NOTES ON ENLIGHTENMENT AUTHORS
Introduction
To
extrapolate from an issue that the Norton editors bring up, we might say that
one the one hand, positing by means of rational inquiry a "universal
science of the mind " holds out the prospect of a truly intelligible order
of things, a full or nearly full understanding of humanity. Such an
accomplishment should, in turn, allow us to behave better and arrange our
societies to benefit nearly everybody. That seems to be the dream of our
leading Enlightenment leading: understanding human beings to the fullest
extent.
Of
course, if you posit a universal order, a universal way of thinking and
perceiving, a universal way that mankind ought to be and behave, as modern
rationalists and Enlightenment philosophers tend to do, abuse of that stance is
always possible. It's a fair criticism. If there's only one right
way, one superior way, every other way is wrong and inferior. Maybe that
accounts in part for arrogant acts like Napoleon and the French
Revolutionaries' attempt to export "freedom" all over Europe at the
point of guns, swords and cannon. Maybe it also has something to do with
the way Europeans felt little compunction later in the Nineteenth Century about
carving up large swaths of the earth in order to "civilize the natives."
And what if a totally rationalized society ends up, given sufficient
technology, being some kind of dystopian Big Brother World from which
individuals will have no means of escape? "Reason" could break
down to something like "ruthless technological proficiency."
In
saying the above, I hardly mean to join in the Humanism- and Enlightenment-bashing
fun that so often passes for brilliance in academic circles. Let's note
that one of the glories of the European Enlightenment and its afterlife is
exactly the capacity for critical self-reflection many philosophers and others
have demonstrated. Still, you can take that kind of criticism to the
point of madness, and we see that from time to time as well. So I don't
mean to suggest that we should abandon Reason as the light of the secular world.
After all, what else are we to embrace? Irrationalism? Violence?
Chaos? Accept my psychotic interpretation of any one of the world's great
religions or I'll murder you right now? No, I'll cast my lot with
promoting and using reason and science leavened with humility. And by the
way, many C18 intellectuals didn't praise or talk about reason exclusively --
not at all; they developed quite a fondness for discussing the role of the
"passions" in human affairs, and they thought the cultivation of our
finer feelings was essential to our well-being as individuals and collectively.
Of
note, too, in the introduction is the mention of C18 artistic form as
lending stability, as being an idealizing, improving power over against the
potentially chaotic revelatory effects of realism in art. We could say
that idealized representations of society and the human animal provide us with
what Oscar Wilde calls "beautiful forms for the imagination" to work
with, or we could call them pretty lies that mislead us about the awful present
or the necessary truth. Your call…. Art has long gone down both
paths, and several others; it will probably continue to do so for a long time
to come.
ENLIGHTENMENT
AUTHORS
Samuel Johnson
104.
Dr. Johnson was himself a high Anglican in terms of his religion, but he was
hardly stuffy about it. You can see that his five-part definition of the
verb "to enlighten" mixes a secular sensibility with a religious one,
one that contains overtones of a divine gift with more secular language like
"To instruct; to furnish with encrease of knowledge."
Immanuel Kant, "What Is
Enlightenment?" (1784)
105.
In essence, Immanuel Kant is saying that it's time for all of us to take the
training wheels off, so to speak. To put it very bluntly, he suggests
that most adults have the minds of children and that they are shamefully
satisfied with themselves for being so. He mockingly thanks the so-called
guardians of the people for inculcating and reinforcing this vile state of
affairs. It is difficult to think for yourself, and easy to let someone
else do it, so why not?
106.
Kant points out that taking the leap to free, rational thought and shedding
mere convention and authoritative opinion would be difficult for any single
individual, but very possible for the public. His famous remark on the
matter is, "indeed, if only freedom is granted, enlightenment is almost
sure to follow." As Abraham Lincoln will put it in the middle of the
next century, you can't fool all of the people all of the time, and there are
enough smart people out there to prove Mr. Lincoln right. This public
enlightenment will only happen slowly thanks to the vicious hold of ancient
privileges and biased ways of thinking – bad, childish habits of mind.
The public may even punish people who come to them promoting enlightenment.
Even so, the idea goes, progress will happen. We notice that Kant praises
Frederick the Great of Prussia as the only prince in the world who says,
"Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, but obey!"
Kant
makes a key distinction towards the end of this page and continuing onward: he
says that "The public use of one's reason must always be free."
The private use of it can sometimes be kept down, but a person speaking in his
or her public capacity has every right to exercise free speech and freedom of
thought. The examples that Kant provides are interesting – a soldier must
obey and not sit around debating orders, for example, and a preacher is bound
to preach in the accepted way without introducing purely personal ideas into
his sermons. Such people are discharging the duties of an office, we
might say, and therefore they are somewhat limited in what they can say.
But when they step outside the boundaries of the office, they may act as what
Kant calls scholars,
and this doesn't mean academic researchers. It seems instead to mean,
"public-spirited individuals acting and speaking in their own capacity."
Then you must allow and promote free speech and free thought to the maximum
extent. At base, Kant is calling for something that today would be called
a strong "public sphere," a place both literal and figurative where
people are free to speak, write and think as they believe they should, without
fear of getting either fired or fired upon. It's a safe space for free
and honest thought and speech. This is the very principle that the
individuals who recently attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical
magazine in Paris, rejected: they saw no reason to respect the right of French
magazine editors to publish material they considered insulting to their
religion. Nothing could be more contrary to Enlightenment values.
The
position of an academic, by the way, is an interesting one to consider because
Kant does not bring it up specifically. Personally, while I always try to
respect other people's methods of teaching, I have found that some small number
of instructors (especially very young ones) take their position as a platform
to push their own politics and worldview. I wouldn't overstate the
percentage who do this -- I actually think it's fairly small -- but nobody
should do it. It is an un-Kantian thing to do in that when you teach
(whether at a public or a private school), you are fulfilling a contractual
duty that involves helping people learn how to handle ideas in a sometimes
precise, sometimes imaginative, and above all fair-minded way. That is
what the humanities are all about, isn't it? Well, the exact contents of
one's lectures are not prescribed by this contractual obligation, as Jacques
Derrida gamely pointed out years ago, and so it is, strictly speaking,
impossible to carry out such contractual obligations to the letter. In a
sense, there is no letter to carry out.
All
the same, if I come to class and try to turn you all into registered Democrats,
or spend half my time saying terrible things about this or that politician,
wouldn't you find it annoying? Even if you happened to agree with me, I
would be trying to tell you what to think. And even if I didn't stoop so
low as to grade you on what I took to be your politics (I’m pretty sure almost
nobody takes things that far), I would still be acting like a
pulpit-bully rather than trying to help you arrive at your own reasoned view of
things. Humility is in order – I am not here to browbeat you into
accepting my outlook; if I tried to do that, it probably wouldn't work anyhow,
and in any case it would not serve the cause of enlightenment. Large-scale
public education, it's fair to say, is part of a continuing Enlightenment
project.
Of
course, being too rigid about this sort of thing would also be
counterproductive – everybody knows the teacher has opinions, and it's okay to
mention them on occasion, in context; college classrooms are not full of
three-year-olds, and there's nothing wrong with pointing out that one's views
come from a particular direction and that they are presently shaping what one
says about Kant, or Dr. Johnson, or whomever we are talking about. That's
just "truth in advertising," so to speak. And certainly,
teachers and other such professionals should be free as "scholars" in
the specifically Kantian sense, to write and talk about whatever they please.
Just not within the confines of the classroom, where their duty is to cover the
material honestly and without pretentious or tendentious bias. That would
be my interpretation of Kant's viewpoint, and I share it myself.
You
can always bring up extreme examples that challenge the purity of such schemes:
what if, for example, a professor publishes an op-ed piece in the local
newspaper brazenly insisting that the Holocaust never occurred? Or
praising extremism and violence targeting the United States? If that were
to happen -- and I think there have been similar instances, though I don't have
any particular ones in mind -- what would the appropriate response be? I
mean, this person may be speaking out on his or her own time and not on the
university's, but it would hardly go over well to have an avowed anti-Semite or
an extremist fanatic teaching one's classes, would it? Would it be
acceptable for a school to fire such a professor, even if he or she doesn't
propagate those views in a specifically academic context?
Moreover,
quite aside from academia, what should we think about someone like Edward Snowden,
who allegedly used his position in relation to America's security apparatus to
"out" some of the country's darker secrets regarding recent wars and
the War on Terror? How does this fit into Kant's scheme of public and
private discourse? If the accounts are correct, was Snowden just acting
wrongly as a private individual with contractual obligations to keep his trap
shut no matter what he came across, or was he more like a whistleblower version
of the Kantian scholar disseminating knowledge of things that much of the
public is now glad it knows about its own government? What kind of
government does highly questionable things and then threatens citizens with
charges of treason in the name of "security"? Is that something
a republic or a democracy should do? Milton, we might note, said tyrants
always invoke necessity (read: security, order, keeping us safe) as the
prime cause for their worst offenses against liberty and human dignity. I
don't have a final answer -- I am just bringing it up as a consequential matter
having to do with the parameters of free speech. There are always
"rules" in society. Are there instances where one may feel
bound to break them, consequences be damned? (See also the Daniel
Ellsberg affair with regard to the Nixon Era and the Vietnam War -- another
famous "whistleblower" case.) How much is "free speech"
worth if it's always bound to be more or less inconsequential, safe, as if the
public sphere were some kind of action-free bubble? Well, before I move
on, I should mention that discussing these kinds of things is partly what is
meant by enlightened debate – you have to be able to talk about such matters
without expecting the world (or the government) to bash you over the head for
it.
107.
At the bottom of the page Kant makes an interesting point – even the views and
practices of great institutions like the church may and do change over time,
so, says our author, it would make no sense to bind a group of clergyman to a
specific ideas for all time. I think that is evidence of humility – it is
in the nature of human thought to introduce new ideas, to embrace change.
That is what makes progress possible, and without it, the human mind and spirit
would stagnate. We are not, as Thomas Paine would remind us, bound to the
past, and have every right to look to the present and even the future.
108-109.
Now we come to the fascinating conclusion of this popular essay. If you
were to ask Kant whether or not the end of the Eighteenth Century is
enlightened, he would tell you "no, it isn't." Still, he says,
"we do live in an age of enlightenment."
What he is talking about is progress
– progress is being made towards an ideal that will be beneficial both for
individuals and for society. Kant praises Frederick the Great of Prussia
(r. 1740-86) as the wisest of rulers. That may seem paradoxical, and the
author admits as much since Frederick did not preside over a democracy or a
republic. On the contrary, what we are dealing with in C18 Prussia is an
autocratic form of governance. But the author thinks that by keeping
religious power grabs down (it was Frederick who boasted, "In my state,
every man can be saved after his own fashion") and by practicing tolerance
but also simultaneously limiting civil freedom somewhat, Frederick is assuring
his realm's order and stability, and is thereby doing freedom the greatest
service that could be done at his own point in history. He is allowing
individuals the fullest practical opportunity to develop their minds without
fear of extreme reprisal, whether from the state, the church, or fellow
citizens. A democratic society may be glorious, the idea runs, but it is
also dangerous and potentially self-destructive. (The unstable nature of
radical democracy is clear from the example of ancient Greece. And though
we are justly proud of our republic here in the States, let's not forget that
we have already had one gut-wrenching meltdown in our relatively brief history:
the Civil War.)
109.
Let's look at the final paragraph on 109, where the author fleshes out the
above ideas. The sum of it is that if you nurture individual freedom in a
safe setting, gradually the people as a whole will become more educated, more
enlightened, and ever more capable of managing greater freedom. In the
end, the government will treat them with the dignity they deserve as fully
developed human beings. What do you think of this notion? Do you
think it's naïve and blind to the way rulers arrange matters to suit their own
power interests, and that it implies a surprisingly negative or at least a
tentative view of human nature (given all that Kant has said about our
wonderful capacity for rational thought, and so forth), or do you think it
makes sense as a vision for a better future? Can a society be so free that
it ends up descending into chaos? Can it ever be good to set up a person
as a philosopher-monarch à la Plato's Republic? Or do you run with
Winston Churchill's quip, "Democracy's the worst form of government --
except for all the other forms of government"?
My
own take? Well, I can agree with Kant's implicit view that civil society,
indeed civilization writ large, is a fragile construct -- it's a matter of
nurturing and artifice, of cultivation, not just following our rawest natural
urges or letting chaos reign until the bad guys burn themselves out. So
in this sense, I understand and agree with the notion that we flourish when
there are sustainable ground rules in place. Hobbes' "War of All
Against All" is not an abstraction -- many lapsed societies have suffered
something very like it. All the same, my sensibilities are those of a
typical rebellious American: we're like the Romans of the Old Republic in that
we can't abide the very name of kings, let alone allow them to rule us.
That means I don't warm up much to Kant's faith in the wisdom of one Frederick
the Great, Hohenzollern King of Prussia. Well, then, is our general
populace a lot more enlightened, so that we have somehow developed into the
kind of public Kant thought could handle full freedom and claim full dignity?
I doubt it -- I think we're still a pretty ignorant bunch, we Americans, no
offense intended. We do and think stupid things on occasion, and we
sometimes vote in fools to high offices; political bias, misinformation,
intimidation and outright lies abound; half of us seem to reject basic science,
there's still some racism and sexism to be reckoned with, and so forth.
Yet here we are, still standing. I'm suggesting that yes, democracies and
democratic-spirited republics are a perilous adventure and they can (and
do sometimes) blow up in the people's faces -- one of our wisest presidents,
Abraham Lincoln, admitted as much when in his Gettysburg Address he called our
form of government and our history an "experiment." All the
same, you've just got to do the best you can, recognize that others are
entitled to their views as you are to yours, and take your chances with the
grandest form of "gub'mint" ever devised. If there's a better
way, I don't know of it. Gandhi put the matter well: be the change
you want to see happen, and perhaps that way you'll enhance the odds in favor
of positive transformation.
René
Descartes, from The Discourse on Method
Descartes
says that the only thing he can be certain of is that since he thinks, he must
exist: "I think; therefore I am," or cogito, ergo sum.
That is a brilliant formulation, by which Descartes is trying to get free of
crippling skepticism about the value of the information that comes to us
through our five senses. The empiricists would tell us that all our
knowledge comes from what we can take in of the world around us: nature is the
master reality, and mind is a passive recipient and mechanical
processor/combiner of fragmentary bits of this reality. But we know that
it's very hard to be certain about such information -- is it ever entirely
accurate, or accurate at all? Descartes, a "rationalist," turns
philosophical inquiry towards the human mind and its operations, and away from
its more common assumption that humanity is more or less chained to the natural
world and natural necessity. (Later, the German Idealist Kant will do
that on an even broader scale and in a more detailed, systematic way, while
also fully recognizing the pitfalls of pure rationalism.) So, "what
can we know?" tends towards "how do we build up and maintain a sense
of what we know? How does the mind construct our reality, insofar as we
have access to reality?" As Vice President Biden might say, this is
a big effin' philosophical and sociological deal. Authors like Descartes
lay the groundwork for modern thought and disciplines that take human beings
themselves as the central object of study. That is a central premise of
the Enlightenment: we can turn our critical inquiry and its methods loose on
humanity itself. So that's why Monsieur Descartes belongs in our medley
of Enlightenment authors.
In
our own time, it's easy to see the difficulties with Cartesian rationalism: it
strongly tends towards divorcing us from the natural world when it seems like
we should be trying to stay connected with that world. It isolates and
exalts mind over matter. There's a certain arrogance about that, isn't
there? Then, too, the assumption that mind and body are neatly split
seems eminently challenge-worthy today. Wouldn't researchers in relevant
fields insist that the brain is part of the entire human organism, and that its
very energy to function comes from being tapped into electrical currents
generated within the body? In this sense, the Beat author William
Burroughs isn't wrong to describe human beings as "soft machines."
The brain is rather like a mushy but magnificent computer. Turn off the
switch to the body's power plant, and the computer almost instantly becomes a
decaying mass of gray goo, if we buy a fully materialist notion of the way
things are. Alternately, we could just say that it's obvious the body affects
how the mind works, so how can we claim they have nothing to do with each
other? Body affects mind, and mind affects body, simple as that; the two
function as a unit.
All
the same, the significance of Cartesian thought and of the Enlightenment more
generally is that it opens up the possibility of truly human sciences, of
rational inquiry into the human condition and of consequent social and
political change on the basis of that inquiry. It's up to us to wield and
modify such thought in a wise manner, and it seems ungracious to blame the
authors for every shortfall in their bold thinking and every possible negative
consequence stemming from it.
Diderot
and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie
118-20.
Encyclopedia. The authors explain the etymology of this word by referring
it back to the Greek nouns kyklos (pronounced kyoo-clos), which
generally means "circle," and paideia, which means
"instruction,, science, knowledge." The latter word, paideia,
was used to describe the ancient Greek system of education. Here, the
idea is that an encyclopedia gathers together and relates as much knowledge as
possible so that it all becomes like one big circle or web that we can go to
for insight on all sorts of things. The further point is to keep
broadening this circle as well as the circle of people who have access to it
and know how to make use of it. Perhaps Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie
isn't so very different from today's vast Internet, though the obvious
difference is that that latter has developed in a sprawling way, with no central
oversight going into the definitions and information one can find there.
Still, the animating spirit of an enterprise like Wikipedia resembles
that of the Encyclopedists, doesn't it? The aim is to disseminate
knowledge to anyone who wants it, and to keep said knowledge from becoming the
semi-mystical province of a privileged few. Anyone who doubts the value
of this kind of enterprise (for all its gaps and flaws) should perhaps take
note of how the Internet is dealt with in authoritarian countries -- they just
can't stand the idea of people gaining access to any version of events that
runs counter to the official line. It has to be their way or no way, and
one is reminded of Plato's injunction in The Republic that only
"hymns to the gods and virtuous men" should come near the people's
ears. None of that rascally nonsense from Homer and his ilk!
119.
Another interesting point made in this section is that "All things must be
examined" (119) in what the authors call "a philosophical age."
This is an era that is interested in defining itself and searching its
prospects as a foundation for a more humane way to live, and you can really see
that in the entries that follow on slavery and on women. We recall that
Kant thought it vital to define the term "enlightenment" because the
age itself had made that word (éclairecissement in French, Aufklärung
in German, Illuminismo in Italian) vitally fashionable. We are
used to saying that terms like "the European Enlightenment" are just
stuff we invented long after the fact to describe earlier eras, but that would
be off the mark if we applied it to the Eighteenth Century. Anyway,
Diderot and D'Alembert & Co. evidently don't think much of received opinion
or the authority it claims. On the same page, the authors denounce
narrow-minded nationalism and regionalism; there is a strong internationalist
current in Enlightenment thinking, one that stems from its hopes for the
universality of Reason and common humanity.
Political Authority
The
authors turn the old theory of "the divine right of kings" on its
head. Milton and his fellow puritans had already done this during the English
Civil War, but all the same it's stirring to read it in an endeavor like the Encyclopédie.
Á bas l'absolutism! What Diderot & Co suggest is that it's liberté
that is divinely appointed as a gift to all mankind, and they say that
power derives from the consent of the people themselves -- when kings claim
divine right, all they're doing is shamming the people because violence and
threats always lie at the heart of kingly power. How, after all, are
aristocracies and monarchies formed in the first place? By events like
the Norman Conquest of 1066, that's how. I don't know the exact date of
this particular entry, but it's sensible to acknowledge that such radical
French notions are the most proximate origin (you could trace it back to John
Locke, etc.) of certain bold language in the American Declaration of
Independence, 1776:
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute
new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety
and Happiness.
Benjamin
Franklin's Letter to Joseph Priestley, 1780
Ben
Franklin aptly sums up Enlightenment enthusiasm for the potential benefits of
scientific discovery. We know him to have been a wise old character, but
in this letter he sounds a bit like a kid in a futuristic candy store -- no
doubt we'll be teleporting heavy goods and living forever someday, etc. Beam
me up, Scotty! C18 optimism about what hard science and nascent social
science have to offer is certainly a strain in Enlightenment thinking, but so
is the older sense -- you can find it all over the place in Renaissance art and
thought -- that human civilization is a fragile achievement, one that can be
lost if we don't work to maintain it. I think both of these attitudes --
optimism and vigilance -- are necessary right on up to the present, and so are Candide-like
efforts to lambast those who take up an extreme view in either direction
(optimism or pessimism).
On
the one hand, the technological progress in our own times is head-spinning.
I'm going to borrow a line from that tall, skinny, ethically dubious guy who
owns a junkyard in Breaking Bad here: "Hey, we’re living in a time
of string theories and God particles. Feasible? Doable? Yeah, sure, why
not?" (Episode 5.01, "Live Free or Die") Wonderful things
are being discovered in astronomy, medicine, and communications.
On
the other hand, human nature really doesn't appear to have changed one iota. Our
raw intelligence always runs way ahead of our emotional and moral maturity, and
that's a serious, perhaps lethal problem. So we continue butchering one
another and ruining the planet, and simply denying anything science tells us if
it makes us uncomfortable. Stephen Colbert is a comedian pretending to be
an oblivious right-wing talking head, but he may just be one of our age's best
philosophers: his concept of "truthiness" describes the attitude of
millions of modern people. My gloss on truthiness would be, "if you don't
like the news or the scientific results, that's okay -- nothing will come of it
all. Just keep doing what makes you feel good, based on what your
political, social, or other biases tell you ought to be true."
It's also the case that not all of our new discoveries come with unalloyed good
effects. The Internet is indeed amazing -- we have a world of information
at our fingertips, it's the ancient dream of the Library of Alexandria come
true, right? So how come a huge percentage of Internet users just want to
stream "dirty movies" or hook up with somebody behind their spouse's
back, or read frivolous little bytes of infotainment? (The great polymath
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola would turn over in his Renaissance grave if he
knew what the average Net user was up to.) It's because they're people,
that's why. And unfortunately, the Internet doesn't change that.
What the Internet does do, however, is threaten the traditional economy
in a number of ways -- it's an another business and social model altogether,
one that lets millions of people illegitimately access intangible products like
music and literature for free (how are artists supposed to live? should they go
"breatharian" and live on air and muted praise?), and make the bricks
and mortar model increasingly obsolete. So where are the jobs in the
Internet economy? People need to earn their living, and you can't sell
stuff if almost nobody has any money to buy anything with. Net-cheerleaders
tend to forget that simple truth -- it's much more fun to speculate wildly
about all the radical ways in which the Internet is going to transform life for
the better. Point is, technology is wonderful, but there are no
guarantees that what it brings will always benefit us. That's where
vigilance comes into play -- "mind the results."
David
Hume's "Of National Characters" and James Beattie's "An Essay on
Truth"
These
two philosophers engaged in a drop-dead battle over alleged differences in
human value and intelligence amongst the various races, with Beattie scornfully
rejecting the skeptic Hume's conclusions that white people are da bomb. Hume's
conclusions are, of course, based on nothing more than the very species of
absurd prejudice he so aptly condemned in others -- you know, believing things
just because others in your group believe them and because they make you feel
superior. There's not much more to it, and the Norton editors are right
to point out that Hume's attitude is evidence of a certain potential for
arrogance in Enlightenment thinking. You'd think that a wise skeptic like
David Hume wouldn't fall prey to universalist twaddle about race, but you have
the evidence right before your lying eyes. At least he opposed slavery,
and pointed out that it was destructive to the masters' spirit and intellect as
well as horribly damaging to enslaved people. So there's that.
Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft
is fairly thought to be the original feminist advocate, thanks to her savvy
Enlightenment-based critique of the arguments set forth by European men
favoring the continued subjugation of women. For the most part, she
reasons, such arguments are circular: deny a whole group of people something
vital like education, observe the results (i.e. insufficiently educated
individuals who can't take part in civic life fully), and then use those
results to insist that the group in question isn't really capable of becoming
educated, so to hell with it -- why bother with nonsense like equality?
Variations on this ridiculously abusive and even tragic move have been applied
to all sorts of groups: black people in America and elsewhere, native peoples
in Latin America, LGBT people just about everywhere, etc. The hit parade
of narrow, discriminatory nastiness goes on, though sometimes dramatic progress
happens. Treat people worse than others, and they'll probably turn out
differently, behave differently -- it's that simple; but the end-line
differences don't prove that the people in question are essentially
(and therefore ab initio) different.
The
thorny part of Wollstonecraft's excerpt is her blunt admission that many C18
women, on average, fail to demonstrate the intellectual and emotional
wherewithal that would enable them to come into full social and political
equality with men. It's an unpleasant confession, but she apparently
believes it's a necessary one since not making it only opens up
feminists like herself to a counter-argument based on simple observation.
I think we all know how powerful such "look around and tell me what you
see!" arguments can be: even when they're completely wrong, they may seem
intuitively correct. Surprise! Ask any modern social scientist or
physical scientist and you'll be informed that "common sense" is
often misleading and conduces to fallacious groupthink à la Plato's Parable of
the Cave. If I see a stick immersed halfway in a cup, and I don't
understand basic refraction (see Snell's Law, or just look it up under Duhhhhhh,
why does the stick look bent? on the Internets), I'm going to assume the
stick is actually crooked, not that it only looks that way at the moment.
People make the same stupid mistake about any number of phenomena in politics,
society, you name it.
So
Wollstonecraft frankly admits that too many women of her era pretty much behave
the way men say they do: they act like irrational, vain, flighty creatures who
couldn't possibly take charge of their own affairs with anything but disastrous
results. But then she offers up her razor-sharp critique explaining why
that seemingly bedrock state of affairs is no more than a variety of the
stick-immersed-in-the-water fallacy: it's an appearance, not the ultimate
measure of women's true capacities. Of course, the persistence of the
same tired old claims right up to today, if perhaps to a lesser degree,
suggests just how much a lot of men (and the institutions that still mostly
favor them) have invested in said claims being true.
The
Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom
The
Marquis is nothing if not audacious both in his sexual eccentricities and in
his manner of argumentation. We might as well give him that. He no
doubt understood that his reasoning on such matters as cruelty and killing
might prove downright painful for a fair number of readers, and it wouldn't
surprise me if he took perverse pleasure in that realization. After all,
the man was a sadist. Anyhow, what he is up to in our excerpts is
clever, if not necessarily convincing: he pursues to its extreme the basic
Enlightenment premise that restraints on human inquiry into truth are
pernicious and dishonest, and in the name of perpetual critique, he rips up the
common C18 idea that education is vital to the amelioration of the human
condition.
The
fictional aristocrat in Philosophy in the Bedroom advances the specific
claim that all of our distinction-making between "us" and "the
animals" is for naught: we are nature, and nature is us. By nature,
he means predators and prey -- what the Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson would
later describe as "Nature, red in tooth and claw." And of
course he means death as the way things get done in nature.
Hmmmm…. animals kill one another for a living, and we are animals, so …. The
Marquis makes his character reject the C18 attempt to bring nature and reason
together (à la Rousseau, who thought that rigidly "civilized" rules
and ways of life were corruptive rather than good for us), and apply the same
scheme to the concept of cruelty. Cruelty, he says -- I take this
to mean voluptuous pleasure in causing and witnessing the suffering of others
-- is natural; our weakness in the face of it stems from that pernicious bit of
artifice, education. Yes, you heard him -- bloody, cruel nature good,
education bad. I suppose this means that a serial killer who starts out
by slowly slaughtering defenseless puppy dogs and kittens and then moves on to
torturing human victims is simply following nature's way, delighting in the
cruel excessiveness of the way things are. The odd thing is, the
Marquis makes his literary character identify such excess with liberty, even
though the actual man seems to have found himself uncomfortable with the
murderous excesses of revolutionaries like Marat and Robespierre.
Well,
I'm going to cast my lot with the puppy dogs and kittens -- sorry, Monsieur de
Sade. What this man is evidently too depraved to recognize is that kindness
is part of our nature. I consider it undeniable that cruelty is also
part of who we are -- in a sense, de Sade is the precursor of Sigmund Freud in
that both see sexuality and aggression as the deep forces that drive us to be
as we are and do as we do. But the point is that human nature isn't
unitary; it isn't like the allegedly unitary nature of, say, tigers and lions
-- I say allegedly because I don't fully accept the notion that animals are
really unitary in that way, either. A tiger isn't fully hard-wired to
kill and do nothing else -- it's a complex, intelligent living being, not a
toaster or a piece of furniture. It may well be natural for us to kill
and even to take cruel delight in the suffering of our fellow creatures, but it
seems to me that a great deal of what is good and even sublime about us is that
we are capable of something better. Striving to improve and employing
artifice are part of humanity's fundamental makeup, and that's a good thing
because our capacity for violence is a terrifying thing to behold, and
potentially fatal to everything around us. This capacity for violence, I
think, is precisely what the Marquis de Sade's fictional aristocrat in Philosophy
in the Bedroom is celebrating in the sexual and civic realms. He
celebrates this quality in the name of la vérité et la liberté, whereas
I would suggest that such celebration amounts to little more than toasting
one's own slavery to the basest instincts.
Similarly,
the pseudo-Pythagoreanism advanced by our well-born speaker in Philosophy in
the Bedroom -- I mean the idea that killing something only transitions it
into some new form of consciousness -- strikes me as what Ernest Becker would
call a "denial of death." To say that you and I are made up
partly of T-Rex dust, or something along those lines, isn't to say that mama
T-Rex herself is alive and well, just hanging out and lounging around in our
bones. In my admittedly materialist view, the fact of death is more
absolute, and therefore more radical in its implications. I prefer to
paraphrase Clint Eastwood's line in one of his old cowboy films, "To kill
a man is to take away everything he's ever had, or ever going to have."
Lights out, that's it. I'm not buying the de Sadian speaker's implied,
"don't fret -- it's okay, really, because he'll come back as a llama in
Peru someday" shtick. It's a fascinating notion that perhaps the
universe is a machine for the perpetual production of consciousness, but this
isn't the same thing as the survival of singular, integral personhood after an
individual's consciousness is snuffed out. It's especially galling when
you're trying to enlist Pythagoras in the cause of cruelty and murder.
