What Makes a Grand Vertu?

La générosité est la vertu du don, disais-je. Don d'argent (par quoi elle touche a la libéralité), don de soi (par quoi elle touche a la magnanimité, voire au sacrifice). Mais on ne peut donner que ce qu'on possédé, et a condition seulement de n'en être pas possédé. La générosité est en cela indissociable d'une forme de liberté ou de maitrise de coi, qui sera, chez Descartes, l'essentiel de son contenu. De quoi s'agit-il? D'une passion et, tout a la fois, d'une vertu ...

La générosité nous élève vers les autres, pourrait-on dire, et vers nous-mêmes en tant que libérés de notre petit-moi. Celui qui ne serait pas du tout généreux, la langue nous qu'il serait bas, lâche, mesquin, vil, avare, cupide, égoïste, sordide... Et nous le sommes tous, mais toutefois pas toujours ni complètement : la générosité est ce qui nous en sépare ou, parfois, nous en libère.
- Andre Comte-Sponville, Petit traité des grands vertus

Comte-Sponville's project, as far as I can tell, is to produce a new version of the Nicomachean Ethics, to give us good atheistic reasons to be virtuous. He is obviously well-read and cultivated; the book bristles with quotations from Nietzsche, Spinoza, Bergson, who are enlisted in the service of his definitions. These are rather complex. For Comte-Sponville, each grand vertu seems to have two aspects: its grandeur as such (admirable aesthetically or morally) and its ability to elevate, free, or strengthen the virtuous individual.

Can this project succeed? Can a virtue be a means to individual self-transcendence as well as a conventionally-
understood moral quality? I think not. The paradigmatic case for me is his analysis of generosity, "the virtue of the gift." For Comte-Sponville, generosity seems to be more interesting for what it is not: it's not justice, it's not love, it's not solidarity. The involvement of self-interest--as in the case of a parent's care for a child--makes a virtue no longer partake of generosity. But virtue as a force for individual self-overcoming is defined for Comte-Sponville by its ability to ignore and reject considerations of self-interest entirely. To me, that
is inseparable from a Nietzschean idea of nobility--a plenitude of power that overflows all economistic calculations and expresses itself as a Beau Brummell-style generosity.

That means that generosity cannot limit itself to a disinterested sphere of pure and disengaged generous actions; that kind of compartmentalizing is a sign of the slave morality. For true generosity, as an elemental creature perhaps even of the "petit-moi," remains generous even when it is putatively interesLted. Beau Brummell can accept a gift because he does not scheme at looking selfless, and his noble overflowing spirit expresses itself just as generously in his care for those close to him as for those far away. In other words, Comte-Sponville's obsessive attempt at carving out a fenced-off part of life for being generous is in itself an indication of a lack of generosity.

Likewise with many of his other virtues--if temperance frees you to drink without becoming a slave to drink, that liberation must entail the freedom to become a slave; if it is intellectually courageous to defend the truth at all costs, it is surely more courageous to defend the false. The grand self-overcoming virtuous human being that Comte-Sponville offers us cannot be bound by his petty categories and narrow-minded restrictions; the peak of her virtue is putting all the virtues to a fatal questioning.

Hence Comte-Sponville cannot fail to be disappointing. Sartre once wrote:

[We]e remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim which is one of liberation or of some particular realisation, that man can realize himself as truly human.

Can we liberate, or realize, ourselves, if we are not our own legislators but only legal commentators? The virtues contain within them the possibility of their transvaluation. That is their value. To defend them on any other basis is to turn back upon the human, to take the laws of man for the commandments of some anonymous god.

Rousseau the Flip-Flopper

Je prévois qu'on me pardonnera difficilement le parti que j'ai osé prendre. Heurtant de front tout ce qui fait aujourd'hui l'admiration des hommes, je ne puis m'attendre qu'à un blâme universel; et ce n'est pas pour avoir été honoré de l'approbation de quelques sages que je dois compter sur celle du public: aussi mon parti est-il pris; je ne me soucie de plaire ni aux beaux esprits, ni aux gens à la mode. Il y aura dans tous les temps des hommes faits pour être subjugués par les opinions de leur siècle, de leur pays, de leur société: tel fait aujourd'hui l'esprit fort et le philosophe, qui par la même raison n'eût été qu'un fanatique du temps de la Ligue. Il ne faut point écrire pour de tels lecteurs, quand on veut vivre au-delà de son siècle. ...

Le paganisme, livré à tous les égarements de la raison humaine, a-t-il laissé à la postérité rien qu'on puisse comparer aux monuments honteux que lui a préparés l'imprimerie, sous le règne de l'Evangile? Les écrits impies des Leucippe et des Diagoras sont péris avec eux. On n'avait point encore inventé l'art d'éterniser les extravagances de l'esprit humain. Mais, grâce aux caractères typographiques et à l'usage que nous en faisons, les dangereuses rêveries des Hobbes et des Spinoza resteront à jamais.
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les arts

I'm at ASECS this week, and after the first day of panels I've found it difficult to shake the impression that Rousseau is constantly lurking unmentioned in the background; it's not sexy to bring him up in questions, since everyone's already read him, and what's more, we all feel the educated bourgeois liberal's unease at this strange Genevan and his weird, iconoclastic ramblings. But the issues everyone's still talking about--authenticity, virtue, self-presentation--are fundamentally the issues vital for Rousseau. Even if we've felt the need to complicate or question his picture of "authenticity," it still stands as a critique and an indictment of everything we'd like to associate with intellectual life--its pluralism, its comfort with nuanced or uncommitted perspectives, its lack of determinate consistency.

Which makes the Discours all the more strange. Rousseau introduces a discourse that indicts the idea of progress by declaring himself to be "beyond his century." He declares, in a text devoted to the origins and conditions of virtue, that the Romans lost their virtue when they started studying it. He indicts print culture in print. In a prize essay, he mocks prize essay contests--indeed, the very Academy that awarded him the prize for this essay. And this whole agglomeration of self-contradictions, of course, is itself in direct contradiction with his authentic, genuine, un-masked persona. (which suggests, incidentally, that Rousseau manages to outdo Nietzsche in this regard).

In short, we have here a kind of almost pathological desire to breach or confront the boundaries of the text. The limits that Rousseau is pushing up against are precisely the limits of what can be said in a printed, more or less academic, piece of writing: restrictions adopted voluntarily as founding axioms of the republic of letters so as not to get bogged down in irresolvable epistemological or methodological debates. Thus Rousseau's self-contradiction isn't entirely self-generated; he's not affirming that the sky is blue in one breath and denying it in the next. Rather, it's a kind of method itself--for discovering the things that sound most jarring when contradicted in this particular setting and fashion.

His mention of print, as well as his description of readers "enslaved by the opinions of their century," serves a particular purpose: the delineation of the crisis in legitimacy or textual authority created by the eighteenth-century reading and writing public. In past ages, either the virtuous taste of the audience or the sober rectitude of the authors could check the teaching of vice by not allowing it to outlast its time. The textual explosion of the eighteenth century has destroyed that mechanism. Rousseau's goal, then, is to confront the assumptions that govern this explosion and hence to restore a more virtuous kind of writing to primacy or at least to legitimacy.

Self-contradiction, in this sense, allows Rousseau to show up the axioms of the republic of letters as guaranteeing a textual homogeneity rather than the almost infinite possibilities print seems to offer. The reader's skepticism is already a wedge between him and written philosophical work, and Rousseau's goal is always to attune him to "the voice of conscience in the silence of the passions." At last Rousseau's reader is disillusioned in the redemptive possibilities of the public, and he can finally choose the right path--to reject the republic of letters:

Voilà la véritable philosophie, sachons nous en contenter; et sans envier la gloire de ces hommes célèbres qui s'immortalisent dans la république des lettres, tâchons de mettre entre eux et nous cette distinction glorieuse qu'on remarquait jadis entre deux grands peuples; que l'un savait bien dire, et l'autre, bien faire.

The Hodja and the Emperor

Tamerlane was disturbed that his subjects were not telling the truth. How could this be corrected? He summoned all the sages he knew of and asked them all how to correct this difficulty. Each of them gave him very learned answers but each response was complicated and difficult to follow. Perhaps they were pouring from the empty into the void. Finally, Nasreddin Hodja appeared and explained to Tamerlane: "Your majesty, it is indeed posssible to understand absolute Truth but before one can understand absolute Truth one must first understand the relativity of Truth. Only after mastering the relativity of Truth can one approach an understanding of Absolute Truth." Tamerlane exclaimed: "That's too complicated and I have an easier answer. I will set the Palace Guard at the gate to the city and before anyone enters the captain will ask them one question. If they answer truthfully they may enter the city but if they do not he shall hang them on the gallows. In that way this city will come to only harbor those who are truthful."

The next morning Hodja was first in line at the city gate. "Where are you going?" asked the captain of the guard. "I am going to be hung on those gallows," said Hodja. "That can't be true," said the Captain. "Well, if it is not true than you will have to hang me," said Hodja. "But if I hang you then it will be true," said the captain. "Yes," said Hodja, "Your Truth."
- A Hodja Nasreddin story (attributed, of course)

Besides his donkey, Hodja Nasreddin has few more constant companions than the emperor Tamerlane--Timur the Lame, who never called himself more than an Emir, yet left pyramids of human skulls in ransacked cities from Damascus to Delhi. The two form a Laurel and Hardy-like comedy duo: Tamerlane sets up the joke, by asking a question that reveals his vanity or arrogance, and Nasreddin outwits him, yet is never punished. It is remarkable that the geographic spread of the Hodja Nasreddin mythos largely corresponds to the extent of Tamerlane's dominions--from Syria and eastern Turkey to the steppes west of China, from the northern Caucasus to the borders of the Arabian peninsula. This is hardly a culturally uniform territory; yet each people in Tamerlane's path found some resonance in the stories of the Hodja (or Mullah, or Effendi...). It is as if he were an embodiment of some popular spirit--not warlike, not courageous, but a sly and yielding trickster who makes off with the cash while the powerful still think they're dealing with a fool.

Tricksters, even anti-establishment ones, exist in every culture, and turn up in the unlikeliest of places. (Sancho Panza is one. So is Solon in Herodotus' Histories, when Croesus asks him about happiness.) But the Laurel and Hardy dynamic, which is ever-present in this genre of story, is limited to a particular historical moment: personal, autocratic power, monarchy, despotism, tyranny. The Timur-Nasreddin stories are so delicious to read because they represent an encounter between the King (the State incarnate) and the Trickster (the People incarnate). The trickster has all the time in the world, because the people's patience is endless:

Tamerlane was looking for someone to teach his donkey to talk. Nobody wanted the job. Finally the wise man of the dunes, Hodja Nasreddin, took the position and promised to teach the donkey to talk in 10 years time. "Are you crazy?" his friends asked him. "Not really," Hodja answered, "the money is good, the job is not hard, and in 10 years a lot might happen: I might die, or Tamerlane might die, or surely enough this old donkey might die."

The healing value of these stories is the possibility they offer of sassing out the emperor, responsible for killing seventeen million people in his day; we're shocked at the Hodja's insolence only because we want to, but cannot, do as he does.

Leo Strauss wrote On Tyranny as an attempt to analyze, not only the phenomenon of tyranny as such, but also the relationship between the tyrant and the philosopher. In Xenophon's Hiero, the subject of his study, the philosopher coaxes the tyrant towards a more virtuous tyranny by using a form of reverse psychology (You're so lucky to have so much power! No, it is a misfortune, I'm always unhappy). This, like Nasreddin's Laurel and Hardy game, is in part an attempt to wrest some space from power by using its embodied, personal, immediate presence.

Strauss suggests that the Greek notion of tyranny is indispensable for modern political science; but what his dark and prescient "Restatement" suggests is that we are dealing with something different. Everyone knows Foucault's arguments, but this is one aspect of the shift towards positive, diffuse biopower that has been neglected: it destroys the possibility even for a mythological engagement with the State incarnate (outside of Kafka, maybe). And in Strauss, when the tyrant as living human gives way to the Tyrant abstraction at the head of the universal and homogenous state, we see likewise the passing of our oldest and most reliable weapons. No philosopher can tease the abstract Tyrant into self-improvement, so it has no use for philosophers; no Hodja Nasreddin can flatter and outwit it, so it has no use for those old stories. Imagine teaching its donkey to talk...

The Orgies of Reaction

Ô lâches, la voilà ! Dégorgez dans les gares !
Le soleil expia de ses poumons ardents
Les boulevards qu'un soir comblèrent les Barbares.
Voilà la Cité belle, assise à l'occident !

Allez ! on préviendra les reflux d'incendie,
Voilà les quais ! voilà les boulevards ! voilà
Sur les maisons, l'azur léger qui s'irradie
Et qu'un soir la rougeur des bombes étoila !

Cachez les palais morts dans des niches de planches !
L'ancien jour effaré rafraîchit vos regards.
Voici le troupeau roux des tordeuses de hanches :
Soyez fous, vous serez drôles, étant hagards !

Tas de chiennes en rut mangeant des cataplasmes,
Le cri des maisons d'or vous réclame. Volez !
Mangez ! Voici la nuit de joie aux profonds spasmes
Qui descend dans la rue. Ô buveurs désolés,

Buvez ! Quand la lumière arrive intense et folle,
Fouillant à vos côtés les luxes ruisselants,
Vous n'allez pas baver, sans geste, sans parole,
Dans vos verres, les yeux perdus aux lointains blancs.
- Arthur Rimbaud, "L'Orgie parisienne, ou Paris se repeuple" (May 1871)

In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus approached a phenomenon that seems absolutely essential for any understanding of possible revolution. The medieval Free Spirits in Munster, the Paris Commune, May 1968--among the only in fact successful anti-authoritarian social upheavals--were also tragically short-lived. An explosion of popular joy, the bosses toppled, true anarchy loosed upon the city. Liberty, equality, fraternity. Graffiti on the walls, the Vendome column shattered, free love and property in common; in short, an orgastic celebration of freedom.

And then, of course, the State returns with its crimson afterglow, and the dreary normalcy of each passing day further obliterates that moment when to be a realist was to demand the impossible.

Engels cited the Commune as the paradigmatic case of what communism would look like. Marxists, anarchists, and sentimental ex-hippie liberals gaze longingly back to May 1968 as an example of potential politics. But the Marcus approach implies that this is entirely wrongheaded. These eruptions of liberty cannot be any more than temporary; like Kerouac's "fabulous yellow roman candles," their very beauty is the guarantee of their destruction.

That much is clear, yet we still want to appeal to those old victories. They tempt us to aestheticize our revolutionary ambitions: even if we achieve no lasting transfiguration, surely these moments are enough to demonstrate the triumph of the dynamic human spirit. This is, indeed, all we have left. These Great Events have no causal power for us, they're only crumbs tossed us by history to keep alive a delusive hope.

Rimbaud's poem threatens even that sanctuary. The Parisian orgy of Thiers' return, the republican reactionaries glutted with blood, the "rutting dogs" of the golden mansions--the death of the Commune is the tragic and grotesque mirror image of its birth. Order, it seems, is not just the banality of evil, the bureacratic machine, the air-conditioned nightmare, the gray technocracy. It can also, with the same relish, unleash the crowd's dark and hidden lusts.

Behind the love and joy of May 1871 and May 1968 is the realization that the war of all against all is a lie, that I need not fear my fellow man. The Situationist graffiti read: "Man is neither Rousseau’s noble savage nor the Church’s or La Rochefoucauld’s depraved sinner. He is violent when oppressed, gentle when free." But the return of reaction makes a promise equally tempting: for a moment, trust to Leviathan, for you will be protected and unpunished while you avenge the State on the bodies of its enemies.

Revolutionaries would like to think that Man prefers the relish of liberty to the relish of impunity. To think so is to ignore the darkness of the human heart. Those liberating May orgasms cannot be seen separately from the ensuing Parisian orgies; and indeed there is more of the latter at the heart of the former than we would ever, in the most hopeless of moments, admit.

The Treason of Materiality

A couple of days ago, I went to the Musée Carnavalet (I am in Paris until mid-June). Tucked away in a corner of the first floor is Marcel Proust's room. Presumably the room itself was bigger; but the black rolltop desk, the Chinese wooden screen, the chaise longue--all of these, the little card says, are from his Paris apartment. I was amazed to see it. I wondered: could it help me understand his world, the better to enter into his project?

I do not think so anymore, though the experience was a striking one. This may be ironic: was not Proust the consummate student of the material, the writer of the madeleine and of Bergotte's potatoes and of those endlessly erotic hawthorns? These things do come alive in the Recherche. But their very importance for Marcel, through the paths of memory triggered by an herbal infusion or a paving-stone, suggests that these things do not have mere existence in the world (according to my primitive reading of Heidegger, mere presence-at-hand). Because of the way that Proust uses these things, they can never be anything other than Zeug (equipment ready-to-hand). Perhaps the whole project of the Recherche is an attempt at creating a surrogate Dasein which reroutes all of its surrounding materiality into equipment defined by its Being-towards-memory.

The Heideggerian speculation is irrelevant, really; the point is, these things are dead to us unless they are being seen through the eyes of a memory that can make use of them. Proust's too-small lacquered desk can tell us nothing, cannot yield its recollections, unless we have the key. The key is the persona of Marcel, or maybe the Recherche itself; what it gives us is the meaning--the precise draught of remembrance--contained in each encountered object. And therefore it is its genius that it no longer needs the material. What the bed could tell us we have already learned, and it ends up as dead as when we started.

But not all material objects of a past world are so well drawn-out from their niches. The Greek coins, the broken pots, the rusted spears of archeology: can they not be persuaded to give up the secrets of a lost world? Still less. For here we do not even see the concreteness which is supposed to be material culture's greatest gift. 'This water trough is representative of a type common in Smyrna before the Persian Wars': the dryness and abstraction of a literature review, the material made to serve as equipment for a memory it can no longer recall. We may know the average dimensions of the ancients' dinner tables, but we yet know nothing of their perceptions, the meanings of their things.

If history were to pay serious attention to the problem of phenomenology--the phenomenology of the past is well within its purview--it would find itself enlisting the aid of philosophers. This could soon be its greatest challenge. Cultural history has made some steps in this direction, but so much of that work is just clever juxtaposition, the intersection of a fragmentary and uneven sample of material. It is necessary to go beyond material culture, to reconstruct the Dasein behind the things, the "plusieurs étages" underneath the museum shelf.

Three Rival Versions of MacIntyre

Can we now realize, within the forms imposed by the contemporary university, the kind of and the degree of antagonistic dialogue between fundamentally conflicting and incommensurable standpoints which moral and theological enquiry may be held to require from within one or more of the contending standpoints? Or can fundamental debate on moral and theological questions now only be carried on outside the constraints of the conventional academic system, in the waging of a kind of guerrilla warfare against that system?

Were we to have to answer "Yes" to this last question, our situation would indeed be desperate. For what forced fundamentally dissident thinkers, such as Foucault, into the conformism of the university was in fact the absence of any independent forums for debate, of any organized institutions for enquiry, of any nonacademic genres of communication outside it. The impoverishment of the wider culture presented them with a harder choice than any that Nietzsche had had to make, that between some considerable measure of academic conformity and almost complete ineffectiveness...
- Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

MacIntyre's book represents the best kind of intellectual history: a thorough willingness to pick through the detritus of the past and deploy it, with sensitivity and power, to make interesting theoretical claims. For a neo-neo-Thomist, he's remarkably open-minded about the potential of Nietzschean strains of philosophy; yet he is also nuanced and critical about them, not a common approach among continentals nowadays. His main criticism of genealogy, however, is not an unproblematic one: he appeals to its apparent inability to involve a consistent self behind the text and suggests some contradictions this implies with respect to its rhetorical needs.

MacIntyre is mistaken--not because genealogy deals just fine with the underlying self, but because no text (or lecture!) can resolve this conflict without some theoretical legerdemain. In fact, MacIntyre's text itself is a battlefield of textual personae, whose apparent incommensurability cannot but lend some credence to the genealogical mode of enquiry.

The first, roughly speaking, is that of the intellectual historian. MacIntyre takes in the history of intellectual conflicts, both in the High Middle Ages and the nineteenth-early twentieth centuries (the seventeeth and eighteenth are curiously elided). For a series of lectures, his grasp of the relevant issues is simply astonishing. Yet the second persona--that of a partisan of the "tradition-bound" mode of intellectual labor, appealing to a craft virtue and a craft memory that can be pursued as a moral goal--does not play well with this. MacIntyre seems to speak of a craft of philosophy, within which an apprenticeship must be pursued that allows one to draw on its craft traditions. What is the tradition of philosophy? Surely MacIntyre would not maintain that it lies only with Aristotle and Aquinas and their kinsmen. Indeed, the only possible source for this tradition is intellectual history itself. But as MacIntyre the intellectual historian so assiduously demonstrates, there is no single good, or even any particular source of virtue, that can be discerned in this narrative of conflicting and clashing traditions! In the ends of their rhetoric, then, these two personae fail to walk hand in hand--one demands something the other immediately withdraws.

There is a third persona, a more hidden one than the rest: that of the proto-Habermasian--Thucydides' Diodotus, the defender of discourse. In the final lectures, MacIntyre ends up calling for an ideal speech situation where purportedly incommensurable versions of philosophical work can set upon each other, tearing up axioms and foundations left and right. (In this, he curiously follows his antagonist Feyerabend). This appeal conflicts with the other two: the craft virtue/tradition of philosophy cannot be left unharmed by the existence of an arena wherein all the old stones may be upturned and re-examined (as MacIntyre implies, the "apprentice" philosopher must be willing to subordinate her immediate sense of the goodness of an idea to the timeless and authoritative tradition of the craft--impossible if the proposed arena of ideas is to have any meaning whatsoever). More significantly, though, MacIntyre the intellectual historian would hasten to tell MacIntyre the Habermasian an uncomfortable truth: the modern university is not a bland and self-satisfied bastion of mindless scholasticism and utter impotence merely because of the desires and actions of its constituent parts. It has been reduced, or restricted, to this state by the pressure of capital and power. Nietzsche already pointed this out in "Schopenhauer as Educator"; it would be remiss for the intellectual historian not to heed the lesson, but the Habermasian seems willing to ignore it.

Given these contradictions, can't we hold MacIntyre to a sense of responsibility for his argumentation, as he suggests regarding the genealogists? After all, doesn't the presence of a consistent orator suggest that a lecture is grounded in a fixed Self more than any other genre? I think we still cannot. The commitments and final causes expressed in any text create personae who have wills of their own within its bounds, and the tales we spin simply lack the power to resolve the breaks between them. It is not simply a matter of masks; personae are often involuntary convulsions. So the first casualty of MacIntyre's exegesis is precisely the Self, untroubled or transformed, to which he directs it.