I appreciate Carl’s post below that explains why Lawler must be correct.
It calls to mind stuff I wrote a long time ago, but remains right even now.
It’s natural to want to speak of human nature–instead of the human condition–because of the Rousseau/existential or “Historical” implications of the latter. The human condition suggests that man makes himself over time out of the nothing that he is by nature. Human=Historical etc.
Because of the decisive influence of Pascal, Tocqueville doesn’t believe THAT.
For Tocqueville, Rousseau’s HISTORY=Pascal’s PSYCHOLOGY. Our restless discontent etc. that Rousseau believes we accidentically acquire over time are constant features of who we are. So they can be called NATURAL. NATURAL here doesn’t mean the social qualities we share with the chimps. It incorporates what distinguishes human beings, distinctions that can be traced to our “hardwiring” as the beings with language or speech open to the truth about all things. So it is natural for us–as natural persons, so to speak–to be miserable without God.
Tocqueville says straight out that the undeluded human experience is to be stuck for a moment between two abysses. That’s straight Pascal. He also says there’s nothing more MYSTERIOUS–although not completely mysterious–and nothing more WONDERFUL than the GREATNESS and MISERY of the being with such consciousness of his personal and contingent existence. That truthful experience (so characteristic of the relentless thinker Pascal himself) is free from the PROUD distortions of the aristocratic (including classical philosophical) consciousness and the TECHNO-MATERIALISTIC distortions of the democratic consciousness. The unsustainability of that purely truthful experience, in Tocqueville’s minds, comes from the fact that it’s basically anxious or pleasure-free. Pascal, he reports, thought himself to death. And the excessive self-consciousness or self-obsessiveness of democratic restlessness is also self-destructive in particular cases, although that truthful experience can’t be completely experienced by human effort. Pantheism, for Tocqueville, is a degrading but ultimately a failed self-help program, as is even bureaucratic despotism. Self-help that works are the pleasures of political life, which are partly truthful and partly diversions (here Tocqueville partly dissents from Pascal–no time to explain now).
So Tocqueville’s account of who we are is not HISTORICIST–and that’s why he’s not full of the extreme hopes and fears of the historicists (the Marxists, the Nietzscheans, even some Straussians). But his view of WHO we are according to NATURE differs from the DARWINIANS and the ARISTOTELIANS (and many Straussians). Many Straussians think Tocqueville is an HISTORICIST because they think they is no ground in nature for the greatness and misery of the WHO (as opposed to the impersonal necessitarianism of the WHAT).
I would like to say more, have a real job, please read Carl and Delsol as the Tocquevillians closest to ME, although Delsol wasn’t even influenced by me!
February 3rd, 2012 | 12:48 pm
OFF TOPIC: I see there’s a just-published book by Wendell Berry praising William Carlos Williams, which is reviewed now on the NYRB site. I know Berry is esteemed in this neighborhood, so look for it, guys.
As it happens, I live in Williams’s town, Rutherford, which now sadly hosts a rather pitiful “Williams Center” for “culture” where a bank squats, uninteresting concerts are held, and mainstream movies are desultorily shown in the basement, often in the wrong aspect ratio. I have never been an unadulterated Williams fan, finding unfortunate traces of anti-intellectualism in his work, though it is nice to see Berry paying tribute to a paid-up “modernist”.
February 3rd, 2012 | 12:55 pm
This is a helpful supplement to what you said at the SCSS Panel on Tocqueville at APSA, Peter. Your reflections remind me alot of the book of Ecclesiastes: “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end”
On a side note, I think an Aristotelian actually could agree with the view you offer here of the restlessness of individual human existence; you’d have to look especially at De Motu Animalium. I don’t agree with Martha Nussbaum on most things, but on Aristotle’s De Motu and the “fragility of goodness” she’s pretty solid.
February 3rd, 2012 | 7:29 pm
Thanks HT. In another life, I’d let Berry convince me to pick up Paterson again.
February 3rd, 2012 | 11:13 pm
Carl, allow me to suggest, “Hannah Coulter.”
February 4th, 2012 | 2:22 am
I have read, but am not sure of the case, that Arendt’s discussion of the “human condition” dealt more with the question of praxis–or the vita activa. Arendt sought to resurrect an ancient understanding of politics as practical action for the modern world.
One could criticize this maneuver of the “human condition” as overly theorizing practice, but in terms of change or actual political decision or choice–what Delsol seems to be concerned with surely provides a better conception of politics than is found in typical measures of assessment quantified as factual statements of what is. Delsol knows the danger of mathematical assessments of what is called performativity.
Politics could be deliberation or it could be disputation, but Delsol’s account opens the political actor to possibility as opposed to determination. This is the question of practice.
But there is still the question of theory–or if this sounds too Marxist–one must consider the relationship between speech and deeds as Thucydides presents it in the cauldron of political choice.. “Human nature”, from the point of view of practice seems too constraining in its “vita contemplativa,” in that it seems to stifle action in terms of an abstract rule.
The problem with denying nature ends up in the Melian dialogue. You would do the same if you were in the condition of the Melians and/or Athenians. You must act!
Arendt herself was concerned with the issue of judgment. She turned to Kant, even if she vulgarized Kant in her account of Eichmann.
Ms. Delsol speaks of “good will.” Without any teleology, on what basis can “good will” provide for proper judgment? Is it humanity?
I am not adverse to such thoughts of humanity, but I think they are weak.
February 4th, 2012 | 11:04 am
From the erudite David Walsh’s introduction to his magisterial “The Modern Philosophical Revolution, The Luminosity of Existence,” we find:
“The reality of nature is contained not within itself, but within its tension, toward being as such.”(p12)
And:
“Human being, in other words, is defined by questioning that is itself a mode of being, never by a nature that has closed the process through an answer.” (pg.13)
February 4th, 2012 | 11:20 am
John, been a while with The Human Condition, but my recollection is that she explicitly denied human nature (“essentialism”) and substituted the human condition. There was some Heideigger lurking in the background of her thought. (Not Delsol’s, though, as far as I can see.)
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