Will Morrisey Reviews

Tzvetan Todorov: Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism. Carol Cosman translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

 

For more than a century, humanism both Christian and ‘secular,’ has come in for a thrashing. Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, decidedly lesser lights such as Sartre and Foucault, to say nothing (well, as little as possible) about clamoring ‘postmodernists’—the most fashionable thinkers have despised it, leaving it in the hands of a few redoubtable defenders: England’s Christian ‘Inklings,’ Malraux and Camus in France, Havel and his fellow Central European dissidents. And in America, aside from Saul Bellow, has there been a recent humanist who was not rather dull? The Bulgarian-born expatriate Tzvetan Todorov has now raised the honorable old flag once more, adding to it an even more controversial vindication of the Enlightenment, also much mauled by his fellow men, along with the women and several other ‘genders,’ of the Left.

Todorov sketches the current intellectual atmosphere in terms of three “hidden pacts” with Satan. Satan offered Jesus rule of the world in exchange for submission to himself; Jesus declined the offer, but His Church surreptitiously accepted it, leading to ecclesiastical corruption, religious warfare, and other worldly sins. Satan next offered Faust supreme knowledge in exchange for the same submission, and Faust accepted, although by the time Goethe revealed the pact it had been in place for two centuries. Satan finally offered modern man the third pact—thought and action freely willed, with no authority “superior to the will of men,” individually or collectively. With no more God, “you will be a ‘materialist,'” Satan announced; you will no longer love your neighbor, being an ‘individualist’; and even the ‘self’ that you now so prize will give itself over to “subterranean forces”—Nietzsche’s will to power, Freud’s libido—conceiving itself as only “an anomalous collection of impulses, an infinite dispersal,” “an alienated, inauthentic being, no longer deserving to be called a ‘subject.'” Once again, modern men only understood the pact’s fine print after they’d signed it.

A profoundly unsatisfactory condition, this modern ‘human condition.’ In response to it, four “intellectual families” have gathered: conservatives, humanists, individualists, and proponents of “scientism.” Conservatives seek to recover the intellectual and moral life enjoyed before the “pacts.” In the West, this often means the return to the Christianity of Christ. The individualists despise conservatism, saying, “You believe that our freedom entails the loss of God, society, and the self? But for us this is not a loss, it is a further liberation,” a liberation to be defended and furthered. The scientists reject both of these stances, insisting that when it comes to the freedom of the will, there has been no loss and no gain, since “there never was any freedom, or rather, the only freedom is that of knowledge,” which enables us to conquer natural necessity. Finally, the humanists “think, on the contrary, that freedom exists and that it is precious, but at the same time they appreciate the benefit of shared values, life with others, and a self that is held responsible for its actions; they want to continue to enjoy freedom, then, without having to pay the price” Satan would exact. Todorov counts himself among the humanists, a thinker in the line of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, men of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the aftermath of the French Revolution, respectively. “I will turn to them to seek tools for thought that can serve us again today,” tools with which he can “build a model of humanist thought,” a “type” of the humanist.  

He claims that the modern world emerged from and replaced the ancient world, “a world whose structure and laws were preexisting and immutable givens for every member of society.” This crucially ignores the importance of prudential choice in certain pre-modern thinkers; tradition alone did not prevail absolutely, “without one’s consent.” This notwithstanding, it is more or less true that both Jerusalem and Athens “require that human beings should submit to an authority external to them,” namely, God and/or nature. This is more true in the sense that human souls were understood to exist within a spiritual and natural order larger than themselves; it is less true in the sense that this order pervaded human souls themselves in the form of speech and reason. Still, “it was revolutionary to claim,” as the moderns did, “that the best justification of an act, one that makes it most legitimate, issues from man himself: from his will, from his reason, from his feelings”—a shift of “the center of gravity…from cosmos to anthropos, from the objective world to the subjective will.” Individuals reconceived themselves as responsible for themselves, and so did “the modern nation-states,” jealous of their sovereignty. 

The conservatives do not attempt, futilely, to “lead us back to the world of the ancients, pure and simple,” but they do hope to lop off or at least moderate modern excesses. Todorov’s examples are Louis de Bonald and Alexis de Tocqueville. Bonald rejected what he took to be the underlying doctrine of the French Revolution, the rejection of Roman Catholic Christianity which began with Protestantism, with its valorization of the individual conscience, and found ‘secularized’ expression in Descartes and Rousseau. Because modern man “knows nothing external to himself,” and because souls are sinful and consciences weak, “we have come under the rule of personal interest,” sundering ties of family, friendship, and country. “Persons bound together by relationships,” he wrote, have become “individuals, each with their rights.” Add modern materialism to this, and you have a new form of atomism. Bonald wants to return European men to Christendom.

Tocqueville acknowledges the ineluctably “democratic” or socially egalitarian, anti-“aristocratic” character of modernity and sees resistance to it as futile and indeed undesirable. He seeks to moderate modernity by setting its passion for liberty against its passions for equality and well-being. He especially deplores democrats’ intellectual inclination to materialist determinism, which he considers compatible with or propaedeutic to despotism. Understanding that “the ultimate result of individualism” under the sway of modern egalitarianism “would be the disappearance of the individual” into the mass of humanity, “he wants to do through his work is to make modern man conscious of the dangers that threaten him and to seek remedies for them.” From the ‘ancients’ he takes the love of political liberty, which requires not the assertion of personal freedom but association and deliberation with others. 

The modern scientists, on the contrary, embrace determinism, whether socioeconomic, biological, or psychological, regarding “the freedom of the individual to be essentially an illusion.” Everything has a cause, and “modern science is the royal road to knowledge” of causes. They do not, however, accept the fatalism of the ancients or the providentialism of the prophets. “Opposed to the passive acceptance of the world as it is,” scientism “can envisage another reality, better adapted to our needs,” emerging from the laws of causality themselves. That is, in understanding natural causes scientists can then manipulate them, adapting them to human “needs.” If we understand genetics, for example, we can breed more nourishing plants and animals. And “there is a temptation to extend the same principle to human societies: since we know their mechanisms, why not engineer perfect societies?” This raises the question, What is perfection? Perfection in their opinion turns out, somewhat circularly, to be “the results of science,” science as “a generator of values, similar to religion.” “Having discovered the objective laws of the real, the partisans of this doctrine decide that they can enlist these laws to run the world as they think best”; “the scientific scholar is tempted to become a demiurge.” The urges of the demiurges incline toward modern utopianism, “the attempt to establish heaven on earth, here and now.” “We have seen the brutal consequences,” shown by Todorov himself in his book, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps [1]—genocidal tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’ In the milder, democratic-republican regimes one sees instead what Tocqueville calls the soft despotism of bureaucracy, wherein “the expert replaces the sage as purveyor of final aims, and a thing becomes good simply because it is frequent,” made so by the “technocratic collective” and decidedly not self-governing individuals. 

At this, individualists rebel. They proclaim self-sufficiency. Far from lamenting their aloneness, they rejoice in the freedom it brings them. “If they have one regret, it is that man is not even freer of those fictions consisting of morality, communal life, and the coherent self.” Their most extreme representative, the Marquis de Sade, maintains that man, born “in the image of other animals,” not in the image of the God he denies, “is a purely egotistical being who knows only its own interests.” “Are we not all born in utter isolation,” in “a perpetual state of war”? he asks, rhetorically. His notorious preoccupation with the body comports with this, as the body “belongs exclusively to the individual.” He takes no care of the bodies of others, “having discovered that the pain of others gives him more pleasure than their joy.” Such sadism makes him “the black sheep of the individualist family.” The utilitarians have been more moderate, but perhaps only because they have decided that sadism isn’t very useful.

Humanists take a different view from all of the other moderns. They share with Tocquevillian conservatives and the individualists the capacity and the right “of being able to act at one’s own will,” both initiating activities and carrying them through without undue interference. This right “implies that the ultimate end” of free human acts is “a human being, not suprahuman entities (God, goodness, justice) or infrahuman ones (pleasures, money, power).” This human being might be oneself or another, but always human; humanism is both human-centered and humane. Todorov summarizes the humanist claims as “the autonomy of the I, the finality of the you, and the universality of the they.” Therefore, humanism is no egoism, as individualism inclines to be. “What guarantees the unity of these three features is the very centrality granted to the human race, embodied by each of its members: it is at once the source, the goal, and the framework of its actions,” anthropocentric not theocentric. Politically, humanists prefer “regimes in which subjects can exercise their autonomy and enjoy the same rights.” The slogan, if not the practice of the French Revolution puts it, famously: Liberty, equality, fraternity.

This is not to say that the regime of liberal democracy excludes the other three modern “families.” But they tend to strain its limits—individualists working toward a-civism or even anarchy; conservatives toward ‘authoritarianism’; scientists toward ‘totalitarianism.’ For humanists, the individualists’ liberty is attractive, especially their esteem for consent to laws of one’s own making, but not “outside the human community.” The scientists’ demand that human beings figure things out for themselves makes sense to them, but not their dogmatic materialist determinism. They share the moderation of conservatives without framing that moderation by divine or natural laws. Todorov considers humanism “the most satisfying if not the only worthwhile response to the devil’s challenge.” Neither rationalists nor irrationalists, they seek knowledge but recognize that it “sometimes follows paths that elude rational analysis.” They need not be religious, but neither need they be atheists, inclining to leave “a somewhat vague space” for religious experience. As to one’s relations with nature, “humanists affirm that man is not nature’s slave, not that nature must become his slave.” In their estimation, human beings share power with God and nature. Accordingly, they refrain from worshipping man in place of God, since “man is neither good nor bad” but ‘can become one or the other, or (more often) both.” While not deriving “values” from divine or natural law, neither do they concede that they are arbitrary. By nature social, human beings need one another not only for survival and reproduction but “as conscious and communicative beings.” This natural sociality enables them to mitigate the harshness of physical nature, including “the laws of their biological nature,” without aspiring to master it. In political life, as the great humanist Montesquieu writes, their laws correspond to their existence as “reasonable beings, and not on the dispositions or particular wills of those beings.” 

Given the centrality of freedom to so much of modern thought, “just what does the freedom of modern man consist of?”  Modern freedom or ‘autonomy’ consists of “one’s choice to feel, to reason, and to will oneself.” In the higher ranges, this means Kantian autonomy in accordance with his ‘categorical imperative,’ but Todorov means more generally the right to take “action that finds its source in the subject himself.” Montaigne, “the pivotal figure between the old and the new, who read all the Ancients and whom all the Moderns would read,” claims, first, “a form of affective autonomy,” to “live with those he loves, not with those whom custom imposes on him,” first of the latter being his family, from whom he distanced himself every day in his famous tower. Montaigne rates friendship, which is voluntary, over family, which is given. Even animals love their children; “the fact that we tend to cleave to our blood relations is proof that we have not left the ‘animal’ condition, that we have not achieved a separate ‘humanity.'” And as a (mildly) individualistic sort, he also dislikes the aristocratic preoccupation with the past and the future seen in their concern for bloodlines; “one must live in the present rather than in the future, and in the self rather than in others.” Similarly, one should guard one’s freedom of mind, especially from the tyranny of books—evidently including the Book. His Essays are just that: essays, attempts at understanding, not revelations or dogmatic assertions. Montaigne writes “against scholastic knowledge and the submission to tradition, in favor of the autonomy of reason and judgment.” “Memory can be useful but it gives me a borrowed knowledge; reason is weak but it is mine; it is therefore the better of the two.” He shares with the Bible a certain humility, nonetheless, “hasten[ing] to show how human reason is weak, how men’s pride has little justification,” given their frailty and their too-frequent depredations upon one another. But neither is the individual “a simple plaything in the hands of Providence.” We can rule ourselves by reason—tentatively, knowing that our reason can fail us. Reason is the way to human freedom. Unlike the Ancients, who regarded reason as the distinctive human characteristic, Montaigne gives freedom this place.

Descartes views freedom similarly but exhibits more confidence in its power. He “sets off on the path of ‘proud’ humanism.” This, thanks to his celebrated “method” of rational thought. Regarding intellectual freedom as inalienable (“I think, therefore I am” replacing God’s “I am that I am,” at least for humans), he more clearly connects modern science to the immaterial than does Bacon’s experimentalism. In the realm of action, no such ‘abstraction’ can be had; political freedom requires the exercise of prudence within concrete, changing circumstances. Descartes as it were ‘brackets’ God, whose revelation, while “incomparably more certain” than human reason “teaches us nothing about a great part of the world,” leaving a very wide space for human thought to roam. “The domain of human knowledge has certain limits; but within these, the Cartesian method is sovereign.” This confidence, Todorov suggests, was likely to spill into the political world, sooner or later. Although “Descartes is not a defender of scientism…the total power he attributes to the will and the reason of the individual paves the way for the theoretical justifications the scientists will use to support their policies.”

The much more thoroughly political Montesquieu defends the humanist claim that “philosophical determinism does not exclude political will.” If materialist determinism takes the place of divine providence, Montesquieu makes himself the ‘secular’ equivalent of the Pelagians and Erasmus, holding man, not God, responsible for his own actions, adjuring the physician to save himself. He never goes so far as the scientistic utopians, claiming that politics can be conducted as a straight deduction from natural laws. Yes, climate is important, but “moral causes are more powerful than physical ones,” and the best way to learn how to deal with physical causes is education. By studying, traveling, discussing through considering received laws, religion, and customs, individuals and p0litical societies find it “possible to surmount the determining force of conditions that preexist [their] voluntary intervention.” Thus, Montesquieu writes, “We fashion for ourselves the spirit that pleases us, and we are its true artisans,” and “this interpretation of the human condition is found at the basis of Montesquieu’s analysis of political regimes.” This leads to his preference for regimes of liberty over despotisms. Only those political institutions “are good that do not hinder [man’s] autonomy of action.” These include republics and constitutional monarchies. The choice of one or the other depends upon the circumstances in which a people finds itself, very much including the kind of education it has received.

Rousseau pulls back from ‘proud’ humanism, maintaining the distinction between freedom of thought and freedom of action that Descartes maintained less than firmly. Human nature exists, but it is somewhat malleable by human beings themselves. “In all his reflections Rousseau will seek to articulate the given and the chosen: love of self and pity are in the nature of man, although they are equally the source of virtues, which depend on the will.” Given this ambiguity, with its inherent possibility of choosing wrongly, Rousseau teaches that individuals must obey the laws, although peoples may revolutionize. This is because the laws, customs, traditions of civil societies are necessary to constrain individuals, but they nevertheless “consecrate the triumph of might, not right.” Anticipating his contemporary, David Hume, he refuses to derive right from facts. “The only legitimate government of a country is the one chosen by the free will of the people of that country,” its “general will.” 

If peoples revolutionize, however, laws, customs, and traditions will no longer constrain individuals as they do in more settled times. To guard against rapine, Rousseau educates his Emile to become “an autonomous being,” self-governing and not prey either to the wills of others or to his own passions. Not for him will be the “servile submission to current opinions and absurd conventions, the habit of conducting himself according to the norms of the day even if they are constantly changing,” worries about what the neighbors will say. Emile will never hide his nature from others, giving up his natural autonomy and becoming “alien to himself.” He will stand as a loyal citizen in the nation of his own soul, ready to act as the head of his household and an example to his countrymen. With this, Todorov draws an important distinction: for Rousseau, “the notion of autonomy is no longer limited in scope; it intervenes in knowledge and in action, in public life and in private life; yet it is not absolute but limited.” That is, “humanists do not misjudge the power of the given, either of physical nature or of social custom,” but they do contend that “liberation is always possible.” “Human life is an imperfect garden,” no Eden then, no utopia in the future. Freedom is rather “a goal inscribed in us,” a goal which “can become the horizon of political institutions.” When it does, however, it brings with it “an unforeseen danger.” Benjamin Constant was the humanist thinker who recognized this danger and addressed it.

If Rousseau criticizes Enlightenment scientism and the social conventions ridiculed by the Enlighteners, and if his firm insistence on self-discipline would have moderated the French Revolution his superficial admirers carried out, Constant writes in that revolution’s aftermath, freedom of the individual “is now threatened” by “the very generalization of the idea of freedom.” Popular sovereignty may threaten individual self-government. Freedom of all may contradict the freedom of each one amongst the all.

With the French Revolution’s replacement of the ‘absolute’ rule of the one with the rule of the many, tyranny took a new and much more lethal turn: the Jacobin Terror. Constant rejects Rousseau’s insistence that the individual alienates all his rights in entering into the social contract, a claim that opens the way for a new and more lethal absolutism. Rousseau’s theory should never have been implemented directly; abstractions do not have good results in the real world, where his General Will must be wielded by real individuals. From moderate Montesquieu, he draws the lesson that neither the origin nor even the structure of political power makes it good; one must consider “the way it functions,” whether it is limited by law or, better, by balancing, countervailing powers. “How can power be limited other than by power?” Constant quite sensibly asks. Individual and political liberty depend upon such limitation. Only then can “what was described by Montaigne and Descartes as a personal practice” be “protected by law as an inalienable right.” In so arguing, Todorov rightly observes, Constant sides with Locke against Hobbes. “Constant thus sketches out, just after the Revolution, the only framework in which a politics in accord with humanist principles can be situated.”

To be sure, the garden will remain imperfect. The democratic side of the modern state, popular sovereignty, may still lean against its republican side, the side that features representative government and balance of separated powers, just as statism may still lean against democracy. Each side moderates “the other’s excesses.” [2]

Constant sees that this likely condition of instability needs moral ballast to maintain it. But with Christianity declining and Machiavellianism ascending, where will morality ‘come from’? Constant finds that source in humanity itself, in the ‘Rights of Man’ asserted but then cruelly violated in the Revolution. “These rights do not decide the politics of states”—that would introduce a pseudo-geometrical deduction into practice that invites the all-too-clearcut rule by guillotine—but they can and should be invoked as limits of political action, limits to the means by which rulers may rule. Constant reverses the approach to natural rights taken by the Jacobins. Instead of using natural rights, including liberty, as justification for the use of any means in order to obtain a perfect—and therefore impossible to realize—garden on earth, Constant invokes natural rights as limitations to the way of life of the democratic republican regime, limitations to the way it rules. As with Christian teachings before it, natural-rights teaching will indeed require teaching: an educational system devoted to its promulgation. 

For Constant, then, the philosophy of freedom turns away from the early moderns’ ‘state of nature’ teaching, without erasing natural rights. Those rights must be understood in a new way, however. “In the network of human interactions, no isolated entities exist but only relations; the very opposition between essence and accident has no place in the world of intersubjectivity,” a world in which “I love the being who is in a certain position in relation to me.” As Constant puts it, more politically, “Everything in life depends on reciprocity.” That is, ruling and being ruled, seen in the family and in the polis by Aristotle and defined by him as politics strictly speaking, can be reintroduced under conditions of modern statism if modern men design their regimes as democratic and republican both, and if they learn to respect natural rights in others with at least some of the concern with which they insist on them regarding themselves.

Despite their emphasis on human sociability and indeed the political character of man, the humanists have not ignored the aspect of human being that at times craves solitude. “Isn’t Rousseau one of the first to have understood this, describing himself as a solitary walker?” And Montaigne, if not a solitary walker, could surely be described as a solitary sitter. Fundamentally, is there “a tenable difference between humanists and individualists?”

Rousseau seeks solitude “to escape the weight of social obligations in order to live freely,” Todorov proposes. He did not cut himself off from all social ties. As seen in the Confessions, he maintained “constrained communications” with others. In The Reveries of a Solitary Walker his solitude serves a purpose, the experience of “a pure feeling of being.” Rousseau thus does not claim that human nature as such is solitary. He rather implies that he differs from the human norm. Todorov describes this as his acknowledgement of his own special “fate,” the condition of being persecuted. This, however, raises the question of why Rousseau suffered persecution. Could it be that he, like Socrates, was a philosopher? “The philosopher was wisest when he preferred the solitude of his desert and written communication of the result obtained by his search for truth. Rousseau understands this and readily admits that his own choice of solitude is hardly that of Descartes, or, one might add, of Montaigne.”

As for Montaigne, “he bases his way of being on his ‘dreamy way.'” Some men are social, some not. “We are no longer dealing with a matter of principle but with the way of life that best suits each individual. There is no single ideal conduct in this regard but several, and everyone has the right to act according to his penchant.” Montaigne sets limits on each of these polar choices: the life “exclusively devoted to the need for glory and honors” leaves no space for reflection; the life of “exclusive concern with the inner life and indifference to any aspect of the social order” neglects the social and political conditions needed to support it. And in both of these lives are indeed ‘exclusive,’ impossible for human beings to live. One is reminded of Aristotle’s remark, that the man outside the city is either a god or a beast; the hero seeks self-deification, the solitary individual lives like a bear or a mountain lion. Futilely, they deny their humanity, their nature as human beings. 

If humanism maintains a balance between freedom and sociality, how does it deal with love, which has taken an at times overwhelming prominence in modern ‘popular culture’? Todorov carefully excludes the more dilute forms of love—humanitarianism or philanthropy and patriotism—following Aristotle in understanding it as “affection pushed to its supreme degree,” eros “addressed only to a single being”—an irreplaceable you, as the song has it. Equality may enter into personal love regarding the relations of the two lovers, but no equality can enter into the relations of the lovers with anyone else. It isn’t “that we cannot love several beings at once, but that every love is defined by its particular object.” And unlike animals, human love consists of more than sexuality; eros or “love-desire” consists of longing, delights in possession, whereas philia or “love-joy” consists of reciprocity, delighting in “the simple existence of the love object,” taking “joy in presence” of it. In theological terms, philia “is a benevolent love, not a concupiscent love,” and its “goal is not fusion,” as with eros, as “I cannot rejoice in the existence of the other unless he remains separate from me.” Philia accords with humanism, eros not. Rousseau tells his readers why: “Love, which gives as much as it demands, is in itself a sentiment filled with equity.”

Here Todorov brings in the moral principle of his favored moral philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who replaced the postmodernists as his guiding star sometime between his book on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and his book on the Holocaust. [3] With philia, the you is no longer a means, it becomes the end; in addition, [the lover] must reserve the autonomy of his will.” “These two characteristics relate love-joy to humanist doctrine.” My beloved isn’t the means to my satisfaction; more, she is free to be herself, even as “the beneficiary of my love.”

This humanist conception of love differs from those of both classical philosophers and of Christians. For Plato and Aristotle, love of a person forms a rung on a ladder or scale, as seen in Plato’s Symposium and in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where the beloved (including the beloved friend) embodies something beyond the person who is beloved: beauty, virtue—a fine principle or abstraction. Genuine philia cannot exist except “between virtuous and worthy individuals.” Christian love (as Milton says of Eve’s love of Adam) is love of God in him. “This explains why, in love-charity, the substitution of the object is possible; I must not attach myself to this or that person, but bring the same love to everyone.”

Not so, for the pioneering humanist, Montaigne. He loves “the unique character of [his] friend,” La Boétie. Montaignian philia “celebrates the achievement of individual identity,” not the person as the embodiment of either virtue or the image of God. “Love of the creature does not lead here to love of the Creator.” “The person of the friend is the sole justification for his choice.” This is why Rousseau’s Héloïse is the new Héloïse. Being loved for her humanity, the humanist’s beloved cannot be perfect, although it is permissible, even laudatory, to imagine her so. Again, “human life is an imperfect garden,” making the act of imagining perfection in the loved one “the most precious feature of human love,” an act of “putting our capacity to fabricate the real in the service of our relations with concrete human beings.” Rousseau Kantifies love before Kant came along to Kantify morality. Philia “promotes the other man [or woman] as the ultimate end of my action, as humanism would have it.” Humanism cherishes the human.

Philia strictly limits the modernist tendency toward making the human will triumphant. Love does not subject itself to the will; therefore, “will cannot govern everything.” After all, “being what one is, one can choose to act according to one’s will, and this justifies the demand for political autonomy, but can one choose to be what one is?” Freedom of the will exist, but within the framework of one’s individual nature.

Obviously, in humanism “the human takes the place of the divine.” Humanism nonetheless avoids tyranny—as scientism does not—by limiting itself in its love to individual persons, by not directing itself toward ‘the state’ or ‘the leader’ or all humanity (as in, for example, communist doctrine). Nor is it conservative in Todorov’s sense of the word, refusing to view human beings as “means in view of a transcendent end,” whether divine, natural, or simply abstract.” Constant wrote in a letter to Annette de Gérando, “A word, a look, a squeeze of the hand have always seemed to me preferable to all reason, as indeed to all earthly thrones.”

If, then, humanism counters Satan’s pacts by showing that life without God need not result in the loss of free will (materialism) or the loss of friendship and love (Machiavellian lives spent jostling for self-interest), does it mean that the soul, now reduced to the self, has no real nature, that it is “in reality impressionable, fickle, distracted”—prey to subconscious forces? Having given up the proud dreams of modernists, does the self dissolve in the acids of postmodernism? “For if the individual is merely a bundle of multiple characters over which he has no control, if he is merely the label haphazardly slapped onto a series of discontinuous states, if he can never take advantage of any unity, can we still speak of his autonomy?” Can the real condition of the self sustain a philosophy of freedom?

Todorov recurs to Montaigne, that adept of self-knowledge. Montaigne addresses two problems in considering himself: his inconsistency over time; his multiplicity in space. He more than concedes, he insists upon, the fact of “human changeableness.” He goes so far as to deny that the human self has an “essence that would resist the vagaries of existence.” “But this does not mean, on another level, that this individual has no stability or that one can never generalize from one individual to another.” How so?

The facts of time and space, he argues, within which we witness our own changes, mental and physical, themselves limit his freedom to change. He has his own unique history, his life over time. And he is born within a framework of custom, a space in which certain customs prevail, which forms habits; habit is a second nature, “no less powerful” than physical nature. “The outcome of a life is the identity of the person.” A life lived rightly “converts form into substance, fortune into nature, habit into essence.” This is why the faces of mature men and women differ from one another far more than the faces of infants. The ‘nature’ so developed “consists precisely of our indeterminacy, of our capacity to supply ourselves with an individual and collective identity: nature has put us into the world free and unfettered,” allowing us to give “unity and meaning to [our] life.” What much later comes to be called ‘history’ becomes, in the hands of humanists, “the place for the constitution of being.” 

Todorov seems unsure whether Montaigne proposes self-creation in a strong sense, or whether, as he puts it, “the course of human life leads everyone to discover his ruling quality, and to stick by it,” as he engages in dialogues with himself and with others. For Montaigne, the dialogues with others range over an array of thinkers, ancient and modern, whose writings he discusses as a means of achieving self-knowledge, self-revelation. As he reads them, he judges one opinion sound, another wrong, gradually forming his own opinions, settled by capable of being unsettled by a better argument.

This apparent plasticity sat on epistemological bedrock. “Montaigne drew all of his conclusions concerning the human race from the nominalism of William of Ockham, which he embraced there are only particular objects in the world; where humanity is concerned, only individuals exist.” And along with William of Ockham stands Niccoló of Florence, who taught his readers “how to separate…the ideal and the real,” discarding the former for the latter. Montaigne claims to present himself as he is, further claiming that he is worth the trouble you take to know him, in his long and complex book. In this, Montaigne too becomes a ‘prince,’ a ruler in the sense of a leader of human thought and sentiment. I am worth knowing, but so are you, since you and I are equally human. Humanism saves itself from narrow individualism, however, because self-knowledge requires others, both those one meets in books and those we meet as friends. Plato, yes, but La Boétie even more. Not just any friends, evidently. “The best friendship and the best dialogue between two men are animated by the impulse to know: ‘The cause of truth should be the common cause for both.'”

This self-knowledge, valuable in itself, also result in knowledge of human beings generally, since in order to acquire it, one must pay attention to others. If “the individual exists only in relationship” with other individuals, there must be some commonality among interlocutors. They “resemble on another,” although they “cannot be reduced to one another.” Montaigne’s “person becomes an instrument for interrogating,” if not an essence, a human nature, then “the human condition.” In this way, Montaigne brings together “all the basic of ingredients of humanist doctrine”: individual freedom, “the autonomy of the authorial I“; the “finality” of the you, the fact that you are unique, with nothing beyond yourself; and “the universality of the they,” all individuals living within “the same human condition.” “In the objective world, everyone is a member of the same species; in the intersubjective universe, everyone occupies a unique position; in communion with oneself, everyone is alone, and responsible for his actions.

But (as Satan insists, and many Christians fear) does humanism inevitably result in the death of God, and the death of God in nihilism, as the God-substitutes men propose are rejected, one after another? And does nihilism result in societal collapse or the rule of force, in anarchy or the renunciation of freedom? Todorov denies these things. Looking first, however, at the other modern “families” of principles, he finds each defective. Conservatives, he claims, do “believe in the existence of common values fixed by the society in which we live,” but define morality as conformity to “the current norm.” (This is obviously an absurd assertion, since “the current norm” is precisely what modern conservatives reject, but let it pass as a literal definition what ‘conservatism,’ for now.) Scientism rejects morality as meaningless, but exempts itself and its activities from that stricture.

Todorov is more concerned with the challenge of individualism, which transforms the Ancients’ “aspiration to the good life” into “the cult of authenticity,” which effectively means doing as one likes. His concern is that the founder of humanism in France, Montaigne, inclines toward Epicureanism. He pretends to Christianity, dividing his life “into two parts: his knees bend, his public actions conform to custom, but his reason and his judgment remain free, and he chooses for himself an art of living that suits him personally, with no concern to impose it on others.” This “paves the way for the individualist attitude,” although it doesn’t go all the way there. In their own ways, both La Rochefoucauld and Hobbes show similar inclinations. Individualism achieves its fullest flower in the esthetes, particularly Baudelaire, who rejected moral principles altogether in favor of “aesthetic values.” Their dandyism parodied the old Platonism, “asking life to be beautiful rather than good”—sundering what Plato had seen together. 

These “families” of moral principles are either do result in nihilism or fail to block its surge. How does humanism fare?

Todorov begins with Rousseau. Between the state of nature and the rule of social convention, Rousseau seeks a “middle way.” The key text here is the Emile. [4] Emile’s education proceeds in stages, the first intended to develop his natural capacities, the second intended to develop his social capacities. That is, he first learns how to defend his physical and moral independence, his liberty, then (upon reaching puberty) his “social virtues,” which will enable him to love a woman and raise a family in civil society. Rousseau avoids nihilism by pointing to the natural “voice of conscience” in every human heart. He firmly rejects the materialism he finds in the Enlightenment, which would indeed bring on nihilism and the destruction of social life. In this, Rousseau ‘secularizes’ Christianity. “He does not seek to establish an art of living that would lead every individual separately to the ideal of the good life”—the path of Montaigne—but “places himself in the perspective of benevolence, a relation that presupposes sociability.” In Rousseau’s political philosophy, there is no divine-law foundation of morality, pity or compassion replaces charity or agapic love (that is, sympathy for the other as human, not as a sufferer), and no sharp distinction between the good as a manifestation of a holy Spirit and evil as ‘the flesh.’

But in locating morality squarely in human nature, acknowledging man’s freedom either to accept the promptings of conscience or to reject them, Rousseau thereby rejects the notions which led to the excesses of the French Revolution. His famously astringent condemnation of the hypocrisy of the aristocratic society of his own day registers his understanding that any society, society as such, can go wrong. A new society will not necessarily improve the existing one; it could even be worse. “No one who proposes to reform society in order to make all men good and happy can legitimately claim affiliation with Rousseau, as the revolutionaries of a later generation (or more recently) have done. It is not the fault of this or that society if men are wicked: they are so because they are sociable beings, free and moral—in other words, because they are human….Man discovers good and evil only in the state of society and through society; but his discovery does not determine him one way or another, it simply offers him the possibility of becoming good or evil.” No utopianism need apply.

What does apply is the voice of conscience, “the true capstone of [Rousseau’s] moral theory,” one of the distinctive features of human nature. It is “the capacity to separate good and evil and therefore the counterpart of human liberty, without which morality has no meaning.” It exists only in the individual soul, not in civil society. It is neither reason nor feeling; it requires no complex logical thought to arrive at, but unlike feelings which vary “according to individuals and circumstances,” it “is the same in everyone”—written, Rousseau writes “by nature with ineffaceable characters in the depth of my heart.” Without it, “reason is mute.” He who follows it is good; he who follows it only after overcoming his vices is virtuous—virtue denoting strength. To be good is to be happy; to be virtuous is to be dutiful. 

Can the dutiful, virtuous man find his way to the happiness goodness brings? Yes, through love—through love of oneself (as Montaigne saw, and practiced) and through love of others, as the Christians saw and as Emile was brought to understand. Moral duty constrains, but “love is joy.” Since love or benevolence “consists of cultivating what is already inside us,” through right education, “love and friendship are therefore constitutive of man.” Loving another does “not sacrifice one’s being, it completes it.” Rousseau writes, “The eternal laws of nature and of order to exist. For the wise man, they take the place of positive law,” rather as Christ’s law of love takes the place of the Mosaic law for the Gentiles. For the philosopher, for a Rousseau, inquiry into those laws continues throughout his life; for him as for Plato’s Socrates, philosophy is zetetic and dialogic. But non-philosophers, the attachments of friendship and love, “with their inevitable freight of illusions and disappointments,” will prevent the founding of any utopia, any Eden, while preventing them from falling into nihilism, whether a nihilism of violence or a nihilism of listlessness.

For the humanist view of politics, Todorov turns not to Rousseau, however, with his ever-problematic Contrat Social, but to more down-to-earth Constant. Constant was what was beginning to be called a liberal in politics and economics, but he rejected the utilitarian form of liberalism then propounded by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, itself derived from the Machiavellian line, seen in Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld. Self-interest alone cannot explain a considerable part of human behavior, as seen in religion, love, and war. And it can be dangerous, as seen in the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Constant described as “self-interest personified.” That is, self-interest may usually motivate peaceful, commercial relations, but not in the tribe of the lion and the eagle. Fortunately, self-interest on the Napoleonic scale defeats itself, as Napoleon’s career in fact illustrated. But why tempt future would-be Napoleons by valorizing self-interest? “The Napoleonic tyranny was at least partially due to the success of philosophic theories that reduced man to a being subject to the reign of interest.” Lions and eagle will never go extinct; it is wiser to redirect their ambitions to things beyond themselves.

Constant concedes that “valorizing individual interest was liberating” at the beginning of modernity, as was popular sovereignty, which seemed to promise that the people really would “act in their own interest.” The Revolution had dampened the latter hope as surely as Napoleon had dampened the former. What is needed then, is a more capacious sentiment, not to replace but to supplement and restrain self-interest, which Constant calls “enthusiasm.” Reason alone won’t suffice because reason alone is weak; it is “an instrument not a force.” Nor is enthusiasm Christian or Rousseauian conscience. It is a moral sentiment, directed at the good of the other, whether the other is a human being, a nation, nature, or God.

Of these kinds of enthusiasm, religious enthusiasm is the most dangerous. (Constant hadn’t seen the truly virulent nationalisms that would come later.) If directed toward the Deity or Supreme Being, it is ennobling; if directed by the “positive religions,” it can lead to persecution, a policy of a religion whose priests use the enthusiasm of the faithful to serve their self-interest. Positive religion “cannot serve as the basis of morality, and it should be as isolated as possible from political authority,” but “though religion cannot be the foundation for morality, morality will be the measure of how we evaluate particular religions,” as “each of them comes closer to religious feeling the less interest in and farther removed it is from political power.” To ensure that positive religions hew to this standard, Constant reaches for what had become the familiar religious solution: church disestablishment and the resulting multiplicity of sects, competing amongst themselves to perfect “religion itself and its action on society.” In Constant’s metaphor, if religion divides into a thousand streams, “they will fertilize the ground that the torrent” of enthusiasm released by one or two religions alone “would have devastated,” and in fact had devastated in Europe’s religious wars.

Todorov optimistically claims that the same might be said of moral systems themselves. Multiply them and let them compete. This, he stipulates, ought to be “the credo of the state,” not of humanists. He seems hopeful that humanism will win the battle of moral ideas and sentiments, in the long run, and he obviously intends his book as a soldier in that battle.

In differentiating politics from morality while at the same time refusing to divorce them, Constant ventured to criticized Kant’s dictum, drawn from Christian thought, that one must do right even if in so doing the world perishes. Specifically, he regards the obligation to tell the truth as applicable only among decent persons. A murderer sets himself outside of civil society; as previous thinkers had held, they put themselves in a state of war with their intended victims. Since, as Constant writes, “no man has the right to truth that injures another,” Socrates is right to say that one may lie if a man in a murderous rage demands to know where you keep the knives. Kant took this criticism unkindly, devoting a long essay, On the Claimed Right to Lie Out of Humanity, to refuting it. In Kant’s rigorously deductive analysis, lying contradicts the truth which, for Enlightenment rationalists as much as for Christians, alone sets you free. He is simply “not interested in the practical consequences of acts.” Constant replied that the true moral goal is “to do no harm to another,” which usually comports with truthfulness, but not always. When it doesn’t, “love of neighbor must win out…over the love of truth,” since the aim of morality is the ‘you,’ not the Kantian ‘I’ who wants to maintain his integrity. In this, “led by his infallible sense of the concrete,” Constant is the better humanist. “If there were an ultimate conflict between truth and humanity, Constant would choose humanity.”

And in the public realm, “truth is not the main thing, but being able to seek it.” A government may surely lie to deceive its enemies and protect citizens; it may not suppress freedom of speech and of the press. “”For Constant, the real virtue of liberty consists precisely in that it allows the examination of all opinions, the pursuit of all arguments.” This practice ensured, the better opinions will prevail, in the long run. Pluralism will do the work Providence does in Christianity.

In a thoroughly Montaignian move, Todorov immediately extends Constant’s dialogue beyond current opinions to past thinkers. “To make [the past] intelligible is also to begin to know ourselves,” since we cannot trust the rhetoric of “our contemporaries,” who often lack the clarity of judgment perspective offers. Having passed from aristocratic or oligarchic civil societies to democratic ones, ‘we moderns’ think and act exactly as Aristotle said democrats do: “claim[ing] allegiance to the principle of equality and cherish[ing] the choices of one’s own will.” “This transformation generated many new sufferings” for the nations of the twentieth century. European moderns split between “conservatives,” who attempted to save some of the old regimes, especially the Catholic Church, under neo-aristocratic or ‘authoritarian’ regimes, and pseudo-scientists, whose claim to rule consisted of their alleged knowledge of “impersonal and implacable laws” of history. Invoking ‘science’ as justification for their “revolutionary utopianism,” they imposed ‘totalitarian’ regimes, modern tyrannies. Their counterparts in more genuinely democratic regimes eschewed rule by terror, relying instead on bureaucracy; “politics then becomes a domain on which we consult experts, and the only debate is over the choice of means, not ends.” Except that ever-more-powerful means often suggest ends, as “capability becomes wish, which is transformed in turn into duty.” As in Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” “the oppression here is not violent, as in the totalitarian states; it is indirect and diffuse, but as a result it is more difficult to circumscribe and reject.” Once “the technicians of democratic societies” have “master[ed] the code of living species,” “humanity will be capable of making itself conform to its own wishes”—or, rather, the technocratic oligarchy will.

To avoid this, Todorov urges recourse to the “humanist core” of modernity. As he has stated, that core consists of understanding human beings as one “biological species”; sociability, by which he means “mutual dependence” for nourishment, reproduction, and self-understanding; and “relative indeterminacy,” that is, the capacity to choose among the many varieties of thought and courses of action. Thinking in a non-utopian way about morality and politics requires us to acknowledge these core human facts—this “‘human nature,’ if you will.” The humanist morality that recognizes “equal dignity for all members of the species,” that elevates the other person rather than myself as “the ultimate goal of my action,” and that prefers “the act freely chosen over one performed under constraint” comports with that humanist anthropology. “Humanism asserts that we must serve human beings one by one, not in abstract categories.”

Human nature, then, provides a capacious standard for human conduct. There are actions which are good for it and actions which are bad for it. The free will inherent in that nature also ensures that human beings can choose good or evil; “men are not necessarily good, that they are even capable of the worst.” “But it is precisely in living through the horrors of the war and the camps that modern humanists, men like Primo Levi, Romain Gary, and Vasili Grossman, have made their choice and confirmed their faith in the human capacity also to act freely, also to do good.” Todorov’s books on the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Holocaust, along with his own life in Bulgaria under the Communist regime, also confirm that faith.

Politically, this means that “the democratic regime has affinities with humanist thought, as authoritarian regimes have with conservatism, totalitarian regimes with utopian scientism, and anarchy with individualism.” But modern democracy in Europe does not mean majority rule, simply; it is ‘liberal,’ restraining itself from “choos[ing] among conceptions of the good” held by its citizens, “provided that these do not contradict its ultimate principles.” Humanism in morality and in politics makes a wager not entirely like Pascal, only for it the wager isn’t on the existence of God but on the capacity of human beings to choose what is good for beings such as they are, against the determinist doctrines who deny that this is possible. Todorov quotes the Christian humanist, Erasmus: “What good is man, if God acts on him as the potter acts on the clay?” And he asks modern determinists, “If everything is played out in advance, what good is man?” On the contrary, we can “prefer the imperfect garden of humankind to any other realm, not as a blind alley, but because this is what allows us to live in truth.” And of course the maxim, “live in truth,” galvanized the dissidents of Central Europe under the Soviet empire, men and women to whom Todorov remains faithful to this day.

 

 

 

Notes

1. Tzetan Todorov: Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. See “The Holocaust Reconsidered,” on this website under the category “Manners and Morals.”
2. Oddly, Todorov claims that “it is with Constant that humanism leads to a political structure, the structure of liberal democracy.” His ignoring of the American founding, which did exactly that, may register his earlier, mistaken, claim that the authors of the Declaration of Independence secretly signed on to Satan’s third pact, the one that struck down the principle of obedience to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. If so, he may be taking the Freemasonry of many of the Founders a bit too far. It is also possible that he is restricting his field of inquiry to Europe and especially to France.
3. See “Spanish Conquistadors Through a Postmodernist Lens,” on this website under the category “Nations.”
4. For a discussion of the Emile, see the several articles on this website under the category of “Philosophers.”