Autobiography as Philosophy
Since Plato a surprisingly large number of philosophers have chosen to write in the first person about their own lives, either in works that were primarily autobiographical or in the context of other more conventionally written texts. These texts stand in marked contrast to the bulk of philosophical writing, particularly in the past century during which the discipline has become ever more professionalized and specialized. Instead of the common impersonal and argumentative forms of ordinary philosophic discussion, these autobiographical texts are deeply personal and largely narrative or explanatory. The contributors to this book examine the philosophical significance of philosophers’ autobiographies and whether or not there are broadly philosophical tasks for which this sort of writing is particularly suited. Autobiography as Philosophy contains a general discussion about the relation between philosophical and autobiographical writing, and essays on the specific writings of Augustine, Abelard, Montaigne, Descartes, Vico, Hume, Rousseau, Newman, Mill, Nietzsche, Collingwood and Russell by specialists on the works of these individuals. The book is original and distinctive in its efforts to think about the writings of historically recognized philosophers as communicative acts governed by their own distinctive interests and purposes. It is, therefore as much about the texts and the authors as about their doctrines and arguments. As a result the book steps back from many of the issues of substantive philosophical discussion to reflect on certain forms of writing as means to philosophical ends, to consider what those ends have included. Thomas Mathien is Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of the Transitional Year Programme at the University of Toronto. He has written on explanation in sociology, philosophy of history, the definition of disciplines and the history of philosophy in Canada. D. G. Wright is currently a professor of Humanities at Humber College in Toronto. He has recently published work on Nietzsche, Rousseau and Montaigne.
Routledge Advances in the History of Philosophy 1 Concepts and Reality in the History of Philosophy Tracing a Philosophical Error From Locke to Bradley Fiona Ellis 2 Autobiography as Philosophy The philosophical uses of self-presentation Edited by Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright
Autobiography as Philosophy The philosophical uses of self-presentation
Edited by Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright
First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY10016 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright editorial matter and selection; the contributors and their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Autobiography as philosophy : the philosophical uses of self-presentation / edited by Thomas Mathien and D.G. Wright. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-415-32704-0 (hardback) 1. Philosophers--Biography--History and criticism. 2. Autobiography. 3. Philosophical literature--History and criticism. I. Mathien, Thomas. II. Wright, D. G., 1969B104.A98 2006 107.2--dc22 2005028330 ISBN10: 0-415-32704-0
ISBN13: 978-0-415-32704-6
Contents
List of contributors
Introduction
vii
1
T H O M A S M AT H I E N A N D D . G . W R I G H T
1
Philosophers’ autobiographies
14
T H O M A S M AT H I E N
2
The Confessions of Saint Augustine: accessory to grace
31
SAMANTHA THOMPSON
3
Who is Peter Abelard?
64
C A LV I N G . N O R M O R E
4
Philosophy without heroism: Montaigne and the vanity of autobiography
76
D. G. WRIGHT
5
Exile and philosophy: Descartes
97
A N D R É G O M B AY
6 Scrissela da filosofo: The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself
109
D O M E N I C O P I E T R O PA O L O
7
Hume’s ‘‘Life’’ and the virtues of the dying
120
DONALD C. AINSLIE
8
Portraying nature: Rousseau’s Reveries as philosophy and art EVE GRACE
141
vi Contents
9 John Henry Newman and autobiographical philosophy
168
J AY N E W M A N
10 Mill’s autobiography
180
FRED WILSON
11 The subject of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo
211
D. G. WRIGHT
12 R. G. Collingwood: philosophy as autobiography
230
LIONEL RUBINOFF
13 Is Bertrand Russell a logical fiction?
253
J O H N G . S L AT E R
Index
266
Contributors
Donald Ainslie is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto. He is the editor of Hume’s Treatise: Critical Essays (2002), and has published on Hume’s theory of knowledge, his theory of the self, and in the field of bioethics. André Gombay is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. His research interests include the philosophy of Descartes, Freud’s theory of mind, issues of responsibility in the philosophy of law, and the intellectual environment of the seventeenth-century philosophers. He co-directed the online edition of the Adam and Tannery collection of Descartes’ works, has co-edited a collection of essays on Descartes’ Passions of the Soul (2002) and has a book-length discussion of Descartes’ philosophy in press. Eve Grace is Associate Professor of Political Science at The Colorado College, Boulder, Colorado. Her field of interest is political theory, and, particularly, the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on whom she has published extensively. She is the co-editor of Volume 9 of the Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to Beaumont, Letters Written from the Mountain, and is completing a book on conscience in Rousseau’s thought. Thomas Mathien is Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of the Transitional Year Programme at the University of Toronto, and also teaches at the Mississauga Campus of that university. He has published on the philosophy of social science, the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy in Canada. Jay Newman is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph. He has particular interests in philosophy of religion and philosophy of culture, and has published numerous books, among them: Foundations of Religious Tolerance (1982), The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman (1986), Fanatics and Hypocrites: On Religious Freedom (1991), Religion and Technology (1996), and Inauthentic Culture and its Philosophical Critics (1997).
viii Contribu t o r s Calvin G. Normore is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He has had previous or concurrent appointments at the University of Queensland, the University of Toronto, Ohio State University, Yale University, the University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of Alberta. He has published and presented on a variety of topics in medieval and early modern philosophy, on the history of logic and on social and political theory. Much of his recent work has been on Abelard, Ockham’s logic, Descartes and the medieval sources of his thought, theories of the will, and future contingents. Domenico Pietropaolo holds the Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies at the University of Toronto, and is Chair of the Department of Italian Studies there. He is interested in theatre history, dramaturgy, literary theory, Medieval studies, Vico, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought – particularly on drama, censorship, history and literary theory. He has published extensively in these areas and served as an editor for collections on theater, Mediterranean culture and writing and Dante Studies in the Age of Vico. Lionel Rubinoff is Prefessor Emeritus in Philosophy and Environmental Studies at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. He has also held positions at York University and the University of Toronto. He has published on R. G. Collingwood, on British idealism, on the philosophy of history and recently on environmental ethics. His books include critical editions of F. H. Bradley’s Presuppositions of Critical History, and of Collingwood’s papers on Philosophy of Religion (Faith and Reason) as well as the monographs, The Pornography of Power: Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, and Tradition and Revolution. He also coedited a collection of essays in the philosophy of history, Objectivity, Method and Point of View. John G. Slater is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His principal field of study has been the life and works of Bertrand Russell. He has published a brief introduction to Russell’s life and thought (Bertrand Russell), has edited five of the published volumes of The Collected Works of Bertrand Russell, and has co-edited a sixth. He assembled the definitive collection of print works by and on Bertrand Russell, now housed at the Thomas Fisher Library, University of Toronto, and has been associated with the Russell Archives at McMaster University, since they were assembled in 1968. Samantha Thompson is in the Ph.D. program at the University of Toronto, and is currently completing a dissertation on the consistency of Augustine’s explanation for the damaged human condition, under the direction of Professor Emeritus John Rist. She has been an instructor at
C on trib u tors
ix
the University of Toronto and has lectured widely on Augustine’s thought and its influence. Fred Wilson is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His areas of interest include philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. He also has historical interests in the works of David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, John Stuart Mill and the Victorian intellectual environment, and the work of the members of the Vienna Circle. He has published eight books and numerous articles in these areas, as well as coediting a festschrift volume for Thomas Goudge, a University of Toronto philosopher who played a significant role in building the department. Douglas G. Wright completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Toronto in 2000 with a dissertation entitled ‘‘Ghost Writers: Theories and Strategies of Communication in the Autobiographical Writings of Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau and Nietzsche.’’ Since then he has published on Rousseau and Nietzsche, and done conference presentations on them, and more recently on the Essais of Michel de Montaigne. He has lectured at all three campuses of the University of Toronto and at Humber College in Toronto. He has also taught at the University of Toronto Schools. His current research interests also include philosophy of education, literary theory and contemporary political philosophy.
Introduction Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright
Contemporary philosophical writing is largely impersonal and technical in style. It proposes definitions, makes arguments, criticizes other arguments, corrects previous infelicities and imprecisions in a position, and situates it all in a context of issues current in the discipline. The canons of style are less rigid than those used in the natural sciences, and they avoid the historian’s phobic avoidance of the first person singular, but they are, nevertheless, unmistakably academic and ‘‘professional.’’ This writing seems, on the whole, well suited to the subjects discussed by the philosophers in current practice, and to the aims they hope to achieve by that writing. Much of the work of their intellectual predecessors also seems suited to the style of the technical treatise, and, indeed, much was written in some variant of that form. However, anyone who has considered the history of the discipline knows that there is a proliferation of other forms and styles to be found even among the canonical classics of the field. One does not have to look far to find quasi-theatrical fictions: since Plato, many philosophers have written in dialogue form, and have, moreover, written a variety of different types of dialogue. It is not hard to figure out who speaks for Berkeley in the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, but Hume does not seem to be completely represented by any character in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Nor are dialogues the only alternatives to prose treatises employed by philosophers. Some have written in verse, though its use has become infrequent since Boethius. Others have favored the aphorism: for Nietzsche, it was just one of many vehicles employed. The fictional parody of the traveler’s tale has been used in political philosophy (beginning with More’s Utopia, which spawned a whole lineage of utopian literature). Philosophers have written their reflections on file cards that they have left for others to organize and publish (Wittgenstein). They have written treatises called ‘‘unscientific postscripts’’ and employed significant pseudonyms, and parables and quotations from folk tales (Kierkegaard). To make their ideas and the reasons for them accessible, they have even resorted to the novel and the play, although it is arguable that, in these cases, the authors have dropped the role of philosopher for other roles: those of publicist of ideas and artist.
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Even formally written philosophy has come in a variety of forms suited for a variety of purposes. The chain of demonstrations, established more geometrico emphasizes the putative rigor of the discipline. The disputatio underlined the role that debate and discussion had in the development and application of a determination. Treatises have the look of a finished and well defended doctrine, while lists of theses appear to be an invitation, if not a provocation, to a debate. Many philosophers of the present day would concede that they had written philosophy in essay form, although it is no easy matter to say whether the term designates a single type of work. The expression clearly now applies to a prose work in which narrative is not central, but in which exposition and argument play a role. Nevertheless, in its origin the essay was highly personal, and (as the expression suggests) tentative. In the hands of Montaigne – whose Essais first introduced the noun form of the word into popular use – it involves a highly concentrated expression of the peculiarities of an author engaged in self-exploration. The philosophical writers who followed, however, made it more formal and impersonal. In Descartes the essay is offered as an example of the application of method. With Locke, it has become a long prose discussion of ideas and their role in understanding, according to the plain historical method, in a manner very similar to that used by others in works known as treatises, or ‘‘inquiries.’’ By the end of the eighteenth century, among philosophers using the English language, the essay had settled into a formal, systematic and above all impersonal prose composition, organized topically and of moderate length. Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man and his Essays on the Active Powers of Man both constitute specimens of this style. When Baruch Brody introduces the 1969 reissue of the former of these, he asks what type of man Reid was, and replies, in part, that his writings give few hints (Reid 1969: x). In English-speaking philosophy, the essay form, in its depersonalized variation, dominates the written production of academic philosophers. Shorter works are generally written in that form, and longer works tend to be chains of essays linked at least by theme. Often each chapter of a monograph develops one line of argument or supports one main conclusion in a sequence that progresses from one aspect to another of a complex set of related issues. John Stuart Mill’s much-read pieces ‘‘Utilitarianism,’’ and ‘‘On Liberty’’ are models of the form. Much of the work of his great rival in the philosophy of science, William Whewell, takes this form (for a number of examples see the selections on 54–75, 79–100 and 251–62 in Butts 1989). The great work of the next generation of utilitarian thinkers, Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, takes the form of essays in sequence. There is an occasional element of informality, but each chapter is written to develop a distinct theoretical point. The approach may owe a considerable debt to the demands of the serious periodicals of the day, and to the expectations of learned societies. Much of Whewell’s work appeared in the transactions of these societies. Much of Sidgwick’s work, including versions of at least two chapters of Methods, appeared in periodicals of the day (Sidgwick 1966: vi, ix).
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3
The appearance of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method in 1904 (still operating today as The Journal of Philosophy) marked the next phase in what seems to be a trend in philosophical style. In place of the extended essay devoted to developing a topic often at the cost of the expository review of the theory of another or the revisiting of a point previously argued by the author, the JPPSM published brief and direct reports of what could be considered ‘‘advances’’ in the field: arguments for novel positions, novel arguments for established positions, or new refutations of positions taken by other professionals. Exposition and literature review is kept to the minimum necessary for effective presentation. Often it is accomplished by parenthetical reference. The complete work consists of the presentation of a single important point about the subject under discussion. During the twentieth century, this formal research report came to be the single important rival to the essay form in professional philosophical writing. Philosophical writing nowadays comes in a variety of forms, as all academic philosophers know. They also all know that, whatever the forms offered, the two which count as standard for the discipline are the essay and the research report. Texts that offer undergraduates training tips in philosophical writing tend to assume this. Thus, Anne Michaels Edwards’ introduction to the subject, Writing to Learn (2000) is subtitled An Introduction to Writing Philosophical Essays. It includes a brief chapter on reading philosophy, but even there refers only to philosophical essays (7, 11). Robert Paul Wolff’s introductory text, About Philosophy, now in its eighth edition (2000), offers a useful appendix on writing philosophy papers. It not only recommends essay form, but specifies a pattern for effective organization of such essays (thesis, analysis of thesis, arguments for thesis, objections to thesis, response to objections) (398). In The Big Questions (5th edn, 1998), Robert Solomon acknowledges what he calls ‘‘indirect styles’’ of presentation, including dialogue, ironic statement, and aphorism (346–54), but discourages beginners from attempting them and suggests both by the categorization applied (‘‘indirect’’) and passing remarks that they are mainly useful for rhetorical purposes. He holds that, ‘‘Most philosophers – even the great aphorists – begin with a straightforward presentation, at least in order to make their ideas clear,’’ and alludes to now lost ‘‘essays’’ by Plato (354). The writing of philosophy is now measured by professional standards. Those standards specify that, even where a text is not yet presented in a clear, impersonal and argumentative form, it should, in principle, be translatable into one. The canons that apply to this form are not rigid: some write formally and labour at a high level of abstraction, or in a technical vocabulary, while others try to be informal, labour to provide illustrative examples, and either avoid special terminology or explain it. Nevertheless, there are canons, instruction in their use, and the constant pressure of professional publication as an enforcement mechanism. The existence of a body of autobiographical literature by thinkers recognized as philosophers in the accepted tradition raises some difficulties for
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these standards of philosophical writing. This literature is not, in the main, argumentative, although arguments may be presented in passing in some cases, and may even figure in central ways in others. It is certainly not impersonal: what marks it as autobiographical is precisely the fact that the most obvious subject of the writing is a person, the author. It often lacks a clear expository form. More often than not it takes the form of first-person narrative. Even when another form is employed, the text presents a life, or at least certain events, thoughts, experiences or responses that the writer attributes to him / herself. In what sense, if any, could such writing qualify as philosophy? The manner in which the question is put is important. There is little dispute that autobiographical writings can contain philosophy. There are, for example, a wide variety of recognizable philosophical theses in St Augustine’s Confessions. The book XI discussion of time, to provide an instance, is often treated as a separate philosophical treatise, albeit one couched in a framework of prayer which is appropriate to the author, but distracting to the analyst. Descartes’ Discourse on the Method is so full of straightforwardly philosophical material on provisional ethics, on epistemology, metaphysics and scientific method, that the autobiographical material concentrated in part I but scattered elsewhere in the text is easy to regard as mere literary ornament. There is also little dispute that autobiographical texts by philosophers can aid in the interpretation of a body of philosophical work. The writings can reveal the author’s own understanding of the occasioning circumstances of the works and of the intentions behind its production. They can reveal the author’s own judgment of the success of the work and authorial understanding of, and response to, the criticisms of others. These texts play a role similar to that of the author’s letters, the discarded drafts of works, lecture notes, jottings in notebooks, and interviews. They take an important place in the interpretative apparatus which scholars often apply to the philosophical works of their subjects. Amelie Rorty has provided an extensive discussion of the interpretative uses of autobiography and other personal writings. She has linked them both to the various audiences which philosophical writers have intended to address, and to the persuasive purposes not only of philosophical writing, but also of public self-accounts (Rorty 1998). Rorty has used the personal writings of philosophers to go beyond simple interpretation of text in order to hypothesize about general questions in the history of ideas. She suggests that personal writings of both male and female philosophers of the early modern period reveal why, despite their talents and resources, the women did not develop into major contributors to philosophy. Their own personal writings, and especially those of the men with whom they corresponded, show that – because of their gender and the tenor of the times – they were not taken seriously enough to be subject to the full weight of philosophical criticism (Rorty 1998: 324–5). R. G. Collingwood famously held that ‘‘all history is the history of thought,’’ re-enacted in the mind of the historian in a context of present
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thoughts that by their contrast confine the re-enacted thought to a different plane (Collingwood 1967: 110–16; cf. his 1963: 282–315). He also held that the ‘‘autobiography of a man whose business is thinking should be the story of his thought’’ (1967: ‘‘Preface’’). This view, if true, implies an important point about the value of philosophers’ autobiographies for the study of philosophy. In the autobiography you get the thoughts rethought and recontextualized. This rethinking is done in a manner that clarifies the original thought by indicating something of what it is not meant to express. It is done by a theorist with privileged access to the thought so interpreted. Collingwood’s autobiography is a first-rate interpretative guide to his philosophy, even though it is not an infallible one. On his account of autobiography, this is exactly as it should be. Even autobiographical passages that are more concerned with the broad social and cultural milieu of the writer can aid interpreters of the author’s work. These will reveal patterns of friendship and hostility among writers, show which historical events are salient to the thinker and reveal facts that make allusive passages in the writer’s other works clear. What is more, the concerns and obsessions that come through in such works reflect on the character of the writer. Collingwood sets forth his respectful rejection of the old Oxonian milieu and his hostility to fascism. De Beauvoir reveals that she found Simone Weil intimidating. Facts such as these are data for the serious scholar, and not only data about the autobiographer. The essays contained in this collection are not intended to investigate these great but incidental uses of philosophers’ autobiographies. Instead their point is to determine whether there is some clearly philosophical work which can be achieved by an autobiography, but which cannot be accomplished, or can be accomplished only with great difficulty, by another form of writing. The pieces included will look at the various claims (and in one case an implicit denial) made about those purposes by philosophical autobiographers. In doing so, the contributors do not neglect the differences among authors about the character and work of philosophy, about the nature of the self, and about the possibility of, and proper procedure for giving an account of the self. While some might be tempted to call on the words inscribed at Delphi, and take self-knowledge as an aim of philosophic activity, neither editor does so a priori. Those whom we regard as significant for our discipline may or may not have engaged in much reflection on their particular character and situation. Many left no written record of having done so. When they have, they may or may not have done so with great insight. Amelie Rorty claims that Bertrand Russell, both a canonical philosopher and a voluminous autobiographer, seems to have been rather obtuse about himself (Rorty 1998: 325). Plotinus considered self-knowledge to imply a kind of internal multiplicity on the part of the knower (Plotinus 1991: VI, 7, 41, 510). One needed to become aware of the number and nature of one’s constituents, as well as the principle and manner of one’s being. The autobiographer,
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however, frequently presents his or her life as a unity. It is a single story of a unified, perhaps indivisible protagonist. If Plotinus’ account is correct, then these autobiographers are not attempting full self-knowledge, even if that is a proper aim of philosophy. Instead we might characterize them as engaged in (at least) self-definition, or (perhaps) self-invention. To offer this, while being persuaded that it is a sincere description of oneself, might be to indulge in an act of self-deception as well. It is impossible to avoid the autobiographical, and its pitfalls, in explaining what the editors are seeking and why they consider it important. It grew out of certain of their obsessions. One of them (Mathien) had, as part of his role as an academic administrator, the annual obligation to read dozens of brief autobiographies by prospective students in a program for which he worked. Besides raising the usual questions about the reliability of such selfaccounts, this endeavor reminded him of the popularity of philosophers’ autobiographies among philosophy students he had known in his youth, and of the continued love of philosophers for producing accounts of their lives. The reminder produced wonder: why is there such an interest and what, if anything, could it do with the discipline practiced by the writers of these pieces. This curiosity first led to attendance at a seminar offered by the Italian department at the University of Toronto under the direction of a distinguished visitor, Donald Verene of Emory University, on Vico’s Vita in the broader tradition of philosophical autobiography. No other philosopher or student of philosophy from the University of Toronto attended, although there were a number of students present from departments of literature. Mathien’s interest was not extinguished by this experience. Instead it led to a 1996 attempt to survey some purposes for autobiographical efforts that could count as philosophical in some broad sense of the term. A revised version of that piece appears here as Chapter 1. It later drove this editor to invite any willing victims to contribute to an informal symposium on the topic. To his great surprise, there were such willing victims and their efforts took the form of a series of talks delivered at the University of Toronto during the 1998–9 academic year. All but three of the contributors to this volume (Newman, Pietropaolo and Rubinoff) participated in that series. The second editor (Wright) was one of the participants in this symposium. His own interest in autobiography emerged in response to what seemed to be an innocuous question: ‘‘Why is the narrative voice of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo so histrionic and self-aggrandizing, even by Nietzschean standards?’’ After launching into this question, envisioning a short monograph on Ecce Homo (and wondering whether the world could bear yet another book on Nietzsche), it was drawn to his attention that Ecce Homo is, amongst other things, a kind of autobiography. And sure enough it is, though being Nietzsche’s autobiography, it characteristically subverts most of our preconceived notions about how such works are structured. But this very subversive restructuring relies crucially for its effects on an appropriation of established forms, and so it seemed that the proper scholarly course of
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action would involve taking a look at the autobiographies that would have served as Nietzsche’s templates. With this the floodgates were opened, and he quickly found himself immersed in the works of such classical autobiographers as Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes and Rousseau, and speculatively reading forward into the more experimental efforts of Proust, Sartre and Derrida. Without ever entirely losing sight of that founding interest in Nietzsche (his contribution here is a much-delayed attempt to answer that original question about Nietzsche’s voice), a much broader interest in philosophical autobiography has come to dominate his subsequent work, and through this, a curiosity about the strengths and limitations of various modes of philosophical writing. Other contributors to this collection have two things in common. First, all worked in Ontario universities and most have had a connection with the University of Toronto, although not exclusively with the Department of Philosophy there. The unfunded nature of the symposium made its extreme regionalism inevitable. Only Eve Grace had any support in for her contribution, an Olin Foundation grant that covered a series of talks at Toronto, all the remainder of which were delivered for the Department of Political Science there. Second, all are scholars in specific aspects of the thought of the philosophers they have undertaken to discuss, rather than in any metaphilosophic study of proper forms and methods of doing philosophical work. The aim of the studies these contributors present here is to consider whether there is anything about the philosophic projects of the authors investigated that would lead them to undertake autobiographical writing as a part of that work. In most cases it turns out that the answer offered by the contributors is an affirmative one. With the exception of Bertrand Russell, all the thinkers discussed here can be interpreted as seeing their life stories as tied to their philosophical endeavors, even though they may have conceived their role as thinker very differently. Russell, it turns out, is an exceptional case because he has an extraordinarily narrow conception of what counts as philosophy – one that also rules out great quantities of his writing, particularly his extensive discussion of moral and social issues. It is not unusual for scholarly discussion at Toronto to involve academics at a variety of stages in their career. In fact many recent conferences, particularly on topics demanding a study of the history of philosophy, have been designed to involve new scholars as well as established authorities in their field. This collection is no exception. Two contributors (Thompson and Wright) had not completed their dissertations at the time of their contribution. Two (Grace and Ainslie) were newly appointed assistant professors at the time pursuing important new work on areas connected to their topics (Rousseau’s political philosophy in the former case, Hume studies and the biomedical-ethical reflections on dying and the good death in the latter). On the other hand three contributors, Normore, Wilson and Slater, enjoy international prominence at least in part for their contributions to the study of the thinkers they comment on here. Gombay is best known for his concern
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about changing views of human nature, the emotions and human action stimulated by the work of three central founders of modernity: Grotius, Descartes and Freud. Newman and Rubinoff have written important commentaries on the works of John Henry Newman and R. G. Collingwood respectively. Pietropaolo has worked extensively on the Neapolitan intellectual tradition in the eighteenth century, to which Vico was an early and highly significant contributor. Mathien is primarily a teacher and administrator, whose research interests have ranged widely, and have been entirely stimulated by reflection on his other activities. In his contribution, Mathien asks whether there are any distinctively philosophical aims for autobiographical writing, and isolates five. Four of them are clear forms of applied practical philosophy: confession, example, apology and consolation. The fifth is a more strictly theoretical activity, but one the philosophical nature of which is currently much disputed: the characterization of human nature. In each case he offers what he argues are standards to be achieved if the purpose attempted is to be successfully accomplished. He also argues that attempts to satisfy such requirements go a long way toward explaining certain features of the cases he discusses. In particular these purposes account for the insistence of some autobiographers on the truthfulness of their accounts. This makes the evaluation of inaccurate autobiographies problematic even when they are sincere. Autobiographers who deliberately mislead their readers will present special difficulties. Thompson’s contribution addresses a text that some have treated as the first genuine autobiography, the Confessions of St Augustine. No one has ever disputed the philosophical importance of its closing chapters on time, memory and the relation between form and matter. However, these chapters have something of the character of independent treatises, and have often, in consequence, been studied independently. The narrative portion of the text is then regarded as a distinct, and eloquent account of conversion, containing only passing remarks of philosophical interest. Thompson rejects this most strongly, arguing in ‘‘The Confessions of St Augustine: Accessory to Grace,’’ that the work as whole, including its autobiographical portion is no mere incidental appendix to Augustine’s thought, but occupies a central and indispensable role within it. That role as Thompson sees it is roughly twofold. First, the text documents the absolute limitation on theoretical knowledge as a means of salvation; the grace of God remains always all important for Augustine. Second, the text in which Augustine describes his own recognition of the need for grace provides an occasion for a similar recognition on the part of the reader. Thompson is particularly compelling in charting out the connection between Augustine’s use of the biographies of others within the Confessions, and the fact that he is presenting the Confessions itself as yet one more such biography to which the reader is invited to respond. Normore offers an account of Peter Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum that reads the text in the light of a revisionist account of the development of philosophy in the broad Middle Ages. On Normore’s view, the period in
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which Abelard worked was an age in which, with the help of only limited traditional philosophical material, a distinctive indigenous Western European tradition of discussion emerged. In this tradition, the influences from earlier traditions are as likely to be from stoic as peripatetic or Platonist sources. Normore finds stoic influences in Abelard’s ethical writings, and finds them useful in accounting for his use of autobiography cast in the explicit form of a consolation. The sage can live well in the face of adversities, providing she or he has cultivated the dispositions to choosing well which constitute virtue. The reader of Abelard’s letter may take comfort in the face of her or his own adversities from the writer’s management of his. Perhaps more than any of the other authors discussed in this volume, Montaigne is conscious throughout his Essais of the allegation of vanity that might attach to any sustained attempt at self-portrait. The concern is exacerbated in Montaigne’s case because, as he insists, he enjoys only a ‘‘middling rank’’ in the hierarchy of human types; on his own accounting, he and his contemporaries are almost infinitely far removed from the stature of the great souls of antiquity. In response to this problem, Montaigne makes the surprising claim that only the modest and otherwise unknown individual can engage in public self-portrait. The truly great souls should be too preoccupied with their private virtue and the value of their exemplary deeds to indulge in showy display before the masses, and so it is in fact a sign of modesty to have done so. Wright argues that since Montaigne has drawn such a sharp line separating the great souls of antiquity from what is currently possible, and presented himself as a model of the highest kind of virtue presently attainable, this defense against the charge of vanity does not work. However, Wright also finds in Montaigne the seeds for an account of vanity that explains why the Essais do not strike us as the work of a vain individual. This revised theory locates the ‘‘vice’’ of vanity not in the mismatch between one’s private self-image and one’s objective value, but rather, in the attempt to solicit attention without acknowledging the insufficiencies in the self that would motivate such an attempt. In ‘‘Exile and Philosophy’’ (Chapter 5) André Gombay points out an astonishing fact about how readers have evaluated Descartes’ work. In spite of a corpus extending to roughly 1,600 pages, including one book-length synoptic overview of his philosophical system, Descartes is known today primarily for two works, the Discourse on Method and the Meditations on First Philosophy, neither of which extends much beyond sixty pages. What these works share is a first-person singular narrative strategy that is not to be found in the rest of the writing Descartes intended for publication. Why did Descartes adopt such a technique in his most successful texts? Gombay finds the answer in the availability of such writing for identification, a process much discussed by Freud, which Gombay finds implicitly prefigured in Descartes’ practice, and, more intriguingly, fairly explicitly theorized in his correspondence. As Gombay reads Descartes, a full acceptance of a truth acknowledged on an intellectual level requires an act of assent that commits
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the subject making the acknowledgment to the content accepted. This commitment is an act of will that is effectively made when the individual making it can reflectively say ‘‘I accept’’ the truth considered. Unlike the other autobiographies considered in this volume, The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself was a commissioned work. Vico composed it at the invitation of Giovannartico di Porcia, a pedagogical reformer who had hoped that such self-narrations by contemporary intellectuals would help students to perceive their disciplines as vital and living traditions, as well as clarifying the processes that led the intellectuals to their discoveries. Pietropaolo argues here that Vico expanded on this mission statement, with his biography serving not merely as an introduction to the philosophical work of the New Science, but as a philosophical text in its own right. According to the view defended in the New Science, the development of the individual mind proceeds according to a pattern that resembles and is incorporated into the pattern of development discernible in the history of civilizations. Armed with this theory, Vico can present his life story as mirroring and revealing something about human nature and its history as such. Moreover, and simultaneously, the efficacy of this theoretical insight when used as a tool for the interpretation of his own life, serves as a further confirmation of the general validity of his theory of history. Ainslie writes that, contrary to appearances, Hume’s brief account of his own life contains two important philosophical lessons. First it stands as an exemplary account of a person, in the manner proposed by Hume in book 2 of the Treatise of Human Nature as the ordinary manner of understanding who we are, a way governed by the indirect passions and the evaluations they produce. The second lesson is connected closely with the fact that this brief work was written at the point of death. Many considered Hume’s skepticism, and apparent agnosticism as a threat, not only to religion, but to any form of morality and to hopes of human happiness. They would have taken any signs of fear or faith in the face of death as confirmation of their opinions and a practical refutation of Hume’s views. He presented his life as one of ordinary virtue and moderate satisfaction, and his expectations of death as calm and resigned. By doing so he intended to provide himself as an example of how to live and die well without the consolations of an afterlife to follow. His efforts to do so were grasped, but misrepresented, by Adam Smith’s famous ‘‘Letter’’ about Hume’s death that frequently accompanies editions of the life. Although an autobiography can be seen as an attempt to take control of one’s life, as Hume’s own views about personal understanding confirm, one does not have the last word in one’s own case, even if one writes at the point of death. In ‘‘Portraying Nature: Rousseau’s Reveries as Philosophy and Art,’’ Eve Grace provides a new perspective on a long-standing enigma in Rousseau’s moral theory. The problem is that of reconciling Rousseau’s insistence that we will only achieve true happiness through adhering to the demands of our given nature with the requirements (acknowledged by Rousseau) of civic virtue. Does not the latter demand that we be at least willing to place the
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good of others before our own? Grace traces this conflict through the entire work of Rousseau, and receives different and, as she sees it, ultimately unsatisfactory answers in each of the major works. In the face of this, the last book of the canon, the autobiographical Reveries of a Solitary Walker, surprises. Although many commentators have dismissed it as ‘‘mere daydreaming,’’ Grace finds in it Rousseau’s most sophisticated and compelling effort to reconcile the competing demands of virtue and self-love. Professor Newman explores the features that unite Cardinal Newman’s more overtly philosophical Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent with his autobiographical Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The two works are most obviously motivated by a common desire to testify to the reasonableness of the Catholic faith that Newman came to call his own. However, Professor Newman argues that the books are also united by their commitment to a thorough-going empiricism which treats individual experience as the touchstone of all knowledge, even at the price of sharply limiting one’s right to universalize the results of inquiry and introspection. In the Cardinal’s striking aphorism, ‘‘egotism is true modesty,’’ the right of assent granted to the individual is balanced by an acknowledgment that though one person’s reasons can be more or less persuasive to another, they can never be logically compelling. However much it might help to justify autobiographical philosophy though, the drift toward subjectivism in this idea sits uneasily within the context of Cardinal Newman’s controversialist and conservative tendencies. Professor Newman uses this tension to make some incisive remarks about the dangers and limitations of autobiographical philosophy in general. Wilson finds Mill’s Autobiography to be a study of human psychology on the introspective method, still regarded as an appropriate philosophical endeavor in the period just past the middle of the nineteenth century. The results of the study can be seen as serving other intellectual aims of a philosophical nature. One, explicitly mentioned by Mill, is empirical confirmation of the feasibility of the scheme of education designed for him by his father. One can get greater intellectual achievement from a child without destroying any capacity, or denying all opportunity for free play. The other, not so explicitly stated, aim is the refutation and replacement of the inadequate version of analysis of mental contents which Bentham and James Mill employed. In the view of the younger Mill, this limited psychological doctrine had a deleterious effect on his own emotional and moral education, and led to the famous depression of his early adult years. The Autobiography indicates the therapeutic experiences by which Mill resolved the crisis associated with this depression, and thereby also suggests the way in which the associationist psychology can be revised. In addressing Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Wright explores the manner in which the concept of autobiography changes in the hands of a writer who is so highly suspicious of any and all theories of subjectivity. How will Nietzsche’s autobiography look, given his repeated claims that there is no enduring self and no possibility of an objective history? While autobiogra-
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phers typically present themselves as engaged in self-description, Nietzsche treats autobiography as an activity that produces a self. In Ecce Homo, Wright argues, Nietzsche radically transforms and rewrites his own history rather than attempting to retrieve and describe it, producing in the process a quasifictional character named ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who is the true subject of the autobiographical narration. This ‘‘character’’ is meant to be utterly unprecedented, unique, and important to the future development of humanity as ‘‘the new bringer of glad tidings,’’ yet he informs us in Ecce Homo that communication is only possible against a background of common experiences. If true, this latter claim would reveal that radical novelty is in principle incommunicable. The result, Wright argues, is a bind from which Nietzsche never escaped: the world-historic destiny to which he lays claim in Ecce Homo can only come about if he is understood properly, but if he is understood, he cannot be the sui generis creative force that could have such a destiny. Rubinoff’s discussion of Collingwood’s An Autobiography (Chapter 12) takes seriously the above-mentioned prefatory comment that the autobiography of a man whose business is thinking is the story of his thought. Collingwood’s account of his life is primarily an endeavor to rethink that thought and to understand the questions that gave rise to it in order to fully grasp its meaning. Rubinoff uses that fact to address the claim of some critics, such as T. M. Knox, that the late work of Collingwood reflected a great change in outlook from an earlier idealism to relativism and skepticism. Collingwood’s own understanding of his work, however, reveals an unwavering commitment to a method of investigation both for philosophy and for history, based on the ‘‘logic of question and answer.’’ He does not reject, even in his late works, the view that the thought of the past can be subject to rational evaluation, even though doing so requires its proper situation in context. Finally the late works particularly manifest his mature commitment to a rapprochement between theory and practice, and a strong commitment to resist the moral dangers he perceived in fascism and Nazism. Slater maintains that Russell could not have regarded his autobiography as a work of philosophical import, except, perhaps in some incidental passages. On Russell’s account of the philosophical method in his 1914 essay entitled ‘‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy,’’ Russell maintains that philosophical propositions must be both general and a priori. Since most of the statements of an autobiography recount events in an individual’s life, they fail on both accounts. It is true that the inclusion of large quantities of primary documentary material (particularly correspondence) and photographs allows the reader to carry out a kind of public check on Russell’s own narrative, and so are in tune with Russell’s broad empiricism. Nevertheless, our own information about the circumstances of its inclusion indicate that the material was placed there years after the initial composition of the text in order to flesh it out to two full volumes. Moreover, it appears that Russell composed very little of the third volume of the autobiography.
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That was largely the work of his fourth wife. Thus the work is not even a pure example of an empiricist account of a person’s own life. The one point at which an unambiguous effect of Russell’s own philosophical approach can be found in the text is in the clarity and beauty of style of the writing in the first two volumes.
Bibliography Butts, R. (1989) William Whewell: Theory of Scientific Method, ed. with an introduction by Robert Butts, Indianopolis: Hackett. Collingwood, R. G. (1963) The Idea of History, ed. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published 1946. ——(1967) An Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press. First published 1938. Edwards, A. (2000) Writing to Learn: An Introduction to Writing Philosophical Essays, Boston: McGraw-Hill. Plotinus (1991) The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, abridged with introduction and notes by John Dillon, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Reid, T. (1969) Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, introduction by Baruch Brody, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Rorty, A. (1998) ‘‘Witnessing Philosophers,’’ Philosophy and Literature, 22.2: 309–27. Sidgwick, H. (1966) The Methods of Ethics, 7th edn, New York: Dover. Solomon, R. (1998) The Big Questions, 5th edn, New York: Harcourt Brace. Wolff, R. (2000) About Philosophy, 8th edn, Upper Saddle River NJ: Prentice-Hall.
1
Philosophers’ autobiographies Thomas Mathien
Those who have done extensive work as professional philosophers, particularly in an English-speaking environment, have developed expectations about the sort of writing that best serves as a vehicle for the discipline. At its most elegant it is clear in syntax, direct, burdened with a minimum of jargon, blessed with diction in other respects economical, simple and precise. Above all, despite some contributors’ conversational and informal use of ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘we,’’ the writing is essentially impersonal. One could make it grammatically impersonal at no cost beyond loss of grace. These expectations suggest standards: the prose of the professional philosopher should be directed to issues, theories, systems, problems. It should not be about an individual except when, and to the degree that, it serves in a commentary on that person’s work. In spite of these contemporary standards, however, there have been more than a few examples in the history of what we now acknowledge as philosophy, of writing by philosophers, and by near-philosophers, in which the principal subject of discussion has been – and had to have been – an individual person. These examples have often included extensive passages devoted to minute details of the lives of these central individuals. One family of these works includes the autobiographies of philosophers. ‘‘Autobiography,’’ as I understand it here, does not refer narrowly to a particular and recent type of narrative account of one’s formation. Although I do include this kind of writing, I wish to discuss broadly, all texts which deal with the author’s life as a central topic (in contrast to many memoirs) and do it with the help of simple or complex form of retrospective narrative (in contrast to many journals). Philosophers’ autobiographies are not common: only a minority of philosophers write them and they are but a small portion of the output of those who do. Nevertheless they are surprisingly common. Beginning, perhaps, with Plato’s Seventh Letter and continuing through Augustine’s Confessions, and sections of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a sequence of contributions – including ones by Abelard, Avicenna and al Ghazali – stretches through writings by Descartes, Hobbes (both in prose and verse) and Hume. Major and lengthy writings by Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman
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and Friedrich Nietzsche follow. Even in our own era of highly professionalized technical philosophical writing intended for academic journals and scholarly book publishers, there have been autobiographies by Croce and Collingwood, by Broad, Carnap, Moore and others (in their respective Schilpp volumes), by Sartre and De Beauvoir, by Russell (voluminously and in several forms) and Quine, by Richard Henry Popkin and Paul K. Feyerabend (very recently: his Killing Time). In what follows I wish to make a few points about this type of writing. They cannot be profound points (the sequence of examples is too long and the variety in it too great), but I hope they will be useful.
Autobiography and communicative purpose The first thing to note is that the use of the first person is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a work’s being classified as autobiographical. These days philosophers are especially fond of the first person – more so than are scientists, historians and social scientists. It is adopted – as I have adopted it – to strike an informal, conversational tone when announcing one’s intentions. Occasionally it is used to express a personal limitation. Some use it to indicate a want of clarity in the work of another in the guise of an apparent admission of one’s own ‘‘inability’’ to understand. These uses of the first person are at most minimally autobiographical and can be dispensed with without any great philosophical loss, even when the subsequent rewriting does damage to style and comprehensibility. There are other texts in the history of philosophy that remain unavoidably committed to the first person but could not be regarded as exercises in autobiography. In these texts, the philosophical activity involves a certain kind of performance, often or always a meditative one. This performance is intended to be repeatable: it may be undertaken by anyone willing or able to play the performer’s role, and the performer may, indeed could, be anyone. The most famous example of this form is René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. While it is written insistently in the first person, not only could the meditator be anybody, but, at stages, she cannot possibly be certain about who she is.1 If Rawlsian reasoning about social arrangements under a veil of ignorance counts as a philosophical activity, it too could be considered to involve an interchangeable ‘‘I’’. There are non-philosophical precedents for this interchangeable assumption of a first-person voice. Psalms in the first person, for example, and formalized prayers allow any appropriate person to become the speaker on the right liturgical occasion (Bruss 1976: 6). Descartes would have been familiar with these liturgical uses of the first person, and may have taken some inspiration from an adaptation of this use which he would have encountered in his days as a student in a Jesuit college, the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. There are fictional discourses, as well, in which first-person narrative is employed. We generally recognize them as non-autobiographical even when
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they contain internal markers that suggest that they are autobiography – at least in part. Defoe wrote a number of such works: Robinson Crusoe and the Journal of the Plague Year are well known examples. Perhaps more intriguing is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a fictional mock failed autobiography, one of the points of which is that there are limits to what one can represent in autobiography. One of these has had an influence on the autobiographical efforts of philosophers, Plato’s Apology of Socrates, which purports to be Socrates’ defense against charges of impiety. In the course of this speech, Socrates makes his case, in part, by outlining a mission (to test the oracle), a practice (questioning of those who have accomplishments and claim to know), and a way of living (in poverty, in the public view yet outside public office). This life account is filled out with a number of details about military service, family links, public reputation and the like. However, the Apology is not Socrates’ defense – although it may have resembled it. It is a literary work, a work of fiction cast in the form of a speech in which a character named ‘‘Socrates’’ is made the narrator of a life story as a justification of the life narrated. It is not a legal defense; it is an intellectual program dressed in the trappings of legal defense. As we shall see, the justificatory and the programmatic aspects have featured in many philosophical autobiographies. Not only is much writing in the first person not autobiographical, but autobiographical writing need not be in the first person. The memoir written in third person has classical precedents: Caesar’s war accounts are particularly well known. Giambattista Vico chose to follow these precedents in his Vita, which is described on the title page as an account of his own life, but told in the third person.2 Nevertheless it is written as a third-person narrative. Other philosophers dress autobiographical details in a generalized disguise. Kant’s regimen for good health in the Conflict of the Faculties is an extrapolated description of his regular routines.3 Furthermore, even when philosopher’s autobiographies are in the first person, they are not necessarily pure first-person narratives. St Augustine places the narrative elements of his Confessions within an extensive prayer. He embeds within that, and attaches to the end of it, substantial discussion on philosophical and theological topics – discussions which develop themes also present in the narrative: themes of time, language and meaning, memory and eternity, perfection and imperfections, grace and choice, faith and understanding. In addition, approaches to telling the life story vary. Hobbes writes a life in verse; Descartes builds his autobiography into the Discourse on Method, and, by doing so, he uses techniques that run counter to his own method to introduce that method and to attract readers to it. Nietzsche produces one as a set of independent vignettes, the order of which is topical rather than chronological. Russell reconstructs a life story from memory and document and interleaves his story with a selection of the primary sources that he employs to confirm his recollections.
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The broad range of literary forms that autobiographies have taken led Elizabeth Bruss to treat autobiography as a particular type of act or performance. Such performances can take any of a variety of forms. They have status as autobiographies in consequence of the author’s intention and the use of any of a number of signifying techniques to elicit a corresponding reader response.4 Much of the discussion that follows addresses the common signifying intentions in philosophers’ autobiographies, and the reader responses to be elicited by them. Does an autobiographical act require anything beyond the successful employment of suitable signals of the author’s intention? It requires a subject of discussion who is also the author, and who – as author – arranges materials purportedly drawn from her own life and environment to convey her own understanding of the character and cause of her life. The reader of an autobiography is intended by the author to take the factual claims contained in it as fact – or at least as the author’s best effort to recollect the facts. The reader is intended to regard the selection of these facts and the construction placed upon them as a sincere effort by the author to represent her life in a way that satisfies some authorial communicative intention. Satisfying this intention will require, minimally, an attempt by the author to be true to herself on some matter. Even deceitful autobiographers – perhaps John Glassco in Memoirs of Montparnasse was one (Glassco 1970) – depend for the success of their deceit on a mutual expectation by author and reader alike that the reader will regard the author as sincere and as accurate about those matters within the author’s powers of accuracy. If the author could not count on this response, or at least on the likelihood of it, the deceitful strategy would be irrational; if the reader did not acquiesce, the strategy would fail. The autobiographer may concede that other interpretations of at least the publicly observable facts and other constructions placed upon them are possible. However, she will often treat them as inferior to her own. The inferiority of these other accounts may stem from the exclusion of details that are not readily accessible to the public. It may be due to the failure to find in the available information the indications of features of her character or condition that she regards as key to grasping her message. The sources of this alleged superiority of the author’s interpretations of her life are two. In the first place the author appears to be able to go beyond the publicly observable facts of her life, including statements of thought and feeling, to achieve a privileged access to actual thoughts, feelings, intentions and other mental states. This includes access to states that were left unexpressed, were expressed only in a distorted fashion, or were hidden by contrary expressions. Autobiographers can even acknowledge that they have previously deceived and misled people – even themselves – and they can acknowledge mistakes, including mistakes about their ‘‘real’’ desires, wishes, reactions and the like. The second source of the apparent epistemic superiority of the autobiographer is the author’s own power of synoptic recollection and reflection. It is
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possible to call up together what we regard as recollections of the facts of one’s life, along with awareness of the publicly accessible traces that confirm them or appear to disconfirm them. These can be considered simultaneously with recollections of responses to the events in question – responses perhaps never made public – and of the various previous attempts made by the autobiographer to make sense of them. The autobiographer will be inclined to see her life, and its chapters, as unities. In the end, others may do better at understanding an autobiographer than she does herself, but it will certainly take more time and cost more effort.
Purposes for philosophers’ autobiographies It is worth considering whether there are distinct communicative characteristics in philosophers’ autobiographies. In doing so I will briefly consider why a philosopher might choose to write, and then to publish an autobiography. Then I will examine what the philosophical reader might find of distinctly philosophical interest in these autobiographical texts. One almost flippant answer to the question ‘‘Why do philosophers write autobiographies?’’ has a philosophical ring: one writes about oneself to come to know oneself. There are other ways to gain self-knowledge, of course. Some of these ways are now beyond the scope of a philosopher’s current disciplinary interest. One can look for assistance in understanding one’s situation and limitations in the results of the work of psychologists, sociologists and other social scientists. These workers have had some success at showing what people are like. No doubt the knowledge can be applied to each of us, providing we understand our own circumstances. However, these insights are usually cast in general terms. The application to our own cases requires knowledge, in detail, of our own circumstances. Autobiography is one way to select and record information of this sort, although it is certainly recordable in other forms – such as the diary and the memoir – and in other media. However, these records, and the aims for which they may be kept, do not seem to be matters of peculiar concern to professional philosophers: quite the contrary, the self-concern seems quite unprofessional. An autobiography can satisfy other, related aims. One is self-explanation. One makes better sense of one’s actions and productions by placing them in broader contexts. This contextualization can be advanced by showing how the matters in question can be seen as reasonable, or typical, or human, or justifiable responses to whatever one understands the situation to be and to the actions of others as one understands them. Autobiography can also be a means of self-evaluation: it can be an extended examination of conscience, a measure of one’s contextualized actions against some set of standards. Publication of these explanatory and evaluative reflections can serve a range of public purposes: self-defense in the face of attacks on one’s reputation can be one, public atonement can be another, teaching by example a third. While these are not specifically philo-
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sophical aims, the attempt to satisfy them will provide special occasions for philosophical work. The philosophical reader has several reasons to be interested in philosophers’ autobiographies. The first is the desire to interpret. The text sheds light on the author and that light in turn illuminates the author’s body of work. Even when the autobiographer’s concern is with his or her social environment and reputation, or to tell stories about noteworthy associates, what is said can aid the interpreter. This is especially the case when – as with Russell or Simone de Beauvoir – those associates include much of the intellectual elite of an era and the social concern is at least partially to connect one’s views with – or distinguish them from – theirs. Even when the autobiographer’s own aims were much more modest – gossip, revenge, exhibitionism – the writings shed light upon the writer. When the autobiographer’s aim is more clearly intellectual – a story of the education of a thinker in a way of thinking – the sort of aim Collingwood thought particularly appropriate to a philosopher5 – the text becomes a central interpretative aid. Collingwood’s own autobiography is an excellent introduction to his views, since it connects his opinions to the considerations he recalled as crucial to their adoption as well to the broader context of his intellectual development. The range of interpretative interests that a study of philosophical autobiography can serve has been well sketched by Amélie Rorty in ‘‘Witnessing Philosophers’’ (Rorty 1998: 309–27).
Distinctly philosophical uses for autobiography Beyond the interests of the interpreter of philosophical texts are the interests of writers who seek to use autobiography as a vehicle for a form of philosophical work that can only be achieved by giving an account of a life, and the interests of the readers who seek to come to grips with such a distinctive philosophical expression. In this kind of writing the personal is not merely incidental but intrinsic to the philosophical task at hand. What is more, the personal element cannot be one involving an individual who could be any person. The author’s own individuality must figure in the subject matter and must figure in a way amenable to narrative treatment though perhaps not – one must remember Nietzsche here – to a unified narrative. People may wonder about the possibility of such intrinsically personal philosophy. They may think that philosophy has become a scholarly profession, after all, and professionals ought to produce a product or service with general applicability. We have always had a strong bias toward the general, the universal and the changeless, or change-transcending. Autobiography, on the other hand, seems to focus on the particular and the primarily changeable. Moreover, autobiography seems too personal, too focused on narrow matters, too indirect when aimed at broader questions and too little given to a precise controlled method to satisfy the standards of a professionalized academic discipline, even when those standards are generous and catholic in the approaches allowed.
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Nevertheless, at least five communicative uses of autobiography can claim to be philosophical. These uses provide philosophers with motives to write works that are at once philosophical and personal, and readers with motives to regard the personal in the work as also philosophical. Four of the uses advance aims that are loosely describable as matters of practical philosophy. They are moral instruction, consolation, apology and confession. They are not mutually exclusive. The last two were identified long ago: they were distinguished explicitly but informally by Rousseau, although he made a different use of the distinction than I will.6 Each of the four draws on features of the author’s life to advance its aim. A work of moral instruction uses firstperson experience as part of an exhortation to some action, while a work of consolation attempts to demonstrate the genuine value of an apparently unhappy life. An apology takes the form of a defense or a justification of a life. One recalls the fictional apologies of Socrates written by Plato and Xenophon. A confession involves self-revelation and admission. The paradigmatic examples are the Confessions produced by Augustine and, perhaps, those produced by Rousseau. The fifth philosophical use of autobiography has a theoretical rather than a practical aim. It may be no longer universally recognized as within the competency of philosophers, but it did have longstanding recognition as a philosophical task. This form of inquiry uses autobiographical information as part of an investigation of what it is to be human. In these studies the autobiographical must have general consequences, perhaps as typical or disconfirming or indicative of a notable human extreme. None of these uses can be persuasive unless the author can be credited with an account of her / his life that is sincere and meant to be accurate at least about the philosophically relevant points. None can be convincing unless the writer really has achieved the accuracy required. In these cases philosophical evaluation can involve judgments about the personal sincerity and capacity for self-knowledge of the authors.
Autobiography as moral instruction Works that use autobiographical accounts for moral instruction can come in two forms, neither of which requires that the author actually be accepted as a professional practitioner of philosophy. What qualifies these accounts as philosophy (if nothing else does) is the use of what the author reveals of his or her life as premises in an argument, the conclusion of which is a recommendation for action. In the first of these forms, the author is meant to provide a positive example of some course of action or of the effects of some course of action. John Stuart Mill, for example, explicitly offers his own intellectual development as evidence in favor of a particular approach to education (Mill 1989: 27). Mill claims that his own achievement proves that young minds can undergo a much more extensive course of instruction than they are usually
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offered, and thrive as a result. The worth of his approach as an argument strategy is not diminished by the fact that his own story incidentally reveals that he is exceptionally well suited to academic work and that his accomplishment there may have been bought at the cost of damage to his emotional and social abilities. In the second form of autobiography aimed at moral instruction, the author uses his or her life experiences as evidence for the evil effects of some set of circumstances or of some social institution. The author presents firsthand experience of these effects as reasons to avoid or oppose their cause. Although there are cases where it can be appropriate for the author to present her- or himself as a typical person, or a typical member of some social group, it is not always necessary to do so. In fact at times it might be desirable to display exceptional characteristics. Thus when Frederick Douglass uses his own experiences as a slave as part of a case for abolition, he pursues a double strategy.7 The brutality he sees directed against the ordinary people around him, human beings like any others, becomes one reason for a morally sensitive person to oppose slavery. Ordinary people are made to suffer, and to live in squalor. They are forced into a state of submission and demeaned by even the milder forms of slavery in a way that no human deserves. What slavery does to someone as obviously talented and tenacious as Douglass was provides a second reason to oppose it. The institution is designed to stifle the development of obvious human potential. It is a way to waste human ability, and it does so because the presence of a large class of stunted humans is essential to the unearned economic and social privileges of a few. Douglass’ efforts at self-improvement are actively suppressed by those who have control over him. He accomplishes much, but much talent and effort must be spent simply finding an opportunity to learn. While his story did provide evidence to other people enslaved in the United States that escape was both possible and desirable, it was primarily intended to ‘‘promote the anti-slavery enterprise’’ and combat anti-Black prejudice in the Northern United States.8 The audience could respond to a life illustrating both the dignity and the suffering of both ordinary and extraordinary slaves. Douglass supplied such an account.
Autobiography as consolation An autobiography can be written to console. There can be distinctively philosophical ways to provide consolation, and philosophers have done so at least since Seneca.9 In fact autobiographical consolations (unless they are intended for the author’s consolation) may have to be philosophical. It is not usually the case that a person undergoing hardships can be helped by someone else’s account of her or his own hardships. They are even less likely to be aided by a story of the successes of another, and mixed life stories seem simply irrelevant. Nevertheless an account of the hardships of another can
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console if that account also shows that such a life is a good one despite the hardships. Autobiographical consolation, then, can work if it provides a fair account of the hardships, and the activities or conditions which compensate for, or counteract, or – best of all – nullify them. The author can find consolation in this. Her or his own life has gone well. A reader whose life also contains difficulties, but is good in the same ways that the author’s life is good can find similar comfort, although a thoroughly philosophical consolation may need to go one step further. There should be evidence that the allegedly good features really are good features. Providing this evidence should help to dispel the doubts of the reader who seeks certainty about these matters. This sort of autobiographical philosophy need not be the preserve of writers who lead the life of philosophers (or one of the kinds of lives which philosophers lead). Nevertheless, philosophers may be especially inclined to provide it. Many of them have been attracted to the bit of wishful thinking that Plato gives Socrates in the Apology that a good man cannot be harmed in life or death.10 Many have found, or have claimed to find, the sort of goodness that produces immunity from genuine harm in the type of life that they would describe as philosophical. A philosopher who thinks that the philosophical way of life is a particularly good way of life may conclude that philosophers with appropriate personal circumstances, and some capacity for narrative, can write especially good consolations. As it turns out there are two famous works of philosophical consolatio, both of which are autobiographical, at least in part. The older of the two has the most appropriate title. It is Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. In it Boethius reviews his own misfortunes and hardships and has philosophy, personified, present a case that the philosophical life is the best life, and that true happiness is not to be found in the things of this world, but in God. This case is presented not only as a chain of arguments but as a therapy in which various anxieties, apparently faced by Boethius but in any case of concern to anyone hoping for a consolation, are articulated and examined and thereby dispelled.11 A less straightforward case of autobiography as philosophical consolation can be found in Peter Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum.12 While Abelard opens by calling his narrative a consolation in a letter addressed to some unspecified ‘‘you,’’ it is by no means clear to whom the account actually was adressed (Muckle 1964: 11). The account does incidentally reveal that much can be accomplished despite adversity, and Abelard maintains in his conclusion that our sufferings in this life are a part of God’s plan and that certain of them are a sign of the world’s hatred for the truly pious (Muckle 1964: 78–80). These thoughts might console a reader, although Abelard’s willingness to go one up on that reader for suffering seems less likely to help. The general tenor of Abelard’s story, however, seems much less consoling than militant. This narrative seems to be written by someone who must have caused a great deal of controversy as a defense, an apology.
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Autobiography as apology Whenever a narrative is written as an apology in this sense, it will be addressed to an audience that either includes or has been influenced by certain hostile accusers. In some cases these accusations are the result of misunderstanding, and can be dispelled by simple self-explanation and contextualization. The accuser does not know the relevant particulars. More profound accusations recognize details, but allege certain deficiencies of a moral or intellectual sort. The apologist’s response is a justification of a way of life, a long-term course of action or an intellectual approach. Thus Newman responded, in the appropriately titled Apologia Pro Vita Sua, to Kingsley’s attacks on his intellectual honesty and independence (Newman 1956). Mill wrote his Autobiography to defend his intellectual position as a utilitarian. against one category of Victorian critic, and his stand as something of a moral perfectionist against many fellow utilitarians (Mill 1989). Russell, whose life, opinions and political positions were extremely controversial, offered an account of them in terms of certain fundamental desires (he calls them ‘‘passions’’) for noncontroversially good things – for love, knowledge, and pity for suffering – which circumstances of family, education, history and the like gave a peculiar direction.13 The efforts of apologists can be regarded as a distinctive form of applied ethics and epistemology. They contain arguments – with empirical premises – that a certain way of life was a good life, a certain momentous choice in life was a wise, or morally justified choice, a certain approach to questions was one likely to give useful or – better – true answers in the circumstances at hand. These exercises are limited in one respect: general principles are subsidiary in them to the details of particular lives. Nevertheless they have an instructive value not available in more general approaches to applied ethics. In an apology a life is argued to have conformed to certain, arguably reasonable, standards of moral or cognitive probity. This conformity is displayed in a well designed narrative. Conclusions about how to live well or how to come to know are available to anyone who can draw suitably close analogies between their lives and that of the autobiographer. Philosophers can set examples; philosopher apologists offer themselves as examples even when they do not do so primarily to teach.
Autobiography as confession The fourth philosophical use for autobiography, confession, involves a strong element of critical self-evaluation. The writer of a confession examines a life with an eye to its limitations. It has the character of an examination of conscience that involves a confessio peccatorum. What is of note philosophically is that such confessiones can only take place from a position of relative enlightenment. One must know that one has failed in the past, and how one has done so, in order to confess the fact. Thus, a confession must be to a degree a
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confessio fidei, or a confessio scientiae, as well. It must include an acknowledgement of a new form of knowledge or insight, whether acquired by supernatural or natural means, together with some sort of historical account of its acquisition. This sort of confessional writing can be found not only with Augustine but also in Rousseau’s Confessions (of course, but perhaps only in part), in Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo. The account of the acquisition of knowledge is of central importance in the confession. The writer of a confession has a difficult position to maintain. Having admitted to previous errors in action, in belief or in attitude, at least some of which were not recognized for what they were at the time of their occurrence, the confession writer must now maintain that their replacements – which establish the viewpoint that makes description of the errors possible – are not themselves errors. The first response is to think that every auto-biography of this form must also be an auto da fe. Confessional autobiographers can adopt a variety of strategies to resolve this difficulty. For example, one can show how the new awareness cannot be erroneous, or demonstrate that it provides a cognitive or moral advantage, that it resolves difficulties in understanding or in conduct of a generally recognized character. My credo may or may not have been arrived at with the motive ut intelligam – in order that I may understand – but my position as confessional writer is strengthened if I can produce improved understanding in consequence of my enlightenment. Augustine frequently uses this second approach in his Confessions, but especially in books XI–XIII, in which a divinely instructed understanding is turned on time, the medium in which created existence, human life and conversion occurs, and on matters of theology and scriptural interpretation. Descartes uses the first of these approaches in part IV of the Discourse on Method – he claims certainty for his fundamental insights (Descartes 1998: 18, AT 32). He uses the second approach principally in part V, where he presents a summary of his unpublished work, Le Monde, as a sample of the fruits of the method, and in the essays which the Discourse served to introduce. However, he also uses narrative, a technique he considers cognitively suspect although psychologically powerful,14 to lead the reader from unreliable traditional learning to the practice of the method which guarantees the achievement of secure knowledge. Rousseau and Nietzsche both tell tales of recognition. In Rousseau’s case this is recognition of the ways in which he, or any human, can fail to live as he thinks best, of the sources of these failures in the treachery implicit in an overcultivated way of life. In Nietzsche’s case it is a recognition of his own importance as a transvaluer of values.15 In each of these cases new knowledge – some improved understanding of things – is portrayed as a necessary condition of a ‘‘true’’ confession and its fruitfulness as a source of independently recognizable achievements becomes a confirming token of the genuineness of the recognition which made the confession possible. However, this all seems extraneous to the more properly autobiographical parts of confession. Why should a new form of knowledge,
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a realization, be embedded in a life story? A physicist need not write autobiography in order to present striking advances on either the theoretical or the experimental front. The answer might be connected to the kind of new knowledge that the writer of the confession claims to have achieved. It is a comprehensive sort of knowledge and one that situates the knower within it. Augustine’s faith allows a clear understanding of his own place in the divine economy of salvation; he can see where he and his associates fit in the picture. Descartes comes to ‘‘know’’ that he can know. His confidence about his capacity for knowledge and its range is based on a bit of self-knowledge, stemming from the resolution of doubt, and shows the way to systematic additions to his knowledge of both human nature and his own mind. Such an instructed intelligence may wish to extend its self-awareness. One’s knowledge of how one fits is extended and deepened by a knowledge of how that awareness was possible and of how it was achieved. In most cases, however, the attainment of this new understanding is not itself fully understood or at least not fully explained by the account given. Descartes’ alleged discovery seems to be largely a matter of chance, of his own good luck to have had a singular opportunity to employ his own good sense.16 Augustine holds that his conversion is the product of God’s eternally benevolent grace toward him, and is according to the divine will. However, the fact that it has been at one stage of his life rather than another that he should be given the means to respond to this grace is beyond his understanding (and ours). While some of the circumstances that set the scene for the choice (the efforts of his mother, the honest rejection of Manicheanism, the influence of St Ambrose) can be grasped as contributing conditions, the turning must remain a mystery. Rousseau can explain his coming to understand human nature as a result of his own life history. However, key elements of that history, for example, the loss of his mother, the encounter with Madame de Waerens and the discovery of the life-changing announcement of the Dijon Academy’s essay contest in the Mercure de France are accidents.17 Of all the philosophers who have written confessional autobiographies, Vico may have attempted the most complete confession. One influential interpretation of Vico’s Vita claims that he regarded New Science, his main achievement, as not simply the result of a happy accident nor merely as a mysterious act of divine election. Rather, at a particular moment in the history of his civilization – not one of energetic expansion – the reflective powers of those who live within it have developed to a degree that a thinker properly situated could understand not only the human condition of the day but also how that condition permitted a well placed thinker to uncover it. The autobiography of Vico can be read as an account of how, placed by providence in the appropriate position, he achieved the reflective awareness of which his age was capable.18 The story of Vico’s own education becomes a genetic account via narrative of an intellect who realizes the self-understanding appropriate to an age. To do this the author must understand
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the age and how it educated its own prophetic mind, his mind. I do not know whether Vico actually achieved all that; I merely suggest that it was his project. The author completes his mission as vehicle of social self-knowledge by showing how it was his destiny to be that vehicle. This project has a certain breath-taking character to it, in part because, if it does succeed, it presents another, further level of understanding – the recognition by the author of his own special place as a knower. Still the task is not complete: this recognition also calls for an account, as will the capacity to account for it, and so on.
Autobiography and inquiry into human nature The fifth philosophical use of autobiography is connected with the project of philosophical anthropology. Until the emergence of the social sciences around the turn of the last century, philosophers generally believed that they could contribute to our understanding of what it is to be human. Many still do. In most cases, however, the methods proposed for achieving such a general self-understanding did not draw on autobiographical materials. Even when autobiographical reports could claim epistemic reliability, they remained too focused on the particular and the contingent to provide evidence for common or essential human characteristics. Nevertheless, there is no inherent barrier to drawing general conclusions from one’s own life story, providing that certain conditions are met. The relative rarity of attempts to do so is either due to the difficulty of meeting the conditions or to the fact that autobiographers tend to have other tasks to accomplish. Nevertheless, the account of a single life can lead to general consequences if a case can be made that the life described is somehow typical and unexceptionable. If the life described can be shown to reveal an extreme form of human behavior, it can motivate conclusions about the range of human capacities. Part of the attraction of stories of human endurance may be due to this feature. If one can portray oneself as both typically human in some respect but reacting to an extreme condition, then one could draw deep conclusions about what all humans will be inclined to when pushed to a limit. As Eve Grace proposes in her contribution to this volume (Chapter 8), Rousseau’s Reveries can be regarded as such a portrayal. Important consequences can be drawn about human nature even when one’s own life is neither typical nor carried on in extreme circumstances. Facts about a single life can refute general claims about humanity precisely when they are inconsistent with predictions relying on those general claims. In his contribution (Chapter 10) Fred Wilson holds that Mill presented the crisis in early adulthood as evidence against what he judged to be the oversimplified version of associationist psychology advanced by his father. Since he thought the facts of human experience supported a more complex associationism which could explain both the crisis and its resolution, he could offer his life not only as refutation but also as a kind of lived experimentum crucis, driving the selection of one of two competing theories of human mental life.
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When certain literary forms become regularly associated with a certain communicative purpose, that very association allows the form to be put to new uses, uses which exploit the reader’s awareness of the old associations. Sometimes the exploitations can be broad and satirical – as is the case with parody. On other occasions the purpose may be to create an allusion in order to generate memory-driven responses and expectations in a reader: philosophers who write in dialogue form for an educated readership know that they will induce thoughts of Socrates and Plato. There are extensions of this kind in the case of the conventional forms used in philosophical autobiography. If one type of narrative becomes common in apology, it can be used for mock defenses, for ironic defenses, for references to defense in works not primarily intended to serve the purpose of defense. Confessional forms can also be used for other purposes. Rousseau really cannot resist using what he presents as a confessional enterprise to deliver a personal defense against certain accusations – and his attempts to deny that he does so are transparent. Nietzsche may have a very special use of the form in Ecce Homo. Suppose that the possibility of a comprehensive, self-situating knowledge is doubtful. Then allegedly comprehensive insights could prove to be simply new interpretations of our own situation, brought about by new needs or emergent prospects. One way to present recognition of this limitation of self-understanding as itself a kind of skewed self-understanding will be to replace the unified confession by multiple, fragmented narratives, embodying apparent contradictions, the very form of Ecce Homo.
Closing admonitions A properly critical account of the philosophical use of autobiography must note three connected cautionary observations about the endeavor. The first is that many sorts of individual are recognized as philosophers. While the various personalities of these individuals lead to different approaches to the activity which we regard as philosophical, it is their common sensitivity to the giving of reasons – even when that sensitivity leads to a rejection of the process – which plays a large role in our recognition. This sensitivity, however it is formed, is given to many types of person, to individuals with various sorts of character. Not every one of these individuals produces an autobiography. Many do not. Many may think autobiographically, and may find it helpful to do so, but may not record the thoughts in a text. Their autobiographical thoughts are an aid to their work but not properly part of it. Others may record them but not organize them in a unified narrative. One’s life can look different to oneself on different days, and some chapters of it may not admit an easy fit with the rest. Not every one of those who have worked out a unified life narrative will opt to publish it. The philosophic autobiography will require a special individual with special aim. The philosopher’s autobiography will be a rare thing. Second, although truthfulness is essential to autobiographical premises in philosophical arguments, ensuring and assessing that truthfulness will be a
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complex matter. Much of any autobiographical account will be achieved through the medium of memory. Memory has the power to retrieve what others have not observed and what no document records. Moreover, it allows one to connect events in one’s life on the basis of their significance to oneself, and those connections need not be apparent even to an observer fully aware of the events connected. However, it can also distort and mislead. Where that effect is extreme, and error about oneself is deeply entrenched, a reasonably well informed observer may be better equipped than the autobiographer to detect the truth. This can be done on the basis of inconsistency or implausibility in the autobiographer’s own story or of conflict between that account and well supported alternative narratives of the same events. Even when memory does not mislead the autobiographer, the natural communicative aim of the autobiography may require selection of detail, shifts in emphasis or the filling in of unrecoverable detail. The story may need organization to satisfy the conventionally accepted forms of narrative current in the intended audience. In particular every autobiographer will have to treat as the end of the story what is of necessity only an intermediate point in the life of its central subject. To be true to herself an author may find she is false to the full complexity of her life. Since the whole truth is impossible and nothing but the truth may interfere with compelling storytelling, the presentation of simple truth moves from mere responsibility to challenge. Finally, the philosopher’s autobiography is likely to be a transforming event even for its author. To produce it, once one has decided to do so, demands much effort, dedicated time, a great labor of recollection, a risk of serious self-disillusionment. All of these can change the writer at least as much as any major piece of writing can. One must add to this the effect of the product. The author has produced a permanent life story, refined, compressed and reduced to, at most, a limited set of narrative threads. This ‘‘reduced’’ and organized life story, perhaps with elements of invention, calls the author to account in a way that merely having engaged in recollection, occasional reflection or diary writing does not. It is a text to live up to. If it has been published, then it will engender expectation in a public as well as in the writer and generate a demand for public accountability. Departure from a course of action that can be described as a plausible continuation of the account will be inhibited. Should such departure occur, it will need explanation. A life still open to many possible futures and a range of alternative accounts has been interpreted by a supreme authority. As a result, future possibilities are limited, certain routes are barred.
Notes 1 Moreover the Cartesian approach to many questions is quite different outside the meditative context than within it. Compare the Meditations with Descartes’ axiomatization of its results at the end of the answers to the second set of objections. Consider also his approach to part I of the Principles of Philosophy. 2 See (Vico 1944: 110–11). The original title is shown there as the Life of Giambattista Vico, Written by Himself.
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3 See (Kant 1992: 175–213) This section, entitled ‘‘On the Power of the Mind to Master its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution,’’ is a limiting case of narrative: the story related applies, with minimal alteration, to every day of the author’s life. 4 See (Bruss 1976), esp. chs 1 and 2, for a discussion of the performative approach to autobiography. 5 See (Collingwood 1967). The ‘‘Preface’’ (v) underlines this aim of writing his autobiography; it is closely related to his views of the work of the historian as primarily interested in the thought of their subjects. 6 See part II, book 7 of (Rousseau 1953). On page 262 Rousseau describes his confessions as the revelation of his ‘‘inner thoughts exactly in all the situations’’ of his life, and calls them the ‘‘history of my soul.’’ He claims that the reader will not think of them as actually another sort of work, an apologia.. 7 (Douglass 1995). Douglass published two other autobiogaphies, at later stages of his life, both of which preserve the slave-narrative portion with slight modifications. See, for example, (Douglass 1969). 8 See William Lloyd Garrison’s ‘‘Preface’’ to Douglass 1995: ix. 9 Several of his dialogues qualify. See, for example his ‘‘Consolation to Helvia,’’ his mother, on the occasion of his exile (Seneca 1997: 3–28). 10 Plato has Socrates make this claim at 41d in Apology (Plato 1997: 37). Oddly, he also seems to have Socrates suggest that a sentence of exile would be harmful to him. 11 (Boethius 1962). The autobiographical account of Boethius’ misfortunes is to be found in book I, prose 4, 9–14. The therapy analogy is given to Lady Philosophy in book I, prose 6, 17. The dialogue that takes up most of the rest of the text carries out that therapy. 12 I have used the translation of the Historia in (Muckle 1964). The introductory paragraph offers the account as ‘‘further encouragement’’ to the unnamed friend, along with the suggestion that his troubles are of little account compared to Abelard’s. 13 This striking proclamation of intent occurs in the prologue to the first volume of his Autobiography (Russell 1967: 13). 14 See (Descartes 1998: 4, AT 7) for his remarks on the misleading character of ‘‘even the most accurate histories.’’ Descartes offers the Discourse as a story or fable which anyone may imitate in the points of success but need not emulate in points where it is found wanting. In so doing he hopes to be useful to some and harmful to no-one (3, AT 5). 15 See (Rousseau 1953: 17) for his introductory remarks and also consider his general account of the society with which he flirted. For Nietzsche, see Ecce Homo (Nietzsche 1967: 213–335) See esp. ‘‘Why I am a Destiny’’, pp. 326–35. 16 The Discourse on Method opens with a note of praise for good sense which is delivered with overtones of great irony. See (Descartes 1998: 1, AT 2). 17 These events are noted in (Rousseau 1953), books I, III, VIII. 18 See Vico’s Life of Giambattista Vico (Vico 1944) and compare the interpretation offered by Donald P. Verene in his (1991). Chapter 2 is especially useful.
Bibliography Abelard, P. (1964) Historia Calamitatum, in Muckle, J. T., The Story of Abelard’s Adversities, a translation with notes by J. T. Muckle, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 11–80.
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Augustine (1961) Confessions, trans. with an introduction by R. S. Pine-Coffin, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Boethius (1962) The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Green, Indianapolis IN: Bobbs-Merrill (Library of Liberal Arts). Bruss, E. (1976) Autobiographical Acts, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Collingwood, R. G. (1967) An Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Murdoch, D. and Kenny, A. (eds and trans.) (1984–91) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Descartes, R. (1984–91a) Principles of Philosophy, in Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Murdoch, D. and Kenny, A. (eds and trans.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(1984–91b) Objections and Replies to Meditations on First Philosophy, in Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Murdoch, D. and Kenny, A. (eds and trans.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols, vol. 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(1998) Discourse on Method, and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald Cress, Indianapolis IN: Hackett. Douglass, F. (1969) My Bondage and My Freedom, New York: Dover. ——(1995) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York: Dover. Garrison, William Lloyd (1995) ‘‘Preface,’’ in Douglass, F., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, New York: Dover. Glassco, John (1970) Memoirs of Montparnasse, Toronto: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1992) The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit der Fakultäten), bilingual edn, trans. with an introduction by Mary J. Gregor, Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska Press. Mill, J. S. (1989) Autobiography, ed. and introduction by J. Robson, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Muckle, J. T. (1964) The Story of Abelard’s Adversities, a translation with notes by J. T. Muckle, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Newman, J. (1956) Apologia pro Vita Sua, Garden City NJ: Doubleday (Image Books). Nietzsche, F. (1967) On the Genealogy of Morals, and Ecce Homo, trans., ed. and commentary by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House. Plato (1997) Plato, Complete Works, ed. with introduction and notes by John M. Cooper, associate ed. D. S.Hutchinson, Indianapolis IN: Hackett. Rorty, A. (1998) ‘‘Witnessing Philosophers,’’ Philosophy and Literature, 22.2: 309–27. Rousseau, J.-J.(1953) Confessions, trans. with an introduction by J. M. Cohen, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——(1979) Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. with an introduction by Peter France, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Russell, B. (1967) Autobiography, vol. I, London: Allen and Unwin. Seneca, L. A. (1997) ‘‘Consolation to Helvia,’’ 3–28 in Seneca, Dialogues and Letters, trans. C. D. N. Costa, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Verene, D. (1991) The New Art of Autobiography, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vico, G. (1944) The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Fisch and Thomas Bergin, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
2
The Confessions of Saint Augustine Accessory to grace Samantha Thompson
The Confessions by St Augustine of Hippo is one of the great books of Western culture. Written in a North African province of a fading Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century, it still is easily found in bookshops of the twenty-first century. Its status as a classic is ensured by the massive influence of its author on the history of philosophy and theology, and by the veneration it commands as a devotional work within the Western Christian tradition. Perhaps of greatest importance to twenty-first-century readers, however, is its reputation as the first autobiography.1 This shift in emphasis from the devotional to the autobiographical represents not only a change in our understanding of the Confessions, but also in our attitude to Augustine’s philosophy (as he does not hesitate to characterize his Christianity). Though the Confessions contains his conversion story, medieval Christians assumed that the work is not ultimately about Augustine but about the God whom Augustine addresses. Their attitude is expressed visually in churches where paintings of events from the Confessions adorn aisles on the way to the altar.2 Such pictures declare that God was not only present in the particular life they depict, but that God is present now, in this place. Only relatively recently have we shifted our gaze from God to the man who talks about God in the Confessions. The result is a deeper analysis of the work, its structure, its influences, even of its author and his methods. Perhaps something is lost in this process. Somehow, the more we know about these things, the more mysterious the Confessions becomes. I think we need to put our knowledge back into the context Augustine himself would have recognized. To see the meaning of pictures of Augustine’s life in a cathedral we need to look up and around at the building, which represents a world with God at its center. Similarly, to understand the Confessions itself we need also to look up and around, at the edifice of Augustine’s philosophy – or perhaps more accurately, at the universe it describes. He is not merely trying to communicate something about philosophy. Rather, by writing his autobiography in the way he does, Augustine is living his philosophy – and for him philosophy must be lived – in the deepest way a man of letters can.
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The mystery of the Confessions Scholars know the philosophical point of the autobiographical part of the Confessions, but no one is quite sure about what it is doing in the work as a whole. As for the former, scholars agree that Augustine’s narrative aims at illustrating a theory of philosophy.3 He makes himself a case study of how and why grace works: God as Creator is responsible for Augustine’s conversion to Christianity, and, by extrapolation, for human salvation. We know this because Augustine obviously selects those details of his life story which illustrate this process, and because he says so: With thanksgiving let me remember, O my God, all your mercies to me and let me confess them to you . . . you have broken my bonds. I will sacrifice to you the sacrifice of praise. I will narrate how you broke them asunder. (8.1.1) A major barrier to understanding the overall philosophical point of the whole Confessions, however, is that its autobiographical core is hedged around and riddled through with often ill integrated non-autobiographical material. The major deviation from Augustine’s narrative about his own life happens in the last three of the thirteen books of the Confessions. These books comprise a painfully detailed exegesis of the first book of Genesis, which Augustine treats not only as an account of creation but also as an allegory of the entire salvation history of humankind. The second major type of deviation includes two miniature biographies which are inserted into Augustine’s autobiographical narrative: that of Alypius, who hailed from (and eventually became the bishop of) Augustine’s hometown and who was one of Augustine’s students in rhetoric, and that of Augustine’s mother. These are indeed Augustine’s best friends, but their biographies do not seem necessary for him to complete his point about God’s direction of his own life. Their stories do not even fit smoothly into the narrative. Then there are the multitude of minor digressions into philosophical musings, polemical lectures and rapturous love songs to God.4 This apparent disunity leads many commentators simply to ignore either the last three books (often referred to as an ‘‘appendix’’ of scriptural exegesis) or the first ten books (the ‘‘autobiography’’). On the other hand, no one doubts that there is some overall philosophical point to the work; after all, one of the few things that unifies the whole is that Augustine never wavers in addressing it to God as a prayer. (This is itself mysterious, since presumably an omniscient God already knows the point Augustine is trying to make, as Augustine admits (5.1.1).) What is this philosophical point, and how is it related to an autobiographical exercise the like of which Augustine, already a prolific author, had never before attempted?5 Twentieth-century scholars have speculated abundantly. Some have dissected the text of the Confessions looking for literary, philosophical or even
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numerical patterns which might point to an overall theme; others have tried to find literary antecedents.6 There are enough discernible patterns to make us think that Augustine tried to unify the work. Nonetheless, many scholars think the Confessions is unique, and best characterized as impressionistic (O’Meara 1992: 91), as a ‘‘mosaic’’ (Chadwick 1986: 67), or (less kindly) as a ‘‘badly composed book’’ (O’Meara 1954: 13): essentially, a conversion story to which Augustine (never a systematic writer) rather awkwardly attached the vestiges of former, partially related, projects.7 Many ‘‘loose’’ interpretations of the Confessions look to the unifying force of the title itself. The Latin verb confiteri means ‘‘to acknowledge’’ or ‘‘to corroborate’’ and so can be applied to all of Augustine’s activities in the work, which include confession of sin, confession of praise and thanksgiving at being released from it, and confession of the faith to which he has come (see O’Meara 1954: 17; Chadwick 1991: ix; Wills 1999: xiv). Of all the theories about the point of the Confessions, however, those most underdeveloped by scholars are Augustine’s own. Augustine actually makes general statements about the purpose of the Confessions in other works and in personal letters. In modern discussions of the Confessions, these statements are dutifully noted, but are not used to shed any light on the full philosophical significance of the work or on its apparent disorganization. It is not difficult to see why. The place we would most expect Augustine to illuminate all the mysteries of the Confessions is in a work he wrote late in his life. Called Reconsiderations, it is generally a scholar’s dream. An annotated chronologically arranged catalogue of all ninety-three of Augustine’s books (not including, however, hundreds of sermons and letters), most of its entries summarize the work in question, clarify and correct the views therein, describe the circumstances in which it was written, and excuse or explain excessive disorganization or digressions. Unfortunately, the entry on the Confessions is not one of these. In it Augustine simply observes that ‘‘the first ten books [of the Confessions] were written about myself; the last three about Holy Scripture’’ (2.32.2), a statement helpful only because it displays Augustine’s apparent satisfaction with this division. And, before making a few trifling corrections of things he wishes he had put differently, he simply expresses uncharacteristic contentment with the work: The thirteen books of my Confessions praise the just and good God regarding my good and evil acts, and lift up [excitant] the understanding and affection of men to Him. At least . . . they had this effect on me while I was writing them and they continue to have it when I am reading them. What others think about them is a matter for them to decide. (2.32.1) In letters written to accompany gifts of copies of his Confessions to fellow Christians, Augustine simply echoes these thoughts, particularly the theme
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of praising God as the Creator and Saviour of the world: ‘‘Join me [in this book] in praising him whom I wanted to be praised on my account . . . for we have brought ourselves to ruin, and he who made us once has made us new all over again’’ (Letter 231.6; cf. Letter 27.4). Scholars often summarize passages like these (usually in passing) as expressions of Augustine’s general desire to ‘‘inspire’’ or ‘‘edify’’ his readers. Understood this way, they are clearly not a source for rigorous insight into the Confessions. To inspire one’s readers is a lofty but general motive for writing, but simply avowing it does not shed light on the point or structure of the text. It is possible to ask, of course, what the Confessions is meant to inspire. But the more concrete we try to be about this, the more problematic the answers are. For example, one commentator suggests that Augustine tells his life story ‘‘to encourage [readers] to try his method of conversion for themselves’’ (Stock 2001: 3). But surely (as will become abundantly clear) the ‘‘method’’ of conversion in the Confessions is not Augustine’s but God’s: the early Augustine would not have been more surprised by how the later Augustine turned out. Another popular view is that Augustine means to inspire his readers to undertake self-therapy through self-examination. (The words ‘‘self’’ and ‘‘therapy’’ are used noticeably often by twentieth-century commentators on the Confessions, a sign perhaps of their own preoccupations.)8 But while Augustine plainly thinks that self-examination is an integral part of the Christian life, this motive alone does not seem to explain those parts of the Confessions which are not about him at all. The more obvious possibility is that, as the letters and the Reconsiderations passage suggest, we are to be inspired to ‘‘praise God.’’ Indeed, these brief statements compel reconsideration of the first few lines of the Confessions, which otherwise could easily be glossed over as a merely pious invocation – especially as they compete with the most famous line of the Confessions which follows them (‘‘You have made us for yourself,’’ etc.). Here we find emphasized again the ideas both of praise, and the fact that it is inspired by God: You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised. . . . And human beings, who are a part of your creation, wish to praise you. . . . You arouse [excitas] them to delight [delectet] in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. . . . But how does one who does not know you call upon you? Yet ‘‘how shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed? Or how shall they believe without a preacher? [Romans 10:14].’’9 (1.1.1)10 In fact, praise tolls like a bell marking the initial chapter of each book within the Confessions,11 where Augustine often borrows from the Psalms to make suggestions about what his readers should say in response to what they are about to read: ‘‘And when they hear these things, let all who adore you say: ‘Blessed be the Lord, in heaven and on earth. Great and wonderful is his
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name’ [Ps 34:1].’’ (8.1.1); ‘‘ ‘The Lord is great, and exceedingly to be praised’ [Ps 95:4]’’ (11.1.1). However, given the complexity of the Confessions, which is itself apparently an exercise of praise, praise involves more than simply saying flattering things about God. Indeed, in theological circles, the devotional ideal of praising God is notoriously difficult to analyze. What, then, is the reader supposed to do in response to the Confessions? In his magisterial commentary on the Confessions, James O’Donnell wisely warns against simplistic attempts to find a single unifying principle to the work: 12
One prevailing weakness of many of these efforts has been the assumption that there lies somewhere unnoticed about the Confessions a neglected key to unlock all mysteries. But for a text as multi-layered and subtle as the Confessions, any attempt to find a single key is pointless. Augustine says himself that he meant to stir our souls, not to test our ingenuity as lock-picks. (1992: vol. I, xxiii) O’Donnell is right that the complexity of the Confessions is explained by the fact that Augustine’s professed motive is not to prove some narrow point but to affect the reader on some more general and profound level. But if he means that the Confessions is unfocused because this motive is vague, he is mistaken. I think that inspiration, the ‘‘stirring of the soul’’ and the praise of God it instigates, is at the very heart of Augustine’s Christianity. Far from being a vague feeling, it encompasses hard psychological fact and even the very reason for existence itself. In a sense, then, inspiration is the key to the Confessions. Moreover, the desire to inspire others is not only the reason Augustine decided to write the Confessions. The narrative portion of the Confessions is itself, I contend, a history of inspiration: Augustine uses the autobiographical portion of the Confessions to show how God’s grace works to convert him by changing what inspires him. If so, there is an illuminating parallel between the way God works in Augustine’s life in the Confessions and the way he says he hopes the reader will be affected by his book. This parallel will reveal the meaning of his comments on the work, and connect the point of the autobiographical section of the Confessions to the point of the entire work as an act of praise. In the Confessions itself, however, Augustine does not analyze the process by which grace works; the narrative concentrates on showing rather than telling how God was active in his life. The only summaries of the process are brief and all the more mysterious because, as we will see, God does not actually appear on the stage of the drama; there are no voices in Augustine’s head or supernatural visions.13 What does Augustine mean, then, when he says that God ‘‘taught [him] in wonderful and hidden ways,’’ (5.6.10) and that God ‘‘urged [him] on with many different voices [vocibus]’’ (13.1.1)?
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Grace as inspiration: the theory The answer emerges when we set Augustine’s case study of grace in the Confessions against his theory of grace. Fortunately we have two good tools for isolating the latter. First, we know that shortly before writing the Confessions, and just after his consecration as Bishop of Hippo – almost a decade after his decision to embrace Christianity – Augustine’s thought on grace changed radically. He decided that human beings cannot make the slightest move toward their own salvation without God’s assistance, a theory which has come to be known as ‘‘prevenient’’ grace – grace that praevenit, ‘‘comes before.’’ Second, this shift is captured by Augustine’s own admission14 in his To Simplician, a work finished the year he began writing the Confessions. It not only describes how grace works, but explains why it works the way it does. Consequently, passages from it have been called the ‘‘intellectual charter of the Confessions’’ (Brown 1967: 170), and they will help us to frame the events of the autobiographical portion of the Confessions in ways which transform our understanding of the whole work. First, however, it is worth reflecting on something that is such an essential feature of Augustine’s philosophy that he does not spell it out in To Simplician (where it is presumed) or in the Confessions (where it so pervades the whole that its centrality can easily be overlooked or misinterpreted by modern readers). This is the character of the ‘‘salvation’’ Augustine thinks grace accomplishes. We are the inheritors of centuries-long controversies concerning Augustine’s radical views on grace (and on the associated concepts of original sin and predestination), debates which have sometimes splintered Christian churches, even entire Christian countries. As such, we are likely to assume first, that the idea of prevenient grace is essentially a revolution in Christian thought, and second, that the essential feature of salvation is the avoidance of eternal damnation. Though there is some truth in both these assumptions, they are impoverished representations of Augustine’s views. In his own way of thinking, grace represents a revolution in philosophy (not to mention the history of humanity); and salvation is the goal of all philosophy. Augustine’s philosophical orientation is given away by his use of medical metaphors in describing the human condition. In fact, the Latin word translated into English as ‘‘salvation’’ is salus, which ordinarily means ‘‘health’’ or ‘‘well-being’’; indeed, it is often less misleading to translate Augustine’s salus this way. Metaphors of health and sickness pervade the Confessions. Augustine vividly likens the misery he caused himself with his own wickedness to various deadly and painful bodily ailments such as fever, tumors, deformity, and wounds.15 Significantly, the most prevalent image of God in the Confessions (after that of the beloved lover) is that of the physician or surgeon.16 God’s grace, then, is not merely merciful because it absolves Augustine from guilt or commutes his sentence of damnation. It is restorative. It works to mend and transform – to heal – its subject. ‘‘How else is
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salvation obtained,’’ prays Augustine, ‘‘except by your hand which remakes what you have made?’’ (5.7.13). The use of the metaphor of bodily health for spiritual health, and the identification of spiritual sickness with both unhappiness and wickedness, are associations familiar to Augustine from classical philosophy. The idea that human beings are almost universally unhappy and wicked and in need of transformation is not an Augustinian or even a Christian innovation. Transformation was the counsel and promise of all the major philosophical schools of Augustine’s time, whether Stoic, Platonist, Epicurean or Skeptic. Moreover, Augustine adopts philosophy’s central concept as the foundation of his presentation of Christianity as the true philosophy, which can deliver what all other philosophies can only promise: happiness. The importance of happiness (Greek eudaimonia, Latin beatitudo) permeates Augustine’s works from the earliest (actually entitled The Happy Life) to the latest. In his sermons especially, he appeals to his listeners’ desire for happiness as though it were a kind of compass which when properly interpreted and followed will guide them to contentment and righteousness.17 But the later Augustine – the Augustine of the Confessions – claims that human beings cannot even step onto the true path of philosophy, the path to happiness, without God’s help. This is an unclassical answer to an essentially classical problem. We can see how radical this is in the context of views Augustine continued to share with other philosophies. Basing the truth of Christianity on something apparently subjective and self-regarding like happiness often seems strange to modern readers, for whom the ideals of Christianity tend to be associated with selflessness and the performance of duty regardless of one’s own desire or comfort. But for Augustine, as for other philosophers of his time, happiness is not merely a feeling of comfort or pleasure obtained by different people in different ways. Rather, the universal desire for happiness for its own sake (10.20.23) points directly at the root of human nature, just as the elusiveness of happiness points to something wrong about the way people are trying to fulfill that nature. Happiness, then, provides the best objective starting point for thinking about how we ought to live, and since philosophy is ultimately concerned with how we ought to live,18 it seeks to discover how we might attain happiness. Each philosophical school known to Augustine outlined a path to happiness for its adherents. Though these schools disagreed about the details of the path, they tended to agree about its general features. The first step in achieving genuine happiness is to realize that it is not quite what everyone thinks it is and cannot be conferred by most of the things people pursue. In fact, happiness is chiefly an optimal state of soul19 analogous to the state of health in the body;20 and just as the body is built21 to require certain goods for its health, so the soul is built to require certain goods. The ultimate requirement for happiness is the ‘‘highest good,’’ the summum bonum, the attainment of which grants the pleasure and contentment people generally associate with happiness. Most importantly, the philosophers took pains to
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argue that happiness is somehow inseparable from virtue, because it involves a correct ordering of priorities. That the happy man is necessarily the good man and the good life the morally good life may seem counterintuitive, but the philosophers pointed out that most of us have at least a dim sense that human perfection and therefore satisfaction require virtue. To follow the path of philosophy, then, people need to confront reality and apply this knowledge to their lives. They need to know what they are, what they therefore need, what object can fulfill those requirements, and how to grasp it. Such knowledge of the truth is wisdom, sophia. Augustine never abandons this general prescription for happiness (and virtue); he goes even further in agreeing with the Platonist philosophers, who, he thinks, have a generally correct view of the highest good. And, until the shift in thought of which the Confessions is an illustration, Augustine even shared philosophy’s optimism; happiness and wisdom, he thought, could be achieved through a disciplined program of self-improvement, with the emphasis on self: the tools for achieving wisdom lay within every person. A well educated person could apply reason (the highest aspect of human nature) to contemplation of successively higher goods, and finally gaze upon the summum bonum, the highest good, God. For simpler souls there was always the guidance of church authority until reason could be wakened.22 Granted, the program could not succeed without the assistance of the divine physician, Christ, through God’s grace. Grace, however, was as close as the asking. It could not be received unless asked for; but that, after all, was only fair (On Free Choice of the Will 3.19.22). No wonder, then, that the pre-Confessions Augustine characterized the Platonists as only a ‘‘few words and opinions’’ away from Christianity (On True Religion 4.7). Gradually, however, Augustine’s confidence in the human capacity for self-perfection began to erode, and his changed attitude to the Platonists is a barometer of this. In the Confessions, ‘‘the few words and opinions’’ have become a gulf, a treacherous wilderness across which the pagan philosopher can only catch a glimpse of his far-off homeland (7.21.27). Grace will still get him there, but the catch is that in order to ask for grace, he needs to have received it already. To search successfully and sincerely for the truth, the truth has to be searching for him – a concept meaningless to the Platonists (11.2.4). Why did Augustine change his mind? Many scholars blame a creeping pessimism23 for which Augustine is now primarily known. The remedy for human wickedness must be more radical than the philosophers think because the malady is worse than they think. The malady is, of course, ‘‘original sin’’, the mysterious and universal human propensity to sin. For the roots of Augustine’s pessimism, scholars usually point to an amalgam of experience and text occasioned by his fairly new role as a pastor of the church. First, his role as an authority to whom other citizens appealed for counsel and arbitration convinced him of a dark side to humanity (including himself) which was not eradicable by reason and argument. Second, priesthood obliged him to
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delve into the Scriptures with the eyes of someone who would have to teach them. This made him reconsider works with which he thought he was familiar.24 One of these works was St Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which Augustine had read both as a Manichean and as a new Christian. Now he reinterpreted some of its central claims in a way that many consider a prime example of his allowing a painstakingly literal reading of Scripture to trump other considerations (such as common sense). As a new bishop, Augustine received letters from an old priest friend, Simplician, requesting some help in understanding Romans. (Augustine was considered something of an expert on the Letter, having lectured on it some years earlier.)25 One of Simplician’s concerns was Paul’s use of the Old Testament story of God’s ‘‘election’’ of Jacob over his twin brother Esau to show the way God allots grace: ‘‘not because of works, but because [God] calls [Romans 9:11]’’ (To Simplician 1.2.4). The problem is that since this favor is, in Paul’s account, bestowed before the birth of the twins, there seems no just reason why only Jacob should receive it. In his earlier lectures Augustine had tried to maintain a commonsensical view of God’s essential justice. He suggested that God must have had some reason to discriminate between the brothers: perhaps God ‘‘foreknew’’ that only Jacob would respond to his call (Commentary on Romans 55.60–62). But in his answer to Simplician, Augustine decides that Paul is saying exactly what he seems to be saying: that Jacob indeed did nothing to ‘‘deserve’’ election. And that is the very point of grace. Grace means, he insists, that God takes the initiative for human salvation: ‘‘otherwise grace is not grace’’ (To Simplician 1.2.2). Citing other Pauline texts26 as well, Augustine rejects any interpretation of grace that makes it a response on God’s part to a therefore meritorious action on our part, even the action of our asking for it – or even wanting it. Augustine no longer believes that grace is needed simply because ‘‘we cannot attain what we want [salvation] without the aid of God’’; rather, ‘‘without his calling we cannot even want [it]’’ (To Simplician 1.2.12).27 We must be careful here. Clearly Augustine is not envisioning people fruitlessly wanting assistance from God until God should deign to give it. Rather, our wanting God’s help is somehow a sign that we have already been helped. Still, in this single passage Augustine denies classical philosophy’s central assumption that the transformation it exhorts can be initiated by the unaided self. Philosophers assume that people really want transformation, or at least want it in such a way as to be able to attain it. But what if they don’t? Philosophers exhort people to be reasonable. But what if they won’t? In fact, Augustine thinks that original sin means that to varying degrees they don’t and won’t. People are not just the victims of bad information; they are committed to error. Philosophers (and his earlier self) are indeed hopelessly naïve about the extent of human wickedness. More fundamentally, however, they are naïve about the way people change their minds, indeed about the reason people do anything at all. Thus, Augustine’s emphasis on the role of
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wanting, of desire, in salvation is not merely a way to preserve the literal sense of Pauline texts or to emphasize the depravity of humanity. Rather, in To Simplician we see the evidence of his new appreciation of basic facts of psychology that shed new light on what God’s grace has to mend. Augustine has decided that what really determines a person’s goodness and happiness is what he wants, and it is this aspect of himself he is least able to change. We can see this conviction emerging in works Augustine was completing (significantly) as he began to write the Confessions, such as On Free Choice of the Will and Eighty-Three Different Questions. In these works, he argues that what motivates us, literally what moves us, is not reason but a species of the same phenomenon which moves the rest of the universe: the force of attraction. There is no movement except toward something, says Augustine, and in human beings desire, what he calls love, causes movement (Eighty-Three Different Questions: 35), and delight (delectio) in an attractive object is what inspires love. All movement, then, even toward reason, is ultimately the manifestation of something we are pursuing because it delights us. Taken together, our loves comprise the phenomenon of ‘‘will,’’ our overall tendency to keep moving until we find the objects of our desire and rest in them.28 Just as the weight of a stone is drawn toward the earth, so, Augustine says, ‘‘My love [amor] is my weight. I am carried [feror] by it, wherever I am carried’’ (13.9.10). It may sound as though Augustine is saying that we are dragged by forces outside our own control, that we ‘‘cannot help’’ what attracts us and therefore what we do. In a way he is – but what we are dragged by is largely ourselves. Far from absolving us from responsibility, Augustine’s arguments about the spontaneity of love are meant to convince us of the essential freedom of will and thus of our accountability for what follows from it. Nothing outside us makes us move; we are the origin of our own loves.29 In this freedom, however, there is a kind of constraint. We originate our loves, but we also follow them. We cannot choose what we love; rather our choices are a manifestation of our loves. There is no getting behind the will to something more basic that motivates it (On Free Choice 3.17). The self that classical philosophy depends on to pursue truth turns out to be startlingly dependent itself on forces outside its ‘‘powers of self-determination’’ (Brown 1967: 155).30 This would cause no problem if the human will tended toward goodness, truth and happiness as it was originally designed to do; but original sin has warped it,31 shifting its center of gravity so that it tends to sin. The very freedom of the will – the will’s subjection to itself in response to its circumstances – becomes a self-made prison: ‘‘Free will exists, indeed, but what value is it to those who are sold under sin?’’ (To Simplician 1.2.21). Ultimately, the problem with pursuing the philosophical path is that the very aspect of ourselves that would allow us to bring about our own transformation – the capacity to effectively desire it – is the very thing that needs transformation. There can only be two ways out. The first would be to bring our injured wills to bear on themselves – to pull ourselves up by our own
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bootstraps. Since this is impossible, the second alternative alone permits genuine human improvement: an outside agent, God, must operate around us and within us to change us. In an extraordinary interpretation of Romans 10:14 (‘‘How shall they believe whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher?’’) – the same verse that Augustine later inserts into the first few lines of his Confessions – Augustine ties his understanding of motivation to the way grace works. We are commanded to believe . . . but who can believe unless he is reached by some calling, by some testimony borne to the truth? Who has it in his power to have such a motive present to his mind that his will shall be influenced to believe? Who can welcome in his mind something which does not delight [delectat] him? But who has it in his power to ensure that something that will delight him will turn up, or that he will take delight in what turns up? If those things delight us which serve our advancement towards God, that is due not to our own whim or industry or meritorious works, but to the inspiration [inspiratur] of God and to the grace which he bestows. (To Simplican 1.2.21) Augustine begins the above passage with what is philosophically a fairly uncontroversial statement: human beings need and ought to hold certain true views, or ‘‘beliefs.’’32 But then he proposes several startling things. The first is that beliefs are inevitably subject to desires and to the options presented to those desires. To come to believe, we need on the one hand to be open to certain things (to be able to ‘‘welcome them in our minds’’ with delight), and on the other hand to be exposed to them in the first place (we can only desire what we have heard of). The second is that God’s grace works by changing what we believe, and to do that it must change, through inspiration, what delights us. In To Simplician Augustine hints how this works. God’s grace ‘‘calls’’ its recipient who is ‘‘moved to faith by some internal or external admonition [admonitione]’’ (To Simplician 1.2.2.). To see what Augustine means in these passages we need to turn to the Confessions.
The autobiography of the Confessions as an illustration of grace In Augustine’s tale of his long journey to find the good life, he ingeniously weaves together different perspectives on the same story. At the risk of some artificiality, I will separate these threads to show how they illustrate his claims about how and why grace works in To Simplician. First, what is the conversion story of the Confessions? A common misconception is that Augustine was transformed from a carnally motivated sinner (thievery and fornication are two of the famous sins to which Augustine confesses) into a chaste, spiritually minded Christian. In fact, the adolescent Augustine’s
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transgressions are hardly sensational especially by Roman standards (see Wills 1999: xvii), and are actually recounted because they are so apparently trivial. Augustine wants to show that even small sins, things ‘‘everyone does’’, are symptoms of spiritual poverty, a painful search for happiness in all the wrong places (3.1.1). The real conversion in the Confessions is much more complicated: it is from a series of false or at least incomplete philosophies to the true philosophy, and therefore from false gods (or false goods) to the one true good, God himself. So, though Augustine maintains that he sinfully clung to these false philosophies, modern readers might have been less misled if he had entitled his autobiography My Intellectual Phases. Yet it is also simplistic to regard the conversion as one of wholly sinful error to enlightenment, of having utterly evil motivations and utterly false views to having good motivations and true views. Augustine, I believe, means his autobiography in part as a special warning to people like himself, the educated, the philosophers, the intellectuals. They are most in danger of self-deceit because they have the best reasons to be satisfied with their own motives and to consider themselves self-made and self-determined. Unlike the common rabble, they are autonomous and objective: they consciously choose the principles by which they live their lives. They painstakingly select and reject ideas according to reason and argument. It is precisely because this claim of objectivity and honesty has some foundation that intellectual sin is so insidious. Thus, the first two perspectives I will extract from Augustine’s single narrative show how such a person can easily fool himself into believing that he is entirely the product of his own deliberation. As the To Simplician passage suggests, his belief is false. He is never quite who he thinks he is; he is a grande profundum, a great depth (4.14.22). This depth is the arena of sin; but, as we will see, it is also the arena of grace.
Two portraits: Augustine seeking and Augustine hiding The first version of Augustine’s story, then, is not about sin; on the contrary it is a history of motives and progress that would make any philosopher proud. Here his intellectual journey is not so much a conversion as a selfconducted evolution, a ‘‘journey from one school of thought to another, using his mind to purify his life’’ (Wills 1999: 93).33 Prior to his acceptance of Christianity, every successive step from one school to another, beginning with Cicero’s vague ideal of wisdom, and moving through Manicheism, Skepticism, and Platonism, is made with the conscious intention of devoting himself to reason and wisdom. For the purposes of providing a framework over which to lay the other perspectives of this story, it is worth looking at this version of the story in more detail, up until that acceptance.34 Augustine’s philosophical quest began when as a student of rhetoric he read Cicero’s exhortation to philosophy, the Hortensius. Though the book was lauded primarily as a model of eloquence, it encouraged Augustine to seek something beyond the influential teaching (and perhaps political) career he
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also coveted. He began to desire wisdom itself (3.4.7). Augustine had been raised in a nominally Christian home where he had absorbed the idea that Christ was somehow the source of wisdom. So, though the Christian God was no more to him than a shadowy stern figure who had failed to save him from being savagely beaten in school (1.9.14), Augustine gamely opened the Christian Scriptures looking for wisdom. But they only confirmed his disappointment with Christianity: their ‘‘humble style’’ was ‘‘unworthy of comparison with Cicero’s writings’’ (3.5.9). He therefore joined the Manicheans, members of a secretive Gnostic sect of Babylonian origin, who ‘‘were always saying ‘Truth! Truth!’ ” (3.6.10). They showed him that the Christian35 Bible – or at least the Jewish and therefore corrupted version of it (5.11.21) – was full of contradictions, superstitions, moral outrages and downright blasphemy. “ ‘Does [God] have hair and nails?’ ” they asked of the Genesis assertion that humanity is created in the image of God. ‘‘ ‘Are those to be judged just men who had many wives, killed other men, and offered sacrifices of animals?’ ” they asked about the Old Testament prophets (3.7.12). Shunning crude Christian anthropomorphism, the Manicheans offered Augustine what he felt to be a wholly more dignified and commonsensical conception of God. It had the added advantage of explaining something that had lately been bothering him: the existence of evil. Here Christianity refused to face the implications of its own doctrine (as, again, the Manicheans helpfully showed him). Christians wanted to believe that, as the Jewish scriptures said, a good God created everything in the world. Yet the world was filled with evil; Christians, therefore, could not avoid implying that God must have created evil. The Manichean alternative was less tortuous. They suggested that the world is as it appears: torn between flesh and spirit, heaven and earth, in a cosmic battle between two eternal and fundamental forces: good (identified with light and spiritual matter, or soul) and evil (identified with darkness and coarse physical matter). The human being was a microcosm of the battle, his essentially good soul a particle of light – of God himself – trapped in an evil and alien body. This explained the individual’s unending battle against evil inclinations, which arose within his body to attack his innocent soul. It was, therefore, ‘‘some sort of reverence’’ which encouraged Augustine to protect God from implication with evil by imagining him as a benevolent and vast mass (the Manicheans were materialists) dispersed throughout an essentially evil universe (5.10.20). Overall, Augustine felt attracted to Manicheism because, unlike Christianity, it seemed a sect for grown-ups. The Manicheans disdained the Christian propensity to believe ‘‘on faith’’ and claimed that they believed only what could be proved by reason. As one of them, Augustine converted many of his Christian friends to the sect using exactly this argument as well as criticisms of Christian doctrine and Scripture (4.1.1; 4.15.26). But he was not naive, and he was considerably better educated than his Manichean brethren. Out of curiosity, he began reading the works of the natural
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philosophers (predecessors of our scientists) and found that their explanations of the heavenly movements accorded much better with the evidence of ‘‘mathematics and [his] eyes’’ (5.3.6) than the Manichean ad hoc versions of cosmic battles in the sky. Augustine waited close to nine years for a Manichean bishop renowned for eloquence and learning, Faustus, to visit and resolve this problem; but when he arrived, he only eloquently admitted defeat. Augustine’s hopes of ‘‘progressing’’ in the sect ‘‘collapsed’’; but he ‘‘resolved to be content with it for the time being’’ (5.6–7). After all, there was still no way around the Manichean objections to the Christian scriptures (5.11.21). Augustine did, however, find a way around them in the sermons of the Christian bishop of Milan, Ambrose, who was also renowned for his eloquence. From him Augustine learned that the true treasure of Scripture lay in its ‘‘spirit’’ and not its ‘‘letter’’. Ambrose’s allegorical interpretations uncovered layers of profound meaning in its deceptively simple imagery and stories: Scripture was ingeniously written so as to speak to every person, from the simplest to the cleverest. Augustine was particularly surprised by Ambrose’s assertion that man was the spiritual image of God, for here he first encountered the astounding but incomprehensible idea of non-physical substance that took up no space (like the soul) or even time (like God). Above all, Ambrose made Augustine realize that the Christianity the Manicheans had been attacking was their own invention (5.14; 6.3.3–4). These discoveries convinced Augustine neither to abandon Manicheism nor to embrace Christianity: ‘‘I did not think that what I had previously held was to be condemned, for both parties seemed to be equal in their defenses’’ (5.14.25). That two opposing systems of thought could both appear somewhat plausible suggested to Augustine that nothing was ultimately provable. This moved him onto the ground of the Academic Skeptics; he decided the most sensible and intellectually defensible position was to take no position: ‘‘I doubted everything’’ (5.14.25). If he could not be made ‘‘just as certain of things that [he] could not see, as [he] was certain that seven and three make ten’’ (6.4.6), then Christianity was still moot. He had, however, admitted that one could at least be certain of mathematical truths. The Platonist books showed him that the fact that seven and three make ten was already a ‘‘certain’’ thing he could not see in the visible world. In fact, they showed, when he ‘‘saw’’ in his mind the truth of certain judgments about mathematics, or goodness, or beauty, he did so by referring to an unchanging invisible standard of truth to which the mind must defer. Here was something that existed and was ‘‘above [his] mind, an unchangeable light’’ (7.10.16) – and was non-physical. It was a short step to the position of Platonizing Christians like Ambrose: this standard was the God of the Christian scriptures, the Word, and the great ‘‘I am’’ of Moses (7.10.16), ‘‘the true light, which enlightens every man that comes into this world [John 1:9]’’ (7.9.13). If Augustine himself was not ‘‘the light’’ but rather the enlightened, this meant that he was not a fragment of God
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(7.9.13). Perhaps he was a created thing, as the Christians said (7.10.16). He began to see how creation (and he) could be both in some sense good and evil at once. For things that we call evil are things that are corrupted; that is, they are good things that have become damaged and need to be restored, not destroyed (7.12.18). Barriers to Christianity had fallen. This is one version of Augustine’s journey to the edge of the Christian life. We will watch him fall in shortly. First, I want to set beside it another perspective that Augustine weaves into it. Only together are they an ‘‘autobiography’’: the version above reads more like a synopsis of arguments and objections than a life. But as he examines his past, Augustine concludes that the story of his movements from one school of philosophy to another is inseparable from the concrete details of his ordinary life: the places he moved to, the people he met, the books he read, the things he desired and feared. In this view, the problem of how to live the philosophical life is less about how people change their minds than about how their minds are changed, because minds never change unless something happens to change them. Or to put this in terms of the passage of To Simplician which we are illuminating, to change one’s mind, one has to be exposed to certain ideas and open to those ideas when they come along. In this version of his story, Augustine’s journey is not so much something he achieved, but something that happened to him. First, Augustine was not as open to ideas in his search for the truth as he thought. He shows us that behind every intellectual position is a desire, the more dangerous the more it is unacknowledged. As a young man, he preferred certain conclusions. This, in itself, is not a problem; indeed, the mature Augustine thinks that we ought to prefer certain conclusions. The danger comes when the preference for truth, in itself ineradicable from the human soul, is overridden by preference for our own version of it (10.23.33–4). Then we seek reasons to bolster that version; we may willfully leave out of our calculations objections to our views, collecting, selecting evidence against them, or most insidiously, setting up misrepresentations of them to attack. Augustine confesses that he did all of these things. In this version of Augustine’s intellectual development we find not so much an earnest seeker of the truth as a slinking protector of self-image, who operated, especially as a Manichean, by two main principles: Anything But Christianity, and Safety First. We discover that a large part of his attraction to Manicheism was not only the apparently puerile nature of Christianity, but a positive aversion to something Christianity insisted on: that his sins, the ugliest manifestations of his character, were his responsibility. Manicheism allowed him to blame instead the alien force of darkness (5.10.18): the Devil made him do it. To protect this view, we learn, he preferred proselytizing Christians of the simplest and most easily bewildered type whom he relished ‘‘seducing’’ with his clever and subtle arguments (4.1.1; 4.15.26). He never considered seeking out a well educated Christian who did not claim to believe the absurdities with which Christianity was
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charged (6.4.5; 6.3.4). Instead, he waited no less than nine years for a Manichean bishop to clear up his nagging doubts about Manicheism. Augustine’s caution about leaving the sect thus betrayed fears that explain his (very) gradual extrication from it. Even after he had begun to face its inadequacies, he was perfectly willing to tolerate its superstitions (cosmic battles in the sky) as an unfortunate addendum to its high theology, and even to flirt with astrology (4.3.4), rather than to entertain Christian ‘‘superstitions.’’ When these turned out to be Manichean distortions, he rejected commitment altogether; partly from prudence, but more importantly, he reveals, from a desire not to be made a fool of again (6.4.6). As well, he felt a nameless dread of the God of the Christians: ‘‘I loved the happy life, but I feared to find it in your abode, and I fled from it, even as I sought it’’ (6.12.20). Not all of Augustine’s unacknowledged motives for sticking so resolutely to the Manicheans were ignominious, however. One of the least judgmental passages concerning his Manichean phase in the Confessions is a poignant description of the friendship he shared with his brethren which could easily be applied to the Christian community of the bishop writing the Confessions. To talk, to laugh, to learn, to teach, to serve one another, to ‘‘make one out of many’’ (4.8.13); this was bliss for a man who ‘‘without friends . . . could not be happy’’ (6.16). Still, there was a dark side to this shared life too: their sense of exclusivity, of superiority over the misguided souls who were not enlightened. In any case, Augustine maintains that a great part of his initial attraction to ideas was his attraction to the people who held them. This was even true of Ambrose: ‘‘I began to love him, at first not as a teacher of the truth, which I despaired of finding in your Church, but as a man kindly disposed towards me’’ (5.13.23). This last example exhibits the role that merely being exposed to ideas in the first place played in his change of mind. In the Confessions the relationship of Augustine’s circumstances to his desires is characterized by irony. Since his introduction to philosophy, he had lived a double life. Philosophers usually encouraged the abandonment of worldly values of power and wealth, at least for their own sakes, in favor of a tranquil life of contemplation. Yet Augustine ardently pursued both goals without noticing the dissonance (at least, again, until he began to take Christianity seriously) (4.1.1). Even more contrary to Augustine’s philosophical ideals than his career goals was the art he studied to attain those goals. The rhetorician was a sort of combination of lawyer, spin doctor and motivational speaker. He was expected to cleverly manipulate fact and emotion in the service of (usually) political goals, rather than in the service of truth. And yet – and here is the irony – the very decisions Augustine made in the interests of his career conspired to lead him out of it. One example involves Augustine’s relationship to the highest ideal of his profession, eloquentia. Only accidentally did Augustine learn about the ideal of pursuing truth (from Cicero’s Hortensius), and about the possibility that Christianity was compatible with that ideal (from Ambrose) – initially, he sought from both these sources only tricks of his trade. Indeed, he came to
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Ambrose’s sermons ‘‘uninterested in [the] subject matter or contemptuous of it’’ (5.14.23). But in both cases Augustine got far more than he bargained for. The one time he actually sought wisdom and got mere rhetoric (from Faustus) he was again propelled in a direction entirely opposite to his intention. Even his choices about where to live, based entirely on unphilosophical motives, had profound effects on Augustine’s philosophical development. He would not have had his decisive encounter with Faustus had he not come to Carthage; he would not have heard Ambrose’s illuminating sermons if he had not come to Milan. Yet Augustine settled in Carthage to teach so as to escape the painful associations in his hometown where a close friend had died (4.4–7). He came to Milan having fled both Carthage and Rome, first, because of intolerably rude and dishonest students (5.8.14; 5.12.22), and second, because he had secured a prestigious post in Milan (the residence of the emperor) as official rhetorician (5.13.23).
Where is God in the Confessions? A third perspective on the story above describes how God was working within Augustine’s life all the time: ‘‘Before I called on you, you went ahead [praevenisti] and helped me’’ (13.1.1). But here we notice something strange. We have already outlined how Augustine came to Milan, to Ambrose and to an openness to Christianity without referring to any kind of supernatural events like voices in Augustine’s head, or revelatory apparitions. And indeed, the divine perspective on the story contains exactly the same events as the mundane perspective. The difference is that it is a real ‘‘story,’’ one that is plotted, and in a double sense. The irony we observed above is, for Augustine, evidence of God’s benevolent plotting against (or for) him. Augustine’s desires, even the mundane or ignoble, lead to an effect opposite to his intentions. ‘‘You carried me away on my own desires so as to put an end to those desires’’ (5.8.15). Indeed, we might say that God baits Augustine with his own desires. This, for example, is how Augustine describes his flight from his dreadful students in Carthage to a better and more prestigious job (he thought) in Rome: ‘‘To the end that I would change my residence on earth for the sake of my salvation . . . you secretly made use [utebaris] of both their perversities and my own’’ (5.8.14). Similarly, his desire to cling to Manicheism led him to pin his hopes on Faustus: yet, the latter, ‘‘who had been a fatal snare to so many men, now began, neither willing it [nec volens], nor knowing it [nec sciens], to loosen the snare in which I was caught.’’ This, says Augustine to God, shows that ‘‘in the secret of your providence, you did not forsake my soul’’ (5.7.13). His desire to learn the skills necessary for worldly advancement led him to attend Ambrose’s well formed sermons, though he was disdainful of their subject: yet ‘‘when I opened my ears to receive the eloquence with which he spoke, there likewise entered . . . the truths that he spoke. . . . All unknowing [nesciens], I was led to him by you, so that
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through him I might be led . . . to you’’ (5.13.23). And, Augustine contends, God meant him to come across the books of the Platonists first to soften him toward Christian metaphysics and to make sure he felt what the Platonists were lacking (7.20.26). Obviously one of the ways Augustine indicates that God is at work is by referring to the participants in this divine plan as unwitting (nesciens, unknowing). But he does not seem to mean that God is making them do things as though they were puppets – just the opposite. Rather, they are nesciens of how God will ‘‘use’’ (uti) the raw material they provide with the actions that follow from their intentions, for which they are clearly fully culpable. But where is God in these descriptions if all the desires originate in the people having them? Augustine says that God is ‘‘most present and most hidden’’ (1.4.4). It would seem he is certainly the latter. Before I examine the nature of God’s presence in the story above, I want to make this problem of God’s apparent non-appearance more acute: God does not even walk onstage for Augustine’s final acceptance of Christianity. Here too the bare events are entirely of human origin; yet in this scene and in what precipitated it, we can train a microscope on what Augustine means by his references to God’s activity. Augustine had been gradually convinced by the books of the Platonists and by Ambrose that Christian metaphysics and Scriptures were true. This presented him with a problem. How should he be living his life (8.1.1)? He got his answer through a set of stories. The first was told to him by Simplician (of To Simplician), whom he visited hoping for advice on how to ‘‘walk in [God’s] way’’ (8.1.1). Platonism, he had found, could not help him to live like a philosopher: he lacked the requisite ability to catch more than a glimpse of God, the highest good (7.17.23). Moreover, Christ he thought merely a very wise man, and this too did not seem to give him any motivation for changing his life (7.19.25). Simplician congratulated him on reading the Platonists’ books, in which, he said, God and his Word were implied (8.2.3). He then related the story of the conversion of Victorinus, who had been, like Augustine, an African with a prestigious post as rhetorician. Like Augustine, Victorinus had become convinced of the truth of Christianity. Well known as a devout pagan in an anti-Christian Rome, he chose to profess his new faith publicly at great cost to his career (8.2, 5). Hearing this, Augustine found himself ‘‘on fire to imitate him’’ (8.5.10). Still, he did nothing, though his wordily duties now tended to make him miserable (6.5.9). Earlier he had reasoned that a ‘‘governorship’’ and a ‘‘wife with some money’’ would actually furnish him with the leisure necessary for the pursuit of wisdom (6.11.19). Now he felt that the only possible Christian life for him was as a Christian philosopher, and that meant, as for all serious philosophers, celibacy. He must abandon the world with its pleasures, including those of his impending marriage (6.13.23; 8.2.3). And he did not really want to. The next story, or set of stories, changed this.
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Augustine and Alypius were visited by Ponticianus, a fellow African who ‘‘by chance’’ (forte) noticed Augustine’s copy of St Paul lying on a table. A discussion of Scripture led Ponticianus to narrate ‘‘the story of Anthony, an Egyptian monk,’’ who had lived a life of poverty and service more radically ascetic than that of any pagan philosopher (8.6.13). Anthony had been converted after hearing ‘‘by chance’’ (forte) a Gospel passage (8.12.29). Ponticianus next told his hosts about two of his friends, civil servants, who on a leisurely walk came ‘‘by chance’’ (forte) to a house where Christians lived in community. There one of the friends, after happening to pick up ‘‘a little book in which was written the life of Anthony . . . was changed within himself.’’ His enthusiasm convinced his companion to join him in renouncing the triviality of his worldly ambitions in order to serve God (8.7.16). This set of stories threw Augustine into turmoil. ‘‘You took me from behind my own back,’’ he tells God, ‘‘where I had placed myself because I did not wish to look upon myself . . . there was no place for me to flee to away from myself’’ (8.7.16). ‘‘All arguments were used up, and all had been refuted’’ (8.7.18). He fled into the garden. There he agonized between the comfortable familiar pleasures of his old life and the new, frightening, yet hauntingly attractive life that he felt was now calling him. In the midst of his indecision he heard from a nearby house a voice like that of a boy or a girl, I know not which, chanting and repeating over and over, ‘‘Take up and read. Take up and read.’’ . . . I began to think . . . whether children made use of any such chant in some kind of game, but I could not recall hearing it anywhere. . . . I interpreted this solely as a command given to me by God to open the book [of Scripture] and read the first chapter I should come upon. For I had heard how Anthony had been admonished [admonitus] by a reading from the Gospel at which he chanced to be present, as if the words were addressed to him. . . . I snatched it up, opened it, and read in silence the chapter on which my eyes first fell: ‘‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in fornications and impurities, not in strife and envying; but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts [Romans 13:13–14].’’ No further wished I to read, nor was there need to do so. Instantly . . . as if before a peaceful light streaming into my heart, all the dark shadows of doubt fled away. (8.12.29) At first glance this scene, famous in iconography as the conversion36 of Augustine, has elements which we more readily identify with divine intervention: a mysterious voice, a divine command, a book opening at exactly the right place, all preceded by the inspirational stories of other Christians. Actually, though, the causes of all these events are given by Augustine
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purely in natural terms.37 The assertions of a minority of commentators aside,38 most agree that Augustine means to give the impression that the ‘‘voice’’ in the garden was that of a real child ‘‘in whose mind nothing could have been more remote than the salvation of Augustine’s soul’’ (Chadwick 1991: xxiii). Clearly, as in the story of Anthony, an ordinary voice is as much a messenger of the divine as a physical book like the one opened by Augustine or by the civil servants in Ponticianus’ story. How, then, do we know that the divine is at work? Besides the fact that Augustine tells us so, he gives several other signals of divine activity in this scene. Significantly, we can find these features in the rest of his narrative too. They can be summed up in this way: Augustine tends to minimize the relevance of human intention, so as emphasize that certain consequences following from it are due to God’s activity. First, in the scene in the garden and in Ponticianus’ stories, Augustine flags divine activity by noting that revelatory events tend to occur forte, ‘‘by chance.’’ A chance event is not merely random; rather, it is a confluence of circumstances not resulting from human design. We can see this motif clearly as well in the miniature biographies of his friend Alypius and his mother Monica which interrupt his life narrative. There, Augustine explicitly connects the theme of chance with God’s use of an unwitting person to effect another person’s sudden enlightenment. For example, he tells us how Alypius was shamed out of a horrible fascination with the gladiatorial shows by a remark Augustine made by chance (forte) in class one day. Augustine makes it clear that he ‘‘had no intention of curing Alypius of his disease’’ (6.7.11); indeed, he was not especially addressing Alypius at all. This, he confesses to God, reveals how ‘‘you make use of all men, both the knowing [scientibus] and the unknowing [nescentibus], in the order that you know . . . out of my mouth and tongue [you] made coals of fire by which you cauterized a mind . . . and healed it . . . ’’ (6.7.12). Augustine also tells the story of how his mother was saved from a future of life-long alcoholism by the spiteful remark of a servant about her tippling. The servant, Augustine emphasizes, ‘‘desired to provoke her little mistress, not to cure her.’’ He stresses this ‘‘so that no one who observes this may attribute it to his own powers, when some other man, whom he wishes to correct, is corrected by his words’’ (9.8.18). To indicate further that it is God and not human words that changed Monica and Alypius, Augustine declines to give us the apparently influential words. In fact, this vagueness about exact wording characterizes Augustine’s own conversion story. Though as we have seen he does outline the ideas and schools of philosophy that influenced him, he is to the enormous frustration of scholars notoriously vague about the exact title, wording, and even authors of the texts which influenced him. He refers to ‘‘a certain Cicero’’ (cuijusdam Ciceronis 3.4.7) as though the name of Rome’s most illustrious orator is almost irrelevant, and does not quote from the Hortensius. He refers only to ‘‘the books of the Platonists’’ (never telling us which ones), given to him by a
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‘‘certain man’’ (who was, moreover, ‘‘puffed up with pride’’) (7.9.13). Even in his description of his conversion in the garden, he does not explain what was so enlightening about the Pauline verses he cites (though they seem to mark some sort of transition in his theology of the incarnation). It almost seems as though he is minimizing the human details of the very texts that changed his life, just as he did with ‘‘chance’’ remarks made in a classroom or scullery. In fact, this is exactly what he is doing. From reflection on the garden scene we can conclude that God does indeed work on Augustine (and Alypius, and Monica) by using the material other human beings provide. But how? The words, either uttered or written by other people, seem to be part of the answer, since what seems to be important about Augustine’s desires insofar as God ‘‘uses’’ them also is that they bring him to encounter certain texts or people. Yet human words are not the answer, since Augustine deliberately de-emphasizes the exact words as though they have no inherent power. But aren’t Augustine’s (or Alypius’ or Monica’s) responses to texts, or to apparent rebukes, just examples of ordinary learning? In a way, yes. And this is the key to the process of grace. In Augustine’s view, the way God enlightens by inspiration through grace is in a sense no more – or less – mysterious than any act of learning.
Learning, signs and grace The link between Augustine’s illustration of grace and his theories about learning is provided by a word, the verbal form of which is admonere.39 As we have seen, this word is one of the few clues in To Simplican about how grace works (we are moved to faith through admonitione). Moreover, in the Confessions, Augustine is admonished though the books of the Platonists (7.10.16), and Anthony is admonished by the Gospel reading (8.12.29). The obvious English transliteration, ‘‘to admonish,’’ has the unfortunate connotation of warning or even chastisement, a rendering all the more tempting because that is sometimes what admonition in the Confessions accomplishes. However, in Augustine’s understanding of teaching and learning the word denotes something much broader: divine activity in the mind. In Augustine’s early texts like The Teacher and On Free Choice of the Will, ‘‘admonishment’’ abbreviates his conviction that all learning, from a single word to the certain fixed truths of mathematics, requires continuous divine involvement within our minds. In fact, God is the only true teacher. Although this ‘‘doctrine of divine illumination’’ has been regarded as rather esoteric, as a philosopher in the classical tradition Augustine means it to account, like all theories, for some feature of ordinary experience. In this case the phenomenon is that of the apparent transferal of knowledge from one person to another. Augustine argues that if we think of teaching this way, then there is really no such thing. Augustine admits that all teaching is apparently mediated by gestures, noises or written symbols mutually understood by two people as referring to
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some object or concept. These noises and symbols, usually words, are a subset of what he calls ‘‘signs’’ (signa). A sign is ‘‘a thing, which besides the impression it conveys to the senses, also has the effect of making something else come to mind’’; the ‘‘something’’ is the signified, the thing (res) understood by the communicators (Teaching Christianity, 2.1.1; cf. On Dialectic 5). However, if we consider how language is learned in the first place, it is not obvious how the speaker transmits the very idea that a word is a sign. Does he do it by speaking a word and pointing to the thing it stands for? But the pointing itself is a sign. All the speaker can do, it seems, is repeat the word in the presence of the object it is meant to refer to, until the learner somehow ‘‘picks up’’ the relationship between signum and res. Augustine concludes that no-one can tell another person that a certain word is meant to refer to a certain thing. Neither can the mere presence of the res. ‘‘The most . . . that can be said for the scope of words is that they afford us an occasion [admonent] for searching for something, but they do not demonstrate it to our understanding’’ (The Teacher 36). The translation here of admonere as ‘‘to afford an occasion’’ captures Augustine’s point: words are necessary for teaching, but they are not sufficient. They just get our attention. How ‘‘the attention of the mind is carried [feratur] through the sign to the thing signified’’ (The Teacher 24) is mysterious. This problem and its solution come into focus in the teaching of certain truths such as those of mathematics (and, Augustine believes, of morals).40 We know intuitively that this kind of teaching is not merely a transferal of words from one mind to another. No-one can understand for someone else: one either understands a mathematical truth or not. And to grasp (apprehendere) a truth is a kind of inner ‘‘seeing’’. In fact, Augustine points out the words for seeing and understanding are used interchangeably because truths are a kind of landscape unfolding internally (On Free Choice 2.8–11). Reason, the eye of the soul, can perceive this landscape if a teacher creates the right context for this to happen (On Free Choice 2.5). However, in this analogy truths must be ‘‘present’’ in order for us to understand what a teacher’s words are pointing to, just as the res must be present for someone to learn the word associated with it. Where are these truths and what connects our reason to our seeing of them? They are not ‘‘out there’’ in the visible world; but they are not inside us as parts of us. Indeed, the very nature of such truths is that they are publicly accessible. In fact, if someone does not ‘‘see’’ truths we do not say that they have their own version of, say, mathematics; we say that they are just wrong and need to correct their vision (On Free Choice 2.12). Augustine claims that the source of fixed truths is what we ought to acknowledge as ‘‘God,’’ Truth itself, since in finding it we have found something that transcends the mind. Just as outer landscapes are illuminated for the eye by light, so truths are illuminated by God. God is to the soul as the sun is to the eye (On Free Choice 2.13). Consequently Augustine insists that God is the only true teacher of Augustine’s own student: ‘‘even though I should speak truth and he accept it as true, I teach him nothing. He learns
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not from my words but from the realities themselves, revealed to him by God’s action within him’’ (The Teacher 40). ‘‘Who teaches . . . unless it be stable Truth?’’ (11.8.10). Nevertheless, God uses teachers: Truth ‘‘admonishes outwardly, and teaches inwardly’’ (On Free Choice 2.14). Admonishment, then, is a coming together of the invisible and the visible, the direct and the indirect, the creator and the creature. All knowledge of truth, then, is in a sense inspired, even graced: the mind is ‘‘carried’’ (feratur) to the truth (The Teacher 24), just as we are carried to by our loves to loved objects.41 Only God can directly enlighten the mind and draw it in the direction of truth; still, he works with ‘‘triggers’’ contributed within the visible world. In the Confessions, Augustine shows God using humanly caused events and words as triggers or ‘‘occasions’’ for enlightenment in just this way. When Augustine experiences such admonishments, new horizons open up beyond them (or inside him) by God’s inspiration. Hence Augustine’s strange emphasis on, and yet minimization of, human activity in effecting his conversion. Only human beings speak to Augustine, and yet only God teaches him ‘‘in wonderful and hidden ways.’’ ‘‘How shall we hear without a preacher?’’ indeed. But human preaching is sterile without God’s inner preaching. An account of the Confessions as an illustration of grace must conclude with some mention of the life to which grace converted Augustine. As the garden scene shows, ‘‘Christianity’’ for Augustine is not a set of propositions but a way of life, a philosophy. In the context of this scene it is too easy for us to think that the Christian Augustine simply renounces the world. Rather, the whole story demonstrates that Augustine’s old loves simply lessen in the overwhelming light of a greater love. In philosophical terms, he seeks the happy life from a different source. The man who once looked with ‘‘longing at honours, wealth and marriage’’ (6.6.9) comes to say to his God, ‘‘This is the happy life, to rejoice over you, to you, and because of you . . . there is no other’’ (10.22.32). What does it mean to say that God is the source of joy, of the happy life? To answer this question is to approach the very heart of Augustine’s philosophy and the importance of inspiration and of signs within it. For Augustine, the Christian’s life on earth is tantamount to the graceinspired listening for the ‘‘speech’’ of the invisible God in the visible world. It is easy to accuse Augustine the trained rhetorician of seeing words everywhere, but nothing less than Scripture encourages him to do so. The ‘‘Word of God’’ is spoken and written through the prophets and apostles and proclaimed in the church. Scripture itself is full of symbolic events and objects – sacraments, or ‘‘visible speech’’ – that encourage the church, itself a sign of God’s presence in history, to use ordinary objects, such as wheat and wine to bring to mind divine things (Cutrone 1999). The greatest sign of all, Jesus the Word of God, is literally God’s ‘‘utterance’’ (7.2.3).42 The universe itself began with the Word through whom God speaks it into existence out of nothing (11.6–7). In return, creation ‘‘speaks’’ of God.
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In the Confessions and in his sermons Augustine often depicts creation – what we would call nature – as uttering a ‘‘great cry’’: ‘‘God made me!’’ A poetic passage in the Confessions has Augustine seeking God among created things, from the sea to the stars, all of which cry out, ‘‘We are not your God! Seek higher!’’ To all the things that stand around the doors of my flesh I said, ‘‘Tell me of my God! Although you are not he, tell me something of him!’’ With a mighty voice they cried out, ‘‘He made us!’’ My question was the gaze I turned on them; the answer was their beauty. (10.6.9 cf. 9.10.25, 11.4.6 and Sermon 126.6) This passage encapsulates Augustine’s conviction that the highest function of creation is to reflect its maker. By doing so it awakens in us desire which it consistently fails to satisfy. Mysteriously, what we most want about created things cannot be had by having the things themselves. Creation is essentially incomplete: the nothingness of its origin manifests as ceaseless change, a constant ‘‘passing away’’ (4.10–11; 7.11.17). Created things, says Augustine, faintly approximate but never reach a condition that would satisfy the human desire for the happy life. ‘‘Among them I found no place of rest, nor did they receive me, so that I might say, ‘It is enough, and it is well’ ” (97.7.11). Ultimately, our hearts are restless until they rest in God (1.1.1), the very source of existence, the ‘‘beauty of all things beautiful’’ (3.6.10). The haunting call of created beauty is perilous. It is too easy to think that it is what we really want. Indeed, Augustine believes that the human race is infected with the damage caused by its attempt to, as St Paul puts it, ‘‘worship and serve the creature rather than the creator [Romans 1:25]’’ (5.3.5). The root of all sin, Augustine believes, is idolatry, the attempt to get happiness from created things and to become ‘‘caught tight’’ (4.10.15) in a cycle of misery – the result of trying to grasp and control things that must inevitably be lost (4.12.18). Nevertheless, creation should not to be despised with the revulsion of the Manichean or the indifference of the Platonist or Stoic. And here is the key to the Christian life, though Augustine’s shorthand prescription for it can be misleading. He suggests that we ‘‘direct’’ (4.12.18) or ‘‘refer’’ (Teaching Christianity 1.33.37) all our earthly loves to God, that we love created things ‘‘in God’’ (4.12.18). Such instructions sound bloodless, as though we are to try to lessen our appreciation of things we enjoy in favor of some hidden abstraction. But the root of the verb ‘‘refer’’, in Latin referre, is ferre, to bear or carry – the verb of desire. ‘‘We love those things by which we are carried along for the sake of that toward which we are carried’’ (Teaching Christianity 1.35.39). The goodness of creation is meant to carry us to God by our own desire. It is like the ring a lover gives his beloved; she loves it because it reminds her of him.43 Human goodness and happiness, then, depend on our capacity to view created things as signs pointing away from themselves. As signs they suggest that the ‘‘vision’’ of God will be more, not less, intense than any earthly love.
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You have blazed forth with light, and have shone upon me, and you have put my blindness to flight. You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you. I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me, and I have burned for your peace. (10.27.38) This is more an expression of longing than of fulfillment. Indeed, longing for God is as close to the happy life as the Augustine of the Confessions thinks we can get in this earthly life. Fallen humanity is too damaged to attain a clear vision of its creator: ‘‘How can you find a happy life in the land of death?’’ (4.12.19). Until the end of time, the eternal Sabbath (13.36.51), God’s grace serves over time to remedy our disease of ‘‘wanting little’’ (3.1.1): ‘‘You prepare [my soul] to accept you by the longing that you inspire [inspirasti]’’ (13.1.1).
The Confessions as an accessory to grace The above is not an exhaustive account of grace in the Confessions. Indeed, for Augustine that is probably impossible; the relationship of the creator to what he has created from nothing has no counterpart within everyday experience, and is therefore better recounted in story than theory. There are many unanswered questions. How exactly does this inspiration work? Does God make any events happen, as opposed to just using the material people provide? How does God, for example, orchestrate the order in which Augustine comes across the admonishing words and texts? Most disturbing, what about people who do not appear to be admonished by anything? Is it possible to resist God’s grace? Augustine spent the rest of his life wrestling with this last question. Our limited investigation, however, establishes two aspects of grace in the Confessions. First, God does not force Augustine do anything. This is, I think, why Augustine insists on his responsibility for sinful motives which, somehow, God uses to introduce him to certain inspiring admonitions. The mere fact that it takes so much time to convert him suggests that God does not destroy one person in order to replace him with another, but rather subtly coaxes the desires of the same individual. Second, and most important, in the Confessions God’s grace works through other people. Earlier we wondered what Augustine means when he claims that God ‘‘urged [him] on with many different voices [vocibus].’’ It is not too much to suggest, I think, that the ‘‘many voices’’ are those of other people, knowing or unknowing. Augustine writes that the soul is not a static thing, but is forged throughout its life through its experiences (Eighty-Three Different Questions 40). The Confessions demonstrates that, in a sense, God makes (or, in salvational terms, remakes) people out of one another. After all, no one is changed by ‘‘ideas.’’ Ideas are not free floating; they are always
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someone’s ideas. This is, I believe, the connection between the autobiographical and non-autobiographical material of the Confessions: Augustine surrounds his own story with other biographies and with Scripture to demonstrate that his story is part of a much larger story which he did not make. In fact, the Confessions as a whole is a kind of word picture of divinely orchestrated relationship. A virtuoso rhetorician, Augustine is fond of word pictures. An invocation of God in the Confessions provides a touching example. The linked chain of words, ‘‘O eternal truth, and true love, and beloved eternity [o aeterna veritas, et vera caritas, et cara aeternitas]’’ (7.10.16) is an image or sign of the Trinity. Similarly, the Confessions forms a picture of interlocking human lives and stories, a mosaic of God’s activity in the world through his creatures as it comes to a point to save a particular creature. Thus, it concludes with the story of the whole world captured in the exegesis of Genesis; it encompasses the stories of two important people in Augustine’s life, his mother who nurtured him physically and spiritually, and his close friend Alypius who was inspired by Augustine to devote himself to God; and it narrates the life stories that precipitated Augustine’s final conversion. Significantly, in the narrative of the Confessions we find that the most efficacious human influences are contributed in two ways, both of which illuminate Augustine’s act of writing the Confessions itself. First, people like Simplician, Ambrose, and Ponticianus are sciens of their contribution; they are aware, that is, not of what God will do with their testimony, but that God will do something with it. Indeed, for Augustine this is true friendship, the communion of saints: life spilling into life, one soul taking into itself another, transforming it into part of itself (Eighty-Three Different Questions 39). Augustine muses that God could teach us more directly but then no respect would have been shown to our human status, if God appeared unwilling to have his word administered to us by other human beings. . . . Then again, charity itself, which binds people together with the knot of unity, would have no scope for pouring minds and hearts in together . . . and blending them with one another, if human beings were never to learn anything from each other. (Teaching Christianity, prologue 6) Second, biographies of conversion seem particularly useful to this ‘‘blending.’’ Nothing illuminates this more than the nested set of conversion stories leading up to the dramatic scene in the garden. The chain begins with the greatest life story of all, that of the incarnate god, Jesus Christ, the Word or speech of God: the Gospel changed Anthony’s course in life. Then Anthony’s life story becomes part of the story of Ponticianus’ friends, and, through them, part of Augustine’s. What about Augustine’s story? Augustine intends, I think, for the word painting of the Confessions to come to life, enveloping its readers and drawing them into the drama of salvation. This overarching drama forms the ‘‘unity’’ of the Confessions.
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At the outset I suggested that the act of writing of the Confessions represents for Augustine the highest expression of his philosophy. Christianity insists that happiness consists in loving God. There are two words Augustine significantly associates with the beauty of creation that inspires that love, and these words help us to understand how he thinks about the Confessions. First, he sometimes refers to the ability of created beauty to point to its creator as its ‘‘confession’’ that it is made by God (Sermon 241.2; On Psalms 144.13).44 Second, following a dominant motif in the Psalms, Augustine says that by pointing to its creator, creation ‘‘praises’’ God (5.1.2). To summarize the attitude of the Christian, he combines the ideas of confession and praise: ‘‘The beauty of the earth . . . is the voice of its confession, that you praise the creator’’ (On Psalms 144.13); ‘‘Let your works praise you,’’ he prays, ‘‘that we may love you, and let us love you that your works may praise you.’’ Praise, then, is not mere flattery of God; it is not something God needs, but something we, as creatures, need. For Augustine, to praise God is to remind ourselves of what we are and need; it keeps the mind and heart directed toward the source of existence and therefore of well-being: ‘‘You arouse humanity to delight in praising you,’’ the Confessions begins. In this work, then, Augustine joins his voice to that of creation, saying ‘‘God made me.’’ To confess is also to speak out, to become a sign to the rest of creation. The Confessions, then, is not an autobiography any more than are the pictures of Augustine’s life in the great medieval cathedrals. They, and the Confessions on which they are modeled, are signs by which our attention is directed to the living God. This is the reason for Augustine’s attitude of public prayer; he faces away from his human audience because he is pointing through himself, away from himself. He offers an intimate view of his own life in obedience to the great commandment: ‘‘You shall love . . . your neighbor as yourself; God, however, [you shall love] with your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole mind [Mk 12:30–31; Lv 19:18; Dt 6:5]’’ (Teaching Christianity 1.22.21). Does this mean that Augustine is trying to convert his reader? Yes and no. Augustine is knowingly providing his life story as an ‘‘occasion’’ for God to use. He presents himself as an accessory to grace. He does not, however, know how he will be used. God ‘‘wrote’’ into his life the lives of others; God will write his life into the lives of those coming after him. Both attitudes explain the impressionism of the Confessions. No single thing converted Augustine, but rather a mosaic of events ultimately designed by God. So he writes the Confessions loosely, using various kinds of material, to increase its potential for influence. Augustine admires the writers of Scripture, who, inspired by God, were able to write so that through them God might reveal various truths to different people, truths unknown even to these writers (12.18, 25). Tentatively he suggests that he ‘‘would prefer to write in such a manner that my words would sound forth the portion of truth each one could take from these writings’’ (12.31.42). That kind of writing, he says, is ‘‘like a fountain which . . . supplies the flow of many streams’’(12.27.37).
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For Augustine, the God who is both present and hidden in his own life story is similarly present and hidden in the life of the person reading that story. His concern is not so much what the reader will do in response to the Confessions, but what God will do with the reader. He hopes that the Confessions will itself become one of the ingredients in yet another soul who comes to say, ‘‘God made me.’’
Notes 1 In an important sense, this reputation is fitting. Although other ancient writers had produced first-person accounts of their deeds and intellectual journeys, most scholars agree that the Confessions is the first such account to examine intimately the layers of motivation which steer a person through life. The radically new selfconsciousness of the personality revealed in the Confessions makes the work almost deceptively accessible to modern audiences and means that Augustine has been acclaimed not only as the father of the modern autobiography, but of psychoanalysis and even of the modern novel. For a detailed study of autobiographies in antiquity see Misch 1950. For an accessible yet scholarly summary of how the Confessions fits into this context see Clark 1993: 33–53. And for a lively account of the revolutionary quality of Augustine’s voice in the Confessions see Cahill 1995: 39–41. 2 The central idea of this paper was in fact inspired by the gigantic medieval ‘‘comic strip’’ of Augustine’s life in Carlisle Cathedral, Cumbria, England. 3 There is such consensus on this that there are too many references to cite. For well regarded statements see Fredericksen 1986: 24; 1988: 104; and O’Meara 1954: 8, 17. 4 Readers familiar with the Confessions will probably want to identify a third major non-autobiographical section: book 10, which is Augustine’s evaluation of human memory and of his current status as a converted yet still imperfect Christian. I choose not to mention this book here though, because it seems to me quite natural for him to examine, in the context of an autobiography, where he is now when he is looking back at where he has been, and to question the reliability and character of the faculty of looking back. 5 O’Donnell points out that prior to the Confessions, Augustine inserted mini-autobiographies into several of his works (1992: vol. I, li–lvi). 6 For a good summary of these suggestions see Van Fleteren 1999 and Steinhauser 1992. 7 Most scholars think that the biography of Alypius may have been the seed of the Confessions. They refer to a letter from Paulinus to Alypius requesting an account of the latter’s life story, a project which, they believe, Alypius may have modestly handed over to Augustine (O’Donnell 1992: vol. II, 360–2, 366). There is also a theory that the Confessions is an unfinished catechistic work since in On Catechizing Beginners Augustine suggests that the teacher first talk about how he himself came to faith before expounding Holy Scripture (Steinhauser 1992: 17). 8 See O’Donnell 200l: 16, 20; 1992: vol. I, 1; Clark 1993: 39; Scott 1992: 39; Brown 1967: 165. 9 In this paper, quotations found within passages from Augustine mostly signal his frequent borrowings from Scripture, which are woven deftly through his works, especially the Confessions. I will not cite the source of such biblical quotations unless relevant. Any good translation of the Confessions will note the scriptural references for the interested reader.
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10 All numbered references refer to the Confessions unless otherwise noted. 11 This pattern in itself suggests the work is not completely disorganized. 12 The Psalms are numbered according to the Septuagint Latin text Augustine uses, which is one behind the Hebrew version of modern Bibles for Psalms 9 through 147. 13 Some people speak of Augustine’s briefly realized attempts, at a certain phase of his development, to grasp briefly the Platonic ‘‘vision’’ of truth itself (7.11, 17) as a medieval-style mystical experience. In my discussions of his view of the value of Platonism below I try to show that for him such ‘‘visions’’ are not ‘‘supernatural’’ in the sense of being ghostly or trance-like, but rather are particularly intense varieties of experiences every human being has every day without realizing their significance, e.g. experience of indefinable longing or even of the ability to make true judgments about states of an impermanent world. They are, most importantly, not visual experiences, but experiences of that which is beyond the senses. 14 See Wetzel 1992 for a discussion of the place Augustine felt To Simplician occupied in his corpus. 15 See, for example, 3.1.1; 1.1.18; 2.7.15; 3.2.4; 6.1.1; 6.6.9; 7.8.12; 8.8.19. 16 See, for example, 2.7.15; 5.9.16; 6.4.6; 7.8.12; 7.18.24; 10.3.3. There is also an extended consideration of Christ’s role as physician in Teaching Christianity 1.14.13, a work begun shortly before the Confessions. 17 See, for example, On Catechizing Beginners 2.16.24; Sermon 150.4. 18 Or at least, the philosophy of Augustine’s time had become centered on this question (See Kent 2001). 19 Though the various schools conceived of ‘‘soul’’ in radically different ways. 20 Again, the schools differ on how bodily health relates to happiness; for some, happiness (properly understood) is entirely independent of the considerations of bodily health; for others, happiness requires bodily health among other goods. Over time Augustine migrated from the first camp into the second, as he came to take biblical assertions of the goodness of material creation more seriously. This fascinating journey cannot be documented here. In any case, he held to the analogy between bodily health and happiness even in his earlier career. 21 I use ‘‘is built to’’ in an ordinary sense, to indicate that the body functions best, or tends toward a certain end, under certain ideal conditions. It in no way implies that all philosophers thought that the body had a builder, as in a divine designer – though of course Augustine himself thought about the ideal state of living things this way. 22 This is the philosophical program Augustine recommends in a very early work, On Order, which he began writing just after his conversion. 23 Augustine’s thought on a number of subjects took a pessimistic turn at this stage. For instance, he decided that the happy life could not be achieved until the new life after death. The reasons for this are connected to those explaining his new understanding of grace, but cannot be explored here. For more see Brown 1967: chs 15, 16. 24 For good documentation of these factors see Fredriksen 1986; 1988; and Brown 1967: chs 15, 16. 25 This work, written about two years before To Simplician, is his Commentary on Statements in the Letter of Paul to the Romans. 26 These include Ephesians 2:8,9 (‘‘By the grace of God we are saved, and not of ourselves. It is the gift of God. It is not of works, lest anyone should boast’’) and
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27 28
29
30 31 32
33 34
35
36
The Confessions of Saint Augustine I Corinthians 4:7 (‘‘What have you that you did not receive? But if you did receive it, why do you glory, as if you had not?’’). I have translated the Latin verb velle (to will, to want) as the more casual ‘‘want’’ because I feel that the English ‘‘will’’ sounds more formal and technical than Augustine’s meaning. (See note below concerning ‘‘will.’’) On the whole I think it is better to translate the Augustine’s Latin voluntas as ‘‘will’’ rather than as ‘‘the will’’ because in English the latter implies that there is a part or ‘‘faculty’’ of the soul corresponding to it, whereas the former merely implies a kind of force or tendency of soul, which I think is closer to Augustine’s usage. There really is no English equivalent, and ‘‘the will’’ comes to us laden with scholastic connotations. I have tried to define ‘‘will’’ in such a way as to cover all of Augustine’s various uses of the term: he sometimes uses it rather technically (as when he introduces concerns about will and assent) and sometimes more intuitively. Rist says that there is no completely satisfactory treatment of Augustine’s concept of will (2001: note 32), but see his Augustine (1994: ch. 5) for one summary of the issues. Augustine’s conception of the freedom of the will does not assume that a free act is one in which the agent has the ability either to do or not do the act. His On Free Choice of the Will was written to counter the Manichean explanation for evildoing (see below) in which an alien substance compels a person to sin. This is why Augustine’s constant refrain in his writings is ‘‘Whose will is it?’’ (On Free Choice 3.1; Eighty-Three Different Questions 8) If we are doing something because we want to, then we are responsible for it. Note that in Augustine’s gravitational metaphor, it is the weight of the stone that drags the stone to earth, not some exertion of the earth: the physics of his time conceived of all movement as the universal striving of objects to find their ‘‘proper place’’ (13.9.10). However, a person’s desire, his wanting, makes him free, unlike a stone. I am influenced by Peter Brown’s accounts of Augustine’s conceptions of choice, freedom and will in his biography of Augustine. I think they are some of the most genuinely Augustinian in the literature. See Brown 1967: 148–57, 170–4, 373–5. Augustine vividly describes this ‘‘half-maimed will’’ in Confessions 8.8–9. I am sidestepping here the classical concern with the distinction between ‘‘belief’’ and ‘‘knowledge.’’ By belief here I simply mean a view that one holds. And of course classical philosophers would find the concept of being ‘‘commanded’’ to believe somewhat alien. Interestingly, this is the version he tells of his coming to Christianity in his early works, before the shift to a more radical theory of grace. The account I give here is not primarily meant as a description of the doctrines, schools and sects to which he adhered, but of his reasons for adhering to them. Those interested in learning more about these doctrines can consult any number of sources on the Confessions or on Augustine’s life, including the ones referred to in this paper. What I distinguish as Manicheism and ‘‘Christianity’’ are what Augustine himself would have called spurious Christianity and ‘‘Catholic’’ Christianity; the Manicheans regarded themselves as the only true Christians. Since ‘‘Catholic’’ means something different to modern readers, to avoid confusion I call it simply ‘‘Christianity’’ here. O’Donnell notes that acquaintances of Augustine would have identified him as ‘‘Christian’’ throughout all his various phases (2001: 9). Some people suggest that until this point Augustine’s conversion has been ‘‘intellectual’’ and that the garden scene represents his ‘‘conversion of will’’ (see, for example,
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O’Meara 1954: chs 11 and 12). I think that the conversion of the will has been going on all along and is inseparable from Augustine’s intellectual conversion. 37 Some may want to argue that the ‘‘vision of continence’’ (8.11.27) experienced during his mental turmoil is a mystical vision, but since Augustine refers to it as one side of a ‘‘debate within [his] heart’’ it seems to me to be a rhetorician’s poetic device rather than a supernatural vision. It does not resolve his indecision and is therefore probably not a miraculous vision. 38 Courcelle in particular championed the view that the voice was truly disembodied and therefore miraculous in the conventional sense. His evidence is founded on the variant manuscript reading ‘‘divina dei’’ (‘‘from the house of God’’) rather than ‘‘vicina dei’’ (‘‘from a neighboring house’’) in Augustine’s description of the origin of the voice. See O’Donnell 1992: vol. III, 62–6 where O’Donnell disputes this interpretation. In my view either word can be applied to a perfectly human voice in Augustine’s way of thinking (see below). 39 For more on the importance of this word to Augustine see Van Fleteren 1990: 67 and O’Donnell 1992: vol. II, 438. 40 Burnyeat 1999 argues that Augustine’s observations about words as signs are not meant as a philosophy of language but in part as an analogy for how we learn truth from a human teacher. Still, in Confessions (1.8.13), Augustine attributes to God the mind’s power to learn language. 41 In a much later work, The Trinity, Augustine explicitly relates the ‘‘movement’’ of love and desire with the ‘‘movement of mind’’ from sign to known thing, which he says is indeed an ‘‘act of will’’ (9.17). 42 Of course, for Augustine the Incarnation of God in Christ is not merely a man who points the human mind and heart to God. Somehow, Jesus is one with God. Augustine uses the very metaphor of speech to show how this is possible. See Teaching Christianity (1.12ff.). 43I borrow this analogy from one of Augustine’s later works, Sermons on First John (2.11), because I think it resonates with his conception in the Confessions of God as lover. 44 Indeed, Gary Wills points out that Augustine often uses ‘‘confession’’ (confessio) interchangeably with ‘‘testimony’’ (testimonium) (1999: xiv–xvi; 2001: 13–15).
Bibliography Augustine texts and translations I have used, with some modifications, the following translations of the works of Augustine. For Latin texts I consulted the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina.
The Confessions (Confessiones) Ryan, John K. (1960) The Confessions of St. Augustine, New York: Doubleday.
Eighty-Three Different Questions (de Diversis Quaestionibus Octogina Tribus) Mosher, David L. (1977) Eighty-Three Different Questions, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press.
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On Free Choice of the Will (de Libero Arbitrio Voluntatis) Williams, Thomas (1993) On Free Choice of the Will, Indianapolis IN: Hackett.
Reconsiderations (Retractationes) Bogan, Mary Inez (1968) The Retractations, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press.
To Simplician (de Diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum) Burleigh, John H. S. (1953) Augustine: Earlier Writings, Philadelphia PA: The Westminster Press.
The Teacher (de Magistro) Wills, Gary (2001) Saint Augustine’s Childhood, New York: Viking Penguin.
Teaching Christianity (de Doctrina Christiana) Hill, Edmund (1996) Teaching Christianity, New York: New City Press.
Secondary sources Brown, P. (1967) Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, London: Faber. Burnyeat, M. F. (1999) ‘‘Wittgenstein and Augustine De Magistro,’’ in Gareth B. Matthews (ed.) The Augustinian Tradition, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 286–303. Cahill, T. (1995) How the Irish Saved Civilization, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. Chadwick, H. (1986) Augustine, Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——(1991) Confessions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, G. (1993) Augustine: The Confessions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crousson, F. (1999) ‘‘Structure and Meaning in St. Augustine’s Confessions,’’ in Gareth B. Matthews (ed.) The Augustinian Tradition, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 27–38. Cutrone, E. (1999) ‘‘Sacraments,’’ in Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.) Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids MN: Eerdman’s, 741–7. Fredriksen, P. (1986) ‘‘Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox Traditions and the Retrospective Self,’’ Journal of Theological Studies, 5.37: 3–34. ——(1998) ‘‘Beyond the Body / Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul Against the Manichees and the Pelagians,’’ Recherches Augustiniennes, 23: 87–114. Kent, B. (2001) ‘‘Augustine’s Ethics,’’ in Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205–33. Misch, G. (1950) A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes, London: Routledge.
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O’Donnell, J. (2001) ‘‘Augustine: His Time and Lives,’’ in Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 8–25. ——(1992) Augustine: The Confessions, Oxford: Clarendon Press. O’Meara, J. (1954) The Young Augustine: The Growth of St. Augustine’s Mind up to his Conversion, London: Longman’s Green. ——(1992) ‘‘Augustine’s Confessions: Elements of Fiction,’’ in Joanne McWilliam (ed.) Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 77–95. Rist, J. (1994) Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(2001) ‘‘Faith and Reason,’’ in Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzman (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 26–39. Scott, J. (1992) ‘‘From Literal Self-Sacrifice to Literary Self-Sacrifice: Augustine’s Confessions and the Rhetoric of Testimony,’’ in Joanne McWilliam (ed.) Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press. Steinhauser, K. (1992) ‘‘The Literary Unity of the Confessions,’’ in Joanne McWilliam (ed.) Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press. Stock, B. (2001) After Augustine, Philadelphia PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Van Fleteren, F. (1990) ‘‘St. Augustine’s Theory of Conversion,’’ in Augustine: Second Founder of the Faith, New York: Peter Lang, 65–80. ——(1999) ‘‘Confessiones,’’ in Allan D. Fitzgerald (ed.) Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids MN: Eerdman’s, 227–32. Wetzel, J. (1992) ‘‘Pelagius Anticipated: Grace and Election in Augustine’s Ad Simplicanum,’’ in Joanne McWilliam (ed.) Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 121–32. Wills, G. (1999) Saint Augustine, New York: Viking. ——(2001) Saint Augustine’s Childhood, New York: Viking.
3
Who is Peter Abelard?
1
Calvin G. Normore
Philosophy is, etymologically, the love of wisdom. It is hard to love what one does not know and so natural for philosophers to be interested in the twin issues of what wisdom is and how to attain it. On these issues there grew up in antiquity a large body of thought and practice, some, though by no means all, of which made its way into the Middle Ages. Perhaps the classic Latin text recording a search for wisdom available in the Middle Ages is Augustine’s Confessions. This records Augustine’s own passage from what he portrays as a crude and deceptive pseudo-scientism through Academic skepticism and some form of Platonism to Christianity. One of the striking features of this Augustinian pilgrimage is that it has two sides – the intellectual journey recorded in book VII and the moral ascent recorded in book VIII. Augustine makes clear that both were necessary for him and that the second is not, or at least not in any simple way, a matter of coming to have the right beliefs; rather some deeper personal transformation (which yet may also be an intellectual transformation) is required. The idea that wisdom involves both a coming to know in a certain way and a coming to be in a certain way was a commonplace of antique thought. It is not much reflected upon by philosophers today and it is not easy for us to see philosophy in these terms.2 It was, however, a conception of philosophy and philosophers very much alive in the twelfth century. Given such a conception it would not be strange for a philosopher to think that a philosophy might have more than one dimension. On the one hand there would be the truth about the world and on the other the process, presupposing that one had already in some sense grasped that truth, of coming to further internalize it – to know it in some strong sense. Both could legitimately be regarded as philosophical tasks. Given that both were philosophical tasks, both could be philosophized about and means could be sought to express that philosophy. Given the differences between the tasks, it would be no surprise if the genres in which reflection about them was expressed were rather different. It is my opinion that Peter Abelard thought of philosophy in this way, and that some of his work, in particular his Historia calamitatum, is precisely an effort to record his own appropriation of a basic truth about the universe
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and to promote a similar appropriation in his reader. My thesis is that Abelard’s autobiography, the Historia calamitatum, is a work of philosophy as Abelard would have understood it and that recognizing this has consequences for our understanding of Abelard. Peter Abelard has left us as rich a treasure of documents about himself as one could hope for from a philospher – and especially from one who got into so much trouble that a century later his very name had all but vanished. Central among them is the Historia calamitatum, an explicit, though partial, autobiography. Second only to it is the remarkable exchange of letters with his wife Heloise. Third, there are lines in his song to his son, Astralabe, and finally the autobiographical remarks scattered through his academic works. Moreover, in his own lifetime, Abelard was charismatic, famous, and even notorious. His contemporaries and near contemporaries talk about him as readily as he talks about himself. (cf. Dronke 1976; Mews 1995; Marenbon 1997: ch. 1) If we can trust these documents then we know more about Abelard than about almost any other medieval thinker. Unless a medieval thinker became a saint important enough to attract a hagiographer, we hardly ever know even basic biographical information such as when or where he / she was born or when he / she died. Typically we have no external evidence of the order in which such a thinker wrote whatever work we have, and very little idea how much of the thinker’s work is extant. In contrast what we know about Abelard is surprisingly detailed. We know for example that he was born around 1079 and that he died on 21 April in some year not very long after 1140. We know that he was born in the town of Le Pallet about ten miles east of Nantes in Brittany. We know that his father, Berengar, was a knight in some sense and that, after the children were grown and on their own, both he and Abelard’s mother entered the religious life. Peter was the oldest of their children but gave up his claim to the family estate so that he could become a philosopher. We know that he studied Dialectic with Roscelin of Campiegnes and, somewhat later at Paris, with William of Champeux. Both of these masters eventually became his bitter enemies. Around the very beginning of the twelfth century and while still very young, Abelard established a series of schools, first at Melun and then at Corbeil, in which he taught dialectic. After a few years of such teaching he vanished from the school scene for a couple of years, apparently returning to his family. He suggests that the cause was illness induced by overwork. When Abelard returned he studied again with William of Champeux – rhetoric this time he says – and apparently hoped to succeed him as head of the cathedral school at Notre Dame de Paris. William seems to have done everything in his power to prevent this, and after a few years Abelard gave up pursuing this goal directly in order to study sacred scripture with Anselm and Ralph of Laon. After a very short time at this he returned to Paris and finally was hired at Notre Dame. While there he began a torrid
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affair with Heloise, the niece of Fulbert, one of the canons at the cathedral chapter. She became pregnant and bore a son whom she, it seems, named Astralabe. She and Abelard then married, but her uncle nonetheless had Abelard castrated, and both Heloise and Abelard retired to monasteries – she to the nunnery of Argenteuil where she had been as a girl and he to the monastery of St Denis. Abelard soon quarreled with the monks at St Denis and moved to one of the daughterhouses of the monastery. While there he was summoned to a council at Soissons to answer charges of heresy in the theology he had been writing and teaching. What happened is obscure, but as some sort of punishment he was sent to another monastery, St Medard, whose abbot, Goswin, apparently had been but was no longer a friend of his. Abelard went AWOL. Eventually he got permission to sever his connection with St Denis and retired to some land he owned. There he built an oratory which he dedicated first to the Trinity and then to the Holy Spirit as the Paraclete and soon began teaching again. After a few years of this he gave it up and accepted the post of abbot of the Breton monastery of St Gildas de Rhuys. He gave the land of his oratory to Heloise, whose nunnery had been expropriated by the monks of St Denis. At St Gildas he quarreled with the monks, who eventually forced him to leave the monastery (though apparently not to resign as abbot). We next find Abelard in the mid-1130s teaching in Paris. Once again something seems to have happened to force him from the city, but once again he manages to return. He then takes up teaching on the Mont Ste. Genéviève when, at the instigation of some – apparently including Bernard of Clairvaux – he was summoned to another council at Sens. Again it is obscure what happened, but some propositions attributed to him were condemned at the council, and he appealed to the Pope. He set off for Rome to make his appeal but Bernard’s letters seem to have got there first and Abelard, apparently ill, fetched up in the monastery of Cluny where his friend and admirer, Peter the Venerable, was abbot. Abelard spent the last years of his life at Cluny and a daughterhouse at Chalôn-sur-Saône He died there, probably in 1142, and was buried at the Paraclete. Eventually Heloise herself and their son Astralabe were also buried there. In 1817 Abelard’s remains and those of Heloise were removed to the cemetery of Père Lachaise, in Paris, where they are today. Even as bare a telling of the story as this shows Abelard to have been a remarkable figure. But we have much more than a table of names and dates for Abelard. His partial autobiography (the Historia calamitatum) which takes us up to around 1132, and the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise, which continues for at least a year or two afterward, paint a forceful picture of them both. They are powerful documents full of forceful imagery and passion. Why did Abelard write his autobiography, which prompted this remarkable correspondence, in the form of a letter of consolation? To tell a tale of one’s own miseries is, after all, not the most obvious way to console a friend for his. Moreover, detailed in many ways though the Historia calamitatum is,
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it is in others remarkably reticent. Why exactly did Abelard leave Paris around 1105? What exactly were his connections with the ‘certain Stephen’ whom he mentions just once but whom we have reason to believe to have been Stephen de Garlande, one of the most powerful – and notorious – men in France? R-H Bautier (Bautier 1981), D. Luscombe (Luscombe 1988) and J. Marenbon (Marenbon 1997) have all argued persuasively that the de Garlande family were in some sense Abelard’s patrons and that behind the life of scholarly debate recorded in the Historia lies a good deal of the politics of the French court in Abelard’s time. Why then did Abelard record and omit exactly what he did? Marenbon (1997) has pointed out that Abelard uses himself and his own life as an ethical example in the Historia and ‘‘shows in his own life, not just an example of calamity which will put his friend’s misfortunes into perspective, but an attitude which his friend (and others) should follow’’ (Marenbon 1997: 321). But there is, I think, even more going on in the Historia. To see it we must first understand what Abelard and Heloise thought it was to be a philosopher and what was their model of philosophy. Let me begin in what may seem an unlikely place – with Heloise’s objections to her marriage to Abelard. Abelard recounts some of these in the Historia. He stresses her insistence on the incompatibility between marriage and the philosophical life, recounting her claim that: The world would justly exact punishment from her if she removed such a light from its midst. Nature had created him for all mankind and it would be a sorry scandal if her should bind himself to a single woman and submit to such base servitude.3 (Radice 1974: 70) And as pointing out that the great philosophers of the past have despised the world, not renouncing it so much as escaping from it and have denied themselves every pleasure so as to find peace in the arms of philosophy alone. The greatest of them, Seneca, gives this advice to Lucilius. ‘‘Philosophy is not a subject for idle moments. We must neglect everything else and concentrate on this, for no time is long enough for it. Put it aside for a moment and you might as well give it up, for once interrupted it will not remain. We must resist all other occupations, not merely dispose of them but reject them.’’ (Radice 1974: 72) Here we get a partial picture of philosophy, not as a branch of study but as a way of life. This, as Pierre Hadot has recently reminded us, was the ancient conception of philosophy. Perhaps it should not surprise us (though it does) to learn that twelfth-century thinkers shared the conception.
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When Heloise reads the Historia she writes to Abelard that he has only set out some of her objections. She stresses her own commitment to freedom in love – that she would rather be his whore than the wife of ‘‘Augustus, the Emperor of the whole world.’’ It is marriage itself and not the inconveniences of family life to which she emphasizes her objections (Radice 1974: 114). Why does Abelard choose to stress those objections centered on the tensions between marriage and philosophy rather than those concerned with marriage itself? He focuses on them because they can play a role in the structure of his narrative: the Historia calamitatum is not an artless retelling of what is on his mind but a document composed for the purpose of recounting his own path through adversity from the position of the ancient philosophers to that of a different kind of sage. All of this presupposes of course that the Historia calamitatum and the correspondence are authentic. In every generation for well over a century there have been some scholars who found it incredible that Abelard and Heloise should have actually written these letters. These doubts about the authenticity of the text come from the words, which paint Heloise as unrealistically sensual, and paint them both as celebrating sexual love in a way that is foreign to the twelfth century. There can be no doubt that the correspondence is remarkable and it is true that doubt about the authenticity of the correspondence is aided by the textual situation: the earliest extant manuscript in which the correspondence appears is fairly late. But, as Peter Dronke pointed out twenty-five years ago (Dronke 1976) the textual basis of these doubts is unusually weak. Dronke found a wealth of contemporary poems and letters in which the explicitly sexual love between Abelard and Heloise is celebrated. Even Peter the Venerable, the great abbot of great Cluny, writing to Heloise at Abelard’s death, does not hesitate to speak of their sexual love. He ends his letter to Heloise telling her of Abelard’s death this way: My illustrious and dearest sister in God: this man to whom you cleaved after the sexual union [copula carnalis] with the stronger and finer bond of divine love, he with whom and under whom you have long served God – I tell you, God is now cherishing him in his lap in your stead or like a replica of you. (Radice 1974: 283–4) If scholars of this century have found Heloise’s sexuality hard to credit, it does not seem to have been a problem for her contemporaries! The controversy over the authenticity of the correspondence between Abelard and Heloise brings home, I think, one of the basic truths of doing any kind of history – including the history of philosophy. There is simply no way to divorce the study of the past from our conceptions of the present. The study of the history of medieval philosophy in particular has been ideological, and a remarkable portion of the recent history of the history of this study
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has been concerned with positioning medieval philosophy for political or religious reasons. But if we can trust the authenticity of the Historia calamitatum and of the letters, as I believe we can, we are still left with the task of understanding the picture of Abelard that they paint. Who is this great love poet and lover and philosopher who, remembering his affair with his perhaps quite young student can write that: We were united, first under one roof, then in heart; and so with our lessons as pretext we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired, and then with our books open before us, more words of love than of our reading passed between us and more kissing than teaching. My hands strayed more often to her breasts than to the pages; love drew our eyes to look on each other more than reading kept them on our texts. But who can also write directly to her: Come too, my inseparable companion, and join me in thanksgiving, you who were made my partner both in guilt and in grace. For the Lord is not unmindful also of your own salvation, indeed, he has you much in mind, for by a kind of holy presage of his name he marked you out to be especially his when he named you Heloise, after his own name, Elohim. In his mercy, I say he intended to provide for two people in one, the two whom the devil sought to destroy in one; since a short while before this happening he had bound us together by the indissoluble bond of the marriage sacrament. At the time I desired to keep you whom I loved beyond measure for myself, alone, but he was already planning to use this opportunity for our joint conversion to himself. Had you not previously been joined to me in wedlock, you might have clung to the world when I withdrew from it, either at the suggestion of your relatives or in enjoyment of carnal delights. See then, how greatly the Lord was concerned for us. (Radice 1974: 149) That the Historia is authentic Abelardiana does nothing to tell us why it was written. Abelard describes it as a letter of consolation to a friend who had suffered some unnamed loss and Heloise, upon reading it, seems to take seriously the possibility that it might well console someone since: ‘‘it is always some consolation in sorrow to feel that it is shared.’’ Nevertheless, she points out that whatever comfort it may have given the unnamed friend, it is really a recounting of Abelard’s troubles and one likely to worry his friends, such as herself, who are concerned for his welfare. By any reckoning it is an odd letter of consolation. Despite that, it ends with a call to consolation that echoes some of the deepest elements in Abelard’s philosophy and draws deeply on his conception of wisdom. Here is the text.
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Who is Peter Abelard? Let us then take heart from these proofs and examples, and bear our wrongs the more cheerfully the more we know they are undeserved. Let us not doubt that if they add nothing to our merit they at least contribute to the expiation of our sins. And since everything is managed by divine ordinance, each one of the faithful, when it comes to the test, must take comfort at least from the knowledge that God’s supreme goodness allows nothing to be done outside his plan, and whatever is started wrongly, he himself brings to the best conclusion. Hence in all things it is right to say to him ‘‘Thy will be done’’. Finally think what consolation comes to those who love God on the authority of the Apostle who says ‘‘As we know all things work together for good for those who love God.’’ This is what the wisest of mankind had in mind when he said in his Proverbs ‘‘Whatever befalls the righteous man it shall not sadden him.’’ Here he clearly shows that those who are angered by some injury to themselves, though they well know it has been laid on them by divine dispensation, leave the path of righteousness and follow their own will rather than God’s; they rebel in their secret hearts against the meaning of the words ‘‘Thy will be done’’ and set their own will above the will of God. Farewell. (Radice 1974: 105–6)
This text, simple enough in its message, sums up a remarkable amount of Abelard’s philosophy and sums it up with the purpose of showing something about the limitations of scholarship as a guide to philosophy. The milieu in which Abelard worked was a milieu in which Aristotle’s logical work was studied intensively but the rest of his philosophy was known only at second hand, a milieu in which Plato was known almost exclusively through the natural philosophy of his Timaeus and in which Seneca and Cicero – two authors in whom Stoicism was preserved – were the major philosophical figures, as important or more important than Aristotle. It is perhaps significant that when one finds someone called ‘‘The Philosopher’’ after 1250 it is almost certainly Aristotle being referred to, but for a fairly large group of writers in 1150 The Philosopher is Abelard himself – and for Abelard it is frequently Seneca. I have argued elsewhere that Abelard was a Stoic (Normore 2004). This is a claim I would make as much about his logic and about his ethics, but here it is the ethics that is especially important. As I understand Stoic ethics, three commitments lie at its core. The first of these is to what I call providentialism – the view that all is arranged for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Stoic commitment to this thesis comes from a deeper commitment to the rationality of the universe. They took themselves to be good followers of Socrates, and espoused what they understood to be the Socratic doctrine that the universe is governed by Mind. Hand-in-hand with this providentialism went determinism. Stoics maintained that every state of the universe was completely determined by what had gone before in a vast but finite cycle that took a Great Year and then started all over again. The
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Stoics also held another Socratic thesis – that of the unity of the Virtues – and since they thought that Virtue was the only unqualifiedly good thing they held what I call the PCG – the Principle of the Concomitance of All Goods – the view that true goods never conflict. Mixing determinism and providentialism creates a problem in ethics. If everything is determined and everything works out for the best, how is anything anyone does ever blameworthy? Dio will kill Theo if and only if that is for the best. Thus if Dio kills Theo it is good, even best, that Theo be killed by Dio. How then can we blame Dio? Exactly how the Stoics dealt with this issue is not clear, I think, but some aspects of it are – they held that it is for what one assents to and not for what one does that one is morally responsible. Abelard holds almost all of these positions. He was notorious for his providentialist determinism and he has become famous for his adherence to the view that it is not the deeds you do, but that to which you consent (his version of Stoic assent), for which you are morally responsible. Of course the point here is not merely that Abelard and the Stoics share a considerable body of doctrine – doctrine that neither shares with Aristotle. In espousing these doctrines, Abelard saw himself as following in the tradition of ancient philosophy as he conceived it: he considered philosophy to be a pursuit of a wisdom like that sought by the stoic sage. In the Scito Te Ipsum Abelard proposes the doctrine that the locus of sin is consent as his own, but in the Collationes (Dialogues) (both in Spade 1995), and in particular in the Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Christian, Abelard introduces it as the Philosopher’s position. The Philosopher claims: For certain things are called goods or evils properly and so to speak substantially. For instance the virtues and vices themselves. But certain things are so-called by accident and through something else, like actions that are our deeds. Although they’re indifferent in themselves, nevertheless they’re called good or evil from the intention from which they proceed. Frequently, therefore, when the same thing is done by different people, or by the same person at different times, the same deed is nevertheless called both ‘‘good’’ and evil because of the difference in the intentions. On the other hand, things that are called goods or evils substantially and from their own nature remain so permanently unmixed that what is once good can never become evil, or conversely. (Spade 1995: 112) This is the first occurrence in the dialogue of the claim that intention is the locus of moral culpability, and it follows shortly a passage in which the Christian refuses to take a stand on the issue. It seems plain then that in this dialogue Abelard is marking this as a distinctive position of the Philosopher. There is more: not only does the Philosopher endorse the Stoic themes I’ve claimed that Abelard himself endorses, he also endorses the Stoic
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Paradox that all evils and all goods are equal and cites Cicero as authority for it. Moreover he accepts the Stoic view that Virtue is the ultimate good – though he uses the authority of Seneca to argue that the Epicurean view that the ultimate good is pleasure is only verbally different. I hope by now to have made the case that Abelard’s conception of philosophy is indebted not nearly so much to Aristotle as to ancient Stoicism and that Abelard sees himself as a philosopher in this tradition. Still, that is not the end of the story. Abelard’s praise of ancient philosophers testifies to two principal merits: their way of life, to which I’ve already alluded, and their devotion to the powers of reason. The regard that Abelard had for reason is clear. There is even a letter to Abelard from Walter of Mortagne in which Walter worries that he has found in one of Abelard’s works on theology a suggestion that Abelard considers his theory of the Trinity so good that that doctrine need no longer be regarded as a mystery. In the Historia Abelard recalls the hostility he experienced because of his efforts to develop a hermeneutic based on the demand for reasons (Radice 1974: 78ff.). Given Abelard’s respect for, and identification with, philosophy as he understood it, one might have expected that he would regard Christianity as Hegel is said to have done – as philosophy allegorized for the masses. Indeed one might take Abelard’s refusal / failure to adjudicate between the Philosopher and the Christian as evidence that he did not think a choice appropriate. However, Abelard does think that Christianity goes well beyond Ancient philosophy. In the dialogue between the Philosopher and the Christian it is, by the end, clearly the Christian who has the better of the argument, and it is instructive that the argument of which he has the better is about such distinctively Christian theses as the need for an afterlife in order to achieve the Good for Humans (Spade 1995: 132ff.). This is no accident: Abelard thinks there is central area in which Christianity has far surpassed Ancient philosophy, and that is in its understanding of suffering. It is here that Abelard sees the claims of reason to be able to establish truth to have run out. They must be succeeded by a faith that discerns a pattern only visible to the person who lives it. The last section of the Historia contains testimony about the pattern. There Abelard compares himself repeatedly to St Jerome ‘‘whose heir he considers himself as regards slanders and false accusations.’’ Like Jerome Abelard is hunted and driven from place to place by his enemies. Like Jerome he is accused of having friendships with women that do not live up to the monastic ideal. It is these accusations and the pressing threats to his work and his life which force upon him the stance he recommends at the very end of the work – that of acceptance of God’s will. Abelard does not see the stance of the Philosopher and that of the Christian as opposed. Just as in his Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Christian the philosopher first instructs the Christian but by the end receives philosophical instruction from him, so Abelard sees the task of living the life of the sage – the truly philo-
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sophical life – as involving both the life of reason and what he conceives of as the life of faith. We find this position eloquently put in his ‘‘Confession of Faith to Heloise’’ preserved by Berengar of Poitiers. But how does a man like Abelard come to faith? We can see part of the path in the dialogue of the Philosopher with the Christian – reason, Abelard thinks, can show us that certain distinctively Christian positions, like the doctrine of heaven and hell, are reasonable. But this process will only take us so far. The arrangement of the two dialogues has the Jew who appeals to authority, the Philosopher who appeals to natural reason and the Christian who appeals to reason aided by revelation all coming before Abelard to have their disputes adjudicated. Abelard there is a judge, not a partisan, and while the flow of the argument seems in the end to side with the Christian so that one might suspect this is where the author’s sympathies lay, the second dialogue breaks off before the character ‘‘Abelard’’ delivers a judgment. We are left without knowing whether reason alone will settle this issue. Nevertheless, it is clear at the end of the dialogue that the Philosopher’s treatment of suffering is inadequate. The doctrines that Virtue is the only true good for humans and that such conditions as the pain that accompanies death (Spade 1995: 139) are matters of indifference and are to be rejected. It is my opinion that Abelard does think the issue of whether Christianity offers a wisdom beyond philosophy is settled for himself. He identifies in the end with Jerome, not with Seneca. But the issue is settled not by his reason but by his life. He discerns a providential plan in his misfortune, a plan that his Christianized Stoicism has made it possible for him to expect and so to understand. This plan is the way by which he is led from the ideal of the Philosopher, which he and Heloise shared, to the ideal of the suffering Christian, which he comes to accept and which he proposes to Heloise (with little apparent success) in their correspondence. His life and not his learning makes a Christian of Abelard on his own telling, and this explains why he thinks that telling his tale rather than arguing the case is a suitable way to provide consolation to others. This element of redemption in Abelard’s thought connects the Historia to his Commentary on Romans (Buytaert 1969) and his Collationes. Each in its own way includes an exploration of how we can be perfected through suffering. In the Historia the focus is on Abelard’s own (still incomplete) progress from philosophical warrior to the character Peter the Venerable recalls in one of his letters to Heloise. The nature and extent of his saintliness, humility and devotion of his life among us, to which Cluny can bear witness, cannot briefly be told. I do not remember seeing anyone, I think, who was his equal in conduct and manner: St Germain could not have appeared more lowly nor St Martin himself more poor. (Radice 1974: 281–2)
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In the Commentary on Romans Abelard’s concern is the need for and the nature of the Incarnation. Here it is Christ’s suffering and Christ’s loving acceptance of his own suffering as a part of the best possible outcome for us on which Abelard dwells. And (and perhaps finally) in the Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Christian it is the reconciliation of the reality of suffering with divine providentialism which marks off the Christian position as an advance over its predecessors. If the tale I have sketched here is correct, Abelard’s Historia calamitatum can indeed be seen as a letter of consolation, for it is a tale of how God can make good out of evil. It is also a genuine work of philosophy in the tradition of the slogan of Augustine and of Anselm of Canterbury, fides quaerens intellectum. Abelard discerns and presents in the Historia a pattern to the calamities of his life that he can best understand by seeing them as part of a grander providential scheme and seeing himself as a latter-day Jerome. It is a pattern which he cannot demonstrate in the sense of prove, but which he can demonstrate in the sense of point out to us, and it is a pattern which he thinks shows how Christian faith both transcends and perfects the philosophy of the Ancients.
Notes 1 Earlier versions of this paper were read as a Millenium lecture at CSU Long Beach and to the Medieval Studies Colloquium at the University of Iceland. I would like to thank the audiences at both institutions and especially Professor Mikael M. Karlsson, Professor Larry Nolan and Dr Svavar Svavarsson. 2 Pierre Hadot has been particularly active in bringing this to our attention. Cf. (Hadot 2002). 3 Abelard, Historia calamitatum, in (Radice 1974: 70). Unless otherwise noted all quotations from Historia calamitatum and the letters are from this translation.
Bibliography Bautier, R. (1981) ‘‘Paris au temps d’Abélard,’’ in Jolivet, J., Abélard en son temps, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Brower, J. and Guilfoy, K. (eds) (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Abelard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buytaert, E. (1969) Petri Abelardi Opera Theologica, Vol. 1, Cura et Studio Eligii M. Buytaert, Turnholti: Typographi Brepols. (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis vol. 11). Dronke, P. (1976) Abelard and Heloise in Medieval Testimonies, Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press. Hadot, P. (2002) What is Ancient Philosophy?, trans. Michael Chase, Cambridge MA: Belknap Press. Jolivet, J. (1981) Abélard en son temps, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
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Luscombe, D. (1988) ‘‘From Paris to the Paraclete: The Correspondence of Abélard and Heloise,’’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 74: 247–83. Marenbon, J. (1997) The Philosophy of Peter Abelard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mews, C. (1995) Peter Abelard, Aldershot: Variorum (Authors of the Middle Ages). Normore, C. (2004) ‘‘Abelard’s Stoicism and its Consequences,’’ in Strange, S. and Zupko, J. (eds) Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 132–48. Radice, B. (1974) The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. Betty Radice, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spade, P. (1995) Peter Abelard: Ethical Writings, trans. Paul Vincent Spade with an introduction by Marilyn McCord Adams, Indianapolis IN: Hackett.
4
Philosophy without heroism Montaigne and the vanity of autobiography D. G. Wright
The sovereign remedy to cure self-love is to do the opposite to what those people say who, by forbidding you to talk about yourself, as a consequent even more strongly forbid you to think about yourself. . . . They think that to linger over your self is to be pleased with yourself, to haunt and frequent yourself is to hold yourself too dear. That can happen. But that excess arises only in those who merely finger the surface of themselves. (Montaigne 1991: 2:6, 426)1
A topic so frivolous and so vain In so many ways, Montaigne still seems so contemporary, still so near to us in spite of the more than 400 years that have passed since he wrote his Essais, that those who came later can actually seem farther away. The austerity of the rationalists and the swooning of the Romantics can often sound distant to our modern ears, but Montaigne is perennial. He is witty and urbane, skeptical but humane, able to find great value and meaning in the everyday yet endlessly fascinated by the exceptional. As Dudley Marchi has shown, each generation from Montaigne’s to our own has found a kindred spirit in the Essais, a prescient example of humanism or empiricism, of pragmatism or existentialism, and most recently, of post-modernism (Marchi 1994). Yet whatever else he may have been, Montaigne was a Renaissance gentleman, a designation thick with connotations even if it is somewhat vague around the edges. However much his habitual self-effacement and deprecatory wit might lead him to portray himself as a ‘‘man of the people,’’ he was also the lord of a modest estate, a man who dutifully served his two terms of office as Mayor of Bordeaux, but otherwise resigned himself to a life of leisure. He might have been an aristocrat who loved the common people, but he remained an aristocrat, wedded to many of the views and attitudes customary to that station. For my purposes here, the aspect of gentlemanly mores that is significant is the widespread assumption that a gentleman does not concern himself with writing; reading itself is already a questionable use of one’s time, but writing is most assuredly ‘‘frivolous and effeminate,’’ an activity that reveals
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all too great a regard for the opinion of others. Citing with approval a commonplace from Plutarch, Montaigne asserts that ‘‘to appear to excel in such unnecessary accomplishments [as writing] is to bear witness against yourself of time ill-spent on leisure and study, which ought to be better spent on things more necessary and more useful’’(1:40, 281; cf. 2:38, 885). While the frequency of remarks on this order decreases markedly during the twenty years that Montaigne spent writing the Essais, he never entirely sets the view aside, nor feels a need to justify it; it is always assumed as an axiom, however much he might seek to shift its boundaries. It is writing itself that needs to be justified, not the prohibition against it. Prefiguring Rousseau in this as in so much else, Montaigne declares that ‘‘scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess;’’ in a better age, his own book ‘‘would be banished from the hands of our people. I am not joking’’ (3:9, 1071). This creates a serious problem for Montaigne. The twenty years of work on the Essais bespeak a man greatly preoccupied with writing. We might excuse his travel journal as a minor and dispensable accompaniment to the more serious and legitimate business of touring and ‘‘taking the waters,’’ but faced with the 1,200 pages of the Essais it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Montaigne is not just someone who happens to have written, but rather, that he is primarily a writer. That he is a very good one only makes matters worse. His casual grace, the rhythmic modulations between moral intensity and wry observation, and most of all, the record of his endless self-editing, all reveal an author who has exerted great effort to transform his already considerable natural talent into a narrative skill of the highest possible order. So Montaigne is a writer, though he knows that he should not be one. Compounding his problem even more, however, is what he chooses to write about: ‘‘I not only dare to talk about myself but to talk of nothing but myself. I am wandering off the point when I write of anything else’’ (3:8, 1067). If the charge leveled against writing is that it is a vain and frivolous activity justified only by the weightiness of its topic, then what on earth is Montaigne-the-gentleman doing writing about himself? He is not a great statesman, a military genius, a saint or a learned bishop. In fact, his public life was entirely unremarkable except for the Essais itself, and surely the brilliance of the completed text cannot retroactively justify the decision to have written it in the first place. It is unbecoming to have written it at all, and presumptuous of him to ask us to read it, a problem to which he mockingly alludes on the first page of the book: ‘‘Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell.’’ The curious admixture of bashfulness and boastfulness in this brief introductory address to the reader perfectly characterizes the Essais as a whole, and adverts to one of its primary preoccupations. Prima facie, autobiography is a quintessentially vain activity, and Montaigne will be at pains throughout his text to assess whether and to what extent this charge should
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be leveled at his own writing (and a fortiori, at him). However, in the process of attempting to defuse the charge of vanity through his endlessly dismissive remarks about his work and his own character, he runs a serious risk of presenting both of these as trivial and irrelevant. The conjunction of terms in his preface is actually false to the autobiographical dilemma; the bind that he must somehow escape is one that presents autobiography as either vain or frivolous. I will argue here that to at least some extent, Montaigne manages to outmaneuver this trap, showing that while he is perhaps ‘‘sprinkled all over’’ with vanity, he is ‘‘not dyed in it’’ (2:17, 722). In doing so, Montaigne inaugurates a new conception of the value of the commonplace soul, one that foregoes the philosophical ambition toward perfect self-mastery and selfsufficiency in favor of a more modest and more explicitly social set of virtues. He himself is the exemplar of this newly dignified, commonplace soul, and in understanding why such a figure does not strike us as vain, we have occasion to rethink the meaning of vanity itself, most specifically as it pertains to autobiography, but also more broadly as it pertains to persons in general.
Meanings of vanity There are at least two forms of vanity at issue in nearly any attempt at autobiography. The primary and most obvious kind of vanity (and my principal concern here) is that one thinks more highly of oneself than one’s talents and behavior warrant. This has never been a desirable trait. It suggests a certain foolishness in so far as it involves a false judgment, and it is a culpable foolishness since the person in question has the best possible access to the information that might correct this error. Second, writing in general, and self-portrait in particular, might be thought vain even when the self-depiction is not overly laudatory, simply because it suggests that an author believes that he or she warrants the time and attention that reading requires. The surfeit of memoir and confession in our own age suggests that this is no longer a pressing question for most, or perhaps that we no longer feel vanity to be such a significant vice, but at least until the nineteenth century it posed one of the major rhetorical hurdles for all would-be autobiographers.2 Who are you, we might well ask, that I should spend my time reading your life story or gazing at your self-portrait? For convenience’s sake, I will speak of these as the moral and the rhetorical problems of vanity, though the interrelations between them means that such labels can only indicate the most salient feature of each category. The moral problem concerns the content of the portrait and its implied maker, while the rhetorical problem concerns the presentation and recommendation of that portrait as a suitable object for the attention of others. Together they create a dilemma for a would-be autobiographer: the best reason for recommending one’s autobiography as worthy of the public’s attention is that its subject is in some manner or other truly exceptional. And yet, the more that
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one embraces this rhetorical justification, the more one may appear uncomfortably vain in the eyes of the reader. I may be willing to read a novel or a work of theory by an author whom I know to be vain, since the character of the author is not clearly and immediately relevant to the work itself; indeed, we would lose much of the canon in philosophy if we were not adept at making such discriminations. However, when the personality of the author is the subject of the text, vanity is a serious problem. A vain autobiography can easily dissuade the reader from any sustained and sympathetic engagement with the text, but an autobiography that wards this off through excessive modesty, one that does not present a compelling and original subject, can seem tiresome and frivolous, hardly worth reading at all. This bind presses on all autobiographers, though it takes different forms in different traditions. While Montaigne has no patience for Aristotle as a metaphysician, he was certainly influenced by his ethics and quite sympathetic to its major preoccupations. Moderation, honesty, and sensitivity to context are each as central to Montaigne’s moral outlook as they are to Aristotle’s, and he shares The Philosopher’s willingness to see (or imagine) large-scale differences in the worth of different kinds of persons. For Aristotle, vanity does not consist simply in having a high regard for oneself, but rather in having a falsely high estimate of one’s virtues, capacities, or accomplishments; the relevant moral norms apply not to the grandiosity of one’s self-image, but to its legitimacy. In fact, while vanity is certainly a vice for Aristotle, it offends him less than the opposite vice, an abject humility (whether genuine or feigned) that is out of step with one’s actual stature (Aristotle 1962: 1125a, line 34). Echoing this sentiment, Montaigne notes, but does not censure the boastfulness and sense of special privilege in Caesar’s memoirs, since it seems perfectly reasonable for Caesar to present himself as one of the world’s great military geniuses. It would be unseemly on the Aristotelean view for Caesar to present himself in any other manner, a cowardly failure to accept the status (and responsibility) that his gifts confer: ‘‘If he is Caesar, then let him frankly acknowledge that he is the greatest Captain in all the world’’ (2:17, 718). Montaigne is frustrated by those ‘‘plebeian rules of etiquette’’ that prevent full and free self-disclosure (3:8, 1067), and often pre-emptively appeals to Aristotle whenever he wishes to credit himself with any positive qualities, or when he needs to justify a shocking or indecorous admission. ‘‘No virtue is helped by falsehood; and the truth can never go wrong’’ (2:6, 426; cf. 2:17, 736). One of the most attractive features of this perspective is that it makes such a clean conceptual separation between pride and vanity; the great-souled individual is full of pride, but as this is fully warranted pride, it is not tainted with vanity. However, Montaigne knows perfectly well that this avenue is not open to him; he is not Caesar, nor remarkable in any comparable manner. Moreover, he was at least equally influenced by a competing account of vanity with roots in late-antiquity Catholicism, of which Augustine is a representative figure.3 This view of vanity takes its bearings
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from the doctrine of original sin, seeing the condition of vanity as a defiant or deluded satisfaction with one’s fallen nature. What makes vanity so bad on this account is precisely that it is a dangerous species of pride, an obstacle to the willing submission to God. It is equally false and impermissible in all persons since God is directly responsible for all human giftedness, and no human achievement can ever diminish our complete dependence on sustaining grace. Augustine’s bitter quarrel with Pelagius in the early 400s revolved around this very point, with Augustine arguing strenuously (and victoriously) that we require the ongoing support of God if we are to avoid moral disintegration. All good things not only come from God (as Pelagius agreed), but are actively sustained by God at each moment thereafter. Our talents are never our talents; they are God’s talents in us. Vanity is thus a vice of both folly and ingratitude. While it is not clear that Montaigne accepted this view in precisely its Augustinian form – he more often cites Democritus or Heraclitus when he wishes to stress the insurmountable foolishness and fallibility of human nature (1:50, 339) – he seems to share the saint’s conviction that pride is always at least somewhat vain, always in excess of what our condition warrants. Anyone who makes repeated examinations of himself, internally and externally, as a human being, with human powers but bereft of the divine privilege of grace; anyone who sees Man as he is, without flattery, will find no quality or faculty in Man which is not redolent of death and dust. (2:12, 623) In traditions that value humility as a cardinal virtue, any activity that lavishes attention on the self can seem to court moral peril at every turn, for as Montaigne notes, even writing against vanity can be yet another instance of vanity (1:41, 285). That is why autobiographical works in such traditions must emphasize their pedagogical and reformatory concerns (including selfinstruction); they must have some ennobling purpose that justifies soliciting such attention if they are to be more than exhibitionist displays in search of glory. Consequently, Montaigne cannot commend his self-portrait to the public on the grounds that it depicts the life of a remarkable man without running afoul of his Christian commitments (or at least, of the state censors who enforce such commitments). However much he sympathizes with Aristotle, he knows both that self-praise is unchristian, and that he is not at any rate a great soul in the Aristotelian sense. He must take pains to show that his self-assessment is suitably low. He is more than happy to oblige. In reading the text, we are given ample testimony to what Montaigne perceived as his many failings and inadequacies. We learn, for instance, that he was a singularly lacklustre mayor, deserving credit only insofar as he did not exacerbate the various problems of state during his tenure (3:10, 1135–44). This failure was due in turn to his
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absolute impatience with the rituals of social ceremony, a haughtiness that he admits goes beyond a laudable disdain for hypocrisy and obsequious flattery. This might have been corrected if he were not entirely lacking in wit, having tasted only ‘‘the outer crust of knowledge’’ (1:26, 163). But it is hard to imagine how he could have benefited from a more rigorous education when he had such a treacherously faulty memory.4 Above all, he was indolent, as his parents and teachers predicted early on: ‘‘The risk was not that I should do wrong, but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless. What they foretold was idleness, not wickedness’’ (1:26, 197). With such an extensive inventory of faults, covering his natural faculties, his social relations, his activities, and even his body itself,5 it would seem that Montaigne must be entirely exempt from any concern that he thinks too highly of himself. His self-criticism is so relentless that readers with Aristotelian sympathies have suspected him of the opposite vice, seeing his habitual self-disparagement as unbecoming when measured against his manifest talent. To my knowledge, Rousseau is the only reader who has suggested that the Essais are unduly flattering to their subject,6 and given the widespread conviction that Rousseau was himself incapable of serious self-criticism, criticism from this quarter may do more to aid Montaigne’s cause than to undercut it. Nor does it seem that Montaigne is engaged in a more subtle strategy of vanity, striving for the dubious distinction of being the worst of sinners or the most abject failure in all the kingdom. He is modest even in his selfrecriminations, accusing himself of ‘‘idleness’’ but ‘‘not wickedness.’’ He simply does not go in for the swooning self-mortification of a soul that declares itself repellent. The worst of his condemnations are generally aimed at the human species, not at himself personally or exclusively, and while Montaigne is not excessive or tiresome in his self-praise, there are only brief and perfunctory attempts to suggest that naming his finer qualities goes against his better instincts. He seems as happy to tell us why we might like him, and why, at any rate, he likes himself, as he is to name his faults.7 Moreover, there is a persistent emphasis on pleasure in his text, particularly in its later essays and later additions. Breaching the gentlemanly taboo against writing in the strongest possible manner, Montaigne admits (what is surely obvious anyway) that the mere act of composing his self-portrait is often immensely enjoyable to him,8 and that the intensified experience of selfhood thereby produced is inherently pleasant: ‘‘I watch myself, savour myself . . . I turn round and round in myself’’ (2:17, 747). This is not the experience of a man disgusted by his own nature. He has his bad days, like anyone, and on these he finds himself contemptible (in the sense of foolish rather than vice-ridden), but more typically he finds something comic in his failings, and the laughter therein is both cathartic and redemptive. In his excellent formulation, the defining characteristic of humanity ‘‘is to be equally laughable and able to laugh’’ (1:50, 340), with the capacity to laugh taking much of the sting out of what is laughable in each of us.
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The higher and the common This is all highly satisfactory insofar as it suggests that Montaigne enjoyed good mental health, thinking neither too highly nor too lowly of himself, but how can he hope to have it both ways? How can he – as a good (Augustinian) Christian – remain sensitive to the baseness of all humanity, while at the same time – as a man with classically inspired sensibilities – see real and important distinctions in the stature of different persons? He holds himself low because all of us are low, but then tells us endless tales about those individuals who stand immeasurably high above us. He does not provide an argumentative resolution to this tension, but his text as a whole betrays a mode of thinking that allowed him to hold both convictions at once. While all of us here and now are such corrupt and banal creatures that any pretensions to grandeur can only be base vanity, it was not always so; there was once a golden age when men were cut from an infinitely richer cloth. This is one of those places in which Montaigne shows himself to be a child of his times, the Renaissance being that excited and bewildered era in which a long and powerful ecclesiastical tradition collided sharply with an emerging love of all things ancient and pagan. Surreptitiously re-dating the Fall, Montaigne draws a conceptual line between the age of the Ancient Greeks and Romans on the one hand, and all of us who have come after on the other. It is a strategy that appears to defuse any suspicion of vanity since his virtues melt into insignificance when measured against the great souls of the past, but it does not force him to disown the relative value that these qualities might have now. One can fail to be the hero, and know that one has failed, without thereby becoming a villain. Standing clearly on the lesser side of the divide, Montaigne presents himself as an adoring spectator of the great souls of antiquity. ‘‘I consider some men, particularly among the Ancients, to be way above me, and even though I clearly realize that I am powerless to follow them on my feet, I do not give up following them with my eyes’’ (2:32, 822), and while he cannot even remotely keep up with their brisk pace, he at least follows ‘‘far behind, murmuring ‘Hear, hear’ ” (1:26, 165). It is not that he is incapable of finding fault in the behavior of his heroes; Socrates, Cato, Plutarch and Caesar are all taken to task on one matter or another in the course of the text. However, these figures are presented as exceptional even in their faults. Montaigne may be troubled by the daemonic voice that speaks to Socrates (3:13, 1268) and by Cato’s ‘‘voluptuous pleasure . . . an access of delight beyond the usual order’’ (2:11, 475) as he defiantly disembowels himself to avoid capture by Caesar’s armies, but these passions and behaviors are grand and more than human, whether they are ultimately desirable or not. Deeply steeped in classical attitudes, Montaigne has an almost Nietzschean tendency to admire a magnificent failing more than the quiet exercise of modest goodness. That an Epaminondas or a Cato once walked the earth is a sheer marvel to him, and though he can find the ‘‘seeds’’ of their virtue and wisdom within himself, he recognizes an impass-
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able gulf separating his own nature from theirs. ‘‘I crawl in the earthy slime,’’ says Montaigne, ‘‘but I do not fail to note, way up in the clouds, the matchless height of certain heroic souls’’ (1:37, 258). The distance established here between the ‘‘common’’ Montaigne and those ancient paragons of virtue, wisdom and achievement is immense. He commends himself for his good judgment, and he knows that he is no worse a fool than anyone else, but his cardinal strength on his own telling lies in realizing how far beneath the giants he stands in the grand scheme of things. Showing his classicist roots far more than his Christian faith, Montaigne is confident that there is ‘‘more distance between Epaminondas and some men than between man and beast’’ (1:42, 288). In contrast, his is ‘‘an obscure mute life which slips by’’ (3:10, 1155), a life well ordered and unimposing, always aware of the vagaries of chance and the certainty of death, and richly attuned to the ever-present possibilities for pleasure; he only truly becomes passionate and incensed by the daily reality of human cruelty.9 These are warm and humane virtues, and they underlie the enduring appeal of the Essais for many of us, but they are hardly the stuff on which legends are born. The heroic and the common comprise altogether different orders, and Montaigne is common. This is a recurring pattern in the Essais. It is sometimes suggested10 that in the most extensive of the essays, the ‘‘Apology for Raymond Sebond,’’ Montaigne exaggerates the absolute transcendence of God and the utter ineptitude of human reason to such an extent that religion is robbed of any real force that it might exert within concrete human experience. The extreme Pyrrhonism that Montaigne employs as a tactical weapon to defend the faith from rationalist incursions is – as he himself warns – a doubleedged sword; it cuts off both the atheist and the believer from any possibility of justifying or explaining their beliefs, even to themselves: The ultimate rapier-stroke that I am using here must only be employed as a remedy of last resort. It is a desperate act of dexterity, in which you must surrender your own arms to force your opponent to lose his. It is a covert blow that you should only use rarely and with discretion. It is rashness indeed to undo another by undoing yourself.11 (2:12, 628) The chasm separating God from humans is made absolute in order to show the irrelevance of the conclusions of human reasoning and experience for religious debate, but as a result, there can no longer be any regular commerce between the transcendent and the earthly realms. The conclusion of the Pyrrhonist argument is not just the religious commonplace that our understanding of God is incomplete or distorted – ‘‘through a glass darkly,’’ as it were – but that we have no understanding at all. ‘‘(W)e utter words, but our intelligence cannot grasp the sense’’ (2:12, 592). Ritual and vaguely superstitious observances may still be in order, but when the mind can have
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no concept before it that would lend sense to its actions, religious devotion becomes entirely separate and distinct from our usual sense-making relationship to life. It is this absolute separation that underlies Montaigne’s insistence on following all points of Catholic doctrine and tradition; it all becomes holy mystery when we have no reliable (or even applicable) instrument that could allow us to distinguish the sacred truth from any possible human accretions.12 We must simply have faith – blind, unreasoning faith – that the church and her institutions have been infallibly constituted by God. For similar reasons, the Bible is almost completely absent from the Essais; it is ‘‘too holy,’’ its wisdom so ineffable, that it is pointless to cite it in explaining or supporting a point that one wishes to make clear, and madness to attempt an exegesis.13 ‘‘It is not a study for just anybody: it is a study for those who are dedicated to it, for people whom God calls to it. It makes the wicked and the ignorant grow worse. It is not a story to be told but a story to be revered, feared, adored’’ (1:56, 359). It is surely grand to know that such a story exists, and that its every word is somehow true – one might read from such a text with adoration and upswept eyes – but its very status as the best of books effectively banishes it from those Essais in which a hundred lesser books find a comfortable home, and engage the best of Montaigne’s energies. The ‘‘Apology’’ is a complex text in its own right, and commentators have arrived at strikingly different conclusions as to its ultimate meaning; I harbor no illusions that my brief remarks here will settle the issues or resolve any long-standing debates. However, the interpretation that I have sketched serves to illustrate a recurring pattern in the Essais: the ‘‘higher’’ in any opposition between higher and lower is raised so high that it becomes almost completely irrelevant. I want to suggest that something similar happens in the Essais’ treatment of the great souls of antiquity. Having all but divinized them (their very faults bespeaking a certain grandeur and scale), the rest of us have lost all points of access and connection to them. While initially they appear as examples to be imitated, eventually they are raised so high that they lose their relevance as practical guides to action or self-reformation. Praised into irrelevance, they are objects of admiration but not of imitation or aspiration. In fact, given the impassable distance separating the high from the common, the great souls prove disastrous as models, just as incautious use of the Bible ‘‘makes the wicked and ignorant grow worse.’’ We more readily destroy than improve ourselves by seeking to imitate the best of the Ancients, and the wise individual (of the common sort) will shun these ‘‘celestial humours.’’ ‘‘They want to . . . escape from their humanity. That is madness: instead of changing their Form into an angel’s they change it into a beast’s. . . . [T]hose humours soaring to transcendency terrify me as do great unapproachable heights’’ (3:13, 1268). Any aspiration – philosophical or religious – that seeks to overcome the limitations of our natural state of being is a kind of frenzy or ecstasy, desirable and attainable for a vanishingly small elect, but
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exceedingly dangerous and properly shunned by the rest of us. As a mark of his prudence, then, Montaigne abandons the quest for absolute self-mastery and supra-human virtue, using its traditional tools for an exactly contrary purpose: ‘‘Other men study themselves in order to wind their minds high and send them forth: I do so in order to bring mine lower and lay it down’’ (3:3, 925). But with the field cleared of its true heroes, the spiritual giants safely ensconced in a Homeric or Biblical golden age, the relative status of the common folk suddenly undergoes a significant reappraisal. Success at ordinary life now becomes the height of accessible wisdom, the greatest human accomplishment within reach in the present age. On what was to become the final page of the Essais, Montaigne tells us that it is an accomplishment, absolute and as it were God-like, to know how to enjoy our being as we ought. . . . The most beautiful of lives, to my liking are those which conform to the common measure, human and ordinate, without miracles though and without rapture. (3:13, 1268–9) Measured against a Caesar, the capacity to live ordinately, fulfilling one’s duties to others while enjoying the pleasures of life, may pale to insignificance, but measured against Montaigne’s own degenerate and duplicitous age, it is an achievement of rare beauty. In practical life, in the field of ordinary men, the exemplary figure will be the individual who lives best within the bounds of our common humanity. And this begins to sound suspiciously like a description of the character whose self-portrait we are contemplating. After all, he finds his Essais ‘‘pardonable . . . not so much for itself or its true worth as from a comparison with other writings which are worse – things which I can see people taking seriously’’ (2:17, 723). The habitual disparagement is tellingly linked to a comparative context that utterly changes its meaning. Though he thinks himself ‘‘a pygmy and quite commonplace in comparison with some former times,’’ he is a ‘‘giant and unusual’’ today (2:17, 735). Montaigne, I would suggest, presents himself not as the best, but as the best that one can get once the gods have absconded and the golden age has come to a close. While we would never expect to see these thoughts laid out in such a linear fashion within the endlessly exploratory and digressive Essais, there is an argument at work here. The best state is to be a great soul. The next best condition, living ordinately within our means, is separated from the first by a great distance. Montaigne is cut from the lesser cloth, and he both knows and insists on it: ‘‘I want neither to be a wretched nobody arguing with doorkeepers nor one who causes crowds to part with awe as I pass through. By lot and also by taste I am accustomed to a middling rank’’ (3:7, 1039). But for reasons that are never made clear, the age of the hero has passed, and aspiring to this status now results in a serious deformation rather than an
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improvement on one’s nature. Therefore, Montaigne – or someone like him – is the best that one can expect to meet outside of history, a giant compared to his contemporaries because he has mastered simplicity. Everyone seeks a reputation for a lively ready mind: I claim a reputation for steadiness; they seek a reputation for some conspicuous and signal activity or for individual talent: I claim one for the ordinate quality, the harmony and the tranquillity of my opinions and morals. (2:17, 747) The ‘‘claims’’ made here repeat the content of ‘‘the most beautiful of lives’’ as Montaigne has described them, an accomplishment ‘‘absolute, and as it were God-like.’’ Montaigne is a modest hero for a new and humbler age.
Justifying self-portraiture Studies of Montaigne often devote a great deal of attention to his various and changing motives for writing the Essais,14 but there has been comparatively little attention given to the manner in which he justifies the production and publication of his text. The rhetorical problem is typically lost behind the more immediately interesting question of motive. When the question does arise, critics writing from the disciplinary perspective of philosophy often point to a specific passage: ‘‘You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff. Every man bears the whole Form of the human condition’’ (3:2, 908).15 This claim, if true, would magically transform autobiography from a genre dealing only in particular and contingent truths (and thus, a genre less appealing to philosophers), into one that can make universal claims; it would make any serious, penetrating, and appropriately focused self-study a kind of human anthropology in miniature. This is a wonderful strategy for convincing doubtful colleagues that the study of autobiography is philosophically relevant, but whatever its broader merits, there are two problems with treating this specific passage as indicative of Montaigne’s manner of justifying his text. First, there is an obvious indelicacy in forcing a single passage to bear so much interpretive weight, thereby forcing the many occasions on which Montaigne stresses the unrepeatable uniqueness of each individual into subsidiary roles.16 But more importantly, it obscures the use that Montaigne makes of distance and dissimilarity in justifying the production of his extended self-portrait. Acknowledging that there is a certain boastfulness inherent in autobiography, Montaigne suggests that it is beneath the dignity of the great soul to indulge in such a calculated display, or to seek attention on this basis of ‘‘mere words’’ rather than deeds. As Aristotle claims, the great-souled man ‘‘will talk neither about himself nor about others, since he is not interested in hearing himself praised or others run down’’ (Aristotle 1962: 1125a, lines
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5–7). While the great souls deserve our admiration and attention and no-one denies it, it is clear to Montaigne that they should not be concerned in the least about whether or not they receive this attention. When the foremost sign of their greatness is their absolute self-sufficiency, why would such individuals care what others think? Caesar, for example, is excused in the Essais for publishing his memoirs, and for their stylistic elegance, because the usefulness of his text outweighs the unseemliness of his having bothered to write and publish it (1:40, 279). The great man in this case – absolutely confident in his worth – condescends to illuminate the lower classes, but he hardly needs the accumulated press-clippings that this action might generate in order to know that he is good and noble. Though Aristotle had taken it as obvious that even his ‘‘great-souled man’’ would desire public honors and friendship, Montaigne construes the heroic souls of antiquity in a manner much more consistent with Stoic doctrine, picturing them as remarkable precisely in virtue of their exemption from such desires. While they fully warrant all manner of attention and admiration, they are singularly indifferent to it. In contrast, common souls may not deserve attention, but when they recognize their insufficiencies and their dependence upon others, it makes sense for them to seek it. While ‘‘virtuous deeds are too noble in themselves to seek any other reward,’’ it ‘‘might perhaps be pardonable for a painter or a craftsman . . . to labour to acquire a name’’ (2:16, 715, emphasis added). These people are not perfect spheres of god-like self-sufficiency; they need the confirming and validating attention of others to shore up their shaky identities and feelings of self-worth, and to reinforce their efforts to live well. It is these ‘‘middling souls,’’ Montaigne concludes, who can compose and present their portraits to the public without compromising their purity and independence. Those whom Fortune has set to work merely among the crowd and whom no-one would ever talk about if they did not talk about themselves, can be excused if they do indeed dare to talk about themselves for the sake of those who have an interest in getting to know them. (2:17, 718–19) This stunning reversal of commonsense assumptions about who should and who should not compose a self-portrait has clear implications. Individuals of exemplary character or of undoubted import on the world stage should be far too preoccupied with the greatness of their deeds or the maintenance of their extraordinary levels of virtue and self-management to indulge in the showiness of memoir and portrait, but those of us who enjoy a lesser stature might very well indulge. Thoughtful autobiography, on this account, begins to suggest a kind of modesty, an acknowledgment that one is not a member of the heroic elite. Montaigne clearly presents himself as this middling soul; ‘‘painting’’ and ‘‘crafting’’ are amongst his favorite metaphors whenever he seeks to describe
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what he is doing in the Essais. Yet as we have seen, his opposition between the grand and the common has effectively raised the status of this formerly middling region, and he has presented himself as ‘‘a giant’’ within this category. Is he then commending his portrait on the grounds of his (newly defined) exceptional status? The bind of vanity in autobiography begins to tighten again. There may be no sure and final way for an autobiographer to escape this bind entirely. Readers of Rousseau’s Confessions, for instance, often suspect that his self-ascribed ‘‘faults’’ serve primarily to align him with the simple innocence and goodness that his philosophical system presents as an ideal. Even if we have not read his more explicitly theoretical works, the Confessions itself presents the moral and evaluative axis of his world-view with exceptional force and clarity; we cannot help seeing that within Rousseau’s world-view, Rousseau is King. The same might be said of Augustine. His exhaustive ‘‘confession’’ takes place within the context of a theology and psychology that ranks the humble and contrite sinner, no matter how grievous the sins, several steps above the complacent or the self-satisfied on the road to redemption. Indeed, since Augustine so often suggests that we must be in the depths of sin and despair before we are ready to call unto God, the self-tortured sinner may have drawn closer to the goal than those who are relatively comfortable with themselves. Montaigne faces a similar charge. Within the context of his other remarks in the Essais, Montaigne’s various self-recriminations typically redound to his credit. His many lamentations about his ineffectual memory, for instance, occur in a text that claims that ‘‘an outstanding memory is often associated with weak judgment’’ (1:9, 32), and he makes quite sure to tell us that good judgment is a vastly preferable quality (1:26, 170). Similarly, his lack of wit, scholarly learning, and reluctance to observe the rituals of polite society – claims that we might well doubt anyway – support the portrait of a plainspeaking honest man. The assumed and stated norms17 in the world of the Essais transform almost all of his failures into aspects of a virtuous whole (cf. de Mijolla 1994: 54–62). In fact, the failings are presented as necessary aspects of their corresponding virtues, and as the best or even the only road that will get us there; the best way to have good judgment and imagination is to avoid the pedantry and mental constipation that comes with an excellent (overly retentive) memory (1:26, 171–2). I don’t think that we should be overly surprised by this, nor should we believe that we have unmasked a charlatan every time we see the pattern recur. In his classic essay on autobiography, Georges Gusdorf trenchantly remarks that whatever else it is, the ‘‘deepest intentions’’ of an autobiography ‘‘are directed toward a kind of apologetics or theodicy of the individual being’’ (Gusdorf 1980: 39). Unless we imagine someone who genuinely loathes him or herself (and who doesn’t find great value precisely in this loathing), a self-portrait inevitably presents us with a life in which the faults and failings are integral aspects of a unified whole. Montaigne’s twist on this
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common pattern is simply to present his portrait against a backdrop of larger-than-life heroes rather than the rogues’ gallery of villains that we find in the autobiographies of Abelard or Rousseau. Let me put some of my cards on the table at this point. First, I don’t think that Montaigne’s project – or the man himself – was either vain or frivolous. However, his efforts to prove this point through insisting on his inadequacies were completely misguided. These allegedly ‘‘negative’’ traits are inevitably tied to virtues and capacities that Montaigne considers to be much more important, and though these virtues are not as awe-inspiring as those possessed by the Ancients, we have seen how that mode of contrast is deeply misleading in the Essais. Moreover, his self-recriminations, however sincerely experienced at the time, are hardly stable and lasting evaluations; in an excellent piece of patient textual analysis tracking Montaigne’s evaluation of his own work, Ian Winter establishes that Montaigne’s most damning claims about the Essais are all written in the months immediately preceding the publication of new editions of the text (Winter 1972). Stage fright is understandable, but it is not the same thing as humility. The aspects of his text that defuse the sense that Montaigne and his task are vain have nothing whatsoever to do with the acuity of his memory, the soundness of his judgment, or his erudition, much less his short stature or his poor table manners. In order to understand why Montaigne and his Essais do not strike us as vain, we need a richer account of vanity than that provided by either the Aristotelian or Augustinian traditions, though one that certainly draws from each of them. It is to the task of outlining such a theory that I now turn.
A new account of vanity Like Aristotle, and most reflective people, I take as paradigmatic of vanity the case of an individual whose claims for him or herself significantly exceed the opinion that would be held by a broad and informed cross-section of society. Those so inclined could add whatever caveats and qualifications they find necessary, but I don’t think that much will turn on them here, for the problem with the Aristotelian definition is that it describes a behavior and then applies a normative evaluation to it without telling us what it is in this behavior that warrants public opprobrium. What is upsetting in the behavior and attitudes of others whom we characterize as vain, I would suggest, is not primarily the lack of fit between self-image and actual merit, though this will generally be sufficient to warrant a verdict of vanity. What is repellent about vanity is something that I will call its ‘‘performative contradiction.’’ Vanity, on this view, is a deluded narcissism that demands attention, yet denies any insufficiencies or needs in the self that would lead to wanting this attention. It is both an error, insofar as it systematically occludes the truth about the self, and a performative contradiction insofar as it denies, in the words and attitude that it gives rise
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to, the needs that motivate the behavior that it produces. The vain individual is offensive because he or she seeks to draw from a public fund of approbation and attention without acknowledging a need to do so, and thus, without incurring a debt of gratitude to those who supply these goods. To flesh out and motivate this analysis, it helps to return to Montaigne’s early and (to some extent) ongoing fascination with Stoicism. The Stoic sage is a being entirely free from the need for others. Not only autonomous but also self-sufficient, such a person could perhaps enjoy the attention of (the right kind of) others when it came, but he or she would have no need of it and no motive for seeking it. Like God on some accounts, such a person would somehow enjoy praise and yet experience no loss or insufficiency if it were not forthcoming. In the chapters of the Essais that Montaigne composed first, this ideal is ubiquitous and largely unquestioned. References here could be endless, but Montaigne’s citation from Horace’s Satires (ll, vii, 83–8) is perhaps the clearest and most succinct representation of this goal: ‘‘Is he a man who stoutly defies his passions, who scorns ambition? Is he entirely self-sufficient? Is he like a smooth, round sphere which no foreign object can adhere to and which maims Fortune herself if she attacks him?’’ That kind of man, Montaigne says, ‘‘is miles above’’ (1:42, 290). But however fascinating the Stoic sage may be as a revelation of Greek norms and aspirations, I hope it will not prove contentious if I claim that no such creature exists. Montaigne is more circumspect on this matter than I am, and allows that such persons might once have existed; indeed, he cautions us repeatedly not to measure what is possible by the limits of our own capacities or by what we can see around us. But insofar as he has placed such beings – if they existed – beyond the pale, in a far off time where history and myth run together, the effect is the same as denial. In our world (the one we share with Montaigne), this ideal of absolute self-sufficiency is unattainable. When any of us declare our virtues and accomplishments, it is because we want something very badly, and what we want is the certainty that these things have been seen and recognized as valuable. Without needing recourse to confirmation and second opinion, God may be capable of seeing his creations and knowing them to be good, but we cannot, and we are thus appropriately repelled by those who pretend to such stature. The ‘‘vanity’’ we see in such persons is a measure of the disparity between their obvious need for acknowledgment and their pretension that this dependency does not exist. This is clear in Augustine; the sin of pride, and thus of vanity, springs from a denial of the sustaining role of God in maintaining one’s being. It is the fallen angel who thinks that he can go it alone, and it is his pride that leads to the fall. It is a mark of both humility and understanding then to recognize one’s absolute and ongoing dependence on God; ‘‘Let me not be my
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own life,’’ says Augustine: ‘‘Badly have I lived from myself: I was death to myself: in you I live again’’ (Augustine 1960: book XII, section 10). Augustine may have harmfully exaggerated this ongoing reliance on God; a clear but unwelcome implication of his view is that the putatively gracious and benevolent Creator does not really ‘‘give’’ us anything that we could properly call our own, since he not only grants us a birthright of talents and capacities, but also motivates and actualizes their implementation. However, Augustine is exactly right in seeing vanity as an unwillingness to acknowledge ongoing need, and a lack of gratitude toward those who have helped to meet these needs, whether these others are human or divine. Though he does not connect this to his theory of vanity, Aristotle knows this too, famously informing us in the Politics that only ‘‘a beast or a god’’ has no need of society (Aristotle 1984: 1253a, line 28). The individual is never complete, never self-sufficient, and one of the most basic needs we have is to be valued by others; our efforts at auto-validation are invariably hesitating and incomplete. The social world is not just a field in which already and otherwise complete human beings can act, but rather one of the constitutive forces in producing and maintaining recognizably human beings. Vanity is parasitic on this social fabric, drawing attention, confirmation and approval from its members while maintaining an aloofness and remove. We need to be positively regarded by others if we are to feel ourselves to have any kind of stable and worthwhile identity at all; the vain person takes this regard – and more than is their due – but in denying that this regard is a gift rather than an entitlement, he or she denies any duty of reciprocity. There is a close kinship between autobiography and this kind of vanity, for autobiography can all too easily embody the most damning aspects of the performative contradiction of vanity in its very form and structure, long before we have cause to consider the content of its portrait. Most obviously, an autobiography can explicitly deny the role of others – of readers – in its own motivation; it is not at all uncommon in the genre to find this expressed in an autobiographer’s claim to be writing ‘‘for myself alone.’’ However, the mere fact that a text is published immediately situates it as a medium through which a writer seeks to interact with the outside world, and there are few texts more ridiculous than those which bear all the traces of careful editing while denying any interest beyond the private and the personal. The contours of self-sufficiency may be there, but so is the practical contradiction; you want something of me, else you would not have made this public. Just as importantly, an autobiography can often mimic self-sufficiency, simply through the conceit that the life it depicts is over and completed. There is a strong tendency in autobiography toward an essentialism about ‘‘the self,’’ a belief that there is a single and definitive truth about each of us, a single objectively valid ‘‘story,’’ no matter how complex that story might be. The self on this view is a buried treasure, infinitely precious and awaiting discovery or reclamation. By containing his or her ‘‘life’’ between two covers, an autobiographer can appear to have defined
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once and for all this self, appropriating the heterogeneous and shifting experiences of a lifetime under a unifying interpretation. A life thus bound together and completed obviously needs nothing from its readers, and it is genuinely unable to gain or lose from response. But the sleight of hand at work here that contributes to the vanity of autobiography is the sly equivocation between author and text. The author is very much seeking a response, even if the text is not; even posthumous publications are clearly informed by the author’s present anticipation of a future readership. Through hiding behind the façade of a ‘‘completed life,’’ the author can seek to avoid acknowledging this fact. At their outset, Montaigne’s Essais were clearly mired in these very aspects of autobiography that generate the impression of vanity. Deeply immersed at the time in the Stoic desire for autonomy and invulnerability, Montaigne initially sounds haughty and dismissive of others even as he clearly courts their attention. He attempts to minimize this impression of vanity though contrasting himself to his betters, and through claiming that his portrait is intended solely for his family and friends, and that he is thus not presumptuously asking for anything from a public readership (2:18, 754). But when he discovers to his surprise and delight that he has somehow attained a wide and enthusiastic readership after the publication of the first edition of the Essais, and as he reflects on the significance that this fact has for him, a new recognition begins to emerge. Recall here the ‘‘middling soul’’ justification that he provided for autobiography: Those whom Fortune has set to work merely among the crowd and whom no one would ever talk about if they did not talk about themselves, can be excused if they do indeed dare to talk about themselves for the sake of those who have an interest in getting to know them. (2:17, 718–19, emphasis added) While his sustained contrast between himself and the Ancients leads us at first to see his ‘‘humility’’ in the first half of the passage, where he places himself ‘‘merely among the crowd,’’ it is the second half of the justification that ultimately plays the decisive role in annulling the impression of vanity. In the open admission that ‘‘no one would ever talk about’’ such people if they did not ‘‘dare to talk about themselves,’’ a link is forged between the need for attention and the desire to compose and present one’s portrait. There is an acknowledgment here of need, or at least, strong desire, which is appropriate given his highly social nature: ‘‘Some natures are withdrawn, enclosed, and private. The proper essence of my own form lies in imparting things and putting them forth: I am all in evidence; all of me is exposed; I was born for company and loving relationships’’ (3:3, 928). He wants our attention – which is common enough – but what is so uncommon for autobiography is that he says so; ‘‘I hunger to make myself known’’ (3:5, 955), he admits. Especially in his later additions to the text, he actively solicits
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response – not dispassionate commendation, but rather genuine human response – presenting his text at times as what is surely history’s most elaborate advertisement in the spirit of a newspaper personals column. We are told to get in touch with him if his humors please our own interests, and all such respondents, whether ‘‘in town or country, in France or abroad, sedentary or gadabout . . . have but to whistle through their fingers and I’ll come to them, furnishing them with ‘essays’ in flesh and blood’’ (3:5, 951; cf. 3:9, 1109). We are not meant to stand back in awe and admiration as we gaze at the portrait, nor feel overwhelmed by the tragic fate of its protagonist. No such aesthetic response is called for or expected since the ‘‘portrait’’ is presented as always incomplete; it is in this respect simply a pretext and prelude for contact with those others who will help Montaigne to continue his self-development, and who can expect such services in return from this highly social autobiographer. As the strongest statement of this need, and of how absolutely basic it was to Montaigne, he admits that the evaluation that others make of him or of his views is completely secondary to the contact itself: ‘‘I take such great pleasure in being judged and known that it is virtually indifferent to me which of the two forms it takes’’ (3:8. 1047). Insofar as this need is acknowledged, autobiography is transformed from Narcissus glorying in his own reflection, adored all the while by the infatuated but ignored Echo, into a gesture of inter-subjective dependency. Where other autobiographers typically emphasize what we might gain from their text (entertainment or edification), Montaigne’s Essais are collaborative in spirit; there is something vital that he needs, or at least desires very much, that he can only get from willing readers, and this need is expressed in the text itself rather than hidden between and beneath the covers. In the style and structure of his method of portraiture as well, he avoids the illusions inherent in the pose of self-sufficiency. Montaigne is insistent – in the title of his text and throughout its many pages – that both he and his work are an unfinished, tentative project. The Essais record an ongoing process of self-transformation, but by their very nature and design, there could be no ‘‘conclusion’’ that would issue in a complete, contained, and selfsufficient Montaigne; he admits with an equal mixture of pleasure and bewilderment that he is less certain about who and what he is after twenty years of writing than he was before he began (3:11, 1164), even though a part of his original purpose was to impose ‘‘order’’ on his unruly mind (1:8, 31). He is certainly not writing his book as an addendum to a life that stands complete outside of the activity of writing, and I take him quite seriously when he famously describes his book as ‘‘consubstantial’’ with its author: ‘‘I have not made my book any more than it has made me – a book of one substance with its author, proper to me and a limb of my life’’ (2:18, 755). His life occurs within the writing of it as much as outside of it, the two existing in a relationship of never ending dialectical exchange. This is revolutionary; he overcomes the old entrenched image of the writer and the philosopher as existing at a distance from life itself, reporting on a life that
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pretends to be completed already and sealed under its definitive authorial interpretation. I indicated at the outset that one of the major aspects of vanity as it pertains to autobiography is the rhetorical problem of justifying the presumption that one warrants the time and energy that reading require. How then does Montaigne respond to the question? Why does he deserve our attention? Though he experiments with a variety of answers, I think his final and best response is to admit that he does not in any way deserve our attention; he simply asks for it. This makes a world of difference in how we assess him, the difference between responding to a demand and responding to a request; the former seeks to force the gaze of the other, compelling the reader to take the self-as-presented as a complete subject, whereas the latter solicits attention for the purpose of initiating dialogue. It embodies an openness to influence and reciprocity. Moreover, in his frank admission of his inability to write his text or live his life without response and attention of some kind, he resolves the moral problem more effectively than he does through any amount of talk about the virtues of Cato and the weakness of his memory. By presenting his extraordinary talent and his modest virtues as developing out of an ongoing exchange with others, we can enjoy these merits in him in much the same manner as that in which we can enjoy and celebrate the successes of our loved ones; competing and isolated egoisms are – at least partially and at least briefly – transcended in an assumed inter-subjectivity. The result is paradoxical, but in a virtuous manner; Montaigne warrants our attention because he recognizes that such attention is a free gift from the reader, and this recognition makes him a genuine member of human community and communality, rather than a parasite who absorbs what he needs from others without acknowledging that a need is being met and a duty of reciprocity incurred. He can invite us to read but not compel us. Recognizing both the real autonomy of others and his ongoing need for them, he offers an invitation that is far from frivolous and never more than sprinkled in vanity.
Notes 1 All quotations from Montaigne are from the Penguin edition of 1991, translated by M. A. Screech. Citations in the text will include the book and chapter from The Complete Essays, followed by a page reference. 2 The Romantic (and later Freudian) emphasis on the mysterious and revelatory depths of each individual soul no doubt laid the conceptual foundations for the eclipse of this question, but within the history of autobiography it is Rousseau who marks the decisive turning point. While the original lengthy introduction to his Confessions argues strenuously for the value of his work as a useful aid in the study of human nature in general, he abandoned this attempt at justification in the final version of his text, substituting instead the crisp and confrontational demand that we judge him, and judge ourselves. His right to an audience is claimed, not defended. 3 Augustine regularly employs the threefold concupiscence derived from 1 John,
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2:16 as a tool for analysis, pride or vanity being the most serious of these failings. Consequently, he often takes pride as a subject, explicitly or implicitly. One of his most sustained discussions is found in Confessions, book X, 58–64. Cf. 1:9, 32; 1:26, 196; 2:10, 470; 2:17, 737; 3:9, 1089 and many other passages. Montaigne tells us about his uniquely faulty memory so often, and always as if for the first time, that one almost begins to believe him; how else does one explain the inordinate repetition? However, the frequency and ease of his quotation and paraphrase from classical sources speaks overwhelmingly against his claim. He is too short to be handsome, lacks his father’s stamina and agility, has bad teeth, and is not as well endowed as he would have liked. ‘‘I had always laughed at the false naiveté of Montaigne who, while making a pretense of admitting his flaws, takes great care to give himself only amiable ones’’ (Rousseau 1995: 433). Above all, Montaigne commends himself on his good judgment, the moderateness of his passions and his actions, and on his capacity to enjoy life’s fleeting pleasures without over-estimating their value, clinging to them too tenaciously, or high-mindedly dismissing them and the value that they do have. In one of his late additions to his text, Montaigne asks, ‘‘Even if nobody reads me, have I wasted my time when I have entertained myself during so many idle hours?’’ (2:18, 755). Montaigne’s concern with cruelty (the wars of religion allowed him to see plenty of it) recurs throughout the text, but is the explicit focus of several essays: 1:31, 2:11, 2:27 and 3:6. For instance, in Elizabeth de Mijolla’s excellent and sadly neglected Autobiographical Quests: Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Wordsworth (1994: 48–9) and Jean Starobinski’s classic study Montaigne in Motion (Starobinski 1985: 79–82). Critics who describe Montaigne as a Pyrrhonist on the basis of the ‘‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’’ would do well to remember this comment, and the context of the essay as a whole, which is written for the use of a specific patroness (according to Screech, probably Margaret of France, future wife of Henry of Navarre). Montaigne clearly has pronounced skeptical tendencies, but outside of the unusual context of this particular essay, they seldom reach the extremes of Pyrrhonism. The fact that the ‘‘Apology’’ is the longest of the essays, and that it has ended up in roughly the center of this ever-expanding text, should not lead us to attribute any special centrality to it as a defining statement of Montaigne’s beliefs. In fact, while having a single extractable essay that ‘‘represents’’ Montaigne’s thought would obviously be quite useful for teachers, it would be entirely contrary to both the name and the spirit of the Essais to expect any such statement. ‘‘We must either totally submit to the authority of our ecclesiastical polity or else totally release ourselves from it. It is not for us to decide what degree of obedience we owe it’’ (1:27, 204). One of the few exceptions to this helps to prove the rule. In his essay ‘‘On Vanity’’ (3:9, 1118), Montaigne cites the words of 1 Corinthians 3:20: ‘‘The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.’’ S. John Holyoake finds at least five distinct motives for self-revelation named within the text itself: an attack on the hypocrisy of an age too concerned with appearances, an attempt to converse with the reader, a means of managing his
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grief over the loss of his friend, a desire to find certainty in at least one domain (the self) after losing it in the broader world, and an inability to write about anything else (Holyoake 1971: 268–9). But such a list could easily be expanded. 15For example, M. A. Screech in his introduction to The Complete Essays (Montaigne 1991: xvii, xliii), and Ann Hartle (2003: 186). The chapter in Hartle’s book in which this citation plays a pivotal role – ‘‘The Great-Souled Man Without Pride’’ – covers some of the ground that I am addressing here. It is impossible to extract the argument in this chapter from the more general argument of her book and so I have not attempted to compare her interpretation to my own, but interested readers will find her discussion of Montaigne’s ‘‘Christianizing’’ of Aristotle’s ethics fascinating and provocative. 16 For instance, consider this passage in which Montaigne seems to deny entirely the claim that each individual contains the general Form of humanity: ‘‘It seems to each man that the master Form of Nature is in himself, as a touchstone by which he may compare all the other forms. . . . What brute-like Stupidity!’’ (2:32, 821; cf. 3:13, 1213). 17 In The Company We Keep, Wayne Booth provides and engaging and extensive discussion of the role of the ‘‘assumed norms’’ of a text as these interact with the reader’s response to the work; it is from Booth that I draw the phrase (Booth 1988).
Bibliography Aristotle (1962) Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Oswald, New York: Macmillan. ——(1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume Two, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Augustine (1960) The Confessions of St Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan, NewYork: Doubleday (Image Books). Booth, W. (1988) The Company We Keep, Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Gusdorf, G. (1980) ‘‘Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,’’ in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, trans. James Olney, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 28–48. Hartle, A. (2003) Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher, Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Holyoake, S. J. (1971) ‘‘Montaigne’s Attitude to Memory,’’ French Studies, 25: 257–70. Marchi, D. M. (1994) Montaigne Among the Moderns: Receptions of the ‘‘Essais’’, Providence RI: Berghahn Books. de Mijolla, E. (1994) Autobiographical Quests: Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Wordsworth, Richmond VA: University of Virginia Press. de Montaigne, M. (1991) Michel de Montaigne: The Complete Essays, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rousseau, J.-J. (1995) The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Volume 5, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly, Boston MA: University Press of New England. Starobinski, J. (1985) Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Winter, I. (1972) ‘‘ ‘Mon Livre et Moi’: Montaigne’s Deepening Evaluation of His Own Work,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 25: 297–307.
5
Exile and philosophy Descartes André Gombay
1. Let me begin by drawing attention to two facts. The first concerns Descartes, the man: after childhood and adolescence, he lived most of his life away from France, the last twenty years in the Low Countries. More striking still: we have not a single philosophical text that we know to have been written by him in the land of his birth. Every work about whose composition we have reliable information was written while he lived abroad. 2. Now to a second fact, also historical: among philosophers, this predicament is in no way confined to Descartes. Go back merely to the seventeenth century, and count the philosophers who have since then lived long stretches of their lives in exile, chosen or forced – or who at least have written their main philosophical work while residing outside their native country. They are not exactly few. Grotius escaped from a Dutch jail in 1621, hidden under books, and wrote the De jure belli ac pacis in Compiègne, near Paris. Paris is also where Hobbes wrote the Leviathan some twenty-five years later, away from the Glorious Revolution. Spinoza did not quite flee but, formally expelled in 1656 from the Amsterdam Jewish community, he lived the rest of his life largely away from that city. Locke wrote the bulk of the Essay in Paris. Hume went to Descartes’ school-town, La Flèche, to compose his Treatise. Think of Rousseau; closer to us, of Nietzsche; and closer still, think of the philosopher who perhaps most resembles Descartes in life-pattern, outlook and character: Wittgenstein. 3. Naturally, this has not been the fate of all major philosophers; yet as a group, they stand out in this respect, that so many of them were abroad when they evolved their main thoughts. By way of contrast, think of composers – Bach Mozart, Beethoven; or novelists – Dickens, Tolstoi, Proust. Again this is no universal truth, but these other great minds seem to have felt at home in the land of their birth, ready to write down their inspiration there. Does it mean, perhaps, that philosophers are peculiar in this respect – that they are misfits, or natural foreigners? 4. There is of course one famous text – at the baptismal font of our subject – to say that they are: it is book VI of the Republic. Remember the setting. Socrates has been describing the city where justice reigns: such a
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city, he proclaims, will come into being only when a philosopher is its king – an announcement that excites surprise, even laughter, among the audience. So Socrates sets out to counter the derision. Of course in the city as it now exists, the philosopher is a misfit – and here (496d) comes the unforgettable image: the philosopher is like the traveler who takes shelter behind a wall, waiting for the hail- or sand-storm to pass. He is an exile in his own land. And of course, as we learn from another dialogue – the Crito – the matter of exile eventually confronted Socrates more literally: he had to choose between leaving Athens, and death. We know his choice. 5. Here is a Socratic paradox, then: the philosopher who is already a foreigner refuses to become a foreigner. But there is, I think, an even deeper tension in Socrates’ stance. On the one hand (book VI of the Republic) he stresses the solitude, isolation, even alienation, of the philosopher. On the other, he has a conception of the link between philosopher and audience that makes the philosopher anything but isolated. I have in mind the Gorgias and the distinction that Socrates draws there (471e–472c) between two ways of arguing: the way of the law courts, and the way of philosophy. In more modern vocabulary (think of labor disputes) the contrast would be between arbitration and negotiation. In a law court, the two opposing parties each seek to convince a third, the judge or arbiter; and they do this by each bringing as many witnesses as they can to testify on their behalf. In philosophy, only one witness counts – the other party: If I cannot produce in you yourself a single witness in agreement with my views, I consider that I have accomplished nothing worth speaking of, in the matter under debate; and the same is true of you also, if I, one solitary witness, do not testify for you and if you do not leave all these others out of account. (472b–c) The ideal of philosophy is intellectual negotiation, not intellectual arbitration: that is why he, Socrates, will engage only in dialogue – where he will not proceed to the next step unless he has secured his interlocutor’s full, heartfelt, assent to the step he is now taking. 6. I have spent so much time talking about Socrates, because the tension (or if you prefer a grander term, the dialectic) between foreignness and intimacy that is discernible in his life and his conception of philosophy, is also present in Descartes; what is more, in not entirely dissimilar ways. 7. So let me come to Descartes and speak a little about his life and writings. As I have said, from the age of twenty-two he spent almost no time in France. Why? The simplest and most likely answer is that he yearned for aloofness and anonymity – many events in his life testify to this. For example, urging a fellow Frenchman to come and live in Amsterdam, he writes: ‘‘in this large city, everyone but myself is engaged in trade and hence so attentive to his own profit that I could live here all my life without being
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seen by a soul’’ (letter to Balzac, 5 May 1631; AT 1, 203; CSMK: 31). This is praise. Some years later he tells Mersenne of having gone to hear a well known Calvinist preacher, 1
but in such a manner that anyone seeing me would know I wasn’t there as a believer. For I came in only as the sermon began, stood by the door and, the moment it was finished, went out without staying for the rituals. (letter to Mersenne, 13 November 1639; AT 2, 620; not in CSMK) Delight at not being seen, arriving late, standing by the door, walking out early: these are deep traits of Descartes’ personality. Perhaps his sense of solitude is most vividly expressed in the famous image of his looking out of the windows of his study, and wondering whether the ‘‘people’’ whom he sees might not just be hats and coats covering automata. The Socratic image of taking shelter behind a wall looks almost benign when compared to Descartes’ musing – in fact it has fueled speculation that he might have suffered a touch (or even more than a touch) of schizophrenia. During his twenty years in the Low Countries, Descartes moved seventeen times; he sent letters from false addresses; he asked acquaintances not to divulge where he was living. This is not to say he had no friends – Constantijn Huygens, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Pierre Chanut are proof to the contrary. Still, here is the motto that in November 1646 he wrote Chanut he had adopted from Seneca: A sad death awaits him Who, too well known to all, Dies unknown to himself. (letter to Chanut, 1 November 1646; AT 4, 537; CSMK: 300) Descartes also wrote these lines as an autograph to Cornelis de Glarges, 10 November 1644 (AT 4, 726). Notice the stark conjunction: ‘‘too well known to all . . . unknown to himself.’’ Did Descartes perhaps think that these two conditions went together? As with Socrates, we are now approaching a paradox – the tension between life and work. 8. Let us look at the work, then, at any rate the main items. These are four books – two in Latin and two in French, all initially published in Amsterdam. They are: 1637: the Essais (in English, Essays), preceded by the Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method); 1641: the Meditationes de prima philosophia and Objectiones cum responsionibus authoris (Meditations on First Philosophy and Objections and Replies); 1644: the Principia philosophiæ (Principles of Philosophy); and 1649: the Passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul).
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The Essays and the Principles contain much that is (in our terms) scientific rather than philosophical; I shall not concern myself with that aspect of them. As everyone knows, the Meditations are an expanded version of the fourth part of the Discourse; and in turn, the first (i.e. philosophical) part of the Principles is an abbreviated version of the Meditations. So there is a clear thread between these three works – they are statements of the same thoughts. But how different they are, in their mode of expression! The Discourse and Meditations are in the first person; the Principles consist of short, impersonal, numbered paragraphs. Let me hazard a not-so-wild guess. Had we only that last work, Descartes would not be read today as much as he is: the Principles interest only Cartesian scholars. One might reply: ah, that is because we have the other, more lively, versions. Perhaps. But we should remember that the Passions of the Soul, which Descartes also chose to write in Principles-like style, i.e. in impersonal numbered paragraphs, are by and large also read only by scholars – even though there is no other version available, and the thoughts they voice are interesting and important. The conclusion to draw is that posterity has been interested in Descartes largely, perhaps even exclusively, insofar as he is a first-person philosopher. 9. But of course, there is first person and first person. The Discourse is standard autobiography – a narrative by Descartes of his own life, including a decision he took three years earlier not to publish the principles of his physics (AT 6, 74; CSM: 1, 149). One section I have always found interesting is part VI, which is largely reminiscences about engaging in scientific work: a lesson Descartes says he has learnt is that one is better off relying on paid underlings than working with colleagues of one’s own rank – these can never be trusted to do what they have promised (AT 6, 72; CSM: 1, 148). Descartes is no charter member of the République des lettres. The original title of the Discourse was Traité de la méthode, but Descartes decided to change it. In a letter to Mersenne of April 1637 (AT 1, 349; CSMK: 53) he explains why: I have not put Treatise on the Method but Discourse on the Method – which means Preface or Notice on the Method – in order to show that I do not intend to teach the method, but only to speak of it. As can be seen from what I say it consists more in practise than in theory; and I call the treatises that follow, Essays in this Method, because I contend that what they contain could not have been found without it, and one can tell its worth through them. About Descartes’ sincerity – re the absence of any didactic intent – I leave you to decide. What is interesting, though, is the implicit idea that this absence would be made manifest to the reader through the style of the piece, namely that it was an autobiography: is there really this rift between didacticism and autobiography? Ironically, posterity seems to have proved Descartes right on this occasion. Somehow, his declaring that he would not have
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discovered what he did, had he not followed the rules outlined in part II of the Discourse, has not resulted in their widespread adoption. So perhaps he was right to disclaim didactic intentions. 10. Let me turn to the work that has made Descartes ‘‘the father of modern philosophy,’’ the Meditations. Here is a book written in the first person, but not a straight autobiography as the Discourse on Method had been. No, the text is in the present tense: these are thoughts unfolding right now. And they will continue to unfold for six days, as many days as there are Meditations – that fiction being more or less sustained throughout. What is more, inside a Meditation there are no paragraphs, the text goes on without a break.2 The whole work is without a footnote, without a single mention of any philosopher, or anyone else for that matter.3 In the entire piece there is just one proper noun, God. Commentators have not been slow in perceiving a religious aura about the book. There is that noun, of course – repeated eighty times; and also a more general fact, a lineage. From his schooldays Descartes would have been acquainted with a tradition of Christian religious writing called, as it happens, ‘‘meditation.’’ Works in that lineage had two standard features: they were written in the first person – the reader being so to speak (and I speak Freudianly here) asked to identify with the writer; and they were ascensional – the meditator, as he or she went on, getting ever closer to the Truth. The first objective is stressed by Descartes even before he begins: ‘‘I would not urge anyone to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me,’’ says the Preface to the reader (AT 7, 9; CSM: 2, 8). This is not a mere figure of style, but should be taken literally: it accounts for example for the bare, untechnical aspect of the book. There is no need of footnotes – Descartes is not writing for scholars, not seeking to situate himself with respect to past thinkers in the field. Nor is he speaking from on high – this is not a master addressing pupils: what is sought is a relationship where reader and writer become mentally one. Incidentally, the notion of making oneself one with someone or something, will (as we shall see) play a key role at an important moment of Descartes’ progress, so the thought voiced in the Preface would come naturally enough to him. And of course that thought is attractive anyhow – don’t we want teachers to be on a level with us? But sadly, there is also a downside to this approach, at least as Descartes uses it. As we know, he was faced with questions and objections: Mersenne had solicited them on his behalf. Well, more often than not Descartes is abusive as he replies; he regards his objector as wilfully inattentive or ill intentioned – he has not really tried to meditate with him. For example he never addresses Hobbes by name, only refers to him as ‘‘the Englishman’’; Gassendi, he calls ‘‘oh, flesh’’; Bourdin, he thinks obtuse and wants erased from the French edition. The tone is of course different when he answers queens or princesses, but overall one gets the definite impression that Descartes does not regard philosophy as a subject where genuine and honest differences of opinion may occur. Spiritual intimacy has its costs.
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The second standard feature of traditional meditation, the ascensional character, is also clearly discernible in the text. It is as though Descartes were climbing a mountain – not straight up but obliquely, circling in a spiral so that the old landscapes keep reappearing, each time seen from higher up. Even the titles of the individual Meditations bear witness to this. What can be called in doubt, says the First; On truth and falsity, will say the Fourth. Likewise, The nature of the human mind; that it is better known than the body (Second) will be echoed by The real distinction between mind and body (Sixth); and Of God, that he exists (Third) heralds Of God again, that he exists (Fifth). The spiraling, too, is apt to create problems. Things viewed early in the climb may well appear different – perhaps clearer – from a higher vantage point: so as we see them again, should we (the readers) simply disregard the vision we had three days ago? Or rather say that we didn’t have a full sight then? And there are even deeper headaches. Is it plain that the view from the higher coil will always be clearer than it was lower down? Could it not in fact have become the opposite – blurred by the height or the rarefied air? Nor is this a worry I raise in the abstract: in one specific case and hardly a minor one – the division of mind and body – the philosopher whom posterity has remembered is much more the Descartes of Meditation Two than the Descartes supposedly at the apex of the climb, in Meditation Six. This is a tricky question, which I shall not seek to answer in this paper. 11. Back to autobiography and exile. It would be no exaggeration to say that the course of Descartes’ final years was greatly affected by his acquaintance with two women whose lives were entwined with preoccupations of exile. One was a princess, Elisabeth of Bohemia; and the other a queen, Christina of Sweden. Though there would also be much to say about Elisabeth, I shall confine my remarks to Christina. Four years after Descartes’ brief sojourn in Sweden, Christina abdicated her throne – the official reason being that she wished to convert to Roman Catholicism. She eventually settled in Rome, and in 1667 was asked by defenders of Descartes to write a letter attesting how influential he had been in her conversion. By then Descartes’ work had been placed on the Index of the Catholic Church, and the defenders hoped this might help reverse the decision. Here is Christina’s testimony, as reported by Arckenholtz:4 he contributed much to our glorious conversion: Providence used him, and our illustrious friend Monsieur Chanut, to give us the first glimpses of the Light. (Arckenholtz 1751: 19–20) Not exactly profuse praise – Christina was doubtless just being agreeable. In fact we have no evidence that she and Descartes ever discussed established religion; given his well known reluctance to do so, the odds are great that they did not. However, there is a another matter that almost certainly also
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figured in Christina’s decision to renounce the throne, and to which discussions she had had with Descartes are indeed very relevant. Let me turn to it. Go back to Descartes’ letter of 1 November 1646, where he discloses to Chanut his new life motto. A few lines afterwards, he writes: From the fact that I have studied the passions, you seem to infer that I must no longer have any. But let me tell you that in examining the passions I have found almost all of them to be good, and to be so useful in this life that our soul would have no reason to wish to remain joined to its body for even one minute if it could not feel them. This has quite a different ring from the intellectualist catechism of Meditations Two and Six. Anyhow, it encouraged Chanut – France’s attaché in Stockholm – to wade into a new area of discussion. In his reply (1 December 1646: AT 10: 609–13) he recounts how, in a recent conversation with Christina, he and the Queen were on opposite sides concerning the question of which is worse, love misplaced or hate misplaced? Chanut will not reveal who stood where; but would he, Descartes, please offer his verdict on the matter? Descartes replied immediately – one of the longest letters we have from his pen (1 February 1647; AT 4: 600–17; CSMK: 305–14). His guess, he writes, is that Chanut has a ‘‘very ardent affection’’ for the Queen (611). As for the question that divided them, everything depends on how the word worse is taken (613). If it applies to the character of the person, hatred makes you worse. If it applies to events in the world, love is more apt to lead to excesses and misery. As Théophile de Viau said, Noble Paris put all Troy to fire To quench his own heart’s flame.5 A crafty piece of diplomacy, isn’t it? But in the pages that preceded, Descartes had been more direct, advancing at least three theses about love: (a) ‘‘no matter how unbalanced [déréglé], love has always the good for its object’’ (614); (b) ‘‘[love] makes the soul imagine lovable qualities in objects in which, at another time, it would see nothing but faults’’ (603); (c) ‘‘it is in the nature of love to make one consider oneself and the object loved as a single whole of which one is but a part’’ (611). None of these pronouncements is extraordinary. The first is of course to be understood intentionally: what we love, we take to be good. A connected point is made in the second remark, only more emphatically. Again, this is hardly an original thought – it was in fact a commonplace in the seventeenth century: think only of Titania’s enchantment at Bottom’s asinine
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brayings. Likewise for the image of love in remark (c), love as makingoneself-one with another person: it too has a long literary history. Remember Aristophanes’ tale in Plato’s Symposium (189d–193a) – those spherical creatures, our ancestors, cleft in two by the jealous gods, each half forever fated to search for the other, the halves sometimes fortunate enough to succeed in their quest; love, the rapturous embrace of their long-sought reunion. A haunting myth. Descartes’ letter elicited a prompt reply from Chanut (11 May 1647; AT 10: 618–24). The Queen, Chanut tells his correspondent, had pressed him to show her Descartes’ letter; eventually he read it to her (perhaps omitting the lines about ‘‘ardent affection’’?). Christina listened attentively and was moved to question Chanut at length about the writer. From Chanut’s answers she concluded that Descartes ‘‘must be the happiest of all humans’’; as far as his opinions on the nature of love went, ‘‘she could not judge a painting whose model she did not know, never having felt that passion’’ (620). She did have a question about a side-remark of Descartes’ on infinity and the world, which Chanut duly transmits. And he ends with a question that he declares his own: ‘‘what secret impulse makes us love one person rather than another, before we know their merit?’’ Again Descartes responds immediately (6 June 1647; AT 5: 50–8; CSMK: 319–24), first about infinity, then about Chanut’s ‘‘secret impulse’’. That impulse, he thinks, is sometimes located in the folds of the brain. And he gives this example (57): As a child I was in love with a girl of my own age, who was slightly cross-eyed. The imprint made on my brain by these wayward eyes became so mingled with whatever else had aroused in me the feeling of love that for years afterwards, when I saw a cross-eyed woman, I was more prone to love her than any other, simply for that flaw – all the while not knowing this was the reason. But then I reflected and realized it was a flaw: I am smitten no longer. Were a word like ‘‘repression’’ present in these lines, might we not be tempted to ascribe them to a more recent (Austrian) thinker? 12. Why have I spent so long on this episode and on these texts? My reasons have to do with both Christina and Descartes; with both exile and autobiography. Exile. Though never officially invoked, one factor in Christina’s decision to abdicate was undoubtedly her reluctance to yield to the pressure exerted on her, that she marry and produce an heir to the throne; a reluctance perhaps linked to her bisexuality. It does not seem wild speculation to suppose that the questions she asked Descartes via Chanut – about misplaced love and misplaced hate, about falling in love regardless of merit – were at least in part prompted by her complex sexual preoccupations. Christina did not marry. Later in life she wrote aphorisms – a fashionable practice in the
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seventeenth century; aphorisms that were published after her death in a volume called L’Ouvrage du loisir,6 and included remarks like this (#347): You need more courage to expose yourself to the perils and ills of marriage than to expose yourself to war; and more important for my purpose, like this (#1064): Love warms, brings light, purifies; it detaches one, unites one with its only object; as soon as you love, all is accomplished. It is difficult not to hear here an echo of the 1 February 1647 letter where the philosopher declared that love made one view oneself as but one half of a larger whole. It is time that we turned to that thought – insofar as it touches Descartes’ philosophy. I know of no text before the correspondence with Christina (via Chanut) where Descartes discusses or even mentions the topic of love; but the feeling will have a prominent place in the Passions of the Soul, where it is called one of the six primitive human passions (part 2, article 69; AT 11: 380; CSM 1: 353). It is then defined as follows: Love is an emotion of the soul. . . . that incites it to join itself by will [de volonté] to objects that seem suitable to it. . . . By the word ‘‘will’’, I mean here not desire – which is a different passion, directed to the future – but the assent [consentement] by which you consider yourself from this very moment so joined to what you love that you imagine a whole of which you think yourself but one part, and the object of your love the other. These are articles 79 and 80 (AT 11, 387; CSM 1, 356). Much here is a replay of the February 1647 letter; but two bits of tune are not. The first is the reference to will: we are told that the lover’s soul joins itself de volonté with the loved person. ‘‘De volonté’’ is an odd phrase, even in seventeenth-century French – surely Descartes cannot be saying that we love at will, that loving is a matter of choice: did he choose to be attracted to cross-eyed women? What, then, does he mean? What exactly is involved in ‘‘joining oneself by will’’ with someone? For an answer, we need to look at the other apparent novelty in the text – the description of will as a faculty of assent (in French, consentement). This of course isn’t new, it harks back to a doctrine first put forward in Meditation Four and never renounced afterward, that whenever we judge or believe, two mental acts occur: an act of intellect and an act of will. The plainest statement is in the Principles (part 1, article 34; AT 8a: 18; CSM 1: 204): the intellect is needed for judging, since we cannot judge what we in no way grasp; but the will is also needed, so that assent [assensio] may be given to what is in some way grasped.
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So Descartes will maintain, for example, that supposing God to be a deceiver is worlds apart from believing that God is a deceiver – or rather, it is one mental act apart. When you merely suppose, you do not yet assent; or as we might say nowadays, you are not committed to the truth of any proposition. Similarly, if you are merely deliberating whether to accept the apple that an old woman is offering you, you have not assented – you are not committed to – any course of action. Or we might say, you have not made-yourself-one with any course of action; just as we might have said that we have not made-ourselvesone with any state of affairs as long as we merely suppose that God might deceive.7 13. So when we decide, we assent – we commit ourselves – to a certain course of action. When we believe, we assent to a state of affairs. And when we love, we assent to a person. Suppose that you regard the mental act of assenting as important; odds are that you will see it occurring – or not occurring – in other, more complex, situations. In a fragment of (straight) autobiography he offers at the end of the Sixth set of Replies (AT 7: 440; CSM 2: 296), Descartes tells how, after he had put forward what he took be a fully conclusive argument for the separation of mind and body, he somehow did not fully manage to convince himself of its conclusion: I was in the same plight as astronomers who have established by argument that the sun is several times larger than the earth, and yet cannot prevent themselves judging that it is smaller when they actually look at it. Descartes and his astronomers are not unique. Freud, for example, was often asked why patients needed to continue their analysis – sometimes for months and years after the analyst had diagnosed their condition: couldn’t the analyst just tell them? His cryptic answer was that there is knowledge and knowledge: ‘‘il y a fagots et fagots” – quoting Molière.8 The distinction that Freud is pointing to is one, I take it, that we understand well enough in an intuitive way; it is also one that we might couch in Cartesian vocabulary. Descartes, we might say, knew in some impersonal manner what he had proved – but without quite assenting to it, without quite making-himself-one with it. A like fate would, according to Freud, befall the analytic patient, were the analyst simply to inform him or her of the diagnosis: even if that information were in some sense accepted, an important mental act would still be wanting, ‘‘assent’’ – an act without which recovery will not take place. I can now return to where I began, to my Socratic paradox: the dialectic between foreignness and intimacy. Think of Descartes. In his worldly dealings he is a committed foreigner: ‘‘I could live here all my life without being seen by a soul,’’ enthuses the letter about Amsterdam. Yet in his thoughts of how individuals can live with one another, or live with the information they have acquired, he has the ideal of an ultra-intimate relation – making-oneself-onewith. He also identifies the mental faculty that makes such a relation possible:
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voluntas, he calls it; or volonté, when he writes in French. It is a faculty omnipresent in our lives; it determines love, decisions and beliefs. And it also determines conviction – a state of mind that goes beyond recognition of the truth. Let us ask once more, why are the Meditations written as they are? Yes, we may grant that the first-person mode was adopted by Descartes so as to bring readers to identify with him; this involves their assent. But there may yet be another assent he was aiming to foster: his own. Suppose you are in the midst of making a discovery – for example that your dog is a mere clock – which you know will offend deep prejudices of yours, inherited from childhood; so that you risk sharing the fate of these many astronomers who, though they know (perfectly well in a sense) the true dimensions of the sun, yet cannot help believing that it is a mid-sized object when they actually face it. How to ward off that fate, or at least try? Might not one possible strategy be to couch your proof, your conclusion, not in the impersonal timeless present of Platonic geometry, but somehow in a real first-person present tense – you are finding the truth right now! Yes, that is artificial in a sense, a stylistic device. But it might lessen the risk of your living in exile, estranged from what you know.
Notes 1
2 3 4 5 6 7
8
As is standard, I first refer by entries beginning AT to the volume and page number of the Œuvres de Descartes, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (revised edn, Paris: Vrin / CNRS, 1964–76); and in the same manner, by CSM, to the most extensive English edition, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91). This has three volumes, of which the third is devoted to the Correspondence and involves a further translator, Anthony Kenny. It is referred to as CSMK. I exaggerate: this is true only of the first three Meditations. There is one break in Meditation IV; four in the next; and about a dozen in the last. Modern editions have not followed Descartes; they fracture the text throughout. Again I exaggerate, but only microscopically: Archimedes is mentioned in the Second Meditation (AT 7, 24; CSM 2, 16) – as part of a figure of style. Arckenholtz 1751: vol. 4, 19–20. AT traces these lines to Théophile de Viau: Stances pour Mademoiselle de M. See de Viau 1856. Kristina (Vasa) of Sweden (1906) provides a French version of these maxims. These are both Cartesian examples. Descartes had to defend himself against the charge that it was blasphemous to even suppose that God was a deceiver: his standard answer (cf. letter to the curators of the University of Leiden, 4 May 1647 (AT 5, 9; CSMK, 316); likewise four years earlier, letter to Buitendijk (AT 4, 64; CSMK, 230)) is to stress the distinction between supposing and believing. As for the poisoned apple, it appears in the Fifth Reply (AT 7, 377; CSM 2, 259). The reference made in lecture 18 of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud 1978: 322) is to Le Médecin malgré lui, Act I scene 5.
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Bibliography Arckenholtz, J. (1751) Mémoires concernant Christine, Reine de Suède, 4 vols, Amsterdam and Leipzig: Jean Schreuder and Pierre Mortier. Descartes, R. (1964–76) Oeuvres de Descartes, eds Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, revised edn, Paris: Vrin / CNRS. ——(1985–91) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (and Anthony Kenny for vol. III, Correspondence) 3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Viau, T. (1856) ‘‘Stances pour Mademoiselle de M . . . ,’’ in Théophile de Viau, Oeuvres complètes, new edition, Paris: F. Janet, vol. I, p. 200. Freud, S. (1978) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, eds James Strachey and Angela Richards, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kristina (Vasa) of Sweden (1906) Pensées de Christine, reine de Suède, Stockholm: Norstedt.
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Scrissela da filosofo The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself Domenico Pietropaolo
Three years after the publication of his autobiography in 1728, Vico put together the material for an addendum in view of a possible revised edition. In these notes he also took into account the writing and publication of the autobiography itself, since in his estimation it had certainly been one of the important events in his recent past. He provided details of the circumstances in which the autobiography was published and offered a concise description of the objectives he had intended to reach and of the intellectual mode that he had adopted in writing it. ‘‘Scrissela da filosofo,’’ he says in the thirdperson style of the autobiography itself, ‘‘he wrote it as a philosopher,’’ an expression by which he means not only that the autobiography deals with philosophical themes but also that it deals with them philosophically. Vico had no doubts that The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself, as his autobiography is called, was a work of philosophy, to be included in the canon of his other philosophical works on its own merits rather than as a biographical introduction to them. For Vico the autobiographical exercise was a form of philosophical research which used introspection and self-narration as methods of analysis and presentation, consistently with the larger concerns of his thought, which are about the self-education of man and nations in history.1 Though in modern editions Vico’s notes have been mechanically added to the text of the autobiography proper, lengthening it by about a third, they were left by him among his unpublished papers, where they remained for almost another century, until they were published as an autobiographical addendum by the Marquis of Villarosa.2 In the state in which the author left them, the notes were probably not considered by him ready for publication, though in finished form they could have served as material for a new and revised edition of the entire autobiography. Such a revision, however, could not have been limited to a mechanical accretion of the text, since the new material was of a strikingly different character, both in style and thematic content. It contains bibliography, a description of the contextual setting of the autobiography itself, anecdotes, letters, and excerpts from published works – hardly material to which the words scrissela da filosofo could be said to apply. If it were simply added to the original text, this unedited material
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would alter its character considerably and forcibly modify the paradigm of perception through which we would have to read it. Unfortunately modern editors frequently publish the additional text, not as an appendix, but as a legitimate continuation of the original, whose stylistic and conceptual unity they thereby sacrifice. In some editions, including a prestigious one by Fausto Nicolini, the addendum is so closely grafted onto the text that it is not possible to determine where the original ends and the extension begins (Vico 1953: 3–106). If the autobiography is considered to be no more than a source of information about the author, the integration of the addendum makes good sense because it helps complete the picture, though the philosophical nature of the original part of the text contrasts heavily with the non-philosophical nature of the continuation. But if the autobiography is regarded as a work endowed with the kind of completeness and coherence, rhetorical and speculative, that enable Vico to judge that he wrote it as a philosopher, the addendum does not integrate the original but disfigures it, while forcing upon the reader a different set of hermeneutical coordinates. My purpose in this paper is to explore the meaning of Vico’s self-assessment, first in the editorial setting in which he conceived his autobiography and then in the context of the stage of development that his thought had reached when he wrote it, all against the general background of the philosophical and rhetorical issues that he more than likely had to deal with in his studies and in his daily professional life as holder of the chair of rhetoric at the University of Naples. The fact that, despite his routine activities as professor of rhetoric, Vico wrote his autobiography as a philosopher who was deeply concerned with the education of men and nations could probably be divined from the intellectual circumstances in which he first conceived it. The external context was a reform movement in general pedagogy, centered in Venice and led by the Friulian nobleman and man of letters Giovannartico di Porcia. At that time the teaching of philosophy in schools was largely a matter of imparting propositional systems in every branch of the discipline through treatises and manuals, such as those that Vico himself had to study in his youth, though he did so mostly at home alone. These standard texts included the Summulae logicales of Peter of Spain, various works of medieval and Renaissance scholasticism, and, especially, the Disputationes metaphysicae of Francis Suarez. The pursuit of more recent work in the discipline was left as a personal research choice for a more mature age. The reform designed by Porcia sought to make the school curriculum more modern and less abstract by including the philosophies of contemporary thinkers as well as accounts of their intellectual development written by themselves, thereby supplementing propositional with narrative systems and transforming the discipline into a living tradition. The prototype that they must have all had in mind, though perhaps critically, was the self-narration of Descartes in his Discourse on Method, but the inspiration for recasting philosophical pedagogy had no doubt come from Leibniz. In a famous letter to Louis Bourguet dated 22 March 1714 on the philosopher Antonio Conti and on the Venetian intellec-
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tual scene, Leibniz suggested that it would benefit research and study immensely if, along with their more technical works, living philosophers were to publish the story of their discoveries: Descartes would have had us believe that he had read scarcely anything. That was a bit too much. Yet it is good to study the discoveries of others in a way that discloses to us the source of the inventions and renders them in a sort our own. And I wish that authors would give us the histories of their discoveries and the steps by which they have arrived at them. When they neglect to do so, we must try to divine these steps, in order to profit more from their works.3 Leibniz’s idea must have reached the Venetian philosophical intelligentsia, among whom Bourguet had friends, and there given rise to discussions on the interesting pedagogical and editorial ventures that it implied. Porcia does not mention Leibniz in his project proposal, but, as a member of that intelligentsia, he was no doubt familiar with the discussions it stimulated. Porcia worked intermittently on his project for several years, and eventually made a list of the most important living Italian scholars and invited them to write the histories of their development, their intellectual autobiographies, for publication in an encyclopedic volume on the state of learning in Italy. Predictably enough, he experienced enormous difficulties, due no doubt to the size and novelty of the undertaking, and, even after a few years, found himself unable to publish the planned collection. In 1728 he finally decided to publish a description of his intended reform, called Progetto ai letterati d’Italia per scrivere le loro vite, and a sample autobiography in the first issue of a new journal, the Raccolta di opuscoli scientifici e filologici, promising to publish other autobiographies at regular intervals. Since there was not yet a term in the language that could adequately designate the genre that we call autobiography, he proposed the term periautography, meaning writing about the self, a word coined for that purpose by Carlo Lodoli on Greek stems. As is well known, the project was later abandoned. The only periautography actually issued by Porcia was The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself. Porcia’s proposal was controversial since it entailed severe criticism of contemporary educational institutions, most of which were either Jesuit or operated largely under the influence of the Jesuit system. In its pars destruens Porcia’s reform was meant to reveal deficiencies of method, vision and materials in the received pedagogical tradition, while in its pars construens it was meant to replace old with living masters, ready to show not only their path to discovery but also their errors and their failures, in order to enable students to feel that they were on intimate terms with the great minds of their day. To accomplish this, the scholars who agreed to Porcia’s proposal would have to become historians of themselves, sufficiently convinced of the importance of their achievements and sufficiently persuaded of the usefulness of the project not to fear the risk of vulnerability to attack.
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Throughout the eighteenth century autobiography was commonly understood to be simply a species of biography – biography of the self. A title such as The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself plainly presupposes this. Moreover, to the extent that biographical narratives, whether of the self or of another, are intentionally truthful, they are also a part of historiography. Indeed, in the opening line of his life of Antonio Carafa, Vico himself claimed that biography is the best part of the art of history: ‘‘ea procul dubio est quae clarorum hominum vitas posteritati consignat’’ (Vico 1997: 31). As a form of the historian’s art, biography requires truthfulness. To write truthfully, of course, means not to alter the facts and not to pass over crucial details in silence so as to fabricate an artificial image of the protagonist. Though his contribution to society was not in an area of public life from which he might have derived tangible benefits, Vico was conscious of the fact that the recognition of his accomplishments implicit in the invitation to write his own life might be seen by others as a temptation to alter the facts, so as to enable himself to claim a more self-sufficient intellectual development and hence to deny the contribution of other studies to the shaping of his mind. That is what Descartes had done, according to Vico, just as Leibniz reproached him in his letter to Bourguet. Therefore, at the very beginning of his text, Vico pledged to compose his autobiography truthfully, ‘‘con ingenuità dovuta da istorico,’’ that is to say with the candor of a historian, from the beginning to the publication of the first edition of the New Science in 1725 (Vico 1970: 6). It will be recalled that the differences, philosophical and philological, between the first and the second versions of the New Science are many and profound, significant enough to induce Vico to repudiate the text of the first almost in its entirety in the text of the second.4 Among the philological changes with important consequences for Vico’s philosophy, the greatest concerns Homer, considered a historical individual in the first New Science but dissolved away in the second as an imaginative universal of bards and storytellers of heroic Greece. As a result, Homer is made to function as the largest avenue to the poetic logic and concrete metaphysics of pre-rational thinking. Among the philosophico-rhetorical differences, an important one concerns the more mechanical application to Dante, in the first version of the New Science, of the independently developed idea that mind evolves in history from poetry to metaphysics, a fact that forces on Vico the conclusion, later much attenuated, that scholasticism irremediably tainted Dante’s poetic genius with a capacity for abstraction.5 Among the purely philosophical differences, by far the most significant is the centrality given in the second version to the epistemological principle that verum factum convertuntur, the presence of which is virtually indiscernible in the first version.6 In fact, if we read all of Vico’s works to the time of the autobiography without taking into account the development of his philosophy in the works that followed it, we would surely conclude that the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy is much more intimate in them
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than is generally thought, and that perhaps even the famous epistemological principle itself may have been suggested to Vico by his work as a professor of rhetoric and by his research into the evolution of law. The cultivation of oratorical ingenuity, central to the literary as well as the juristic tradition, equips the mind with the ability to reconfigure images and concepts with precision, and thereby to discover truth by the imaginative and linguistic assemblage of its parts.7 The one unifying concern throughout is the education of the mind and the growth of civilization – from the age of primitive brutehood to the age of reason in the history of humanity, and from infancy to adulthood in the history of individuals – to a degree of sophistication that urged upon him the need to configure a new science devoted to its rigorous examination and to its systematic theorization. The greatest responsibility in this daunting pedagogical task is assigned to poetry, the practice of which enables man to find his way out of the darkness of ignorance. This applies to the early history of the nations, when the practice of poetry corresponds to the creation of myths, in the subsequent explication of which primitive men find the guidance they needed to construct civilization, the myths only catalyzing their minds to progressive self-refinement. It also applies to developed civilizations. In his oration De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, which, among his works, is the one closest to the pedagogical reform designed by Porcia, Vico maintains the principle that poetry and philosophy use different means to accomplish the same thing: ‘‘Nam poeta delectando docet quae severe philosophus’’ (Vico 1990a: I, 146).8 The only difference is that the philosopher addresses himself to initiated students of his discipline, and so can speak abstractly and with technical arguments, while the poet addresses himself to both the uninitiated and the initiated multitude, and hence must speak concretely and with persuasive examples. At their best, however, both the poet and the philosopher teach us to think, to understand, and to act properly. The schools fail if they expose young students to the austerity of philosophy at too early an age, when they ought to expose them instead to art and eloquence. Vico confesses the difficulties that he himself experienced in attempting to master treatises in logic and metaphysics as a young man and relates how, even as an educated adult well rehearsed in logic and metaphysics, he would experience great delight in discovering relations between apparently unrelated things while he read works of oratory, history and poetry, all of which fall in the domain of rhetoric.9 The mental capacity and habit of thought required to accomplish philosophical tasks is first acquired by way of rhetoric, the very subject which the schools of Vico’s time, following the tradition started at Port Royal, were banishing from the curriculum. The first and most important philosophical task undertaken by Vico in his autobiography is his argument for the primacy of rhetoric in the pursuit of truth. The most relevant part of rhetoric is topics, which is ‘‘the art of finding in anything all that there is in it.’’10 Topics is an art of discovery and invention chronologically and epistemologically prior
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to logic, while logic is an art of judgment that must be presented with ready-made ideas on which to exercise its power of discrimination between true and false. Topics is the art that provides logic with that conceptual material. It is therefore the ultimate source of discourse and the real origin of all new knowledge. Proficiency in topics is acquired by reading works of eloquence, which have, therefore, chronological priority over treatises on abstractions and rules of inference. Such priority, however, does not mean that rigorous training in logical and metaphysical analysis is unnecessary. On the contrary, in every question ‘‘one should look for truth in the infinity of being,’’ an operation that requires careful descent through the hierarchy of genera that link being to species, something that cannot be done without rigor in logic and metaphysics.11 For the student of philosophy, technical training in logic and metaphysics is indispensable, but it must follow adequate training in topics. Vico’s argument in defense of rhetoric, which I have here summarized in its essential features, is ultimately an autobiographical argument. Vico says that he first became acquainted with the philosophical function of topics when he read Cicero as a youth, and that he subsequently applied the theory diligently to himself in order to acquire a habit of mind that would always help him find the appropriate thing to say. When he was later able to add to his training both logic and metaphysics, he was then ready to articulate the great thought that he had been tossing around in his mind without realizing it, namely the principle that later became the New Science. As far as training is concerned, Vico likes to recall that he was always an autodidact, a child teaching himself to think, and takes pleasure in relating the fact that the Cartesian philosopher Gregorio Caloprese would call him autodidascalo, a term that in his circle of acquaintances was normally used to describe only Epicurus (Vico 1970: 27).12 But the significant inference that Vico allows his reader to draw from his autodidacticism is that his life reflects the self-education of man throughout history, for the bestial giants who roamed the wilderness when the diluvial waters receded slowly had to teach themselves to become human and to build civilizations. The manner of this reflection concerns the nature of autobiographical discourse. One of the most interesting arguments put forth by William Spengemann in his history of the genre is that all autobiographies are to some degree allegorical, so much so that allegory can be regarded as a formal requirement of the genre.13 The truth revealed by or in individual episodes of the protagonist’s life lies always somewhere beyond it, in an abstract realm of principles and ideas that constitutes the ultimate reference of the narration. What changes in the history of the genre from the Middle Ages to the present is the manner in which the allegorical truth is signified and the status that it has in the universe of discourse of the community addressed by the author. Thus St Augustine represents life as an allegory of eternal ideas, revealed by the narrator rather than consciously experienced by the protagonist, whereas Benjamin Franklin depicts life as an allegory of reason, shown
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as it is attained gradually by the protagonist through experience, rather than revealed to be operating invisibly from somewhere beyond experience. In the medieval and in the early modern period, the autobiographer could moreover ground the allegorical thrust of his narration in a large fund of beliefs shared by the community to which he and his readers belonged. In more recent times, on the other hand, autobiographers are forced to work in a space characterized by the lack of consensual assumptions, with the frequent consequence that the allegory of the autobiographical self appears to exhibit uniqueness to the reader rather than commonality, since it is grounded in difference rather than similarity. Vico’s autobiography was written in age in which the medieval and premodern perspective on man had not yet fallen into oblivion and perhaps not even into disrepute, despite the advancements of the arts and sciences in the intervening centuries. At this time the modern predilection for singularity had not yet intruded upon the general consciousness and literary taste. Vico shares with St Augustine, to whom he always felt greatly drawn and whom he regarded as his special protector, the notion that the narrator is profoundly different from the protagonist. The narrator is the one who ultimately understands with total clarity the relation between life and the eternal scheme of things, to which the protagonist remains more or less blind. Moreover, Vico shares with Dante, whom he regarded as the almost perfect Tuscan reincarnation of Homer, the idea that life, as experienced by the protagonist, is a channel through which the eternal truths of that scheme gradually manifest themselves to consciousness, in a long, and at times painful, educational process. Vico the narrator, speaking in the here and now of autobiographical reflection, has no difficulty seeing that every significant episode of his past life was a sign of the future to come and the function of a truth of human nature that transcended his particularity. Writing from the calm perspective of the narrator, confident that he is in possession of the key to the structure of history, that he has reached a reliable understanding of the self-education of man, and, moreover, that he has a sufficiently clear grasp of the providential superintendence of God over the scheme of things, Vico sees his younger self laboring under overwhelming intellectual experiences whose significance he was then unable to recognize. Allegory is the device through which he can see his history in relation to the history of humanity. It enables the author to look at and into his own past while remaining firmly planted in the present. He can see the seeds of the present in the past, discerning the oak, as Aristotle once observed, in the acorn from which it has come forth. What is more, allegory allows the author to see that this oak is but one of an immense forest of trees just like it, and that ultimately the only claim to significance available to the self lies in the fact that the private intellectual realm is both a reflection and a small part of a realm so large it can only be imagined. In what way is the allegory of one’s life a concept of philosophical interest? To answer this question we must take into account the rhetorical
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model of autobiographical allegory and the epistemological conditions necessary for its articulation as narrative. In logical terms, the movement of thought from man to mankind and from life to history is a movement from species to genus. In the language of rhetoric the relation of species to genus, or of part to whole, is known as a synecdoche. Synecdochic allegory is a special form of thought; many allegories depend instead on metaphor or simile. What distinguishes synecdoche is that it is grounded in ontological continuity, whereas metaphor and simile, which are frequently used as models of thinking, cannot operate without discontinuity. Synecdochic arguments take the mind from a given order of reality to the higher one that incorporates it. In the search for the truth of an object, the observer is already located within the thing that he proposes to explore and examines it from the inside, by standing firmly on a part of it which he already knows. Unlike metaphorical patters of thought, in which the process of going from known to unknown entails jumping across discontinuities and involves the risk of making unfounded analogies, synecdochic thinking enjoys the privilege of being able to advance by a progressive expansion of the initial cognitive base of the argument. Its significance for philosophical autobiography is immediately obvious: it allows the philosopher to use introspection as a base for arguments about mankind, and recollection as a base for arguments about history. In this rhetorico-philosophical setting, a philosophy of the history of mankind is to a considerable extent a philosophy that can be extrapolated from within the self, acknowledged as a microcosm of both and used as an aid in the disciplined acquisition of knowledge. Considered in the context of the technical self-understanding of the discipline, philosophy by self-narration would probably be a hazardous undertaking in any period of the history of philosophy, but the prospect must have appeared especially risky in an age dominated by rationalism, which had openly repudiated art, rhetoric and history as means to philosophical knowledge. Yet it is not difficult to argue that there is a place for it at the very heart of rationalism. When the focus of thought shifted from the object to be understood to the degree of certainty with which that understanding could be endowed, when the light of intelligence was consciously thrown on the cogito rather than the cogitatum, self-reflection through the filter of language – and hence of rhetoric – became a virtually mandatory step in serious philosophical endeavors. It is not necessary to define self-narration as self-reflection in time, though that is precisely what it is, for us to see that autobiography is likely to flourish even in a climate of severe rationalism once the thinking subject has displaced the external object from center stage. This is true of every self and not simply those that appear to typify conspicuously the structure and history of humanity. Narratively, of course, Vico’s own life is distinct from the life of all other men, but allegorically it does not enjoy any privilege whatsoever. Providence may make some lives easier to decipher as instances of the development of mind – and Vico certainly thought that this was true
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of his own life – but it does not endow them with ontological and epistemological privileges. Every life can be a point of access to the meaning of humanity. Philosophical autobiography is concerned with the ways in which particularity is related to universality. The question is whether autobiographical narration has the status of argument or the status of illustration, whether it should be regarded, that is, as a rhetorical way of discovering new truths or, more simply, as a way of making easier the acquisition of already established truths. There can be no doubt that periautography was initially meant to fall in the latter category: Vico and the other scholars and thinkers invited to participate in the project were to illustrate how they had accomplished their philosophical tasks, so that their example might inspire young students to pursue their own glory. Their narration was meant to be descriptive but not necessarily speculative, in the sense that it was not expected to lead their authors to new discoveries. Yet Vico knew long before he received the flattering invitation to write his autobiography that disciplined self-reflection is a good path to discovery. Recalling his sixth oration at the University of Naples, Vico says, with turns of phrase analogous to those in Leibniz’s letter to Bourguet, that he led his listeners to meditate on themselves so that they might discover how, through the pursuit of eloquence, virtue and knowledge, man may teach himself to overcome his alienation from the rest of humanity, despite his corrupt nature. Self-meditation can enable us to understand that the cognitive and moral development necessary to a single individual in order for him to emerge from his fallen state is reflective of the one required by mankind as a whole to reach harmony of social being (Vico 1970: 35–6). In a synchronic purview, mankind appears to be related to each individual by selfresemblance, in the guise – we might say more geometrico – of a figure containing another congruent to it in all aspects other than scale. The task of philosophy is to focus upon that self-resemblance and to explain it. In the New Science Vico turns synchrony into diachrony. Viewed as the history of mind, the history of humanity is self-reflective throughout in that the pattern that governs the whole, a structure that Vico calls the ideal eternal history of the nations, is also discernible, in reduced scale and through the mechanism of synecdochic allegory, in the intellectual biographies of each of the individuals that comprise it, unless those individuals have been forced into unnatural development by the wrong pedagogy. The relationship of genus to species is not merely a synecdoche of inclusion but also one of structural self-resemblance. In the pattern of cognitive development recurring across boundaries of scale and illustrated in Vico’s own intellectual growth, Croce recognized Vico’s application of the theory of universal history to his own life or particular history. Moreover, it would be difficult to argue that the reverse is not true as well, for this self-resemblance enables the philosopher to descend into the consciousness of primitive humanity by retrieving from his own past the different stages of the structure of mind. In the flow of history as in the flow of life, the pattern of
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cognitive ability seems to evolve, not only in response to the causal sequence of the events, but also, and perhaps chiefly, under the pull of an invisible structure, always latent in the events themselves but manifest only at the end. Retrospection reveals to the autobiographer and to the historian that the flow of intellectual life toward plenitude has been at all times both a causal structuring and a teleological unfolding of mind in man and mankind. The principle of allegorical self-resemblance reveals Vico’s autobiographical narrative to be at once descriptive and speculative. It is descriptive insofar as it informs us of the circumstances and outcome of every significant stage of Vico’s studies, but it is speculative in that the ideas reached by Vico in this manner enable him to ground his philosophy in self-narration. These are arguments that he deals with in full in the New Science, to the composition of which his entire life seemed to have been ordained by God. In the final pages of the autobiography, when he contemplates from above the philosophical tasks that he carried out in his great work, his normally calm – if at times difficult – writing is imbued with unusual ardor. In a paragraph several pages long, of prose so passionate as to suggest by its style that we should almost try to read it in a single breath, he lists without modesty his many philosophical discoveries, in a crescendo of rhythmical sentences that signal the grand finale of both his intellectual life and his narration of it. He had lived the one and written the other as a philosopher, striving to understand the nature of humanity chiefly by meditating on himself in the process of making such efforts. These meditations permeate the entire New Science, a work that for Vico contains not only evidence of his major philosophical accomplishments but also proof that ‘‘his intellectual life was bound to have been such as it was and not otherwise’’ (Vico 1963: 182).
Notes 1 2
3 4 5 6
As Donald Phillip Verene put it in his study of the autobiography, ‘‘in Vichian
terms autobiography is the centre of the problem of philosophizing in the modern world’’ (Verene 1991: 91). The most reliable modern text of the Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se’ medesimo is the one edited by Mario Fubini published with the title, now conventional, of Autobiografia (Vico 1970). The autobiography proper is on pp. 3–62, the additional notes here called ‘‘Aggiunta fatta dal Vico alla sua autobiografia (1731)’’ are on pp. 63–87, and the continuation by the Marquis of Villarosa, entitled ‘‘Gli ultimi anni del Vico: Aggiunta del marchese di Villarosa’’ is on pp. 88–96. The expression ‘‘scrissela da filosofo’’ is found on p. 71. Unless otherwise specified all textual references are to Fubini’s edition, and all translations are from the English version by Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Vico 1963). Quoted from the English translation in Fisch and Bergin’s ‘‘Introduction’’ (Vico 1963: 5). See SN 28, 33 and 25, in Vico 1953, as well as Fubini 1965. On Vico’s assessment of Dante see Pietropaolo 1988: 90–1. It is discernible only in paragraph 40, included in the selection of the First New
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7 8 9
10 11 12 13
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Science translated by Leon Pompa in Vico 1982: 98–9, on which see Pompa’s comment in the introduction to the volume (Vico 1982: 25). See also Fassò 1976: 3–14. On this point see Mooney 1985: 153. ‘‘The poet teaches by delighting what the philosopher teaches austerely’’ (Vico 1990b: 43). ‘‘e con la spessa lezione di oratori, di storici e di poeti dilettava l’ingegno di osservare tra lontanissime cose nodi che in qualche ragion comune le stringessero insieme’’ (Vico 1970: 15). English translation by Fisch and Bergin: ‘‘and in the constant reading of orators, historians and poets his intellect took increasing delight in observing between the remotest matters ties that bound them together in some common relation’’ (Vico 1963: 123). ‘‘l’arte in ciascheduna cosa di ritruovare tutto quanto in quella è’’ (Vico 1970: 16); translation by Fisch and Bergin (Vico 1963: 124). ‘‘e in ogni questione si vada a prendere il vero nell’infinito dell’ente’’ (Vico 1970: 17); translation by Fisch and Bergin (Vico 1963: 125). ‘‘Teacher of himself’’ (Vico 1963: 136). Spengemann 1980: 120. My allusions to the Confessions of St Augustine, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and the Vita nuova of Dante are much indebted to this book. See in particular pp. 57–60.
Bibliography Fassò, G. (1976) ‘‘Law and Historical Origin of the New Science,’’ in Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity, eds G. Tagliacozzo and D. Ph. Verene, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fubini, M. (1965) ‘‘Dalla prima alla seconda Scienza nuova,’’ in Stile e umanità di Giambattista Vico, Milan / Naples: Ricciardi. Mooney, M. (1985) Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Pietropaolo, D. (1988) Dante Studies in the Age of Vico, Ottawa: Dovehouse. Spengemann, W. C. (1980) The Forms of Autobiography, New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Verene, D. (1991) The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the ‘Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself’, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vico, G. B. (1953) Opere, ed. F. Nicolini, Milan / Naples: Ricciardi. ——(1963) The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. M. H. Fisch and T. G. Bergin, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. ——(1970) Autobiografia, ed. M. Fubini, Turin: Einaudi. ——(1982) Selected Writings, ed. L. Pompa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——(1990a) ‘‘De nostri temporis studiorum ratione,’’ in Opere, ed. A. Battistini, Milan: Mondadori. ——(1990b) On the Study Methods of Our Times, trans. E. Gianturco, ed. D. Ph. Verene, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. ——(1997) ‘‘De rebus gestis Antonj Caraphei libri quatuor,’’ in Le gesta di Antonio Carafa, ed. Manuela Sanna, Naples: Guida.
7
Hume’s ‘‘Life’’ and the virtues of the dying Donald C. Ainslie
Hume’s autobiography, ‘‘My Own Life,’’1 is short and to all appearances quite bland. Its twenty-one paragraphs contain only a cursory summary of the major events in his life – jobs held, cities visited, and especially the books that he wrote. He goes through each of his major works, says a word or two about when and where it was drafted, notes its publication date, and then describes his reactions to the reception it received. Hume’s intention was merely for the ‘‘Life’’ to be a preface to future editions of his works. He did not write it with any overtly philosophical purpose. However I will argue that, by putting Hume’s autobiography into its appropriate contexts, there are nonetheless two kinds of philosophical lessons that we can learn from it. First, because an autobiography is the story of a self, I will suggest that we can use it to shed light on Hume’s account of the person. His treatment of this issue is often thought to be objectionably reductionist, but the ‘‘Life,’’ though brief, does not seem out of step with our normal ways of conceiving ourselves. Thus it points to a sometimes neglected breadth in Hume’s discussion of the self. Second, it is important to recognize that Hume wrote the ‘‘Life’’ in what he knew to be his final few months. It is dated 18 April 1776 and he died four months later on 25 August 1776. In the autobiography’s closing paragraphs, Hume discusses his experience with his fatal illness, and he ends with what he calls a ‘‘funeral oration of myself’’ (MOL: 21). Moreover, as Hume clearly expected, his death became a matter of great public interest in Edinburgh and beyond. The public clamored to know: Would the ‘‘great infidel’’ recant his sceptical tenets about religion and the afterlife when he was staring death in the face? Because of this controversy, the ‘‘Life’’ was first published not as a stand-alone essay, but followed by a ‘‘Letter from Adam Smith, Ll.D to William Stahan, Esq.,’’2 in which Smith describes Hume’s comportment in the months after he finished the autobiography, emphasizing in particular his ongoing cheerfulness – a word that appears seven times in the course of only a few pages – even while he was facing a mortal disease. Most contemporary editions of the ‘‘Life’’ continue to include Smith’s ‘‘Letter.’’ He concludes it by describing Hume as ‘‘approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature
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of human frailty will permit’’ (LAS: 12). Thus I will suggest the second philosophical lesson to be learned from the ‘‘Life’’ concerns Hume’s (and Smith’s) conception of what I will call the virtues of the dying, the morally exemplary ways in which we can come to grips with our finitude.
Hume’s theories of the self Hume’s most famous account of the self comes in the section of his Treatise of Human Nature entitled ‘‘Of personal identity’’ (T 1.4.6).3 He starts out by describing a view of the self that he attributes to ‘‘some philosophers’’ – really, an amalgam of Descartes and Locke – where the self is something that stands over all of a subject’s mental states, each of which adverts to its being that subject’s mental states (T 1.4.6.1, SBN: 251). Hume dismisses this view by introspectively examining his mind and declaring that his perceptions make no reference to a subject that has them; rather the perceptions are ‘‘distinct existences,’’ each potentially independent from all of the others (T 1.4.6.3, SBN: 252). And so he concludes that the mind is ‘‘nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement’’ (T 1.4.6.4, SBN: 252). He goes on to say that we nonetheless believe our minds to be unified both at a time and across time because the imagination associates our ideas of our perceptions, thus causing us to overlook the differences between the different perceptions that constitute the mind-bundle (T 1.4.6.16, SBN: 260–1). This bundle theory of the self lends support to a rather unusual conception of autobiography. Because, according to the theory, the self just is the set of experiences a person has, an autobiography would have to attempt to list those experiences – not only what we normally think of as major life events, such as those Hume describes in the ‘‘Life,’’ but every experience whatsoever, including in Hume’s case such things as the sensation of wine sliding down his throat on a hot day in July 1758, the anger he felt when his brother took his toy in December 1716, and the smell of ‘‘Auld Reekie’’ Edinburgh on an evening in 1775. The bundle theory involves a peculiar leveling of all of a person’s experiences; all perceptions are equally part of the bundle, making it impossible to distinguish between the ephemeral perceptions that are part and parcel of everyday life and the things that matter to him or her. A biographer is left with the hyper-Shandyesque task of itemizing every experience the person in question ever underwent. Hume, of course, attempted no such thing in his autobiography, and so there might seem to be an inconsistency between his view of the self and the ‘‘Life.’’ His treatment of personal identity, however, was not his last word on the self, and an examination of two of his other writings will help to erase the sense of inconsistency. First, in the ‘‘Appendix’’ to the Treatise, Hume admits that his original treatment of personal identity is a failure (T App.10–21, SBN: 633–6). The
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reasons that he offers for this admission are obscure, and have been the topic of extensive debate in the secondary literature.4 My view is that he realizes that he had not properly accounted for the fact that we must introspect – ‘‘enter most intimately’’ into ourselves (T 1.4.6.3, SBN: 252) – before we can recognize that the mind is a bundle of perceptions. And this reflective posture means that, in explaining our belief in mental unity associatively, he has had to rely on special mental states that allow him to be aware of the perceptions that constitute the bundle. These second-order ideas of perceptions – what he elsewhere calls ‘‘secondary’’ ideas (T 1.1.1.11, SBN: 6) – are associated in producing our belief in the unity of those perceptions that we have in view from our introspective posture. But what of the secondary ideas themselves? We believe them to be part of our minds even though they have not been associatively integrated into the rest of the bundle, no ‘‘tertiary’’ ideas of them having been associated with the ideas of the other perceptions that make up the mind. Hume’s problem, on this interpretation, is in explaining our belief in the unity of the introspecting mind – say the philosopher who is thinking of her mind’s perceptual constitution – with the mind reflected upon (Ainslie 2001). This problem also affects the possibility of autobiography. The bundle theory not only makes biography impracticable because of the difficulty of listing all of the experiences a person has undergone; the ‘‘Appendix’’ shows that the bundle theory creates a special problem for autobiography in particular. It is impossible for us to summarize our own experiences fully without thereby engendering new unsummarized experiences that themselves belong in the bundles’ autobiographies. The impossibility of introspectively catching ourselves reflecting on ourselves means that we will never be able to tell all of our own stories. Some interpreters treat Hume’s second thoughts in the ‘‘Appendix’’ to be a rejection of the bundle theory as such – it does not appear when he recasts book 1 of the Treatise into the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – in which case the problems it creates for autobiography would have been overcome by the time Hume got around to writing the ‘‘Life.’’ But I think that the second thoughts are better seen as a more narrow rejection of his attempted explanation of the belief in mental unity. Clearly he takes the problem that he acknowledges in the ‘‘Appendix’’ to be singular, calling it the one ‘‘considerable mistake in reasoning’’ in all of books 1 and 2 (T App.1, SBN: 623). And he also takes it to be insulated from his treatment of the self outside of the personal identity section; he does not seem to think that the mistake obliges him to return either to the discussion of our belief in the mind-independent existence of sensory objects, where the bundle theory first appeared (T 1.4.2.39, SBN: 207), or to the detailed account of the personoriented ‘‘indirect’’ passions of pride, humility, love and hatred in the first two parts of book 2. So it would be wrong to suggest that Hume views his second thoughts of the ‘‘Appendix’’ as indicating his discovery of a major problem for his system. Indeed, the bundle theory reappears in his posthu-
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mously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where all of the characters assent to Demea’s statement that ‘‘the soul of man . . . [is] a composition of various faculties, passions, sentiments ideas; united, indeed, into one self or person, but still distinct from each other’’ (Hume 1947: 159). Given that Hume was revising the Dialogues at the very time he was writing the ‘‘Life,’’ we can assume that he continued to hold the bundle theory of the self while writing his autobiography. And the problems that this view creates for the possibility of autobiography mean that he must have relied on a different conception of the self in writing the ‘‘Life.’’ Though it is sometimes overlooked by interpreters, Hume indicates in the Treatise itself that he means the bundle theory to have only a limited application. In introducing it, he says that it describes the self ‘‘as it regards our thought or imagination,’’ as opposed to the self ‘‘as it regards our passions or the concern we take in ourselves’’ (T 1.4.6.5, SBN: 253). In the interpretation that I favor, this distinction means that, while the bundle theory is true of the minds of all of ‘‘mankind’’ (T 1.4.6.4, SBN: 252), it will make a difference only to those people – primarily philosophers – who have their minds in view, say by their introspective investigation of their mental principles. For, unless you make your perceptions into objects of your thought, you will not have any beliefs about the unity of the mind-qua-bundle. The question will simply never come up. The rest of us (including most philosophers most of the time), Hume suggests, relate to ourselves by means of the passions. Consequently we find him devoting the first two parts of book 2 of the Treatise to the indirect passions, with their fundamental orientation to persons. These parts are the second of the two texts that will help us to see how Hume can escape from the problem that the bundle theory poses for autobiography. For Hume the indirect passions are emotional attitudes toward persons that are triggered by positive or negative evaluations of some of their features where ‘‘feature’’ is construed very broadly. For example, in being proud of my house, I first take pleasure in it and then, because of my recognition that it is my house, this pleasure is associatively transformed into a pleasure – the glow of pride – at myself. Pride thus serves to convert my recognition of the fact that I own a fine house into the affectively imbued recognition that I am a homeowner. Indeed, all four of the indirect passions allow us to see one another as more than merely ordinary objects, any fact about which is on a par, whether it be about a trivial matter such as the number of times someone has tasted a pineapple, or a deep feature of her, such as her being from a certain family, having various character traits, or the like. Because we are affectively engaged by these latter deep facts, we feel an indirect passion when we recognize them, so that we come to see their bearers as persons who are defined by the features in question. We take them to be ‘‘connected to’’ a person’s ‘‘being and existence,’’ as opposed to his trivial properties, which we take to ‘‘be in a manner separated from’’ him (T 2.1.8.8, SBN: 302). It is by means of the indirect passions that we register what matters to us in our lives, what makes us into the persons we are.5
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Hume thinks that this engagement with what matters is not merely subjective. When a sufficient number of people in a society respond with an indirect passion to a certain type of feature, then bearers of that feature are defined by it no matter what their personal responses to it might be. It follows that an objective (perhaps only intersubjective) social world is defined by our general patterns of indirect passional responses to one another (T 2.1.6.8–10, SBN: 293–4). Hume suggests that there are four kinds of features that tend to elicit the indirect passions – bodily qualities, virtue and vice, socioeconomic status, and ‘‘external advantages and disadvantages’’ (T 2.1.7–10). The last of these four is a motley of various items that, for contingent sociocultural reasons, have been taken to be meaningful in a particular society; Hume particularly emphasizes our tendency to define people in terms of their family background. These four categories of causes of the indirect passions summarize Hume’s understanding of the contours in the social landscape, the ways we typically make sense of one another as being different kinds of persons. Clearly it is this less well-known passional theory of the self, and not the bundle theory, that we see at work in the ‘‘Life.’’ For in it Hume emphasizes precisely those aspects of his life that he identifies in the Treatise as the main causes of the indirect passions: his health and impending death, his character traits, his financial status, and his family background. I will focus on each of these topics in turn, taking them in reverse order.
Family Hume understands family relations as a species of causal relation. Given that causation is one of the three basic associative principles in his theory, he also believes that we have a natural tendency to associate our ideas of ourselves with our ideas of our parents and our children (our connection with our siblings is accordingly of a lesser degree, in that it depends on a shared causal source rather than a direct causal connection). This associative tendency is sufficient to cause an indirect passion whenever we find a quality that we value in our family members; for example, ‘‘the beauty, address, merit, credit and honours of their kindred are carefully display’d by the proud, as some of the most considerable sources of their vanity’’ (T 2.1.9.9, SBN: 307). People will be especially disposed to see their family as defining them if it has a history made memorable by longstanding ownership of or residency in a particular locale. In a number of places, Hume puts special emphasis on the connection that parents feel with their offspring, and the asymmetry of the maternal and paternal versions thereof. He says that ‘‘the relation of blood produces the strongest tie the mind is capable of in the love of parents to their children’’ (T 2.2.4.2, SBN: 352). And it is just this tie that he appeals to in explaining how justice is possible, parental concern being the motive that teaches people the benefits of cooperation despite their self-interest (T 3.2.2.4, SBN:
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486). Hume also takes seriously the problem that human biology creates for us. Because women give birth to their children, they can be sure that a given child is theirs; but men have no such guarantee. Hume suggests that human societies have typically improvised a solution to this problem in the artifice of chastity, a norm requiring that women in particular restrict themselves from acting on their natural sexual desires except within socially sanctioned marriages characterized by female sexual fidelity (T 2.2.12). In compensation for men’s insecurity about the paternity of children, family life often takes the form of patriarchy, where the male contribution is taken to be more significant, and thus a more appropriate focus for the indirect passions: ‘‘As in the society of marriage, the male sex has the advantage above the female, the husband first engages our attention . . . the thought both rests more easily upon him with greater satisfaction, and arrives at him with greater facility than his consort’’ (T 2.1.9.13, SBN: 308–9). The artifice of marriage also stands behind the practice of patrilineal naming, as well as the tendency for children to feel their connection with their mother to be diminished if she were to marry upon the death of their father; for her taking of her new husband’s name would be a sign that she is no longer fully affiliated with her first family (T 2.2.4.9, SBN: 355). In the ‘‘Life,’’ Hume follows this account of the significance of family to the letter. He stresses that he comes from a good family, both by my father and mother: my father’s family is a branch of the Earl of Home’s or Hume’s; and my ancestors had been proprietors of the estate, which my brother possesses, for several generations. My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the College of Justice: the title of Lord Halkerton came by succession to her brother. (MOL: 2) He goes on to recount how his father died when he was an infant, leaving him to be raised by his mother, ‘‘a woman of singular merit, who, though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children’’ (MOL: 3). She did not remarry, thus freeing Hume from the difficulties that come with having a step-father. We see here exactly the emphasis on longevity of possession, the merit of ancestors, and the perils of blended families that we would expect given Hume’s psychological theory in the Treatise.
Riches Hume’s explanation of the significance of power and riches for our selfconcern and his discussion of his financial status in the ‘‘Life’’ converge similarly. In the Treatise, he says that ‘‘[n]othing has a greater tendency to give us an esteem for any person, than his power and riches; or a contempt,
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than his poverty and meanness’’ (T 2.2.5.1, SBN: 357). The reason is that the ‘‘very essence of riches consists in the power of procuring the pleasures and conveniences of life’’ (T 2.1.10.10, SBN: 315). And this power itself gives us pleasure, thus triggering the passional response whereby we take the riches to define someone. Hume also emphasizes the significance of sympathy – our instinctive tendency to feel the pleasures and pains of those around us – to our reactions to power and riches. We are pleased by others’ riches because we sympathize with the pleasure that we imagine their possessors must feel; and the rich, in turn, sympathetically share in the pleasure that onlookers feel when contemplating their wealth, and this sympathetically acquired pleasure itself becomes the source for increased pleasure on the onlookers’ part: ‘‘[T]he minds of men are mirrors to one another, not only because they reflect each others [sic] emotions, but also because those rays of passions, sentiments and opinions may be often reverberated, and may decay away by insensible degrees’’ (T 2.2.5.21, SBN: 365). Poverty is open to a similar account; its unpleasantness causes us to feel humility or hatred (in rather unconventional senses of these words), with the aversion of others sympathetically increasing our discomfort. Hume thinks that our feelings toward one another’s socioeconomic conditions become solidified into a system of ‘‘rank’’ (T 2.1.6.8, SBN: 293), where the exact structure of a given society’s system will be a product of its stage of development, in combination with other contingent factors (Wallech 1984). Thus, in a set of appendices to the History of England, Hume explains the different systems of rank that predominated in that country at different times: the Saxon system, feudalism, absolutism, and what we now call capitalism (1983). Given Hume’s recognition of the significance of socioeconomic status, it is not surprising to discover that he stresses financial matters throughout the ‘‘Life.’’ He clearly wants the readers of his autobiography to admire him for having achieved material success by means of his writing – never having to resort to the patronage of the nobility in order to live independently (MOL: 17). He starts out by saying that: ‘‘My family . . . was not rich, and being myself a younger brother, my patrimony, according to the mode of my country, was of course very slender’’ (MOL: 3). It was in part his ‘‘slender fortune’’ that ‘‘forced’’ him in 1734 to make a ‘‘feeble trial’’ at working for merchants in Bristol (MOL: 4). Upon its failure, he tell us: ‘‘I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my talents in literature’’ (MOL: 4). He made ‘‘considerable accession’’ to his ‘‘small fortune’’ by taking appointments as a tutor and military secretary, so that he could consider himself ‘‘independent’’ – though Hume tells us that ‘‘most of my friends were inclined to smile when I said so; in short I was now master of near a thousand pounds’’ (MOL: 7). With the money he made from his publications in the 1740s and 1750s, he became ‘‘not only independent, but opulent’’ (MOL:
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17). Diplomatic appointments in France left him ‘‘with much more money, and a much larger income’’ (MOL: 9), so that by 1769 he was ‘‘very opulent,’’ with a revenue of £1,000 per year (MOL: 19).
Virtue and vice Of course, Hume means his claim that a person’s socioeconomic status is the ‘‘most common’’ cause of the indirect passions to be merely descriptive. It is a matter of fact that we focus on it, largely because the signs of it are usually evident, available to us on first sight (T 2.2.5.11, SBN: 361). It is particularly important in our dealings with strangers, where we must often look for evidence of the extent to which they can follow through on their business commitments. Because of this, Hume thinks that socioeconomic status is ultimately a superficial way of making sense of people. To make finer grained distinctions about kinds of persons we must appeal to their qualities of mind, the character traits that stand behind their typical forms of behavior. According to Hume’s moral theory, when traits are useful or agreeable to their possessor or to those who surround her, they will please an impartial observer and thus qualify as virtues (if they are detrimental or disagreeable, they qualify as vices). An indirect passion will follow on these moral evaluations, for the pleasure or pain in response to the trait is transfused into a pleasure or pain directed toward the person; we thus come to see people as defined by their moral features (T 3.1.2.5, 3.3.1.30–1; SBN: 473, 591). Hume clearly wants to convey a sense of his character to the readers of the ‘‘Life.’’ In fact, this task constitutes the dominant theme of the autobiography. It opens with a gesture toward modesty: ‘‘It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life’’ (MOL: 1). And it closes with a summary of his various traits, in exactly the same way in which each chapter of his History ends with an account of the characters of the relevant kings and queens: I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my [humour], notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men any wise eminent, have had reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched, or even attacked by her baleful tooth: and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of
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Hume’s “Life” and the virtues of the dying both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate in any one circumstance of my character and conduct: not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say that there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained. (MOL: 21)
In the body of the ‘‘Life,’’ Hume’s introduces his discussion of his career as a writer by saying that ‘‘a passion for literature . . . has been the ruling passion of my life’’ that he was lucky to have in combination with a ‘‘studious disposition, . . . sobriety, and . . . industry’’ (MOL: 3). And when recounting the publication of his works, he describes his reactions to their reception in such a way as to highlight his traits. After the Treatise fell ‘‘dead-born from the press,’’ his natural ‘‘cheerful and sanguine temper’’ allowed him to ‘‘recover the blow’’ and thus to return to work ‘‘with great ardour’’ (MOL: 6; emphasis in original). When the public showed little enthusiasm for the first Enquiry or a new edition of the Essays, Hume notes that ‘‘such is the force of natural temper, that the disappointments made little or no impression on me’’ (MOL: 9). When his work finally did manage to goad the ‘‘Reverends and Right Reverends’’ into attacking him, Hume says that, ‘‘not being very irascible in . . . temper,’’ he was ‘‘ever more disposed to the favourable than unfavourable side of things; a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess, than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year’’ (MOL: 9). The attacks on the first volumes of his History did leave him ‘‘discouraged,’’ but he nonetheless ‘‘resolved to pick up courage and to persevere’’ (MOL: 11–12). By the time of the publication of the volumes of the History on the Tudors, he says he was ‘‘now callous against the impression of public folly,’’ despite the ‘‘clamour’’ against the volumes (MOL: 16). In the penultimate paragraph, describing his fatal illness, Hume says: ‘‘I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. . . . It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present’’ (MOL: 20). Though Hume clearly wants readers of the ‘‘Life’’ to come to an understanding of his character traits, he also recognizes in his writings about morality that discerning someone’s traits, especially his or her virtues and vices, is no easy task. The problem arises in part because of our tendency to let our interest distort our view of one another. We are tempted to approve of someone’s miserliness if we are due to inherit his fortune upon his death. We disapprove of the industrious person whose hard work puts us at a competitive disadvantage. It is because of this distortion that only some of our sentimental responses to people count as moral evaluations. We must consider someone ‘‘in general’’ (T 3.1.2.4, SBN: 472), bracketing our interest in the matter.
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However, impartiality is only a necessary condition for the recognition of traits. A person possesses a trait only if she reliably behaves in a specified manner: The generous person does not give only when especially flush with funds, or when she will be lauded by others for her actions; she gives in various ways throughout her life to a significant number of those in need that she happens to encounter (just exactly what she must do to qualify as generous will be a contingent matter, a product of the history of virtue for that culture). But who will be in a position to recognize that someone’s giving manifests the correct pattern to count as generosity? Most of us only see a small sample of any other’s activities. How are we to know how the person in question behaves when he is not around us? We can perhaps rely on the testimony of others, but it is not clear that they are in a much better position to judge him. Hume’s solution to this problem is for us to adopt a ‘‘steady and general’’ point of view in our evaluations of character. We are to correct for those cases where we have only an incomplete glimpse of a person’s behavior by adopting the judgments of those who are correctly situated with respect to that person (assuming that they have corrected for their interest in the situation). What counts as ‘‘correctly situated’’ will vary from virtue to virtue (T 3.3.1.5, SBN: 581–2). In those virtues (or vices) that primarily affect those who are close to the person in question – the virtues that make someone good (T 3.3.3) – her intimates are in the best position to judge, for they are the ones who will enjoy the effects of her behavior; they are the ones who will feel the pleasure that she spreads around. In those virtues (or vices) that resonate throughout larger portions of society – the virtues that make someone great (T 3.3.2) – the intimates of the person in question will probably be in one of the worst positions to judge of her, for sometimes the qualities that have the most social influence are the ones that make somebody a difficult father, or wife, or child.6 Instead, the people having the best sense of the relevant character trait are those who encounter the person in her public roles, as employer, as leader, as role model. Finally, those qualities that count as Humean virtues because they improve the interests of their bearers are best recognized by the persons in question, if they are able to cast an unjaundiced eye on themselves. This is a big ‘if’. When it comes to self-evaluation, Hume recognizes that we are often ‘‘seduc’d into a good opinion of ourselves’’ (T 2.4.8, SBN: 355) no matter what kind of virtues or vices we bear. As he puts it in another context, we suffer from ‘‘the very difficulty of judging concerning an object, which is never set at a due distance from us, nor is seen in a proper point of view.’’ The best we can do is to ‘‘hearken anxiously to the opinions of others, who are better qualified to form just opinions concerning us’’ (Hume 1898: 152). Hume incorporates this need for the recognition of others into his moral psychology, when he says that pride and humility – and the selfconceptions they engender – can be sustained only when our own positive or negative assessments of our features are ‘‘seconded’’ by similar evaluations
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felt by others. We need the sympathetic support of those around us to maintain our sense of ourselves as being a particular kind of person (T 2.1.11.1–2, SBN: 316–17). So the autobiographer faces a difficult task when he attempts to describe his virtues and vices. Not only must he bracket his self-interest and place himself in a general point of view, as he would have to do in any judgment of virtue or vice, he must also take special care to avoid the special pitfalls attending self-evaluation. Hume’s awareness of these difficulties can be seen in the opening and closing sentences of the ‘‘Life.’’ He opens by making explicit his concern that it might seem vain to write an autobiography at all, and his final ‘‘funeral oration’’ closes with the hope that the vanity he has displayed is not ‘‘misplaced,’’ given that his character is ‘‘a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained’’ (MOL: 21). Hume’s sentimentalist meta-ethics make this claim surprising, in that he argues repeatedly that virtue and vice are precisely not matters of fact (e.g. T 3.1.1). But I take it that he wants to make explicit his recognition that he does not have the last word on his character. Others will often have better insight into who he is than he himself does. And so the reader of his autobiography who wants an accurate understanding of Hume must read it in conjunction with other descriptions of him. We must work to keep him honest, reinforcing his selfassessment when it is accurate, and correcting it when it seems off the mark. Hume does not believe that a person has special authority in understanding himself. The fact that an autobiography is necessarily written while a life is still in process further exacerbates the author’s difficulty in accurately portraying his own traits. For Hume thinks that a trait is manifested in the pattern of activity a person displays, but that it is possible for different traits to cause what seems to be the same pattern of activity for large stretches of someone’s life. For example, a vain person and a generous person might both engage in similar sorts of giving activities for much of their lives, but when the former ceases all such behavior when he is not awarded the good citizenship award, we would redescribe his earlier activities as having been manifestations of vanity all along, even if he looked at the time to be generous. We need to see how someone behaves for her whole life before we can be confident in our descriptions of her traits. Any mid-life character assessment suffers from the defect that the subject’s later activities might reveal that the apparent patterns that seemed to be in place in the earlier assessment were mere appearances – and in fact were the first stages of patterns of activities that actually reveal quite different traits as having been there all along. Even at the end of a life, the evidence still might not be conclusive. An extremely successful hypocrite, for example, might die before lapsing into a revealing inconsistency of pattern. The autobiographer, in particular, cannot be sure that something he does after the autobiography is finished might show him to have a character quite different from what he claimed to have – perhaps even believed himself to
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have – at the time of writing. Hume attempted to avoid this problem by postponing his writing of the ‘‘Life’’ until he was fairly confident that he would not live much longer. But it is still a possibility that what he did after he finished the ‘‘Life’’ would undermine its self-presentation. What would we think of him had he made a deathbed recantation of his anti-religious views, and turned to prayer in an attempt to save his soul from hell? Hume was especially lucky, then, that Smith’s ‘‘Letter’’ has come to be seen as inseparable from the ‘‘Life.’’ For Smith offers a brief biography of Hume’s final days that does second Hume’s understanding of himself – ‘‘clearing and ascertaining’’ his character description – or so it seems. However, I will suggest below in the section dealing with the ‘‘Letter’’ that Smith’s quasi-Stoic conception of virtue and vice sits uneasily with Hume’s moral theory. So the encomium that Smith offers to Hume ends up undermining Hume’s own view of himself to some extent, even if the facts about Hume’s death that Smith provides do reassure us that there were no unexpected changes in his behavior that would have forced us to reassess our overall understanding of his character.
Hume’s illness and death The fourth category of causes of the indirect passions has to do with bodily qualities such as beauty or deformity and presumably also sex and race. Our reactions to one another’s bodies mark us as being distinctive kinds of persons. Hume argues, however, that sickness and health do not usually qualify as causes of the indirect passions; because ‘‘health and sickness vary incessantly to all men,’’ they are too common and too ephemeral to define us. Nonetheless ‘‘wherever a malady of any kind is so rooted in our constitution, that we no longer entertain any hopes of recovery, from that moment it becomes an object of humility’’ (T 2.1.8.8, SBN: 302). We end up as a different kind of person once our sickness sets us apart from others. Hume mentions his health twice in the ‘‘Life’’: first, when he notes that his youthful enthusiasm for philosophy was cut short by illness (MOL: 4); and second, in its penultimate paragraph where he discusses what he takes to be his ‘‘mortal and incurable’’ bowel disease (MOL: 20). Hume does not dwell on the former, saying only that his ‘‘health being a little broken by [his] ardent application, [he] was tempted, or rather forced, to make a very feeble trial for entering into a more active scene of life’’ (MOL: 4). Hume is here alluding to his experience with melancholy in his late teens that he describes in much more detail in a fascinating 1734 letter to a Scottish doctor in London, the exact identity of whom remains unknown (the most likely candidate is the Scriblerian, John Arbuthnot) (Grieg 1932: letter 3, 13–16). In it, Hume discusses both his excitement as he first discovers philosophy, and his frustration as his attempts to pursue it were stymied by persistent health problems. He quotes one of his friends as telling him that he was suffering from the ‘‘disease of the learned,’’ that is to say, melancholia.
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The letter ends with his resolving to leave philosophy behind for a more active life as an assistant to a merchant in Bristol. As Hume makes clear in the ‘‘Life,’’ he did not find the life of commerce to his liking, and he was soon able to return once more to philosophy – namely by retreating to La Flèche where he wrote his masterpiece, the Treatise. Hume clearly draws on his experience with melancholia in the dramatic ‘‘Conclusion’’ to book 1 of the Treatise, where he narrates the experience of a philosopher who induces in himself a nervous breakdown. Its climax is the anguished cry: Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron’d with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv’d of the use of every member and faculty. (T 1.4.7.8, SBN: 268–9) Only dinner, conversation, and a few games of backgammon with friends allow Hume’s narrator to escape from the paralysis he so vividly presents here. Unfortunately, the lesson we are to learn from Hume’s autobiographically inspired portrayal of philosophical melancholy remains obscure, with different interpreters taking it to support several conflicting interpretations.7 Thus it is disappointing to find in the ‘‘Life’’ such a cursory treatment of what was clearly a formative philosophical experience for Hume. Perhaps because he never did again suffer from melancholia, he thought it should be dismissed as just another instance of the ‘‘incessant variations’’ that make most sicknesses irrelevant to who a person really is. Or perhaps because he was tempted to dismiss the Treatise as mere juvenilia, not recognizing that it was later to be deemed the greatest philosophical work in the English language, it did not occur to him to expand on his youthful experiences with melancholia and how they informed his philosophy. Hume spends more time on his terminal illness, emphasizing especially both his luck in largely escaping from suffering, despite the ravages of disease, and the fact that his impending death had in no way changed his character or disposition. I have already suggested one reason for this emphasis: a radical change of behavior when faced with adversity would mean that Hume’s traits were different from what he had thought they were; we would have to read back into his earlier geniality whatever we learned from the later change in comportment. But there is a second, and probably more important, reason for Hume’s emphasizing the continuity of his manner and activities: his contemporaries tended to treat death as an especially fraught occurrence, affording a glimpse of the beyond to those who are in its throes.
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Consider how the vast majority of Hume’s Scottish compatriots would view death. The Calvinism of the Presbyterian church meant that all of us were taken to be irremediably corrupt, stained by original sin in such a way that we cannot resist the blandishments of our earthly desires. If we got what we deserved, death could only mean our being sent to hell. But the Presbyterians hold that God has dispensed his saving grace to some of us, forgiving us our sins and sending us to heaven. The problem is that we cannot do anything about this. Good works in this life are never sufficient for us to guarantee us a place in heaven; after all, who are we to think that we can oblige God to do something for us? Sinful pride! The Presbyterians recognized that this meant that our fate in the afterlife was, from our point of view at least, predestined; God would or would not dispense his grace on us. Who knows why? He works in mysterious ways. It is clear, then, why death would be such an awe-inspiring event for most eighteenth-century Scots. For when a person dies, her fate becomes clear: either deserved eternal suffering or the eternal bliss God might deign to dispense (Miller 2001: Ch. 2). Hume, of course, rejected all of this, attacking religion throughout most of his published writings and in the Dialogues that he was busy editing at the same time as he was composing the ‘‘Life.’’ But many of the eighteenthcentury Scots could not believe that Hume would actually live by his published views. They found Hume’s attempt to live outside the confines of religion truly unimaginable. How could someone accept that his death simply meant his annihilation? Surely Hume worried that he had guaranteed himself his place in hell by his impiety. James Boswell, the famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, actually posed this question to Hume in a conversation a few months before he was to die: I asked him if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness. He said not the least; no more than the thought that he had not been, as Lucretius observes. . . . In this style of good humour and levity did I conduct the conversation. Perhaps it was wrong on so awful a subject. But as nobody was present, I thought it could have no bad effect. I however felt a degree of horror, mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr Johnson’s noble lessons, of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms; and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive enquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith. I told him I believed the Christian religion as I believed history. . . . He then said flatly that the morality of every religion was bad, and, I really thought, was not jocular when he said that when he heard a man was religious, he concluded he was a rascal, though he had known some instances of very good men being religious.8 (Boswell 1991: 248–9)
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I think that Hume emphasizes in the ‘‘Life’’ that his confrontation with mortality had changed neither his practice nor his philosophical commitments in order to send a clear message to Boswell and his ilk. A religious skeptic could die with more grace and tranquility – could better exemplify the virtues of the dying – than a believer. There was nothing about the approach of death that gave one a reason to accept orthodoxy. The public clamor over Hume’s death was in fact more intense than he might have imagined. Samuel Pratt, in a defense of Hume that appeared shortly after the publication of the ‘‘Life,’’ writes: Such was the estimation in which Mr. Hume was held from his amiable qualities as a citizen, as well as from his literary fame, that for some weeks before his death, his situation became the universal topic of conversation and enquiry; each individual expressing an anxious solicitude about his health, as if he had been his intimate and particular friend. (Pratt 1777: 40–1) Once Hume had finally succumbed to his disease, crowds gathered to watch the coffin be carried out of his house, and they were even larger at the cemetery in his family home of Ninewells. Pratt quotes one conversation that he overheard: ‘‘ ‘Ah’ (says one) ‘he was an atheist.’ ‘No matter’ (says another) he was an honest man’’ (Pratt 1777: 44n). Smith’s ‘‘Letter’’ is thus essential for Hume’s philosophical purposes in the ‘‘Life.’’ The details about Hume’s ongoing peace in his final days, especially those that Smith gives as quotations from a letter from Hume’s doctor, show that even when death was upon him, he never was tempted into a deathbed conversion. He remained – as the slogan on his family crest has it – ‘‘true to the end.’’
Smith’s ‘‘Letter’’ Smith ended up being attacked for his support of Hume’s attempt to promulgate the possibility of non-religious virtues of the dying. George Horne, the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, scolded Smith that ‘‘[y]ou would persuade us, by the example of DAVID HUME, Esq.; that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against the fear of death’’ (Horne 1777: 29). The better model for dying was that provided by Hooker, who said ‘‘I have long been preparing to leave [this world], and gathering comfort from the dreadful hour of making my account with GOD, which I now apprehend to be near’’ (Horne 1777: 33). Even worse, Horne thinks, was Smith’s description of Hume as a model of virtue: Is it right in you, Sir, to hold up to our view, as ‘‘perfectly wise and virtuous’’, the character and conduct of one, who seems to have been possessed with an incurable apathy to all that is called RELIGION; and who strained every nerve to explode, suppress, and extirpate the spirit of
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it among men, that it’s [sic] very name, if he could effect it, might no more be in remembrance. (Horne 1777: 10–11) Four years after the fact, Smith himself wrote to a friend: A single, and as I thought a very harmless Sheet of paper, which I happened to Write concerning the death of our late friend Mr Hume, brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain. (Mossner and Ross 1977: letter 208) But this remark poses the question: Just how harmless was Smith’s defense of Hume’s death? On the one hand, in so far as Smith recounts the events leading up to Hume’s death, he does seem to be supporting the project of making public how one can die virtuously as a non-Christian. On the other hand, a closer examination of Smith’s interpretation of these events will show that his praise of Hume carries a double edge. For his preferred conception of virtue makes ‘‘cheerfulness’’ in the face of death require that one believe in God and an afterlife. Smith, I will suggest, in declaring Hume to be a model of virtue, attributes to him the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith despite his disavowal of them. For Smith, virtue is fundamentally a matter of self-control: ‘‘[K]een and earnest attention to the propriety of our own conduct . . . constitutes the real essence of virtue.’’9 By ‘‘propriety’’ here Smith means that our conduct should be such that an impartial spectator would sympathize with it – would feel and act in the same manner as we do, were she or he in our shoes. This impartial spectator is not so much an actual person, as a construct that each of us makes within himself: ‘‘I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that person whose conduct is examined into and judged of’’ (TMS 3.1.6: 113). The virtuous person’s ‘‘keen and earnest attention’’ is effected by a constant reference to the verdicts of the ‘‘man within the breast’’ that serve to moderate his conduct. Smith thinks that there are two fundamental kinds of moderation necessary for virtue, one, a moderation of our reactions to others, the other a moderation of our own emotional states. Thus ‘‘soft, the gentle, the amiable’’ virtues are displayed by our sympathizing with those whom we encounter; the ‘‘great, the awful and respectable’’ virtues of self-denial require that we moderate our emotional responses, positive and negative, in order to make it easier for others to sympathize with us (TMS 1.5.1: 23). Perfect virtue combines the two types of virtue into a unified character: The man of the most perfect virtue, the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of
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Smith thinks that death poses a particular challenge for us. It is ‘‘the king of terrors; and the man who has conquered the fear of death, is not likely to lose his presence of mind at the approach of any other natural evil’’ (TMS 6.3.6: 239); ‘‘no character is more admired than a man faces death with intrepidity, and maintains his tranquillity and presence of mind amidst the most dreadful dangers’’ (TMS 6.3.17: 244). It is even better to face death with cheerfulness, for Smith thinks that ‘‘[n]othing is more graceful than habitual cheerfulness’’ (TMS 1.2.5.2: 42). Hume’s cheerfulness in his final days is thus an important piece of evidence in favor of Smith’s identification of him as a model of virtue. Note how different Smith’s view of virtue is from Hume’s. For Hume, virtue is fundamentally a matter of spontaneously displaying a coherent pattern of behavior – both actions and reactions – that causes pleasure in disinterested others throughout one’s life. He rejects the suggestion that virtue requires constant self-monitoring for two reasons. First, he thinks that it requires an unrealistic moral psychology. We have seen that, for him, the mind is nothing but the set of experiences a person undergoes. There is no subject that stands over our mental states that could serve as a judge of their merits, either epistemologically or morally. Of course Hume thinks that we can and do reflect on our behavior, say in moments of deliberation. But his famous dictum that ‘‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’’ (T 2.3.3.4, SBN: 415) is meant to tell us that this kind of deliberation is itself something that occurs only sometimes, as a spontaneous response to our motives, and its outcome itself is not different in kind from our unreflective behavior – a product of whichever feeling happens to be the strongest in us at that moment. Even though Smith posits the doubling of the self, as an internal spectator and an external agent, as an ethical achievement, not as a metaphysical truth, Hume would still think that it is psychologically impossible. Second, because he takes the Smithian doubling to be impossible, Hume thinks that a moral view that encourages it is dangerous. The problem is that constant self-monitoring undermines the regular operations of our mental principles. The spontaneity that he takes to characterize virtue is replaced by the anxiety of constantly second-guessing ourselves. The best we can hope for is an ‘‘artificial life,’’ in the manner of Diogenes or Pascal – an unsettling and otherworldly life that cuts us off from our fellows and is driven by whichever theoretical systems happen to have captured our fancies (Hume 1975: ‘‘A Dialogue’’, 343; Hume 2001: para. 57). So Smith’s praise for Hume as instantiating the Smithian model of virtue could not have been welcomed by Hume. For if Smith is right, then Hume’s
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own alternative model of virtue must be rejected. And if, instead, Hume were to hold on to his own philosophical views, then he would have to say that the evidence in favor of his displaying Smithian virtue would count as evidence against his having virtue as he himself understood it. In fact, Smith’s praise of Hume carries what the latter would have to think was an even worse implication. For Smith thinks that it is only possible to show ‘‘cheerfulness’’ in the face of death by means of religious thoughts, in particular, thoughts of a ‘‘future state’’ in which God will ensure that the virtuous and vicious each receive their due: Our happiness in this life is thus upon many occasions, dependent upon the humble hope and expectation of a life to come: a hope and expectation deeply rooted in human nature; which can alone support its lofty ideas of its own dignity; can alone illumine the dreary prospect of its continually approaching mortality, and maintain its cheerfulness under all the heaviest calamities to which, from the disorders of this life, it may sometimes be exposed. (TMS 3.2.33: 132) Smith’s claim here is of piece with the providentialism that animates all of his moral philosophy. Though he was by no means an orthodox Presbyterian, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, he repeatedly makes statements such as this: ‘‘[E]very part of nature, when attentively surveyed, equally demonstrates the providential care of its Author, and we may admire the wisdom and goodness of God even in the weakness and folly of man’’ (TMS 2.3.3.2: 105). It follows that, in praising Hume, and emphasizing his behavior while dying, Smith implicitly suggests that he was relying on thoughts of a future state in order to maintain his spirits.10 Hume, of course, would not welcome this suggestion. His writings throughout his life display a skepticism about religious arguments and an analysis of the baleful social and moral effects of religious systems, including those that emphasize the role of a divine providence and a future state.11 Smith was always uncomfortable with this aspect of his friend’s philosophy. Notably, he opposed Hume’s appointment to the University of Glasgow in 1751 because he worried about the public effects of his irreligion (Ross 1995: 112–13). And Smith also was less than enthused about Hume’s request that he ensure that the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion – with their thorough and complete dismantling of the argument from design that Smith himself seemed to favor – be published after his death. Hume, realizing that his friend could not be counted on to follow through with the request, changed his will at the last minute, removing Smith from this obligation (Mossner and Ross 1977: letters 165–8; also Campbell and Ross 1982). We have seen that Hume ends the ‘‘Life’’ by saying that his character is ‘‘a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained’’ (MOL: 21). Smith’s ‘‘Letter’’ shows that clearing and ascertaining a character description is not
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so easy after all. While we can presumably accept Smith’s word when it comes to how Hume behaved, what that behavior means is another story. Was Hume’s death a vindication of his atheistic principles? Or was it evidence that he engaged in the constant self-monitoring and the consolation of a future state in the manner that Smith seems to think necessary for virtue?
Conclusion Autobiography is often construed as an attempt by the author to seize control of her life, to offer an ‘‘official’’ interpretation of her experiences to which others should defer. She is the authority for understanding what really happened to her (consider the notions of authorized and unauthorized biographies). But Hume denies that we have special control over or insight into ourselves. We do not stand over ourselves, commanding that our lives take specific directions, deciding which of our desires to act on and which of our cognitive tendencies to believe.12 Instead Hume thinks that we are instead immersed in our lives, manifesting traits of character the effects of which might wholly pass us by. On this Humean view, there is nothing special about autobiography, and the modesty that he shows in the ‘‘Life’’ is wholly appropriate. An autobiography probably should not be anything more than a twenty-odd paragraph, cursory summary of the major events in the person’s life. Finally, Hume would also welcome the fact that his autobiography has become paired with a biography, even if he would have rejected the critique that I have suggested is implicit in Smith’s ‘‘Letter.’’ For the biographical addendum is itself illustrative of Hume’s thesis about the lack of control that a person has over who he or she is. Others’ understandings of people contribute to making them into who they are. This is a fact about human nature, not a threat to our integrity that we should struggle to overcome.
Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
I use the version of ‘‘My Own Life’’ found in (Hume 1987: xxxi–xli). I refer to the ‘‘Life’’ in what follows by ‘‘MOL’’ followed by the appropriate paragraph number. Smith’s ‘‘Letter’’ is also found in (Hume 1987: xliii–xlix). I refer to the ‘‘Letter’’ in what follows by ‘‘LAS’’ followed by the appropriate paragraph number. I refer to the Treatise in what follows by ‘‘T’’ followed by the appropriate book, part, section and paragraph numbers as given in (Hume 2000), followed by ‘‘SBN’’ and the page number as given in (Hume 1978). Don Garrett gives a helpful summary in his (1997: ch. 8). I defend the interpretation offered in this and the next paragraph in (Ainslie 1999). Think of Bill Clinton, for example. There are three general schools of thought. Some interpreters, such as Robert Fogelin (1985), take Hume to embrace the radically skeptical position in which we recognize the falsity of our reasoning and our sensory beliefs, even while we cannot help but ignore this verdict. Others, such as Garrett (1997), take Hume
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to be arguing that instinctive tendencies to believe trump the arguments against reason and our sensory beliefs, so that the skeptical arguments are ultimately overridden. And still others, such as Annette Baier (1991), take Hume to be offering a reductio argument: if you accept an overly rationalist conception of reason and our sensory beliefs, you will end up in a skeptical impasse; she takes Hume to be arguing against these rationalist conceptions. 8 The last quoted sentence is taken from somewhat earlier in the diary passage. 9 I refer to Raphael and Macfie (1982) in what follows by ‘‘TMS’’ followed by the appropriate part, section, chapter, and page numbers. 10 Smith does admit that some people reject theism: A future state in which virtue and vice receive their due is a doctrine, in every respect so venerable, so comfortable to the weakness, so flattering to the grandeur of human nature, that the virtuous man who has the misfortune to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and anxiously to believe it. (TMS 3.2.33: 132). An atheist might thus manage to be virtuous, even though she lacks the consola-
tion of religion; but Smith denies that an atheist could openly and resolutely espouse her view, with no hidden second thoughts. 11 Most famously in ‘‘Of a particular providence, and of a future state’’ in (Hume 1975: first Enquiry, ch. 11) and (Hume 2000: ch. 11). 12 I defend the interpretation given here in Ainslie (ms).
Bibliography Ainslie, D. (1999) ‘‘Scepticism about Persons in Book II of Hume’s Treatise,’’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 37, 469–92. ——(2001) ‘‘Hume’s Reflections on the Simplicity and Identity of Mind,’’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62, 557–78. ——(ms) Hume’s Bundle: Scepticism and Self-Consciousness in the Treatise. Baier, A. (1991) A Progress of Sentiments, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Boswell, J. (1991) The Journals of James Boswell, J. Wain (ed. and intro.) New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Campbell, T. D. and Ross, I. S. (1982) ‘‘The Theory and Practice of the Wise and Virtuous Man: Reflections on Adam Smith’s Response to Hume’s Deathbed Wish,’’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11, 65–74. Fogelin, R. (1985) Skepticism in A Treatise of Human Nature, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Garrett, D. (1997) Cognition and Commitment in Hume’s Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Grieg, J. Y. T. (1932) Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Horne, G. (1777) ‘‘A letter to Adam Smith, Ll.D., on the Life, Death, and Philosophy of his friend David Hume, Esq.,’’ 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. (1898) ‘‘A Dissertation of the Passions,’’ in T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (eds) Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, vol. II, New York: Longman, Green, and Co.
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——(1947) Dialogues Concering Natural Religion, Norman Kemp-Smith (ed. and intro.) Indianapolis IN: Bobbs-Merrill. ——(1975) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (eds) Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——(1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (eds) 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——(1983) History of England, vols 1–5, Indianapolis IN: Liberty Classics. ——(1987) Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, revised edn, E. F. Miller (ed.) Indianapolis IN: Liberty Classics. ——(2000) A Treatise of Human Nature, D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (eds) Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——(2001) Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: A Critical Edition, T. Beauchamp (ed.) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Miller, S. (2001) Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat, Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press. Mossner, E. C. and Ross, I. S. (eds) (1977) The Correspondence of Adam Smith, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pratt, S. (1777) Supplement to the Life of David Hume, London: J. Bew. Raphael, D. D. and Macfie, A. L. (eds) (1982) A Theory of Moral Sentiments, Indianapolis IN: Liberty Classics. Ross, I. S. (1995) The Life of Adam Smith, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wallech, S. (1984) ‘‘The Elements of Social Status in Hume’s Treatise,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 45, 207–18.
8
Portraying nature Rousseau’s Reveries as philosophy and art Eve Grace
Rousseau’s autobiographical writings are not generally viewed as part of the philosophical ‘‘system’’ elaborated in his major writings of political philosophy, and are thus often ignored as irrelevant to a philosophical understanding of it.1 They are usually treated as literature, or as the basis for a psychological, rather than a philosophical interpretation of his other works. At the worst, the autobiographical works are seen as embarrassments that must be set aside in order to defend Rousseau’s philosophical ‘‘system,’’ primarily because of his alleged paranoia and the frequent claims to be found in these works that there existed a conspiracy against him. Yet Rousseau himself, by engaging so extensively in an autobiographical enterprise, would seem to make his own experience and personality an issue for the interpretation and assessment of his philosophy; he claims that in order to become ‘‘the painter and apologist of nature,’’ he took ‘‘his model from his own heart.’’2 Those commentators who do take this claim seriously, nevertheless tend to argue that Rousseau does not perceive any complications in simply conceiving of his own character as the portrait of universal human nature; for him, ‘‘self-knowledge is not a problem, it is a given.’’3 Closer inspection of the autobiographical writings, however, reveal that they do indeed form an integral part of Rousseau’s theoretical corpus. This may be particularly true of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, his last work.4 It is routine among those who discuss the Reveries to argue that this work either has no discernible organization, or that its organization is guided by purely autobiographical concerns, that it is an informal journal recording descriptions of Rousseau’s own character, of his memories, of his pursuits (like botany) and of the sentiments that he experienced while the object of what he took to be a universal ostracism. Indeed, it does not at first appear to be a work of philosophical intent: it seems to be composed out of sentiment rather than argument. In tone and style it is overwhelmingly personal and anecdotal; in substance it seems no weightier than nostalgic lyricism, and it purports to be an intimate journal, a diary. In short, it seems to bear none of the usual signs of a theoretical work. It is thus not systematically interpreted as an integral, albeit partial, statement of Rousseau’s political
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and philosophic thought, even by those who recognize that philosophical or moral questions inform it.5 Closer inspection, however, reveals that the Reveries is far closer in its pursuit of such questions to the Emile and the Second Discourse, works which according to Rousseau form the trunk of his system, than it is to the ‘‘unstructured journal’’ of ‘‘charming contemplations’’ or daydreams which it at times claims to be. Indeed, even those characteristics that would seem to mitigate against reading the Reveries as a theoretical work – such as Rousseau’s frequent claims in it that he is the victim of a universal conspiracy – can be shown to form a necessary part of the Reveries’ philosophical project and of Rousseau’s philosophical concerns. When read in the context of Rousseau’s thought as a whole, the Reveries forms the last and central piece of a puzzle, which, when fitted in, helps to make the whole picture leap into view. The Reveries sheds unparalleled light upon a set of central questions that form the core of Rousseau’s ‘‘system,’’ and which are difficult of access. These questions or difficulties can be adumbrated as follows. Rousseau famously ends his first work, the First Discourse, by exhorting us to follow the ‘‘true philosophy’’ of virtue, the ‘‘sublime science of simple souls.’’ Upon closer inspection, however, Rousseau’s conception of virtue, at whose heart is the ‘‘voice of one’s conscience,’’ appears to be far more complex and equivocal than his Orphic hymn to it might seduce us into believing (Rousseau 1964b: 64). Rousseau recalls our thoughtful attention to virtue as one of the problems central to political philosophy, namely, that of the complex and troubling discordance at the heart of human experience: happiness and justice or moral virtue, our most passionate concerns, seem to be bound together only loosely, or even to be fundamentally at odds. In Rousseau’s considered view, only if that discordance can be overcome, and only if virtue’s naturalness can be demonstrated by establishing its centrality to selflove or happiness, can virtue or morality reasonably be said to be of sovereign importance to us. In attempting to resolve this problem, however, Rousseau provides his readers with not one, but two accounts of the fundamental principles of human nature and of morality: a ‘‘natural’’ account based on reason, and a ‘‘religious’’ account based on the ‘‘inner revelation’’ of sentiment, whose principal statement is the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. He thus places his examination of the problem of morality within the context of a confrontation between reason and revelation. Why Rousseau provides us with two contrasting accounts, and which, in the event of contradiction between them, is the correct expression of Rousseau’s thought, persist as compelling questions within the context of his systematic works. What follows is an attempt to describe the basic problems of Rousseau’s moral philosophy, and to show how the Reveries fits into and completes his presentation of them. Given the complexity of the questions involved, what is offered here is a framework for investigation of the Reveries, rather than a completed study of it.6
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The natural account The principles of the natural account are manifested most clearly in the Second Discourse. While Rousseau returns to virtue in all of its complexity, he does so in the natural account entirely on the basis of his apparent agreement with modern and ancient materialists that there is no natural telos or endeavor toward morality or virtue, or even sociability among human beings. Rousseau’s investigation of nature is conducted according to a hypothetical materialism which professes neutrality in matters of metaphysics; in effect, it seems to preclude any form of explanation other than a physical and reductionist one.7 According to the natural account, man is fundamentally an ingenious machine endowed with ‘‘perfectibility’’ (Rousseau 1964b:113). The principle of ‘‘perfectibility’’ explains the extent to which what is thought to be ‘‘nature’’ is contingent upon history: [w]ith the sole exception of the physically necessary, which nature itself demands, all our other needs are such only by habit, having previously not been needs, or by our desires: and one does not desire that which he is not capable of knowing. (Rousseau 1964b: 213) It therefore explains the extent to which any form of human actualization relies upon the historical development of reason and some form of society. ‘‘[T]here is no thought or passion in man that we cannot say how it entered.’’ Will, desire, and reason, according to the Second Discourse, are originally ‘‘purely animal functions’’(Rousseau 1964b:114–16).8 The ‘‘principles’’ of ‘‘soul’’ anterior to reason are two primary inclinations, self-love and compassion. These are in turn reducible to one fundamental inclination: selflove, whose ‘‘primary goal’’ is the pleasure of the sentiment of existence (Rousseau 1964b: 95; 1979: 212–13; 1964a: 1324). Self-love is the ‘‘source of our passions, the origin and principle of all the others:’’ it is ultimately the ‘‘principle’’ of the more complex concept of happiness, which in part rests upon acquired ideas or reason and the imagination (Rousseau 1979: 39, 212–13, 219; 1964a: 1324). The specific humanity of man is thus a result of the accumulated refinements and transformations of animal drives and animal cleverness into the human passions and human faculties that we apprehend today. Man is originally a unified being; the ‘‘spiritual’’ element, properly understood, is a transformation of the physical body of which he is solely composed. In this ‘‘natural’’ account, then, the conscience must necessarily be understood as a manifestation of original self-love. According to Rousseau’s fundamental principle of the ‘‘natural goodness’’ of man, the human animal by nature is a solitary, free, and self-sufficient being. He neither seeks, nor needs, virtue: ‘‘[all] the first movements of
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nature are good and right’’ (Rousseau 1990: 9, 213; cf. Rousseau 1964b:193; 2002: 28). This ‘‘natural goodness,’’ however, develops in a way that seems to point in the direction of morality, for compassion is so closely allied to selflove by Rousseau that he describes it as one of two primary principles or inclinations in the Second Discourse. The human self is not necessarily at war with others; rather, it is potentially ‘‘expansive,’’ having the capacity to attach itself to other beings, and even to find, so to speak, its own well-being or ‘‘existence’’ in that of others (Rousseau 1979: 235note). The powerful and apparently spontaneous forces of compassion, identification, and expansiveness lead us to form and to love an ‘‘extended self’’ which seems to extend beyond the limited and narrow self-concern of self-love, and to give rise to the ‘‘duty to keep commitments’’ which self-interest alone cannot reliably do.9 However, the natural account would seem to forbid the conclusion that love of an order or common good, fashioned from natural attachment or affection, is the sufficient and decisive link between justice and happiness. The significant limitations of ‘‘natural goodness’’ as described by Rousseau must be considered.10 As Rousseau himself shows repeatedly, links between moral virtue, particularly civic virtue, and individual flourishing are difficult to forge. While we may feel pleasure, for example, in acting upon compassion, the claim that we have a duty to act upon it, and that we are blameworthy for not acting upon it, is of a different order. Indeed, the fact that Rousseau, and we ourselves, tend to speak in terms of a moral duty rather than in terms of simple inclination indicates that the relationship between the well-being of the ‘‘community’’ and that of the individuals within it is not like that between the health of the body and any one of its parts. Justice requires that ‘‘the private will conform in all matters with the general will;’’ we tend to expect that the just man will perform his duties in spite of other, competing private interests. While ‘‘the aversion to dying is the strongest of all those aversions that nature gives us,’’ the virtuous man may even go to his death for the sake of justice (Rousseau 1979: 193, 289). Much the more salient portion of the ‘‘identity’’ or self of a physical being, however, is its physical existence, which is the condition of all goods and cannot be shared. The relationship of an individual to the others who comprise the ‘‘common good’’ can never be understood as simply ‘‘constitutive’’ of the self for this reason. The difficulty is that the very proof of the force of conscience in our lives, namely our willingness to sacrifice for it, seems to deny that it is simply good for us. It is said that everyone contributes to the public good for his own interest. But what then is the source of the just man’s contributing to it to his prejudice? What is going to one’s death for one’s interest? (Rousseau 1979: 289) Hence while unflinching allegiance to the common good can be forged on the anvil of public education, Rousseau tells us that the citizen is ‘‘denatured’’ (Rousseau 1979: 40; 1978: 68).
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We then seem to face the following problem: how can Rousseau, like a new Socratic gadfly, exhort human beings to love of the noble image of virtue on the basis of an account of nature that seems rather, both more reliably and directly, to lead us away from it? Yet his praise of virtue seems unequivocal. Rousseau characterizes the virtuous human being as a creation of culture or education, which, building largely upon an allegedly unique human capacity to resist our inclinations, erects a shrine to justice in the human heart. ‘‘The word virtue comes from force. Force is the foundation of all virtue. Virtue belongs only to a being that is weak by nature and strong by will’’ (Rousseau 1979: 444, translation modified; 1964b: 113–14; 1978: 55–6). This force of will subjugates our other inclinations in the name of the rule of duty. The just man ‘‘generalizes’’ his interest so as always to consider the common good; his private interest conforms on all matters with the general will (Rousseau 1978: 217; 1979: 473). Until one learns to place the general will as an inflexible law over one’s inclinations, one is only apparently free, with the ‘‘precarious freedom of a slave to whom nothing has been commanded’’ (Rousseau 1979: 445). Rousseau insistently praises submission of oneself to justice as the necessary condition for freedom. The creation of virtue or moral freedom ‘‘alone makes man truly the master of himself. For the impulse of appetite alone is slavery’’ (Rousseau 1978: 56). Thus the full flowering of our moral selves would seem to be a creation of education or history that, from the viewpoint of human dignity, is superior to any ‘‘natural goodness’’ (Rousseau 1978: 56).11 Nevertheless, this transformation of human beings through moral education seems to violate nature: Rousseau also insists that adherence to duty is contrary to happiness, to our dominant natural inclination to do as we will, to our spontaneous hatred of all restraint. Rousseau frequently describes an uncontrollable love of independence as intrinsic to human beings. Thus ‘‘Nature’s voice’’ as such does not extend to combating our desires through duty.12 The political community’s imposition upon us of duties toward others is in fact the principal vehicle through which man ‘‘finds himself outside of nature and sets himself in contradiction with himself’’ (Rousseau 1979: 40, 213). Nature thus seems not to point toward virtue, but away from it; from the perspective of natural freedom, central to natural man’s self-love or happiness, virtue would seem to be tyranny. Rousseau’s natural account itself, then, seems highly paradoxical: nature’s impulses are both ‘‘good and right,’’ a benign source of happiness, as well as contrary to human dignity and even the source of a kind of slavery; virtue is both contrary to our freedom and happiness, and essential to them, as well as to just behavior toward our fellows. The natural account, then, points to the following questions. On the basis of this natural account, how does a human being come to conceive that, as central to his humanity, he must be ‘‘free to acquiesce or resist’’ the impetus of his inclinations (Rousseau 1964b: 114)? How is the conscience or ‘‘moral instinct’’ related to self-love and to the sentiment of existence, such that ‘‘good
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witness of oneself’’ is a natural good, and the ‘‘remorse of conscience’’ a natural ill (Rousseau 1979: 81)? How can our self-love, our primary pleasure in simply ‘‘existing,’’ be the ultimate source of moral passions whose object does not at all seem to be ‘‘existence’’? In particular, the genesis of amourpropre, within this account, is mysterious. For in the natural account this potent artificial source of our ‘‘virtues and vices,’’ whose object is our relative rank and the good opinion of others, somehow arises spontaneously and immediately upon comparisons that we make with another being (Rousseau 1964b: 47–8, 91; 1979: 214–15). Amour-propre is the seed from which all the social passions spring, from which grow ‘‘what is best and worst among men, our virtues and our vices’’(Rousseau 1964b: 175). It seeks to obtain, as it gives, preference, and it leads us incessantly to rank ourselves among our fellows. Much of Rousseau’s account of morality or virtue points to honor or glory as the source of our concern to do justice against our interest. Here, then, Rousseau seems to resuscitate an old argument according to which the sense of justice or ‘‘conscience’’ is understood to be merely the confounding of praise and our own good, salutary from the viewpoint of society but at the very least suspect from the viewpoint of the individual. The ultimate connections in Rousseau’s thought between amour-propre and virtue, and between virtue and our own good or self-love, consequently remain obscure. How is the desire for ‘‘existence’’ at the core of self-love transformed into a love of virtue? To what understanding of ‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘self-love’’ in Rousseau’s thought does a consideration of the ways in which it transforms itself lead, and what is the content of the ‘‘existence’’ which is subject to these signal modifications? In short, if virtue is contrary to nature, and nature, according to Rousseau, cannot be given a direction contrary to itself but only ‘‘channeled,’’ how can or does virtue arise and direct human actions?13
The problem of the ‘‘facts of nature’’ The difficulties of the natural account are compounded when we consider more carefully the manner in which Rousseau attempts the notoriously difficult endeavor to determine something we could call ‘‘nature.’’ Man, defined as the product of perfectibility, is necessarily a historical being; with perfectibility, genealogy becomes queen of the social sciences. Rousseau claims to be the ‘‘true historian of human nature,’’ and indeed both his ‘‘theoretical’’ works and his autobiographical works present themselves as histories.14 Yet while Rousseau characterizes our human ‘‘nature’’ as largely the product of history or culture, the Second Discourse – Rousseau’s universal history of the species and his demonstration of his account of man as being essentially defined by perfectibility – is evidently not founded upon the historical record. Because of this, the Second Discourse is often criticized as fundamentally flawed. Simply put, Rousseau is said by one commentator, for
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example, not to be able to distinguish between ‘‘ethical truths’’ and ‘‘historical facts’’ in the Second Discourse: ‘‘Rousseau himself is never entirely clear to what extent his notion of a state of nature is ‘ideal’ and to what extent it is ‘empirical.’ ”15 This criticism appears to save the integrity of Rousseau’s thought by arguing that his state of nature is prescriptive rather than descriptive; but it does not confront the radicalization of the notion of ‘‘prescription’’ when no longer founded upon description. Rousseau himself insists on a truly scientific investigation, while going out of his way to show that his argument requires other, more solid evidence than the scanty anthropological or anatomical speculations that he actually does provide (Rousseau 1964b: 93). Nevertheless, he insists that his historical account is not conjectural but true: on the basis of the ‘‘principles’’ he has established and of the reasons that are ‘‘the most probable that one can draw from the nature of things,’’ he claims that one cannot reasonably conceive of any other (Rousseau 1964b:141). Rousseau summarizes his method in the Second Discourse in this manner: [w]hen two facts given as real are to be connected by a series of intermediate facts which are unknown or considered as such, it is up to history, when it exists, to present the facts that connect them; while it is up to philosophy, when history is lacking, to determine similar facts that might connect them. (Rousseau 1964b:141) It appears that the ‘‘first’’ facts, the facts of the state of nature, are known prior to the speculative ‘‘historical’’ account, provided in the Second Discourse, which traces our path from there to here. With these statements Rousseau flagrantly opens himself to the accusation of contradiction: how can the discovery of nature require prior knowledge of nature? The difficulty, noted by Rousseau himself, is that the fundamental argument of the Second Discourse – perfectibility – seems not only to have barred entry into ‘‘nature,’’ but even to have eradicated it altogether. According to his own argument, Rousseau is the product of a particular time and a particular place. How then can he be certain that he is speaking the truth about Man, as he claims, and not only about some men? These problems, however, are not the result of error. Rousseau shows that he is not at all unaware of the difficulties of the enterprise: how, in the absence of a historical record, the original nature of a historical being might be discovered (Rousseau 1964b: 91–3). According to him, even were there such a record, it could not constitute the foundation of our knowledge of nature. The reason for this is indicated by Thucydides, whom Rousseau calls the ‘‘true model of historians’’ because he escapes the defect to which history is subject as a rule: he ‘‘reports the facts without judging them, but he omits none of the circumstances proper to make us judge them ourselves’’ (Rousseau 1979: 239). History wishes to be an account, not only of actions,
148 Rousseau’s Reveries as philosophy and art but of the general causes of men’s actions. History, however, cannot furnish the standard by which we can judge the truth of its account of these causes, or of the general inclinations of human nature (Rousseau 1979: 239–40). For we can only determine the truth of history’s claims by comparison with the truth that we can observe in the present (Rousseau 1979: 451).16 We must begin from what we see. With this correction in mind we see that the state of nature acquires the status of plausible fact only if it can be deduced from what can be observed in the present. Upon what evidence directly accessible to him, then, did Rousseau base the conclusions of the Second Discourse? He who hunts human nature, claims Rousseau, will begin to find its tracks in the contradiction between the way men speak and the way they act (Rousseau 1979: 237; 2002: 51). Because biography most closely studies the internal causes, that is to say, the movements of the ‘‘soul’’ which lead to speech and action, it is generally superior to history. Nevertheless, biography ultimately suffers from the same defect as history, namely that the internal causes cannot be directly observed (Rousseau 1979: 240). Therefore the most valuable tool for investigation is autobiography or introspection, a systematic comparison of one’s actions, experiences, and opinions with one’s ‘‘secret sentiments.’’ If the study of human nature is founded on introspection, then, Rousseau’s autobiographical works become the keystone of his thought. Rousseau’s project in the Confessions is to attempt to distinguish what is acquired from what is natural by retracing the ‘‘chain of secret affections’’ that constitutes his internal history (Rousseau 1959: 1149). It is as the first truly precise account of the human soul that the Confessions is a ‘‘precious book for philosophers,’’ ‘‘a piece of comparison for the study of the human heart . . . the only one which exists’’ (Rousseau 1959:1154). To become a work of philosophy, however, autobiography must demonstrate that it can move from the particular to the universal. Rousseau must show that ‘‘nothing is foreign’’ to him (Rousseau 1969: 1102). He is particularly pressed to meet this demand, since he claims that ‘‘humanity’’ is largely the product of a variety of adaptations to particular times and places. According to one interpretation, he aspires to universality partly through comparison with other cases than his own ‘‘in order to distinguish in [his] heart what belongs to the species and what to the individual’’ (Rousseau 1959: 1158). Nevertheless, according to this view it is primarily the great diversity, and hence the universality, of Rousseau’s own soul which most solidly grounds his unique access to nature. ‘‘Rousseau claims that the range of his ideas, feelings, and experiences is as close to universal as is humanly possible. His internal and external lives are varied and deep enough to provide comparisons unavailable to other people’’ (Kelly 1987: 36). This universality rests not so much on the variety of his experiences, as on his unique psychological development: the meeting of his unique characteristics with unique accidents sets off an illumination within him which uncovers to him the true nature of his being, and therefore that of Man. Here, history seems to reappear. The history of Rousseau’s soul, the retracing of the ‘‘chain
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of secret affections’’ divulges the history of the species; the speculative connections in the ‘‘history’’ presented in the Second Discourse are filled by the internal histories of the Confessions, the Dialogues, and the Reveries (Kelly 1987: 31–46). Yet what, if anything, provides evidence that Rousseau’s unique ‘‘illumination’’ accurately reveals nature? The same basic difficulty that applies to history applies to autobiography: it is dependent upon a standard external to itself, namely ‘‘nature,’’ to determine its universality or truth. An account solely of the sequence of the soul’s phenomena does not permit one to distinguish what is natural and what civilized or artificial. Furthermore, Rousseau repeatedly shows not only his awareness of the need for great fidelity and exactitude in capturing the facts, but also his grasp of the difficulties in meeting this need (e.g. Rousseau 2000: 7–8, 39–40). The Reveries states clearly that the Confessions is in no way an accurate historical account: ‘‘I wrote [my Confessions] from memory; this memory often failed me and only furnished me with imperfect recollections’’(Rousseau 2000: 37; 1995: 5).17 The problem seems to remain that any lapse in his account may represent a significant interruption in the historical narrative. The question, then, remains: upon what evidence, directly accessible to him, did Rousseau arrive at the amoral and subhuman nature he describes in the Second Discourse? It is perhaps because of these difficulties that, as we will see, the Reveries, unlike the Confessions, is presented above all as a case study of Rousseau’s method, and it models itself, not upon history, but upon physics.
The religious account Let us now turn to Rousseau’s alternative, religious account of the fundamental principles of nature and morality. The Profession of Faith in Emile, is generally considered to be the central statement of Rousseau’s own religious beliefs. His character, the Savoyard Vicar, professes the existence of a providential God and the existence of a principle of morality innate to human beings while seeking to nullify the claims, and therefore the authority, of both reason and revelation (Rousseau 1979: 276–7, 281, 285–6).18 The Vicar claims that reason nullifies itself because it cannot decisively pronounce for or against any metaphysical doctrine, since it can be used, on the basis of the evidence, to prove the two sides of any such question (Rousseau 1979: 255, 263, 268, 289, 290).19 Further, the Vicar requires that one recuse one’s own reason because it errs in its activity, and it does so principally because it necessarily judges everything in relation to oneself. Thus the Vicar is in agreement with his materialist opponents that reason ‘‘relate[s] everything to me:’’ it obeys the will that we get from nature to flee what harms us and to seek our good (Rousseau 1979: 272, 290–1). Having turned reason’s weapons against itself, however, the Vicar then uses it to neutralize the alternative or competing claimant to authoritative guidance for human life: revelation. In considering revelation, we are necessarily
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led to the view that we ‘‘need reasons for subjecting [our] reason.’’ The authority of revealed doctrine as transmitted to us must ultimately be established on the basis of ‘‘moral proofs,’’ that is, on the basis of our own experience and judgment of what is credible (Rousseau 1979: 297; 2002: 67–9). In the Vicar’s presentation of the quarrel between an ‘‘inspired man’’ and a ‘‘reasoner,’’ the ‘‘reasoner’’ is made to deny that the ‘‘inspired man’’ can claim as truth anything contrary to reason’s fundamental principle of noncontradiction. The Vicar claims that the real ‘‘minister of truth’’ must ‘‘not tyrannize my reason’’ with ‘‘mysteries and contradictions:’’ he must ‘‘enlighte[n] it,’’ or build upon its fundamental conceptions (Rousseau 1979: 300–1).20 Thus while the Vicar uses reason to restrain reason’s faults, he also conceives of it as providing him with certain irrefutable principles by which to correct and guide his judgment; he goes so far as to claim that the ‘‘authority of God’’ speaks directly through his reason (Rousseau 1979: 301).21 The Vicar, however, is in partial agreement with the ‘‘inspired man’’ that there is a category of things ‘‘beyond reason,’’ although these are essentially different from the category of things that are clearly ‘‘contrary to reason.’’ In opposition to materialists, he argues that there is an active or moral sensibility, or spontaneous inner sentiment, which is clearly distinct from our physical sensibility because it contradicts the ideas that arise from the latter.22 He argues that even if one concedes the dependence of the content of our ideas on our sensations, one does not have to concede that all of our dispositions derive from the same source: ‘‘whereas our ideas come to us from outside, the sentiments evaluating them’’ arise spontaneously within us (Rousseau 1979: 290–1). In the Vicar’s view, human beings are divided by nature between their sentiments which ‘‘speak to the common interest,’’ and reason which ‘‘relates everything’’ to ourselves. We are divided between the soul’s love of ‘‘general order,’’ and the body ‘‘which incites the soul to relate everything’’ to the care of the body (Rousseau 1979: 291–2). The inner revelation of these spontaneous moral sentiments constitute the strongest possible ground for faith or belief in a dualistic metaphysics and a moral order; for try as we may, we cannot convince ourselves of their falsity (Rousseau 1979: 273–6, 280, 286, 289). Inner sentiment directly establishes: that the world is governed by a powerful and wise will and a dualistic metaphysics, according to which man is free in his actions and animated by an immaterial substance with a conscience, or ‘‘an innate principle of virtue and justice on the basis of which . . . we judge our actions and those of others as good or bad’’ (Rousseau 1979: 276, 278, 281, 289). The Vicar provides two accounts of conscience. In his first account, the ‘‘impulse to conscience’’ arises from the ‘‘double relation to oneself and to one’s fellows.’’ For, contrary to Rousseau, the Vicar states that we are also by nature ‘‘sociable, or at least made to become so;’’ hence we have innate sentiments not only with regard to ourselves and our needs, but ‘‘relative to our species’’ (Rousseau 1979: 289–90). He also at first tries to argue that justice
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is its own reward. The ‘‘sublime degree’’ of the just man’s ‘‘incorruptible happiness’’ lies in ‘‘the glory of virtue and the good witness of oneself,’’ which he earns through ‘‘the good use of the soul’s liberty,’’ choosing the common good over his own (Rousseau 1979: 292, 281, 288, 291). Thus, at first the Vicar argues as if God’s providence is limited to granting us this freedom (Rousseau 1979: 281). In this account of conscience, then, morality and human nature, reason and sentiment, are presented as forming an undivided whole. The Vicar, however, cannot maintain the austerity that regards the inner sense of one’s own worth as one’s only reward, and soon breaches this apparent unity. For the just man’s belief in a just order is repudiated by his experience of the world: ‘‘the wicked man prospers, and the just man remains oppressed’’ (Rousseau 1979: 282–3). Further, both his speech and his conduct attest to the experience of an incessant struggle between selflove and love of order, or reason and the conscience, the cessation of which struggle in his view constitutes the primary good of the afterlife.23 The Vicar is quite clear: if morality does not lead to fulfillment, then it is not worthy of our allegiance.24 Because the demands of the conscience are ultimately contradictory to self-love, the conscience must be founded on a principle that transcends selflove: the costs of adhering to the demands of conscience are such that we must conceive of it as a ‘‘divine instinct’’ implanted in us by God (Rousseau 1979: 290). The natural sanctions for injustice – remorse and the loss of the ‘‘glory of virtue and the good witness of oneself’’ – appear to be, at best, insufficient in the face of the weakness of justice in the world. Thus, belief in Providence and in the immortality of the soul is a vital necessity (Rousseau 1979: 284). For the Vicar, then, the question of the relation between the divine and natural order on the one hand, and our own wellbeing on the other, is fundamental. For all that one might want to establish virtue by reason alone, what solid base can one give it? Virtue, they say, is love of order. But can and should this love win out in me over that of my own well-being? Let them give me a clear and sufficient reason for preferring it. At bottom, their principle is a pure play on words; for I say that vice is the love of order, taken in a different sense. There is some moral order wherever there is sentiment and intelligence. The difference is that the good man orders himself in relation to the whole, and the wicked one orders the whole in relation to himself. (Rousseau 1979: 291–2) The good man so orders himself, however, because he also believes that the whole is ordered in relation to his own well-being. Without a god who cares for the morally good man, justice is senseless: if ‘‘the Divinity does not exist, only the wicked man reasons, and the good man is but a madman’’(Rousseau
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1979: 291–2). Thus, while the Vicar purportedly lays aside reason, he actually attempts to prove that the inner revelation of sentiment is ultimately compatible with reason: on the basis of the evidence of sentiment, developed by reflection, we can come to know that a divine order must ultimately reconcile self-love and conscience.25 The existence and goodness of conscience in the religious account, then, turns upon the existence of divine law, or upon the certitude of obtaining a ‘‘great and sure compensation’’ for our undeserved sufferings (Rousseau 2000: 24). How inner sentiment constitutes decisive evidence of the divine origin of and sanctions for conscience is the great difficulty in this account. Rousseau most pointedly brings us back to the question of how far the religious account is compatible with reason in the Third Walk of the Reveries. There he raises repeatedly and with increasing urgency the question of whether his faith, ‘‘approximately that which I have since set down in the Profession,’’ is true (Rousseau 2000: 23).26 The harmony between reason and the inner revelation of the Vicar’s sentiments rests upon the Vicar’s own claims regarding Providence. Providence in turn rests upon the ‘‘universal harmony’’ or moral order, the existence of which he derives from reasoning on the basis of his conceptions of nature and the attributes of God (e.g. Rousseau 1979: 276, 282, 306–7). The Vicar has to admit, however, that ‘‘the principal truths’’ he has ‘‘deduced’’ from ‘‘the impression of sensible objects’’ rest upon his judgment of causes, judgments in which he is led only by ‘‘the inner sentiment’’ and in necessary ignorance of the origin of beings (Rousseau 1979: 268, 276–7, 289). Despite this ignorance, he must claim that reason allows him to determine God’s attributes, especially God’s justice, as ‘‘necessary effect[s]’’ of his being (Rousseau 1979: 282). In the end, this attempt founders upon the weakness of our reason. God’s attributes are ultimately no more comprehensible to the Vicar than the idea of creation through will: he admits that ‘‘I affirm them without understanding them, and at bottom that is to affirm nothing.’’ The ‘‘worthiest use’’ of the Vicar’s ‘‘reason is for it to annihilate itself before [God] . . . it is the charm of my weakness to feel myself overwhelmed by [God’s] greatness’’(Rousseau 1979: 276–7, 286). The Vicar can truly say ‘‘O Jupiter! For other than the name I know nothing of you’’ (Rousseau 1979: 258). His metaphysical or theological account would seem to confirm his own view that ‘‘all we have is imagination. . . . We would rather decide at random and believe what is not than admit that none of us can see what is’’ (Rousseau 1979: 268). The question persists, then: is it contrary to reason to live in the light of what is ‘‘beyond’’ reason? The Vicar is ‘‘forced’’ to reason about the nature of God in the light of ‘‘the sentiment of his relations with me,’’ that is, in light of the sentiment that he deserves justice (Rousseau 1979: 283). The Profession would seem to leave intact the question whether a fundamentally moral as opposed to a metaphysical conception of religion is ‘‘reasonable’’ and sufficient. In the Profession, metaphysics no longer supports morality, but is
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propped up by it. The Vicar’s natural religion would seem to be an untenable halfway house between reason and revelation. As the Vicar himself suggests: ‘‘[i]f natural religion is insufficient, this is due to the obscurity in which it leaves the great truths it teaches us’’ (Rousseau 1979: 300). The Vicar’s argument reveals that he himself remains torn between two conflicting demands, demands he cannot successfully reconcile. He is torn between his love of justice and his desire for happiness, between his sentiment and his reason. Rousseau in the Third Walk of the Reveries confirms that the ‘‘conclusion’’ that God must requite justice is itself the reason for belief in Providence (Rousseau 2000: 23–6).27 Rousseau recapitulates the result of his search for the ‘‘destination’’ of his being by stating that standing against the ‘‘appearances’’ of a moral order are certain ‘‘insurmountable difficulties;’’ the moral order would ‘‘seem illusory even to me if my heart did not confirm my reason’’ (Rousseau 2000: 24–5). There is no evident natural law in the absence of divine law, but the existence of divine law is precisely what reason apparently cannot decisively prove.
Reason and the ‘‘inner sentiments’’ The relation between Rousseau’s religious and natural accounts is a much debated one. A number of interpreters see no tension between the two accounts, conceiving of Rousseau as a religious or sentimental writer who, while succumbing at times to severe doubts in the company of French Enlightenment figures such as Diderot and d’Holbach, remained the product of his Calvinist upbringing and never fundamentally strayed from the fold. These view the ‘‘Profession of Faith’’ as Rousseau’s ‘‘moral and religious credo.’’28 They see Rousseau, like his Savoyard Vicar, as basing his conclusions upon the method of introspection, in which one scrutinizes oneself to discover one’s inner sentiments, which are the spontaneous manifestations of a natural moral order rooted in the divine. The numerous contradictions, however, between the natural and religious accounts, pointed out by a number of commentators, are striking and seem decisively to forbid our interpreting the two accounts as simply variations of the same argument.29 Rousseau seems to place the question of the harmony or disharmony between reason and revelation at the very center of his work. He takes most seriously the profound human experience of the desire for the justice that is due us, and treats this experience not only as a moral, but as a necessarily philosophical problem. Not to take this problem, and therefore the question of the existence of a divine order, fully seriously is one of the, or perhaps the, central weakness of ‘‘modern philosophy.’’30 Unlike ancient philosophers, like Socrates, whom Rousseau holds up as a standard of true philosophy, the ‘‘moderns’’ appear in Rousseau’s work as dogmatic rationalists and atheists. While building upon the ‘‘physical order,’’ they have rejected the alternative of a divine or ‘‘moral order’’ without having sufficiently examined the evidence for it (Rousseau 2000:
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21–6, 29, 72–3). Modern philosophers, according to Rousseau’s critique in the Reveries, are themselves creatures of a belief in justice the existence of which their teaching undermines and even denies. They are thus in contradiction with themselves. They are blind to the pivotal evidence of their own motives, particularly to the desires that cause them to philosophize and to attempt to disseminate enlightenment; they have an unexamined faith in ‘‘reason’’ just as many believers do in God. Modern philosophy cannot therefore justifiably claim that it has decisively refuted the opposite system (Rousseau 2000: 24). As a consequence, the accuracy of its scientific understanding is undermined by the persistence of unexamined beliefs that continue to sway modern philosophers themselves and for which they do not account. In ignoring our sentiments, then, modern philosophers overlook the real beginning point of inquiry. It is Rousseau’s more penetrating and determined examination of our ‘‘inner sentiments,’’ then, which may distinguish him from the rest of modern philosophy. Rousseau’s science is superior because it begins from what can, according to him, be directly known. A science of human concerns and sentiments, or human nature understood from the ‘‘inside,’’ is therefore necessary, and would constitute a science of ‘‘happiness,’’ which is nature’s first demand, and perhaps the only science possible for partial beings such as we (Rousseau 1969: 1087–8). For while we cannot rest satisfied, as Rousseau’s Vicar seems to do, with simply accepting inner sentiments (which even he has to confess, in the end, may be nothing but ‘‘illusions’’) neither can we allow a prejudice for ‘‘reason’’ to decide summarily that the Vicar’s account cannot be true (Rousseau 1979: 269). For the ‘‘heart’’ or ‘‘soul’’ remains as a stubborn empirical phenomenon that must be accounted for by any alternative account of human nature based on reason, including Rousseau’s own. The question of the comparative truth of the natural and the divine accounts cannot therefore be merely an academic question for us.31 If we rub these two accounts together, as it were, the friction between them may throw off sparks that will illuminate the ultimate grounds of Rousseau’s espousal of virtue and conscience. The Reveries is central to this endeavor. As a pivotal test of the claim that the inner sentiment reveals the truth regarding man’s dual nature and the existence of a divine order, the Vicar had challenged anyone to show that love of justice is reducible to self-interest. Let someone ‘‘resolve these contradictions . . . and I will recognize only one substance’’ (Rousseau 1979: 279). The Reveries responds directly to the Vicar’s challenge. It is in the Reveries that Rousseau engages in his most minute examination of the ‘‘inner sentiments’’ in response both to his character the Vicar, and to his contemporaries. In this work, Rousseau engages in an analysis of the first movements of nature or of the ‘‘moral instinct’’ (Rousseau 2000: 34). He also explores in the most concentrated manner the profound degree to which he himself is moved by the desire for justice. Again and again in the Reveries Rousseau believes himself cured of his desire to be treated by men as he deserves, only to find
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his apparent self-sufficiency and peace shattered by the insistent demand that virtuous innocence bring with it esteem and happiness. Our moral experience, as the Vicar argues, raises serious doubts about the sufficiency of the natural account: if we are fundamentally selfish, why do we feel such a powerful internal concern for justice? How did an ingenious self-preservation machine invent the idea that he must deserve his happiness, and proceed to act upon it in ways that are not easily reconciled with the demands of self-interest? Is amour-propre, understood as a desire to prevail upon the opinions of others, sufficient to explain this phenomenon?32
The Reveries as a ‘‘model of the heart’’ Rousseau’s analysis of nature in the Reveries begins from a particular situation: a ‘‘revolution’’ in the moral ‘‘order of things’’ (Rousseau 2000: 3–5). Rousseau describes himself as subjected to the extreme of injustice by a universal ‘‘conspiracy’’ which irremediably transforms him from the benefactor that he strove to be into a malefactor in the eyes of the world. Rousseau artfully uses the ‘‘conspiracy,’’ and the ostracism from society that follows from it, as an ideal situation for investigation of the character and effects of our concern for justice. Conspiracy, and Rousseau’s enforced solitude, perform certain functions in the development of his examination of the ‘‘inner sentiments’’ and the foundation of the ‘‘conscience.’’33 First, universal ostracism confronts Rousseau, and the reader who attempts to accompany him in his reflections, with the problem of justice at its most acute; the drama of conspiracy brings into sharp relief what normally remains muted and therefore less manifest. The ordeal of conspiracy condenses our normally sporadic experience of the unfairness and even iniquity of others by transforming it into an instance of universal and irremediable injustice. It tears asunder the easy concord that often seems to exist between our desire for justice and our desire for happiness. Rousseau is thereby pressed, in a way that one rarely is, to question the foundation and reasonableness of his desire to be treated as he deserves. Second, universal conspiracy offers the conditions under which to test the true motives of our attachment to justice: it is a crucible in which appearances are burnt away to reveal the true coin of the relations between the individual and others. Rousseau is ‘‘nothing’’ among men, which means that he can no longer be an object of praise and blame (Rousseau 2000: 7). Rousseau frequently suggests that virtue is better understood, not as a selfless renunciation of one’s good for the sake of the common good, but as the satisfaction of a desire for honor or praise. Hence the real test of our attachment to justice is anonymity. A person who knows how to govern his own heart, keep all his passions under control, over whom personal interest and sensual desires have no power, and who both in public and in private with no witness does only
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A truly just human being, according to Rousseau, is one who does good without a witness, when neither praise nor interest is to be gained. ‘‘If he exists, I rejoice for the honor of the human race.’’ Does he exist? Rousseau’s enforced solitude, in which there is neither praise nor honor, provides, as it were, an experimental condition in which to test whether virtue reaches the heights that we wish it to reach, or whether the noble performance of ‘‘duty’’ is merely another means of quenching man’s acquired thirst for praise. Rousseau’s ostracism, like Glaucon’s crucifixion of the just man in Book 2 of Plato’s Republic, deprives him of all goods consequent to a reputation for justice, in order to press this question: what is the goodness of justice in itself, unaccompanied by the honors and benefits consequent to the good opinion of others or the reputation for justice (Rousseau 2000: 3–4, 268; 1990: 65)? It pointedly raises the question of the value of justice for the just individual himself, apart from the rewards consequent to a reputation for it. Third, Rousseau’s description of a universal ‘‘conspiracy’’ is a poetic presentation, not only of the human inclination within society toward partiality and possessiveness, but of the moral man’s understanding of the world as governed by will or intention directed toward him. Drawing our concealed sentiments into the open and magnifying them, ‘‘conspiracy’’ is a parody of the moral understanding of the world, an understanding which is, according to Rousseau, the source of obdurate and intolerable pains. For we are incapable of resigning ourselves to ills as long as we conceive of them as the result of the wills or intentions of others (Rousseau 2000: 72–4; 1979: 87–8). This conception of our situation also makes us prey to boundless, and ever disappointed, hopefulness, for others could, if they wished, concede to us the things we deem to be ours by right. Further, it leads to extreme dependence on the opinions of others, since the just distribution of rewards or good reputation is dependent on the willingness of others to grant it. Our sense of deserving destroys the moderation of our desires. If our sense of worth, and not our power, sets limits to our desires, then we are likely to be frustrated. The ‘‘conspiracy’’ thus produces a profound discordance between Rousseau’s expectation of a moral order in which one is treated according to one’s sense of merit, and what he in fact experiences; he finds himself living at the malevolent antipode of a moral order, in an inexplicable ‘‘dream’’ world, governed by a malevolent all-powerful concert of wills, in which innocence is impotent and the just are reviled. Like Descartes’ malin génie, ‘‘conspiracy’’ distorts Rousseau’s every perception and makes it impossible to understand his true situation (Rousseau 2000: 3–7, 15).34 Rousseau surmises that the painful discordance he experiences, a dramatically heightened depiction of one we all at some time experience, must be
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the work of either ‘‘amour-propre’’ or the ‘‘Devil’’ (Rousseau 2000: 6, 73). The Reveries gradually unveils the malin génie, not as conspirators, but as our desire for justice itself, goaded by amour-propre and the imagination.35 Through his examination of the effects of this ‘‘conspiratorial’’ view of the world upon himself, Rousseau suggests that, from the viewpoint of nature alone, our care for justice is itself not only problematic, but even detrimental: it weakens and even destroys our natural moderation and independence. The Reveries thus serves as a correction to the Social Contract’s beautiful claim that morality is an unmitigated human gain (Rousseau 1978:55–6). Rousseau seeks in the Reveries to understand the causes of this mysterious disorder in order to discover what he is and the destination of his being (Rousseau 2000: 3, 7–8, 17–27). Driven by his ‘‘conspiratorial’’ understanding of the world, the moral human being ultimately seeks to do away with necessity altogether, by conceiving of a divine will which supports his demand for justice (Rousseau 2000: 15–16). His certitude regarding divine assistance depends upon the religious account’s correct understanding of the ‘‘heart.’’ While he claims to be able to rest his hopes securely upon his inner moral sentiment, he also describes himself as racked by doubts, and as not being able to let go of the desire for rational certainty (Rousseau 2000: 22–7). If, however, we more closely examined the roots of our concern for justice, we might be able to understand the natural source from which this concern arises, and thus be able to resolve the problem posed by our moral hopes and our desire for happiness. Both the desire to confirm the religious account, and the alternative aspiration of sounding and doctoring the hopes that inspired it, then, rest upon an accurate account of the ‘‘heart’’ or the ‘‘inner sentiments.’’ Rousseau does not, however, thereby hold out the promise of a cure, or the possibility of being able to live with an understanding undistorted by amour-propre. For not through philosophy, but only through ‘‘the terrible lessons [he] received’’ did Rousseau learn to distinguish amour-propre from a ‘‘pure love of justice.’’ The resignation to his ills which Rousseau achieves is ‘‘not the work of my wisdom, it is that of my enemies,’’ and of his own unusual temperament (Rousseau 2000: 73, 74, 76–7). The Reveries proceeds to examine the ‘‘heart’’ in two stages. In the first, Rousseau analyzes the Vicar’s claim to have systematically distinguished our ‘‘acquired ideas’’ from our ‘‘sentiments.’’ Upon closer examination, it is not clear, as the Vicar has insisted it is, that the ‘‘acts of the conscience are not judgments but sentiments,’’ or that the existence of a moral order is simply apprehended directly (Rousseau 1979: 290, 280). If ‘‘reasoning’’ – that is, certain judgments or acquired ideas – is embedded within the supposedly irreducible sentiments of sincerity, free will, and duty to the common good, then the reasoning upon which the inner sentiments rely is open to assessment in light of the principles of reason that the Vicar himself applies. Central to the Vicar’s conception of virtue are the ideas of moral freedom and
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obligation. These are necessarily tied to the idea of deserving or merit, which reconciles our devotion to justice with our happiness. Further, the idea of deserving is the lynchpin of the Vicar’s proof for the existence of a providential order. Precisely where a gap between reason and sentiment would seem to open up because of reason’s uncertainty regarding the existence of Providence, he asserts, the fact that the just are deserving of Providence is evidence that it exists (Rousseau 1979: 283). The Reveries therefore pits the Vicar’s account of sentiment against his own account of reason by assessing the opinions embedded within the ‘‘inner sentiments.’’ Rousseau’s discussion of ‘‘sincerity’’ in the Reveries is only one example of this kind of analysis. As Rousseau describes it in the Profession and the Third Walk, the truth of the ‘‘inner sentiments,’’ as well as the pious expectation of compensation, are dependent upon the ‘‘sincerity’’ or ‘‘good faith’’ of one’s efforts to discover the truth about the existence of God and what he demands of us. Those who are sincere or morally innocent ‘‘lay all personal interest aside’’ and fear ‘‘to deceive [themselves] above all else;’’ their sincerity is distinguished from the willful perversity of those who do not try to keep themselves from error (Rousseau 1979: 269–70; 2000: 22). If, despite their best efforts, the former are mistaken, they can only be accused of innocent error, whereas the latter are guilty of ‘‘crime’’ (Rousseau 2000: 22, 27). ‘‘Good faith,’’ however, is not marked by disinterest about the outcome of our attempts; it is rather characterized by a greater desire ‘‘above all not to be mistaken.’’ The pious man must distinguish between error and bad faith. Nevertheless, ‘‘[i]t is difficult to keep ourselves from believing what we so ardently desire’’ (Rousseau 2000: 22). Further, it is not merely difficult, but rather impossible simply to choose the ‘‘maturity of judgment’’ which we must bring to any careful consideration of these questions (Rousseau 2000: 22). In the Vicar’s account of will, judgment is ‘‘the cause which determines my will,’’ a judgment which is in turn determined by the ineradicable desire to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad (Rousseau 1979: 280). The just or pious man must therefore conceive of injustice as a willful resistance to the goodness of conscience as clearly shown by reason, a reprehensible negligence toward the truth regarding one’s own greatest benefit.36 He explains injustice by conceiving of a soul that willfully chooses to do itself harm. The just man’s own self-understanding is one which, upon reflection, cannot be considered reasonable: he seems to argue that human beings willfully choose to err about what is most important to them, their own good or harm. But when human beings err, can they truly be said to choose? As the Vicar himself says: one ‘‘chooses the good as he has judged the true; if he judges wrong, he chooses badly’’ (Rousseau 1979: 280).37 Cannot the unjust man then only be understood as making a costly mistake? Rousseau states elsewhere his own view that the opinion that we can choose contrary to what we deem to be good is mistaken (Rousseau 1979: 243–4, cf. 96, 236–7; 1990: 669–70).38 The ‘‘sentiment’’ of his own merit, consequent to his practice of ‘‘sincerity,’’ contradicts the Vicar’s own allegiance to the prin-
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ciple of non-contradiction. This presents a difficulty because, in Rousseau’s view, if we do not follow this principle, we would be prevented ‘‘from believing anything at all, considering that every principle of faith would be destroyed’’ (Rousseau 1960: 12). If the Vicar has not distinguished assiduously enough between acquired and perhaps confused ideas, and spontaneous sentiments, we must ask whether he has correctly apprehended our inner sentiments. Thus Rousseau turns in the Reveries to his own more methodical examination of the ‘‘inner sentiments.’’ His ‘‘goal . . . is to make [himself] aware of the modifications of [his] soul and of their sequence’’ (Rousseau 2000: 7). He seems here to dispose of the view that ‘‘nature’’ can only be uncovered by retracing the historical development of the ‘‘soul’s modifications,’’ which he seemed to embrace in the Confessions, in favor of the view that nature’s activity can be apprehended directly: ‘‘I will perform on myself, to a certain extent, the measurements natural scientists perform on the air in order to know its daily condition. I will apply the barometer to my soul, and these measurements, carefully executed and repeated over a long period of time, may furnish me results as certain as theirs’’ (Rousseau 2000: 7).39 Rousseau thus records the ‘‘feelings and thoughts which constitute the daily fodder of my mind in the strange state I am in’’ just as they ‘‘came to me and with as little connection as the ideas of the day before ordinarily have with those of the following day’’ (Rousseau 2000: 7). He then observes the patterns that arise within this succession of thoughts and feelings, as well as the contradictions between his own opinions about what he should do or feel, and what he actually does or feels. For the signal failure of one ‘‘desire’’ to issue in action leads one to suspect either that its real object is obscure to us or that another desire is stronger.40 He thus reflects, for example, upon why he is led to lie at one time and not at another, or to feel generosity at one time and not at another. Rousseau undertakes a kind of ‘‘experimental physics of the soul:’’ the movements of the ‘‘air’’ or the ‘‘soul’’ under different specific conditions are tested by the application of a ‘‘barometer’’ that seeks to measure the underlying, hidden pressures or inclinations which ultimately cause these movements. Such an application of the ‘‘barometer,’’ however, requires the minute examination of what may seem to be very mundane incidents, involving a careful comparison of his responses in different situations – hence the simple anecdotes with which the Reveries is seemingly filled. When Rousseau carries out his own examination of the ‘‘inner sentiments’’ in the Reveries, he discovers that, contrary to the Vicar’s assertion, the ‘‘conscience’’ is not ‘‘infallible’’ (Rousseau 1979: 290). The ‘‘moral instinct’’ or ‘‘conscience’’ is revealingly inconsistent. It fails or speaks ambiguously.41 By examining these instances of failure or ambiguity, he probes what limits conscience, or to what impulses it is originally responsive. Rousseau proceeds in the Reveries, through different stories and ruminations on his own experience, to examine the internal state that produces the various moral
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sentiments that would seem to provide the clearest evidence of a concern for justice and a common good. Shame, self-esteem, generosity, compassion, and gratitude are tested and examined in situations in which acting upon them is conducive neither to reputation nor to any other form of interest. By comparing the situations in which these moral sentiments take effect to those in which they do not, one can begin to piece together the more fundamental inclinations of which they are the transformations. On the basis of this comparative study of the moral sentiments, the moral instinct or the rudiments of the conscience seem to be revealed as variations of the impulses of a physical or strictly natural being: one who acts according to a sense of, and a desire for, power and independence, both absolutely and in relation to others when he comes to compare himself with them. We act ‘‘morally’’ or benevolently not because we feel a duty toward the ‘‘common good,’’ but as an overflowing expression of self-love, which seeks to exercise force or vigor in an extended sphere. The Reveries, read in conjunction with Emile and the Second Discourse, leads to the conclusion that the conscience or moral instinct has a natural foundation in the inclinations of a physical being which is moved by an open-ended, expansive desire to increase the sentiment of power at the core of its being (Grace 2002). Conscience is a manifestation of self-love that seeks to increase the sentiment of existence. As was stated earlier, were the ‘‘contradictions’’ between self-love and justice resolved, the Vicar would have to ‘‘recognize only one substance.’’ The Vicar’s faith was founded upon the claim that ‘‘love of justice’’ is a principle distinct from and irreducible to self-love. Rousseau’s investigations in the Reveries, however, seem to reveal that the core of the ‘‘religious account’’ is a set of ‘‘inner sentiments’’ or moral claims which can be analyzed on the basis of their own fundamental principles or implicit assumptions. This challenge to the ‘‘innateness’’ of the ‘‘inner sentiments’’ opens the way for, and gives credence to, an alternative psychological account of the ‘‘conscience.’’ When developed more fully than is possible here, the alternative account of morality provided by Rousseau seems to be at least as plausible as that provided by his Vicar, and offers support for Rousseau’s statement that ‘‘the love of well-being is the sole motive of human action’’ (Rousseau 1964b: 144; 1979: 442).
Notes 1
Rousseau’s major autobiographical works are the Confessions, Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, and The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. He identifies the core of his philosophical enterprise as consisting of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (First Discourse), the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality (Second Discourse), and Emile or On Education. These are ‘‘inseparable and form a whole’’ (Rousseau 1969: 1136). 2 Rousseau 1990: 214; 1995: 3; 1969: 1102; 1959: 1154. 3 Marcel Raymond, in Rousseau 1959: 1788note 3; Starobinski 1971: 218; Eigeldinger 1962: 66. The Confessions is a ‘‘truthful writing which would like to be true’’ (Philonenko 1984: 3: 268, 257–78). According to Guéhenno, an examination of biographical material shows that Rousseau failed in his attempts to
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4 5 6 7
8 9
10 11
12 13 14
15
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provide a sincere portrait of himself which would serve as the basis for discovering the ‘‘man of nature’’ (Guéhenno 1962:1: 9–10, 2: 290–1). One notable exception to this approach is Kelly 1987. The Reveries of the Solitary Walker is an unfinished work that takes the form of a ‘‘journal’’ of Rousseau’s ‘‘reveries’’ during his daily walks. It is divided into ten ‘‘walks,’’ the last three of which are in incomplete form. One exception is Davis 1999. A book-length study is currently being completed. Rousseau ‘‘comes close to what is now called a ‘value-free’ approach within the realm of metaphysics’’ (Masters 1968: 73). See also pp. 66–74 and 147–57. For a valuable examination of Rousseau’s method, particularly in comparison with that of his contemporaries, see Goldschmidt 1974, esp. pp. 115–306. What this ultimately means would need much more detailed explanation than can be provided here. An illuminating account of reason in Rousseau’s thought is provided by Marshall 1979. They would thus seem to form the rudiments of the ‘‘inner sentiment’’ which the Vicar points to as conscience. The natural account here seems to echo the Vicar’s first account of conscience, which argues that conscience is born of innate sentiments relative not only to ourselves but ‘‘relative to our species’’ (Rousseau 1979: 290; cf. 1964b: 33–4). Some suggestions regarding these limitations can be found at Rousseau 1979: 221, 229; 1959: 1050–3. As is well known, some commentators argue that Rousseau resolves the tension between virtue and happiness by abandoning the latter. See, for example, Cassirer 1989: 47–9, 57, 59, 63–6, 78, 99; Polin 1971: 75, 245; Belaval 1969–71: 22. In this view Rousseau, like Kant, lays a foundation for human dignity by making man overcome his natural selfishness in the service of moral liberty: ‘‘obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.’’ The view that Rousseau’s deepest concern was moral liberty, however, cannot be reconciled with his constant argument that to be choice-worthy virtue must conform to the requirements of human happiness. The claim that Rousseau wishes to find in man a self-legislating being neglects, moreover, the ambiguity of Rousseau’s pronouncements on the question of free will. Rousseau 1990:126–8, 144; cf. Rousseau 1964b: 36, 118, 164–5, 179, 208; 1979: 84; 2000: 52; 1959: 1139. Rousseau 1969: 56; 1978: 158–60. The Second Discourse is man’s ‘‘history as I believed to read it, not in the books of your fellow men, which are liars, but in nature, which never lies;’’ the Emile ‘‘ought to be the history of my species;’’ the Confessions is the history of the development of the rare man who is capable of discovering nature; even the Reveries is said to be a chronological account of the thoughts and feelings that occur to Rousseau during his daily walks. Rousseau 1964b: 103–4; 1979: 416; 2000: 7; 1959:1150. Cassirer 1945: 24–5. Starobinski argues that the Second Discourse is a manifestation of Rousseau’s ‘‘accusatory attitude,’’ through which he lives ‘‘an act of critical opposition.’’ It is the development ‘‘from his singular subjectivity, [of] another order of things, another moral world, a world of innocence and virtue opposed to the ways of the corrupt world’’ (Starobinski 1978: 39, 48). Rousseau’s thought is fundamentally ‘‘mythical and ethical,’’ aimed at ‘‘the reality of the possible.’’ ‘‘The search for exactitude as an object of science hardly preoccupies Jean-Jacques’’
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(Eigeldinger 1978: 21–2, 55, 58, 62). Judith Shklar argues that Rousseau ‘‘did not even aspire’’ to ‘‘great logical rigor or systematic exposition of abstract ideas’’ (Shklar 1969: 1). Cf. Goldschmidt, for whom method is ‘‘primordial’’ in Rousseau’s philosophy (Goldschmidt 1974: 334; Masters 1968: 115–18). 16 Rousseau 1964b: 43. Cf. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War I.x.; Orwin 1989: 348–51. 17 In the Confessions itself, Rousseau tells us: I write absolutely from memory, without monuments, without materials that could recall it for me. There are events of my life that are as present to me as if they had just happened; but there are lacunae and voids that I cannot fill except with the help of accounts as confused as the remembrance of them that has stayed with me. Thus I have been capable of making errors sometimes and I will be capable of doing so again on trifles . . . but in what truly bears on the subject I am assured of being exact and faithful, as I will always attempt to be in everything: one can depend on that. (Rousseau 1995: 109) In fact, the editors of the Pléiade edition marvel at the precision of Rousseau’s memory (Rousseau 1959: xxxiii). 18 For an analysis of Rousseau’s defense of the Profession against the Archbishop of Paris in the Letter to Beaumont, see ‘‘Introduction’’ in Rousseau 2002. 19 According to Rousseau, however, though the human mind cannot decisively comprehend the ‘‘origin of things,’’ reason weighs in more heavily on one side than on the other regarding the kinds of questions that the Vicar declares to be ‘‘beyond his reason’’ (Rousseau 1979: 277; cf. 285). The Profession thus seems to overstate Rousseau’s view of the degree of reason’s neutrality with respect to metaphysical questions. The Vicar claims that ‘‘the philosophers, far from delivering me from my useless doubts, would only cause those which tormented me to multiply and would resolve none of them’’ (Rousseau 1979: 269). The Vicar’s overstatement in the Profession forces philosophy or reason to remain at bay. Since it is accused of being unable decisively to pronounce whether or not ‘‘the nature of things’’ provides a metaphysical foundation for a moral order, the realm of practice can then be considered independently of reason’s putative authority. 20 The reasoner declares: ‘‘[a]nd who are you to dare tell me that God contradicts Himself, and whom would I prefer to believe – Him who teaches me eternal truths by reason, or you who proclaim an absurdity on His behalf?’’ (Rousseau 1979: 300). In the Vicar’s presentation of the quarrel between the ‘‘inspired man’’ and the ‘‘reasoner,’’ the ‘‘inspired man’’ is made to question whether we can simply trust the principles by which the Vicar and his ‘‘reasoner’’ reject revelation; however, he is depicted as not being able to ground the authority he proposes as an alternative except upon attempted ‘‘reasonings’’ of his own (Rousseau 1979: 300–1). Rousseau’s point of departure against the Archbishop in the Letter to Beaumont is the same. It is the Archbishop’s statement that reason and revelation necessarily coincide (Rousseau 2002: 999). Rousseau describes his own view of the principle of non-contradiction as reason’s fundamental conception in the Letter to d’Alembert; he calls it a ‘‘principle of faith’’ (Rousseau 1960: 12). While the Vicar speaks of ‘‘eternal truths’’ arising from our application of reason’s fundamental principle of non-contradiction, Rousseau does not.
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21 This is part of his summation of the dialogue between the ‘‘inspired man’’ and the ‘‘reasoner,’’ and thus seems to indicate that he sides with the ‘‘reasoner.’’ 22 Rousseau also describes an ‘‘active and moral sensibility’’ distinct from the amoral or ‘‘passive’’ one arising from the body (Rousseau 1990: 112). It is not yet clear, however, that he interprets it in the same way as does his Vicar. 23Given his encomium to virtue, the Vicar paradoxically aspires ‘‘to the moment when, after being delivered from the shackles of the body, I shall be me without contradiction or division and shall need only myself in order to be happy’’ (Rousseau 1979: 293). 24 If moral goodness is in conformity with our nature, man could be healthy of spirit or well constituted only to the extent that he is good. If it is not and man is naturally wicked, he cannot cease to be so without being corrupted, and goodness in him is only a vice contrary to nature. If he were made to do harm to his kind, as a wolf is made to slaughter his prey, a humane man would be an animal as depraved as a pitying wolf, and only virtue would leave us with remorse. (Rousseau 1979: 287; cf. 280, 289) 25 According to Barth, Rousseau originated ‘‘theological rationalism . . . for which the Christian spirit is identical with the truly humane spirit,’’ thereby providing ‘‘nothing less than the settlement of the conflict between reason and revelation’’ (Barth 1959: 116–17). 26 This statement is sufficient to indicate that, whatever Rousseau’s faith is, it is not simply or exactly that of the Vicar. 27 Cf. Doubt, he decided, was not for the people and he managed to convince himself that it was too violent a state for his spirit as well. It is far from clear, however, just what, if any, religious beliefs Rousseau managed to salvage, except the bare faith that God exists and that there was a better life hereafter. Without that hope he would be too miserable, but to say that one believes something because one would despair otherwise, is not what is usually meant by an affirmation of faith. (Shklar 1969: xiii). 28 Schinz 1921: 274. The ‘‘Profession’’ is Rousseau’s ‘‘sentimental manifesto,’’ the ‘‘essence of his system’’ (Masson 1970: esp. 2: 84–5, 252–94). ‘‘Rousseau philosopher inclines before Rousseau believer’’ (Philonenko 1984: esp. 2: 254, 200–5). ‘‘[The] Profession de foi establishes principles which are in complete accord with Rousseau’s conception of the order of nature already developed in the earlier part of Emile’’ (Grimsley 1973: esp. 70). See also Grimsley 1968; Burgelin 1952: esp. 100; Eigeldinger 1962: 163–82, 193; Barth 1959: 81, 89. 29 Rousseau himself states that the auditor of the Vicar’s Orphic poetry sees ‘‘a multitude of objections’’ to the Profession’s account of natural religion (Rousseau 1979: 294). He does not force our attention upon the gap that exists between his two accounts; the gap, however, seems to be a yawning and even unbridgeable one. On the basis of inner sentiment, the religious account clearly supports a dualistic metaphysics that is rejected by the natural account. At the center of the conflict is the status of morality: while the Vicar claims that man and
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society must obey the natural law imprinted on our natures by God, the natural account denies the existence of natural law and founds society upon the artificial general will. Some examples of commentators who believe that there are crucial differences between the Vicar and Rousseau: Melzer 1990: 30n1; Masters 1968: 54–8, 84–9; Butterworth 1982: 176–81. Shklar argues as follows: There were plenty of good reasons for d’Alembert to claim that the Savoyard Vicar’s ‘‘Confessions of Faith’’ was a superfluous bit of ‘‘mummery.’’ However, it is evident that Emile’s tutor is less religious than the Vicar, and Rousseau never went beyond saying that he greatly approved of Julie’s and the Vicar’s faith. His own was more or less like it, but not the same. (Shklar 1969: 114) See also Rousseau 2002: 140. The footnotes to the ‘‘Profession of Faith,’’ in Rousseau’s own name, differ significantly from the Vicar’s arguments. For a useful discussion of some of these differences, see Macy 1992: 615–32. 30 This is the only defect of ‘‘modern philosophy’’ upon which Rousseau focuses, in his last critique of it, in the Third Walk of the Reveries. 31 If everything depended on the use made of this life, it was important for me to know it so that I could at least turn it to the best account within my power while there was still time and not be a complete dupe. But given the way I felt myself disposed, what I had to dread the most in the world was risking the eternal lot of my soul to enjoy the goods of this world which have never appeared very worthwhile to me. (Rousseau 2000: 22) 32 There are striking parallels between the Profession and the Reveries which underscore this intent: the Reveries begins by raising the same questions as the Vicar does in a similar situation: what is happiness, and why should we be just in the face of incomprehensible and apparently irremediable injustice? The Reveries goes on to raise and to explore the two alternative accounts. 33 As Barguillet notes, there is not one walk in which Rousseau does not speak of a universal conspiracy as existing against him (Barguillet 1991: 36). There is an extensive debate in the literature over how to interpret Rousseau’s repeated claims that a ‘‘conspiracy’’ existed against him. My only claim here with regard to the question of ‘‘conspiracy’’ in Rousseau’s works is that it performs specific functions in the Reveries of developing the problems of justice and nature that he is discussing. 34 I am indebted for this suggestion to Thomas Mathien, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto. 35 Barguillet suggests that the Reveries as a whole is pathetic poetry written by a man with an amour-propre gone mad (Barguillet 1991: 41). However, while Barguillet argues that this is an idiosyncracy of which Rousseau is unaware, I am arguing that he is presenting the ‘‘conspiracy’’ as dramatic metaphor for the way in which amour-propre ‘‘goes mad’’ in human beings generally. 36 The guilty who say they are forced to crime are as dishonest as they are wicked. How is it they do not see that the weakness of which they complain is their own work; that their first depravity comes from their own will; that
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by willing to yield to their temptations, they finally yield to them in spite of themselves and make them irresistible? (Rousseau 1979: 293) 37
If I do a good deed without a witness, I know that it is seen, and I make a record for the other life of my conduct in this one. In suffering an injustice, I say to myself, ‘‘The just Being who rules everything will certainly know how to compensate me for it.’’ (Rousseau 1979: 292) Since this life is only a series of ordeals, it mattered little what these ordeals were like provided the effect they were destined for resulted from them; and consequently, the greater, stronger, and more multiplied the ordeals, the more advantageous it was to know how to endure them. (Rousseau 2000: 24).
38 See Franquières for the consequences of this understanding (Rousseau 2000: 268–9). It is perhaps because of this difficulty that the Vicar at one point concedes that ‘‘reason combats’’ the sentiment of ‘‘the soul’s liberty’’ which is the soul’s ‘‘merit.’’ 39 Rousseau uses the same metaphor in describing himself in an article that he wrote in 1749 for a projected periodical journal, the Persiffleur. It fleshes out the passage in the Reveries: By dint of examining myself I have not ceased from disentangling within myself certain dominant dispositions and certain nearly periodic returns which would be difficult to notice for anyone but the most attentive of observers, in a word myself. It is more or less like this that all the vicissitudes and the irregularities of the air do not prevent sailors and inhabitants of the countryside from noticing in it certain annual circumstances and some phenomena, which they have reduced to a rule in order to more or less predict the weather in certain seasons. (Rousseau 1959: 1109–10). 40 The Fourth Walk depends on this kind of analysis in order to uncover what lies behind the conscience. See Rousseau 2000: 28–40. 41 See Rousseau 2000: 31, for a statement of the problem.
Bibliography Barguillet, F. (1991) Rousseau ou l’illusion passionnée: les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Barth, K. (1959) From Rousseau to Ritschl, trans. Brian Cozens, London: SCM Press. Belaval, Y. (1969–71) ‘‘Rationalisme sceptique et dogmatisme du sentiment chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau,’’ Annales Jean-Jacques Rousseau 38. Burgelin, P. (1952) La Philosophie de l’existence de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Butterworth, C..(1982) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, New York: Harper Colophon.
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Cassirer, E. (1945) Rousseau Kant Goethe, trans. James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall Jr, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. ——(1989) The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay, 2nd edn, New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Davis, M. (1999) The Autobiography of Philosophy: Rousseau’s The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Eigeldinger, M. (1962) Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la réalité de l’imaginaire, Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière. ——(1978) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: univers mythique et cohérence, Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière. Goldschmidt, V. (1974) Anthropologie et politique: les principes du système de Rousseau, Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin. Grace, E. (2002) ‘‘The Restlessness of ‘Being:’ Rousseau’s Protean Sentiment of Existence,’’ History of European Ideas 28.1. Grimsley, R. (1968) Rousseau and the Religious Quest, Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——(1973) The Philosophy of Rousseau, London: Oxford University Press. Guéhenno, J. (1962) Jean-Jacques: en marge des Confessions: roman et vérité, 2 vols, Paris: Gallimard. Kelly, C. (1987) Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The ‘‘Confessions’’ as Political Philosophy, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. Macy, J. (1992) ‘‘ ‘God Helps Those Who Help Themselves’: New Light on the Theological-Political Teaching in Rousseau’s Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar,’’ Polity 24, no. 4. Marshall, T. (1979) ‘‘Perception politique et théorie de la connaissance dans l’oeuvre de Jean-Jacques Rousseau,’’ Revue française de science politique 29.4–5. Masson, P.-M. (1970) La Religion de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints. Masters, R. (1968) The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Melzer, A. (1990) The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Orwin, C. (1989) ‘‘Thucydides’ contest: Thucydides 1.22 in context,’’ Review of Politics 51: 345–64. Philonenko, A. (1984) Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la pensée du malheur, 3 vols, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. Polin, R. (1971) La politique de la solitude: essai sur J.-J. Rousseau, Paris: Editions Sirey. Rousseau, J-J (1959) Confessions, Autres textes autobiographiques, Oeuvres Complètes, eds Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Paris: Editions Gallimard. ——(1960) Politics and the Arts: Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. ——(1964a) La Nouvelle Héloïse, Théâtre, Essais littéraires, Oeuvres Complètes, eds Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Paris: Editions Gallimard. ——(1964b) First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters, New York: St Martin’s Press. ——(1969) Emile, Education, Morale, Botanique, Oeuvres Complètes, eds Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, Paris: Editions Gallimard.
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——(1978) On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters, New York: St Martin’s Press. ——(1979) Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, New York: Basic Books. ——(1990) Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, eds Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, Hanover PA: University Press of New England. ——(1995) The Confessions, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, eds Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Christopher Kelly, Hanover PA: University Press of New England. ——(2000) The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letter to Franquières, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Christopher Kelly, trans. Charles E. Butterworth, Alexandra Cook and Terence E. Marshall, Hanover PA: University Press of New England. ——(2002) Letter to Beaumont, Letters Written from the Mountain, and Related Writings, The Collected Writings of Rousseau, eds Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace, trans. Christopher Kelly and Judith R. Bush, Hanover PA: University Press of New England. Schinz, A. (1921) Vie et oeuvres de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, New York: D. C. Heath. Shklar, J. (1969) Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starobinski, J. (1971) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle, Paris: Gallimard. ——(1978) ‘‘The Accuser and the Accused,’’ Daedalus 107 (3): 41–58.
9
John Henry Newman and autobiographical philosophy Jay Newman
Even many who have not read a page of his writings are aware that John Henry Newman is the author of both one of the most renowned autobiographies, the Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) and one of the most influential works of religious philosophy, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). Newman’s gifts as an autobiographer and a philosopher pervade virtually the entire corpus of his writings and are apparent in his contributions to fiction, poetry, theology, history, and other branches of literature. Newman did not regard himself as primarily an autobiographer or a philosopher; and it is fitting that his greatest admirers should remember him as, first and foremost, a devout witness for the Christian faith, and that his more open-minded detractors should regard him as, above all, a shrewd and effective ecclesiastical controversialist. Nevertheless, Newman is a complex figure in spite of the homogeneous focus of his life’s work as a Christian thinker and writer. He had little interest in autobiography for its own sake, and in a sermon on self-contemplation he observed austerely that Surely it is our duty ever to look off ourselves, and to look unto Jesus, that is, to shun the contemplation of our feelings, emotions, frame and state of mind, as if that were the main business of religion, and to leave these mainly to be secured by their fruits. (Newman 1868: 163) Neither did Newman have much interest in philosophy for its own sake; and throughout his writings we find derisive barbs directed against those who do, as when he asks in one of his celebrated lectures on higher education, ‘‘In a word, from the time that Athens was the university of the world, what has philosophy taught men but to promise without practising, and to aspire without attaining?’’ (Newman 1959: 140). But Newman was certainly a gifted and accomplished autobiographer and philosopher and had benefited in his early years from a wide-ranging preparation for both avocations. Newman’s interests as autobiographer and philosopher are distinctly interrelated, and not only because of the unified religious project into which
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Newman integrates them. Although the Apologia is more appropriately regarded as a religious and spiritual biography than a philosophical one, it is a philosophical work in a number of ways, not least in its emphasis on the intellectual pathway to sound ideas about the most important topics; and it is unmistakably a paradigm of the kind of reflection that Newman examines epistemologically and phenomenologically in the Grammar. However, for those who are interested in the relations of autobiography and philosophy, Newman’s conception in the Grammar of autobiographical philosophy may merit closer consideration. The fundamental import of Newman’s autobiographical and philosophical interests is suggested by Newman’s glaring reference in the Apologia to his adolescent obsession with ‘‘two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’’ (Newman 1956: 127), and while this remarkable comment may bring Cartesianism to the reader’s mind, Newman was rather more consistently preoccupied than Descartes was with himself and his God, and to some extent the nucleus of both Newman’s autobiographical and his philosophical reflection can properly be regarded as his fixation on his personal relationship with God. While its rhetorical power remains almost beyond question, the Apologia is now a somewhat enigmatic work even for many intellectually sophisticated and informed Roman Catholic and Anglican readers, partly because the historical controversies that animate the work may well seem rather dated. The Apologia was proximately a response to what Newman rightly regarded as a grave and gratuitous slander directed at him – and secondarily at a number of ecclesiastical groups with which he was currently or formerly associated – but Newman seized the opportunity to discourse at length on the elaborate intellectual and spiritual reflection that had led him gradually over several decades to move from mainstream Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. As the book’s title indicates, it was an attempt at vindication, not only of his truthfulness – which the anti-Catholic bigot Charles Kingsley had ostentatiously questioned – but of the Catholicism which Newman had embraced and the methods of intellectual inquiry that had led him to embrace it. Thus the work is characteristically Newmanian in being authentically apologetical on several levels. In addition to vindicating Newman’s personal integrity before his fellow Englishmen – most of whom he realized would remain inimical to much that he represented – it justified his life’s work as a Christian inquirer and educator and defended, in a distinctively personal way, the world-view which he had arrived at and had come to symbolize to his countrymen. Though in part a sophisticated work of philosophical and theological apologetics, the Apologia eschews the traditional ‘‘formal’’ arguments that Newman regarded, rightly or wrongly, as largely irrelevant to authentic religious conviction. Persuaded even already as an Anglican that ‘‘it is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing’’ (Newman 1970b: 63),1 the
170 Newman and autobiographical philosophy author of the Apologia meticulously explains the development of his own religious reflection in the hope that fair-minded readers will empathize with or at least appreciate, as much as they can, the motives, methods, conclusions, and insights operative in the intimate spiritual and intellectual journey that he has with utmost sincerity disclosed to them. The work was remarkably successful when it first appeared, for while most non-Catholic readers were not inspired to follow Newman into the Catholic church, many were moved to view Newman’s fellow Catholics – and Newman himself – in a considerably more kindly light, while Newman’s Catholic readers had a richer understanding of their own commitment. What is more, most readers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, were fascinated by the opportunity Newman had afforded them to understand better the nature of faith, of reason, of inquiry, and of the mind itself. Even most of those who could not come to embrace Newman’s Roman Catholic vision were impressed by the fact that Newman had provided them with trenchant insights into how they themselves had arrived at a world-view, for there was indeed much that they had in common – as creatures who think and believe and become committed to a vision – with this curious man who had not been born a Catholic or been indoctrinated with Catholic teachings but had gradually arrived by reflection, investigation, and determination at a life-transforming spiritual certitude. Readers of Newman’s age were undoubtedly struck by what we would today characterize as the ‘‘existential’’ dimension of Newman’s spiritual and intellectual journey. But if Newman’s fellow Englishmen, even many who were antagonistic to the Catholic church, found Newman’s account of his journey congenial and plausible, it was partly because they had been prepared for it by centuries of British empiricist philosophy. Newman is often and appropriately associated by historians of philosophy with existential thinkers such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Marcel, but he was as loyal to classical empiricist methods and principles as his contemporary John Stuart Mill and other nineteenth-century British philosophers who had embraced the ‘‘liberalism’’ that he criticized throughout his life. Newman’s aversion to rationalism was not only an existentialist aversion but an empiricist one as well. In the writings of Newman, perhaps more than those of any other great thinker, we are reminded of a pivotal commonality between existentialist and empiricist thought, both of which deem rationalism to rest on a basic misunderstanding of the way the human mind works in real life and both of which stress concrete experience rather than formalistic abstractions. Newman’s enterprise in the Apologia, as in so many of his works, is largely descriptive and phenomenological. While in the Apologia and other works, Newman countenances various forms of evidence that classical empiricists such as Hobbes, Hume, and even Locke do not, still his affinities with Christian empiricists like Berkeley and Bishop Butler are evident. Newman’s emphasis on conscience and the moral sense is entirely in the spirit of classical British empiricism, and his advocacy of nominalism and his disparagement of abstract general ideas are at times as uncompromising
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as Hobbes’ and Hume’s (Newman 1979: chs 1–4; cf. Jay Newman 1986: 39–41). So the emphasis on concrete experience and the devaluation of formal abstractions that vitalize Newman’s account of his spiritual and intellectual journey would have struck a responsive chord with Englishmen nurtured on classical British empiricism. There is a critical sense in which the Apologia is more faithful to empiricist principles than such monumental dissertations of British empiricism’s golden age as Locke’s Essay, Berkeley’s Principles, and Hume’s Treatise. In the Grammar – itself a work closer in conception to those discourses – Newman emphasizes repeatedly that ‘‘real’’ apprehension and assent are more efficacious and thus ultimately more important than mere ‘‘notional’’ apprehension and assent (Newman 1979: chs 1–4; cf. Jay Newman 1986: 39–41). He proposes that Real apprehension . . . may be pronounced stronger than notional, because things, which are its objects, are confessedly more impressive and affective than notions, which are the objects of notional. Experiences and their images strike and occupy the mind, as abstractions and their combinations do not. (Newman 1979: 50) He later states that, ‘‘[O]n the whole . . . acts of Notional Assent and Inference do not affect our conduct, and acts of Belief, that is, of Real Assent, do (not necessarily, but do) affect it’’ (Newman 1979: 87). This is a critical point for Newman, as, ‘‘Life is for action’’ (Newman 1979: 91); and in Newman’s view, the abstract, purely philosophical forms of religion and secularist ideology being promoted by the liberals of his day are wholly inadequate replacements for traditional dogmatic religion, which makes possible the ‘‘real’’ religious assent needed for inspiring Christian moral action (Newman 1979: 86–92). The Apologia is largely devoted to Newman’s account of the historical development of his religious ideas, including philosophical ones, but Newman recognizes that the full value of his ideas for the reader can only be conveyed if the ideas are related directly to concrete human experiences and actions: initially, Newman’s own experiences and actions, and then by empathetic understanding, those of the reader. Newman, who himself wrote semiautobiographical fiction, would undoubtedly have sympathized in this regard with later existential thinkers who have preferred to articulate their philosophical ideas in works of autobiography, fiction and drama rather than works of abstract theory. In any case, whatever philosophical insight the Apologia imparts has a distinctive form and degree of effectiveness that ‘‘pure’’ philosophy does not because of its being directly related to Newman’s life and to experience and action in general. Moreover, the kind of philosophical insight it imparts is quite different from the kind imparted by classical empiricist treatises such
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as Locke’s Essay, which, for all of their vivid examples, largely employ abstract argument to establish the primacy of concrete experience. Even most secularist readers would likely grant that the Apologia contains, among other things, philosophical ideas about God, reality, knowledge, rationality, morality, culture, human destiny, and other traditional philosophical topics, and moreover that these philosophical ideas are not merely incidental to Newman’s description of his experiences and actions but render his account of his life more significant and more valuable to the reader. Though Newman’s account offers little in the way of formal argument in defense of his ideas – a formal kind of inference which, in any case, Newman regarded as comparatively insignificant with respect to certitude in concrete matters – it may be seen as indirectly defending them by clarifying the informal reasoning by which he arrived at them (Newman 1979: ch. 8). In this respect Newman is heir to another legacy of classical British empiricism, but a dubious one. As Isaiah Berlin has observed, the classical British empiricists habitually supposed that a certain kind of answer to the question of the genesis of knowledge or the ways of learning automatically entailed a certain sort of answer to the question of what was the correct proceeding for establishing the truth of, and what concepts were involved in, a given proposition (Berlin 1984: 25–6). Nevertheless, the reader of the Apologia may still be able to discern how the process by which Newman arrived at various ideas has marks of reasonability, in spite of the absence from the text of formal demonstrations. Though the larger part of Newman’s account is devoted to a discussion of religious opinions more fittingly characterized as theological than philosophical, and much of his account simply alludes to his being impressed by some book, sermon, or conversation, in places the focus is more clearly philosophical. For example – and for Newman, examples are vital to a philosophical method that calls for focused reflection on concrete experience – in referring to Joseph Milner’s influence on his understanding of miracles, Newman writes: It is Milner’s doctrine, that upon the visible Church come down from above, from time to time, large and temporary Effusions of divine grace. This is the leading idea of his work. . . . [B]ut still it was natural for me, admitting Milner’s general theory, and applying to it the principle of analogy, not to stop short at his abrupt ipse dixit, but boldly to pass forward to the conclusion, on other grounds plausible, that, as miracles accompanied the first effusion of grace, so they might accompany the later. It is surely a natural and on the whole, a true anticipation (though of course there are exceptions in particular cases), that gifts and graces go together . . . and moreover . . . there was no force in the popular argument, that, because we did not see miracles with our own eyes, miracles had not happened in former times, or were not now at this very time taking place in distant places. (Newman 1956: 142)
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Similarly, in referring to John Keble’s influence on his philosophy of assent, Newman writes: Butler teaches us that probability is the guide of life. The danger of this doctrine, in the case of many minds, is, its tendency to destroy in them absolute certainty, leading them to consider every conclusion as doubtful, and resolving truth into an opinion, which it is safe to obey or to profess, but not possible to embrace with full internal assent. . . . I considered that Mr Keble met this difficulty by ascribing the firmness of assent which we give to religious doctrine, not to the probabilities which introduced it, but to the living power of faith and love which accepted it. . . . Faith and love are directed towards an Object; in the vision of that Object they live; it is that Object, received in faith and love, which renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient for internal conviction. . . . I did not at all dispute this view of the matter, for I made use of it myself; but I was dissatisfied, because it did not go to the root of the difficulty . . . and accordingly I tried to complete it by considerations of my own. (Newman 1956: 139–40) Still, whatever the Apologia offers in the way of autobiographical philosophy is for most philosophical readers only ‘‘philosophy’’ in an attenuated sense; and Newman himself would not sanction our regarding the subject matter of the Apologia as integrally philosophical in the way (or to the extent) that the subject matter of the Grammar is. The Grammar is in its structure and style a more conventionally and more consistently philosophical work, and its philosophical focus is indicated unambiguously to the reader by the terminology as well as the subject matter of its opening pages. Chapter 1 addresses ‘‘Modes of Holding and Apprehending Propositions,’’ and the first line of the essay is the rhetorically and existentially unimpressive observation that, ‘‘Propositions (consisting of a subject and predicate united by the copula) may take a categorical, conditional, or interrogative form’’ (Newman 1979: 25).2 It may initially seem rather odd that only a few years after the appearance and enthusiastic reception of the Apologia, Newman should have devoted so much of the Grammar to the incongruous eighteenth-century project of employing abstract argument to establish the primacy of concrete experience. The motives that led Newman to write the Grammar are probably more complex than most students of the work have recognized and are indeed more complex than Newman himself allowed or perhaps even realized (cf. Jay Newman 1986: 18–34). The Grammar’s philosophy of assent is obviously less directly rooted in the Apologia than in the famous sermons on faith and reason that Newman delivered at Oxford while still an Anglican (Newman 1970a); but just about anyone who read the Grammar when it first appeared would have realized that the essay provides a detailed philosophical examination of reasoning processes that Newman had displayed in a concrete autobiographical form in
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the Apologia. Long before he wrote the Apologia, Newman had already provided his readers with numerous examples of those reasoning processes at work, and Newman undoubtedly believed that the operation of those processes could be discerned in most works of non-fiction, including those written by people whose ideas Newman himself deplored. Nevertheless, the Apologia’s account of Newman’s spiritual and intellectual journey would have been well known to most of the initial readers of the Grammar, and some of Newman’s specific descriptions of how he arrived at certain beliefs would surely have been vivid in those readers’ minds. The Grammar was not written simply to explain on a philosophical level the reasoning processes explained on a concrete autobiographical level in the Apologia, but Newman knew that most of the first readers of the Grammar would think back to passages in the Apologia; and for this reason among others, Newman could justifiably believe that the abstruse parts of the Grammar were not entirely divorced from his more personal reflection. Moreover, the Grammar considered as a whole is not nearly as conventional a philosophical work as its opening pages would suggest. It is, as is to be expected, a work of Christian apologetics – one more of many projects in line with Newman’s lifelong vocation as a witness for the Christian faith. Newman does give much consideration in the essay to concrete examples of reasoning involving secular subject matter, but he does so only because he ultimately aims at showing that inference and assent in religious reflection are not essentially more irrational than inference and assent in other fields of inquiry and insight. Again, though substantial parts of the Grammar are devoted to abstract analysis, a markedly large proportion of the essay is devoted to concrete examples that Newman believes are more revealing in their own way than his epistemological and psychological theories and arguments. Even at its most abstract, Newman’s philosophical discussion in the Grammar is generally based on a kind of introspective investigation of mental contents and processes that, while corresponding to similar examinations by philosophers such as Locke, Hume and Butler, is even more prominently phenomenological in its thrust. This is because Newman is more consistently aware than Hobbes, Locke and the eighteenth-century British empiricists that his description of the way that the human mind reasons and arrives at assent is based on his introspective understanding of the way that his own particular mind has reasoned and arrived at assent throughout his own life. As if this were not enough, at key points in the essay Newman forsakes philosophical sobriety to indulge in the flamboyant forms of homiletical or controversialist rhetoric that aroused his admirers and detractors alike (e.g. Newman 1979: 52–4, 88–92, 333–5, 370–5). Thus despite the essay’s philosophically technical sections, Newman is faithful even in the Grammar to his conviction that in spiritual and intellectual reflection, the personal and concrete ultimately have priority over the formal and abstract. These considerations suggest that the Grammar, like the Apologia, is a work of autobiographical philosophy, though in a different key. The Apologia
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is an autobiographical work that can be recognized on reflection to have a significant philosophical dimension, whereas the Grammar is a philosophical work that can be recognized on reflection to have a significant autobiographical dimension. However, the project in the Grammar is not in this regard simply the inversion of that of the Apologia; for Newman’s basic mission, that of a Christian who witnesses as an inquirer and educator, remains the same throughout the entire corpus of his writings. Moreover, whether writing autobiography, philosophy, fiction, poetry, theology or history, Newman is always writing on one level about his favorite topics – himself, God, and his relationship with God. The unity of Newman’s lifelong spiritual vocation is itself worth considering here. It has been obscured by the fact that Newman is one of the most famous ‘‘converts’’ in history, someone who has been seen as abandoning the church of his family, friends, colleagues and countrymen and associating himself with a powerful alien institution. But the relations between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, as Newman even as a young man was given to reminding his fellow Anglicans, have historically and theologically been exceedingly more intimate than the relations between other ecclesiastical traditions. Newman was morally convinced that it was not he who represented apostasy but rather those in the Anglican church who had allowed liberal, Calvinist, and other alien tendencies to weaken Anglicanism’s relationship with the universal church. The Apologia and Grammar both emphasize how certitude in concrete matters – including religious ones – is ordinarily obtained by reasonable inquirers only after the conscientious ‘‘cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case under review’’ (Newman 1979: 230; cf. Newman 1956 140–1). The Apologia meticulously describes Newman’s long personal journey to certitude, and the Grammar concentrates not on spontaneous religious experience as such but on the reasoning processes that precede the operation of an illative sense that is the perfection of the ratiocinative faculty (Newman 1979: 269–71). There are, in fact, passages in the Apologia, such as those cited above, that would require very little rewriting to fit neatly into the Grammar, and correspondingly there are passages in the Grammar which would require little rewriting to fit comfortably into the Apologia. Both works indeed endeavor to provide the reader with insights into, among other things,3 how Newman and other inquirers have arrived at insights (cf. Newman 1956: 140–1). The autobiographical dimension of the Grammar is as pervasive as the religious, but there are places in the essay where it is particularly pronounced, and none is more striking than the opening paragraphs of the last chapter of the work, chapter 10, where in addressing the ‘‘momentous’’ and ‘‘sacred’’ subject of ‘‘Inference and Assent in the Matter of Religion,’’ Newman makes one of the most notorious of his many notorious statements. The statement itself is enclosed in a characteristic piece of autobiographical philosophy:
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This extraordinary passage, one of the most important in Newman’s copious writings, is, among other things, Newman’s most concise and perhaps most poignant characterization and justification of the project of autobiographical philosophy. And at its core is the notorious observation that in philosophical and religious inquiries, ‘‘egotism is true modesty.’’ All of us are to some degree self-conscious, but few people have paraded their self-consciousness as obsessively as John Henry Newman (Jay Newman 1986: 176–7). Newman’s justification of what he calls ‘‘egotism’’ has a profound philosophical significance that we shall consider momentarily, but some of Newman’s critics have appropriately seen it as indicative of the egomania that caused Newman so much grief during his lifetime and has continued to this day to trouble even some of his admirers. It has seemed to them that when he declares here in the Grammar that his own experiences are ‘‘enough for himself,’’ by doing so he in effect devalues the experiences and judgments of his fellows and even the experiences and authoritative judgments of the ecclesiastical leaders – traditional as well as contemporary – whose wisdom he regularly commends to his readers. Despite the sundry forms of conservatism and traditionalism that temperament and intellectual conviction had led him to embrace and espouse on so many occasions, Newman had an extraordinarily intense confidence in the deliverances of his own conscience. While often ostensibly respectful of the conscience-based judgments of his fellows, he was rarely hesitant to affirm the superiority of his own conscience-based judgments. In some ways Newman was an extremely intolerant man, immodestly disrespectful of the considered judgments of his fellows, including prominent leaders of the hierarchy of his own church. His career as a Roman Catholic leader was marked by a series of confrontations with both Catholic progressivists and highly placed Catholic conservatives. Even after having been vindicated to some extent by having been made a cardinal, he was still viewed with suspicion by some of the church’s most powerful functionaries (Jay Newman 1986: 18–19). However, apart from his own curiously ‘‘liberal’’ tendencies (Jay Newman 1986: 18–19, 31), which greatly agitated notable Catholic conservatives, Newman was more often than not a self-professed bigot, whose attitude toward the tolerance of religious error was largely Augustinian in spirit (Jay Newman 1986: 32–3), and whose critical remarks
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on religious and intellectual rivals could be as slanderous as the charges that Kingsley had foolishly leveled at him, at Tractarians, and at Roman Catholic priests. Even many who generally admired his response to Kingsley could not help wondering about the continuing relevance of personal characteristics described vividly in the Apologia: This absolute confidence in my cause, which led me to the imprudence or wantonness which I have been instancing, also laid me open, not unfairly, to the opposite charge of fierceness in steps which I took, or words which I published. In one of my first Sermons I said, ‘‘I do not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to the country were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion than at present it shows itself to be.’’ (Newman 1956: 161) I have changed in many things: in this I have not. From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. (Newman 1956: 163) Newman’s egomania, bigotry, and dogmatism were exacerbated by other character traits, for he was vain yet insecure, paranoid and querulous, frequently unable to handle fair and sensible criticism, and quite possibly manic-depressive. Still, in encapsulating the spirit of his project of autobiographical philosophy, Newman’s proposal that in philosophical and religious inquiries egotism is true modesty not only illuminates and to some degree justifies his own distinctive approach to many philosophical and religious subjects, but advances the classical British empiricist agenda by opening up a new pathway for it to travel – a reasonable and, for many, appealing alternative to the pathways of positivistic materialism and skepticism. At the same time, it has provided stimulative insight to an array of religious and secular thinkers interested in the Subject and in subjectivity, including phenomenologists, existentialists, humanistic pragmatists, and even analytical and Thomistic thinkers struck by the importance of insight itself. Newman remains one of the most incisive and most influential philosophical and religious writers on the subject of the Subject. All the same, the immense importance that Newman ascribes to subjectivity does not fit together comfortably with Newman’s illiberalism or indeed with his professed faithfulness to the authority of what may well be the world’s most determinedly authoritarian institution, the Catholic church. Fascination with subjectivity – even a subjectivity that protects a religious believer from the attacks of tough-minded scientific and rationalistic secularists – has a way of developing into subjectivism, indeed a subjectivism closely akin to forms of liberalism against which Newman crusaded throughout his life.
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Contemporary Catholic reactionaries who make a show of lionizing Newman for his attacks on liberalism usually know all too well that Newman has also been a hero to Catholic progressivists and even some radicals, including modernists such as Tyrrell and Loisy who have been thunderously censured by the popes. As Arnold Lunn has observed, ‘‘Others who were not of his school have claimed that the ‘illative sense’ leads them to other goals, and that developments of Christian doctrine from which Newman would have shrunk in horror fulfill his tests’’ (Lunn 1924: 80). Someone who disagrees with Newman on just about everything else can wholeheartedly repeat Newman’s words that, ‘‘In religious inquiry each of us can speak only for himself, and for himself he has a right to speak. His own experiences are enough for himself.’’ In the final chapter of the Grammar, in the pages following his proposal that in philosophical and religious inquiries egotism is true modesty, Newman, ever the apologist, offers some ‘‘specimens, among the many which might be given, of the arguments adducible for Christianity’’ (Newman 1979: 379). The arguments Newman elects to offer in this chapter are, for the most part, ludicrous at best and in places thoroughly appalling, particularly when in an interminable and detestable tradition of Catholic theological antiSemitism he reflects on the cosmic import of the continuing suffering of the Jews (cf. Jay Newman 1986: 180–4). Edmond Darvil Benard observes that This positive apologetic will strike many readers as the weakest part of the Grammar. But this is not surprising when we consider that Newman was not professing his apologetic to be the proof of Christianity, but merely that evidence from the convergence of probabilities which was personally convincing to him. (Benard 1946: 168) What Benard says is true enough, but more needs to be said. A thoughtful person reading the apologetic at the end of the Grammar may well be left pondering how so sophisticated a thinker as Newman could have found these arguments not only convincing but worthy of being put forward at a most critical moment in his autobiographical philosophy. And here we bear witness to a powerful limitation of autobiographical philosophy. In the finest passages of the Apologia and the Grammar, Newman elicits from his reader more than empathy; he elicits a more respectful view of the ideas that he holds dear to his heart. But when autobiographical philosophy goes awry, the reader may be left with grave reservations about the integrity of both the author and the very vision he is championing.
Notes 1 The sermon in which Newman enunciated this position was preached in 1831. 2 The first pages of this University of Notre Dame Press edition are devoted to an introduction by Nicholas Lash.
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These other things include, for example, the cultural dangers posed by liberalism and the reasonableness of the Catholic faith.
Bibliography Benard, E. D. (1946) A Preface to Newman’s Theology, St Louis MO: B. Herder. Berlin, I. (1984) [1956] The Age of Enlightenment, New York: Meridian. Lunn, A. (1924) Roman Converts, London: Chapman and Hall. Newman, J. H. (1868) [1834–43] ‘‘Self-Contemplation,’’ in Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 2, London: Rivingtons. ——(1956) [1864] Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Garden City NY: Image Books. ——(1959) [1852–9]The Idea of a University, Garden City NY: Image Books. ——(1970a) [1871] Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, 3rd edn, London: SPCK. ——(1970b) [1843] ‘‘The Usurpations of Reason,’’ in Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford, 3rd edn (1871) London: SPCK. ——(1979) [1870] An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Newman, Jay (1986) The Mental Philosophy of John Henry Newman, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
10 Mill’s autobiography Fred Wilson
The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill1 is a classic of nineteenth-century literature, and a classic of nineteenth-century thought. Many also consider it an important document in philosophy.2 But it is less than clear exactly what philosophical message we should take from it. (Maybe there are several.) In any case, it is not simply a narrative of the life of John Stuart Mill. Thus, Mill barely mentions his work for the East India Company. He entered its employ when he was seventeen and rose to the position of Chief Examiner, the highest position in the company bureaucracy, retiring only when the British government took over direct rule of India after the Sepoy Mutiny. During his career Mill came to be in charge of relations between the company and the states still ruled by a local dynasty. This part of his life he clearly reckons as insignificant to the story he has to tell.3 On the other hand, he considers his parliamentary career as important and he devotes more space to it than even to his mental crisis. It is not evident how such emphases fit with his purposes in writing the Autobiography. What is the philosophical, or, if you wish, intellectual point of his life which these emphases were meant to illustrate? Mill’s narrative describes the education of a youth and the maturity of a major thinker. (There are two ages of man in this story.) The story of his education by his father, taking associationist principles as a framework for action, has often been told:4 starting Greek at three is often thought remarkable, though the Mill who wrote the Autobiography himself thought that it showed what could be done in education if reasonably decent practices were put in place. Mill’s later career as a reformer and as a parliamentarian is likely equally well known. These, the early education on the one hand and the mature career on the other, are divided by a crucial event, one of two crucial events in Mill’s life.5 In this crucial event the younger Mill discovered the limitations of his education and became the thinker of his maturity. This dramatic event was a period of severe depression – a ‘‘crisis in my mental history,’’ as he describes it. This period of depression was the outcome of his education, on the one side, and, on the other, the mature thinker and social reformer was a product of the crisis. The Autobiography is the story of this development.
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The ‘‘crisis’’ in Mill’s ‘‘mental history’’ is well known, the ‘‘dry heavy dejection’’ of ‘‘the melancholy winter’’ of 1826–7. During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit. I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise, that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out of it. . . . I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could bear it beyond a year. (Mill 1873: 143–5) There is a loss of sense of self as having any moral direction, a sense that nothing is worth anything, not even oneself: he could not bear the feeling that he had no feeling. This mental crisis, involving a sense of the worthlessness of work, has been attributed to the fact of overwork (cf. Bain 1882: 37f; Robson 1968: 22) – he was working at India House for the East India Company, writing political essays, engaging in public debate, editing Bentham’s manuscripts on legal evidence, tutoring his siblings – but Mill always worked hard, and had but one mental crisis. In any case overwork does not usually lead to a breakdown of self and a sense of its worthlessness. More plausible is the suggestion that the crisis is pathological. Mill’s description of his mental state in fact fits nicely the description that Freud gives of depression in his classic study, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia’’: The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of activity, and a lowering of the selfregarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment. (Freud 1987: 252) Mill makes all these points, save perhaps the delusional expectation of punishment. Freud compares melancholy to mourning. The latter involves a loss of a loved one, and mourning characterizes the period through which one becomes reconciled to the loss. Mourning is a reasonable response to the reality that has forced itself on one. But there is no similar objective loss in the case of melancholy. The difference is that in mourning the world has become poor and empty, in melancholia it is the ego that has become poor and empty. There is a loss, but it is a loss of part of oneself. The loved object is reproached for this loss, but the reproach is displaced from the object to the self. The real object has become part of the self, and the distance between the object and the self is a distance between the self and the self itself. The reproach of the object becomes self-reproach.
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There is something to be said for such an analysis in Mill’s case. It is evident that the younger Mill identified with his father: the education that his father gave him, and which Mill recounts in detail, was preparation for the younger Mill to take the place of his father as a leader of the philosophical radicals in a movement for political reform. Mill emerged from the crisis with a new and revised political platform. The older battles were won – some sort of modest victory could be anticipated and the coming of the Reform Bill of 1832 could be foreseen. New directions were needed, and a new sensitivity to the ways that further reform might take. To take up these new directions Mill had, in part at least, to reject the heritage of his father.6 He had to reject as inadequate the obligations of his father that had been made his own obligations. But the reproach to the father who had made himself part of Mill’s own self could only appear as a reproach to Mill himself. Mill’s sadness is a sadness at this loss of his father; his father is reproached for necessitating this loss, but this reproach becomes self-reproach so that the sadness – the mourning – becomes the sadness of self-reviling ego – melancholia.7 This sort of analysis of Mill’s depression, in terms of reproach to his father becoming a reproach to himself, has been offered by psychoanalysts, A. W. Levi, for example (Levi 1945), or, in greater detail, Bruce Mazlish (1975). It is strengthened indeed by Mill’s description of the incident that placed him on the way to recovery. He refers to an incident related in Marmontel’s Mémoirs. (1930) Marmontel returns home to his family just after the death of his father. He arrives: I knocked and said who I was, and immediately heard a plaintive murmur, a mingling of wailing voices. The whole family arose and came to open the door, and, entering, I was surrounded by this whole weeping family; mother, children, old women, all disheveled and almost naked like ghosts – holding out their arms to me with cries that pierced and rent my heart. I do not know what strength I suddenly manifested – nature undoubtedly reserves it for extreme misfortune. Never have I felt so much greater than myself. I had to take on myself an enormous load of sorrow, and I did not succumb under it. I opened my arms, my bosom, to this unhappy crowd and received them all. And with the certainty of a man inspired from heaven, without a sign of weakness or a tear – I, who weep so easily – said to them: ‘‘Mother, my brothers and sisters, we are suffering the greatest affliction; do not let us be overwhelmed. My children, you have lost a father and you have found one; I will be one to you; I am and wish to be; I accept all its duties; you are orphans no longer.’’ (Marmontel 1930: 36) The voice is that of Marmontel, but the wish, it has been said (Levi 1945: 101), is that of Mill. Mill himself so comments, emphasizing how he sympathetically felt Marmontel’s resolve to take his father’s place. So there is
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something to be said for this point. But as Mill also makes clear, there is something more. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Memoirs, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them – would supply the place of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burthen grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stick or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which all worth of character, and of capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from my ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was, once more, excitement though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opinions, and for the public good. (1873: 145) The wretchedness is relieved, in part at least, by reconciling himself to the reality of the loss of his father, the separation from him. It was no longer necessary to reproach the father for his failure to prepare for the new directions, nor was it any longer necessary to reproach himself: he could come out of the wretchedness of self-reproach, come out of the melancholy, and once again move forward as a person and as a public figure. Just as Marmontel could take the place of his father, in his own self-estimation and in the estimation of others, so could the young Mill see himself taking the place of his own father. In Marmontel’s response to his father’s actual death, Mill found his own response to his father’s (symbolic) death. The difficulty with this reading is that it leaves out what, concretely, in the episode moved Mill out of his despondency. It was not the acceptance of the reality of his distancing himself from the views of his father, though this too might have been present. For Mill, what is important about that despondency is the lack of affect, his incapacity to take pleasure in things in which he nonetheless feels he ought to take pleasure. Marmontel felt within himself the sense that he could assume the new duties of head of his family. Mill feels those feelings and in them recognizes that he too is capable of similar feeling. The despondency comes from the reproach for not being able to have such feelings; in his response to Marmontel’s Memoirs Mill discovers that he can after all have these feelings: he finds them actually present in his consciousness. Having such feelings removes the reproach for not having them, and removes the despondency.
184 Mill’s autobiography There may well be something to the Freudian analysis. But for Mill, there is something more salient going on. He reproaches himself for not being able to have certain sorts of feeling. He held, with his teachers, that ‘‘the pleasures of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest sources of happiness’’ (1873: 143). But he does not have these feelings that he feels he ought to have: ‘‘Of the truth of this I was convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling’’ (1873: 143). The self-reproach for not having those feelings that he ought to have is removed when he comes to recognize that he can in fact have those feelings. Crucial in the episode is not the fact that Marmontel, in his own mind and in that of others, takes the place of his father, but that Mill himself could feel Marmontel’s feelings: Mill realizes that he can after all respond sympathetically to others. What blocked Mill from seeing that he could in fact feel was not the incapacity to recognize that he had to replace, to lose, his father, and the regret that such a loss creates, but rather a more general sense that he could not have the feelings that would enable him to locate himself in the world of the sun and sky, trees, stones and rainbows, country walks and music, and in the world of social institutions and public affairs. This issue for Mill himself was that of finding the cause that gave him a sense that he could not feel, a cause that could be – was – removed by the sudden sense that after all he could feel. This was not merely a personal point, as the Freudian analysis would be. To the contrary, Mill devoted some effort to eliminating from his story the individuating, the merely personal. He makes the story he tells in the Autobiography one that has a lesson for everyone, and makes of himself a person who is not only an individual, with an individual history, but also one who can and does represent Everyman. We can see this change from the personal to the impersonal in the development of the manuscript over time. We have, besides the version Mill himself published, an earlier draft of the text, and there are also some rejected leaves. There is an objectivity in the published version that is absent from the earlier material. Thus, for example, the early draft describes the Socratic method as it is found in Plato’s early dialogues, describes Mill’s early reading of these dialogues, and asserts that ‘‘I have ever since felt myself . . . a pupil of Plato’’ (1853–4a: 24). In the final version this personal aspect is dropped and replaced by the general point that the title of Platonist is more appropriate to those who ‘‘have endeavoured to practise Plato’s mode of investigation’’ than to ‘‘those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works.’’ (1873: 25). Many individuating personal details of his own life are dropped upon revision, for example, his keeping a journal ‘‘on the model of Grimm’s Correspondence’’ (1853–4a: 110; 1873: 111), or his enthusiastic admiration of Carlyle’s essay on Johnson (1853–4a: 182; 1873: 183). His all-too-personal description of the relationship of his father and mother as an ‘‘ill assorted marriage’’ (1853–4a: 52; 1873: 53) is
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dropped, as is his remark that his father ‘‘had not, and never could have supposed that he had, the inducement of kindred intellect, tastes, or pursuits’’ (1853–4a: 56, 1873: 57). In the rejected leaves he is even less charitable about his mother: That rarity in England, a really warm-hearted mother, would in the first place have made my father a totally different being, and in the second would have made the children grow up loving and being loved. But my mother, with the very best intentions, only knew how to pass her life in drudging for them. (1853–4b: 612) These deletions have the effect of making more deliberate and objective the tone of the essay. Even the deep feelings of the mental crisis acquire, in the revised text, a more detached and dispassionate description.8 Mill makes clear how this event, or perhaps especially this event, has a representative significance. Mill’s crisis and dejection is hardly unique; there are clearly other cases. The comparison is to ‘‘the state . . . to which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first ‘conviction of sin’ ” (1873: 137–9). This comparison is in both versions, but in the revised version Mill goes on to declare his case representative: ‘‘In all probability my case was by no means as peculiar as I fancied it, and I doubt not that many others have passed through a similar state’’ (1873: 145). Mill is making a period of intense significance in his own personal history into a condition typical of many. The lessons to be learned from his own case are established as having a more general importance. Making the description of his life more objective and generalized, more factual in tone, has the effect of making Mill himself a representative type. Mill makes this point himself, right at the beginning of his essay: ‘‘I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate, can be interesting to the public as narrative, or as being connected with myself’’ (1873: 5). This has the effect of disarming those who recognize, as Hume recognized in his own autobiographical essay (1826), that the writing of an autobiography inevitably has a touch of vanity. The point of Mill’s essay is not mere history, not mere justification, but instruction: I have thought that in an age in which education, and its improvement, are the subject of more, if not of profounder study than at any former period of English history, it may be useful that there should be a record of an education that was unusual and remarkable. (1873: 5) He is going to illustrate through himself a sort of education, the virtues of which will become clear as the tale is told: it is an education ‘‘which, whatever else it may have been, has proved how much more than is commonly
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supposed may be taught, and well taught, in those early years which, in the common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted’’ (1873: 5). Mill intends to use his own case to represent a general lesson about improving education. But if the education was of a type that, given its good effects, is worthy of emulation, then one must also look to the defects: the comment, ‘‘whatever else it may have been,’’ indicates that there is more to the story than Mill is here stating. He is clearly indicating that there is a further lesson to be learned. Among those effects, he will argue, was his mental crisis. If he can show both the crisis and the way out, then he shall have shown something of the defects of his way of becoming educated and something of how those defects might be avoided. His own case will then illustrate how his father’s methods of educating him might be emulated and employed for the best while the destructive outcomes can be avoided. But that argument will come later in the essay. Mill gives two other reasons for writing his autobiography. He reckons that in an age where opinions are changing and being re-shaped, ‘‘there may be somewhat both of interest and of benefit in noting the successive phases of any mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and to unlearn either from its own thought or that of others’’ (1873: 5). In his education Mill not only learned many things but learned how to learn, and it might be interesting in itself, but also useful as a model, to see how this learning how to learn worked itself out through his own life; one could discover through the patterns in Mill’s own life the patterns conformity to which is the process of learning how to learn. The third reason appears only in the published version, a desire to make acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual and moral development owes to other persons, some of them of recognized eminence, others less known than they deserve to be, and the one to whom most of all is due, one whom the world had no opportunity of knowing. (1873: 5) It is not to praise himself that the essay is being written; it is not being written out of the sort of vanity to which Hume alluded (Hume 1826). It is being written as a possible useful lesson and to say thanks, mainly to his father, a point that makes one pause when contemplating the Freudian interpretations, and to Harriet Taylor. Carlyle is clearly significant, Wordsworth is mentioned, but Coleridge is largely ignored (though Mill does spend time discussing the Coleridgians John Sterling and F. D. Maurice [1873: 159ff]). The debts that he acknowledges are to those who contributed to his development into a significant public figure, active in the cause of the improvement of mankind. The understanding of Mill’s aim evidently turns upon how one understands the mental crisis. He himself provides some help: it is not a unique
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sort of thing. The comparison that he makes to Methodism is useful. George Whitefield, the great Methodist preacher, also suffered from such a state of dejection. He also offers a way out. ‘‘This fit of sickness continued upon me for seven weeks,’’ Whitefield relates, and About the end of seven weeks, and after I had been groaning under an unspeakable pressure both of body and mind for above a twelvemonth, God was pleased to set me free in the following manner. One day, perceiving an uncommon drought and a disagreeable clamminess in my mouth and using things to ally my thirst, but in vain, it was suggested to me, that when Jesus Christ cried out, ‘‘I thirst,’’ His sufferings were near at an end. Upon which I cast myself down on the bed, crying out, ‘‘I thirst! I thirst!’’ Soon after this, I found and felt in myself that I was delivered from the burden that had so heavily oppressed me. The spirit of mourning was taken from me, and I knew what it was truly to rejoice in God my Saviour. (Whitefield 1905: 48) Whitefield’s experience is no doubt the sort of mental state to which Mill is alluding. What is of interest is the fact that the solution to the crisis that we find in Whitefield is not there in Mill; implicitly Mill rejects Whitefield’s solution. Mill did not find his way out of his melancholy through a religious infusion of faith. This solution was hardly congenial: whatever his dissatisfactions, he remained committed to the this-worldly philosophy of empiricism. As Mill says, after he recounts his crisis and the changes in his thought that it occasioned, he still maintained the same viewpoint as he had in his ‘‘early opinions . . . in no essential part of which I at any time wavered’’ (1873: 175). The solution of Whitefield presupposed a view of the world in which the mind could rise above the empirical to a higher world to provide a unifying goal or purpose beyond mere senseless pleasure. If Mill was to have a way out of his melancholy that let him remain faithful to his empiricist heritage, a this-worldly way out, then he could not take up the way out that Whitefield claimed to have found. He did find an escape from his melacholy, but it did not involve the attempted discovery of a world which is at once beyond the world of ordinary experience and yet a source of value for that world and our being in it. Mill presents his case as representative – it is representative of this alternative way out of melancholy. He offers himself, in this Autobiography, as a model to others, for solving a melancholic crisis in a way compatible with our being creatures of this world of ordinary experience. Part of the way out that Mill discovered came through poetry, that of Wordsworth; another part of it came through his feeling for another. This is why, I suggest, it is Wordsworth, and not Whitefield, who provides the experience that led the younger Mill out of his depression. Whatever was to help Mill, it had to fit with his empiricism, the early opinions to which he
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remained committed: he was too much committed to them to accept the sense of a religious reality as providing a way out of the melancholy. Mill’s mental crisis derived from a sense that he lacked all feelings that could give moral purpose to his life, the sense that he ought to have such feelings and the self-reproach for not having them. It was reading Wordsworth that brought about relief. This relief consisted in coming to have such feelings. These feelings of sympathy for others provided him once again (or perhaps for the first time) a moral purpose to his life. He now had a reason to go on, a moral focus that he had not previously experienced. It was the capacity of Wordsworth’s poetry to evoke such feelings or bring them into consciousness that made the difference. Mill turned to Wordsworth more or less by accident (1873: 149–51). He responded to Wordsworth’s ability to express emotion, and in reading his poetry, Mill found that, after all, he could feel. What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. (1873: 151) This was the same capacity to feel that was discovered by Mill in his reading of Marmontel’s Memoirs. In discovering these feelings, in coming to know about his own self that he could have those feelings, he was ‘‘relieved of my ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness’’ (1873: 143). But having feelings was not the full picture. The failure to find happiness included a failure to find happiness in the utilitarian goal of the happiness of all. Perhaps, as in Mill’s own case, the pleasures of life would cease to be pleasures. ‘‘I felt that the flaw in my life, must be a flaw in life itself. . . . And I felt that unless I could see my way to some better hope than this for human happiness in general, my dejection must continue’’ (1873: 149). Wordsworth’s poetry overcame this flaw. Moreover it showed him, not merely that he was capable of having states of feeling that he had not realized previously, but also that he could respond sympathetically to others and experience the shared feelings of social intercourse. [Wordsworth’s poems] seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared by all human beings. . . . From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. (1873: 151) It was precisely this capacity to enlarge human feelings that Wordsworth endeavoured to put into his poetry. He was successful in this aim in at least the case of Mill.
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Mill’s mental crisis came from the same source as of Whitefield, a deep skepticism about knowledge and moral knowledge in particular. This skepticism about value led in turn to a questioning of one’s self and one’s place in the world, and to self-reproach for not knowing. Mill located the roots of his problem in the practice of psychological or introspective analysis. I now saw, or thought I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity – that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as indeed it has when no other mental habit is cultivated. (1873: 143) This method of analysis was central to the associationist picture of the human mind that the younger Mill shared with his father, and with Bentham. It derived from Hume and Hartley by way of Priestley.9 It was this associationist account of mind upon which the elder Mill relied when he established the patterns through which his son was educated (see James Mill 1829 / 1869; also J. S. Mill 1869). This theory provides, in outline, a genetic theory of the human mind. It takes for granted that in the world to which the human mind responds are the sensible appearances of things, sensations, or, as they were often called, impressions. Impressions generate ideas, which are sensory images resembling the impressions from which they are derived. The basic law of learning is the law of association (James Mill 1829 / 1869: v. I, ch. III, 70ff): If a’s and b’s are impressions, and are regularly presented together in some relation R, then ideas (images) of a’s and b’s come to be joined in consciousness. The ideas as joined in consciousness form a complex idea. The more common the presentation of the impressions, the stronger the association among the ideas. If the relation R is that of similarity then the complex idea that is produced is the abstract idea of a kind of thing which applies to both a’s and b’s. If the relation R is that of conjunction of time and place, then the complex idea that is produced is a causal judgment that a’s cause b’s. This is the basic theory – it amounts to a theory that learning occurs through classical conditioning. But a secondary mechanism is allowed – that of reinforcement (1829 / 1869: v. I, 86). As the younger Mill puts it, it is . . . certain, that the property of producing a strong and durable association without the aid of repetition, belongs principally to our pleasures and pains. The more intense the pain or pleasure, the more promptly and powerfully does it associate itself with its accompanying circumstances, even those which are accidentally present. (1869: v. I, 86n) As it turns out, pain is more effective than pleasure in effecting associations; it is, as James Mill puts it, more ‘‘pungent’’ (1829 / 1869: v. II, 203).
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Education aims to shape persons for action. That implies that one wants to provide the pupil with knowledge of the means for achieving human ends. Knowledge of means is simply knowledge of sequences of events in the world. One has such knowledge when the appropriate associations of ideas are established, where the connections among ideas mirror the connections among events. Nature provides us with such knowledge when the repeated observation of a sequence of events in the world produces a corresponding association of ideas. ‘‘The impressions made upon them [the minds of children] should correspond to the great and commanding sequences established among the events on which human happiness principally depends’’(James Mill 1819: 177). These important associations can be produced artificially, through the art of the educator. Upon the appearance of an idea, the idea of a consequent can be introduced by the words of a speaker – the educator. by means of words and other signs of what is passing in the minds of other men, we are made to conceive, step by step the trains which are generating them, those trains, by repetition, become habitual to our own minds, and exert the same influence over us as those that arrive from our own impressions. (1819: 191) If the associations thus produced are reinforced then such an artificial association becomes almost as strong as that produced by natural means. James Mill specifically notes that ‘‘Nothing is more remarkable in human nature, than the intense desire which we feel of the favourable regards of mankind’’ (1819: 191). The favor of princes can thus induce habits of thought in their inferiors. More generally, the educator can bring about in the pupil strong trains of thought, firm beliefs about the world, through effective use of praise and blame. However, reliance on mere imitation and praise and blame is not as secure as reliance upon more natural means of forming connections in thought. Indeed, this constituted one of the defects of Mill’s education: it seemed to him that his teachers – his father and Bentham – ‘‘had occupied themselves but superficially with the means of forming and keeping up those salutary associations. They seemed to have trusted altogether to the old familiar instruments, praise and blame, reward and punishment’’ (1873: 141). And the problem is that these traditional methods of teaching bring about associations that are ‘‘artificial and casual’’: ‘‘The pains and pleasures thus forcibly associated with things, are not connected to them by any natural tie.’’ (1873: 141). Now, on the associationist theory there are simple ideas and complex. All ideas have their genetic antecedents in impressions. A complex idea has its genetic antecedents in impressions so connected that they bring about the association of the simple parts into the complex whole. By examining the constituents associated in the complex idea one can determine what were the impressions that generated that complex. There is an isomorphism or one-
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one relation between the parts of the complex idea and the impressions that generated that idea. Thus, one can determine the causes of one’s ideas by attending to those ideas and analyzing them into their parts.10 Associationism goes beyond a mere account of how the mind is affected. The mind is not wholly passive, moved only by things that lie outside it. There are also ‘‘the Active Powers of the Human Mind’’ (James Mill 1829 / 1869: v. II, 181). The mind is moved internally by feelings of pleasure and pain. As the elder Mill put it in the essay on ‘‘Education’’, ‘‘To attain happiness is the object’’ (1819: 154). Many things are of course sought after. But things other than pleasure and pain are sought after only so far as pleasure and pain have become associated with them. Thus, as the younger Mill explained the theory he had accepted, ‘‘all desires and all pleasures,’’ all the passions and all the virtues, and, indeed, many vices, ‘‘are the effects of association, that is, according to the theory I held, all except the purely physical and organic’’ (1873: 143). This is not to say that there are not what one would refer to as ‘‘higher’’ pleasures, and ‘‘higher’’ motives. But these are explained as the effects of association. Various things that are ends are originally simply means to basic pleasures (and to avoid basic pains). These things come to be associated with the pleasures (or pains) that they generate. Eventually the means come to be felt to be as desirable as the pleasure (or pain) with which they are associated. In fact, they come to be felt to be parts of what counts as pleasure (or pain). They thus come to be not mere means but, as parts of pleasure, ends. Mill insists upon this as a central feature of his utilitarian moral philosophy. As he put it in his essay on ‘‘Utilitarianism’’ (Mill 1863), virtue may not be an original end but is capable of becoming so; and ‘‘in those who love it [virtue] disinterestedly it has become so [an end], and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness’’ (1863: 235). It is through a process of association that virtue as a means, or, for that matter, money as a means, becomes an end – for the virtuous in the one case, for the miser in the other. In this way something, such as virtue or money, comes to be a ‘‘principal ingredient of the individual’s conception of happiness’’ (1863: 236). Money is ‘‘instrumental in procuring the causes of almost all our pleasures, and removing the causes of a large proportion of our pains, is associated with the ideas of most of the pleasurable states of our natures’’ (James Mill 1829 / 1869: v. II, 206–7). This has the consequence that the pursuit of money is often stronger than the pursuit of virtue. How few men seem to be at all concerned about their fellow-creatures! How completely are the lives of most men absorbed, in the pursuits of wealth, and ambition! With how many men does the love of Family, of Friend, of Country, or Mankind, appear completely impotent, when opposed to their love of Wealth, or of Power! (James Mill 1829 / 1869: v. II, 215)
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The problem has, in principle at least, a cure: ‘‘This is an effect of misguided association, which requires the greatest attention in Education, and Morals’’ (1829 / 1869: v. II, 215). If education provides the connections, it is psychological analysis that reveals those connections.11 Analysis has its virtues. Among our associations, many of those that are brought about by education represent no real connection in things. These are the beliefs of prejudice and error – ‘‘Black cats bring bad luck.’’ Analysis will reveal the antecedents to be education rather than connections in the world. The capacity of analysis to uncover these errors is its virtue. The very excellence of analysis (I argued) is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the result of prejudice, that it enables us mentally to separate ideas which have only casually clung together. (1873: 141) The difficulty that arises is that the same analysis that dissolved prejudices seems also to dissolve all motives save the search after bodily or animal pleasure. Education brings it about that we do seek virtue as an end. It does this by effecting associations between virtue and pleasure. But subsequently the reflective person’s analysis uncovers these genetic antecedents. We put ourselves in the analytic set and in attending to these motives, we can discern within them their parts. These parts of such a motive represent its genetic history. Virtue may be an end, but it is so only because education has effected association between the good on the one hand and pleasure on the other. But the traditional education, based on the use of ‘‘praise and blame,’’ effects associations which are ‘‘artificial and casual.’’ It would seem, then, that what are felt to be ends can therefore be recognized as extrinsic to the pleasure (or pain) which is the real motivator, and simply a means which has come to be associated with those pleasures (or pains). James Mill clearly acknowledges that association effects the connection between virtuous acts and our own pleasure through the production of the latter by the former. As he puts it in the Analysis: It is interesting here to observe, by what a potent call we are summoned to Virtue. Of all that we enjoy, more is derived from those acts of other men, on which we bestow the VIRTUE, than from any other cause. Our own virtue is the principal cause why other men reciprocate the acts of virtue towards us. With the idea of our own acts of virtue, there are naturally associated the ideas of all the immense advantages we derive from the virtuous acts of our Fellow-creatures. When this association is formed in due strength, which it is the main business of a good education to effect, the motive of virtue becomes paramount in the human interest. (James Mill 1829 / 1869: v. II, 292–3)
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But this will not do for virtue. Any sympathetic response turns out to be, really, just another self-regarding action. On the elder Mill’s account of virtuous action, one cannot generously give to the wandering beggar; the act of giving can only be an act done in expectation of some later return. Ordinarily we take it that giving money or, more generally, pleasure to another may or may not be virtuous, depending upon the motive. If something is given out of care for the welfare of another, then it is virtuous, a matter of generosity. But if it is given as a means to some further end, some return for the investment as it were, then the act is self-regarding and not one of generosity, not a virtuous act. Analysis seems to reveal that all such acts are simply means, not ends. They are therefore not acts of virtue (cf. Nelson 1985). The higher values seem after all not to be higher. Analysis reveals, or seems to reveal, that virtue is impossible. Wordsworth found in accepting the rationalist’s ethics that one ought not to act out of such motives as generosity. By the ethics of the revolutionary, to act on such sympathetic responses is immoral; the only end that should move one is concern for the general welfare of humankind. But this has the consequence that one can never know which acts are virtuous: moral skepticism is the result. It also results in such horrors as the Terror, where one convinces oneself that one is acting for the welfare of all while spurning as irrelevant and indeed wrongheaded any sympathetic response to the victims. Mill finds an even deeper moral skepticism. It turns out that one cannot have these motives. Where Wordsworth feels the motives but also feels that he ought not to have them, Mill finds he does not, really, have these motives, and, more strongly, that he cannot have them – he is not that sort of person. But at the same time he feels that he ought to be moral, even if the only end is the ultimate end of serving the general happiness. Indeed, it was his father’s expectation, and Bentham’s, that he would take over the leadership of the utilitarian party. He was raised to serve the Benthamite end, of the general happiness of humankind. This was the end that he ought to have and the end that, given his education, he would in fact have. But analysis revealed that this end that he ought to have was an end that he could not have. The young Mill ‘‘had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object’’ (1873: 137). Sympathetic ties form the social relations that bind persons together into social wholes. They are the foundation of political life. Commercial society tends to undermine the political order upon which it of necessity rests (cf. Mill 1963: v. XII, 31–2). Bentham’s view of human beings shares with commercial society this disintegrative tendency. It is hardly the philosophical stance of a person genuinely capable of fostering the moral and political order – a Socrates or a Plato. Mill wanted to foster the moral order of society that commercial ties were threatening, but he seemed unable to develop the sympathetic ties that such an order requires (cf. Green 1989). Mill himself describes very clearly his own incapacity for sympathetic involvement with
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others, in a passage later deleted from the Autobiography, and ascribes the deficiency as due in large part to the absence of such feelings in those who provided his education. I thus grew up in the absence of love and in the presence of fear; and many and indelible are the effects of this bringing up, in the stunting of my mental growth. One of these, which it would have required a quick sensibility and impulsive temperament to counteract, was habitual reserve . . . my circumstances tended to form a character, close and reserved from habit and want of impulse, not from will, and therefore, while destitute of the frank communicativeness which wins and deserves sympathy, yet continually failing in reticence where it is suitable and desirable. (1853–4b: 612–13) Mill, as he himself saw it, had little opportunity to acquire sympathetic emotions. After all, for James Mill, the passionate emotions were a ‘‘form of madness’’ (1873: 49); he was ‘‘ashamed of signs of feeling’’(1873: 53). Praise and blame were given for actions, but ‘‘Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subject of praise or blame’’ (1873: 51). The ‘‘physical relation and its adjuncts’’ he regarded as ‘‘one of the deepest seated and most pervading evils in the human mind’’ (1873: 109). Bain reports his view that most fatal to friendship was great intimacy (Bain 1882: 139). He was, to be sure, a utilitarian, so that ‘‘his standard of Morals was Epicurean’’, but at the same time ‘‘he had (and this was the Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure’’ (1873: 49). This had the effect of making it ‘‘not altogether untrue’’ of the younger Mill that he fit the standard but usually unfair idea of a Benthamite as a ‘‘mere reasoning machine’’ (1873: 111). The upshot was a person who lacked any inner feelings of sympathy and benevolence. Duty was to be sought not as an end but as a means to happiness. Humankind would be made better not through such feelings but as the ‘‘effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings’’ (1873: 113). There was thus not only a personal failing on the part of his teachers – a failure to give due place in their own lives or in the life of the younger Mill to the human feelings, but also a failure of their theory of human being to give a place to such feelings.12 The vision of human being that guided his teachers, his father and Bentham, was impoverished. It in effect had no place for motives such as benevolence and sympathy; it allowed only for selfish motives. To be sure, the human feelings and such motives as benevolence or a sense of duty did have a sort of place, but only as a means to one’s own pleasure (or pain); insofar as they are ends they are so only by virtue of having become through education associated with pleasure (or pain). As teachers, Bentham and James Mill were doubly deficient, doubly impoverished. They were themselves impoverished emotionally – they lacked such feelings and
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motives – and they therefore failed to communicate them to the student. Moreover, this failure on their part was reflected in, and supported by, an impoverished theory of human being. Bentham was not Socrates, nor was Mill’s father Plato. Nonetheless, the younger Mill did have a sense of duty, a sense obligation to serve the public good. However, analysis dissolved this and effected his dissolution of himself as a moral person. my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to be found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. (1873: 139) Analysis seems to undermine all motives save the animal motive of bodily pleasure (and pain). And what is true of ourselves is true of others. Our own welfare may indeed depend upon others being virtuous. But in them, too, virtue is an end only through associations that are ‘‘artificial and casual;’’ in them, too, the only motive, the only real motive is bodily pleasure (and pain). It seems to lead, in other words, to skepticism about all our higher intellectual and moral purposes. Despair follows this disintegration of moral purpose, loss of sense of the self as a moral being, and with it the selfreproach and the feelings of moral worthlessness. Analysis especially damages the capacity for sympathetic response – the possibility of so responding to others that one is moved or motivated as the other to whom we are responding is moved or motivated. One cannot then enter empathetically into the mind and circumstances of the other and to experience the pleasures and pains of others as if they were one’s own (Robson 1968: 133–6; Halliday 1970). Mill took the corrosive effects of analysis on our moral, sympathetic, and imaginative powers to be the source of his depression. They created the sense that he was a failure as a moral being. It was this sense of failure as a moral being that Wordsworth helped to correct. Wordsworth, through his poetry, provided knowledge of such feelings – ‘‘Poetry is first and last of all knowledge,’’ as he put it (Wordsworth 1802b: 168). This knowledge is both the knowledge that they exist and that they are not merely a means to happiness but genuine parts of happiness, not merely things that, together with pleasure (or pain), ‘‘swell . . . an aggregate’’ but things that have become so unified with pleasure (or pain) that they are desirable in themselves (Mill 1863: 235). Wordsworth showed that there is a reality to this unity, that analysis cannot threaten. There is a phenomenological reality to these feelings that make them genuine unities and not mere aggregates, a phenomenological reality that cannot be thought away in an exercise of psychological analysis.13
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Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey makes the relevant point nicely. Though absent long The forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration: – feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and love . . . (Wordsworth 1802a: ll. 23–36) There is on the one hand the feeling presently experienced. There is on the other hand ‘‘unremembered’’ feelings from which these have arisen. The poet is ‘‘tracing . . . truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement,’’ as Wordsworth put it in the ‘‘Preface’’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800: 136). There is association, those are the primary laws of human nature, but the product of that association is not merely an aggregate of feelings; it is a unique sort of feeling, different in kind from its genetic antecedents. Phenomenologically, the feeling that is the product of the association is not a mere sum of parts but a unique form, novel if you wish, qualitatively different from those feelings which are its genetic antecedents. The discovery of the phenomenological unity of feelings required a rethinking of the notion of psychological analysis (Wilson 1990: ch. 4). There is on the one hand the simple feeling. There is on the other hand the set of sensations into which it is analyzed and which form its genetic antecedents. But now consider James Mill’s notion of an idea: Here is the idea of a house. Brick is one complex idea, mortar is another complex idea; these ideas, with ideas of position and quantity, compose my idea of a wall. My idea of a plank is a complex idea, my idea of a rafter is a complex idea, my idea of a nail is a complex idea. These, united with the same ideas of position and quantity, compose my . . . idea of a floor. And so on: all the parts are represented by actual ideas. ‘‘How many more [parts] in the idea called Every Thing?’’ (James Mill 1829 / 1869: v. I, 115–16). E. G. Boring has commented on this passage that it is the reductio ad absurdum of Mill’s notion of psychological analysis: there is not the slightest
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observational ground for supposing that when one has the idea of Every Thing one has present in consciousness a literally unlimited number of ideas at once. The elder Mill’s commitment to a theory has overcome his commitment to have theory fit the facts as they appear to consciousness (Boring 1957: 226). As John Stuart Mill was later to put it (Mill 1872b: 259), the parts of a complex idea, such as the idea of Every Thing, cannot be literal or integrant parts of that idea. This is not to say that the ideas of the genetic antecedents are not present in the idea that those antecedents produce; the genetic antecedents are ‘‘nameless’’ and ‘‘unremembered.’’ But these parts can as it were be recovered. Though absent and ‘‘nameless’’ it is also true that Though absent long The forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: They are not there as integrant parts but were once felt and those feelings can with the proper attention be again felt. Those genetic antecedents are there but only dispositionally, there to be recovered as the mind attends analytically to the idea. There are in effect two descriptions of the idea or state of feeling, the phenomenological description and the analytic description; the former describes the idea or feeling as it ordinarily appears in consciousness, the latter describes the idea or feeling as it appears under the analytic set. The former is the description of the idea or feeling as a simple unity. The latter reveals the genetic antecedents of that idea or feeling. The genetic antecedents are not present as integrant parts but only dispositionally as metaphysical parts, there to be recovered under the analytic set. The mental process which produces the idea being analyzed is one in which the genetic consequent is unlike the genetic antecedents. That is why the idea under the phenomenological description differs from the idea under the analytic description. Mill draws a distinction between the mechanical mode of composition from the chemical mode. In the former, ‘‘the joint effect of causes is the sum of their several effects;’’ in the latter the effect is ‘‘is heterogeneous to them [its genetic antecedents]’’ (1872a: bk III, ch. VI, sect. 1). The chemical combination of two substances produces . . . a third substance with properties different from those of either of the two substances separately, or of both of them taken together. (Mill 1872a: bk III, ch. VI, sect.1) This chemical mode of composition characterizes mental phenomena: When a complex feeling is generated out of elements very numerous and various, and in a corresponding degree indeterminate and vague, but so blended together by a close association, the effect of a long series
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It is evident that with these qualifications about introspective analysis the problematic cases such as the idea of Every Thing fall into place. In fact, they are no longer paradoxical. Moreover, Mill can now fit into the theory of associationist psychology the fact that feelings can exist as simple unities, different in kind from their genetic antecedents. Thus, the higher pleasures and higher purposes can grow out of the lower pleasures by a process of association but can nonetheless be different in kind from those lower pleasures. It is this that John Stuart Mill discovered in his reading of the poetry of William Wordsworth. ‘‘I seemed to learn,’’ he tells us: what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greatest evils of the world shall have been removed . . . I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. (Mill 1873: 151) In addition he learned that the ‘‘moral faculty . . . if not a part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it’’ (Mill 1863: 230). With this more adequate account of associationist psychology and of psychological analysis Mill emerged, with Wordsworth’s help, from his mental crisis, and with this more adequate psychology merged a more adequate view of human nature – and of his own nature. In Wordsworth the psychological wholes are presented in a way in which they can be seen to fit into and be required by associationist psychology. It is not surprising, then, that the younger Mill could find in Wordsworth the feelings and sentiments, and the modified associationist psychology, that relieved him of the depression brought on by the acceptance of his father’s simplistic psychology.14 It came, not so much by the acceptance of that psychology as a theory but by its use as it had been used as a set of guiding principles in his education. That education proceeded on the basis of ‘‘praise and blame,’’ in order to establish associations, the associations that were intended to make the good of humankind Mill’s moving passion, to make it a part – the central part – of his pleasure. The problem is that such a means effected only a conjunction of the idea of the good on the one hand and pleasure on the other. It was this sort of casual connection, that of integrant parts, which analysis tended to dissolve. It tended to reduce the pursuit of virtue to a mere means to less noble ends – which is to say that, since it is a requirement of virtue that it be sought for its own sake, that its status as virtue is eliminated.
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In order to secure for virtue that status of being sought for its own sake, it must be made securely into a part of happiness. Wordsworth does this. Instead of a casual association of mere integrant parts, he effects a more permanent association of feelings into a new whole of which those feelings are metaphysical parts. Through his poetry he is able to do what Mill’s educators could not but fail to do. They were themselves impoverished in their feelings, and could not conceive that there were other feelings than those evoked by praise and, still more importantly, blame. Wordsworth effects not a casual but a ‘‘natural connexion between those objects and those feelings’’ that are necessary in one not so emotionally impoverished as Mill’s original teachers (Mill 1988: 440). To resolve his crisis, Mill had to learn three things. The first was that he could have the feelings of sympathy and benevolence toward other persons and indeed toward the good of humankind. He began to experience such feelings with his reading of Marmontel. But it was Wordsworth who most deeply effected the change. Mill could now genuinely feel that ‘‘the pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially of mankind on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest and surest source of happiness’’ (Mill 1873: 143). He knew this previously – ‘‘to know that a feeling would make me happy if I had it, did not give me the feeling’’ (Mill 1873: 143) – but now he had the feeling. The second point to be learned was that these feelings are unique and qualitatively different from their genetic antecedents. Wordsworth’s poems ‘‘expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of’’ (Mill 1873: 151). The third thing that Mill had learned was that although the psychological laws that explain these feelings are laws of association, they were not associations of the mechanical sort but of the chemical sort. This discovery of the correct way to interpret the psychological laws of association had two implications. One was that analysis could still be a useful method for the investigation of mental phenomena. The laws of association still hold, and justify the use of the method for finding the causes, the genetic antecedents, of our ideas and feelings. But, second, analysis by itself need not wear away our moral and sympathetic feelings. What analysis wore away in his case, and what led to his depression, was casual connections that had been established by weak patterns of education – it was not feelings of virtue and vice per se but the badly arranged casual connections that Mill had subjected to the analytic method. ‘‘[T]he delight which these poems [Wordsworth’s] gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis’’ (Mill 1873: 153). This last has the more general implication that the basic framework of his father’s and Bentham’s view of human being – the associationist-utilitarian picture deriving from their eighteenth-century predecessors – was sound. He was correct to say with regard to his ‘‘early opinions’’ that ‘‘in no
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essential part of [them had he] at any time wavered’’ (Mill 1873: 175). It was not a deep-rooted flaw in the theory that led to his depression; rather it was defects in the application of that theory. The defect in its application in his own education, that led to his depression, was revealed to be, at its core, a defect in the emotionally impoverished personal psychology of his teachers. Thus he could conclude that ‘‘all my new thinking only laid the foundations of these [his opinions] more deeply and strongly, while it often removed misapprehension and confusion of ideas which had perverted their effect’’ (Mill 1873: 175). Once Mill had learned the first two of these things, that he could have feelings of sympathy and benevolence toward other persons and indeed toward the good of humankind and recognize that these feelings are unique and qualitatively different from their genetic antecedents – he could begin to move out of his depression. Having learned them, he once again – or perhaps for the first time – was able to regard the general well-being of humankind as something to be sought for its own sake. That end had become, perhaps for the first time, genuinely part of his happiness. He could experience himself as a moral being, and the self-reproach of his depression was shown to be groundless: no longer did he have to feel that he could not feel as he felt he ought to be able to feel. As the sympathetic and moral feelings gradually developed, the clouds of depression disappeared. ‘‘I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it’’ (Mill 1873: 153). If Mill learned from Wordsworth, he also learned from Harriet Taylor. Mill provides an estimation of her character. If the estimation is taken to describe Harriet’s contribution of an intellectual nature to the details, or even the outline of Mill’s thought, then it would seem to be the over-estimation some have contended.15 But Mill’s estimation of her contribution turns on something other than this. What was crucial to Mill’s thought was her great capacity to respond sympathetically to others. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them, by imaginatively investing their feelings with an intensity of its own. (Mill 1873: 195) Harriet Taylor sustained Mill after his recovery from his mental crisis; he had become well, but she made of him still better. Mill grew in the relationship, extending his feelings and sympathies. ‘‘[U]ntil I knew her,’’ he tells us, ‘‘the opinion [regarding the subjection of women, but he might as well have mentioned his view of the labouring classes] was, in my mind, little more than an abstract principle’’ (Mill 1873: 253n), rather than a strongly approved proposal actively to be pursued. What Wordsworth had begun, Harriet Taylor continued.
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To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my development, though the effect was only gradual. (Mill 1873: 197) The revolutionaries had represented morality as based solely on the principle of promoting the happiness of humankind, or the principle of utility; this was to provide the standard and only motive of action. It led to paralysis, as Wordsworth experienced trying to live to that standard. His recovery consisted in part in embracing the moral rules of everyday life. For Mill the matter was not so simple. The relief from his depression, his mental crisis, consisted in part in the discovery that ordinary moral feelings had a role to play in a healthy mental life. These feelings pick out certain forms of action as morally required. These are the rules of justice, which consider the avoidance of pain, and the rules of benevolence, which deal with creation of happiness. But Mill does not take these moral deliverances of consciousness as merely given, as do the moral rationalists. These feelings are derived from experience, through a process of association. They are not, therefore, contrary to the rationalists, the deliverances of a uniform human nature. They must, therefore, derive, not their psychological force, but their moral force from something else. As Mill argues, they can be justified only if conformity to these rules is, on the whole, conducive to the sum of human happiness.16 That is, those feelings can be accepted as feelings that we ought to have and the rules that they support as rules to which we ought to conform, only through the principle of utility. They are secondary moral rules, justified by the basic moral rule, the principle of utility.17 In our self cultivation, we ought to develop those feelings and those rules that can be justified by the principle of utility, while we ought to suppress those feelings that cannot be so justified. As Mill expresses it in his Autobiography, he had to learn that one cannot attain happiness, the end established by the principle of utility, simply by aiming at that happiness; one can achieve happiness, the end sanctioned by utility, only by aiming at other ends18 – provided, of course, that aiming at those ends is itself conducive to the utilitarian goal: ‘‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you will cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life’’ (Mill 1873: 147). Wordsworth takes for granted as defining what ought to be, the ends determined by the moral feelings that he experiences. Mill goes beyond this by requiring these feelings themselves be justified. But it is often hard to discover better ways of being human and being sociable. It requires a sensitivity to the feelings of others. A morality grounded on large and wise views of the good of the whole, neither sacrificing the individual to the aggregate nor the aggregate to the individual, but giving to duty on the one hand and to freedom and
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Moral being requires us to respond sympathetically to others, and that capacity can be maintained only if others have the capacity to evoke sympathetic and moral feelings in us (cf. Kowalewsky 1979). Moral reform is profoundly difficult. about the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight, which if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius of which our species can boast. (Mill 1874a: 487–8) The religion of Jesus should be seen as one of morality rather than rigid principles of belief and action. As he said in a letter, ‘‘The sayings of Christ should be . . . not . . . laws . . . laid down with strict logical precision for regulating the details of our conduct . . . but . . . the bodying forth in words of the spirit of all morality’’ (Mill 1963: v. XII, 101). What we need is a ‘‘religion of spirit, not of dogma’’ (Mill 1963: v. XII, 210). Mill would hardly compare himself with Jesus. Yet he saw himself as a moral reformer, someone endeavoring through public activity, to change the moral feelings of his fellow humans. Recall that he felt as a young man that he had: ‘‘an object in life, to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object’’ (Mill 1873: 137). Mill’s depression followed upon his coming to feel inadequate to this end. His recovery consisted in his being restored as a moral being in which this, the love of humankind, has become a genuinely moral end. His time at India House, while important in his own history, could not reasonably be seen as serving the welfare of humankind. His parliamentary career, and the activities associated with it, was different: here he was undertaking the moral task of the ‘‘improvement of mankind.’’ And so the apportioning of space in the Autobiography devotes far more to the later career than to the earlier. There has been puzzlement about this allocation: we now see that Mill’s apportionment fits directly the portrait of himself as a morally concerned and feeling human being.19 This is the essence of benevolent politics. Sympathy provides the cement of society, and it is appeal to sympathy that will create the feelings necessary for human improvement. Where his father and Bentham had emphasized enlightened self-interest, the younger Mill discovered in his recovery from
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his depression the importance of community tied together by bonds rooted in our sympathy for others. This sympathy was not to be found in the social isolation that Mill’s education involved, but in companionship and discourse with sympathetic others, something Mill had achieved with Harriet Taylor. One who proposes the moral reform of society has a need of sympathetic feelings. What made possible Mill’s service to humankind was the development of his own moral feelings and own moral sensibility (cf. Halliday 1970). Harriet Taylor played the crucial role here. It was not an intellectual contribution; it consisted rather in her role as a sympathetic companion in enlarging, as Mill saw it, his capacity for generous and moral action (cf. Nelson 1985). Mill emphasizes the importance to him of her concern for others, and for all of humankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them, by imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest feeling in return. (Mill 1873: 195) Mill’s relationship with her developed his own moral and sympathetic feelings. The feelings cultivated by this intercourse were Taylor’s contribution to Mill’s philosophical and political work. He distinguished two main areas of thought to which she contributed. The first was that of ‘‘ultimate aims;’’ the other is that of ‘‘the immediately useful and practically attainable’’ (Mill 1873: 197). These are both a matter of values. Mill’s own strength, as he saw it, ‘‘lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and political science’’ (1873: 197). It is this last which seems to us, coming afterwards, to be most substantial. Here is Mill the logician and philosopher of science, Mill the political economist who extended and enriched the theory of his father and of Ricardo, Mill the psychologist who extended and defended the work of Berkeley and (again) his father, Mill the empiricist critic of Sir William Hamilton, Mill the defender of utilitarianism. The contribution of Taylor to, say, the political economy lay in its practical applications – for example, its concern for the laboring classes or, more theoretically, the distinction between the laws of production and the laws of distribution (Mill 1873: 155–7). She provided an orientation and set of values, and an overall tone. But if one takes the importance of Mill’s Political Economy to lie in any significant theoretical contribution that took economic theory beyond the stage reached by Ricardo, then her contribution is of little significance. However, for Mill the
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politician, the person who felt concern for the laboring classes, and felt it more through his association withTaylor, her contribution was indeed important and, indeed, indispensable. So we should not see Mill as over-estimating her role in his life as he was trying to portray it in his Autobiography. She confirms and advances his emotional education to its full intensity in the committed social improver. We saw that in the Autobiography, Mill (re)presents himself as a model for the psychological and moral development of a human being. In particular, he presents himself as a person who suffers a moral crisis of depression or melancholy and loss of a sense of moral direction and moral worth. He examines how he got into it and how he managed to escape.
How he got into the crisis is fairly clear. His teachers, like most teachers, aimed to give him a set of values, a moral structure that would give his life purpose, together with the knowledge that would enable him to succeed. Mill made clear that they more than succeeded on the latter, and he hoped that others would draw the conclusions that much more could be accomplished in education than was usually attempted. However, the inculcation of values did not wholly succeed. Here Mill hoped that his own case would be taken as representative and that others would draw the conclusions that the cultivation of the feelings was as important as the cultivation of the intellect, and that the means to former were not the same as the means to the latter. Education tied to praise and blame could secure knowledge, and the methods to improve knowledge, but they would not do for values. For these what was required was a careful use of such things as poetry, but above all the example of caring and feeling teachers. The central event of the Autobiography is the mental crisis. It came about by virtue of the shortcomings in Mill’s education. He overcame the crisis in effect by undertaking a period of psychotherapy – though Mill was writing of course before there was anything like psychotherapy. Here too he meant his own case to be representative – representative of how such a crisis could be overcome. There were ways of dealing with such a crisis that were dangerous, and then there were ways that were more secure. He held that his was of the latter sort, and he expected, no doubt, that others would draw the appropriate lessons. Mill’s crisis was resolved by what can be seen as a form of informal psychotherapy. The depression Mill experienced arose from a skeptical sense that nothing has value; he presents his case as a common form of depression or melancholy. Wordsworth was another example. Mill’s own condition derived from his impoverished education and from the uncritical acceptance of his father’s simplistic psychology. In Wordsworth’s case, this skeptical attitude and the subsequent negative self-evaluation derived from his uncritical acceptance of the rationalist’s fantastic moral theory. The way out of that was to discover within oneself unnoticed sources of value. In the case of Mill, poetry enabled this discovery, followed by communion with Harriet Taylor.
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In contrast to Whitefield’s account of his crisis, Mill makes no appeal to supernatural sources of value. For Mill the experiences in the naturalistic and the religious accounts are similar, and perhaps the way to recovery is much the same. But the metaphysics of the religious account is wrong. This difference was crucial. Mill was raised devoid of religion. ‘‘I am one,’’ he wrote, ‘‘of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it’’ (Mill 1873: 45). In fact, he was raised to view religion as seriously defective: [My father] looked upon it [religion] as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up factitious excellencies, – belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of humankind, – and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues; but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals, making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. (Mill 1873: 43) Religion has ‘‘demoralizing consequences’’ and involves ‘‘slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections’’(Mill 1873: 43). A resolution of a crisis of depression that depends upon religious conviction and faith cannot be acceptable: the moral dangers are in fact too great. Mill maintains that a religious solution could not possibly be stable: religion is psychologically and socially problematic, and those errors and hateful principles of which religion is a source will confront the efficacy of any resolution of a melancholic crisis that relies upon them. In the end, Mill argues, the religious way out is intellectually incoherent. But more strongly, as Mill elsewhere argues, not only is the religious solution essentially incoherent but it is dangerous. Having us aspire to achieve values deriving from a world beyond us may set us up for failure: the goal is so far beyond us, or beyond our capacity to achieve, that, after all, life is deemed worthless – precisely the sort of attitude that creates the melancholic crisis in the first place. The truth that life is short and art is long is from of old one of the most discouraging parts of our condition; this hope admits the possibility that the art employed in improving and beautifying the soul itself may avail for good in some other life, even when seemingly useless for this. But the benefit consists less in the presence of specific hope than in the enlargement of the general scale of the feelings; the loftier aspirations being no longer in the same degree checked and kept down by a sense of the insignificance of human life – by the disastrous feeling of ‘‘not worth while.’’ The gain obtained in the increased inducement to cultivate the
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The cognitive incoherence is important: Precisely because the religious solution provides a semblance of sense for what in fact lacks sense it can make an impossible goal appear reasonable. As a solution to a melancholic crisis it may not only fail, but may act to deepen it. Better the naturalistic solution that Mill presents in his autobiographical study, and, in presenting it, providing an argument by example for its utility.
Notes 1 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (Mill 1873) This edition is the definitive text of the final version that Mill prepared for publication. References to this final edition will be marked by ‘‘1873’’. Printed with the final version is an Early Draft. References to the early draft will be marked by ‘‘1853–4a’’. The final version of Autobiography and the Early Draft are printed facing each other in vol. I of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. This volume also contains some leaves that were rejected for the early version of Autobiography. These appear as Appendix G, pp. 608–24. References to those will be marked by ‘‘1853–4b’’. 2 For an overview of Mill’s philosophy, see F. Wilson, entry ‘‘Mill, John Stuart,’’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 3 Mill in fact thought of them as relaxation: I have, through life, found office duties as actual rest from the other mental occupations which I have carried out simultaneously with them. They were sufficiently intellectual not to be a distasteful drudgery, without being such as to cause any strain upon the mental powers of a person used to abstract thought, or to the labour of careful literary composition. (Mill 1873: 85). 4
For a good discussion of this education, see Michael St J. Packe (1954). For an earlier version, see A. Bain (1882). Both make clear that the younger Mill’s education, while rigorous, was not the torture that was common in English ‘‘public schools’’ (e.g. Westminster, which Bentham had attended) and which James Mill argued strongly against in his essay on ‘‘Education’’: see James Mill (1819: 182) where the practice of ‘‘fagging’’ at Eton is strongly condemned; its practice at Westminster could equally be condemned. As for the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, see the remarks in Packe (1954: 19f). John Stuart Mill strongly approved of his education, and clearly stated that he had a happy youth: As regards my own education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or a gainer by his [James Mill’s] severity. It was not such as to prevent me from having a happy childhood. And I do not believe, that boys can be induced to apply themselves with vigour, and what is so much more difficult, perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force of persuasion and words. (Mill 1873: 53, emphasis added)
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5 The other major event was his introduction to Harriet Taylor. As we shall see, this is relevant to the story of the first event. 6 Mill records the revisions in his views of society that were enabled by his recovery from his crisis, and the consequent emotional distancing from his father that these occasioned (Mill 1873: 163–89). Mill’s re-thinkings were aided by his reading Coleridge, and his reading of, and visits with the St Simonians and Comte. With these reflections in mind, he entered into debates about Lord Grey’s administration, and about the Reform Bill of 1832 and its consequences, hoped for and actual (Mill 1873: 179). Among the major re-thinkings were his views on the nature of social science; under the impact of Macaulay’s critique of his father’s views, he came to reject his father’s views as simplistic – though he also rejected Macaulay’s as equally simplistic (Mill 1873: 165ff). (For a discussion of Mill on the philosophy of social science, see Wilson (1997); also Wilson (1991).) Essentially, with regard to James Mill’s opinions, the younger Mill often agreed with his father on practical matters, and avoided so far as possible discussing areas where they disagreed on fundamental points of doctrine. However, he makes more than evident how far he was emotionally removed from his father: ‘‘My father’s tone of thought and feeling, I now felt myself at a great distance from’’ (Mill 1873: 189). He clearly rejected his father, and this rejection was not simply intellectual. The re-thinking that he had to undertake forced that rejection – which of course fits neatly with the psychoanalytic reading of his mental crisis. 7 George Graham, ‘‘Melancholic Epistemology’’ (Graham 1990) argues that often enough there are good grounds for being depressed about the state of the world, and that it is therefore wrong to take depression as simply pathological. This is no doubt true, but hardly helps in cases like that of Mill or those with which Freud was attempting to deal. Nor is the discussion in Richard Garrett, ‘‘The Problem of Despair’’ (Garrett 1994) of much help. Garrett looks to philosophical arguments to deal with feelings of despair. There is definitely some point to cognitive therapies. Mill in fact can be partially understood in terms of such strategies. But this cannot be the whole story. There are the affective aspects of depression, the anhedonia and guilt with which it is filled and with which mere argument cannot come to grips. 8 But hardly ‘‘mitigated’’ as Stillinger (1981: xxvi) suggests. 9 For discussion of the background to Mill, see Wilson (1990: ch. 1); and also Wilson (1989). 10 For discussion of the associationist theory and the role of psychological analysis, see Wilson (1999a). 11 For greater detail, see Wilson (1990: ch. 2). 12 For an illuminating discussion of the family context in which Mill was raised, and its importance for his subsequent thought, see Christine di Stefano (1989). 13 These points are expanded upon, with reference to the philosophy of Kames and Reid in Wilson (1989). Kames and Reid are empiricists, but emphasize the phenomenology of perception, in contrast to the associationist empiricism of Hume and the Mills. 14 For more on this point, see Wilson (1999a). 15See, for example, F. E. Mineka (1963). For the contrasting view, see J. Robson (1966). 16 Mill tells us that, ‘‘I never . . . wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life’’ (1873: 145).
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17 Cf. Mill, ‘‘Utilitarianism,’’ (1863: ch. 2, 220f, 224f, also ch. 5). See also Wilson (1990: ch. 7). 18 Thus, Mill tells us that I now thought that this end [happiness] was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy . . . who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but itself as ideal end. (Mill 1873: 145–7). 19 For Mill’s view of himself as undertaking a moral project in entering Parliament, see Bruce Kinzer (1992).
Bibliography Bain, A. (1882) John Stuart Mill: Life, A Criticism with Personal Reflections, London: Longmans, Green and Co. Boring, E. G. (1957) A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd edn, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. di Stefano, C. (1989) ‘‘Rereading J. S. Mill: Interpolation from the (M)Otherworld,’’ in M. Barr and R. Feldstein (eds) Discontented Discourses: Feminism / Textual Intervention / Psychoanalysis, Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 160–72. Freud, S. (1987) ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ in J. Strachey (trans. and ed.) On Metapsychology and the Theory of Psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library, vol II, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 251–68. Garrett, R. (1994) ‘‘The Problem of Despair,’’ in G. Graham and G. L. Stephens (eds) Philosophical Psychopathology, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 73–89. Graham, G. (1990) ‘‘Melancholic Epistemology,’’ Synthese, 82: 399–422. Green, M. (1989) ‘‘Sympathy and Self-Interest: The Crisis in Mill’s Mental History,’’ Utilitas, 1: 259–77. Halliday, R. (1970) ‘‘John Stuart Mill’s Idea of Politics,’’ Political Studies, 18: 461–70. Hume, David (1826) The Life of David Hume, Written by Himself, London: Hunt. Kinzer, B. (1992) A Moralist In and Out of Parliament, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Kowalewski, D. (1979) ‘‘Politics and Emotion in the Thought of John Stuart Mill,’’ Journal of Psychohistory, 7: 455–66. Levi, A. (1945) ‘‘The ‘Mental Crisis’ of John Stuart Mill,’’ Psychoanlytic Review, 32: 86–101. Marmontel, J. F. (1930) Memoirs, trans. Brigit Patmore, London: George Routledge and Sons. Mazlish, B. (1975), James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Basic Books. Mill, James (1819) ‘‘Education,’’ in T. Ball (ed.) Political Writings of James Mill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1992): 137–94.
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——(1829 / 1869) Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2nd edn, ed. with additional notes by J. S. Mill et al. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer. Mill, J. S. (1853–4a) Autobiography: Early Draft, in Autobiography and Literary Essays, in J. Robson and J. Stillinger (eds) (1981) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. I. ——(1853–4b) ‘‘Rejected Leaves’’ (of Autobiography: Early Draft), in J. Robson and J. Stillinger (eds) (1981) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. I, appendix G. ——(1863) ‘‘Utilitarianism,’’ in Essays on Ethics Religion and Society, ed. J. Robson (ed.) (1969) The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. X, 203–26. ——(1869) ‘‘Notes,’’ to James Mill (1829 / 1869)) Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2nd edn, ed. with additional notes by J. S. Mill et al. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer. ——(1872a) System of Logic, in vols VII and VIII, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. ——(1872b) An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, in vol. IX, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. ——(1873) Autobiography, in J. Robson and J. Stillinger (eds) (1981) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. I. ——(1874a) ‘‘Theism,’’ in J. Robson (ed.) Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. X, Toronto University of Toronto Press, 1969, 429–89. ——(1874b) ‘‘The Utility of Religion,’’ in J. Robson (ed.) Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. X, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969, 403–28. ——(1963) The Earlier Letters, F. Mineka (ed.) in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vols XII and XIII, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ——(1981) Autobiography and Literary Essays, in J. Robson and J. Stillinger (eds) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. I. ——(1988) ‘‘Wordsworth and Byron,’’ in his Journals and Debating Speeches, J. Robson (ed.) vols XXVI and XXVII of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mineka, F. E. (1963) ‘‘The Autobiography and the Lady,’’ University of Toronto Quarterly, 32: 301–6. Nelson, A. D. (1985) ‘‘John Stuart Mill: The Reformer Reformed,’’ Interpretation, 13: 359–401. Packe, M. St J. (1954) The Life of John Stuart Mill, London: Secker and Warburg. Robson, J. (1966) ‘‘Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill,’’ Queen’s Quarterly, 73: 167–86. ——(1968) The Improvement of Mankind, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stillinger, J. (1981) ‘‘Introduction,’’ to J. Robson and J. Stillinger (eds) Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, vol. I, vii–liii. Whitefield, G. (1905) Journals, ed. W. Wales, reprinted 1969 with introduction by W. V. Davis, Gainsville FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints.
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Wilson, F. (1989) ‘‘William Wordsworth and the Culture of Science,’’ The Centennial Review, 33: 322–92. ——(1990) Psychological Analysis and the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ——(1991) ‘‘Mill and Comte on the Method of Introspection,’’ Journal of the History of Behavioral Science, 27: 107–29. ——(1997) ‘‘John Stuart Mill on Psychology and Social Science,’’ in J. Skorupski (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to John Stuart Mill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 203–54. ——(1999a) ‘‘Some Controversies about Method in Nineteenth Century Psychology,’’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science, 30C: 91–142. ——(1999b) ‘‘The Ultimate Unifying Principles of Coleridge’s Metaphysics of Relations and Our Knowledge of Them,’’ Ultimate Reality and Meaning, 21: 243–61. ——(2003) ‘‘Mill, John Stuart,’’ in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu / Wordsworth, W. (1800) ‘‘Preface’’, in Wordsworth and Coleridge (1802): 153-179. ——(1802a) ‘‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,’’ in W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge (1969) Lyrical Ballads, ed. W. J. B. Owen, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 111–17. ——(1802b), Additions to Wordsworth (1800), in W. Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge (1969) Lyrical Ballads, ed. W. J. B. Owen, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 164–70. Wordsworth, W. and Coleridge, S. T. (1802) Lyrical Ballads, ed. W. J. B. Owen, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.
11 The subject of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo D. G. Wright
‘‘The nineteenth century,’’ Peter Gay notes, ‘‘was the psychological century par excellence,’’ a time when confessional autobiographies [and] informal selfportraits . . . grew from a trickle to a stream, and when their display of subjectivity, their purposeful inwardness, markedly intensified. What Rousseau in his painfully frank Confessions . . . had sown in the eighteenth century, the decades of Byron and Stendhal, of Nietzsche and William James, reaped in the nineteenth. Thomas Carlyle perceptively spoke of ‘‘these autobiographical times of ours.’’ (Gay 1988: 129)1 And yet, the development of a psychology that seemingly expanded the resources available for would-be autobiographers, and the increasing experimentation brought about by the very popularity of the genre, revealed at the same time the fundamental and inescapable limitations of autobiography. Even prior to Nietzsche’s own work in the genre, the conceptual limitations of autobiography were obvious to any who would study the previous examples. Memory is unreliable, sincerity impossible to establish, language distorting, and the holy trinity of autobiographical persons – author, narrator, and protagonist – can seemingly never be made into One. What Nietzsche adds to this already impossible set of facts is a deepening of Hume’s critique of the very notion of a unified person. Even in his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche was already speaking of the ‘‘individual’’ as the outcome of a kind of dream, one easily shattered by the resurfacing of an all-embracing will. By the time of the Genealogy of Morals, this Schopenhauerean will had been recast in the less overtly metaphysical language of force, and the ‘‘self’’ portrayed as a dark creation of ressentiment; a political interest now supplements the earlier polemic against the subject, as the postulation of a soul is seen as an attempt to limit the spontaneous circulation of force through the cultivation of responsible agents. Running in tandem with these modes of analysis, Nietzsche identifies language itself as instrumental in perpetuating the belief in a subject behind every predicate:
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‘‘I shall repeat a hundred times [and he very nearly did]; we really ought to free ourselves from the seduction of words!’’ (BGE 1966: §16). But in each case, Nietzsche’s aim is to strip the ‘‘soul’’ of its assumed naturalness, and to treat the Cartesian cogito as a historical product rather than the sort of immediate given that could securely ground further reflection. Thus, if there is no uniquely localizable, essential and enduring ‘‘self,’’ the project of auto-biography seems dubious; there is no longer any ‘‘thing’’ to talk about, and no one to do the talking. Given these observations, it is no wonder that some have thought it best to read Ecce Homo – Nietzsche’s ‘‘autobiography’’ – as a purely critical text, an exposé of the naivety of the genre, and a means through which Nietzsche could develop his ongoing critique of that ‘‘calamitous atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest, the soul atomism’’(BGE 1966: §12).2 Consequently, Nietzsche seems to be the end of the line for autobiography. The genre that began so promisingly with Augustine and received its defining modern formulation through Rousseau becomes, after Nietzsche, a project fit only for members of ‘‘the Order of Holy Foolhardiness’’ (BGE 1966: §6). But just as awareness of the impossibility of a complete and objective history has not sounded the death knell for the historical instinct, nor fatally compromised the value of the histories still being written, the ‘‘end’’ of autobiography is far from the end. Nietzsche reconfigures rather than discards the genre, for while his critique of subjectivity renders the very concept of a ‘‘life story’’ problematic, he also (in other moods) places a premium on the capacity to weave the disparate events of a life into a unified narrative: that is to say, to think of all things in relation to all others and weave the isolated event into the whole: always with the presupposition that if a unity of plan does not already reside in things it must be implanted into them. Thus man spins his web over the past and subdues it, thus he gives expression to his artistic drive. (UM 1985: 91) Autobiography on this model is a task of creation rather than description. Ecce Homo is, of course, subtitled ‘‘how one becomes what one is,’’ not ‘‘how I became what I am.’’ The burden of this paper will be to elucidate what selfcreation means for Nietzsche, at least as it is described and practiced in Ecce Homo, and also to show some of the limitations of this approach.
Alienation and re-appropriation To claim that autobiography is a matter of creation rather than description for Nietzsche is not to suggest that he envisions an ex nihilo act of literary selfproduction; history remains very much present with Ecce Homo. Given that Nietzsche’s ‘‘history’’ is so utterly dominated by his vocation as a writer, the
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largest part of Ecce Homo (‘‘Why I Write Such Good Books’’) is devoted to a discussion of his previous texts. In fact, while Nietzsche’s other texts are at least potentially isolated entities, Ecce Homo has such a tight relationship to the other books in the corpus that it would be incoherent without them. It gets much of its content at second-hand through appropriating the teachings of these other texts, and this inter-textuality is a clue to the kind of work that Nietzsche is doing in his autobiography. Ecce Homo, unlike Nietzsche’s other writings, is a text about texts, and these texts happen to be his own. However this is not equivalent to writing a commentary on the earlier works in a manner that would be possible for anyone other than Nietzsche. There is an at least prima facie authority – the authority of the author – that is only available to Nietzsche, and that appears to legitimate this kind of interpretive rewriting. ‘‘[I]t is Nietzsche’s own interpretation of his development, his works, and his significance,’’ says Kaufmann, ‘‘and we should gladly trade the whole vast literature on Nietzsche for this one small book. Who would not rather have Shakespeare on Shakespeare . . . than the exegeses and conjectures of thousands of critics and professors?’’ (EH 1969: 201).3 Kaufmann’s question may appear rhetorical – who better to explicate a work than its author? – but would Nietzsche have agreed? Given his rather high opinion of his interpretive prowess, he might have agreed that in at least his own case, the author happened to be the best interpreter available. However, he does not claim such a right on the basis of authorial privilege. For the author to step forward and declare ‘‘this and this alone is what my book meant and means,’’ there must be a tacit understanding that author’s intentions are the fixed and grounding basis of interpretation, and at least part of what Nietzsche is doing in referencing Zarathustra in the third person is calling such assumptions into question. He is ‘‘calling into question,’’ or perhaps ‘‘overtly rejecting,’’ any assumption of this kind of authorial privilege. As Peter Fenves aptly notes, Nietzsche refuses to let intentions put a halt on interpretation, even when they are legitimately described as his intentions; he is not in a privileged position to say what his words mean, even if he can very well say what he meant by them. Nietzsche is thus often surprised by what he writes; he takes delight in discovering that he had more to say than he thought at the time of composition, Ecce Homo . . . being the most obvious example. (Fenves 1987: 167) While Nietzsche thus frees meaning from its confinement in intention, and in the process abjures the privilege of ‘‘owning’’ his texts, this is only half of the story. The same Nietzsche who in Ecce Homo disavows identity with the writer of his earlier works is also engaged in the act of re-appropriating them. The alienation in the first movement is, one could say, sublated in his subsequent resumption of identification. For example, Nietzsche tells
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us in Ecce Homo that his essay ‘‘Schopenhauer as Educator’’ is really best construed as ‘‘Nietzsche as Educator’’ (Books: 2:3). Not only does this claim affix the portrait of Schopenhauer to the image of Nietzsche developed in Ecce Homo, it also returns the earlier essay to its place in the canon in a significantly modified form; it is now an essay about Nietzsche and an event in the life of the ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who is the subject of Ecce Homo. The author of 1872 – who surely would have said that the essay was ‘‘about’’ Schopenhauer – is ignored, or rather, overruled. Ecce Homo stands as a comprehensive, personalizing preface to the entire corpus, and in passing through it, each of Nietzsche’s previous works is returned in a modified form to its place in a body of work affiliated with the ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who narrates Ecce Homo. The kinds of modification practiced in Ecce Homo are manifold. There is now, for instance, a ‘‘profound and hostile silence about Christianity’’ throughout The Birth of Tragedy (Books: 1:1). This is certainly not a silence we would have heard in the text prior to Ecce Homo; why on earth should there be a discussion of Christianity in a book on Greek Tragedy? Similarly, the three essays of the Genealogy each now begin in a way ‘‘that is calculated to mislead: cool, scientific, even ironic, deliberately foreground’’ (Books: 8:1), and this claim cannot but affect the way we read this earlier text. But while such comments are fascinating as an index of an evolution in Nietzsche’s philosophical concerns, though not a ‘‘reader’s guide’’ to the corpus, there is at least one feature in this interpretive prefacing that is of a rather different order. As in the discussion of the Schopenhauer essay, the various names through which Nietzsche has written in the past are assimilated in Ecce Homo to the ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who narrates the text. Commenting on Human, All too Human, for instance, Nietzsche says, ‘‘the name Voltaire on one of my essays – that really meant progress – toward me’’ (Books: 3:1). Of his early essay ‘‘Wagner in Bayreuth,’’ Nietzsche states that ‘‘in all psychologically decisive places I alone am discussed – and one need not hesitate to put down my name or the word ‘Zarathustra’ where the text has the word ‘Wagner’ ‘‘ (Books: 1:4). The process is so ubiquitous that – not without some irony – I would like to call it intentional. In his guise as narrator, Nietzsche annexes to his own name the teachings formerly presented through the names of Wagner and Schopenhauer, Voltaire, Dionysus, Paul Rée (Books: 3:6), and – through a curious intermediary step – the text of Daybreak itself, which ‘‘lies in the sun . . . like some sea animal basking among rocks. Ultimately, I myself was this sea animal’’ (Books: 4:1). In Ecce Homo, the names through which the author had formerly written are claimed to be, broadly speaking, open to inter-substitution, and ‘‘Nietzsche’’ comes to stand as the master-name within an ever-expanding network. Both movements in this process are necessary to understand what is going on in Ecce Homo. The externalization of his texts – which reflects Nietzsche’s denial of a fixed and enduring author-subject – allows him to reinterpret these earlier works; meaning is decisively severed from author’s intent and the texts are thereby liberated to say any number of different things.
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However, this act of reinterpretation is also part of a process through which the texts are claimed; it is a gesture of power. In this context, we might remember the following passage from the Genealogy: the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it. . . . [A]nd all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous meaning and purpose are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. (GM 1969: §2:12, emphasis added) Nietzsche’s right to interpret his past works is not claimed because he is their author, but rather because of his ability to make them serve as functions in the project he undertakes in Ecce Homo. Rather than relying on what he takes to be the idealizing illusion of a fixed and enduring subject who possesses his history as a series of attributes, Nietzsche actively affiliates himself with the aspects of his past that he selects and interprets, sealing this transforming appropriation with his signature, his name. The traditional mimetic standards of interpretation (and of autobiography itself) are inverted here, for while a rote repetition would reveal a text that still serves the agenda of a previous ‘‘Nietzsche,’’ a ‘‘fresh interpretation’’ and ‘‘adaptation’’ that ‘‘obscures or even obliterates’’ his earlier intentions reveals a mastering of both his texts and the personal history they represent.4
Autobiography in the moment of recurrence This project is presented in the most highly condensed fashion on the ‘‘interleaf’’ to Ecce Homo, the epigraph that stands between the preface and the first chapter: On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today; I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer – all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! – How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? – and so I tell my life to myself. ‘‘This perfect day,’’ the sun overhead, two paths stretched out forward and back, and all things ripe or overripe: the language is drawn from Zarathustra, the imagery associated with the thought of eternal recurrence.
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It is from this unique location that Nietzsche will narrate his life to himself. Fittingly, Nietzsche summons up in this moment a will to the most comprehensive affirmation, the great and unbounded ‘‘yes’’ to life expressed in the emphasized line, ‘‘How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?’’ There is an ambiguity lurking in this affirmation, however. Is Nietzsche grateful for his life as a whole, or is he – in addition – grateful for each moment within it? The latter seems impossible. How could Nietzsche love the ‘‘torments that go with an uninterrupted three-day migraine, accompanied by labourious vomiting of phlegm’’ (Wise: 1)? Does it make any sense to affirm a migraine qua migraine, eternally or otherwise? Nietzsche occasionally notes the important role that his various sufferings seem to have played in allowing him to produce the work that he considered so important, and whether or not we agree with his analysis, claims of this sort are at least intelligible. When he tells us that his sickness was necessary for the production of the ‘‘perfect brightness and cheerfulness, even exuberance of the spirit,’’ displayed in the text Daybreak (Wise: 1), we can understand why he might, all things considered, be grateful for his migraines, stomach problems and near blindness. However, the claim he makes is much stronger than this. He does not make an ‘‘apology’’ for suffering through a greater-goods theodicy, and actually goes out of his way to prohibit just such approaches. Instead, he explicitly claims amor fati as his ‘‘inmost nature,’’ and describes this as the love of fate that wants ‘‘nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary . . . but [to] love it’’ (Clever: 10). This perspective seems to preclude appeal to either a ‘‘greatergoods’’ theodicy or a Stoic ‘‘bearing’’ of what is necessary to explicate what is involved in genuinely willing the recurrence of all things. The parts must be loved as well as the whole. Amor fati appears to function as an aspect of the willing of recurrence, not its precondition. It is not the case that Nietzsche’s capacity for ‘‘loving’’ even his suffering as a brute given – a ‘‘fact’’ – allows him the privilege of affirming his life as a whole, but rather, a feature of his ecstatic yes-saying is his reinterpretation of this factual given. The ‘‘most tremendous nature,’’ he says in the Untimely Meditations, would be characterized by the fact that it would know no boundary at all at which the historical sense began to overwhelm it; it would draw to itself and incorporate into itself all the past, its own and that most foreign to it, and as it were, transform it into blood. That which such a nature cannot subdue it knows how to forget; it no longer exists, the horizon is rounded and closed. (UM 1985: 69, emphasis added) Ecce Homo aspires – within the context of the eternal return – toward comprehensive affirmation and appropriation; with the exception of the polemic against the Germans that occupies most of Ecce Homo’s review of The Case of Wagner, it is overwhelmingly positive in its outlook, at least relative to
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Nietzsche’s typical posture. This affirmation produces a transforming incorporation of the past, but this is only one side of the action of ‘‘the most tremendous nature’’ as it is described in the Untimely Meditations. Much that is in Ecce Homo is heavily reinterpreted, but much is also missing. How much of what is recalcitrant in the past is absent in these pages? Jean Graybeal, for instance, has drawn our attention to the absence of Nietzsche’s mother and sister in the text as we have received it (Graybeal 1998). Nietzsche describes in great detail the temperament and aptitudes that he has inherited from his father, but his mother is reduced to a cipher, merely ‘‘something very German’’ (Wise: 3).5 In a similar vein, there is no mention at all of any romantic entanglements; Lou Salomé is presented – briefly – as ‘‘a young Russian woman who was my friend at that time’’ (Books: 6:1), without the barest hint that he had hoped for rather more than a manuscript from her. There is much that Nietzsche ‘‘knows how to forget’’ when he is writing; his horizon is ‘‘rounded and closed’’ in the moment of recurrence, accepting within its borders only that which he can successfully assimilate, that which he can ‘‘transform into blood.’’ When Nietzsche wrote the Untimely Meditations, the value of this capacity to ‘‘forget’’ was very much open to question. How does one praise the capacity to forget while simultaneously castigating all forms of idealization and repression? How does wilful forgetting differ from the asceticism that Nietzsche so fiercely rejected – the denial or suppression of one part of life in order that the depleted remainder might continue? There is no answer in this early text, only a recognition that while life needs the unhistorical as much as the historical, it is ‘‘difficult to know the limit to the denial of the past’’ (UM 1985: 76). This early investigation suggests that a delicate balancing act is necessary between memory and forgetting, and that tradeoffs and compromises will be inevitable. Yet this prevailing unease has disappeared by Ecce Homo. Here, Nietzsche moves through his own history with uncanny assurance, showing no discomfort at all over what he may have ‘‘forgotten’’ about himself. My suspicion is that it is vocabulary developed in his Zarathustra that makes such confidence possible, or at least, that allows forgetting to be granted a clear and positive value under a different name. One of the things that the pseudo-Christian lexicon of Zarathustra allows Nietzsche to do is to recast this practice as a part of a drama of sacrifice and redemption, trading in the process on the positive valuation of sacrifice found within this tradition. It is this language that Nietzsche uses when he speaks of ‘‘burying’’ his forty-four years, as if this burying were inextricably linked to the fact that the work of those years ‘‘has been saved, is eternal.’’ There is an element of sacrifice in the moment of recurrence, at least as it operates in Ecce Homo; the recalcitrant, the un-affirmable, is buried – and forgotten – in a process of alienation that precedes the joyous re-appropriation of the rest of the past. For Nietzsche, redemption does not involve stripping away the inessential in order to reveal an underlying and untarnished substance; it takes
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place through change and modification. The fragment, riddle, and dreadful accident of the past is drawn together in and by the narrating voice that says ‘‘but thus I willed it.’’ The brute facticity of the past – the will’s gnashing of teeth – is overcome in a redeeming affirmation.6 But not everything returns, and that which returns, returns differently; ‘‘thus I willed it’’ expresses here a transforming incorporation that sacrifices what appears inviolate in the old in order that it might nourish the new. What returns in the sacrificial moment is christened with a new name. When the fisherman Simon ‘‘forgets’’ his past – buries it – in order to follow his Lord, he is given a new name; it is as the apostle Peter that he enters into eternal life, his past life as Simon – a life dead in sin – is sacrificed in the moment of redemption. Mirroring, if not mimicking this archaic magic that associates naming with life, and sacrifice with eternity, Nietzsche gives his own name to his eternal life. ‘‘Nietzsche’’ now names what ‘‘has been saved, is eternal,’’ the phoenix that emerges transformed and renewed by passing through death. This is striking and unexpected: the thought of recurrence had always been Zarathustra’s ‘‘heaviest burden,’’ his ‘‘most abysmal thought.’’ Yet here, as if he were simply reporting an obvious and well established fact, Nietzsche positions himself as infinitely grateful for his ‘‘whole life’’ – and we know a thing or two about what that included in his case. Whether or not Zarathustra (the character) ever successfully willed the eternal return has become a well worn topic of scholarly speculation, but even if he did, it is still one thing to represent such an achievement in a fiction and quite another for Nietzsche, the author, to claim to have orchestrated his own redemption. Does this not strain Nietzsche’s involvement in the rhetoric of Christhood past the breaking point? Daniel Conway is concerned about this aspect of Ecce Homo and seeks an interpretation that would exempt Nietzsche from the charge. Not only is a single diary entry in principle an inadequate representation of an author, Conway suggests, but also the special properties of the day (or moment) of Ecce Homo’s narration make it a uniquely inappropriate reflection of its author: Readers familiar with Nietzsche’s books know that the subject of Ecce Homo resides more permanently in the quotidian world of fragmentation, anxiety, resentment, and disappointment. This Nietzsche cannot be faithfully represented by a single day, much less by the ‘‘perfect day’’ eternalized in the interleaf epigraph; ‘‘he’’ cannot even be reduced to the finite number of episodes recounted by the author of Ecce Homo. (Conway 1993: 65) Prior to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche had always been deeply committed to understanding the world as a perpetual flux, a world that receives only provisional meanings through the act of wilful interpretation. If he really was presenting himself as having definitively come into full and final possession of his
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nature in the writing of Ecce Homo, we would be forced to judge the text to be either ludicrously inconsistent with the remainder of Nietzsche’s corpus, or follow such critics as Conway who suggest that it is simply a parody of such romantic pretensions to ‘‘self-actualization.’’ However, we are only faced with such an unwelcome set of choices if we read the assimilation of names in Ecce Homo as all pointing back to their author, where the textual marker ‘‘Nietzsche’’ is taken to refer to a specific, extra-textual individual, in this case, a former philologist suffering from chronic gastric complaints. This is of course the natural way to read the text: it is what we are expecting and perhaps even hoping for – a moment when the real Nietzsche finally steps forward unmasked and claims responsibility for the teachings conducted under so many different names. Nietzsche does, after all, begin the preface with the statement ‘‘it seems indispensable to me to say who I am’’ (EH: preface §1), thus encouraging such desires. Furthering this impression, the text enacts a great number of ‘‘unmaskings,’’ the various names in the past texts now revealed to be mere pseudonyms for Nietzsche himself. My suspicion though is that the opposite is occurring. Rather than naming an individual who stands outside of the text as the grounding referent for the variety of other names that circulate throughout his writings, the name ‘‘Nietzsche’’ becomes, in Ecce Homo, a part of that textual system itself. The author creates for himself a literary persona in the form of the narrator of Ecce Homo, a character who engages in the kind of selfcreation described within the body of texts that he claims as his own. In naming this narrating persona ‘‘Nietzsche’’ however, the author makes the relationship between himself and this narrator highly ambiguous. Is this narrative voice simply another persona temporarily employed by his author, such that we could read Ecce Homo as accurately and unproblematically reflecting its author’s thoughts? Is the narrator an independent fiction who speaks for no-one but himself, like a character in a novel? Or is the author attempting to substitute this character for his flesh and blood life, asking us (and perhaps himself as well) to treat this yes-saying ‘‘tremendous nature’’ as more authentically real than the less unified and coherent author – a ‘‘subsequent piece . . . of wretched minor fiction’’ (BGE 1966: 269) – who ‘‘resides more permanently in the quotidian world of fragmentation’’ (Conway 1993: 65). Though all three possibilities play a role in Ecce Homo, I will argue that it is the third and strangest interpretation that makes the most sense out of the text.
Life and death transactions To substantiate this interpretation, it is first necessary to note the discrepancy between the two openings to Ecce Homo, the official ‘‘Preface’’ and the interleaf whose function I have just been discussing. They stand as mirror images of each other, leading the text in opposite directions, for while the interleaf addresses itself to the forty-four years of life and work that are
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buried in the present moment of writing, the preface looks directly toward the future: ‘‘Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am’’ (EH: preface §1). As with the interleaf, the narration that follows is governed by a kind of life and death transaction, but here it is no longer the past that is sacrificed for the present, but rather the present is sacrificed for the future. In this opening paragraph, Nietzsche makes the first and most striking use of a figure that will recur throughout the text in a number of forms: it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. Really, one should know it, for I have not left myself ‘‘without testimony.’’ But the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live. (EH: preface §1) So Nietzsche is dead, or at least, not quite alive outside of a sort of prejudice, a credit drawn on his written testimonial. But this ‘‘dead’’ writer – dead over a hundred years now, and anticipating his own death as he writes in 1888 – imagines having not only an effect, but the greatest possible effect on the future: ‘‘It is only beginning with me that there are hopes again, tasks, ways that can be prescribed for culture – I am he that brings these glad tidings – And thus I am also a destiny’’ (Books: 9:2). Since there is no ‘‘action at a distance,’’ to have this effect, the dead one must somehow return in order to inaugurate these world-historical changes. This line of thinking is consonant with Nietzsche’s constant deployment of (inverted) Christian motifs; the dead Christ returns as Spirit in order to make salvation possible. For that matter, the title of the text itself is an allusion to Pilate’s words as he presented Jesus to the masses, and thus already an anticipation of both death and return. In Nietzsche’s case, I don’t think that these are simply rhetorical flourishes; he does seem to anticipate a kind of return from the dead. It is surely not accidental that the chapter which follows the retrospective ‘‘why I write such good books,’’ is the forward looking ‘‘why I am a destiny,’’ for running alongside the thematic of immediate self-possession in Ecce Homo is the insistence that ‘‘Nietzsche’’ will only fully become what he is in the future. Speaking of his world-historical destiny as inaugurating ‘‘that great noon at which the most elect consecrate themselves for the greatest of all tasks,’’ Nietzsche writes that this is ‘‘the vision of a feast that I shall yet live to see’’ (Books: 1:4, emphasis added). If we are to take such comments seriously – and they appear frequently enough that I think we should – then we are directed to think of ‘‘Nietzsche’’ not as an author finding consolation in the thought of a destiny that, sadly, he will never experience, but rather, as that which will only properly come into its own after its author is dead. The proper imagery is not that which relates ‘‘Nietzsche’’ to the Moses who leads us to
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the promised land that he can never enter himself, but that which shows ‘‘Nietzsche’’ to be the (textual) Spirit who comes to us after the self-sacrifice of (the authorial) Christ.7 The ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who signs Ecce Homo in the moment of eternal recurrence, then, is the ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who will be present at the moment of his future destiny, an eternally living Nietzsche strangely split off from his ill-fated and largely unknown author: this is the trick of posthumous people par excellence: ‘‘What did you think?’’ one of them asked impatiently; ‘‘would we feel like enduring the estrangement, the cold and quiet grave around us – this whole subterranean, concealed, mute, undiscovered solitude that among us is called life but might just as easily be called death – if we did not know what will become of us, and that it is only after death that we shall enter our life and become alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!’’ (GS 1974: §365) It is in his name – through his name – that Nietzsche will have this effect, a fact he well knows: ‘‘I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous’’ (Destiny: 1, emphasis added). Moreover, when he implicates himself in the logic of sacrifice and redemption on the interleaf epigraph, it is his forty-four years that are buried; the work – the presents of these years – is what ‘‘has been saved, is eternal.’’ The name is affiliated in the moment with an eternally recurring, textual Nietzsche, a Nietzsche who ‘‘lives on,’’ a Nietzsche who assumes both the past recorded in his name and the destiny to which he lays claim. And so, Nietzsche-text is now opposed to Nietzsche-author; the two subjects share the same name, but otherwise differ enormously. Given that the first bearer of that name is dead, what returns – eternally – and thus, what signs Ecce Homo, is the name ‘‘Nietzsche.’’8 Ecce Homo therefore presents itself as the autobiography of its eternally living narrator, not as an account of its long departed author. I have been writing as if this process was unique to Nietzsche, but in certain respects it is quite common. For Nietzsche, the thought of the eternal return brings into play quite dramatically the negotiation of life and death in the unique moment from which the narration takes place, but autobiography by its very nature is almost inevitably posthumous. In order to narrate a life, the author is necessarily distanced from that life itself, writing from a rhetorically unstable temporal location that is somehow affiliated with death; the text is always written from somewhere beyond. This is most obvious in a work of religious confession such as Augustine’s, where the narration is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) taken to be co-authored by God, and where the notions of sacrifice, death, redemption, and new life find their most natural home. But Rousseau also positions his text as equivalent to the Book of Judgment in the preface to his Confessions, and Hume refers to
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My Own Life as a self-authored eulogy. The autobiography, unlike the diary, often flirts with death as its most basic structural conceit. This is because a synoptic view of one’s life that is presented as simply one more action within that life undermines its own authority; there is no reason to believe that such an understanding will not be changed or discarded in the next moment. Autobiography or self-portrait readily decays into diary if it cannot find the rhetorical means through which to present itself as arising from someone outside of life itself. Therefore, it almost inevitably assumes an ‘‘afterlife’’ of some sort as a privileged location from which the truth – the whole truth – can be told. Even secular autobiographies tend to be religious in this sense, groping constantly toward a ghostly self-presence outside of temporally bound earthly life, toward a time and place in which one fully is – at last – what one is. Georges Gusdorf takes something like this to be a defining feature of the genre throughout any of its various mutations: the past that is recalled has lost its flesh and bone solidity, but it has won a new and more intimate relationship to the individual life that can thus, after being long dispersed and sought again throughout the course of time, be rediscovered and drawn together again beyond time. . . . Temporal perspectives thus seem to be telescoped together and to interpenetrate one another; they commune in that self-knowledge that regroups personal being above and beyond its own time limits. (Gusdorf 1980: 38–9, 44) In Nietzsche’s language, it is as though a bargain has been struck, an impossible form of credit drawn, such that the death of the writer – a mortgage drawn against his or her life – justifies the immortality of his literary self. And this is precisely the logic that Nietzsche will constantly invoke in Ecce Homo: ‘‘one pays dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive’’ (Books: 5:5). We have already seen one aspect of Nietzsche’s curious assumption of the position of dead man through considering the role of the eternal recurrence in his text. The gateway moment standing in front of Ecce Homo serves both to locate the narration outside of temporal history – ‘‘one foot beyond life’’ – and to bring into play the logic of sacrificial redemption. Through this thought, Nietzsche ties the sort of death he experiences as a writer to the future in which his name will come into its proper life; the two are not so separated that the one movement would be logically prior to the other, but rather, they are inextricably tied together in one phenomenon. And yet, if this analysis is taken to describe the manner in which Nietzsche appropriates his history – the re-creation of his previous works in the affirming moment – it is also true that it describes his experience of creation as well. Throughout his career, Nietzsche often returned to an image of artistic creation that depicts the accumulated energies of the body as being released in a unified creative / procreative act. The body, Nietzsche will remind us, is depleted
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through this process; the greatest possible creative act – a total expenditure – would therefore be accompanied by an evacuated, ‘‘dead’’ creator. As early as the Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche was already insisting on this intimate connection between creation and death, and significantly for my purposes here, suggesting that the name passes from the dead to the living – that what the name names is the work rather than the artist: he lives best who has no respect for existence . . . [who knows on the] way to immortality and to monumental history, how to regard it with Olympian laughter or at least with sublime mockery; often they descend to their grave with an ironic smile – for what is there left to bury! Only the dross, refuse, vanity, animality that had always weighed them down . . . But one thing will live, the monogram of their most essential being, a work, an act, a piece of rare enlightenment, a creation. (UM 1985: 69, emphasis added) The evacuation of the energies of the writer in a unified (and unifying) act of creative production would, or could, bring about both aspects of posthumousity – the living, eternal, monumental name and the expired, exhausted being who formerly bore the name. This analysis may support the interpretation of the writer as assuming a sort of premature death, but this is only half of the matter. If the autobiographer is consigned through this unnatural transaction to a kind of living death – ‘‘more a precious memory of life than life itself’’ (Wise: 1) – is the renounced life thereby successfully transported into the named text? Is the Flesh made Word to dwell among us? Again, this seems impossible, and yet Nietzsche gives us reason to believe that this was in fact his experience. Consider in this context the following characteristic passage from Ecce Homo in which Nietzsche describes his relationship to the productions of other authors: For years I did not read a thing – the greatest benefit I ever conferred on myself. That nethermost self which had, as it were, been buried and grown silent under the continual pressure of having to listen to other selves (and that is after all what reading means) awakened slowly, shyly, dubiously – but eventually it spoke again.9 (Books: 3:4, emphasis added) If ‘‘having to listen to other selves’’ is ‘‘what reading means,’’ then it seems that written productions do impose themselves as selves of a kind. ‘‘Should I permit an alien thought to scale the wall secretly?’’ Nietzsche says, ‘‘ – And that is what reading would mean’’ (Clever: 3). If the experience of reading is properly construed as undergoing the insistent imposition of an alien subjectivity, then might the act of writing – in at least some circumstances – be a process through which a subjectivity is transferred into a text by inscrip-
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tion? If this is possible at all, then the autobiographical inscription of a name on a text will be the privileged site of this form of writing. The practice of auto-bio-graphy, self-life-writing, would – as if by alchemy – create life in a text, a ghost that would re-emerge on every reading to commune with the one who summons it. Whatever our private reservations about the coherence of this agenda (and I certainly harbor such reservations myself), I think that it is an accurate assessment of what Nietzsche is trying to do in Ecce Homo, and it helps us to make sense out of this otherwise bewildering text. He is playing for much larger stakes than a traditional autobiographer, who seeks merely to describe a non-textual life. Much of the triumphant tone of Ecce Homo is derived from Nietzsche’s intoxication over the immensity of what he is attempting. It is not, or not merely, the response of an author well pleased with his previous work, but rather the heady thrill of an author recasting himself as a literary creation, a creation that more fully embodies and expresses who he is and what he believes than its author ever could. Not only is the new Nietzsche an improvement on the old, his creation also at least mimes the achievement of the oldest of human aspirations; Nietzsche cheats death through the creation of a new, textual version of himself, a self that will bear his name and image in perfect self-sufficiency for all eternity. It is a perfect this-worldly equivalent of the Christian salvation that Nietzsche denied, and if it is true that it requires the sacrifice of his natural life, that is perhaps a price well worth paying. As Diotima says in the Symposium, who would not willingly make such a deal in order to perpetuate oneself in the form of a perfected spiritual child? ‘‘Those whose procreancy is of the spirit rather than of the flesh . . . conceive and bear the things of the spirit’’ (Plato 1984: 208e–209a); ‘‘And I ask you, who would not prefer such fatherhood to merely human propagation?’’ (209d).
The quest for the perfect reader Insofar as the relationship between author and narrator-character is thought of in the terms I have just sketched, then Nietzsche’s strange project in Ecce Homo succeeds. But though the imagery of the self-made-into-text dominates Ecce Homo, it is not the only relationship between author and narrator at work in the book, and the ghost of the anxious author haunts the production of his textual namesake. The life and death transaction that seeks to produce a literary character as a perfected replacement for his author is compromised and incomplete in Ecce Homo, since the author is unwilling to accept the necessary consequences of locating his identity fully and definitively in the narrative self he has created. A clear implication of the attempt to textualize oneself is that one must be read to be ‘‘alive;’’ the easy self-certainty of the Cartesian cogito is forsaken for a written self that is enacted in the disputed territory of public readership. While I have argued that the ‘‘Nietzsche character’’ comes to stand as a
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kind of subject, it is obvious that he is not a reflexive subject. An autobiography may present a highly complex character – often one more complex and richly integrated than its temporally bound author – but it clearly can have no experience of itself. The price of immortality then is another kind of death; the name that demarcates a pattern of energy but which does not contain an energy of its own remains static, unknown to itself or to others. It needs to be read, to receive an investment of the energy of another, in order to vitalize and animate its latent potential. Ironically, the ‘‘Nietzsche’’ of Ecce Homo suffers from an even greater dependency on others than his author does; the realization that his public vulnerability inevitably increases through the very acts of writing that allow him to ‘‘become what he is,’’ is very much a part of the texture of Nietzsche’s work, perhaps the deepest source of his legendary rage against the teeming multitudes. The plight is common to all secular autobiographers – those who stake their immortality on the perpetuation of their names – but the imperative exists in a still more acute form in Nietzsche, for as we have already had cause to observe, his name must not only recur down through the ages, but must also have the greatest possible effect; it must be read, and it must be read well. His situation is made still more complex by the fact that the ‘‘destiny’’ professed by Nietzsche is predicated on his radical individuality, his ‘‘untimeliness.’’ ‘‘Nietzsche’’ is the bearer of the new glad tidings precisely because he is the subject of ‘‘a new series of experiences,’’ and yet he insists in the same work that, as readers, we experience only ourselves: ‘‘Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear’’ (Books: 1:1). Nietzsche’s ‘‘name,’’ it seems, must simultaneously be heard correctly in order to bring about its proper effect (and to validate the credit he has advanced himself in his name), but must also paradoxically remain incomprehensible, lest a too-ready access to it compromise the stance of absolute novelty. In this regard, it is telling that Ecce Homo closes with a repetition of the question ‘‘Have I been understood?’’ The question of whether or not he is read – the common autobiographical concern – is superseded by the more vexed question of whether or not his readers have understood him. What could possibly constitute an acceptable answer to this question for Nietzsche? To be understood is necessarily to be in common with one’s reader, to be comprehensible within a general structure of experiences. This would unacceptably compromise the world-historical singularity of the ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who would claim to divide history in two (Destiny: 8). Even for the most ‘‘multifarious art of style’’ ever devised, it is not clear that there are linguistic means available for communicating an absolutely novel experience: ‘‘We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. . . . Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking’’ (TI 1990: §26).10
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The most desirable solution to this dilemma is impossible. The ‘‘name’’ that is heard by all and yet utterly unfathomable, universally recognized and yet subsisting in the sureness of its own power, is the name of God. For one who is not God, the identity bound up in a text is inevitably destined to a dangerous transit through an outside reader in order to ‘‘become what it is.’’ The divine signature – ‘‘I Am who (I) Am’’11 – is thus opposed to the all-too-human ‘‘I am what you read,’’ and the nature of this reading is far from assured in advance. The pathos in Ecce Homo, the simultaneous need for confirmation and rage against this very need, arises in part from the fact that through inscribing his subjectivity in the name that says Ecce Homo, Nietzsche – the man – has lost control over his own identity. This ambivalence of rage and need is expressed within the first paragraph of the preface – ‘‘I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom – namely, to say: Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else’’ (EH: preface §1). A ‘‘misreading’’ makes for a new Nietzsche. The deflationary effect of being misunderstood appears to unsettle Nietzsche’s typical conviction that he will usher in the convulsions of a new age: ‘‘why should I not voice my suspicion? In my case too, the Germans will try everything to bring forth from a tremendous destiny – a mouse . . . how I wish I were a bad prophet in this case!’’ (Books: 10:3). But in expressing this doubt, the spell is broken, for these are clearly the words of an anxious author, not those of the ‘‘Nietzsche’’ who is grateful for his whole life and confident in his immortality and grand destiny. It is the denial of a fixed and grounding meaning in the author’s intention that allows Nietzsche the freedom to reinterpret and revalue his work, and he is more than pleased to demonstrate his capacity to creatively appropriate these texts. However, he shows a marked reluctance to extend the same freedom to his readers when he himself is the text. Better to remain forever undecided, better to live as a ghost, than to suffer the infinite fragmentation of identity that would result from too many readings. Consistent with this ambivalent need to be both read and not read, Nietzsche imagines in almost all of his texts a perfect reader in the future. This future reader stands at a distance from Nietzsche that must remain indeterminate; they must be near enough to validate his prophetic declaration of a world-historical destiny, but far enough away to avoid compromising his untimeliness.12 Despite Nietzsche’s insistence that ‘‘here, no ‘prophet’ is speaking’’ (EH: preface §4), this is certainly reminiscent of the ‘‘unfalsifiable’’ structure of prophecy. When Nietzsche has had his effect, then we will know that he was properly read and therefore that his name remains vital and active, but if the contrary were true, how could we ever know; when might a sufficient length of time have passed without the occurrence of a moral cataclysm inspired by Nietzsche’s name, such that we could safely say he was wrong? Through an indefinite deferral of the time of the validating reading, ‘‘Nietzsche’’ can continue to live on his own credit, a debt that will seemingly never come due. Ecce Homo is a text that never quite decided what it wanted to be; its outward-looking and teleological direction constantly collides with its private,
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inward, and eternalizing character. Insofar as the autobiography is an enclosed, private system, it situates itself as the site in which the textual history of its author is selected, transformed, and federated under a single name. This is the centripetal movement of the text; what was formerly dispersed in the social realm through writing is brought back in, at least during the moment of new writing. But when it looks outside and finds a reader, since one is needed to register this subject-signature, the guards immediately go up. Then, Nietzsche the author begins to mask his perhaps premature and compromising self-disclosure. At this point, Nietzsche’s signature becomes nearly illegible, and Ecce Homo becomes an autobiography that effaces its own subject in order to protect it. Nietzsche’s complicity in both the autobiographical practice, and in its subsequent deferral, lends a strange emotive coloring to the work as a whole; now a subject is present, now he is gone.
Notes 1 All quotations from Ecce Homo will be included parenthetically within the text,
2 3
4
5
indicating the section of the book (Wise = ‘‘Why I Am So Wise,’’ Clever = ‘‘Why I Am So Clever,’’ Books = ‘‘Why I Write Such Great Books,’’ and Destiny = ‘‘Why I Am a Destiny’’), then providing the chapter within that section, and where applicable, the numbered subsection within that chapter. Other texts by Nietzsche will be referenced through the standard English abbreviations of their titles (UM = Untimely Meditations; GS = The Gay Science; BGE = Beyond Good and Evil; GM = The Genealogy of Morals; TI = Twilight of the Idols; AC = The Antichrist; WTP = The Will to Power), with the section numbers common to all editions being provided after the ‘‘§’’ symbol. Page rather than section numbers will be given for UM, since the sections are comparatively long. BGE 1966: §12. A clear example of reading Ecce Homo as a critical exercise can be found in Richard White’s ‘‘Autobiography Against Itself’’ (White 1991). Much as I love Ecce Homo, I am sure that I would not make the trade Kaufmann proposes; there is more than a whiff of idolatry in his claim that ‘‘this one small book’’ is more valuable than ‘‘the whole vast literature on Nietzsche’’ (editor’s introduction to EH: 201). Straining the limits of how we use the term, Nietzsche calls this process ‘‘objective,’’ even if he does allow that it is ‘‘the strangest ‘objectivity’ possible’’ (Books: 1:4); ‘‘a historiography could be imagined which had in it not a drop of common empirical truth and yet could lay claim to the highest degree of objectivity’’ (UM 1985: 91). Graybeal makes an interesting comparison between the treatment of Nietzsche’s mother in the published version and that found in his proposed revision to the relevant chapter (his editors, past and present, have tended to refuse this substitution, deeming it the product of madness). The alternate passage would have disrupted any presumption of amor fati in the text: Whenever I seek the deepest contradiction to myself, the incalculable meanness (or commonness) of instinct, then I always find my mother and sister. . . . The treatment that I suffer from my mother and sister, up until
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The subject of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo this moment, infuses me with an unspeakable horror. . . . I confess that the most profound objection to the ‘‘eternal recurrence,’’ my truly abysmal thought, is always mother and sister. (Graybeal 1998: 238–40)
6 The allusions and references here are to the chapter ‘‘On Redemption’’ (2:20) from Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most detailed account of what is at stake in redeeming the past. 7 There are limits to any metaphor, but we can go quite a way with this one before it collapses. And this limit is reached more as a result of Nietzsche’s over-use of the Christian narrative than from his opposition to its underlying metaphysics; in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche appears at various points to be a disciple, Christ, the Holy Spirit, John the Baptist announcing the coming of Zarathustra, and Peter building the church upon him, with no attempt being made to keep the personae separate. 8 Elaborating a similar connection, Derrida will add that ‘‘if life returns, it will return to the name but not to the living, in the name of the living as a name of the dead’’ (Derrida 1990: 9). 9 Thomas Brobjer has given us excellent reasons for disputing the accuracy of this claim by providing a detailed examination of the contents of Nietzsche’s library (Brobjer 1997). 10 The concern that language corrupts and can never adequately express genuine novelty runs throughout the entire Nietzsche corpus. ‘‘Communication by words is shameless,’’ says Nietzsche in his notebooks, ‘‘words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common’’ (WTP 1967: §810). See also (BGE 1966: §268): ‘‘To understand one another, it is not enough that one uses the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one’s experience in common.’’ 11 Exodus, 3:14; ‘‘God said to Moses, ‘I am who am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I Am has sent me to you.’ ‘‘ There are a variety of possible translations here, including ‘‘I am who I am,’’ and ‘‘I will be what I will be,’’ but each shares an emphasis on plenitude, eternity, and complete self-presence. 12 There is a parallel, though less pronounced structure in the geographical (rather than temporal) proximity of the perfect reader; everywhere but in his native Germany, his readers are nothing but first-rate intellects and proven characters, trained in high positions and duties; I even have real geniuses among my readers. In Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen . . . everywhere I have been discovered; but not in the shallows of Europe, Germany. (Books: 2:2).
Bibliography Augustine (1961) Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin, New York: Penguin Books. Brobjer, T. (1997) ‘‘Nietzsche’s Reading and Private Library 1885–1889,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 58.4: 663–90.
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Conway, D. (1993) ‘‘Nietzsche’s Doppleganger,’’ in The Fate of the New Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, Brookfield: Avebury, 55–78. Derrida, J. (1990) ‘‘Otobiographies,’’ trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie V. McDonald and trans. Peggy Kamuf, Albany NY: SUNY Press. Descartes, R. (1993) The Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 3rd edn, trans. Donald Cress, Indianapolis IN: Hackett. Fenves, P. (1987) ‘‘Nietzsche: Life as Literature’’ (review of Nehamas, 1985) Philosophy and Literature, 11.1: 163–70. Gay, P. (1988) Freud: A Life for Our Time, New York: W. W. Norton. Graybeal, J. (1998) ‘‘Nietzsche’s Riddle,’’ Philosophy Today, 32.3: 232–43. Gusdorf, G. (1980) ‘‘The Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,’’ trans. James Olney, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 28–48. Nietzsche, F. (1954) Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ——(1966) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books (cited in text as BGE). ——(1967) The Will to Power, trans. F. J. Hollingdale and Walter Kauffman, New York: Vintage Books (cited in text as WTP). ——(1969) The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage Books (cited in text as GM and EH respectively). ——(1974) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffman, New York: Vintage Books (cited in text as GS). ——(1985) Untimely Meditations, trans. F. J. Hollingdale, New York: Cambridge University Press (cited in text as UM). ——(1997) Daybreak, trans. F. J. Hollingdale, New York: Cambridge University Press. Plato (1984) The Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, New York: Mentor Books. Rousseau, J.-J. (1953) Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen, New York: Penguin. White, R. (1991) ‘‘Autobiography Against Itself,’’ Philosophy Today, 35.3: 291–303.
12 R. G. Collingwood Philosophy as autobiography Lionel Rubinoff
The radical conversion hypothesis controversy Collingwood’s Autobiography (1939) (A), described by George Santayana as ‘‘strangely conceited but instructive’’ (Boucher 1995: 6)1 has been the subject of considerable controversy: as much for its openly contemptuous attack on his philosophical opponents as for its role in providing a key to the interpretation of his thought. In From Realism to Rapprochement: The Autobiographical Interpretation of Collingwood’s Philosophy, Glen Shipley complains that virtually none of Collingwood’s commentators have considered the A as an interpretation valid for the whole of his philosophy2 – most still do not even today.3 According to Shipley, the question we should be asking about Collingwood’s philosophical development is not, what chronological series of publications occurred during his lifetime, but rather, what order or sequence of thoughts he intended his readers to follow if they are to understand his thinking. For this purpose, Shipley argues, one must turn to the A, for it is there that ‘‘Collingwood publicly specified for his philosophical heirs what sort of program he wished them to inherit, and in it he tried to make clear how they should proceed to lay claim to this inheritance’’ (Shipley 1984: vol. 1, 44). Those who question this approach doubt the reliability of the A as a livre de bonne foi. They propose that Collingwood’s thought underwent a conversion from idealism to relativism and skepticism (commonly referred to as radical historicism). In the spirit of Shipley’s approach, I will argue against this view – which I have elsewhere called the ‘‘radical conversion hypothesis’’4 – and in favor of an approach that views the A as a key to both the early and later thought. It is a bridge by means of which we can better appreciate the continuity of his thought as it progressed from his attack on realism, which began in earnest around 1911, to the ‘‘reform of metaphysics’’ in An Essay on Metaphysics (1939) (EM), and his attempt in The New Leviathan (1942) (NL) to bring Hobbes up to date in the light of advances made in the fields of history, psychology and anthropology. In chapter X of the A, Collingwood declares that his stated purpose in it is to offer advice on how to make sense of his life-long philosophical achieve-
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ments; and to record ‘‘some brief account of the work I have not yet been able to publish in case I am not able to publish it in full’’ (A: 118). This surely suggests that at the time of writing the A Collingwood did not expect his philosophy to undergo any radical changes. Elsewhere in this chapter he explains that ‘‘the ideas very briefly summarized in this chapter and the two preceding it were being worked out for nearly twenty years’’ (A: 116); a statement that implies a continuity rather than radical discontinuity between his early and later thought. The continuity thesis receives further support from the reference in this chapter to both An Essay on Philosophical Method (EPM) (1933) and The Principles of Art (PA) (1938) as part of a series that he began planning in 1932. As well, it should be noted that, at Collingwood’s own request, the EM was published as vol. II of a series with the title ‘‘Philosophical Essays;’’ the first volume of which was the EPM. A subsequent edition of the EM was published as vol. III, with Speculum Mentis (SM) as vol. I.5 At no time does he suggest, in either the A or the EM, that between 1932 and 1938 his thought underwent a radical conversion which led him to abandon the project that he claims to have begun during the First World War. There is a very significant difference between a philosophical system that develops and refines itself over time and one that undergoes radical changes in outlook. Finally, if we are to take the A seriously as a livre bonne foi, we must take Collingwood at his word when he emphasizes that in the final analysis his thought is to be viewed as a lifelong attempt to achieve a rapprochement between theory and practice; an achievement which depends upon having first achieved a rapprochement between philosophy and history. In pursuing this objective Collingwood understood himself to be following a tradition established by Socrates and continued into his time by the school of T. H. Green (A: 147, 16–17). Shipley suggests that we approach the A on the same terms that Collingwood recommends for approaching any philosophical text. The reader, writes Collingwood in the EPM, must approach the text as an expression of individual experiences which the writer has actually lived through, and which the reader must live through in his / her turn by entering into the author’s mind with his / her own. At the same time, the reader is not likely to benefit from the reading of a text unless, like the author, he / she is seriously engaged in a search for the truth, and is prepared to entertain and re-think the questions and problems confronted by the author. ‘‘What we can get by reading any book is conditioned by what we bring to it’’ (EPM: 216). Finally, Collingwood cautions, criticism of the author’s thought must be deferred until this first task has been successfully completed. ‘‘To this basic task of understanding his author the task of criticizing his doctrine or determining how far it is true and how far false, is altogether secondary’’ (EPM: 215). This does not mean that criticism is unimportant: ‘‘criticism is not forbidden, it is only postponed’’ (EPM: 218). So far as the author is concerned: ‘‘The business of thinking includes the discovery and correction of its own errors’’ (EM: 100). Because self-criticism is an essential element to
232 R. G. Collingwood: philosophy as autobiography the author’s own search for truth, criticism of the author is equally essential in the experience that we as readers are trying to share. Nevertheless, it is impossible to criticize without first comprehending; the question whether an author’s views are true or false does not arise until we have found out what they are (EPM: 217). Precisely the same advice is repeated in the A (27–8) where this approach to the interpretation of philosophy is presented as an application of the ‘‘logic of question and answer,’’ which Collingwood developed in opposition to the propositional logic of philosophical realism (A: chs III–V). The treatment of the ‘‘logic of question and answer’’ in the A extends the view expounded in the EPM while emphasizing and clarifying the importance of evaluating philosophical doctrines in the context of the specific (historically situated) questions for which they were intended as answers. The author’s thoughts must be understood as responses to questions that he has asked himself rather than responses to questions that form the context of the reader’s life-world. No one ‘‘who does not understand what the questions are can hope to understand the doctrines’’(A: 55), let alone presume to criticize them. History is thus methodologically and epistemologically prior to philosophy. Because they failed to understand this, the realists had no understanding of the history of philosophy. ‘‘They thought that Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the stoics, the Schoolmen, the Cartesians, &c., had all asked themselves the same questions, the same questions that were being asked by modern ethical theory, and had given different answers to them’’ (A: 59). For this reason their attempts at criticism were completely without merit. Given Collingwood’s emphasis on the historicity of philosophy, combined with his conception of historical understanding as re-thinking, the autobiographical approach to the interpretation of his thought is especially appropriate. It was also an appropriate way for Collingood to re-think the history of his own thought processes, in the course of which he was able to clarify for himself the precise nature of his mission as a philosopher. As a manifestation of Collingwood’s mind in narrative form the A is therefore not only an invitation to the reader to re-think the progress of Collingwood’s voyage of self-discovery, it is also a catalyst for the reader’s personal voyage of self-discovery. By presenting his thought in the form of an autobiography, as an exercise in historical re-thinking, Collingwood is, thus, not only establishing a historical identity for himself, he is providing an opportunity for the reader to gain a privileged access to the questioning process from which Collingwood’s thought developed. Needless to say, had Collingwood’s critics taken the autobiographical approach to the interpretation of his thought and employed the theory of philosophical method as expounded in the EPM and the A, they would have been less likely to misrepresent his later thought as a collapse into relativism and skepticism, as Collingwood’s literary editor, T. M. Knox, did in his widely debated preface to The Idea of History (1946) (IH). He quotes Collingwood as arguing that, since philosophical doctrines are
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always expounded from a particular, historically conditioned, point of view: ‘‘There is no point in asking which was the right point of view. Each was the only one possible for the man who adopted it.’’ Theories may differ ‘‘but none of them is therefore erroneous, because any theory is simply an expression of a particular point of view’’ (IH: xii–xiii). Knox argues that these ‘‘sceptical claims’’ follow from the infamous declaration that since ‘‘philosophy as a separate discipline is liquidated by being converted into history,’’ ‘‘history is [thus] the only kind of knowledge’’ (IH: x, xii). Knox regards such statements as evidence of Collingwood’s conversion to radical historicism.6 This, Knox complains, is where Collingwood was led by his ill fated attempt to achieve the so-called rapprochement between philosophy and history so proudly proclaimed in the A. This enthusiasm for history forced him into the very skepticisms whose falsity he had discerned and overcome in the EPM, considered by Knox to be Collingwood’s finest work. Moreover, it made him turn ‘‘traitor’’ to his philosophical vocation – defined by a study of ‘‘The One, The True and The Good’’ (IH: x–xi).7
The quest for a rapprochement between philosophy and history The above citations, in support of the radical conversion hypothesis, are taken from notes composed in 1939 while Collingwood was preparing the manuscript for the unfinished The Principles of History (PH), only recently discovered and published in a volume edited by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen (Collingwood 1999). In his Preface to the IH, Knox speculates that Collingwood abandoned the PH mainly because, given the absorption of philosophy into history, a philosophical treatise on the principles of history had become either impossible or unnecessary. By this time, Knox suggests, ‘‘it was not even open to him to distinguish his practice as an historian from his philosophical theory about his practice’’ (IH: xvii). Since the A explicitly endorses the view that philosophy (as theory) and history (as practice) are identical, Knox surmises that Collingwood would have reached the conclusion that an autobiographical / historical account of one’s current point of view is all that can be expected of an author professing to have a theory about how he practices his craft. Knox thus concludes that the A both serves as a substitute for the PH and becomes Collingwood’s apologia for his conversion to radical historicism and abandonment of his belief in the autonomy of philosophy as a separate discipline; a view, Knox reminds us, that permeates the doctrines of the EM, to which Collingwood turned after giving up on the PH, and in which he expounds his widely debated ‘‘reform of metaphysics.’’ When properly understood, however, neither the doctrines that comprise the unfinished PH nor the doctrines put forth in the A and the EM lend support to Knox’s radical conversion hypothesis. Collingwood’s account of the logic of question and answer in the A indicates that his perspective on
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the relationship between philosophy and history has not changed substantially since the publication of EPM. The A does not suggest that because the history of thought is a history of historically situated ‘‘points of view’’ it is beyond criticism. Instead, it stresses the previously noted position that a correct understanding of the questions for which the author’s doctrine is a response is a pre-condition for criticizing it. This process is itself historical and must, therefore, necessarily acknowledge the historicity of the entire question and answer complex.8 Although he held that all thought is historically conditioned, Collingwood was never in doubt about the historian’s obligation to pass judgment on the past. As historians, writes Collingwood, in an address to the Stubbs Historical Society in 1936, We must not shrink from this responsibility. Let us realize that, as historians, we have taken upon ourselves the serious task, not only of discovering what actually happened, but of judging it in the light of our own moral ideals. We are the present of man, passing judgment on his corporate past (PH: 218) and, ‘‘Without judgment of values, there is no history’’ (PH: 216). Indeed, Collingwood maintains in the IH: Nothing could be a completer error concerning the history of thought than to suppose that the historian as such merely ascertains ‘‘what soand-so thought’’, leaving it to someone else to decide ‘‘whether it was true’’. All thinking is critical thinking; the thought which re-enacts past thoughts therefore criticizes them in re-enacting them. (IH: 215–16) Elsewhere in the IH, Collingwood describes as ‘‘self-contradictory’’ the ‘‘task of discovering [for example] ‘what Plato thought’ without inquiring ‘whether it was true’ ‘‘ (IH: 300). The consistency of such statements with the doctrines of the EPM raises serious questions about the validity of the socalled radical conversion hypothesis. Moreover, we should keep in mind that when he composed his preliminary notes for the PH he would likely have taken it for granted that, when worked into a final version of the PH, they would be interpreted by the reader in the context of the logic of question and answer already explained and illustrated in the A, which he regarded as one of his most important philosophical achievements. In addition, the A was written during the very period when Collingwood was preparing the manuscript for the PH. The fragmentary notes as cited by Knox, therefore, can hardly be regarded as definitive expressions of his doctrine of historicity.9 Finally, Dray and van der Dussen have an adequate explanation for Collingwood’s failure to complete the PH: with the outbreak of war in September 1939 finishing the NL
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became a more urgent matter, since it contained ideas which Collingwood regarded as a public service to state: ‘‘a perceived duty to act immediately, and not at some future and more convenient time, on a matter which he considered of great public importance’’ (PH: lx).
The logic of question and answer Collingwood claims to have first developed his logic of question and answer in 1916, while meditating on the purpose of the Albert Memorial (A: ch. V). He also traces the emphasis that he places on the questioning aspect of knowledge to his experiences with archaeology: what we learn about reality – any reality – is a function of the questioning activity. Moreover, it is not simply a matter of interpreting the thought and actions of agents as answers to specific questions. Nothing can be considered as evidence by a historian (or archaeologist) until it is seen as answering a question that the historian wants to ask (PH: xxix). The object of knowledge is not something ‘‘intuited,’’ as the realists claim, nor a mere imaginative construction imposed on the past, but a product of questioning; something discovered rather than invented, but discovered only because we have managed to ask the right questions. Much like the detective who successfully solves a crime: as illustrated by Collingwood’s fictional detective story, ‘‘Who killed John Doe?’’ which forms a part of the IH (266ff.). In the A Collingwood illustrates the process both by his meditation upon the Albert Memorial and by the examples drawn from his historical research on the history of Roman Britain: his explanations for the Celtic revival in Britain after the departure of the Romans, and the wall between Solway and Tyne (otherwise known as Hadrian’s wall) which had previously remained mysteries (A: ch. XI). These inquiries are guided by the presupposition that every artifact, action, or thought, represents the fulfillment of a purpose, and may thus be considered a response to a specific problem or question. This, in the language of the EM, is an absolute presupposition of the method of historical analysis. Collingwood summarizes the resulting theory of knowledge as follows. A body of knowledge consists not of ‘‘propositions’’, ‘‘statements’’, ‘‘judgments’’, or whatever name logicians use to designate assertive acts of thought (or what in those acts are asserted; for ‘‘knowledge’’ means both the activity of knowing and what is known), but of these together with the questions they are meant to answer; and a logic in which the answers are attended to and the questions neglected is a false logic. (A: 30) In the A account of this doctrine, which exemplifies what in the EM he refers to as his ‘‘reform of metaphysics,’’ Collingwood points out that questions like ‘‘What purpose did ‘X’ serve?’’ or ‘‘What was ‘X’ thinking at the time he wrote ‘Y’?’’ are really only a kind of summary of more specific questions:
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‘‘Was ‘X’ intended to serve this or that purpose?’’ or, ‘‘Was ‘X’ thinking a, b, or c?’’ Thus, for example, the problem confronting the ‘‘savage’’ was not simply that of obtaining food, but of spearing this or that fish, digging up this or that root, or finding blackberries in this wood. Applied to the principle of contradiction, which forms the basis of the realists’ propositional logic, the logic of question and answer implies that no two propositions can contradict each other unless they are answers to the same specific question. The same applies to the perennial search for truth (A: 29–33). There may well be such a thing as a philosophia quaedam perennis, but this ‘‘melody,’’ as Collingwood describes it in SM, is not ‘‘a body of truth revealed once for all, but a living thought whose content never discovered for the first time, is progressively determined and clarified by every genuine thinker’’ (SM: 13). The same point is made in the IH. Here Collingwood argues that it would be a mistake to consider the history of philosophical systems as successive accounts of one unchanging subject matter, the mind of man as it always has been and always will be; the history of different and competing answers to the same set of questions. They are rather only inventories of the wealth achieved by the human mind at various stages in its history. For example, ‘‘whether he realized it or not, J. S. Mill’s ethical theory describes, whether well or ill, a particular phase in the history of human morality’’ (IH: 195). The same applies to the history of thought from Plato to Kant, each of whose attempts to construct a science of the human mind is historically conditioned, representing the position reached by the human mind in its historical development to that time (IH: 229). In a discussion of the history of political thought (A: 61ff.), Collingwood explains that what makes these systems different, yet the same, is the fact that while, on the one hand, they are answers to different questions, ones that make sense and arise only because of the historical conditions of the times in which they arise, on the other hand, they represent answers to questions which give rise to each other. This conception of the historicity of thought clearly rules out any attempt to judge it as if it consisted of competing answers and solutions to an unchanging set of eternal questions and problems. The difference between one system and another is thus a difference between distinct attempts to answer different questions. Once we realize that the sameness is not the sameness of a universal but the sameness of a historical process, the difference can be understood as the difference between one thing, which in the course of that process turned into something else, and the something into which it has turned; ‘‘the history of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose solution was changing with it’’ (A: 62). In the language of the EPM, the history of philosophical systems displays an overlapping ‘‘scale of forms;’’ a conception that, for Collingwood, serves as an alternative description for what in the SM is referred to a ‘‘concrete’’ as distinct from an ‘‘abstract’’ universal and is intended to overcome rather than embrace radical historicism and skepticism.10 Indeed, Collingwood emphasizes, these systems remain valuable to posterity, not in spite of their strictly
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historical character, but because of it. To us, the ideas expressed in them are ideas belonging to the past; but it is not a dead past; by understanding it historically we incorporate it into our present thought, and enable ourselves by developing and criticizing it to use that heritage for our own advancement. (IH: 230) If Collingwood’s ‘‘reform of metaphysics’’ was intended to portray metaphysics as nothing more than the story of historically relative points of view, then whether it is done well or badly can hardly be of much importance to the welfare of civilization. It was Collingwood’s conviction, however, as stated in the EM (46–7), that the practice of metaphysics is in essence therapeutic: a conditio sine qua non of civilization and the very life of reason itself, as is the practice of history in all of its other forms (IH: 227–8). Collingwood illustrates this with the Patristic critique of Aristotle which regarded Aristotle’s metaphysical belief that the existence of nature and its properties was not a presupposition of natural science but facts observed by the senses as a fundamental error. In so doing Collingwood claims the Patristic philosophers rescued Christianity and the civilization upon which it was based from the disease that killed pagan civilization (EM: 215–27).11 As they corrected the errors of the past so every subsequent generation of philosophers is obliged to follow suit. Collingwood appears to have devoted himself to these considerations in his post-1936 writings. Doing so is far from endorsing the philosophical skepticism that is alleged to follow from his supposed compression of philosophy into history.
Philosophy and history as a school of moral and political wisdom: the rapprochement between theory and practice Besides worrying that in the post-1936 writings Collingwood had forsaken his earlier commitment to the search for a philosophia quaedam perennis, or investigation of ‘‘The One,’’ ‘‘The True,’’ and ‘‘The Good,’’ Knox was clearly uncomfortable with Collingwood’s emphasis on the distinctly un-Hegelian principle that ‘‘all thought is for the sake of action.’’ While Collingwood used this as the basis of a rapprochement between thought and action, Knox (and Collingwood’s younger contemporary, Michael Oakeshott) tended to agree with Hegel that philosophers must beware the temptation to be edifying.12 The emphasis on a rapprochement between thought and action in the A inevitably drew criticism from philosophers like Knox and Oakeshott,13 who were particularly concerned that Collingwood might recommend acting on the basis of opinions that would be inherently corrupt and unreliable, because of their historical relativity. Collingwood’s pursuit of the rapprochement between thought and action
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was inspired by what he considered a call to resist the moral corruption propagated by the ‘‘realist’’ dogma that knowledge makes no difference to what is known. Applied to ethics, this dogma asserts that moral philosophy is only the theory of moral action: it cannot therefore make any difference to the practice of morality (A: 48–50, 147). In political theory, the realists denied a distinct ‘‘common good,’’ as a basis for all social life, ‘‘by insisting that all goods were private’’ (A: 49). Collingwood’s A guides us to understand his theory of rapprochement. It also connects his early, middle, and later works as stages on the way to accomplishing this rapprochement. Explained as well, is how Collingwood came to view the publication of the EM and NL as a moral imperative, given his perception of the crisis facing civilization at that time. Though Knox regards the A’s obsession with a rapprochement between theory and practice as a departure from Collingwood’s earlier commitments, in fact this aim was present from the very outset of his career. In Religion and Philosophy (RP) (1916a), for example, he maintains that the dualism between thought and action is false: ‘‘the mind is what it does’’ (RP: 34). The prologue to SM begins with the words, ‘‘All thought is for the sake of action’’ (9), while the theory of ‘mind as pure act’ is vigorously pursued in the NL (61ff.). Although Collingwood’s critics often dismissed SM as ‘‘juvenilia,’’ he himself thought that, while much of it needed to be supplemented and qualified, it nevertheless represented ‘‘a good deal of genuine thinking,’’ and ‘‘there is not a great deal that needs to be retracted’’ (A: 56). There is no indication, in the A, that Collingwood regarded his later thought as a radical departure from his early works. If anything, the suggestion is that the doctrines of SM might actually help to clarify what he was attempting to express in later works. Collingwood describes the rapprochement between thought and action (or theory and practice) as one in which both philosophy and history comprise a school of moral and political wisdom (A: 99, 100, 114). Precisely the same doctrine is already present in SM, when he writes: We try to understand ourselves and our world only in order that we may learn how to live. The end of our self-knowledge is not the contemplation by enlightened intellects of their own mysterious nature, but the freer and more effectual self-revelation of that nature in a vigorous practical life. (SM: 15) Indeed, Collingwood declares in the A, if our theories are erroneous then they act upon the mind itself and affect our actions. The mind that harbors false notions attempts to live up to them (A: ch. XII). Collingwood’s perception of the need for a rapprochement between thought and action in 1938, when he wrote the A, is virtually unchanged from the position he took in 1924, when he published SM. In the A he places the blame for the ineptitude of political leadership and our failure to bring the
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world of human affairs under the control of reason on the teachings of philosophical realism with its denial that knowing makes any difference to the object known (A: chs VI, XII). In the NL he refers to the despair of discovering that the institutions and machineries of government offered to us as defenses against the oppression, exploitation, persecutions and wars which have plagued humanity in the past have not only failed us in this regard but have themselves become agents of oppression (NL: 89). It is against such a background of despair that we turn to the philosopher with virtually the same question that Collingwood posed in SM (35): ‘‘What shall we do to be saved from our present distresses?’’ His response in 1942, when he wrote the NL, was to argue that today the philosopher’s mission is to carry on the work, sadly neglected since Hobbes and a handful of successors began it, of constructing a science of politics appropriate for the modern world (NL: 89). This task is at once both historical and philosophical, and may be regarded as representing the fulfillment of Collingwood’s promise in the A, to devote himself exclusively to establishing the conditions under which history and philosophy can attain to a school of moral and political wisdom. As we have noted, Collingwood presented himself in the A as one of the last members of a philosophical tradition stretching from Socrates to T. H. Green: a tradition committed to the belief that knowing makes a difference to both the object and the knowing subject or self. According to Collingwood, Green saw philosophical education as not primarily a training of professional scholars and philosophers, but as a training for public life. In the spirit of this mission, he sent out into public life a stream of ex-pupils who carried with them the conviction that philosophy, and in particular the philosophy they learned at Oxford [namely, the curriculum of the ‘‘Greats’’ program], was an important thing and that their vocation was to put in into practice. (A: 16–17)14 In the First Mate’s Log (FML) (1940), Collingwood’s autobiographical account of his reflections during a voyage on the Fleur de Lys through the Greek islands in 1939, there is a passage of singular importance concerning his sense of vocation in life and mission as a philosopher. The passage, written while visiting Delphi, describes Collingwood’s reflections on its significance to philosophers. It was the place where Socrates ‘‘had that riddling command which his followers are still trying to obey’’ (FML: 62). Collingwood felt a strong affinity with Socrates’ answer to the ‘‘call from Delphi.’’ He felt that as a philosopher he too had become, at Apollo’s bidding, the organ by which the corporate consciousness of his generation examined and criticized itself; an activity that demanded individual self-criticism and self-understanding. As the organ of his own society’s self-criticism the philosopher finds himself called to:
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R. G. Collingwood: philosophy as autobiography Follow Socrates in the calling that led Socrates to condemnation and death. That call came from Delphi; and the philosopher who makes his pilgrimage to Delphi sees there, not merely the place where long ago an event happened which was important in its time and may still interest the historian, but the place whence issued the call he still hears: a call which, to one who can hear it, is still being uttered among the fallen stones of the temple and is still echoing from the ‘‘pathless peaks of the daughters of Parnassus’’. (FML: 63)
At the very outset of the A, Collingwood refers to a childhood experience of ‘‘being burdened by a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, ‘I must think’ ” (A: 4). This experience may be compared with the ‘‘call from Delphi’’ described in the FML: the experience from which Socrates drew his inspiration and which thereafter has defined the calling and burden of subsequent generations of philosophers. As a child Collingwood was uncertain as to what precisely he was to think about. By the time he wrote SM he was no longer in doubt. Indeed, he already had a sense of his mission as a philosopher as early as 1916 when, in an essay entitled ‘‘The Devil,’’ he expresses the conviction that truth alone can unmask the evil forces in the world and it is the philosopher’s task to bring such truth to bear in people’s lives.15 Collingwood committed himself to this task both before and following the publication of his A. Notwithstanding the mission of the philosopher / historian, Collingwood insisted that regarding philosophy and history as a source of effective action in the world does not imply that because of their superior expertise only philosopher / historians should be trusted with the affairs of state. Rather, the insights gained through these disciplines, which ought to form the core of the modern educational curriculum, can enrich and illuminate the accumulated experiences of life and the practice of one’s profession, whatever it might be. Thus, Collingwood declares, in ‘‘The Present Need of a Philosophy’’ (1934) (PNP) that philosophy Cannot descend like a deus ex machina upon the stage of practical life, and, out of its superior insight into the nature of things, dictate the correct solution for this or that problem in morals, economic organization, or international politics. There is nothing in a philosopher’s special work qualifying him to pilot a perplexed generation through those rocks and shoals. . . . Even Plato did not think otherwise. He never proposed that professional philosophers should be dragged, blinking, from their studies and forcibly seated on thrones; only that expert knowledge of political life and its practical difficulties should be illuminated by philosophical reflection on its ultimate end. (PNP: 166) When, in his unpublished manuscript on Folklore and Folktales (1936 / 7) (F),16 he writes that ‘‘all history is studied . . . to make possible a rational life
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in the present day’’ (F: 186), he does not mean that history is a science like physics, by means of which it is possible to discover laws of human nature to be imposed upon the present and the future for the purpose of bringing them under control. He means rather that through the study of history, human reason becomes better able to diagnose situations in which it finds itself and better able to design appropriate solutions for problems which, although they resemble problems faced in the past, are unique to the situations at hand.17 ‘‘What history can bring to moral and political life is a trained eye for the situation in which one has to act’’ (A: 100).18 Elsewhere, Collingwood describes the philosophical study of moral conduct, ethics, as having the similar purpose of helping to decide how to live. ‘‘Philosophy ought in some way to help our generation in its moral, social and political troubles’’ (PNP: 166).19 Ethics is accorded this utility because it includes reflections on the ends of life for the purpose of deciding which of one’s goals have moral or intrinsic worth (FML: 148), and may thus be regarded as the highest form of self-realization.
The tragedy of technical knowledge and the crisis of modernity When Collingwood wrote the A, he believed that the First World War, while an unprecedented triumph for natural science and technology, was an unprecedented disgrace to the human intellect. It was clear to Collingwood that the gigantic increase of humanity’s power to control nature had not been accompanied by corresponding developments in wisdom and the power to control human situations (A: 91). He believed that the most serious threat facing mankind today lay in the destructive potential of science and technology, whose vast powers not only exceed our ability to control their applications but may just as readily serve the interests of evil as of good (A: 91). The tragedy of technical knowledge lies in the fact that neither its acquisition nor application requires ‘‘wisdom’’ or ‘‘virtue.’’ Nevertheless, its very possession brings a Faustian temptation to apply it; using the power made possible by knowledge depends on nothing more than mastering the appropriate skills or techniques. For Collingwood, however, the wise and judicious use of knowledge depends not on technique alone, but on the depth of selfunderstanding that only philosophy and history can provide. The pursuit and application of knowledge without wisdom is hubris, and, as Collingwood laments in F as ‘‘we come more and more to rely on our machines [through whose employment we have redirected our emotions] the glory of using them becomes a drug’’ (F: 189). We must not forget, laments Collingwood, that: Behind all his array of scientific tools, man is still the same naked animal. If he needed valor and wisdom to face nature unarmed, he needs them all the more if he is to use the tools without destroying himself. Civilized man . . . mistakes the superiority of his tools for the superiority in himself. He forgets that unless . . . his power to make tools do
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R. G. Collingwood: philosophy as autobiography what he wants has advanced in proportion to the advance in the tools themselves, he is sacrificing all the ends of life in his elaboration of means to procure them. Even now, he seems helplessly looking on while it works for itself, like the sorcerer’s apprentice who raised the devil. (F: 191)
Thus do we reach the sad state of affairs described in the A and NL, in which we discover that the ‘‘new leviathans’’ of our own making, by means of which we had hoped to defend ourselves against barbarism, turn out themselves to be ‘‘the chief authors of the evils for whose ending we have made them’’ (NL: 89). Coupled with the realization that the new powers of natural science and technology have fallen indifferently into the hands of the evil and foolish as well as the good and the wise, this produces a recognition that the effects of any failure to control a human situation are more serious now than they had ever been before. Unless, warns Collingwood, we can bring instrumental reason (techne) under the control of wisdom, the reign of natural science and technology will ‘‘within no very long time, convert Europe into a wilderness of Yahoos’’ (A: 91). What is worse, as Collingwood points out in the EM discussion of ‘‘The Propaganda of Irrationalism,’’ the assault on reason and civilization initiated by the new barbarism will itself be conducted in the name of reason and under the guise of progress (EM: ch. xiii, 133ff.); as evidenced by the rise of fascism and Nazism (A: 89ff.).20 Collingwood argues in virtually all of his publications that the only way calamity can be avoided is by developing a better science of human nature which is both theoretical and practical. That science is not psychology but history and its dialectical partner, philosophy, conceived as a school of moral and political wisdom (A: 99). Without this wisdom we are inclined to the thoughtless misuse of technology and the power that it makes possible. The danger facing humanity, at any time in its history, is proportionate to the failure of its educational institutions to train students in the practice of history and philosophy as a school of moral and political wisdom – which, for Collingwood, is the condition of the possibility of achieving genuine selfknowledge. We need to comprehend the extent to which we are held captive by the appetite for domination often disguised behind a façade of Promethean inventiveness and rationality. Collingwood saw that there is no better way of gaining access to the demonic dimensions of human nature and the human condition than through the study of history. To immunize ourselves against the Faustian imperative and the propaganda of irrationalism we should relive the demonic episodes of the past, experiencing them as components of our own psychic make-up (see F: 186). Practical wisdom and sound judgment requires similar schooling. One way to educate the imagination and intellect of both historians and the citizens for whom they write is through historical re-thinking or re-enactment of the thought and actions of those historical agents whose conduct is
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deemed exemplary. The precise role of this schooling comes into sharper focus when considered alongside Collingwood’s discussion, in the A, of the importance of learning how to improvise rather than being guided by readymade rules. When we are faced with situations for which ready-made rules are available the appropriate methods are those of natural science. In life, however, we are often faced with situations for which there are no exact precedents. To treat such situations as if they could be subject to rules is to distort them and thus allow them to get out of control. Indeed, Collingwood argues, in a passage that reveals the extent to which, as a historian, he is prepared to pass judgment on the past: The reason why the civilization of 1600–1900, based on natural science, found bankruptcy staring it in the face was because, in its passion for ready-made rules, it had neglected to develop the kind of insight which alone could tell it what rules to apply, not in a situation of a specific type, but in a situation in which it actually found itself. It was precisely because history offered us something altogether different from rules, namely insight, that it could afford us the help we needed in diagnosing our moral and political problems. (A: 101) We need to see clearly what the situation we are actually in is in its specificity or uniqueness and then extemporize a suitable way of dealing with it. Often we decide we must act without rules when we could refer the situation to a known type but are not content to do so. We have a rule for dealing with situations of this kind but do not want to apply it because we know that such going-by-the-book always involves a certain misfit between ourselves and our situations. In acting according to rules, we are not dealing with situations in which we actually stand, but with situations which, for the sake of convenience, we impose upon the situations in which we actually stand, thereby neglecting their distinctiveness. Although the type or general class is a useful handle for grasping situations, it often comes between us and the situations thus understood. This can lead to the failure to act well. For example, the framers of the Versailles treaty not only lacked any understanding of why the war had occurred in the first place, but made the mistake of regarding the treaty simply as one between the victor and vanquished foes who deserved to be punished. As Collingwood complains: ‘‘For sheer ineptitude the Versailles Treaty surpassed previous treaties as much as for sheer technical excellence the equipment of twentieth-century armies surpassed those of previous armies’’ (A: 91). Collingwood illustrates extemporization thus: [E]verybody has certain rules according to which he acts in dealing with his tailor. These rules are, we will grant, soundly based on genuine experience; and by acting on them a man will deal fairly with his tailor and
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R. G. Collingwood: philosophy as autobiography helps his tailor to deal fairly by him. But so far as he acts according to these rules, he is dealing with his tailor only in his capacity as a tailor, not as John Robinson, aged sixty, with a weak heart and a consumptive daughter, a passion for gardening and an overdraft at the bank. The rules for dealing with tailors no doubt enable you to cope with the tailor in John Robinson, but they prevent you from getting to grips with whatever else there may be in him. Of course, if you know that he has a weak heart, you will modify the rules for tailor situations in the light of the rules for situations involving people with weak hearts. But at this rate the modifications become so complicated that the rules are no longer of any practical use to you. You have got beyond the stage at which rules can guide action, and you go back to improvising, as best you can, a method of handling the situation in which you find yourself. (A: 104–5)
This example resembles those offered by Jean-Paul Sartre to illustrate the implications of the fact that in the moral universe ‘‘existence precedes essence.’’ In such a condition, Sartre argues, we are left without excuse or appeal to a priori principles: ‘‘nothing remains but to trust to our instincts’’ (Sartre 1948). For Collingwood, as for Sartre, such instincts are neither blind nor gratuitous. Rather, they are shaped by our experiences; that is to say, they are formed by the deeds one does, whether in the form of making moral decisions or re-enacting the past. The ability to improvise requires an a priori imagination, whose development is nurtured through the questioning activity that comprises the method of history (IH: 240ff.).
Metaphysics, historicity, and human self-making Collingwood holds that the rapprochement between philosophy and history is a self-making process as well as a science of human nature and a school of moral and political wisdom that enables a rapprochement between theory and practice. As he declares, in the IH: If the human mind comes to understand itself better, it comes to operate in new and different ways. . . . The historical process is a process in which man creates for himself this or that kind of human nature by recreating in his own thought the past to which he is heir. (IH: 85, 226) The doctrine of human self-making through historical knowledge is further explained in the A, in a passage that ties together the core doctrines of the IH. If what the historian knows is past thoughts, and if he knows them by re-thinking them himself, it follows that the knowledge he achieves by historical inquiry is not knowledge of his situation as opposed to knowl-
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edge of himself, it is knowledge of his situation which is at the same time knowledge of himself. In re-thinking what somebody else thought, he thinks it himself. In knowing that somebody else thought it, he knows that he himself is able to think it. And finding out what he is able to do is finding out what kind of a man he is. If he is able to understand, by re-thinking them, the thoughts of a great many different kinds of people, it follows that he must be a great many kinds of man. He must be, in fact, a microcosm of all the history he can know. Thus his own self-knowledge is at the same time his knowledge of the world of human affairs. (A: 114) Given the autobiographical account of his career as a philosopher, Collingwood’s view of history as a school of moral and political wisdom bears little resemblance to the late conversion to relativism and skepticism suggested by Knox in his preface to the IH. Collingwood himself acknowledged relativistic implications of his thought but disclaimed patience for skepticism. He admits that historical thought ‘‘is a river into which none can step twice,’’ so that, ‘‘even a single historian, working at a single subject for a certain length of time, finds that when he tries to reopen an old question that the question has changed.’’ Nevertheless, he insists: This is not an argument for historical scepticism. It is only the discovery of a second dimension of historical thought, the history of history: the discovery that the historian together with the here-and-now which forms the total body of evidence available to him, is part of the process he is studying, has its own place in that process, and can see it only from the point of view which at the present moment he occupies within it. (IH: 248, 229–30) Against those who think that because even the history of thought is written from a point of view, it is devoid of objectivity and therefore lacks the status of a genuine science, Collingwood points out that historical knowledge is achieved not in spite of but because the historian has a point of view; for ‘‘unless he has a point of view he can see nothing at all’’ (IH: 108).21 The A’s depiction of history as a school of moral and political wisdom provides an interpretative context for Collingwood’s exhortation in the IH, and repeated in the EM, that historical knowledge ‘‘is no luxury or mere amusement, of a mind at leisure from more pressing occupations, but a prime duty, whose discharge is essential to the maintenance not only of any particular type of reason, but of reason itself’’ (IH: 228; EM: 224). This statement is hardly what one might expect of someone who had fallen into philosophical skepticism, with its denial that there is any such thing as reliable, verifiable, knowledge, who could hold that since all thought is historically conditioned, questions of truth and falsity cannot arise (IH: xvii). Such a skeptic is unlikely
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to have written an autobiography expressly to defend a rejection of the doctrines of realism because they deny the possibility of a rapprochement between theory and practice and thus condemn the world to the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism (A: 147). The means to avoid such a tragedy must, pleads Collingwood, arise from a philosophy that, rather than professing skepticism, promises a ‘‘reasoned commitment’’ that will restore our faith in the possibility of human progress, and in the possibility ‘‘that the problems of moral and political thought are in principle soluble . . . that there are no evils in any human institution which human will cannot cure’’ (PNP: 169). Collingwood maintains that the historical expression of the human will is a consciously creative vera causa; that social and political institutions are creations of it and are essentially responsive to it; and that, therefore, whatever evils they contain are in principle remediable. History is not some cosmic force which either advances or derails human progress, but the work of human beings, the product of res gestae directed by, and under the control of, the human will. This is the gospel of philosophical liberalism; the foundation upon which democracy rests. At the conclusion of the A, Collingwood places the blame for the rise of fascism and the triumph of irrationalism on the influence – unintended but nevertheless decisive – of the ‘‘minute philosophers’’ of his youth, by which, of course, he meant the realists (A: 167). Elsewhere in the A, he writes: If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential dupes of every adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or religion, who should appeal to their emotions and promise them private gains which he neither could procure them or even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could be discovered. (A: 48–9) The rationale for such seemingly inflammatory remarks is embedded in the critique of realism to which much of the A is devoted. It was in the course of developing this critique, as part of his attempt to construct a speculum mentis appropriate for modern times, that Collingwood was led to the realization that his rejection of the realism of his youth and the anti-metaphysical doctrines of positivism that succeeded it, was not merely an academic exercise. It was a matter of political and moral importance that all his life he had ‘‘been engaged unawares in a political struggle against these things in the dark.’’ ‘‘Henceforth,’’ he vows, ‘‘I shall fight in the daylight’’ (A: 167). The fate of European science and European civilization is at stake. The gravity of the peril lies especially in the fact that so few recognize any peril to exist. When Rome was in danger, it was the cackling of the sacred geese that saved the Capitol. I am only a professorial goose, consecrated with a cap and a gown and fed at the college table; but cackle is my job, and cackle I will. (EM: 343)
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Notes 1
Boucher points out that in spite of Collingwood’s contemptuous attitude toward his philosophical colleagues at Oxford, the A passed through the appraisal process relatively unscathed. While there was some disquiet among the Delegates about the possibility of feelings being hurt, it was the tone of the last chapter on contemporary politics that worried them most, only to agree that it was not the business of the Delegates [among them representatives of the realist school under attack] to censor the political views of the author. (1995: 7)
2 Shipley writes: Collingwood gives no indication in the Autobiography of any radical change of mind either before or after he had begun his ‘‘series.’’ He therefore clearly intends his readers to approach the body of his later writings (i.e. after 1932) as the fulfillment of a single-minded project, and the earlier writings as a development leading up to it. An interpretation of Collingwood’s philosophy would be consistent with the plan of the Autobiography only if it follows this pattern. (1984: 64) 3 4
5 6
7
Notable among recent publications whose authors accept the reliability of the Autobiography are Guiseppina D’Oro 2002 and Rik Peters 1999. Stephen Toulmin 1978 has also accepted the A as a livre de bonne foi. Lionel Rubinoff 1966; 1968; 1970. Support for the Knox interpretation can be found in Nathan Rotenstreich 1957 as well as in Alan Donagan 1962. Even sympathetic admirer’s of Collingwood like John Passmore subscribe to this view and regard the Autobiography as the place where Collingwood ‘‘made public his conversion to Historicism’’ (1957: 306). For more details concerning this point, see David Boucher 1995: 11–12. Collingwood’s position on the convertibility of history and philosophy has an interesting history. In RP 1916a: 51 he declares that they are the same; in SM 1924: 246, they are argued to be different, while in EM 1940: 55 they are once again identified. For this reason, the EM is regarded by some Collingwood scholars as a retraction of the position of SM. An alternative interpretation would regard these statements as attempts to express the same idea, whose meaning has undergone development since first proposed in RP – in accordance with the theory of historical development and the doctrine of identity in difference as expounded in the A. It is instructive to note that in the First Mate’s Log: 145–53, which was composed in 1939 and published in 1940 during the period when, according to Knox, Collingwood had abandoned his commitment to ‘‘The One,’’ ‘‘The True,’’ and ‘‘The Good,’’ he engages in a spirited critique of utilitarianism which is inspired by the judgment that there must ultimately be something that is good in itself as a condition of giving meaning to the idea that something is good because it is useful (Collingwood 1989: 145–9). In ‘‘The Devil’’ Collingwood argues that: ‘‘In order to attain to any existence worth having, we must bear in
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mind that truth, reality, God, are real things existing quite independently of our individual life and private opinions’’ (1916b: 474; 1968: 232). There is no evidence that Collingwood ever changed his mind about this. 8 William Johnston points out that Collingwood’s method of question and answer was very likely influenced by the emphasis in the Oxford ‘‘Greats’’ curriculum on learning to give the right answers to the right questions which, together with the emphasis on the importance of studying philosophy and history together, shaped the context within which Collingwood pursued his own undergraduate studies. Johnson cites the following comment by Vivian Hunter Galbraith, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Galbraith says: ‘‘Long before Collingwood made a philosophy of it – history consisted of giving the right answers to the right questions’’ (Johnston 1967: 35). 9 For a more detailed discussion of these texts, see editors’ introduction to PH 1999: lxxviii, ff. 10 Collingwood’s doctrine of the concrete universal or scale of forms provides the metaphysical foundation for a conception of pluralism that respects differences without risking anarchy. It is a unity of differences, unfolding over time, whose variable essence, because identical with its generic essence, is unpredictable, and hence conducive of genuine novelty. Since in history the appearance of each new species or variable element is an occasion on which the generic essence itself is redefined, there are no abstract rules by means of which the future history of the genus can be deduced. Thus, for example, the genus ‘‘art’’ consists of a variety of overlapping forms – painting, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, and so on – each having its own distinctive and novel characteristics, and yet collectively sharing the ‘‘family resemblances’’ that comprise the distinctly recognizable world of ‘‘art,’’ which is recognizably different from the ‘‘crafts’’ and mere ‘‘amusements’’ that sometimes masquerade as art. The same process repeats itself within the history of each of the distinct arts in which, as one style (say, the ‘‘romantic’’) succeeds another (say, the ‘‘classical’’), novel and unpredictable elements are introduced which alter and redefine the very essence of the art form per se. Precisely the same considerations apply to the history of political theory conceived as a history of successive, overlapping, answers to different questions, comprising the history of a problem more or less constantly changing, whose solution was changing with it (A: 62). In short, with every new increment in the unfolding history of any art form or form of thought, whether specific or generic, there is a corresponding change in the very essence of the species or genus. This explains why ‘‘history is a river into which none can step twice’’ (IH: 248), and why, with respect to any act of historical re-enactment, no achievement is ever final, and every generation must revisit and rewrite history in its own way. This is not radical, subjective, relativism, but merely the application of the logic of the concrete universal (or question and answer) to the analysis of historicity. Much has been made of the fact that after the publication of SM Collingwood made no further reference to the doctrine of the concrete universal – from which it is inferred that he underwent a profound, radical shift from idealism to historicism. A more likely explanation, however, is that, following a review of SM by someone who referred to it as ‘‘the usual idealist nonsense’’ (A: 56–7), Collingwood made a conscious effort to rid his language of any terminology that might suggest an affiliation with idealism (or at least to the kind of idealism from which he had already distanced himself, even when referring to the
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concrete universal). I would thus agree with Guiseppina D’Oro that there are ‘‘no philosophical reasons for Collingwood’s change in philosophical vocabulary, but primarily only sociological ones’’ (D’Oro 2002: 2). For a more detailed discussion of the concrete universal as a model for Collingwood’s doctrine of the scale of forms, see Rubinoff 1970: 154ff. 11 The Patristic fathers consist of a group of philosophers and theologians whose critiques of Greek philosophy and dedicated efforts to construct an alternative metaphysical account of the existence and nature of God and of God’s relationship to the world, comprise the foundations of the Christian faith. They include such individuals as Philo, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, who lived in the first and second centuries AD as well as the fifthcentury philosopher St Augustine, and the twelfth-century philosopher Anselm. The important consideration, so far as this discussion is concerned, is that, as represented by Collingwood, the Patristic critique of Aristotelian metaphysics has a decidedly normative and therapeutic dimension. The Patristic philosophers recognized that the ‘‘pagan’’ world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions because, they said, ‘‘owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were.’’ The remedy, as they saw it, was itself metaphysical. It involved substituting a correct piece of metaphysical analysis for an incorrect piece. This new analysis they called the ‘‘Catholic faith’’ – whose presuppositions, they said, must be made by anyone who wished to be ‘‘saved;’’ saved, that is to say, from the moral and intellectual bankruptcy, the collapse of science and civilization which was overtaking the ‘‘pagan’’ world. It is a matter of some historical importance, Collingwood reminds us, to realize ‘‘that the propositions that go to make up this ‘Catholic Faith,’ ” preserved for many centuries by the religious institutions of Christendom, ‘‘have as a matter of historical fact been the main or fundamental presuppositions of natural science ever since’’ (EM: 227). It is instructive to note the resemblance between Collingwood’s account of the Patristic critique and his own critique of contemporary European civilization in both The New Leviathan and an essay written in 1940 entitled ‘‘Fascism and Nazism’’ (see note 20 below). 12Thus Hegel writes, in The Philosophy of Right, that philosophy deals with what is actual in the world, leaving aside all speculation on whether what ‘‘is’’ ‘‘ought’’ to be. ‘‘The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’’ (1942: 13). 13 For a more detailed discussion of Oakeshott’s views on the relation between philosophy and practical life, see Boucher 2001: 89. 14 It is important to note that while Collingwood accepted Green’s emphasis on the teaching of philosophy as ‘‘a school of practical wisdom,’’ he did not subscribe to his ‘‘idealist’’ metaphysics (A: 56). 15 Collingwood 1916b. 16 All references to this manuscript are to passages reprinted in W. J. van der Dussen 1981: 183–91. 17 Collingwood did not mean to argue that philosophy is capable of offering definitive and authoritative prescriptions for conduct. Philosophy is not casuistry. It is not a method whereby one arrives at knowledge whose authority – such as we sometimes find in religious fanaticism – absolves the individual of responsibility for his / her actions. Philosophy is normative only in so far as it articulates the ideals and criteria by which a person can judge his / her conduct successful or unsuccessful. Thinking ethically is a self-critical act. For this reason, Collingwood recommends substituting
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the term ‘‘criteriological’’ for ‘‘normative’’ (EM: 109). This is precisely the approach that Collingwood takes in the A, in his critique of ethical theories that rely upon rules (A: 99ff.), discussed below in greater detail. 18 In regarding history as a school of moral and political wisdom Collingwood is not ignoring the difference between morality and politics. Thus he declares in his essay ‘‘Political Action’’ that ‘‘Political action, as such, is not moral action’’ (Collingwood 1928: 95). Political goods represent a distinct form of good, as conditions of political order. At the same time, there is a moral imperative for preferring order to anarchy or chaos. In the language of the EPM, political values are distinct but not separate forms on a scale of forms. 19 For an informative and illuminating discussion of Collingwood’s doctrine of rapprochement see Collingwood 1989: 37ff. 20 In ‘‘Fascism and Nazism’’ (1940), Collingwood identifies as another source of the rise of fascism the loss of the religious passion that had throughout the history of Europe inspired Christendom and the civilization of modern science and politics to which Christianity gave rise. His analysis of the situation to which the loss of religion has given rise complements his critique of realism in the A and his critique of the anti-metaphysical doctrines of positivism in the EM. ‘‘The real ground for the ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic’ devotion to ‘freedom,’ ‘‘ writes Collingwood, was religious love of a God who set absolute value on every individual human being. Free speech and free inquiry concerning political and scientific questions; free consent in issues arising out of economic activity; free enjoyment of the produce won by man’s own labour – the opposite of all tyranny and oppression, exploitation and robbery – these were ideals based on the fact that God loved the human individual and Christ had died for him. The doctrines concerning human nature on which liberal or democratic practice was based were not empirically derived from research into anthropological and psychological data; they were a matter of faith; and these Christian doctrines were the source from which they were derived. (Collingwood 1989: 190) This passage revives themes previously developed in ‘‘The Devil’’ and the EM. Thanks to the influence of the philosophical systems of realism and positivism, which deny the efficacy of faith and its role in the life of reason, and deny as well any suggestion that ethics and religious belief can make any difference to how we actually live our practical lives, European civilization has been purged of the religious passions and energy which previously had sustained its liberal-democratic institutions; deriving its ‘‘punch’’ from its revival of pre-Christian religions and mythologies. Statements such as these complement his analysis of fascism in the concluding chapter of the A and serve as an appropriate preface to the NL. 21 See also the following passage from ‘‘The Philosophy of History’’: Everyone brings his own mind to the study of history, and approaches it from the point of view which is characteristic of himself and his generation; naturally, therefore, one age, one man, sees in a particular historical event things which another does not, and vice versa. The attempt to eliminate this subjective element from history is always insincere – it means keeping your own point of view while asking other people to give up theirs – is always
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unsuccessful. If it succeeded history itself would vanish. . . . This does not reduce history to something arbitrary or capricious. It remains genuine knowledge. (Collingwood 1965: 138–9) This passage suggests that Collingwood did not alter his views substantially between 1930 and the period during which he composed his A and the various papers and lectures which comprise the IH and the PH. It is instructive to compare the above passage with Collingwood’s example of what is involved in the attempt to re-enact Nelson’s thought when he spoke the words, ‘‘In honour I won them, in honour I will die with them’’ (A: 112–14). In this example Collingwood answers the question posed in the earlier ‘‘Philosophy of History’’ paper concerning the conditions under which it is possible to re-think the thoughts of agents in the past from the historian’s present point of view (Collingwood 1965: 139).
Bibliography Works by R. G. Collingwood (1916a) Religion and Philosophy (RP) London, Macmillan. (1916b) ‘‘The Devil,’’ B. F. Streeter (ed.) Concerning Prayer, London, Macmillan. Reprinted 1968 in Faith and Reason: Collingwood’s Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Lionel Rubinoff, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. (1924) Speculum Mentis (SM) Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1928) ‘‘Political Action’’ (PA) in Boucher (1989). (1930) ‘‘The Philosophy of History,’’ in William Debbins (1965) Essays in the Philosophy of History by R. G. Collingwood, Austin TX: University of Texas Press. (1933) An Essay on Philosophical Method (EPM) Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1934) ‘‘The Present Need of a Philosophy’’ (PNP) Philosophy, 9: July; reprinted in Boucher (1989). (1936 / 7) Folklore and Folktales (F) All references to this unpublished manuscript are to W. J. van der Dussen (1981). (1939) An Autobiography (A) London: Oxford University Press; reprinted with an introduction by Stephen Toulmin (1978), Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1940) An Essay on Metaphysics (EM) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Revised edn, ed. with an introduction by Rex Martin (1998), Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1940) ‘‘Fascism and Nazism’’ (FN) in Boucher (1989). (1940) The First Mate’s Log (FML) London and Oxford: Oxford University Press and Milford. The chapter entitled ‘‘Monks and Morals’ has been reprinted in Boucher (1989). (1942) The New Leviathan (NL) Oxford: Clarendon Press. Revised edn, ed. with an introduction by David Boucher (1992), Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1946) The Idea of History (IH) ed. with a preface by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Revised edn, ed. with an introduction by W. J. van der Dussen (1993), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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(1965) Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. William Debbins, Austin TX: University of Texas Press. (1989) Essays in Political Philosophy, ed. David Boucher, Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1999) The Principles of History (PH) ed. with an introduction by W. H. Dray and W. J. van der Dussen, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Other works cited Boucher, D. (ed.) (1989) R. G. Collingwood: Essays in Political Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press ——(1995) ‘‘The Life and Times of R. G. Collingwood,’’ in Boucher, D., Connelly, J. and Modood, T. (eds) (1995) Philosophy History and Civilization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on R. G. Collingwood, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. ——(2001) ‘‘The Idealism of Michael Oakeshott,’’ Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, 8: 73–98. Donagan, A. (1962) The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, Oxford: Clarendon Press. D’Oro, G. (2002) Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, London: Routledge. Hegel, G. (1942) The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnston, W. (1967) The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Passmore, J. (1957) A Hundred Years of Philosophy, London: Duckworth. Peters, R. (1999) ‘‘Collingwood’s Logic of Question and Answer in Relationship to Absolute Presuppositions: Another Brief History,’’ Collingwood Studies, 6: 1–28. Rotenstreich, N. (1957) ‘‘Historicism and Philosophy: Reflections of R. G. Collingwood,’’ Révue internationale de philosophie, 11.42: 401–19. Rubinoff, Lionel (1966) ‘‘Collingwood and the Radical Conversion Hypothesis,’’ Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 5.1: 71–83. ——(1968) ‘‘Collingwood’s Theory of the Relationship Between Philosophy and History: a New Interpretation,’’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 5: 363–80. ——(1970) Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1948) Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet, London: Methuen. Shipley, G. (1984) ‘‘From Realism to Rapprochement: the Autobiographical Interpretation of Collingwood’s Philosophy,’’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Loyola University of Chicago. University Microfilms International. Toulmin, S. (1978) ‘‘Introduction’’ to Collingwood’s Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. van der Dussen, W. J. (1981) History as a Science: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
13 Is Bertrand Russell a logical fiction? John G. Slater
When I was asked to consider whether Russell’s philosophical position was reflected in any way in his autobiographical writings, my immediate reaction was that there was no connection whatsoever between the two. Further reflection has convinced me that is still the correct answer, but there are some points of comparison to be made, even though they fall far short of establishing any more than a very weak link between his philosophical and his autobiographical writings. What is most constant in Russell’s philosophical work is the method he adopted and not the conclusions at which he arrived by using it. The core of his philosophical method is derived from his work on the foundations of mathematics. In order to show how one well developed branch of mathematics (arithmetic) had its foundation in another (symbolic logic), Russell set out to discover the minimum vocabulary required to state the truths of arithmetic in logical language. At a meeting in Paris in 1900, he learned that Guiseppe Peano, an Italian mathematician, had paved the way by axiomatizing arithmetic using only three concepts – ‘‘zero,’’ ‘‘number’’ and ‘‘successor’’ – plus logical terminology. With these terms, he had stated the five axioms of arithmetic, and, using purely logical rules of inference, had proved such theorems as ‘‘2 + 2 = 4.’’ Russell’s own original work was centered on providing analyses of Peano’s three undefined terms in the language of symbolic logic, including class theory. Thus, to take the easiest of the three to state in ordinary language, ‘‘zero’’ is analyzed to mean ‘‘the unit class of the null class’’ or alternatively ‘‘the class whose sole member is the null class.’’ The null class is the class with no members: there are many instances of it, for instance, the class of female popes. Peano’s first axiom, ‘‘zero is a number,’’ is now stated as ‘‘the unit class of the null class is a number.’’ Russell provided similar definitions for both ‘‘number’ and ‘‘successor.’’ After the substitutions are made, the restated Peano axioms contain no arithmetical terms at all. After he had formulated these definitions, Russell faced a daunting problem, namely, what did the word ‘‘the’’ mean in these definitions? Clearly ‘‘the’’ in both its singular and plural usage is a term of logic, but there existed no satisfactory analysis of its meaning when used singularly in
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the logical literature of the time. Russell provided an analysis of its meaning in such expressions as ‘‘the null class’’ in his famous theory of definite descriptions. ‘‘The present king of France is bald’’ – to take one of his own examples – seems to commit us to the existence of a present king of France, even when we assert that the sentence is false. His analysis removed that unwelcome consequence. The sentence, he argued, is really three sentences rolled into one: ‘‘there is at least one present king of France’’ and ‘‘there is at most one present king of France’’ and ‘‘whatever is a present king of France is bald.’’ The first two conjuncts taken together mean there is exactly one present king of France. Each of the three conjuncts is either true or false on its own, and in this case the first one is false (the other two are true), therefore the whole is false, since a false conjunct renders a conjunction false. We are no longer committed to the existence (or even subsistence, whatever that might mean) of a present king of France. Russell, in discussing this example, twitted the Hegelians, who then dominated British philosophy, by writing that ‘‘Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig’’ (1905: 48). Russell always regarded his analysis of the meaning of ‘‘the’’ in definite descriptions like ‘‘the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’’ as his most important contribution to philosophy, for it cleared away a load of metaphysical rubbish. Many others have echoed his opinion. It is worth remarking on the importance of his theory for understanding our language. Definite descriptions are essential to everyday discourse, for they serve to denote nameable objects whose names, if they have any, are unknown. As everyone knows, the fact that one does not know a person’s name does not prevent one from talking about that person. We constantly make use of such descriptions as ‘‘the bus driver’’ and ‘‘the person sitting next to me at the lecture’’ in ordinary conversation, and they serve to denote a person in the same way that person’s name would do. And we are sometimes surprised when in conversation we suddenly realize that our interlocutor is referring by name to someone we have only known by description. On such occasions we learn a truth of identity, for instance, ‘‘the bookstore’s cashier is Isabel.’’ The police use such descriptions when they do not yet know the identity of the person who committed a crime: ‘‘the hit-and-run driver,’’ ‘‘the murderer of Holly Jones,’’ and so on. Descriptions are also useful in political discourse, for one can talk of ‘‘the Prime Minister of Canada in 2010’’ without having any notion who he or she might be. Indeed, definite descriptions are used in every area of discourse. Although definite descriptions play the same role in sentences that names do, they are not names as even a moment’s reflection reveals. No parent would ever name their infant ‘‘the so-and-so,’’ whatever ‘‘so-and-so’’ might be. Russell found a neat way to show that the meaning of a definite description is not a name. He had been told that King George IV had once asked, when the Waverley novels were being published anonymously, whether Scott was the author of Waverley? Now if ‘‘the author of Waverley’’ meant ‘‘Scott’’ then the king would be asking whether Scott was Scott, an inquiry, as
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Russell wryly put it, hardly attributable to the first gentleman of Europe. In Russell’s analysis ‘‘the author of Waverley is Scott’’ becomes ‘‘one and only one person wrote Waverley and that person is identical to Scott.’’ Notice that the definite description has vanished in the analysis. Russell also applied his analysis to ‘‘the perfect being’’ as it is used in the ontological argument for the existence of God. The description, he pointed out, begs the very question at issue, for upon analysis it reads: ‘‘there is at least one perfect being’’ and ‘‘there is at most one perfect being.’’ The first of these asserts the being’s existence, the very point to be proved. (1905: 54). When he and his teacher, Alfred North Whitehead, had completed their work on Principia Mathematica (1910–12), whose overall argument is that some at least of mathematics is a branch of logic, Russell turned his attention to the analysis of other philosophical concepts, such as ‘‘matter’’ and ‘‘cause.’’ His hope was to do for physics what he and Whitehead had done for mathematics, namely, to reveal the minimum vocabulary needed to state the elementary truths of the science and to provide definitions for them in logical terminology. In a 1912 letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, with whom he was then carrying on a torrid love affair, he outlined the task ahead of him succinctly: The sort of thing that interests me now is this: some of our knowledge comes from sense, some comes otherwise; what comes otherwise is called ‘‘a priori.’’ Most actual knowledge is a mixture of both. The analysis of a piece of actual knowledge into pure sense and pure a priori is often very difficult, but almost always very important: the pure a priori, like the pure metal, is infinitely more potent and beautiful than the ore from which it was extracted. As regards the mathematical element in science, Principia Mathematica does the extraction very elaborately. But there are a number of other more elusive a priori elements in knowledge – such problems as causality and matter involve them. It is these that I want to get hold of now – I am only quite at the beginning – it is a vast problem of analysis, wanting tools that one has to make oneself before getting to work. It is very hard, to begin with, to make out what science really asserts – for example, what the law of gravitation means. Neither science nor philosophy helps one there – mathematical logic is the only help. And when one thinks one has found out what it asserts, one can’t state the result so as to be intelligible to any one who doesn’t know mathematical logic. So one’s audience must be small! (#616) In contemplating this new problem area, he reflected on the method that had proved so successful in his work on logic and drew a number of conclusions regarding successful work in philosophy. First, philosophical problems are too large and complex for one person to handle alone; collaboration is needed to make the sort of advances he
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thought possible. Neither he nor Whitehead alone could have written their big book. Second, and closely related to the first, philosophical problems are best attacked piecemeal. The efforts of many people had gone into the development of the language of Principia. Without the work of others its authors would not have been able to fashion the elaborate synthesis detailed in the book. Third, his success in developing the theory of descriptions began by his collecting together a host of different examples illustrating the problem – such as ‘‘the golden mountain exists’’ and ‘‘the round square does not exist’’ along with the two examples discussed above concerning Waverley and France – and then examining them with minute care, applying to them every logical test at his command. In an undated letter to Lady Ottoline he wrote of collecting ‘‘queer facts’’ (#373) as the first step in the attempt to solve any philosophical problem. The next step was to read everything he could lay his hands on that might provide a solution to the problem or even shed some light, however feeble, on it. The importance of this step is both positive and negative: someone may have solved the problem, but it is more likely than not that others will have shown what will not work, thus relieving him from having to explore certain dead ends. Having furnished his mind with all the data he could gather, the next step was to allow for a period of incubation. His favorite way of passing the time was to read ‘‘endless silly novels’’ (#707, 23 February 1913); in his later years these were always detective novels. Success will come, if it comes, all at once. In successful cases, he became ‘‘just a very competent machine – the points that turn up as I write I see how to deal with, by a kind of easy instinct – it really means being tremendously strung up, but it feels oddly easy’’ (#781, 20 May 1913). Russell was greatly impressed with the small number of undefined terms that he and Whitehead were required to introduce in Principia. In the propositional calculus they needed only ‘‘not’’ and the inclusive sense of ‘‘or’’ (either p or q or both p and q); the other connectives – ‘‘and,’’ ‘‘if, then’’ and ‘‘if and only if’’ – were all defined in terms of these two. For example, ‘‘p and q’’ is defined as ‘‘it is not the case that either not-p or not-q,’’ and ‘‘if p then q’’ as ‘‘either not-p or q.’’ Definitions are essential to an axiomatic system, because without them the length of the theorems would quickly render them incomprehensible. In his later work Russell preferred the language of ‘‘minimum vocabularies’’ to refer to the set of undefined terms in a science, a minimum vocabulary being ‘‘one in which no word can be defined in terms of the others’’ (Schilpp 1944: 14). Given a minimum vocabulary for a science, all of the propositions of that science are expressible in terms of it and logical terminology. It is worth noting that minimum vocabularies are always selected with some standard interpretation in mind, but they are open to any other interpretation that makes all of the primitive propositions true simultaneously. The advantage of speaking of minimum vocabularies rather than axiom systems is that the former allows for instances of only partial success. Full success yields an axiom system. Only some of this methodological advice can be applied to the task of writing an autobiography. By its very nature, an autobiography cannot be a
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collaborative work, nor can it be done piecemeal, except in the sense that it has to be written over a period of time. It makes no sense to speak of a minimum vocabulary in autobiography, for a human life cannot be presented as a deductive system. But some of what Russell learned in analyzing definite descriptions is applicable. Facts have to be gathered together, but they are not the sort of odd facts he recommends collecting at the start of a problem in philosophical analysis. The principal facts relevant to autobiography are facts about the subject and the people and institutions with whom the subject interacted during his or her lifetime. Some of the facts in such a collection are clearly more important than others, so there must be an ordering of the collection in terms of their value in telling the story. This sorting out also requires that a given fact must be fixed with a date in order that it find its proper place in the story. Of help here are any diaries or letters that have survived the moves of one’s life. Checking one’s memories against those of others who are acquainted with the events being recalled is of first importance, for they may have access to written materials unknown to the person contemplating an autobiography. These documents are of use in correcting and dating the subject’s own memories. Although these steps are not exactly the ones Russell mentions as helpful in philosophical work, they do bear a resemblance, since one is preparing one’s mind to write a connected account of one’s own experiences as they unfolded in time. Immersing oneself in as many facts as one can may be likened to the period of incubation that Russell found essential in philosophical work. In the case of his autobiography, once the facts had been collected and organized and mulled over, he was ready to get on with the writing. In 1914, Russell gave his method a name and developed it further. In ‘‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’’ he argued that philosophical propositions must have two properties: they must be general and they must be a priori. By ‘‘general’’ he meant that philosophical propositions must deal with everything that there is, but distributively (one thing at a time) and not collectively (all together): and not only must they be concerned with all things, but they must be concerned with such properties of all things as do not depend upon the accidental nature of the things that there happen to be, but are true of any possible world, independently of such facts as can only be discovered by our sense. (1986: 65) By ‘‘a priori’’ he meant that a philosophical proposition can neither be ‘‘proved nor disproved by empirical evidence.’’ There must be no appeal to ‘‘the course of history, or the convolutions of the brain, or the eyes of shell-fish’’ (65). ‘‘We may sum up these two characteristics of philosophical propositions by saying that philosophy is the science of the possible’’ (65). He drew a further conclusion: ‘‘Philosophy, if what has been said is correct, becomes indistinguishable from
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logic as that word has now come to be used’’ (65). His readers were provided with an example of a philosophical proposition: ‘‘If x is a member of the class α and every member of α is a member of β, then x is a member of the class β, whatever x, α, and β may be.’’ The very subjectivity and particularity of autobiographical writing serves to exclude it from being philosophical in this austere sense. As was noted above, it is not possible to reduce the life of a person to a set of axioms and a few rules of inference. Further reflection on his work in Principia led him in ‘‘The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics’’ (1914) to state ‘‘the supreme maxim in scientific philosophizing:’’ ‘‘Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities’’ (1986: 11). What he means by this is exemplified by the analysis reported above of ‘‘zero’’ as ‘‘the unit class of the null class,’’ which rids us of having to regard zero as an entity. Russell would later speak of zero and other inferred entities replaced by logical constructions as ‘‘logical fictions.’’ In this essay he is proposing that the entities of physics, including matter itself, be replaced by elaborate logical constructions out of the data of sense. It was an immensely ambitious project that he soon abandoned, largely because of the radical turn his activities took when war broke out in August of that year. At first blush one might think that this maxim would apply to autobiography, since one is attempting to construct the history of one’s self in terms of a set of events lived through. But the finished product would not be a logical construction in Russell’s sense, for it fails the logical test. A logical construction must have the same properties as the inferred entity it is replacing, and it is hardly to be imagined that a written account of one’s life has the same set of properties as the life itself. Russell himself is not, nor can he be, a logical fiction. Russell’s continued application of his method to the philosophical problems associated with matter led him, reluctantly, in 1918 to adopt a version of neutral monism, a philosophy first introduced by William James. Russell’s version of it took events as the neutral things out of which physical and mental entities were to be constructed, events being very short slices of space-time. For purposes of exposition it is perhaps more natural to call these events ‘‘appearances.’’ In the case of a material object, Russell thought of it as a construction out of the set of appearances of the object (as we commonly but misleadingly say) radiating out from the place where we are wont to say the object is. But there is no substantial object at that place, for the object, in this philosophy, is simply the set of appearances with their logical relations and nothing more. Sets of appearances of this sort are governed by the laws of physics. The perceiver or mind, on the other hand, is the set of appearances radiating inward toward a point where we are accustomed to say the perceiver or mind is located. Again, there is no substantial ego at that point, for the perceiver or mind is understood to be that ordered collection of appearances. Order in this case is imposed by psychological laws. On this view there are no material substances, as Aristotle supposed there were, or transcendental egos of the sort postulated by Kant, and consequently no
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Cartesian dualism. What distinguishes physical objects from psychological entities is not their materials but the laws under which their parts (appearances) are organized. In writing his autobiography a decade or more after he had developed his neutral monism, Russell might, just might, have had it in mind as the sort of way to organize the events of his life. But it would stretch matters to claim any more than that, and even that much is probably false. The reason is that the events making up his life are not of the sort he described in his writings on neutral monism. Events, as we use the term in considering a human life, have much longer durations than those described in his metaphysics. If we allow the duration of events to increase until they include what we might call life-events, then the sort of model he described in his metaphysics could be used as a guide in writing up his life. Under this assumption, he would think of himself as the vortex of a steady stream of life-events, the growth of which gradually revealed what it was to be Bertrand Russell. This, however, seems too far-fetched to be credible. As we will see presently, Russell qua autobiographer did not consider himself as making a contribution to philosophy as he understood the nature of that discipline. Having seen that very little of his philosophical method and his philosophy can apply directly to his autobiographical writing, let us turn now to an account of the way his autobiography came into being. The first two volumes of his published autobiography were written in the early 1930s when he was very hard pressed for money. At the time he was separated from his second wife, Dora Black, and had to support her and their two children, John and Katharine. His divorce from his first wife, Alys Whitall Smith, left him with alimony payments that were his responsibility until Alys’ death in the early 1950s. Then there were the expenses of Beacon Hill School, which he and Dora had founded in the mid-1920s and which Dora continued to manage. Finally, he was involved with Patricia Spence, who was to become his third wife a few years later. His only sources of income were the royalties from his books, which had fallen off because of the Great Depression, and fees from lectures, but in order to earn them he had to travel to the United States. Seeing that his options for increasing his income were very limited, he decided to cash in on his fame (or notoriety), especially in the United States, by publishing his autobiography. The revelations he proposed to include were bound, he thought, to make it a best-seller. As a first step, he wrote to the people with whom he had corresponded and asked them to return his letters (if they still had them) so that they might be copied. He owned the copyright in these letters, but he needed their recipients’ agreement to publish them. In this way he got back from Lady Ottoline Morrell the approximately 1,800 love letters he had written her starting in 1910. Other caches of letters, including a large number from Lady Constance Malleson, who had been his mistress during the war years and later, came his way. Family papers were already in his hands; they had come to him after the death of his older brother Francis, the second Earl Russell, in 1931.
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Russell read through all of this material, thus refreshing his memory of past events, and then hired a stenographer to take his dictation. The first draft of his autobiography was dictated in short order, in about a fortnight. When he had the typescript in hand for correction he realized that it was much too short for the two volumes he wanted to publish. He also suspected it was probably impossible for it to be published without very severe cutting, which would further shorten it. The reason was, of course, libel. In Britain you could not libel the dead, but you certainly could the living, and he felt sure that libel lawyers would object to his discussion of his sexual affairs with women who were still alive. These included besides his first two wives, Lady Ottoline and Lady Constance Malleson. When he showed the typescript to Lady Ottoline she was reluctant to see it published during her lifetime. The lawyers, he felt sure, would advise his publisher that all the sexual passages must be excised and his publisher, wanting to avoid law suits, was bound to take their advice. The failure of this attempt to make money figured prominently in his decision to return to work as a professional philosopher. He sought an academic appointment that would provide him with sufficient income to pay his bills and to live in the style to which he was accustomed. It took him a few years to re-establish his credentials as an active philosopher, but he was rewarded in 1938 with an appointment as professor of philosophy in the University of Chicago. He was to spend nearly all of the war years in the United States, and added spice to his life story by being charged with corrupting the young through his books and consequently denied (by Mayor Laguardia who exercised his line-item veto on its budget) an appointment as professor of philosophy in the College of the City of New York in 1940. The typescript of his autobiography lay dormant until Russell returned to England in 1944, when he took it up again. After bringing its story up to 1944, he saw that it was still not long enough to require two volumes, his desired length. To flesh it out he decided to include a sample of his contemporary correspondence, nearly all of it letters from other people, at the end of each chapter. These additions were sufficient to make it a two-volume work. One glimpses here the empirical side of Russell’s nature. In philosophy he does fall into the great British empiricist tradition, so letting his readers see a selection of his raw material seemed quite natural to him. His selection of letters in these two volumes is in general a very good one, and the letters do serve to introduce the reader to some of the extraordinary people he had known. When he was satisfied with the content of the volumes, he deposited them with Stanley Unwin, his publisher since 1916, with instructions to bring them out only after he was dead. Very few people knew of its existence. Russell did acknowledge its existence to anyone who asked him directly, but he did not reveal it in print. In the 1960s when he decided to set up two foundations – the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the Atlantic Foundation – and needed funds to endow them, he wrote to Unwin and instructed him to publish the autobi-
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ography. Unwin was appalled and traveled out to Russell’s home in Wales to beg him to reconsider. Russell proved adamant and the books were sent to libel lawyers for vetting. Lady Ottoline had died in the 1930s, but Lady Constance Malleson was still alive. Fortunately, she had no objection to being named in the book. After some excisions, the two volumes were duly published in 1967 and 1968. While they were going through the press, a decision was made to prepare a third volume, since the first two covered his life only to 1944. Russell wrote very little of this last volume; the rest of it was assembled by his fourth wife, Edith Finch Russell, and his secretaries with his approval. Its documentary material includes polemical writings that had been issued by the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation under Russell’s name; some of which were written by him and some of which appear to have been drafted by others. These latter pieces lack Russell’s customary literary style, and as a result the volume suffers by comparison with its two predecessors, so much so that his American publisher, Simon and Schuster, refused to publish it. The general conclusion to be drawn, then, is this: Russell’s autobiography does not reflect his philosophy except in the respect that there is an attempt in it to provide the reader with some of the data he had to hand when he wrote it. The a priori, which is so central to his philosophy, finds no place in it, since none of its propositions are either general or a priori in the required sense. Indeed, no autobiography would ever include such propositions, except, possibly, as illustrations of some intellectual point. The only side effect of his philosophical work that makes an appearance in the autobiography is exhibited in the clarity and the beauty of its writing. These are two great merits of its first two volumes. One of the outstanding features of Russell’s autobiographical writings is the prominent display of passion in them. Before their publication, students of his philosophy had formed an altogether different conception of his inner life. A very well known instance is to be found in Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy. Durant attended Russell’s lectures in 1914 and offered this description: ‘‘When Bertrand Russell spoke at Columbia University in 1914, he looked like his subject, which was epistemology – thin, pale, and moribund; one expected to see him die at every period.’’ A page later he resumes his description: He impressed one, in 1914, as cold-blooded, as a temporarily animated abstraction, a formula with legs. He tells us that he never saw a motionpicture till he read Bergson’s cinematographic analogy for the intellect; then he reconciled himself to one performance, merely as a task in philosophy. (Durant 1927: 519) With the publication of the first volume of his Autobiography and its extraordinary Prologue, ‘‘What I Have Lived For,’’ opinion changed. In it
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Russell confessed that he had been driven by three great passions: ‘‘the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the sufferings for mankind’’ (1967: 13). I wish to comment on the second of these passions. During the course of editing the philosophical papers he wrote between 1909 and the end of his career as a writer, published in five thick volumes, I uncovered evidence that the passion Russell felt in his search for knowledge went back a long way. This discovery will serve to support his claim in the Prologue, and also explain why evidence of it never appeared in his philosophical writings. In a letter to Lady Ottoline, written on 30 April 1912, he reflected on the work that had gone into the writing of Principia Mathematica: It is not an easy thing to move the world. I have put into the world a great body of abstract thought, which is moving those whom one might hope to move by it, and will ultimately, probably, move many people who will have never heard of philosophy. What makes it vital, what makes it fruitful, is the absolute unbridled Titanic passion that I have put into it. It is passion that has made my intellect clear, passion that has made me never stop to ask myself if the work was worth doing, passion that has made me not care if no human being ever read a word of it; it is passion that enables me to sit for years before a blank page, thinking the whole time about one probably trivial point which I could not get right. That same passion now has gone into my other writing. (#429) Later in the same letter he returns to the topic: In that mood, pure thought on things not connected with human life, seems to me the only thing worth while. I find then a kind of joy in clearness, in transparent lucidity, in godlike detachment. I like to see the clear stream issuing from the sandy soil. But this is mainly pride, which is one of my besetting sins. The passion, he goes on to remark, is strongest when he is thinking about ‘‘big things’’ like the philosophical problems he had to solve in writing Principia Mathematica. These confessions will strike anyone who has examined Principia as most remarkable. Nothing in that gargantuan book would ever cause the reader to think of passion at all. It is even more austere than Durant found Russell to be in the lecture room. And, although he was ready to confess to Lady Otttoline the role passion played in the writing of the work, he did not want his readers to be aware of the fact. This point is revealed in an undated letter written a few days before the one quoted above. My intellect is amazingly clear these days – it sees into the heart of things in a white flash. I expect my paper on matter will be a model of
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cold passionless analysis, setting forth the most painful conclusions with utter disregard of human feelings. I haven’t had enough courage hitherto about matter, I haven’t been sceptical enough. I want to write a paper which my enemies will call ‘‘the bankruptcy of realism.’’ There is nothing to compare to passion for giving one cold insight. Most of my best work has been done in the inspiration of remorse, but any passion will do if it is strong. Philosophy is a reluctant mistress – one can only reach her heart with the cold steel in the hand of passion. (#423) A revised version of his paper on matter was published for the first time in Volume 6 of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (1992: 77–95). The reader can confirm that he achieved what he set out to do, for the analysis is precise but cold, neither betraying Russell’s feelings nor engaging those of the reader, and when he read it to a Cambridge audience later that year he reported that it had not been a success. Of those present only Wittgenstein had understood it and even he did not have much to say about it. Some of the passion poured into writing a work gets fixed into its structure or organization, and it accounts for much of the beauty to be found in the completed work. Mathematicians and logicians often remark on the beauty of a work, just as people speak of the beauty (or lack of it) of certain buildings. In the latter case some of the architect’s passion is fixed in the form and materials of the completed building. Russell claims that the same is true of his work: a completed philosophical work is like a building after the architect and building crews have departed. Philosophizing, on the other hand, is an outpouring of passion on a topic not yet under one’s control. Only a fraction of this passion gets fixed in the finished product, but it contributes greatly to its value and its beauty. The grace and beauty of the first two volumes of Russell’s autobiography reflect some of the passion that went into their production, but the total amount expended would not have been anything comparable to that used up in his best logical and philosophical work. The reason is that the subject of the autobiography was known in advance. Writing an autobiography is an instance of what Russell called ‘‘mind on mind’’ and not ‘‘mind on outer night.’’ He makes this contrast while telling Lady Ottoline (#373, 8 March 1912) just how much easier book-reviewing is than original work. In reviewing a book you have the data all neatly presented to you and your only task is to record your reactions to it, bringing to bear, of course, what you already know about the subject. Original work, on the other hand, requires that you impose ‘‘form on chaos.’’ You must both bring new material into existence and provide it with an organization. Autobiographical writing requires only that you impress a chronological form on the data you have to hand. In writing his autobiography Russell was cut loose from the constraints on passion he had imposed upon himself in his logical and philosophical
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work; in writing about his life he wanted his readers to know how he felt at certain times in his life, for instance, the anguish and despair he felt in early August 1914 (1968: ch. 1) when war broke out. The story of his life was the proper place to reveal such feelings. Still these feelings required a certain distillation, and perhaps even distance in time, before the public could be made privy to them. This was no doubt part of the reason he decided, in the late 1940s, that his autobiography would be published only after his death. Unlike some of his philosophical contemporaries who have published their memoirs, Russell attempts, in reconstructing the way he felt at certain times, to share with his readers what might be called for want of a better term ‘‘his inner life.’’ By contrast, the autobiographies of A. J. Ayer, Willard Van Orman Quine, and even Frederick Copleston, read as if their subjects had little or no inner life at all. What they record almost exclusively are external facts, what they did, whom they met, where they traveled, etc. The reader suspects that their lives were not as placid as they are presented and longs to learn something of the inner turmoil that went on when they made certain important decisions in their life. Why, for instance, did Copleston decide at age eighteen to join the Roman Catholic church in opposition to his parents’ wishes? Russell, to his credit, does try to record the way he felt as he faced crucial decisions. In my opinion, it makes his account of his life richer and more credible than those of these three contemporaries. Giving an account of his life was not for Russell tackling a philosophical problem. It was more a labor of love, since it involved, in an important way, the re-living of past events and the reconstruction of a selection of them into a narrative he hoped would interest his readers. He had to rely upon his memory and whatever contemporary documents, like letters, he had available. Memories of emotional experiences are particularly difficult to get right. One remembers being wrought up on a certain occasion but the emotion itself has vanished and all that is left is the memory that one experienced a strong emotion such as anger or frustration or pride or love at the time. By its very nature autobiography is subjective. Only a small percentage of what the author reports can be verified by others. The very choice of the memories to record and the particular shading to give them are under the author’s sole control. Few, if any, readers are in a position to criticize either the selection or the accuracy of the reporting. By printing a selection of the letters he had before him in writing his autobiography, Russell went some way toward providing his readers with a basis, however limited, for judging the accuracy of his life story. Had Russell himself been asked the question posed in this essay, he would probably have replied as he did to one of his critics in the Schilpp volume: With regard to [Principles of] Social Reconstruction, and to some extent with my other popular books, philosophic readers, knowing that I am classified as a ‘‘philosopher,’’ are apt to be led astray. I did not write Social Reconstruction in my capacity as a ‘‘philosopher;’’ I wrote it as a
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human being who suffered from the state of the world, wished to find some way of improving it, and was anxious to speak in plain terms to others who had similar feelings. If I had never written technical books, this would be obvious to everybody; and if the book is to be understood, my technical activities must be forgotten. If I were a mountaineer and wrote a book on the subject, I might mention the sunrise, and I should not expect to be reminded that, according to the Copernican theory, the sun does not rise. Some criticisms of my books on social and political questions seem to me something like such a reminder. (Schilpp 1944: 730–1) Russell did not write his autobiography in his capacity as a philosopher, rather he wrote it as a human being who hoped the example of his life would inspire others to attempt to emulate some of his own (finer) accomplishments.
Bibliography Durant, Will (1927) The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers, New York: Simon and Schuster; London: Ernest Benn. Russell, Bertrand (1905) ‘‘On Denoting,’’ reprinted in Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1950, ed. Robert Charles Marsh. London: George Allen and Unwin. ——(1912) Letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell. Photocopies of these letters are housed in the Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario; the originals are in the University of Texas in Austin. Letters are referred to by number in the above. ——(1916) Principles of Social Reconstruction, London: George Allen and Unwin. The US edition is entitled Why Men Fight. ——(1967) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1872–1914, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster. ——(1968) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914–1944, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster. ——(1969) The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1944–1967, London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston MA: Litttle, Brown. ——(1986) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 8, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, 1914–19, ed. John G. Slater. London: George Allen and Unwin. ——(1992) The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. 6, Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–13, ed. John G. Slater, with the assistance of Bernd Frohmann. London: Routledge. Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.) (1944) The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press.
Index
a priori 5, 12, 244, 255, 257, 261 Abelard, Peter 8–9, 14, 22, 64–75, 89; accusations and threats against 72–73; authenticity of Historia and Letters, doubts of 68; birth and remarkable life of 65–67; charisma of 65; Confession of Faith to Heloise 73; consolatory objectives of Historia 69, 74; death of 66, 68; detail (and reticence) in Historia 66–67; determinism, providentialism and 71; faith of 73, 74; Heloise’s objections to marriage with 67–68; intention and moral culpability 71; on love in guilt and in grace 69; marriage and philosophy, incompatibility of 67–68; medieval thought 64–65; monastic life of 66; Peter the Venerable 68, 73; philosophy and the love of wisdom 64–65; philosophy as way of life 67; praise of ancient philosophers 72, 74; providentialist determinism 71; scholarship as guide to philosophy, limitations of 70; sexual love between Heloise and, celebration of 68; stoicism of 70–71, 71–72, 73; studies of 65–66; working milieu of 70 About Philosophy (Wolff, R.P.) 3 Ainslie, Donald C. 7, 10, 120 allegory 114–16; synecdochic allegory 116, 117 Alypius 32, 49, 50, 51, 56, 58 Analysis of the Phenomenon of the Human Mind (Mill, J.) 192–93 Anglicanism 169, 173, 175 Anthony (Egyptian monk) 49, 50, 51, 56
Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Newman, J.H.) 11, 23, 168–78 Apology (Plato) 16, 22 Arbuthnot, John 131 Aristotle 70, 71, 72, 79, 86–87, 115, 258–59; on vanity 89–90, 91 Atlantic Foundation 260–61 Saint Augustine 4, 7, 8, 14, 16, 20, 24, 31–61, 64, 80, 88, 114, 115, 221; on vanity and pride 90–91; see also Confessions of St Augustine autobiography: alienation and re-appropriation of autobiographical writing 212–15; allegory and 114–16; as apology 23; autobiographical concerns of Rousseau’s Reveries 141–42; ‘autobiography,’ meaning in context 14; bundle theory of self and 122; cautionary observations 27–28; communicative purpose 15–18, 20; conceptual limitations of 211; as confession 23–26; as consolation 21–22; didacticism and 100–101; distinctly philosophical uses for 19–20; epistemic superiority of autobiographer 17–18; evaluation of self and 18–19; and exile 104–5; explanation of self and 18; factual claims in 17; first person, use of 15–16, 58n1; Humean view on 138; and inquiry into human nature 26–27; knowledge, acquisition of 24–25; life and death transactions 219–24; memory and 28, 149, 162n17, 211, 264; in moment of recurrence 215–19; as moral instruction 20–21; philosophers, many sorts of individual recognized as 27; philosophical research in autobiography 109; purposes
Index for philosophers’ autobiographies 18–19; quest for the perfect reader 224–27; Rawlsian reasoning 15; reader’s interest in 19; reconfiguration of autobiographical writing 212; selection of detail 17, 28; self-knowledge and 18–19; synoptic recollection and reflection 17–18; third person, use of 16; thought and feeling, statements of 17; transformatory nature of 28; truthfulness in 27–28; variety of approaches to life stories 16–17 An Autobiography (Collingwood, R.G.) 12, 230–32, 235–36, 238–46 Autobiography (Mill, J.S.) 11, 23, 180–208 Autobiography (Russell, B.) 259–60, 261–62 Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 14 Ayer, A.J. 264 Bach, J.S. 97 Bain, Alexander 194 Beethoven, Ludwig van 97 Benard, Edmond Darvil 178 Bentham, Jeremy 11, 189, 190, 193–95 Berkeley, George 1, 170–71 Berlin, Isaiah 172 Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation 260–61 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche, F.W.) 212, 219, 227n1, 228n10 The Big Questions (Soloman, R.) 3 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche, F.W.) 211, 214 Black, Dora 259 Boethius, Anicius Manilus Severinus 1, 14, 22 Boring, E.G. 196–97 Boswell, James 133, 134 Bourdin, Pierre 101 Bourguet, Louis 110–11, 112 Broad, Charlie Dunbar 15 Brody, Buruch 2 Bruss, Elizabeth 17 Butler, Bishop Joseph 170, 174 Byron, George (Lord Byron) 211 Caesar 79, 82, 85, 87 Caloprese, Gregario 114
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Calvinism 99, 133, 153, 175 Campiegnes, Roscelin of 65 Carafa, Antonio 112 Carlyle, Thomas 184, 186, 211 Carnap, Rudolf 15 Catholicism 11, 79–80, 84, 102, 169–70, 175, 176–78, 264 Cato 82, 94 causation, associative principle of 124 Champeux, William of 65 Chanut, Pierre 99, 102, 103–4 Christian apologetics 174, 178 Christianity 32, 37, 42–46, 47–48, 53, 54, 64, 72–73, 82 Christina of Sweden 102–3, 104–5 Cicero 42–43, 46, 50, 70, 114 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 186 Collationes (Abelard, P.) 71, 73 The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (Slater, J.G., Ed.) 263 Collingwood, R.G. 4–5, 12, 15, 19, 230–51; on acting according to rules 243; childhood experience 240; on criticism (and self-criticism) 231–32, 239–40; danger to humanity, education failure and 242; on extemporization 243–44; historical identity and development of thought of 232–33; historicity 232, 244–46; history and philosophy as school of moral and political wisdom 237–41; judgment on past 243; logic of question and answer 232, 235–37; metaphysics 237, 244–46, 248n10; modernity, crisis of 241–44; moral and political wisdom, philosophy and history as school of 237–41; on philosophical systems, differences in 236–37; philosophy and history as school of moral and political wisdom 237–41; quest for rapprochement between philosophy and history 231, 233–35; radical conversion hypothesis controversy 230–33; on sameness in philosophical systems 236–37; self-making process in humans 244–46; technical knowledge, tragedy of 241–44; theory and practice, rapprochement between 231, 237–41; theory of knowledge 235–36; thought and action, rapprochement between
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238; wisdom and judgment, schooling and 242–43 Commentary on Romans (Abelard, P.) 73, 74 Commentary on Romans (Augustine) 39 Concomitance of All Goods, Principle of (PCG) 71–72 Confessions of St Augustine 4, 8, 14, 16, 20, 24, 31–61, 64; as accessory to grace 55–58; admonition and faith 51; autobiographical core, disunity between non-autobiographical material and 32–34; autobiographical emphasis on the 31; autobiography as illustration of grace 41–42; beliefs, desires and 41; biographies of conversion 56; chance events 50; classical philosophy, denial of central assumption of 39–40; commitment to error 39–40; complexity of the 35; conversion of Augustine 49–50, 56, 57; creation 54–55; eloquentia 46–47; Faustus, Augustine’s encounter with 44, 47; freedom of will, accountability and 40–41; God in the 47–51, 58; grace as inspiration 36–41; happiness, righteousness and the attainment of 37–38, 54–55, 59n20; health metaphors in the 36–37; ideas, Augustine’s openness to 45–47; inspirational objectives of the 34–35; interpretations of the 32–33; knowledge of truth, grace and 52–53; language and signs 51–52; learning, signs and grace 51–55; mathematical truth 52; medical metaphors in the 36–37; motivation, grace and 39–41; mystery of the 32–35; original sin 39; pessimism of Augustine 38–39; philosophical quest of Augustine 43–45; purpose of the 33–34; rhetoric and philosophy 46–47; self-improvement and the achievement of wisdom 38; selfperfection, change in attitude to 38–39; self-therapy and the 34; status of the 31; unifying principles within the 34–35; writing of the Confessions, illumination of act of 56–57 Confessions (Rousseau, J.J.) 24, 88, 94n2, 148, 149, 159, 162n17, 211, 221 Conflict of the Faculties (Kant, I.) 16 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius) 14, 22
Conti, Antonio 111 Conway, David 218–19 Copleston, Frederick 264 Correspondence littéraire (Grimm, F.M.) 184 Crito (Plato) 98 Croce, Benedetto 15, 117 Dante Alighieri 112, 115 Daybreak (Nietzsche, F.W.) 214 de Beauvoir, Simone 5, 15, 19 de Garlande, Stephen 67 De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (Vico, G.) 113 Defoe, Daniel 16 Delphi 5 Democritus 80 Derrida, Jacques 7 Descartes, René 2, 4, 7, 8, 9–10, 14, 15, 16, 24, 25, 110–12, 121; anonymity, aloofness, yearning for 98–99; argument, certitude on basis of 106–7; assent, faculty of 105–6; autobiography and exile 104–5; Christina of Sweden and 102–3, 104–5; conviction 107; diplomacy of 103; Elizabeth of Bohemia and 99, 102; exile and philosophy 97–107; ‘father of modern philosophy’ 101; first person narratives 100; foreignness and intimacy, dialectic between 98, 106–7; intellect and will 105–6; love, theses about 103–5; reminiscences on scientific work 100; sincerity of 100–101; Socratic paradox 98, 106–7; solitude, sense of 99; voluntas 106–7; will and intellect 105–6; works of 99–100 Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Christian (Abelard, P.) 71, 72–73, 74 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume, D.) 1, 123, 133, 137 Dickens, Charles 97 Diderot, Denis 153 Diogenes 136 Dionysus 214 Discourse on Method (Descartes, R.) 4, 9, 16, 24, 99, 101, 110; change in title for 100 Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality – Second Discourse (Rousseau, J.J.) 142, 143, 144, 146–47, 148, 149, 160 Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts – First
Index Discourse (Rousseau, J.J.) 142, 160n1 Disputationes metaphysicae (Saurez, F.) 110 Douglass, Frederick 21 Dray, W.H. 233, 234 Dronke, Peter 68 Durant, Will 261, 262–63 East India Company 180, 181 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche, F.) 6, 11–12, 24, 27, 211–27 Echo 93 Education (Mill, J.) 191 Edwards, Anne Michels 3 Eighty-Three Different Questions (Augustine) 40, 55, 56 Elizabeth of Bohemia 99, 102 eloquentia 46–47 Emile or On Education (Rousseau, J.J.) 142, 149–50, 160 Emory University 6 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume, D.) 122 Epaminondas 82, 83 Epicurus 37, 72, 114 Essais (Montaigne, M.de) 9, 76, 83, 88, 90, 92; Apology for Raymond Sebond 83–84; brilliance of 77; Caesar excused for publication of memoirs 87; collaborative spirit of 93; exploratory and digressive 85–86 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke, J.) 171, 172 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Newman, J.H.) 11, 168–78 Essay on Metaphysics (Collingwood, R.G.) 230, 231, 233, 237, 238, 242, 245 An Essay on Philosophical Method (Collingwood, R.G.) 231–32, 234, 236 Essays (Descartes, R.) 99, 100 Essays (Hume, D.) 128 Essays on the Active Powers of Man (Reid, T.) 2 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Reid, T.) 2 Fascism and Nazism (Collingwood, R.G.) 250n20 Faustus, Augustine’s encounter with 44, 47
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Fenves, Peter 213 Feyerabend, Paul K. 15 First Mate’s Log (Collingwood, R.G.) 239–40, 241, 247n7 Fokelore and Folktales (Collingwood, R.G.) 240–41 Franklin, Benjamin 114–15 Freud, Sigmund 8, 9, 106, 181, 184, 186 From Realism to Rapprochement: The Autobiographical Interpretation of Collingwood’s Philosophy (Shipley, G.) 230 Galbraith, Vivian Hunter 248n8 Gassendi, Pierre 101 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche, F.W.) 211, 214, 215 Genesis 32, 56 al Ghazali 14 Glarges, Cornelis de 99 Glassco, John 17 God 68, 74, 85–86, 88, 90–91, 101, 162n20, 169; authority of 150; belief in 135; Christian 43, 46; commonsensical conception of 43; Confessions of St Augustine and 31–35, 47–51; consolation through love of 70; as Creator 32, 34, 54–55; ‘divine instinct’ in us from 151, 152; existence of 158, 163n27, 249n11, 255; faith in 84, 154; grace of 8, 39, 53, 55–58; happiness in 22; images in Augustines Confessions of 36–37; inspiration for Augustine’s Confessions 34–35, 221–22; invisibility of 53; judgment of 137, 153; longing for 54–55; love of 150n20; man as spiritual image of 44–45; Meditations of Descartes on 102, 106; name of 226; natural law imprinted on us by 163n29; Newman’s Apologia and ideas about 172; Newman’s relationship with 169, 175; omniscience of 32; ordination by 118; as outside agent 41; praise, exercise of 32, 33, 34, 35; Presbyterian view of 133; providential superintendence of 115, 149; as saviour 187; summum bonum 38, 42; talents in us of 80; as teacher 51; transcendence of 83; truth and 52–53; vanity and 80; wisdom and goodness of 137
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Gombay, André 7–8, 9–10, 97 Gorgias (Plato) 98 Grace, Eve 7, 10–11, 26, 141 Graham, George 207n7 Graybeal, Jean 217 Green, T.H. 231, 239 Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Baron 184 Grotius, Hugo 8, 97 Gusdorf, Georges 88, 222 Hadot, Pierre 67 Hartley, David 189 Hegel, Georg W.F. (and Hegelians) 72, 254 Heloise, wife of Abelard 65, 66–67, 68, 73 Heraclitus 80 Historia Calamitatum (Abelard, P.) 8–9, 22, 64–65, 66–67, 68, 69, 72–74 historicity 232, 244–46 History of England (Hume, D.) 126, 127–28 Hobbes, Thomas 8, 16, 97, 101, 170–71, 174, 230 Holbach, Paul-Henri Dietrich, baron d’ 153 Homer 112, 115 Hooker, Richard 134 Horace 90 Horne, George 134 Hortensius (Cicero) 42, 46, 50 Hume, David 1, 7, 10, 14, 97, 120–39, 170–71, 174, 185, 186, 189, 211, 221–22; anti-religious position of 133–34, 137; on autobiography 138; bodily qualities, elicitation of indirect passions through 124, 131; bundle theory of self 121–23; causation, associative principle of 124; character, assessment over time of 130–31; character, autobiographical revelation of 127–28; of character evaluation 128–29; comportment in last days 120–21; criticism, attitude to 128; of death 132–34; of family relations 124–25; hatred, ‘indirect’ passion of 122–24; health of 131; human biology, chastity and 125; humility, ‘indirect’ passion of 122–23; illness and death of 131–34; of impar-
tiality 128–29, 135; love, ‘indirect’ passion of 122–23; melancholia of 131–32; of moral evaluations 128; parental concern, cooperation and 124; passion for literature 128; patriarchy 125; perceptions, ideas of (‘secondary’ ideas) 122; ‘personal identity’ 121–22; philosophical lessons from ‘My Own Life’ 120–21; pride, ‘indirect’ passion of 122–23; of riches and power 125–27; of self-evaluation 129–31; Smiths ‘Letter’ concerning last days 120–21, 131, 134–38; socioeconomic status, elicitation of indirect passions through 124, 127; socioeconomic status, significance of 126–27; sympathy, significance of 126; terminal illness of 132; theories of the self 121–24; on vanity 127, 130; of virtue 136; of virtue and vice 127–31; virtue and vice, elicitation of indirect passions through 124, 127; virtues of the dying 120–21 Huygens, Constanntijn 99 Idea of History (Collingwood, R.G.) 232–33, 234, 235–36, 237, 244–45 James, William 211, 258 Jesus Christ 49, 53, 56, 168, 187, 202, 220 Jewish Scriptures 43 Johnson, Samuel 133 Johnston, William 248n8 The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method 3 Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe, D.) 16 Kant, Immanuel 16, 236, 258–59 Kaufmann, Walter 213, 227n3 Keble, John 173 Kierkegaard, Søren 1, 170 Killing Time (Feyerabend, P.K.) 15 Kingsley, Charles 23, 169, 177 knowledge: acquisition of 24–25; of feelings 195–96; Mill on 190; selfknowledge 18–19, 141; skepticism about 189; technical knowledge, tragedy of 241–44; theory of 235–36; of truth, grace and 52–53
Index Knox, T.M. 12, 232–34, 237–38, 245 language: autobiography and 111; in Collingwood’s writing 235–36, 248, 250n18; distortions of 211, 228n10; learning of 52, 61n40; logical language 253; mataphysical language of force 211; of ‘minimal vocabularies’ 256; Nietzsche on language and the ‘seduction of words’ 211–12; of rhetoric 116; and signs in Augustine 51–52; themes of 16; of Zarathustra 215–17 Laon, Ralph of 65 Leibniz, Gottfried 110–11, 112 Levi, A.W. 182 The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself (Vico, G.) 10, 109, 111, 112, 118n2 liturgy 15 Locke, John 2, 97, 121, 170–71, 174 Lodoli, Carlo 111 Loisy, Alfred 178 Loyola, Ignatius of 15 Lunn, Arnold 178 Malleson, Lady Constance 259, 260, 261 Manicheism 25, 42–46, 47, 60n35 Marcel, Gabriel 170 Marchi, Dudley 76 Marmontel, Jean-Francois 182–84, 188, 199 Mathien, Thomas 1, 6, 8, 14 Maurice, F.D. 186 Mazlish, Bruce 182 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes) 99, 100, 101–2, 105; ascensional character of meditation 102; religious aura 101 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes, R.) 9, 15 Melancholic Epistemology (Graham, G.) 207n7 Mémoires d’un père (Marmontel, J-F.) 182–83, 188 Memoirs of Montparnasse (Glassco, J.) 17 memory 8, 16, 94, 223; autobiography and 28, 149, 162n17, 211, 264; balance between forgetting and 217; checking on others’ 257; memory-driven
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responses 27; Montaigne on 81, 88–89, 95n4; power of 28; refreshment of 260; unreliable nature of 211 Mersenne, Marin 99, 100, 101 metaphysics 48, 112–14, 143, 149, 205, 237, 244–46, 248n10; of Christian analysis 228n7; Disputationes metaphysicae 110; dualistic 150, 163n29; metaphysical parts in analysis 197, 199; Newman on 176; Rousseau’s 152, 161n7, 162n19 Methodism 185, 187 The Methods of Ethics (Sidgwick, H.) 2 Mill, James 11, 189–93, 194–95; ideas, notion of 196–97; passionate emotions, madness and 194; on virtuous action 191–93 Mill, John Stuart 2, 11, 14, 20–21, 23, 26, 170, 180–208, 236; acknowledgement of debts for intellectual and moral development 186; ‘active powers’ of human mind 191; analysis, corrosive effects of 195; artificial and natural associations 190; associationist principles as framework for action 180, 189–90; associationist psychology 198; associationist-utilitarian view, soundness of 199–200; chemical mode of composition (of ideas) 197–98; death of father, effect of 181–83; depression (melancholia) of 180, 181–82, 187, 195; despondency, self-reproach and the removal of 183, 188; duty, sense of 195; on education 190; on educational improvement 186; empiricism in 187–88; ethics, rationalist and revolutionary 193; Every Thing, notion of 197; Everyman in writing of 184; feelings, permanent association of 199; feelings and associations 195–98; feelings and emotional impoverishment 194–95; genetic theory of human mind 189; happiness and utilitarianism 188; ‘higher’ motives and pleasures 191; ideas, mental processes and 197; ideas in associanist theory 190–91; instructiveness as objective 185–86; integrant parts of ideas 197; introspective analysis 189, 197–98; James Mill on virtuous action 191–93; on knowledge 190;
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knowledge of feelings 195–96; learning through classical conditioning 189; limits of education, discovery of 180–82; mature career of 180; mechanical mode of composition (of ideas) 197; mental history, crisis in 181, 186–87, 201, 204–5; moral feelings, experiences of 201–2; moral reformer 202–3; moral skepticism 193; object in life 193; pain, pleasure and associations 189–90, 195; personal psychology of Mill’s teachers 200; poetry of Wordsworth, relief from depression through 187–88; political and moral science 203–4; psychological analysis 189, 192, 195, 196, 198; psychological development 204; psychological laws of association 199; reasons for writing the Autobiography 185–86; reconciliation at loss of father 183; recording phases and patterns of change 186; on relationship of father and mother 184–85; religion and 205–6; representative significance for 185; selfcultivation, feelings and rules in 201–2; service, sense of obligation to public good 195; skepticism about knowledge 189; social intercourse, shared feelings in 188; sympathetic ties and social relationships 193–94, 202–3; sympathy, feelings of benevolence and 199, 200; sympathy, moral being and 202; sympathy, self-reproach and pleasures of 184, 188; utilitarian moral philosophy 191–92; virtuous action 191–93 Milner, Joseph 172 modernity, crisis of 241–44 Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) 106 Le Monde (Descartes, R.) 24 Monica, mother of Augustine 32, 50, 51, 56 Montaigne, Michel de 2, 7, 9, 76–96; adoring spectator of great souls of antiquity 82–83; on aspiration and the limitation of the natural state 84–85; bashfulness of 77; on the Bible 84; boastfulness of 77, 86; classicist roots 83; ‘common’ Montaigne, distance between ancient paragons and 83–84; commonplace soul 78; contemporariness of 76;
cruelty in humans, passionate against 83; failings and inadequacies, self-perception of 80–81; on faith 84; on great souls of antiquity, and personal contrast with 84–85, 86–87, 92; higher sensibilities and common baseness 82–86; honesty of 79; humility and vanity 80; laughability in 81; meanings of vanity 78–81; on memory and judgment 81, 88–89, 95n4; ‘middling soul’ justification for autobiography 87–88, 92; moderation in outlook of 79; modesty in 87–88; moral problem of vanity 78–79; pleasure, emphasis on 81; portraiture, style and structure of 93–94; pride and vanity, conceptual separation of 79–80; Pyrrhonism in 83–84, 95n11; religious devotion, separation from sense-making relationship to life 84; Renaissance gentleman 76–77, 82; rhetorical problem of vanity 78–79, 94; self-disparagement of 81, 85; self-editing 77; self-portraiture, justification 86–89, 93; self-recriminations 88, 89; sensitivity to context of 79; simplicity in 86; solicitation of response in 92–93; on spiritual giants 84–85; stoicism in 87, 90, 92; validation of others, self-worth and 87, 91; vanity a vice of folly and ingratitude 80; vanity and inter-subjective dependency 89–94; vanity and original sin 80; vanity of autobiography 77–78, 88, 91–92, 94; writing, frivolous effeminacy of 76–77; writing, preoccupation with 77; see also Essais Moore, G.E. 15 More, Thomas 1 Morrell, Lady Ottoline 255, 259, 260, 262, 263 Mortagne, Walter of 72 Mourning and Melancholia (Freud, S.) 181 Mozart, W.A. 97 My Own Life (Hume, D.) 120–21, 221–22 Narcissus 93 The New Leviathan (Collingwood, R.G.) 230, 238, 239, 242 New Science (Vico, G.) 10, 25, 112, 114, 117, 118
Index Newman, Jay 11, 168 Newman, John Henry 8, 11, 14, 23, 168–79; autobiographer and philosopher, interrelated aspects 168–69; autobiographical dimension of Grammar 175–76; character traits 177; Christian apologetics 174, 178; ecclesiastical controversialist 168; empiricism of 170–72, 174; existentialism in 170, 171; God and 169, 175; Grammar, motivations for writing 173–74; intolerance of 176–77; introspective investigation of mental processes 174; liberalism, crusades against 177–78; modesty in egotism 177, 178; personal integrity 169; on philosophy 168; rationalism, aversion to 170–71; reasoning processes of 173–74; religious reflection 169–70; self-consciousness of 176–77; self-contemplation 168; spiritual vocation, unity of 175; subjectivity, importance for 177–78; theological opinion in 172–73 Nicolini, Fausto 110 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 1, 6–7, 11–12, 15, 16, 19, 24, 27, 97, 211–27; affirmation of life in 216, 218; alienation and re-appropriation of autobiographical writing 212–15; asceticism, rejection of 217; autobiography in moment of recurrence 215–19; capacity to forget, praise for 217; communication and understanding in 225–26; eternal return in writings of 220–22; externalization of texts 214–15; ‘history’ of 212–13; immortality in writings of 220–22, 224–26; interpretive powers of 213–15; on language and the ‘seduction of words’ 211–12; life and death transactions 219–24; meaning and intention in 213–15, 226–27; names in writings of 214, 219; narrator-character, relationship between author and 224–27; positive outlook of 216–17; productions of other authors, relationship to 223–24; quest for the perfect reader 224–27; radical individuality of 225; recasting himself in writings 224; reconfiguration of autobiographical
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writing 212; rhetoric of Christhood in 218–19, 221; sacrifice and redemption in writing of 217–18, 220–23; ‘self’ and ressentiment 211; self-textualization in writings of 224–25; subjectivity, critique of 212; sufferings of 216; see also Ecce Homo Normore, Calvin G. 7, 8–9, 64 Notre Dame, Paris 65–66 Oakeshott, Michael 237 O’Donnell, James 35 Old Testament 39 Olin Foundation 7 On Dialectic (Augustine) 52 On Free Choice of the Will (Augustine) 38, 40, 51, 52–53 On Liberty (Mill, J.S.) 2 On True Religion (Augustine) 38 L’Ouvrage du loisir (Christina of Sweden) 105 Pascal, Blaise 136, 170 Passions of the Soul (Descartes, R.) 99, 100, 105 Patristic fathers 249n11 Peano, Guiseppe 253 Pelagius 80 periautography 111, 117 Peter of Spain 110 Peter the Venerable 68, 73 philosophical anthropology 26–27 philosophical writing: autobiographical literature by thinkers 3–4, 14–29; contemporary standards in 14; essay forms 2, 3; expectations of professional philosophers 14; history in context of perceptions of the present 68–69; history of ideas 4–5; impersonal technicality of contemporary 1; Leibniz’s idea on publishing stories of discoveries 110–11; periautography 111, 117; professional standards 3; quasi-theatrical fictions 1; recontextualization of thought in autobiography 5; research reports 3; variety of forms of 2, 3; writing as a philosopher 109–10 The Philosophy of History (Collingwood, R.G.) 250n21
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Index
Pietropaolo, Domenico 8, 10, 109 Plato 1, 3, 14, 16, 20, 22, 27, 70, 97–98, 104, 156, 193, 234, 236 Platonism 37, 38, 42, 44, 48, 50–51, 54, 59n13, 64, 184; Platonic geometry 107 Plotinus 5–6 Plutarch 77, 82 Poitiers, Berenger of 73 Political Economy (Mill, J.S.) 203–4 Politics (Aristotle) 91 Ponticianus 49, 50, 56 Popkin, Richard Henry 15 Porcia, Giovannartico di 10, 110, 113; intellectual biographies, project to publish 111 Pratt, Samuel 134 Presbyterianism 133, 137 The Present Need of a Philosophy (Collingwood, R.G.) 240–41, 246 Priestley, Joseph 189 Principia Mathematica (Whitehead, A.N. and Russell, B.) 255–56, 262 The Principles of Art (Collingwood, R.G.) 231 The Principles of History (Collingwood, R.G.) 233, 234–35 Principles of Philosophy (Descartes, R.) 99, 100, 105–6 Principles of Social Reconstruction (Russell, B.) 264–65 Progetto ai letterati d’Italia per scrivere le loro vite (Porcia, G. di) 111 Proust, Marcel 7, 97 providentialist determinism 71 Psalms 15, 34, 57, 59n12 psychology 88, 230–31, 242; associationist psychology 198; conscience, psychological account of 160; Hume’s psychological theory 125; moral psychology 129, 136; Newman’s psychological theories 160; personal psychology of Mill’s teachers 200; psychological analysis 189, 192, 195, 196, 198; psychological century 205; psychological data 250; psychological development 148, 204; psychological force 201; psychological interpretation 141; psychological laws 199, 258–59;
psychologically decisive places 214; religion and 205–6 Pyrrhonism 83–84, 95n11 Quine, Willard Van Orman 15, 264 Raccolta di opuscoli scientifici e filologici 111 Rawlsian reasoning 15 Reconsiderations (Augustine) 33, 34 Rée, Paul 214 Reid, Thomas 2 The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics (Russell, B.) 258 Religion and Philosophy (Collingwood, R.G.) 238 Republic (Plato) 97–98, 156 Revaluation of All Values (Nietzsche, F.W.) 215 Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rousseau, J.J.) 10–11, 26, 141–65 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe, D.) 16 Romans, St Paul’s Letter to the 39, 54 Rorty, Amélie 4, 5, 19 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 7, 10–11, 14, 20, 24, 25, 27, 77, 88, 89, 94n2, 97, 211, 221; amour-propre 146, 155, 157; autobiographical concerns of the Reveries 141–42; of biography and history 148–49; of common good 144; comparative study of moral sentiments 159–60; of compassion 143–44; of conscience 150–51, 159–60; conspiratorial understanding of the world 155–57; of contradiction between men’s words and actions 148–49; ‘facts of nature,’ problem of 146–49; of faith 152; of faith in ‘reason’ 154; force as foundation of virtue 145; human nature, ‘natural’ and ‘religious’ accounts of 142; ‘illumination’ of 148–49; of immortality of the soul 151; of injustice 158–59; ‘inner sentiments,’ reason and 153–55; of judgment, maturity of 158; of justice 144, 151, 160; justice and universal conspiracy 155–56; malin génie 156–57; methodical examination of ‘inner sentiments’ 159–60; of moral duty 144, 151; of moral education 145; morality, ‘natural’ and ‘religious’ accounts of 142;
Index natural account of human nature and morality 143–46; of perfectibility 146–47; philosophical system of 141–42; of Providence 152; of reason and imagination 152; of reason and Providence 153; of reason and revelation 153; religious account of human nature and morality 149–53; of revalation 149–50; Reveries as ‘model of the heart’ 155–60; Reveries as philosophy and art 141–65; self-knowledge 141; of self-love 143–44, 145–46, 151, 160; of sentiment and acquired ideas 157–59; of sentiment and reason 150, 152, 153–55; of sincerity or ‘good faith’ 157–58; theoretical concerns of the Reveries 142; universal ostracism of 141, 155–56; of universality 148–49; virtue, conception of 142, 145, 161n11; of well-being and divine and natural order 151–52 Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues (Rousseau, J.J.) 149, 160n1 Rubinoff, Lionel 12, 230 Russell, Bertrand 5, 7, 12–13, 15, 16, 19, 253–65; autobiographical writing, methodology in 256–59; autobiography and philosophy of 253, 261–65; axiomatic systems 256; collaborative work in philosophical analysis 255–56; data gathering in philosophical analysis 256; empiricism in 260; financial difficulties 259–60; logical constructions, inferred entities and 258; method of 253; motivation for autobiographical writing 264–65; on names 254–55; neutral monism 258–59; passion in autobiographical writings 261–63; on philosophical problems 255–56; philosophical propositions, properties of 257–58; physics, on elementary truths of 255; piecemeal approach to philosophical analysis 256; symbolic logic 253; theory of definite descriptions 254 Russell, Edith Finch 261 Russell, Francis 259 St Ambrose 25, 44, 47, 56 St Anselm (Anselm of Canterbury) 65, 74 St Jerome 72–73
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St Paul 39, 49, 51, 54 Salomé, Lou 217 Santayana, George 230 Sartre, Jean-Paul 7, 15, 244 Satires (Horace) 90 Saurez, Francis 110 Schilpp, Paul Arthur 15, 256, 264–65 Schopenhauer, Arthur 214 Schopenhauer as Educator (Nietzsche, F.W.) 214 On Scientific Method in Philosophy (Russell, B.) 12–13, 257 Scito Te Ipsum (Abelard, P.) 71 self-consciousness 176–77 self-contemplation 168 self-criticism 231–32, 239–40 self-cultivation 201–2 self-disparagement 81, 85 self-editing 77 self-evaluation 129–31 self-improvement and the achievement of wisdom 38 self-love 143–44, 145–46, 151, 160 self-making process in humans 244–46 self-meditation 117, 118 self-perception of failings and inadequacies 80–81 self-perfection 38–39 self-portraiture, justification of 86–89, 93 self-recrimination 88, 89 self-reflection 116–17 self-reproach 184, 188 self-textualization 224–25 self-therapy 34 self-worth and validation of others 87, 91 Seneca 21, 67, 70, 72, 73, 99 Sepoy Mutiny 180 Seventh Letter (Plato) 14 Shipley, Glen 230, 247n2 Sidgwick, Henry 2 Simplician 39, 48, 56 To Simplician (Augustine) 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 48, 51 sincerity 6, 8, 17, 20, 38, 89, 170; of Descartes 100–101; impossibility of establishing 211; personal 20; Rousseau on 157–58 skepticism 37, 42, 64 Slater, John G. 7, 12–13, 253
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Index
Smith, Adam 120–21, 131, 134–38; virtue, moderation and 135–37 Smith, Alys Whitall 259 Social Contract (Rousseau, J.J.) 157 Socrates 16, 20, 22, 27, 70–71, 82, 97–98, 99, 153, 193, 239–40; Socratic paradox 98, 106–7 Soloman, Robert 3 Speculum Mentis (Collingwood, R.G.) 231, 236, 238, 239, 240 Spengemann, William 114 Spinoza, Baruch 97 Spiritual Exercises (Loyola) 15 Stahan, William 120–21 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 211 Sterling, John 186 Sterne, Laurence 16 stoicism 37, 54, 70–71, 71–72, 73, 87, 90, 92 Story of Philosophy (Durant, W.) 261 Stubbs Historical Society 234 Summulae logicales (Peter of Spain) 110 Symposium (Plato) 104, 224 Taylor, Harriet 186, 200–201, 203 The Teacher (Augustine) 51, 52–53 Teaching Christianity (Augustine) 52, 54 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith, A.) 135–36, 137 Thompson, Samantha 7, 31 Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (Berkeley, G.) 1 Thucydides 147 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche, F.W.) 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 228n6 Timaeus (Plato) 70 Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth, W.) 196 Tolstoi, Leo 97 A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Berkeley, G.) 171 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume, D.) 10, 121–22, 125–26, 128, 132, 171 Tristram Shandy (Sterne, L.) 16 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, F.W.) 215 Tyrrell, George 178 University of Toronto 6 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche, F.W.) 216–17, 223
Unwin, Stanley 260–61 Utilitarianism (Mill, J.S.) 2, 191 Utopia (More, T.) 1 van der Dussen, W.J. 233, 234 vanity: Aristotle on 89–90, 91; Augustine on vanity and pride 90–91; of autobiography 77–78, 88, 91–92, 94; God and 80; Hume on 127, 130; humility and 80; and inter-subjective dependency 89–94; meanings of 78–81; moral problem of 78–79; and original sin 80; performative contradiction of 89–90; pride and vanity, conceptual separation of 79–80; rhetorical problem of 78–79, 94; a vice of folly and ingratitude 80 Verene, Donald 6 Versailles Treaty 243 Viau, Théophile de 103 Vico, Giambattista 6, 8, 10, 16, 25–26, 109–19; allegorical self-resemblence 118; allegory and autobiography 114–16; autodidacticism 114; on biography 112; diachronic view of humanity 117–18; education, deep concern for 110; history, universal and particular 117–18; life of Antonio Carafa 112; mental capacity, acquisition of 113–14; narrative articulation 115–16; narrator and protagonist 115; passionate prose of 118; past, seeds of present in the 115; philosophical function of tipics, acquaintance with 114; philosophical research in autobiography 109; philosophico-rhetorical differences 112–13; philosophy by self-narration 115–17; poetry, responsibility of 113; professional life of 110; proficiency in topics, acquisition of 114; reflective understanding 115; reform movement in general pedagogy 110; rhetoric, argument in defence of 113–14; selfmeditation 117, 118; self-reflection 116–17; synchronic view of humanity 117; synecdochic allegory 116, 117; thought, acquisition of habit of 113–14; truth and candour of 112; unpublished material (subsequently
Index published as addendum) 109–10; writing as a philosopher 109–10; see also The Life of Giambattista Vico, written by himself Victorinus 48 Villarosa, Marquis of 109 Vita (Vico, G.) 6, 16, 25 Voltaire 214 voluntas 106–7 Wagner, Richard 214 Weil, Simone 5 Whewell, William 2 Whitefield, George 187, 189, 205 Whitehead, Alfred North 255
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will: freedom of will, accountability and 40–41; intellect and 105–6 Wilson, Fred 7, 11, 26 Winter, Ian 89 Witnessing Philosophers (Rorty, A.) 19 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1, 97, 263 Wolff, Robert Paul 3 Wordsworth, William 186, 187, 193, 195–96, 198–99, 200, 201–2 Wright, Douglas G. 1, 6, 7, 9, 11–12, 76, 211 Write to Learn (Edwards, A.M.) 3 Xenaphon 20
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