de Maistre, continued

De Maistre did in fact say quite a lot about the Spanish Inquisition, in a series of Letters, which can be read in translation at this web site: www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/history/links/maistre/maistre.html

Here is de Maistre's extraordinary portrait of the man who, more than anything else it seems, makes civilized life possible, the Executioner:

To come now to detail, let us start with human justice. Wishing men to be governed by men at least in their external actions, God has given sovereigns the supreme prerogative of punishing crimes, in which above all they are his representatives.... This formidable prerogative of which I have just spoken results in the necessary existence of a man destined to inflict on criminals the punishments awarded by human justice; and this man is in fact found everywhere, without there being any means of explaining how; for reason cannot discern in human nature any motive which could lead men to this calling.... Who is then this inexplicable being who has preferred to all the pleasant, lucrative, honest, and even honorable jobs that present themselves in hundreds to human power and dexterity that of torturing and putting to death his fellow creatures? Are this head and this heart made like ours? Do they not hold something peculiar and foreign to our nature? For my own part, I do not doubt this. He is made like us externally; he is born like us but he is an extraordinary being, and for him to exist in the human family a particular decree, a FIAT of the creative power is necessary. He is a species to himself. Look at the place he holds in public opinion and see if you can understand how he can ignore or affront this opinion! Scarcely have the authorities fixed his dwelling place, scarcely has he taken possession of it, than the other houses seem to shrink back until they no longer overlook his. In the midst of this solitude and this kind of vacuum that forms around him, he lives alone with his woman and his offspring who make the human voice known to him, for without them he would know only groans. A dismal signal is given; a minor judicial official comes to his house to warn him that he is needed; he leaves; he arrives at some public place packed with a dense and throbbing crowd. A poisoner, a parricide, or a blasphemera is thrown to him; he seizes him, he stretches him on the ground, he ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises it up: then a dreadful silence falls, and nothing can be heard except the crack of bones breaking under the crossbar and the howls of the victim. He unfastens him; he carries him to a wheel: the shattered limbs interweave with the spokes; the head falls; the hair stands on end, and the mouth open like a furnace gives out spasmodically only a few blood-spattered words calling for death to come. He is finished: his heart flutters, but it is with joy; he congratulates himself, he says sincerely, "No one can break men on the wheel better than I." He steps down; he stretches out his bloodstained hand, and justice throws into it from a distance a few pieces of gold which he carries through a double row of men drawing back with horror. He sits down to a meal and eats; then he goes to bed, where he sleeps. And next day on waking, he thinks of anything but what he did the day before. Is this a man? Yes: God receives him his temple and permits him to pray. He is not a criminal, yet it is impossible to say, for example, that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that he is estimable and so on. No moral praise can be appropriate for him, since this assumes relationships with men, and he has none. And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears. God, who is author of sovereignty, is the author also of chastisement: he has built our world on these two poles...

I have a few things I'd like to say about this passage in relation to various other aspects of de Maistre's thought, but first I should like to direct you to the essay by Isaiah Berlin which forms the introduction to de Maistre's Considerations On France, Richard A. Lebrun ed.(Cambridge, 1994)

Lao Giao comments:

"Fascinating. I am not familiar with the writings of de Maistre. Did he know that the Crusades and the Inquisition were as bloody as the French Revolution? Did he believe that there was water above the sky, as Genesis tells us?"

Thank you, Lao Giao. To take your second question first, de Maistre was not only a keen student of the exact sciences of his day, which he perfectly understood, but also believed that the bible was the word of God. So he believed in the Deluge and he refused to accept or even take seriously the idea that the world might be millions, not thousands, of years old.

He would have known all about the crusades and inquisition, though I have not seen them mentioned in his writings. I don't suppose he'd have had any trouble justifying these bloody uses of power. Civilization, he thought--Christian civilization of course--always requires such uses of power.

On First Reading de Maistre

Reading CONSIDERATIONS ON FRANCE (1796) has been a pleasant surprise. This is no 18th century christian Qutb, no narrow-minded, anti-science, fundamentalist. De Maistre is a clear, terse, well informed, wittily ironic and very entertaining writer, a sort of conservative Voltaire.

Later: having read further, however, I want to qualify what I just said.

Maistre is at his best in his remarks about the Revolution which strike me as correct: the end (and no one knew in 1796 how or when the casual slaughter would end) could not justify the means. No one could or ever has been able to agree about the object of all that killing--three million dead according to Maistre, by 1796--all in the name of indefinable abstractions: 'liberty', 'reason', 'virtue.'

Our Civil War, which may have cost us a similar percentage of the population, about 2%, eliminated a tangible evil, slavery. And while the end of slavery did not really liberate the ex-slaves, who remained largely under the thumb of the white ruling class in the South for the next hundred years, we were not forced to re-fight either the civil war or our own revolution, unlike France which was forced to re-fight the Revolution at least twice during the 19th century.

Maistre may be largely correct when he describes the revolutionary leaders as unscrupulous men who only cared about power and were debased by it. Power corrupts. No one caught up in the desperate struggle not only for power but survival was unaffected. That goes, as well, for all those big words, 'liberty', 'reason', etc. that people thought they were fighting for. So many became so disillusioned and so bitter that there had to be a word for it. That, I think, was when the ancient philosophical word 'cynic' reversed its meaning: no longer a believer in virtue as the highest good but a disbeliever, like Shakespeare's Iago--and Maistre himself. Maistre was a product of the Revolution, just as Napoleon was.

Here are a couple of sentences that give you something of the Swiftian flavor of Maistre's prose at this time: "I know very well, that in all these discussions, we are assailed continually with the wearisome picture of the innocents who perish with the guilty. But, without penetrating far into this extremely profound question, it can be considered solely in its relation to the universally held dogma, as old as the world itself, that the innocent suffer for the benefit of the guilty."

I shall have more to say about Maistre's ideas about law, sovereignty, and republican forms of government as set forth in this and the following essays. These ideas are clearly and cogently set forth; Maistre is a brilliantlly logical writer. Nothing he says about sovereignty in these earlier writings should give us pause. The dark side of Maistre--the original of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor--appears in the ST. PETERSBERG DIALOGUES (1821)

Now, in what could be called Modernity's Golden Age, we take if for granted that while modern science may never give us the last word about nature and the universe, it is on the right track. We know without a doubt about how old the earth is, and the sun and the universe. Maistre knew a lot about "the exact sciences" (his phrase). He knew, for instance, that the new sciences of geology, chemistry, physics and astronomy were beginning to provide evidence that the earth has to be a LOT older than scripture would lead us to believe. But it didn't matter. In THE DIALOGUES, Catholic dogma trumps science from the get-go; he applauds the intellectual integrity of those who defiantly ignore whatever those rascally scientists might have to say. An iron curtain in Maistre's mind separates catholic doctrine and dogma from the vast enterprise of scientific inquiry in the early 19th century. Or, to alter the metaphor, he becomes a man in an iron mask: the Executioner who, as a professional breaker-of-men (literally), becomes for Maistre the image and symbol of sovereign power, and the last defence of a civilization now increasingly surrounded and infested by people who have cast off all the restraints on our natural sinfulness that Christianity had once-upon-a-time taught us to respect.

Though Maistre is his usual urbane and polished self, the imaginative power that goes into his terrifying portrait of the Executioner (with his bloody hands and exemplary home life) as the pillar of civilization and last defence against the barbarians within, shows that Maistre knew he had lost the argument with or about modernity.

an impossible blog

Since modernity is what just about every poet, economist, philosopher, artist, historian, composer, novelist (have I left anyone out?) has been trying to understand for the last two or three hundred years, trying to understand modernity turns into the problem of understanding understanding, which is sort of like understanding consciousness which is sort of like trying to watch your eyes move by looking in the mirror . . . If you get my drift, and I'm not sure I do.

On the theory that there are some things that are best understood by studying those who hate or fear them, I've begun reading the works of modernity's greatest hater, Joseph de Maistre, in Jack Lively's translation. And here I have to say that, being illiterate in French and German, I am unqualified to say much of anything to the purpose about the romantic reaction to modernity in the 19th century--and particularly in French symbolist poetry and German philosophy. Further, even if I were literate in these languages, I would probably find much of that poetry and philosophy impenetrable. I have tried to read Kant, Hegel, Mallarme and Rimbaud in translation with but indifferent success.

What follows, I hope, will consist of notes and reflections on de Maistre.

Post-Modernity

When A.E. Housman described himself, in the poem I have just shown you, as being spiritually and emotionally prepared for "trouble," he had no idea how dark or how long the night would be as all the lights in Europe and, indeed, in large parts of the world, were going out. For fifty years, we in the U.S., Canada, Australia, England, observed from afar (mostly) slaughters and exterminations on an unprecedented scale. Maybe I should have left the 20th century out when I called modernity a success in utilitarian terms. Nevertheless, my question still holds: if modernity is about, among other things, the untrammeled pursuit of happiness, as Hobbes defines that word, what if anything can we say about its future?--as, (as seems to be the case) temperatures and oceans keep rising; the era of cheap energy, water and food ends; the balance of nature turns against us; and more and more states begin to fail? And who or what is the cause of these natural disasters? Isn't that obvious? We have met the enemy and it is us. We in the West invented modernity and we in the West got most of the benefits. Or as Swift would say, we are the ones who creamed off nature and left the sour and the dregs for everyone else to lap up.

If modernity is all washed-up, and that too may be the case, what's next? Will those who call themselves "post-modernists" please step forward? And tell us how, exactly, postmodernity will differ, politically and economically, from modernity? Will the arrival of postmodernity mean, for instance, the end of liberal democracy, the secular rule of law, and scientific inquiry? And please, no more hermeneutical chatter. It does not follow from the fact there are no transcendent goods or truths, that there are no goods and no truths. Here is what C. J. Insole has to say in the latest TLS (2-1-08) in his review of Charles Taylor's book about modernity, A SECULAR AGE: "What if truth is true independently of our stories about it? Well it might be. Just like gravity, it is there anyway, although it will emerge in our stories, and stories will be one of the ways that we can access the truth about it. Disagreement about truth is then just that: disagreement about truth, not a discovery that truth contains within itself disagreement."(p.5)

Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit of Happiness

Jefferson's words, at the beginning of our DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, define not only our American way of life but the way of life that most of the people on this planet now aspire to. And what, for all these billions of people, does that word 'happiness' mean? In the absence of any generally agreed upon concept of the Highest Good, 'happiness' can only mean what Hobbes says it means: continual success in acquiring the goods that the good life requires, whatever they may be.

Those ideas about happiness did not come out of nowhere and were not invented by Hobbes; he was merely calling attention to the fact that for better or worse this was the direction in which the world was already headed.

We have now had approximately 500 years of more or less Hobbesian economics and politics and these have been years of more or less uninterrupted economic growth. Just about any reasonable person would say that, if 'utility'(the greatest good of the greatest number) is our standard--and I have to say for myself that I don't see how there could be any other--modernity has been over-all, despite some horrific disasters, a success. Nevertheless, any reasonable person would also have to say that during all this time, but especially the last hundred years, Swift's definition of 'happiness' as "a perpetual possession of being well-deceived" is also correct; or, as George Eliot would say, the possession of being "well wadded with stupidity." ("If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity." MIDDLEMARCH, 1871)

Please don't get me wrong: I am not, like Swift, being ironic or writing satire, nor do I have a different definition of happiness to offer you.

Now, as the price of happiness is on the rise, it seems reasonable to wonder where its pursuit is likely to lead us in the future. And here, by way of an answer, I'd like to give you a poem to read, written about 100 years ago by A. E. Housman:

I to my perils
Of Cheat and Charmer
Came clad in armour
By stars benign.
Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her,
But man's deceiver
Was never mine.

The thoughts of others
Were light and fleeting,
Of lovers' meeting
Or luck or fame.
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.

Happiness According Hobbes

Swift's definition of 'happiness' (as "a perpetual possession of being well-deceived"--along with the final kicker, "the serence, peaceful state of being a fool among knaves") is a carefully considered and crafted response to the following statements on this subject by Hobbes (Leviathan ch. 11, On Manners):

By MANNERS, I mean not here, Decency of behaviour; as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick
his teeth before company, and such other points of the Small Morals;
But those qualities of man-kind, that concern their living together
in Peace, and Unity. To which end we are to consider, that the Felicity
of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied.
For there is no such Finis Ultimus, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum
Bonum, (greatest good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old
Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires
are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand.
Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object
to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way
to the later. The cause whereof is, That the object of mans desire,
is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of time; but to
assure for ever, the way of his future desire. And therefore the
voluntary actions, and inclinations of all men, tend, not only to
the procuring, but also to the assuring of a contented life;
and differ onely in the way: which ariseth partly from the diversity
of passions, in divers men; and partly from the difference of
the knowledge, or opinion each one has of the causes, which produce
the effect desired.


So that in the first place, I put for a generall inclination of
all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power,
that ceaseth onely in Death. And the cause of this, is not alwayes
that a man hopes for a more intensive delight, than he has already
attained to; or that he cannot be content with a moderate power:
but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well,
which he hath present, without the acquisition of more.

We need to understand that Hobbes is talking about the way we live NOW, under the conditions of what I am calling 'modernity'--not in some mythical state of pre- or post- political nature in which the rule of law has not yet been invented, or has collapsed (as in one of the increasing number of failed or semi-failed states that are now beginning to appear in various parts if the world). Once people had been liberated from the various strait-jackets of tradition and religious belief, which is what was occurring during the Renaissance and Reformation centuries, they began to exhibit what Hobbes calls a restless desire of power after power. Shakespeare saw it coming and invented Iago, the man from nowhere (like Cormack McCarthy's Antonin Chigurr). Swift thought that maybe Hobbes might have got it right, and wrote the fourth book of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. But long before he had written that book, he had began to think seriously about Hobbes' definition of happiness (or 'felicity')as "a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object
to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later." Or, in other words, continual success in the endless competition for the good life i.e. the material honors and goods of this life. Such a life, thought Swift, would be a kind of madness, and could only be tolerable if one essentially closed one's eyes and ignored the brutish struggle for power that human life including one's one depended on. Hence Swift's definition of happiness as the perpetual possession of being well deceived.