Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism

Imperfect Garden

THE LEGACY OF HUMANISM

Imperfect Garden

THE LEGACY OF HUMANISM

by

Tzvetan Todorov

TRANSLATED BY CAROL COSMAN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2002 © by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Todorov, Tzvetan, 1939—

[Jardin imparfait. English]

Imperfect garden : the legacy of humanism / by Tzvetan Todorov ; translated

by Carol Cosman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-1-40082-490-8

1. Humanism—France—History. 2. Individualism—France—History. 3. Social values—France—History. 4. Philosophy, French. I. Title.

B778 .T5613 2002

144'.0944—dc212001036868

2001036868

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This work was published in conjunction with the French Ministry of Culture — National Center of Books.

This book has been composed in Sabon with Centaur Display

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

www.pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my philosopher friends, Luc and Andrè

C o n t e n t s

Prologue The Hidden Pact

Chapter 1 The Interplay of Four Families

Chapter 2 The Declaration of Autonomy

Chapter 3 Interdependence

Chapter 4 Living Alone

Chapter 5 The Ways of Love

Chapter 6 Individual :Plurality and Universality

Chapter 7 The Choice of Values

Chapter 8 A Morality Made for Humanity

Chapter 9 The Need for Enthusiasm

Epilogue The Humanist Wager

Bibliography

I m p e r f e c t G a r d e n

T H E L E G A C Y O F H U M A N I S M

Prologue

The Hidden Pact

Satan proposed the first pact to Jesus. After forcing him to fast forty days in the desert, he gave him a momentary vision of all the kingdoms on earth. Then he told him: All this is in my power. Yet I am prepared to grant it to you. I ask only one small gesture in return: that you recognize me as your master; if you do this, all is yours. But Jesus replied, I do not want this power, for I wish only to serve God, and his kingdom is not of this world. Jesus thus rejected the pact. His successors, however, accepted it after a while. And from Constantine to Louis XVI, for more than fourteen centuries, they strove to reign over the devil’s kingdoms. Somewhat later, a Russian seer claimed that if Jesus returned to earth one day, he would be roundly reproached by the Grand Inquisitor for his rejection: Men are weak, the Inquisitor would have said, faith in God is not enough, God’s law is worth more.

The second pact was proposed in the fifteenth century by an emissary of the devil, Mephistopheles, to a proud and ambitious man, a magician, necromancer, and conjuror called Johann (or perhaps Georg) Faust, who had attempted to penetrate the secrets of life and death. Since you are so curious, the devil’s emissary said to him, I propose a bargain: You will have access to all knowledge of the world, no mystery will resist you; and you are surely aware that knowledge leads to power. In return, I am not asking you to make a grand declaration of submission: I require only one thing, a little odd, it’s true: at the end of twenty-four years (but that is a long time! you might not live to be so old), you will belong entirely to me, body and soul. Unlike Jesus, Faust accepted the terms of the contract. He therefore enjoyed infinite knowledge and garnered unanimous acclaim. But it is said that during the last years of the pact he became disgruntled, lost his interest in secrets, and never left his house; he prayed that the devil would forget him. But the devil does not forget, and the day the contract expired he carried the horrified Faust away, wailing in vain.

The third pact dates from nearly the same era as Faust’s, but it has one peculiar feature: its very existence was not revealed at the moment it went into effect. The devil’s ruse this time consisted of keeping the other party to the contract, Modern Man, as humanity was then called, in the dark, allowing him to believe that he was gaining new advantages thanks to his own efforts, and that there would be no price to pay. This time, what the devil was offering was not power or knowledge but will. Modern Man would have the possibility of willing freely, of acquiring mastery of his own will and living his life as he wished. The devil hid the price of freedom so that man should develop a taste for it and have no desire to renounce it at a later date—then find himself obliged to clear his debt.

Modern Man—Renaissance Man, Enlightenment Man—took some time to realize the full extent of his possibilities. Some of his representatives asked only for the freedom to organize their affective life to their own taste. They would have the right to choose a life with the people they cared for rather than following the laws of blood or those of the city, or their parents’ attachments. They might also freely choose their place of residence: let will and not chance decide the framework of their lives! Later, other representatives of Modern Man found the pleasure of freedom too sweet to be confined to only personal life. They demanded that reason should be liberated too: that it should no longer be obliged to recognize the authority of tradition transmitted by the memory of men. Tradition could continue to rule in civic matters or in dealings with God, but reason should be free to note the true and the false. Thereafter, the only knowledge declared to be certain was knowledge that had been reached by the natural lights of reason. Thus a purely human science was born, quite unlike the omniscience of Doctor Faust.

Having tasted these two freedoms—the freedom to submit exclusively to his own affections, to his own reason—Modern Man was tempted by a new extension of his will. He had yet to assume the vast domain of his public actions. Only an action performed in freedom, on the strength of his will (this is what he would later call his responsibility), was now declared moral; only the political regime chosen by the will of its subjects—now called democracy—was judged legitimate. No domain now escaped the intervention of the will, which could enjoy its freedom in every circumstance. During this time—a good two centuries—the devil did not reveal that one day he would demand his due.

In the course of these two centuries, the conquest of freedom was the business of studious thinkers who confined their arguments to the pages of their books. A change took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, when a few men of action, discontented with the state of the world around them, perused the ideas hidden in these books and decided to let them out. They admired the beautiful new principles discovered by their elders and wanted to live in harmony with them rather than subject them to intellectual reflection. The American Revolution and the French Revolution were accompanied not only (in the first case) by a Declaration of Independence, but also by a Declaration of Autonomy never publicly announced, of adherence to the principle according to which no authority is superior to the will of men: the will of the people, the will of individuals.

Now the devil, judging that Modern Man had swallowed the bait, chose this moment to reveal the pact and announce that it was time to start paying for his past bounty. Even before the end of the eighteenth century, and of course repeatedly since, he has continued to present his bill. He did not wish, however, to appear in person but preferred to inspire several dark prophets, whom he charged with revealing to people the total sum of their debt. If you want to keep your liberty, these prophets said to their contemporaries, you will have to pay a triple price, first by separating yourself from your God, then from your neighbor, and finally from yourself.

No more God: You will have no reason to believe that a being exists above you, an entity whose value would be superior to your own life; you will have no more ideals or values—you will be a materialist. No more neighbor: other men, beside and no longer above you, will continue to exist but they will no longer matter to you. Your circle will shrink: first to your acquaintances, then to your immediate family, and finally to your self; you will be an individualist. You will then try to cling to your self, but this too will be threatened by dislocation. You will be swept by currents beyond your control; you will believe you are deciding, choosing, and willing freely, when in truth these subterranean forces will do it for you, and you will lose the advantages that had seemed to justify all those sacrifices. This self will be nothing but an anomalous collection of impulses, an infinite dispersal; you will be an alienated, inauthentic being, no longer deserving to be called a subject.

When modern men (gradually joined by modern women) understood from these dark prophets the announcement of the pact to which they were party, they were divided. They could not agree on how to respond to what seemed to them at times a warning, at times a threat, and at times a curse. After the revelation of the contract, those who aired their opinions in public—scholars, writers, politicians, or philosophers—grouped together into several large families, according to the responses they wanted to make to this pact. These intellectual families still exist in our time, even if overlappings, defections, and adaptions have some-what muddied the picture.

The first family, the easiest to identify, unites those who think that the devil is right: that the price of freedom truly includes God, society, and the self, that the price is too high and therefore it is better to renounce freedom. More precisely, the members of this family do not advocate a pure and simple return to the old society, because they see quite well that the world around them has changed and that such a return would imply the same exercise of freedom and will that they otherwise condemn. But they regret the previous state of things and try to preserve vestiges of it while opposing the demands of a more radical modernity. This is the family of conservatives: those who would like to live in the new world while appealing to the values of the old.

The other families, reduced here to three, are united in accepting and welcoming the advent of modernity, and for this reason they have some-times been confused with one another. However, their differences are no less crucial, and their reactions to the devil’s challenges have nothing in common. These modern families are the humanists, the individualists, and the proponents of scientism (not necessarily those who practice science).

When the scientists hear the claims of the devil, they dismiss them without batting an eye. Don’t worry, they reply, there will be no price to pay because there never was any freedom. Or rather, the only freedom is that of knowledge. Thanks to human capacities of observation and reasoning, therefore thanks to purely human science, it is possible to penetrate all the secrets of nature and history. Now, whoever has knowledge has power, as Faust already discovered. Science leads to technology; if we master the laws of the existing world, we can also transform it. As for choosing, and apart from choosing to know, one’s freedom is very limited: men are unwittingly led by biological and historical laws, and what they take for their freedom is, more often than not, only their ignorance. Even the values they claim inspire their actions essentially flow from these ineluctable laws of the world. If God, society, and the self participate in human identity, nothing will extract them from it; if they do not, there will be nothing to regret. In either case, the devil will turn away with his hands empty.

The reaction of the individualists, members of the second, resolutely modern family, is quite different. It consists of saying: You believe that our freedom entails the loss of God, society, and the self? But for us this is not a loss, it is a further liberation. Your description of our state is correct, but rather than chilling us (or worse, making us wish to turn back), we shall try to push it even further. Let man affirm himself in his essential solitude, in his freedom from all moral constraint, in his unlimited dispersal! Let him affirm his will to power, let him serve his own interests: the greatest good will emerge for him, and that is all that matters. Instead of mourning we should shout for joy. What you describe as a sickness (or as the painful counterpart of a hidden pact) is in reality the beginning of a celebration.

For scientistic thinkers, there is no price to pay for freedom, for there is no freedom in the usual sense but only a new mastery of nature and history based on knowledge. For the individualists, there is no price to pay because what we have lost merits no regrets, and we shall carry on very well without common values, without encumbering social ties, without a stable and coherent self. The humanists, the last large family, think, on the contrary, that freedom exists and that it is precious, but at the same time they appreciate the benefit of shared values, life with others, and a self that is held responsible for its actions; they want to continue to enjoy freedom, then, without having to pay the price. The humanists take the devil’s threats seriously, but they do not concede that a pact was ever concluded, and they throw down a challenge to him in return.

In our part of the world, we are still living today under the sway of the devil’s threats. We cherish our freedom but we are afraid of living in a world without ideals or common values, a mass society populated by solitary individuals unfamiliar with love; we secretly—though not always knowingly—dread the loss of our identity. These fears and questionings persist. To come to terms with them, I have chosen to turn to the history of thought. Remembering the dwarf perched on the shoulders of giants, I wanted to defend myself against these threats by calling to my aid the thought of writers from that rather distant period when the unknown pact was concluded; to tell in some fashion the story of the invention of modernity, with its main characters—their adventures, conflicts, and alliances. I believe, moreover, that one of the modern intellectual families, the humanists, might be more helpful than the others in thinking about our present condition and overcoming its difficulties. And so this book is devoted to them.

The term humanist has several meanings, but we can say in a first approximation that it refers to the doctrines according to which man is the point of departure and the point of reference for human actions. These are anthropocentric doctrines, just as others are theocentric, and still others put nature or tradition in this central place. The term humanist figures, perhaps for the first time in French, in a passage by Montaigne in which he uses it to characterize his own practice, in contrast to that of the theologians. Though he grants the theologians their right to respect, and certainly to existence, he prefers to separate the two domains and reserve a new field for the humanists, which consists of strictly human activities or fantasies, of purely human writings, those concerning subjects that are matters of opinion, not matters of faith, treated in a lay not clerical manner (Essays, I, 56, 234).* The specificity of human affairs (in contrast to those that relate to God) is therefore the point of departure for humanist doctrine, even if it is not confined to that; its other ingredients will emerge in the course of the present investigation. This initial choice does not mean, as we shall also see, that man is granted unconditional esteem: Montaigne himself never forgets that human life is meant to remain an unfinished or imperfect garden (I, 20, 62).

To conduct this investigation to advantage, I have imposed limits on myself in time and space. I deal exclusively with humanists in the French tradition (an arbitrary limitation but a necessary one). Further-more, the texts I have read do not belong to the contemporary period. The thought of the authors who founded the doctrine has not been radically revised in the course of 150 years; moreover, it seems to me richer and subtler than the humanist vulgate, which can be glimpsed in the common discourse of our day. Humanism is the ideology under-pinning modern democratic states; but this very omnipresence makes it invisible or insipid. Because of this, although everyone today is more or less a humanist, the doctrine in its original form can still surprise and enlighten us. It seems to me that these classic authors had in a sense given a rejoinder to the dark prophets even before the prophecy had been formulated, while not limiting themselves, of course, to this response alone.

The humanist thought that I examine flourished during three strong periods: the Renaissance, the century of the Enlightenment, and the aftermath of the Revolution. Three authors embody these periods: Montaigne, who produced the first coherent version of the doctrine; Rousseau, in whom it reached its full flowering; and Benjamin Constant, who understood how to think about the new world that emerged from the revolutionary upheaval. I will turn to them to seek tools for thought that can serve us again today.

This book, in its way, participates in the history of thought. I say specifically thought and not philosophy, since its field is wider, closer to practice, and less technical than the other. The intellectual families that I identify are ideological rather than philosophical each of them is an aggregate of political and moral ideas, of anthropological and psycho-logical hypotheses, that participate in philosophy but are not limited to it. By choosing to study thought in itself, I am already committing my-self to the humanist family, since thought would not deserve to be examined separately if it were not free but only the mechanical product of a cultural community, a social class, a historical moment, or the biological necessities of the species.

Yet I must specify that what chiefly interests me is not to reconstruct the thought of Montaigne, Rousseau, Constant, and several others yet again; but while trying to read these authors attentively, to use them to build a model of humanist thought that is sometimes called an ideal type. My object of knowledge is not the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or Romanticism, but modern thought in its diversity, with humanism at its center, as it has manifested itself in each of these epochs. In other words, my project is typological rather than historical, even if I am convinced that the only useful typologies are those that help us to know history. For the same reason, I have renounced at the outset any concern with an exhaustive approach and opt most of the time not for the first formulation of a thought but rather for what I judge to be the most powerful or eloquent.

These qualifications are even more necessary since the establishment of humanist doctrine is not—or not always—part of the conscious project of these authors. It is by meditating on various subjects, sometimes quite far removed from mine, such as the self or the world, the spirit of the law or political principles, that they establish as though in passing the tenets and nuances of this new thought. They imply humanism more than they state it outright. I am therefore led to divert their arguments from their original goal while trying not to betray them.

The use to which I mean to put these authors of the past is responsible for the way I read them—a dialogue with history rather than a history in the strict sense. I aspire to understand their thought and to convey its meaning more than to explain it by tracing its causes or reconstituting its original context. This desire to go downstream rather than upstream, and to stay in the realm of ideas, does not imply that I would consider the opposite choice illegitimate; it is simply not part of my present project.

Is there something anachronistic about bringing texts of the past to bear on a present discussion? Perhaps in this case it is a paradox of the critic, indeed of any historian just beginning his or her activity, since this critic, this historian, is always addressing his contemporaries and not those of his author. The commentators’ habitual squinting condemns them to tack continually from one dialogue to the other, from author to reader; the balance they attempt is a gamble. Moreover, the thinkers of the past aimed both at their contemporaries, with whom they shared the same historical context, and at future readers, representatives of humanity as a whole; they addressed themselves both to the present and to eternity. So at the risk of displeasing pure historians as well as pure ideologues, I persist in believing that the past can help us to think about the present.

By relying in this way on the history of thought in order to advance my own reflections, I am pursuing (and perhaps, personally, completing) an inquiry begun in 1979 that led to my publication, in 1989, of On Human Diversity, a work in which other humanist themes were already evoked, notably that of universality; these two books are therefore, in certain respects, complementary.

*Wherever possible, material quoted from other sources is from the standard English translations of the works, which are listed in the bibliography. All other quotations are by the translator of the present volume.

Chapter 1

The Interplay of Four Families

A revolution took place in the mind of Europeans—a slow revolution, since it took several centuries—which led to the establishment of the modern world. To grasp it in its most general sense, we can describe it as the passage from a world whose structure and laws were preexisting and immutable givens for every member of society, to a world that could discover its own nature and define its norms itself. The members of the old society gradually learned their assigned place in the universe, and wisdom led them to accept it. The inhabitant of contemporary society does not reject everything passed down by tradition but wants to know the world on her own, and demands that whole swathes of existence should be governed by the principles she chooses. The elements of her life are no longer all givens in advance; some of them are chosen.

Before this revolution, an act was declared just and praiseworthy because it conformed either to nature (that of the universe as well as that of man) or to divine will. These two justifications can sometimes conflict and sometimes be reconciled (this is sometimes described as the rivalry between Athens and Jerusalem); but both require that human beings should submit to an authority external to them: nature, like God, is not accessible except through common wisdom or religion—a tradition accepted and transmitted by society without one’s consent. The universe one inhabits, including its human laws, is based on an else-where upon which this particular person has no purchase. It was revolutionary to claim that the best justification of an act, one that makes it most legitimate, issues from man himself: from his will, from his reason, from his feelings. The center of gravity shifts, here, from cosmos to anthropos, from the objective world to the subjective will; the human being no longer bows to an order that is external to him but wishes to establish this order himself. The movement is therefore double: a disenchantment of the world and a sacralization of man; values, removed from one, will be entrusted to the other. The new principle, whose consequences may still affect us, is responsible for the present face of our politics and our law, our arts and our sciences. This principle also pre-sides over the modern nation-states, and if we accept them, we cannot deny the principle without becoming incoherent. On the other hand, we can do so in the name of a return to the supremacy of religion (as in theocratic fundamentalism) or to the primacy of a natural order that reserves no special place for man (as in certain ecological utopias).

Today we readily agree to describe this passage from the Ancients to the Moderns, which began in the Renaissance, in more or less similar terms. Consensus disappears, however, the moment we begin to analyze its effects. My working thesis is as follows: Modernity itself is not homogeneous; the criticism to which it has been subjected has revealed several tendencies within it that constitute the framework of social thought in which we are living today. For this reason, I find it disconcerting to use a single word to designate these reactions, such as modernity, or individualism, or liberalism, or rationality, or subjectivity, or "Western," especially since the amalgam imposed by such terms is often used to polemical purpose. I call each of these major tendencies a family, both because the various representatives of one family each have their own peculiarities, and because alliances between members of distinct families are always possible. These families are four in number, and they were clearly outlined by the second half of the eighteenth century. Condorcet, Sade, Constant, and Bonald were all born in the middle of the century, between 1740 and 1767; and they embody these four distinct families, which appear quite distinctly in the aftermath of the Revolution, when those who reject it begin to challenge the mode of thought that made it possible. This does not mean, of course, that our families do not have their roots in a much earlier tradition.

It is always awkward to regroup the thought of individual authors under generic labels. No one likes words ending in ism, and for good reason: every regrouping has something violent and arbitrary about it (I myself hesitated until the last moment to decide whether it was fairer to speak of three, four, or five major modern families); someone can always challenge you with intermediate or hybrid cases. Every authentic thinker has his or her individuality, and it is a simplification to amalga-mate them with others; every work itself is unique and deserves to be considered separately. Only disciples and epigones properly correspond to labels; the original thinkers always participate in more than one intellectual family—witness Montaigne or Rousseau. I am not unaware of the disadvantages of this procedure. I have decided, however, to use it because I also see its advantages. First, we must have at hand a common language in order to speak of the past (proper names are not enough); then, my acquaintance with the texts has convinced me, although it is impossible for me to prove it, that certain affinities, certain differences are more important than others and therefore justify this or that re-grouping. Finally, the amalgam of distinct families seems to me to be one of the chief obstacles to the lucid analysis of our current situation. That is why I would now like to evoke them in greater detail.

To begin with, we must recall the principal reproaches addressed to modernity as a whole; these will allow us, paradoxically, to identify the first modern family.

The Conservatives

In the wake of the French Revolution, voices were clearly heard condemning the earlier revolution, the revolution in thought. Its partisans had, of course, been challenged before; but this purely ideological debate remained limited to a particular author or an isolated theme. Once ideas were transformed into actions and institutions, they provoked a reaction of much greater intensity and unremitting resistance. Yes, the opposition maintained, it is possible to see individuals, like collectivities, as self-governing, but this freedom is too dangerous and its benefits insufficient to compensate for the havoc they wreak. It would be preferable to return to the earlier situation, with less freedom but without the new disadvantages.

We might say, then, that whatever the nuances in their different formulations, the advocates of this general argument always proceed from a position of conservation. At the same time, this position does not lead us back to the world of the Ancients, pure and simple: this return has become impossible in reality, and only the most extreme reactionaries reject the modern world as a whole. The usual conservatives also constitute a modern family, one that accepts a minimum of modernity, one for whom all the other modern families tend to merge and to deserve equal condemnation. The conservatives are those who think that modern men have sold their souls to the devil, and that they ought to regret it, indeed that they should attempt to buy it back. But this critique is not the way they define themselves. Their positive stance is to value and seek to preserve the existing order against revolutionaries and reformers on all sides—against reactionaries as well as progressives (the project of a conservative revolution is to them a contradiction in terms). What already exists deserves to exist; changes have, on the whole, more draw-backs than advantages. The conservatives privilege if not immobility, at least gradualism.

In finding a spokesman for this family, we have an abundance of choices, since conservative warnings have never ceased, from the Revolution until our day. To illustrate its variety, I have decided to keep two of its representatives from among the earliest, chosen by design for being as different from one another as possible. One is a theocrat, the other a democrat; yet the substance of their reproaches is very much the same.

The first is Viscount Louis de Bonald, declared enemy of the Revolution, who attacked it, beginning in 1796, in his treatise Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux, and who would develop his criticisms over the next three or four decades.

Bonald begins with what he considers a disastrous effect—revolutionary reality in France—and works his way back to its causes, which he finds in philosophy (Revolution, he assures us, is the freakish child of Philosophy and Atheism), the philosophy of Descartes and Rousseau, itself heir to the Reformation.

Where did the Revolution come from? From that doctrine which substituted the reason of each for the religion of all, and the calculations of personal interest for the love of the Supreme Being and his fellow men (Théorie, I, 494–95). Thought bears a heavy responsibility: before manifesting itself in action, freedom was in men’s minds. It acted like a corrosive agent in two directions, which Bonald always associates: love of God and love of men,