lie is something, albeit not what the liar wants his auditor to believe it is. The image is other and less than the original, but it does exist, with its own center of gravity. “Fictions have force” (246).

    The force of those fictions called literature arises from the complementarity of sight and speech, the human power to represent sights in words that bring out the significance of the sights they conjure. If too far separated from originals, however, sight and words deceive—as in Romanticism, which Brann describes as imagination’s “fateful attempt at self-sufficiency” (520). The imaging of nonverbal depiction—whether mathematical, as in geometry, or painterly—requires “the fit of thought and space” (596). In modern, non-Euclidean, geometry a sort of Romanticism creeps in, as the mathematician posits or wills delimitations of infinite space; axioms or intuitions disappear, replaced by arbitrary concepts. Interestingly, Brann does not make this charge with respect to modern painting; abstraction there starts with imaging (641), and therefore with originals. Modern politics is another matter, as Brann cites the ill-fated exhortation written on a wall in Paris in 1968: “Let the imagination seize power” (712). Utopias are, paradoxically, powerful only when they are not willed, as may be seen by contrasting the longevity of Plato’s ideal city with the evanescence of the dreams of Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

    If the imagination serves as  sort of pivot between the senses and the intellect, spiritedness (the Greek thumos)—that part of the soul that get angry, that loves honor and victory—serves as a pivot in the soul “between the gross desire for things and the love of truth about them” (767). Imagination and spiritedness are related, as even social workers see when the speak of the ‘need for a positive self-image’ as indispensable to ‘self-esteem.’ Brann discusses this relation succinctly, and might have done more with it. It may have been quite significant in the transition from ‘ancient’ to ‘modern.’ It is surely significant in the academy today, where so many of the confusions in literary criticism and political activism evidently arise from a sophistic-Romantic inclination to conflate intellectual eros with a polemicized imagination.

    This book represents a lifetime’s observation, reading, thoughts, and imaginings. Thankfully, there can never be a definitive work on the subject. There is now a just and wise one.