So this week, in political thought today, we’re reading Roger Scuton’s A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: ARGUMENTS FOR CONSERVATISM. Here are some excerpts from the last chapter on T.S. Eliot. They’re all relevant to Ralph’s spin on the Straussian theme of PROGRESS or RETURN. The real conservative answers: Both or neither; we want to live courageously and truthfully in the present, which requires due attention to those who came before us and those who come after. We fall victim to neither selective nostalgia nor progressive idealism. We conservative poets (in the broadest sense) aren’t full of “anti-bourgeois aggression,” because we know that we, too, are more bourgeois than bohemian. We want to accept critically–that is, realistically–the modern world we’ve been given:
“What distinguishes Burke from the French revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but his desire to live fully in the present, to understand it in all its imperfections, and to accept it as the only reality that is offered to us. Like Burke, Eliot recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.” (194)
“And his refusal, through all this, to adopt the mantle of the bohemian, to claim the tinsel crown of artist or to mock the ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle sets him apart from the continental tradition which he did so much to promote. He realized that the true task of the artist in the modern world is one not of repudiation but of reconciliation. The ‘enfant-terrible-ism’ of a Cocteau or the anti-bourgeois aggression of a Sartre were entirely foreign to him. For Eliot the artist inherits, in heightened and self-conscious form, the very same anxieties that are the stuff of ordinary experience. The poet who takes words seriously is the voice of mankind, interceding for those who live around him, and gaining on their behalf the gift of consciousness with which to overcome the wretchedness of secular life. He too is an ordinary bourgeois, and his highest prize is t live unnoticed amid those who know nothing of his art – as the saint may live unnoticed among those for whom he dies.” (197-8)
“For Eliot, words had begun to lose their precision – not in spite of science but because of it, not in spite of the loss of true religious belief, but because of it, not in spite of the proliferation of technical terms, but because of it.” (200)
“Eliot was brought up in a democracy and inherited that great fund of public spirit which is the gift of American democracy to the modern world. But he was not a democrat in his feelings. For he believed that culture could not be entrusted to the democratic process, precisely because of this carelessness with words, this habit of unthinking cliché, which would always arise when every person is regarded as having an equal right to express himself.” (201)
“The truths of science, endowed with an absolute authority, hide the truths that matter, and make the human reality imperceivable” (203).
“The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.” (208)
“The task is to re-discover the world which made us, to see ourselves as part of something greater, which depends upon us for its survival, and which still can live in us” (208)
October 8th, 2010 | 1:40 am
These are great quotes from a good book and a great author, but they leave much with which one wishes to quibble. Is Eliot really what Scruton paints him to be? Irving Howe attests to the truth of Eliot as much as Allen Tate.
It is all well and good to mock Sartre’s love of fame and his quixotic attempt to mix Marx and Heidegger in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. If only he had read Kojeve–or been present during the lectures with Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, Fessard, etc. But Sartre is brilliant, and an Eliotic sense of the “uses of tradition” for moderns with a “dissociated sensibility” is no ordinary Burkean conservatism. Eliot like Sartre is trying to square a circle–the utter nihilism of modern society of the “Waste Land” allows for the reconciliation of opposites in the simple language of the “four Quartets.”
Scruton has a point if he wants to make the comparison of Sartre to the most ridiculous statements of those who in the name of Herbert Marcuse say that we should speak refusal as silence (or doing otherwise) in the name of revolution. But even Herbert Marcuse is not as nuts as many make him to be.
It is true that Eliot was no revolutionary, and it is true that his poetry and criticism makes for a facing up to the abyss in the name of the traditional order of Christian culture. Given the Waste land and the Love Song of J Afred Prufrock, it still seems like a leap to me, a la Kierkegaard. You can measure your life in coffee sppons or in terms of the calendar of the Anglo-Catholic church. Nothing in the middle–or better nothing for an attempt to persuasion.
In this way C.S. Lewis is far superior to Eliot (in my huble opinion).
Cocteau is not as bad as Scruton makes it. The enfants terribles can be read against what the ignorant say. The enfant terribles are simply an honest account of the world as it appear. Its ironic presentation allows for an analysis which looks for what is unsaid. The unsaid is incredibly important here.
Just as Hobbes wanted to eradicate Aristotelianism because speaking of essences led the unlearned to think that Aristotle spoke of invisible powers governing the universe, Scruton wants to tell us not to read the Holy Terrors (in translation) because it teaches the unlearned all sorts of bad ideas that lead to May ’68.
I say let there be reading of good books (like Cocteau)–even they are provocative with regard to convention. How do we avoid May ’68, er 2010? I don’t know. I just don’t think ridicule is always the best way.
Espinoza, as my espanol friends call him, likewise chose ridicule in his criticism of the holding sway of Biblical authority. I think Scruton is advocating a method of ridicule with regard to Cocteau, Sartre, et al.–it is a way of out-Machiavelli-ing Machiavelli here. I don’t want to see where such a contest ends. But if I must–so be it.
This contest is surely what Eliot is up to–the contest regarding who has the most probity? He writes a poem with footnotes for Christ’s sake! If this is what conservatism becomes, then I’ll bet on someone other than Scruton’s true sensibleness, let alone Eliot’s traditionalism.
October 8th, 2010 | 1:55 am
BTW–one of my favorite quotes from Scruton’s book come much earlier in the chapter on “Dying Quietly.” The context is the issue of assisted suicide in terms of public regulation (but it applies generally to any issue of public policy)–
“The best advice to the law reformer, therefore, is to go carefully, to make only incontestable assumptions, and to endeavour to set out the human problem in its full complexity before attempting a legislative answer to it. This advice is not often followed, for the simple reason that people are always impatient for reform whenever they find their ambitions impeded by the law, and are always reluctant to accept–what may be glaringly obvious to others–that the law exists precisely to impede their ambitions.”
October 8th, 2010 | 10:49 am
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October 10th, 2010 | 3:22 am
Perhaps one should learn the wisdom of “Teach us to forget and not to forget.”
October 10th, 2010 | 1:23 pm
Peter, I really love the quote you chose from p. 201–couple that with Tocqueville’s teaching on Common Opinion, and you’ve got a whole lot of our situation politically and culturally. And boy, Eliot sure does sound Benetonian and Percy-an in that p. 200 quote.
John Presnall, a useful and rich comment in many ways. Your intellectual graciousness towards Sartre and others of the muy screwed-up French left intelligensia circa 1944-1974 is, I would guess, more defensible than not. Let’ s just take (I don’t know Cocteau outside of his B&B film, and Marcuse really is pretty thoroughly sick-making…no, he was not nuts, but niether was Lenin) Sartre: I know that those with good instincts will not think that a guy like Sartre should be cut any slack whatsover, but I’ve been teaching and thus reading a lot of Raymond Aron recently, and he speaks of Sartre much as Presnall does here. As genuinely philosophic, brilliant, worthy of reading. Of course, he also diagnoses, in his brief essay (contained in Defense of Political Reason) on why Solzhenitsyn refused to meet with the Sartre in Moscow, a good deal of why he was such a feeble and harmful thinker with respect to politics. And yes, it does stir the anger when you contrast the celebrity-philosopher Sartre semi-or-demi-justifying the camps and such, with the moral facts about them that Solzhenitsyn brings to life. Vengeance is the Lord’s, but one cannot but sometimes wish horrible experiences of real-life-socialism upon Jean-Paul Sartre. See…I’m getting carried away about his arrogant and unrepented-of errors even as I write this. But again, John, fine comment.
October 12th, 2010 | 10:34 pm
Solzhenitsyn was right not to meet Sartre if such encounter was in the making. Solzhenitsyn it seems speaks first hand in regard to what Sartre always only knew second hand. Sartre spent too much time aligning himself with causes of which he did not know. He may be “tragic” in the sense of one who was as brilliant as he was willing to sacrifice his intellect in the name of ideology. His Marxist angst against capital and his anticolonial enthusiasm have a degree of political nobility, but they have nothing to do with a decent politics. A thoughtful man and a good citizen will have nothing to do with Sartre’s enthusiasms, but such supra-political enthusiasms dominate much of what is considered serious politics these days–even in the American context, a la Zinn, Chomsky, Parenti, et al. Or should I say the girl who wrote the “Shock Doctrine” but whose name i have forgotten–Naomi Klein!
No doubt, I think this kind of thought is all part of a weird cult, but it is a cult that appeals to the most blase of pot smoking, dip shit, ordinary of American citizens. And as California makes pot smoking legal, then get used to this conspiratorial, paranoid mode of thinking as being the norm. I don’t smoke pot for a number of reasons, but one of the most paramount reasons is that it make me paranoid! Get used to this paranoia as being the norm with legalized pot.
I will not deny my enthusiasm for Sartre in his phenomenology of everyday life. Nausea is a great book as well as some of the descriptions of looking in keyhole found in Being and Nothingness. However, I will not defend Sartre’s bad attitudinizing on every issue from Algiers to Iran to Cuba to Hungary that appeared during his day. Why did a great mind have to do this? To speak on every “global” or “international” issue. I suspect it has to do with Frenchness that goes back to that citizen of Geneva Rousseau. Though I suspect it exists at the heart of Lockean liberalism, whereby the lay of nature tells us that when our own self preservation comes not into conflict we are bound to help the preservation of MANKIND. Locke was the the precursor of Bono–i.e., indifferent to his neighbor but loving mankind.
I admire Raymond Aron greatly. Aron always kept his head and remained sensible despite Lacoue-Labarthe’s derision (which means the derision of Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, Lyotard, Badiou, Zizek, etc., etc., etc. of the literati–Lacan is a special case but he too had nothing but derision for those who would not follow his “return to Freud” (which is bullshit)).
So I agree with Carl’s criticism of what I have to say regarding my defense of Sartre. However, this requires a real recognition of what is at stake, and I am not sure I know what that is. I’ve been watching the film “Carlos”–about Carlos the terrorist from the ’70s and ’80s. It is a great movie, and like the Baader-Meinhof Complex, it shows who the enemy is in a camera obscura. Who is the enemy? In this way, these films seem to be sympathetic with these terrorists–like they’ve been reading too much Sartre of Fanon.
So let me suggest (with no controversy in circles like these) a writer like Pierre Manent who offers a defense of a reasonable nationalism understood according to liberal principles, but which knows the complicated history of European history. Without smart minds like Manent, I fear that folk enamoured with the universal and homogeneous state will only spawn folk like “Carlos” who wish to make their mark by tearing down whatever is made.
October 12th, 2010 | 10:46 pm
Carl, I agree that Cocteau’s B&B is a weird movie of an ancient fairy tale. That’s why I like it. Though I have weird tastes like that, and I like Cocteau for showing such weirdness in a way that appeals to my decadent taste.
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