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Postmodernism By Paul Newall (2005)
In the study of philosophy we eventually come up against postmodernism, however hard we may try to avoid it. Typically the context is someone uttering the familiar refrain "that postmodern nonsense", but sometimes it can be heard as a description of art or society. In this piece we'll try to get a grip on what it means, what we can use it for, what we can learn from it and why some people are want to insist that only troglodytes partake of it.
What is Postmodernism?
The first place we run into trouble when discussing postmodernism is in defining the term itself. The thinkers and ideas often referred to as postmodern disagree amongst themselves —usually significantly—as well as with dictionary versions, while opponents may not always be fair in their characterisations. With this in mind, can we even speak of postmodernism in the first place? To try to make sense of it, we can attempt several approaches.
The word itself
The term "postmodern" is a recent one, as we might expect. The furthest it has been traced is to 1932 or thereabouts, when it was used to describe the contrast in Hispanic poetry between Borges (and others) and newer work that seemed to be a reaction to modernism (or ultramodernismo, as it was called). Toynbee called the period from 1875 to the present (in 1940, when he wrote) "postmodern", while poets and artists began to employ it to talk of challenges to modernism. Some writers prefer to distinguish between two senses of the word: on the one hand, we have post-modern (with a hyphen) to denote the continuation of modernism, perhaps in new directions (hence the post-modern, or after modernism); on the other, postmodern (with the hyphen gone) signifies something different (postmodern, or after modernism and separate from it—replacing it).
Modernism
Given that all this talk involves modernism in some way, we need to understand this notion if we hope to appreciate what came after or replaced it. The difficultly—yet again—is that this term is itself used to denote a wide spectrum of directions, tendencies and influences in literature and art, as well as a philosophical idea; indeed, it also appears to differ in meaning in many countries, even if only slightly. Before we get any further, then, we can say that one of the main problems with postmodernism is that not everyone means the same thing by it: it could be a person rejects a claim characterized as postmodern when the listener does not even think of it as such. Perhaps the proper response, then, to someone who exclaims " not more postmodern rubbish!" is to ask "what do you mean by postmodern?" It may be worth ducking if the rejoinder is a swift clip around the ear, though.
In order to attempt a rescue of this situation, we can focus not on the many specific differences in understanding but on the general tendency described by Jürgen Habermas and others whereby modernism is synonymous with or much the same as the Enlightenment project; that is, those ideas that came about (roughly) at the time of the Enlightenment (the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), often also called the Age of Reason. This was when the first encyclopedias were being compiled and thinkers were critical of forms of traditional knowledge or authority, especially religious or political ones. Broadly speaking, the hope was that the search for truth by means of reason and the natural sciences would replace superstition, irrationalism and fear and lead to an ordered world in which men thought for themselves instead of following custom or the beliefs that had been held unquestioningly for generations. Kant offered a motto as defining the Enlightenment, saying "Sapere aude: have courage to use your own understanding." Goya rendered this as "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos", or "the sleep of reason produces monsters".
While it is easy to see where the attraction in the progressive enlightening that would follow the march of reason, Weber called it the "disenchantment of the world"; many of the religious ideas, superstitions and folk tales that provided explanations or comfort of one kind or another would not stand up to scrutiny, but the rational picture that replaced them could seem cold, impersonal and just as imprisoning. Habermas' opinion is that although this process may be flawed in some ways, it is not yet finished: although much has been accomplished, the potential in this approach has still to be realized. Postmodernism, then, is on this view rather an anti-modernism that would give up this reasoned effort in favour of an irrational one that is skeptical of the very possibilities encouraged by the Enlightenment.
Whether we accept this characterization or not, we could say that postmodernism is skeptical of theoretical viewpoints that are foundational (as we discussed in our fifth article) or grounded in some way, and critical of theory in general. Sometimes a distinction is made along the following lines:
Affirmative postmodernists: theory needs to be changed, rather than rejected Skeptical postmodernists: theory should be rejected, or at least subject to severe critique
There are other ways to appreciate what postmodernism involves by looking at some of the ideas and understandings proposed by various important thinkers, as well as by comparing some of the trends in modernism with how they have become viewed in a postmodern context. This what we'll do shortly below.
After modernism?
Before we get to some of the characteristics of postmodernism, it would be meaningful to ask if any of them are new or radically different from anything that came before. Is postmodernism really after modernism? The answer to this question appears to be in the negative: all the features we see below have been spoken of or held before in ages past. We could try to insist that never before have thinkers assumed them in a systematic fashion, but that is also not the case today—as we said previously.
Some writers have suggested that the very notion of defining periods (as "modern", "postmodern" or anything else) is merely a rhetorical device: a means of comparing the present to something different (usually to show the more recent in a favourable light) by constructing some other time in history that was perhaps not so enlightened as our own. For example, we have already seen the contrast between so-called "traditional" ways and modernism or the rise of the Age of Reason. Were traditional times really as backward as they are sometimes portrayed, though? If not, then it seems fairer to say that succeeding views brought to light those features that were already there but perhaps neglected or ignored. As we saw in earlier pieces, some of the "new" ideas proposed by philosophers and others have in fact been little different from (or the same as) those in the past; the only change might be that circumstances became more favourable to their acceptance.
Comparing the two
Bearing these remarks in mind, we can now contrast modern and postmodern thinking on some illustrative areas and questions, taking each respectively. Although we must be careful to over generalization or oversimplification, opposing modern to postmodern we have:
Structure opposed to anarchy Construction opposed to deconstruction Theory opposed to anti-theory Interpretation opposed to hostility toward definite interpretation Meaning opposed to the play of meaning or a refusal to pin down Metanarratives opposed to hostility toward narratives The search for underlying meaning opposed to a suspicion (or certainty) that this is impossible Progress opposed to a doubt that progress is possible Order opposed to subversion Encyclopedic knowledge opposed to a web of understanding
Some of these will be considered in greater depth as we continue.
Elements and influences
Metanarratives
One of the most important thinkers on postmodernism, referred to often, is Jean-François Lyotard. In discussing postmodernism, he wrote:
I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives..."
Now some people are not too convinced about Santa's existence either and may be incredulous toward him (hence explaining the lumps of coal in their stockings), but at least we know what we mean by him. What are metanarratives?
A narrative is usually another way of saying a "story" or a description of some turn of events, so a metanarrative (sometimes also called a Grand Narrative, with capitals for effect) is a narrative that explains (or perhaps contains) all others. For example, there are various narratives all over the world that explain the creation of the universe and everything in it; if a particular story is claimed to be the ultimate one that explains properly or accurately, it could be characterised as a metanarrative. The Enlightenment narrative that we have discussed above, to take another instance, says that reason and the natural sciences will help to free the world from superstition and ignorance, bringing us to (or closer to) true knowledge of our universe. Metanarratives can and are used to translate other narratives into their own form, subsuming them as they must if they are to explain all other accounts in their own terms.
According to Lyotard, then, postmodernism is at least skeptical of this tendency, if not outright "incredulous" at the very possibility of finding one story that explains the world and all others. It is easy to see where this suspicion could come from: we could make the argument that since all attempts so far (that we know of) to find a grand narrative have failed, it follows that the thing just cannot be done. That does not follow, of course, as we saw in our fifth article, but it might at least incline us to be doubtful of the chances of success.
Some critics have suggested that in talking of the "death" or failure of all metanarratives, we are merely offering yet another metanarrative in their place, one that talks of this universal failure and tells us we have to accept it as the final story. Another point of objection concerns those narratives that have not yet failed; for Habermas, as we saw, modernism has not fulfilled its potential, while other cultures have their own narratives that cannot easily be dismissed just because Anglo-European ones are said to be doomed.
Another way to look at this issue is by way of foundationalism, which we considered in our fifth article on epistemology. The search for a metanarrative, according to Gianni Vattimo, is much the same as the quest for a foundation underlying our knowledge; this assumption that we require a foundation, though, is called into question. Instead, Vattimo suggests the metaphor used by Jorge Luis Borges in his famous story The Library of Babel, in which the universe is described an infinite library. When we wander though it looking at the books, we find that they each refer to other books—never an external authority, or the "catalogue of catalogues", as Borges terms it. Rather than appealing to foundations, then, or something else to ground our knowledge, we instead have to be satisfied with the library, or an interlocking web of ideas and beliefs.
A philosopher who has looked at this question in much depth is Richard Rorty, who is very critical of foundationalism (see our fifth article) and much of classical epistemology. In his early work he opposed the notion that knowledge somehow "reflects" or "mirrors" the world around us. If that is so, then it would make more sense for us to give up looking for an overarching language or narrative to understand all others in and instead just translate between them, much like Vattimo. Antifoundationalism is a rejection of the earlier ideas in favour of other understandings of knowledge, some of which we considered previously. Rorty suggests that we employ our concepts as tools to accomplish whatever goals we have, not as a means of hooking onto the world as it really is.
Another epistemological perspective that has seen much activity in recent years and which often comes up in the context of postmodernism is constructivism. According to this idea, we don't receive knowledge through our senses or through discussion; instead, we build it up for ourselves from these and other inputs—we construct knowledge, rather than discover it. A slightly different way to say this is that we adapt our knowledge to organize what we experience, as opposed to using it to explore an external reality. This is quite a contrast with foundationalist approaches; according to some constructivists, we come up with many models to guide us toward whatever goals we have and all that reality can do is help us accept or reject those that are unsuccessful. We could say that we're devising better and better maps to get us where we're going, not exploring the territory.
An obvious criticism of constructivism is to ask how it can select between alternative models if not by reference to a world that already exists and is not just constructed by us? Can we really say that we built up the fact that we can't breathe underwater, or was it instead forced upon us by the way the world happens to be? We find in our everyday experience that not every model is as good as any other when trying to accomplish a specific task, so many constructivists point to coherence or pragmatic concerns (cf. our tenth article) instead of verifying ideas by testing them against the world.
The notion of metanarratives and their rejection or acceptance thus involves many aspects, including epistemology and metaphysics. If Lyotard's definition of postmodernism is anything to go by then our opinions of these issues can go some way to determining how we view the subject.
Power and knowledge
In our sixth piece we looked at the power that can be associated with terms like "knowledge" and "truth". Some thinkers characterized as postmodern worry about this and feel that some legitimate areas or methods of inquiry—or indeed modes of life—could be restricted. To take a simple example, if it is known that a certain method of farming is known to most efficient, it may be that some people insist that everyone adopt it—after all, there are a lot of hungry people. Nevertheless, should we allow this knowledge to force others to live in a way they do not wish to?
On another level, some people consider that "primitive" groups should be civilized for their own benefit, but critics say that this assumes that what is good for one is good for everyone. This is partly a question of ethics (see the previous piece), of course: should we point to the successes of a particular way of doing something or insist that others adopt it to, say, increase their health or life-span? The concern is that the sanction of calling something the truth endows it with a power that makes it easier to force people to do or accept things they otherwise might not.
Another example of this kind concerns madness or insanity, the history of which was studied by Michel Foucault and others. According to a certain understanding of this phenomenon, popularized by a group known as the anti-psychiatrists, it is very difficult indeed to define what we mean "insane", say, unless by comparison to "normal" behaviour; what, though, is normal? Nowadays more complex methods are used in this process but it is clear that in the past it would be a relatively easy matter to define conduct that we disapprove of as abnormal or insane and legislate for the (forcible) treatment of people displaying it. If a certain group has the power to decide who is mad and who isn't, then their actions could have terrible consequences, as we have seen throughout history with the sterilization of so-called simpletons in the US or the concentration camps in Germany.
The principle behind these and other instances is to be aware of the power and influence associated with defining terms or making distinctions between people; the way we understand concepts has consequences—the pen being mightier than the sword on occasion—so we have to be aware of this and act accordingly.
Poststructuralism
A term that comes up often in discussions of postmodernism or thinkers associated with it is poststructuralism. Much like our opening remarks on postmodernism, this is also a difficult concept to define and involves the same notion of after-structuralism, so we need to look at this as well. Structuralism, then, is sometimes described as the attempt to bring all our attempts to understand the human condition under one model or structure, with a single methodology, all derived from the linguistics (the study of languages) of a Swiss theorist called Ferdinand de Saussure. There are many other influences but this is often said to be the main one.
Much work and controversy is associated with Saussure's studies and that which followed, but the important and basic is that language is conceived of as not just a way of expressing our needs and ideas but something required before we can even think or have social interaction. The meaning of a story, say, is thus to be found in its structure; by analysing this and the language used, we can come to understand it.
As structuralism became more important, particularly in Europe, poststructuralism emerged as a challenge to it. Is the meaning of a word really fixed or is it instead, to consider an alternative, actually defined by the use we want to put it to? What if the words we employ to refer to some fixed structure in fact miss their mark and never quite provide us with a bedrock structure to base everything on? Poststructuralism suggests instead that meaning is always unstable; when we use a word to point to a concept, it never quite gets there—reaching instead to another word, and thence to another, and so on. This is another challenge to the possibility of metanarratives and the Enlightenment ideas in particular.
Interpretation
When we read a story, we sometimes take it for granted that the author is explaining to us what happened to the characters, what they thought about and—often—what the moral of the tale is. We could think of it as a fireside chat, in which the writer talks and we listen; in some detective stories, say, we are hoping to find out who did it, how and why. In some books, though, the moral isn't so obvious, and with poetry or movies it can be even worse; sometimes two people can see the same film and understand it in completely different ways. In that case, the issue is one of interpretation: who has appreciated the point of the piece most accurately?
One way to answer this would be to ask the author, if he or she is still alive. Having said that, why should they necessarily be the one to decide? If we have a favourite poem that we read to have a particular meaning to us, should we allow that there are more authoritative ways of approaching it? Given that there may be very many understandings of the same piece, some of which may seem a lot more sophisticated than what the writer apparently intended, can it make sense to call one legitimate and the others not?
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation, named according to some after the Greek god Hermes (Mercury in the Roman pantheon), the patron of interpreters (among other things) who also lent his name to hermeticism. In the past it was associated with the interpretation of scriptures; some holy books warn against over-interpretation while others attribute many distinct layers of meaning to the same text, particularly in some Judaic works and the Hermetic oeuvre. Works by Homer, Dante or Shakespeare have been studied on many levels, but the prime example remains the religious texts: commentaries on commentaries had so much become the standard that in the fifteen hundreds Luther declared his famous maxim sola scriptura (or "by Scripture alone"), intending to strip away all the interpretations that had gone before and hence influenced the reader and instead start anew.
In more recent times, Jacques Derrida declared "il n'y a pas de hors texte"—there is nothing outside the text. One way to understand this is to take it that there are is no guidance or adjudication to be found when considering a piece save within it; thus, when we try to decide what the correct interpretation of a poem is, we can only use the poem itself and not point to something external that would settle the matter for us. Indeed, one writer (Dilthey) said that the purpose of hermeneutics is "to understand the author better than he understood himself"; perhaps the writer unconsciously included aspects or influences in a text that he or she is not aware of and that can only be brought to light by interpretation by others? This led some to proclaim the "death of the author", but at the very least we have the author, the text itself and the reader all having an input into how the text is read.
Deconstructionism
One form of interpretation or analysis of texts that is associated with Derrida and the so-called Yale school of Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Geoffrey Hartman is deconstruction. It has had more of an impact on philosophy and literary theory in Continental Europe, but its influence has been felt widely. It can be traced back to Nietzsche but the problem with explaining or understanding it is that its proponents often insist that there is no deconstructionist method; that is, it isn't just another systematic approach to be applied that can be defined by explicit steps or principles. Even so, we can list some general guidelines that will help:
Add nothing to the text: The piece (it could be anything) under consideration should fall apart from its own flaws without needing to look outside it. Look for unstated assumptions: By reading closely, we may be able to find presuppositions that the author relies on implicitly but doesn't argue for or explain; by pointing these out and criticising them, the purpose of the text may fail. Reverse the terms: It may be that by changing some of the terms in a piece to their polar opposites, exactly the reverse argument is made. For example, a racist text may be just as sound (or otherwise) with "white" swapped for "black" (or vice versa); but if it applied to any group, it wouldn't be making a point at all. Look for multiple interpretations: Rather than allowing one reading of the text to be privileged, try to find others—particularly those that may contradict or be entirely opposed to others. If a piece can support so many, perhaps its conclusions or premises should be called into question? Look for limitations: What can the text not include or describe? What has been explicitly or implicitly excluded from it in order to make the points or arguments therein?
A major criticism levelled at deconstructionism is that its proponents seldom attack their own work in the same way; why not deconstruct a deconstruction, for instance? There are also obvious limitations to which texts can be deconstructed: although some think it can apply to anything, it is hard to see how it can address mathematical or (some) scientific papers without the knowledge of these areas that most deconstructionists lack or without tackling the philosophical problems associated with them first.
Another objection to deconstruction comes from a different perspective on language. According to Wittgenstein, rather than representing a correspondence between propositions and reality (cf. our tenth article), language is a series of games or practices that enable us to achieve whatever goals we have in a situation; thus, as we said earlier, meaning is defined by use. On these terms, deconstructionism is simply beside the point: language adapts to its use and pulling a text apart fails to take account of this.
Queer and feminist theory
"Queer" was originally a derogatory mode of address for homosexuals but was adopted in a positive sense in the 1990s by some militants. Based partly on Foucault's writings on sexuality, queer theory is concerned with sexual identity and particularly the idea that fixed categories (such as "masculine" and "feminine") are insufficient to describe the diversity we see in our world. Foucault noted that a vague grouping of actions were replaced by a group of sexual categories and questioned whether this was justified or meaningful; is it enough to speak of heterosexual and homosexual or is this binary either/or not enough to account for the varieties of human behaviour? Even if we add other designations, the same question remains: are we describing divisions that actually exist or instead forcing individuals into moulds that they do not fit? What are the consequences of the latter, especially for those questioning their sexuality? Queer theory studies these and other similar questions.
In a similar way, feminist theory considers the role and influence of gender and of ideas defining the role of women in society. For instance, is knowledge asexual? Some propose a radical feminist epistemology wherein knowledge claims depend on who is making them? Did biological differences determine, wholly or in part, the historically restricted role of women or were social and other prejudices to blame? Does the portrayal of women in the media, art or literature have a positive effect or does it merely reinforce old stereotypes? Should women work for equality or the celebration of difference? Whatever the answers to these questions, the main point raised by feminist theory is that the relationship between the sexes is not one of fairness and equal standing but instead a narrative of oppression and inequality. Whether this is so, who or what is to blame and how to remedy it is still the subject of much discussion today.
Postcolonial theory
Although influenced by Edward Said's early work, postcolonial theory is relatively recent and seeks to study those cultures affected by colonialism. One way to define it is as those political, economic, social and cultural practices that evolve as a result of or response to colonialism. A potential problem for any look at a former colony is seeing it from a Western perspective and judging accordingly; when people from within the culture decide to describe it for themselves, why should they adopt this perspective instead of their own? What is the effect of using the former colonial language, say, as opposed to the native tongue(s)? Does self-description come naturally or is it a reaction or resistance to being discussed on another's terms? How did the interaction between coloniser and colonised affect both?
One consequence identified related to the Western use of the term "Orient" (or, today, the "Middle East"); according to some theorists, this had the connotation of "exotic" or different and hence instilled a view whereby other parts of the world were talked of as "us and them" or "here and there", a practice that continues today and which prevents or makes it difficult for the "us" to understand "them". In addition, "they" might have had to alter their feelings of identity as a result of the pressures of colonisation. Postcolonial theory looks at these issues and tries to increase our appreciation of our history and its impact on our ability to learn about others if we implicitly suppose them to be different before we even start.
Criticisms
Postmodernism (and its related aspects) is not without its critics, of course. Several different complaints have been raised, the importance of which depend on how a particular idea has been stated:
Although postmodernism focuses on irrational tendencies and appears to celebrate them, it still uses reason as a tool. Postmodernists mock the inconsistencies of modernism but are not consistent themselves. Rejecting criteria for judging questions is not enough; alternatives have to be provided. Postmodernists call for interdisciplinary work and not taking subjects in isolation, but they do this themselves in their own criticisms and fail to learn enough about other subjects to be in a position to do so.
The first three are often forms of ad hominem tu quoque, a logical fallacy in which an argument is questioned because the proponent doesn't seem to hold him or herself to it; if the positions are explained carefully, though, there is no requirement for a postmodernist to be consistent if his or her objective is only to show that an idea is flawed. One way to think of this is as a substantial shrug of the shoulders: if someone demands to know what we have to offer instead of their suggestions, we can say "I don't know, but yours are still wrong"; afterwards we can ask what we need to conclude from this (for instance, is it better to have bad ideas than no ideas at all?). There are some thinkers, of course, that do offer explicit statements that can be addressed by the above criticisms (such as saying "we should not use reason to decide things" and then offering argument in support), but our discussion in the eighth article entreats us to be careful and not to avoid interesting postmodern ideas that are not beaten so easily.
The remark that much of postmodernist thinking demonstrates a lack of knowledge of other disciplines—leading to weak criticisms thereof—is one we could make about most subjects but has more importance in this context. Is it sensible to complain at the relationship between power and knowledge, say, without knowing how physicists and biologists claim to come by the latter, particularly given the diversity of approaches even in these (cf. our sixth piece)? A situation to be avoided if possible is one in which no-one really knows what anyone else is doing but criticises them all the same. The problem of realism that we looked at before is very significant to the kinds of ideas postmodernists have put forward, which is why we find it being addressed by some of them. Opponents of postmodernism find it doubtful that the search for facts or truth need oppress anyone; although it is possible to use knowledge as power, they say, this has nothing to do with the facts themselves and everything to do with interpretation and the people doing the interpreting.
Another telling criticism is to note that to be anti-theory is still to have a theory; that is, the theory that we shouldn't have a theory. Rejecting the need for criteria (whatever their purpose) is still a criterion. Is it possible to be as playful as some suggest, not holding beliefs or methodological approaches and instead refusing to define or pin down narratives? How lightly can we hold our ideas before we end up either holding nothing at all or become certain of them without realising it?
One point raised against postmodernism concerns the language used in many works, which can seem tangled and obtuse at the best of times. Are long, complicated words being used as part of a specialist language or because postmodernists have nothing of consequence to say and want to hide this fact behind their rhetoric? Often the answer is a matter of opinion, or of saying that even a difficult writer can sometimes offer a comment clearly enough to raise an eyebrow before plunging back into a thicket of terminology. Since a key assumption of this series is that anything worth saying can be said clearly, it may be that some people are reluctant to wade into postmodernist thinking for fear that their time will be wasted; unless the writer is composing his thoughts merely for the amusement of himself and a few select friends, this is a difficulty that still restricts the impact that postmodern ideas can have.
The limits of interpretation
One thinker critical of the idea that meaning is forever deferred or that interpretation can go on and on without ever reaching an end is the semiotician Umberto Eco. In his work Interpretation and Overinterpretation he asked if instead there are limits to how much interpretation we can do with a given text. For example, suppose we take Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, the tale of a father's murder, apparently by his own son, and with much discussion of philosophical and theological issues. We can each read it in a different way, understanding some lines, sections or characters in disparate ways and maybe even disagreeing vehemently about the moral of the story (if any); however, it seems ridiculous to say that we could interpret it as a manual explaining how to survive on Mars in the event of a global shortage of apples—some readings are too far beyond the text to be able to claim much (or any) support from it.
In addition to apparently baseless interpretations, we can also overinterpret and see things that aren't there. An especially rich source of examples can be found in conspiracy theory, wherein the search for links between events and the hidden motivations of individuals or groups can result in speculations that, while they have some basis in fact, go too far. We see this also in the hunt for codes in Shakespeare and Marlowe: the former is believed by some to have left clues to the real authorship of his work while the latter was a spy and peppered his writing with anti-masonic comments. Eco himself gives the instance of the "Followers of the Veil" who read Dante's erotic references as coded criticism of the Church. Too much interpretation can lead us to see what we want to, rather than the (sometimes) quite specific intention of the author.
Eco's main point is not that a text can tell us how it should be read but that it restricts what we can say. Even if we can take an infinity of different understandings, they are not equal: some of them will be supported by the text while others will not. In this respect, his remarks are much like the criticisms that were raised against older forms of empiricism (cf. our fifth and sixth pieces): we can't just appeal to our own ideas of what there is in the world but neither can we test them against that world without further ado; instead, we have to accept that our assumptions, goals and hopes can influence what we see but we still check our thinking to see if it has any support in the very thing we are trying to understand. Thus we can accept that there may be no final reading or fact to be found without giving up the possibility that some readings are more "far-fetched" than others. In terms of metanarratives, it may be the case that none of the possibilities yet or to come can succeed entirely, but we can still say that some are better than others.
To summarise, postmodernism is made up of too many elements and thinkers who very often disagree with each other to permit any simplistic assessment of it. We have to take each idea as it comes and treat it on its own merits, even while it remains fashionable to employ "postmodern" as a synonym for muddleheaded.
Dialogue the Ninth
The Scene: The next day. Trystyn and Steven are walking beside the river, discussing the previous night's events. Both seem down.
Steven: Why didn't you tell me she was already taken?
Trystyn: She isn't "taken".
Steven: What? Of course she is.
Trystyn: You should think about the consequences of the words you use, even when upset. She's not an object; she's in a relationship.
Steven: Which you failed to tell me about.
Trystyn: What could I have said? It's not for me to define what she has and what she means by it. Perhaps she views it differently to me, or to you?
Steven: You know very well what I mean.
Trystyn: Perhaps, but not what she means.
Steven: (Exasperated...) What? Meaning is fixed.
Trystyn: No, it isn't. Lots of people use words in different way, or understand them differently to how you might. Meaning is flexible this way, according to how you want to use a word. Maybe her relationships are flexible, too?
Steven: Mine are not. In any case, if you intend to use a word in conversation or anything else—if you want to communicate—then it has to be the same or nearly the same as the other party. I'm sick and tired of this postmodern nonsense where people avoid any kind of responsibility by claiming that there are just too many interpretations to call any of them valid. If you talk to someone then you have to consider what they'll think or feel; look at their behaviour, the situation you're in and the circumstances. It's just like taking a bunch of theories and testing them; it's not enough to take your own interpretation and call it equally valid to any other, or better because it's yours.
Trystyn: You can see, though, that she might've assumed you knew?
Steven: Why would I? How easy it'd be if we all accepted that nothing can be known at all; we can't pin meaning down because it always eludes us or remains indeterminate. You know who does that? People who are afraid to say "this is what I mean, and nothing else". You can read a book any way you like but there are boundaries to it forced upon you by the author's intentions, the characters and their goals, possibilities in the story; you can add to it, but the structure is already there to build on. If you move too far away from the context then you're just talking to yourself, making yourself look ridiculous.
Trystyn: I guess the point of it all is to prevent one perspective from gaining power over others, or to stop it from being considered correct at the expense of all others. We know what happens when people are certain of themselves and decide to convince everyone else.
Steven: (Shaking his head...) This kind of tyranny isn't associated with everything. I just wanted to walk her home. An author pens a story and doesn't necessarily intend to subvert the human condition or hide his motives so that some guy with no knowledge of his subject can pull it to pieces and coin a few words while he's at it. The way around problems with meaning isn't to render everything meaningless.
Trystyn: Wow.
Steven: (Under a full head of steam...) Of course I know that perceptions differ; that meanings vary between theories; that sometimes pinning something down can kill it. What's the solution? We have to be a lot more careful. We can take account of the problems and try to be clearer, or more cautious, but what we can't do is take our toys and go home. What does that achieve?
Trystyn: Not much, I guess.
Steven: Suppose it can't be done—that we can't find all the answers. Suppose even that every attempt to do so is tainted by our biases or the use we hope to make of it, or even that meaning will forever elude us. Won't we still try?
Trystyn: I'm sorry I didn't.
Steven: I didn't expect to know her mind, or for her to fall at my feet. It just wasn't too much to ask that you both pay some attention to me—after all, I'm hardly the most complicated of fools—and consider the consequences of what I would find meaning in.
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The Return of Political Philosophy Pierre Manent
It could be said that the twentieth century has witnessed the disappearance, or withering away, of political philosophy. An old–fashioned empirical proof of this statement is easy to produce: certainly no Hegel, no Marx, even no Comte, has lived in our century, able to convey to the few and the many alike a powerful vision of our social and political statics and dynamics.
However highly we might think of the philosophical capacities and results of Heidegger, Bergson, Whitehead, or Wittgenstein, we would not single out any of them for his contribution to political philosophy. Heidegger, it is true, ventured into some political action, including speeches, but it is a matter for deep regret. Heidegger’s was the steepest fall; on a much lower level, there was Sartre’s indefatigable vituperation against anything rational or decent in civic life.
It is true that contrariwise, authors like Sir Karl Popper and Raymond Aron have been worthy contributors to both general epistemology and political inquiry, always in a spirit of sturdy and humane citizenship. And some modern representatives of that venerable tradition of thought, Thomism, have offered serious reflection on moral, social, and political problems within a comprehensive account of the world. But despite such countervailing considerations, the general diagnosis seems to me to be inescapable: no modern original philosopher has been willing or able to include a thorough analysis of political life within his account of the human world, or, conversely, to elaborate his account of the whole from an analysis of our political circumstances.
To be sure, the effort to understand social and political life did not cease in this century. It even underwent a huge expansion through the extraordinary development of the social sciences, which have increasingly determined the self–understanding of modern men and women. It might be asserted that the collective and multifaceted work of all those sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, economists, and political scientists has shed more light on our common life than could the exertions of any individual mind, however gifted; that, when it comes to understanding our social and political life, this "collective thought" is necessarily more impartial than even a mind as impartial as Hegel’s; that in this sense political philosophy, including democratic political philosophy, has an undemocratic character since it cannot be so collectivized; and that accordingly its withering away is a natural accompaniment to the consolidation and extension of democracy.
As is the case with all collective enterprises, the social sciences have many more practitioners than they do ideas and principles. I would even argue that they rest upon one sole principle, the separation of facts and values, which sets them apart from philosophy and testifies to their scientific character. The demise of political philosophy is of a piece with the triumph of this principle. I admit that generally such sweeping statements are better avoided. Nevertheless it is a fact that the fact/value distinction has become not only the presupposition of present–day social science but also the prevalent opinion in society at large. In present conditions, a teenager proves his or her coming of age, a citizen proves his or her competence and loyalty, by making use of this principle. Nowhere has the principle been set forth with more power and brilliance than in the work of Max Weber. The limitless and tormented landscape of twentieth–century social and political thought is commanded by Weber’s towering presence and overwhelming influence.
Speaking before students just after the end of World War I, Weber asks about his duty as a teacher, about what his audience, and the public at large, can legitimately require of him. He answers, in reflections later published as Science as a Vocation, that they have a claim on his intellectual probity: the teacher, as a scientist, has the obligation to acknowledge that to establish the intrinsic structures of cultural values and to evaluate those values constitute two totally distinct tasks. Weber rigorously distinguishes between science, which ascertains facts and relations between facts, and life, which necessarily involves evaluation and action.
This proposition has become commonplace today, yet it is difficult to understand what exactly it means. To give an example that is more than an example, how does one describe what goes on in a concentration camp without evaluating it? As some commentators have pointed out, Weber, in his historical and sociological studies, does not tire of evaluating even when establishing the facts; no, he ceaselessly evaluates so as to be able to establish the facts. Otherwise how could he tell a "prophet" from a "charlatan"?
However that may be, it is clear that for Weber, intellectual honesty necessarily prevents us from believing or teaching that science can show us how we ought to live; and that this same intellectual probity necessarily prevents us from believing, for instance, that a thing is good because it is beautiful, or the other way around. But what are the causes of his peculiar preoccupation with intellectual probity? In Weber’s opinion, modern science exposes it to a specific danger.
Modern science exhibits a singular trait: it is necessarily unfinished—it can never be completed. It is open–ended, since there is always more to be known. Weber asks why human beings devote themselves to an activity that can never be completed, why they ceaselessly try to know what they know they will never completely know. The meaning of modern science is to be meaningless. Thus intellectual honesty requires that we not confer an arbitrary meaning on science, that we be faithful to its meaninglessness by fearlessly carrying on its enterprise. This necessary virtue is at the same time inhuman, or superhuman; indeed it is heroic. Since heroism, however necessary, is rare, many so–called scholars or teachers succumb to the temptation to confer arbitrarily some human meaning on science, or its provisional results. Weber believed that the scientist who thus lapses from his duty transforms himself into a petty demagogue or a petty prophet.
What characterizes the modern situation is that only science can be the object of public affirmation or approbation. Other "values"—for instance, esthetic or religious "values"—cannot be publicly expressed with enough sincerity to hold their own in the public square. At the end of Science as a Vocation, we read:
The fate of an epoch characterized by rationalization, intellectualization, most of all by the disenchantment of the world, led human beings to expel the most sublime and supreme values from public life. They found refuge either in the transcendent realm of mystical life or in the fraternity of direct and reciprocal relationships among isolated individuals. There is nothing fortuitous in the fact that the most eminent art of our time is intimate, not monumental, nor in the fact that nowadays it is only in small communities, in face–to–face contacts, in pianissimo, that we are able to recover something that might resemble the prophetic pneuma that formerly set whole communities ablaze and welded them together. . . . For those who are unable to bear this present fate with manliness, there is only this piece of advice: go back silently—without giving to your gesture the publicity dear to renegades, but simply and without ceremony—to the old churches who keep their arms widely open.
This eloquent conclusion bears, and needs, rereading today. There is nothing antiquated or quaint about it. On the contrary, the stripping down of the public square and the flight into private realms have continued apace, coupled with the ever growing power of science to mold every aspect of our lives, including the most intimate. As a consequence, public life is more and more exclusively filled with private lives: what remains of "the public" is nothing but the publicization of "the private"—or so it seems.
Of course, this assessment could be said to miss the fundamental fact of modern society which, under the appearance of meaninglessness, is the coming–into–being of the noblest principles of all, democracy and self–determination. There is no doubt that Weber, however friendly to its political institutions, underestimates the strength and resilience of democracy, perhaps its human meaning and range. In his eyes democracy is no match—no remedy—for the disenchantment of the world, and for a good reason: it results from it. It is unable to reunify modern human beings since it ratifies and, so to speak, institutionalizes their intimate divisions.
If we take seriously Science as a Vocation, we will say that there is a gaping hole, a void, a meaninglessness at the heart of modern life since science, the highest and sole truly public activity, is meaningless. At the same time, if modern man wants to be equal to the task of science, he ought to look this nothingness in the face without blinking. In this sense, nihilism, at least this nihilism, is not only our curse but also our duty. Weber’s eloquence aimed at keeping us awake and forcing our gaze toward this central nothingness. Thus the most authoritative, nay, the only authoritative voice in the realm of social and political thought in this century was a desperate voice.
It is impossible to put Max Weber behind us. Because he looms so large, it is difficult for us to see how the human phenomenon appeared before he separated science and life. But let us be alert enough to realize how strange and lopsided our intellectual and moral life currently is. Each and every human thing is fair game for science. Through separating facts from values we are able to divert the mighty flow of reality into the bottles of science.
But there is no reciprocity: science is never allowed to come back to illuminate reality and life. Democracy is predicated on the basic intelligence of the common man, which in turn is predicated on the inherent intelligibility of life, at least of the current occurrences of life. As a result, democracy is the regime that has the least tolerance for nihilism. (And nihilism breeds contempt for democracy.) To say that life is intelligible is not to say that it is unproblematic or without mystery. It is only to say that what we do is naturally accompanied by what we think and say, or that we ordinarily give some account of what we do. Our actions are many, and our accounts often conflicting, and so we reflect and deliberate and debate. The life of the mind is inherently dialectical—although, through the separation of facts and values, we have often lost sight of that reality.
Weber well understood that the separation between life and science was in some sense unbearable for ordinary mankind, and he rightly noticed that the attendant discomfort gave rise to fake monumentalism, spurious prophesying, and pedantic fanaticism. Certainly Europe would soon experience all those ugly phenomena on a scale that the desperate Weber had not anticipated even in his most desperate mood. Very roughly, we could say that totalitarianism was the attempt to fuse together science and life. In communism, the fusion was forced through the despotism of "science"—understood vulgarly. In Nazism, the fusion came through the despotism of "life"—again, understood in an utterly vulgar way.
Totalitarianism was the experimentum crucis for political philosophy in our century. Through it political philosophy was radically tested, and was found wanting. The mere fact that such terrible enterprises could arise was proof that European thinkers had not developed and spread a rational and humane understanding of modern political circumstances. This claim does not presuppose the proposition, abstract to the point of meaninglessness, that "ideas govern the world"—only the sound observation that human beings are thinking animals who need tolerably accurate ideas and evaluations to orient themselves in the world. This truism is the truer the more intellectually active and able the person concerned. It would be unfair to extend culpability for this century’s crimes into the past indefinitely, but it is true that, after Hegel elaborated his synthesis, no other philosopher was able to give a satisfactory, that is, an impartial, account of the modern State and society. Political philosophy after Hegel was not able to give a nearly satisfactory account of totalitarianism during and even after the fact.
Michael Oakeshott once remarked that great political philosophies are generally answers to specific political predicaments. It is easy to document this proposition from Plato and Aristotle, through Machiavelli and Hobbes, to Rousseau and Hegel. As I observed at the outset, the twentieth century did not elicit such comprehensive answers from political reflection, and this despite the fact that its predicament was of the most extreme sort: devastating world wars, murderous revolutions, beastly tyrannies. If there ever was a time for writing a new Leviathan, that was it.
But our most impressive documents are novels: which political treatise on communism is a match for 1984 or Animal Farm or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or The Yawning Heights? And what a strange commentary on this situation that, for some readers at least, the most suggestive introduction to Nazi tyranny is to be found in On the Marmor Cliffs (1939), a fable whose author, Ernst Jünger, was a soldier and adventurer with more than a passing complicity with the nihilistic mood that fomented Hitler’s rise to power. Some will object that this indictment is unfair, that many penetrating books on communism, fascism, and Nazism have been written by historians, social scientists, and political philosophers; indeed, that the notion of totalitarianism itself got its currency and credit more from philosophy than from literature; and that at least one philosophical book on the subject—Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)—won a fame and exercised a power of fascination comparable to those of the literary works I have just mentioned. The objection is valid as far as it goes. We need to take stock of this momentous debate.
For political philosophers, dealing with Nazism and communism was difficult. These unprecedented political phenomena required a specific effort of analysis, yet most of the interpreters no longer had much place in their thought for political categories, especially the notion of regime. Their natural reaction was to make sense of these new forms of politics by subsuming them under nonpolitical categories with which they were more familiar. For instance, communism came to be understood as the domination of "bureaucracy," or as "bureaucratic state capitalism," a Trotskyist mantra widely used in France and elsewhere. As for Nazism, not a few on the left would see in it the instrument of "the most reactionary strata of financial capital," while many on the right saw just another avatar of "eternal Germany."
Of course these definitions, however fashionable for a time, could not long satisfy honest or discerning people, who eventually elaborated and gave credit to the notion of totalitarianism as a new and specific regime. We can be grateful to those who introduced this notion, because more than any other it helped us to look at the facts, to "save the phenomena," so to speak, and accordingly to evaluate more adequately the thorough ugliness of the whole thing. At the same time, however, totalitarianism remained an ad hoc construct. The discussion of it mainly concerned the marks, or criteria, of totalitarianism: whether "ideology" or "terror" or both together were principal or necessary components of any "totalitarian" regime. The proponents of the notion were prone to try to outbid one another by concentrating attention on the most extreme characteristics of these regimes, with the result that, as in Hannah Arendt’s case, the notion is not even applicable to Nazism and communism except in their most extreme fits of terror and murder. This bidding war induced the mainstream of political scientists to renounce the notion completely, or to dilute it until it became unrecognizable and useless.
The facts of Nazism and communism obliged honest and discerning observers to elaborate the notion of a new regime. At the same time, this "regime" was the opposite of a regime. The classical regime, harking back to Plato’s and Aristotle’s first elaboration of political philosophy, is what gives political life its relative stability and intelligibility. The totalitarian "regime," on the contrary, was characterized first of all by its instability and its formlessness. It described itself, accurately, as essentially a movement: the "international Communist movement," or die NZ–Bewegung (Munich was called by the Nazis die Hauptstadt der Bewegung [the capital of the movement]). Arendt herself was acutely aware of the paradoxical character of totalitarianism. In a piece titled "Ideology and Terror," Arendt borrows from Montesquieu’s analysis and classification of regimes to try to categorize the totalitarian regime. For Montesquieu, each regime has a nature and a principle. The principle is the more important, since it is the "spring" that "moves" the regime. Now, explains Arendt, totalitarianism has no principle, not even fear—which is the principle of "despotism" according to Montesquieu. For fear to be a principal motive of action, the individual would need to think or feel that he is able to escape danger through his own actions; under totalitarianism, on the other hand, where the killings wax and wane without any discernible reason, this sense cannot be sustained. Raymond Aron’s commentary on Arendt’s analysis is severe but illuminating:
One cannot help asking oneself whether Mrs. Arendt’s thesis, thus formulated, is not contradictory. A regime without a principle is not a regime. . . . As a regime, it exists solely in its author’s imagination. In other words, when Mrs. Arendt elaborates some aspects of Hitlerite and Stalinist phenomena into a regime, a political essence, she brings out and probably exaggerates the originality of German or Russian totalitarianism. Mistaking this admittedly real originality for a fundamentally new regime, she is induced to read into our epoch the negation of classical philosophies and thus to slide into a contradiction: defining a working regime by an essence which so to speak implies the impossibility of its working.
This sharp criticism undoubtedly hits the mark. But Arendt would probably hit back that the "contradiction" is not of her making: it belongs to the "contradictory essence" of totalitarianism.
It is interesting to note that Alain Besançon, a distinguished French historian who studied with Aron, rediscovered and trenchantly brought out this difficulty twenty years later. In an article aptly titled "On the Difficulty of Defining the Soviet Regime," Besançon tries and exhausts Aristotle’s and Montesquieu’s classifications of regimes, concluding that the Soviet regime does not fit into any of them. In his eyes it is an "absolutely new" regime, and its newness lies in the part played by "ideology." Besançon proposes that instead of "totalitarianism" we simply classify communism as an "ideological regime." In their different ways, Arendt, Aron, and Besançon all draw our attention to the problem of relating totalitarianism to the tradition of political philosophy. The totalitarian regime seems to be the regime embodying the negation of the idea of regime, and accordingly the irrelevance of classical political philosophy.
More than any other thinker in this century, Leo Strauss tried to recover the genuine meaning of political philosophy. Indeed, political philosophy as originally understood owes its bare survival—fittingly unobtrusive to the point of secretiveness—to Leo Strauss’ sole and unaided efforts. Without him, the philosophy of history, or historicism of any stripe, would have swallowed political philosophy completely. For Strauss, in seeming contradiction to what I have just said, twentieth–century experiences were motives for going back to political philosophy, specifically to classical political philosophy: "When we were brought face to face with tyranny—with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past—our political science failed to recognize it. It is not surprising then that many of our contemporaries . . . were relieved when they rediscovered the pages in which Plato and other classical thinkers seemed to have interpreted for us the horrors of the twentieth century." Thus modern tyranny—Strauss carefully avoids the word "totalitarianism"—brings us back to ancient tyranny as described and understood by Plato and other Greek thinkers.
At the same time, Strauss makes clear that there is in modern tyranny something specific, and terrible, that eludes the grasp of classical categories. The return to the Greeks can only be a "first step toward an exact analysis of present–day tyranny," he argued, for contemporary tyranny is "fundamentally different" from the tyranny analyzed by the ancients. How could Strauss offer such a proposition? Recall that he devoted his life to establishing that classical philosophy elaborated the true understanding of the world, founded on nature which does not change, and that accordingly it does not need to be superseded or improved upon by a new "historical" understanding. Given that, how could Leo Strauss admit that communism and fascism are fundamentally new? How could the political life of man undergo a fundamental change? He answers: "Present–day tyranny, in contradistinction to classical tyranny, is based on the unlimited progress in the ‘conquest of nature’ which is made possible by modern science, as well as on the popularization or diffusion of philosophic or scientific knowledge."
Strauss was perfectly aware that such a change, or at least the possibility of such a change, needs to have been taken into account by Greek philosophy if the claim he raises on its behalf is to be upheld. He affirms that that is the case: "Both possibilities—the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the possibility of the popularization of philosophy or science—were known to the classics. . . . But the classics rejected them as ‘unnatural,’ i.e., as destructive of humanity. They did not dream of pre s ent–day tyranny because they regarded its basic presuppositions as so preposterous that they turned their imagination in entirely different directions." Thus, the Greek thinkers did not imagine modern tyranny because they understood its principles and saw that they would be so much against nature that there was no use dwelling on them.
However galling the affirmation that the Greeks understood us better than we understand them, and ourselves, it is not what most impresses us in Strauss’ assessment. It is rather that the two principles that make for the specific evil of modern tyranny are part and parcel of the foundation on which modern democracy was built. If this is true, modern tyranny would have as much in common with modern democracy as with ancient, i.e., "natural," tyranny.
We must not forget that these rare propositions of Strauss on contemporary political circumstances were formulated in the context of an exchange with Alexandre Kojève, one of the most influential interpreters of Hegel in this century. The Russian–born philosopher and French civil servant held that the conceptions of classical political philosophy have lost their relevance because the modern regime, or rather State, precisely through the transformation of nature and the reciprocal recognition implied in democratic citizenship, has basically solved the human problem. The unpalatable traits of modern "tyranny" must not blind us to the fact that "history has come to its end."
Thus Kojève is not much interested in the totalitarian phenomenon, the ugliness of which disappears against the big picture. However shocking Kojève’s benign neglect, even favor, toward Communist totalitarianism, he does draw our attention to the disturbing fact that modern democracy shares with totalitarianism the claim to have solved the human problem. Modern democracy understands itself not as a regime among others, not even as the best regime, but as the only legitimate regime: it embodies the final, because rational, state of humanity.
Here we encounter a topic as difficult and intricate as it is important. In the classical understanding, the plurality of regimes was rooted in the intrinsic diversity of human nature, in the heterogeneity of its parts: human beings were soul and body, and the life of the human soul had its springs in the specific motions of its different parts. In the modern democratic understanding, a human being is first and foremost a self, and mankind as a whole is simply the fulfilled self writ large, which is to say, considered universally. This generalization is valid only if all the selves of all the human beings are in some important sense the same. The affirmation of the self, or the self–affirmation of humankind as composed of selves, thus presupposes the homogeneity of human nature. For the modern understanding, the solution of the human problem is one with the homogenization of human life.
A mighty task—an indefinite one—is contained herein, because that homogeneity can never be complete, or it will be so only "at the end of history," when nature, human as well as nonhuman, will have been mastered. But in some sense, and this is Kojève’s point, we have already reached a sufficient level of mastery. The science necessary for the conquest of nature is without end, it is true, but that means that its power is destined to grow without end, which means that reason allows us to imagine ourselves all–powerful already. As for human life proper, oppressive differences will long continue to arise, but they are in principle already vanquished by the declaration and institutionalization of the equality of rights. In brief, the miracles of science and the good works of democracy are attested enough to legitimate faith that liberal democracy has answered all the big questions of politics.
Of course faith can be lost. When the good works of democracy are less apparent, or when the delicate mechanisms of constitutional government, necessary for guaranteeing rights, are not available in a certain situation, the temptation arises to make good on the promises of democracy by every means available, that is, even or especially by antidemocratic means, to bring science to completion and achieve human homogeneity by overturning democracy.
Herein lies what has been aptly called the "totalitarian temptation." In this sense, as the French philosopher Claude Lefort has pointed out in L’invention démocratique (1981), his acute analysis of democracy, totalitarianism is the attempt to "embody" or "incorporate" democracy, to transform "indeterminate" democracy into a visible "body." Democracy is "indeterminate" because, in the democratic dispensation, the "seat of power" is "void"—occupied only provisionally by succeeding representatives. The King’s presence was overwhelming; the democratic statesmen’s is ordinarily underwhelming. As long as the citizens have not accustomed themselves to the worthy but modest function of choosing their representatives, the representatives will not be a match for the majesty of the people. Some demagogue will explain to the people that he will lead them to the empty place so that they themselves will occupy the seat of power: "Totalitarianism establishes a mechanism which . . . aims to weld anew power and society, to obliterate all the signs of social division, to banish the indetermination which haunts democratic experience. . . . From democracy and against it a body is thus made anew." When writing those lines, Lefort had principally in mind the Soviet regime, but it is clear that "race," no less than "class," can offer the basis for the building of this new homogeneous body.
Thus Lefort, drawing part of his inspiration from the phenomenological tradition, brings to our attention the bodily character of the political, or the political character of the body. This close relationship, although coming to the surface of speech in common expressions like "political body" or "body politic," has long been obscured in our democratic dispensation. Our forefathers, on the contrary, were well aware of it. Indeed how best to define the predemocratic order? If we look for one synthetic trait, then we will define it as an order founded on filiation. Everyone’s place in society was in principle determined by his or her "birth." One’s name and estate were determined through heritage. There were only families, poor or rich, common or noble, but each one governed by the head of family.
In contradistinction to ancient cities, in which heads of families were roughly equal politically and participated in the same "public space," in Western predemocratic societies there was no public space. Or rather, what was public was the family analogy, the logic of filiation and paternity, the fact that the same representation of the human ties or bonds circulated throughout the whole. Ultimately, what was public, that is, what was sacred, was the person of the King, that is, the King’s body.
This familial order, based as it was on the fecundity of the body and on accidents of birth, strikes us today as bizarre and even disgusting. If we are sophisticated enough, we will say with cool competence: it was the value system of our forefathers, ours is different, and our grandchildren’s will again be different from it and ours. I’m afraid I am not so sophisticated. This familial order was not just a value system or a cultural construct. It drew its strength, its durability, its quasi–universal validity (before democracy) from the general awareness that it was rooted not only in an undoubtedly natural fact, but in the fact that, so to speak, sums up "nature," that is, birth and filiation.
Even among scholars, it is a common mistake to confuse any political reference to "the body" with "organicism." It is then seen either as a mere figure of speech, or, more ominously, as a "holistic" representation fraught with oppressive potentialities. As a matter of fact, a "body" is very different from what is generally understood by "organism." In the latter, the part is strictly subordinated to the whole. In the former, the whole is present and active in each part. Thus the idea of the body is not at all a mechanical, or even a physical, idea. It is, on the contrary, a spiritual idea: each part is at the same time itself and the whole. In this sense, every society, every polity, is a body.
These very sketchy observations help us to understand the meaning and strength of the order of the body, and by the same token to wonder at its swift and nearly complete demise. Lefort describes the nature, and appreciates the enormity, of the process as follows:
The ancien régime was made up of innumerable little bodies that provided people with their bearings. And those little bodies disposed themselves within a huge imaginary body of which the King’s body offers a replica and the token of its integrity. The democratic revolution, long underground, blows up when the King’s body is destroyed, when the head of the body politic falls to the ground, when accordingly the corporeity of society dissolves. Then something happens which I would dare to call the disincorporation of individuals. Extraordinary phenomenon. . . .
Why was it such an "extraordinary phenomenon"? To put it in a nutshell: while previous societies organized themselves so as to bind their members together, while they extolled the ideas of concord and unity, our democratic society organizes itself so as to untie, even to separate, its members, and thus guarantee their independence and their rights. In this sense, our society proposes to fulfill itself as a dis–society. An extraordinary phenomenon indeed!
But will not a society thus dissociating be unable to carry on, to say nothing of prospering? That is the recurrent fear in modern society, voiced by conservatives and socialists alike, with even a few liberals joining in at times. But as a matter of fact, belying all the prophets of doom, democratic societies have maintained their cohesion, they have prospered; indeed, they offer today—the vast bulk of mankind agrees on this point—the only viable and desirable way of organizing a decent common life. So we must infer that their continuous decomposition has been accompanied by a continuous recomposition. What is the principle of this recomposition? To cut a very long story short: it is the principle of representation. As Lefort emphasizes, the order of representation has succeeded the order of incorporation. And the principle behind the principle of representation is the will—the will of people—a purely spiritual principle. The ultimate mainspring of democratic society is the fecundity of human will, or rather the capacity of the will to produce desirable effects.
Let us retrace our journey so far. I have argued that totalitarianism has been the experimentum crucis for political philosophy in this century, and that political philosophy, thus tested, was found wanting. We are able now to give a more precise assessment. The perplexities that attend the inquiry into the nature of totalitarian regimes do not arise solely from the peculiarly enigmatic essence of those regimes. Or rather, their enigmatic essence derives from another enigma or uncertainty, one that also concerns democracy. The uncertainty is this: where, and what, is the people’s will? How can a purely spiritual principle give form and life to a body politic? The "totalitarian temptation" is made possible by, and takes place in, the uncharted territory between the "body" of predemo cratic society and the "soul" of democratic politics. There is much more here than a glib metaphor. Indeed, we are at the heart of our practical and theoretical difficulties: herein lies the task of political philosophy, if it cares to have one.
We need to return again and again to the contrast between predemocratic and democratic societies, and to the dialectics between the two. This insistence may seem odd to Americans, since the U.S. had no real experience of predemocratic society and does not seem to be worse off for it: as Tocqueville so memorably said, "Americans are born equal, instead of becoming so." But my proposal is for a philosophical inquiry, not a historical one.
We begin with a paradox. We instinctively think that predemocratic societies gave an advantage to the soul as opposed to the body, even as we instinctively suppose that democratic societies have rejected the excessive pretensions of the soul and have "liberated the body," or, in Saint–Simonian parlance, "rehabilitated the flesh." These impressions are not simply erroneous; there is much truth in them. But at the same time we could say that the opposite also is true. We have seen that predemocratic societies were "incorporated" societies, rooted in the fecundity of the body, culminating in the King’s body. As for democratic societies, while they are not particularly religious, they are politically and morally spiritualist, even otherwordly. Electing a representative, unlike begetting an heir, is the work of the will—of the mind or the soul.
That spirituality holds true not only in political relations, but in social and moral life as well. Democratic societies typically insist that all our bonds, including our bodily ones, have their origin in a purely spiritual decision, a decision reached in full spiritual sovereignty. We reject any suggestion that the body could create bonds by itself, that there could be ties rooted essentially in the "flesh." The "new family" results from the growing understanding of marriage and parenthood as "continuous choice." Even bodily intercourse is no longer supposed to create bonds by itself, to have meaning by itself: it does so only as far, and as long, as the will makes it so. Such meaning the will is free to confer and withdraw "at will." We increasingly behave, and we increasingly interpret our behavior, as if we were angels who happen to have bodies. Carnal knowledge is no longer such.
No wonder, then, that what goes by the name of political philosophy or theory today is rather angel ology. In an otherwordly space—perhaps separated from this earth by a "veil of ignorance"—beings who are no longer, or not yet, truly human deliberate over the conditions under which they would consent to land on our lowly planet and don our "too solid flesh." They hesitate a lot, as well they might, and their abstract reasonings are complex and multifarious, if so hypothetical that they carry little weight. Political thought cannot indulge indefinitely to live in an atmosphere that is at the same time rarefied and vulgar. Totalitarianism, it is true, has been defeated without much contribution from political philosophy, and democracy seems to sail on unchallenged. But even in practical terms, it is not prudent to lean exclusively on the workaday virtues of the democratic citizenry.
We need to recapture something of what democracy left behind in its march to supremacy. Modern democracy has successfully asserted and realized the homogeneity of human life, but it is now required to try to recover and salvage the intrinsic heterogeneity of human experiences. The experience of the citizen is different from that of the artist, which in turn is different from that of the religious person, and so on. These decisive articulations of human life would be hopelessly blurred if the current conceit prevailed that every human being, as "creator of his or her own values," is at the same time an artist, a citizen, and a religious person—indeed, all these things and more. Against this conceit, political philosophers should undertake to bring to light again the heterogeneity of human life.
It might be argued that this heterogeneity is adequately taken care of through the public acknowledgment of the legitimate plurality of human values. Nothing could be more mistaken. As Leo Strauss once tersely remarked, pluralism is a monism, being an –ism. The same self–destructive quality attaches itself to our "values." To interpret the world of experience as constituted of admittedly diverse "values" is to reduce it to this common genus, and thus to lose sight of that heterogeneity we wanted to preserve. If God is a value, the public space a value, the moral law within my heart a value, the starry sky above my head a value . . . what is not? At the same time, for this is confusion’s great masterpiece, the "value language" makes us lose the unity of human life—this necessary component of democratic self–consciousness—just as it blurs its diversity: you don’t argue about values since their value lies in the valuation of the one who puts value on them. Value language, with the inner dispositions it encourages, makes for dreary uniformity and unintelligible heterogeneity at the same time.
Certainly Max Weber would look with consternation on a state of things he unwillingly did so much to advance. As Science as a Vocation makes clear, he devoted his uncommon strength of mind and soul to the task for which I have just entered my feeble plea: to recover, or to salvage, the genuine diversity of human experiences. He was undoubtedly right to underline that the Beautiful is not the same as the Good or the True. But then, or so it seems to me, he crossed the line. Why interpret this internal differentiation of human life as a conflict, even as a "war"—the "war of the gods" attendant to the "polytheism" of human "values"? Why say that we know that some things are beautiful because they are not good? Why say that we know that some beings are good or holy because and inasmuch as they are not beautiful? It seems that Weber here let himself be carried away by the restlessness of his spirit. How impatient we moderns have become! If two things don’t match exactly, then they must be enemies.
Perhaps we have been impatient and restless from the beginning. Was not Descartes, the father of Enlightenment, as well the father of our impatience when he deliberately equated what is doubtful with what is false? How much wiser in my opinion was Leibniz, who tranquilly countered that what is true is true, what is false is false, and what is doubtful is . . . well, it is doubtful. We need Leibniz’s equanimity more than Descartes’ impatience, so that we may sojourn within our different experiences, and draw from each its specific lesson.
The same human being, after all, admires what is beautiful, is motivated by what is good, and pursues the truth. Sometimes he comes across a "brave bad man," as it befell Lord Clarendon; or he meets a fair treacherous woman. These complexities, sometimes even incongruities, of human experience need to be described accurately. Generally, the more bold the colors, the less exact the drawing. Human life does not warrant despair, and the social sciences do not warrant nihilism, because human life is humanly intelligible.
It is possible, even probable, that the democratic regime could not have come into being without the impatience of Descartes and others; it is possible as well that democratic citizens would have fallen asleep if not for the strident clarion calls of Weber and others. But victorious and mature democracy would do well to temper these extreme moods and open itself to the inner diversity of human experience as it claims to be open to the outer diversity of the human species. This would seem to be a tall order: for now, at least, few political philosophers have given it heed.
Pierre Manent is Director of Studies at the école des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His books include Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy and The City of Man. This essay is adapted from a conference paper delivered at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in June 1999.
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