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History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
HoP 494 Tell the Truth While Laughing: The French Moralists
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online@historyoffphilosophy.net Today's episode Tell the Truth while Laughing the French Moralists There's a widespread of somewhat dispiriting belief that nobody ever does anything unless there's something in it for them. Of course the thieves and the corrupt politicians are motivated by self interest, but so, in a way are the morally virtuous. The volunteer nurse may seem to be selflessly devoting time and effort to the greater good, but in fact they're doing it to win admiration from their friends and family. Very occasionally someone does a good deed and refrains from telling anyone about it, but even they are just seeking the pleasure of self satisfaction, which gets even more pleasant when they congratulate themselves for staying quiet about how virtuous they are. This is obviously a cynical interpretation of human behavior, but is it nonetheless a convincing one? A straightforward argument in its favor would go like whatever anyone does deliberately is done out of some motivation or desire which is satisfied through performing the actions. So even virtuous actions are carried out for the sake of attaining that satisfaction. To act successfully, whether for good or for ill, is by definition to get what you wanted. But this argument doesn't prove that the cynical view is correct. Maybe what the person acting wants, what motivates them, is that someone else other than themselves should benefit. The desire does belong to the volunteer nurse, but. But the desired result surely belongs, at least in part, to the patient. So more will be needed to persuade us of the cynical view. In fact, a lot more. What's really called for is a clear eyed and penetrating portrayal of human motivation, one that would show that apparent altruists who are moved by love for their fellow humans are in fact driven by love for themselves. And no one has ever provided a more persuasive account along these lines than Francois de La Rochefoucauld. The leading figure among a group of thinkers often called the French moralists. He turned an unforgiving eye upon his fellow man, laying bare the flaws and hypocrisies that explain our behavior. One reason La Rochefoucauld's critique is so convincing is the form in which it was written. Though he did produce other writings, he's known mostly for his Maxims, a set of pithy and aphoristic remarks that first appeared in a pirated edition in 1663 or 1664. And was then reissued in an authorized version in four further editions, the last in 1678. His choice to write in this mode was, in part a principled one. Among the Maxsons we find the remark that true eloquence consists of saying all that is needed and only what is needed. But it also reveals something about his literary role models and inspirations. Among these, the two most worth mentioning are Montaigne and Pascal. Of course, Montaigne pioneered the essay form and did not write in the form of maxims, but there are delicious aphorisms scattered through his essays, which, like La Rochefoucault's, combine humor and ironic insight to show human nature as it really is. One difference is that Montaigne's great subject was, as he freely admitted, his own self. La Rochefoucauld would surely not exempt himself from his own criticism, and many of his mordant observations must have resulted from studying himself, a technique he could have learned from Montaigne. But his remarks are framed as general ones about the flaws and foibles of humankind. Something else La Rochefoucauld shares with Montaigne is that he is endlessly quotable. When I covered Montaigne back in episode 412, I, I simply gave in to the temptation to list some of the most quotable passages, and I haven't gotten any better at resisting temptation in the meantime. So let's enjoy just a few of La Rochefoucauld's most indelible remarks. The most famous, and one that sums up his whole philosophy in a single phrase, is hypocrisy is a form of tribute that vice pays to virtue. But there are plenty of others that could be written on T shirts sold at a cynics convention. True love is like visitations by ghosts. Everyone talks about such things, but few people have seen them. Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples. There are good marriages, but there are no rapturous ones. We would rather speak ill of ourselves than say nothing about ourselves at all. A refusal of praise is a desire to be praised twice over. We find very few sensible people except those who agree with our own opinion. And perhaps my favorite, we all have enough strength to bear the troubles of other people. Perhaps because I spend a lot of time with clever people, I also enjoy his description of how when you're talking to a clever person, you can see in their eyes that they are ignoring you as they wait until it's their turn to talk again. As these examples show, La Rochefoucauld's acerbic comments remain freshly relevant today and often ring true. Upon reading a maxim, you think, oh yes, I've often experienced people behaving that way. Then after a moment's further reflection, you think, oh dear, I often behave that way myself. La Rochefoucauld captures this with his characteristic irony in a note to the reader, which advises his audience that they will enjoy the work more if they read it, assuming that none of what he says applies to them. Of course, no one could manage that, as confirmed by the reaction of a contemporary who wrote, I sometimes blush to see he has guessed the truth, but I clearly feel as I go on reading that if I'm not learning to become more wise, I am at least learning to recognize that I am not. One might say that where Montaigne used self examination to help others see themselves clearly, La Rochefoucauld shows clearly the faults of others to help his readers examine themselves with their morally critical tone and their use of aphoristic form. La Rochefoucauld's maxims are also very reminiscent of Pascal's Pensee. This is no coincidence, because La Rochefoucauld moved in the same Jansenist circles as Pascal. He was a supporter of the rebellious Prince of Grandet in the civil war known as the Fronde. After defeat in 1652, La Rochefoucault retired from military and political life. For a time he lived with his uncle, the Marquis de Liancourt, who, along with his wife, was committed to Jansenism. It's often thought that this religious movement offered a refuge for the frustrated rebels among a declining feudal nobility, as one scholar has put it, and that the bleak worldview of La Rochefoucauld and other moralists may have been in part an expression of disappointment after the Fronte. Speaking of other moralists, the two who were most closely connected to La Rochefoucault were his friend Jacques Esprit and Madame de Sable, whose salon was frequented by both men. La Rochefoucauld was also friendly with Madeleine de Scudery, whom I mentioned last time for her description of the gardens at Versailles. De Scuderie is mostly known as a novelist, but Esprit and de Sable both wrote works in the moralizing vein. The maxims of Madame de Sable appeared just after her death in 1678. It contained a tidy 81 aphorisms, in contrast to the hundreds churned out by La Rochefoucauld. As for Esprit, he wrote a treatise with the self explanatory title the Falsehood of Human Virtues, which appeared at about the same time, these authors were not just thinking along similar lines and moving in the same circles. They were trading ideas and promoting each other's works. Esprit got feedback on his book from Pierre Nicole, who co authored the Port Royal Logic with Arnaud, while Nicole wrote his own work of moralism called On Self Knowledge de Sable. And La Rochefoucauld acknowledged deep, neutral influence, with La Rochefoucauld going so far as to say that some of his maxims were in fact really hers. Exploiting the period's lax restrictions on bias and book reviewing, Disable published an enthusiastic response to La Rochefoucauld's maxims in the Journal des Savants, calling it a treatise on the impulses of the human heart, which can be said not to have been known to man before. One of Desable's own maxims expresses nicely a central theme of French self love causes us to deceive ourselves in virtually everything, to hear other people blame and to blame ourselves. The same faults we do not correct in ourselves. The phenomenon of self love, or amour propre, was discussed at length in a kind of short essay that began the first unauthorized edition of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, though it was withdrawn for later editions. It's a revealing little text. Here he portrays self love as a pervasive feature of human psychology, one whose nefarious effects are seldom noticed and even less frequently understood. No one can fathom the depth of its chasms or penetrate their darkness. In another maxim from the first pirated edition, La Rochefoucauld writes that self love exists at every stage of life and in every walk of life. It lives everywhere. It lives off everything or nothing. It adapts to anything or the loss of anything. As Disable said, the most sinister and effective ploy of self love is to make us deceive ourselves. We are driven by selfishness and resentment, but we don't want others to see us like that. Nor do we want to admit our own flaws, since we are, in the words of both Esprit and La Rochefoucault, idolaters of the self. Thus, La Rochefoucauld says, we are so accustomed to disguise ourselves from other people that in the end, we disguise ourselves from ourselves. What exactly does this self deception involve? The answer brings us back to our opening question about the motivation of virtuous action. It's pretty obvious from the title of his book what Esprit would say about what we take to be true. Virtue is in fact usually false, and the person involved is among those who are fooled as Michael Moriarty, a specialist on French moralism, has commented, Esprit's aim is therapeutic. It is not simply a matter of seeing through others false claims to virtue, but of recognizing the shallowness of one's own. Thus, people think of themselves as kind and generous, but really they are just trying to make other people indebted to them. Even celebrated heroes who sacrificed their lives for some cause were in fact thinking only of their own reputations. Knowing that death is inevitable, but that fame can be immortal, La Rochefoucauld, too, notes that virtue often stems from vice. This paradox takes pride of place in the authorized editions appearing in the very first. What we take for virtues are often merely an assortment of different deeds and interests which fortune or our own diligence has managed to order. People may be generous out of greed, or brave out of fear, or dutiful out of laziness. They may be kind to others simply because they lack the strength to be bad. When they pity the misfortunes of others, this is usually just because they're imagining something similar happening to themselves. Some conventionally admirable traits are actually little more than tricks. Moderation has been turned into a virtue to limit the ambition of great men and to comfort average people for their lack of fortune and lack of merit. Worse still, even genuine moral improvements rarely leads to an overall gain in virtue, because what we take away from our other faults is often added to our pride. I find it significant that La Rochefoucauld here speaks almost in the language of bookkeeping. And sometimes this becomes even more explicit, as in the maxim pride is not willing to owe and self love is not willing to pay. He is, after all, writing at a time when capitalism and the logic of the market are beginning to impact upon European society, something we'll discuss when we get to early modern Dutch philosophy, in light of which we could think of self love as a sort of unrestrained capitalist, one who's trying to accumulate not wealth but esteem, both self esteem and the esteem of others. With this more modern and cynical account of human nature, La Rochefoucauld and the other moralists were reacting critically to a more idealistic ethical paradigm. The 17th century French aristocracy had for several generations cultivated the idea of honette, which we could translate as honorable conduct. Its roots are in the ancient Stoic idea of the honestum. The honorable man, or homme honet is someone of noble character who acts purely for the sake of moral excellence. One exponent of this mode of thought was the Chevalier de Marais, who helped turn Pascal to a life of spiritual study. In 1687, he published a work called Inevitably Maxims, which elevated the established code of courtly conduct to a more ambitious and abstract ideal. For Demerret, the greatest threat to the honorable man is the power of emotion, which needs to be subordinated and brought under control in part through the refined etiquette of courtly society. Descriptery also valorized civility and gallantry, mere synonyms of honorable conduct. Though she raised doubts about the feasibility of the ideal in a dialogue on self knowledge, in La Rochefoucauld, d' Essablay and Desri, these doubts are ushered onto central stage. They are convinced that the self styled honorable man is in fact self deceived. Even if such a man usually manages to act well in conventional terms, he will almost certainly be doing so for bad reasons. As we've already seen, such a person cannot be trusted to do good in all circumstances. He will be generous, brave and courteous, so long as this serves the purposes of his self love. But if circumstances change, for instance, if no one is looking, he may well act differently. Nor can we know for sure how we ourselves would act in different circumstances. In the words of a friend of mine, the ancient philosophy scholar Tad Brennan, I don't know about you, but I've never been in a counterfactual situation. Even with respect to our actual situation and our actual deeds, it's very difficult and perhaps even impossible to know whether we do good things for good reasons. As Escuy says, the human heart is a great mystery. Here see the closeness of the moralist position to Jansenism. Pierre and Nicole remarked that only God can know for sure whether a person is motivated by charity or by self love. The moralists were thus saying in ethical terms what MA Branches said in metaphysical terms, that the self is unknowable. So we can see La Rochefoucault and the others as repudiating the Cartesian theory of human nature, and according to which we are immediately available and transparent to ourselves and also capable of bringing the passions under effective control. La Rochefoucauld is having none of this. He says that the passions are the only orators who always succeed in persuading and that the downfall of one passion is almost always the rise of another. But the real target of his polemic is not really Descartes. It's the ancient philosophers who inspired Descartes ethics and also inspired the aforementioned ideal of honorable conduct. These were the Stoics and especially Seneca. Provoked by the resurgence of interest in this classical tradition, La Rochefoucault and like minded Authors cast doubt on both the feasibility and the sincerity of Stoic ethics. He explains why the philosophers, meaning primarily the Stoics, affected to accept poverty cheerfully and face death with courage. Lacking wealth themselves, they were motivated by self love to argue that poverty is a matter of indifference. As for death, the Maxims conclude with a mini essay on the topic, pointing out that the Stoics could only contemplate death with equanimity because they knew there was no escaping it and figured they might as well enhance their reputations to make the best of a bad situation. As he puts it in a briefer remark, the philosophers are less convinced than they claim that death is not an evil. Nothing proves this as clearly as the trouble they take to secure the immortality of their names through the loss of their lives. Lest anyone missed the point, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims came with a cover page or frontispiece displaying a grinning cherub who is literally unmasking a bust of Seneca, revealing the agony behind his serene visage. Visible on the pedestal of the bust are the Latin words quid vetat, which come from a line in Horace's Satires, quam, quam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat, meaning what's to stop someone from telling the truth while laughing? The use of classicizing epigrams was of course, nothing unusual. In the 17th century we find something similar with Esprit, whose treatise on False Virtues has on its frontispiece a quote from who would embrace virtue if you took away her rewards? But the fun at Seneca's expense is more than just a bit of humanist inspired mockery. By questioning whether the Stoics had really achieved virtue, La Rochefoucauld may have meant to question whether any pagan could be truly virtuous. What seems to be a general skepticism about the prospects of virtue may in fact be a critique of humanity in its fallen condition. This would both clear the way for and point the way towards real virtue, a genuine goodness that can be attained only within Christianity. And with this we come to a fundamental interpretive dispute about La Rochefoucauld. Since his maxims were first published, they have been read in two very different ways as irredeemably cynical and as piously jansenist. When he imputes sinister motives to even the most virtuous seeming people, is this because he thinks virtue is always a sham? Or is it because he thinks that virtue without God is a sham? Amongst his contemporaries, some thought that Rochefoucauld was simply projecting his own wickedness onto everyone else. Madame De Lafayette exclaimed upon reading the maxims, what corruption there must be in one's mind and heart for one to be capable of imagining all that. Others worried that whatever his own beliefs, La Rochefoucauld was giving aid and comfort to the immoral libertines by suggesting that virtue is unattainable. Actually, the worry was somewhat more specific than this. One contemporary wrote that readers would be convinced by La Rochefoucauld that there is no virtue or vice in anything and that we perform all our actions by necessity. This is not an implausible take, because he does often make it sound like the workings of self love are irresistible. This is in part for a reason we've already seen, namely, that we don't even understand the workings of self love. How can we resist what we don't understand? Of course, La Rochefoucauld phrases the point more nicely than this, saying we are very far from knowing all the things that our passions make us do. As we also saw, even apparent moral improvements are usually compensated by regressing in some other way. And he describes this in remarkably passive terms. When vices leave us, we flatter ourselves that we are the ones who are leaving them. A number of the maxims suggest that our moral traits are simply governed by the states of the body or its temperament. Thus he writes that the body's humors follow a normal, regular course which imperceptibly impels and bends our will. They exercise secret dominion over us. This may be why La Rochefoucauld says that nature has set limits to each man's virtues and vices at his birth. But all of this can be accommodated within the Christian reading. As a fellow traveler of the Jansenists, La Rochefoucauld may mean simply to say that we cannot resist self love with merely natural power because grace is needed for true righteousness. This idea never becomes explicit in the maxims, but there's nonetheless textual evidence in its favor. For one thing, there are a couple of unpublished maxims that connect his apparent cynicism to the doctrine of grace. One of these says that our moral failings make it obvious that we have fallen from the original state of humankind. And another is even more to punish man for original sin. God has allowed him to make a God of his self love so that it may torment him in every deed he ever does. Just as explicit is a letter from La Rochefoucauld in which he tells his correspondent that his intention in the maxims was to demonstrate the wretchedness and contrariness of the human heart in order to bring down the ridiculous pride of which it is full, and to show how much in all things it needs to be sustained and rectified by Christianity. Of course, La Rochefoucauld would be the first to warn us that such remarks most likely stemmed from his own self love. Perhaps he was just worried about his reputation and didn't like to be seen as an immoralist. But if we hesitate to embrace complete cynicism, we'd be following La Rochefoucauld's example in that too. Though there's no overtly Christian framework within the published version of the Maxims, they do allow that true virtue just might be possible, even if it is very rare and all but impossible to identify with certainty. Thus, La Rochefoucauld retains the ideal of the honorable man, saying that this is someone who never prides himself on anything. He also softens quite a few maxims by saying that people act out of selfish motives, often rather than always. Further confirmation of the Christian background is provided by the writings of Esprit. He states outright that moral virtues will indeed be perfect just so long as they are practiced out of love for God instead of self love. And finally, both Esfries and La Rochefoucault admit that doing good for selfish reasons is better than not doing good at all. It's even been suggested that Rauchefoucauld is promoting an ideal of self acceptance. Wicked as we are, it is better that we recognize our wickedness and understand how it can paradoxically be turned to good ends. Well, maybe. But the cynically immoralist version of La Rochefoucauld is the one who may more easily be found in the pages of the Maxims and the one who stays in the memory of his readers. This is presumably why the most famous immoralist of all, Friedrich Nietzsche, said of the French moralists that their books have more true thoughts in them than all the books of German philosophers taken together. No wonder Nietzsche appreciated La Rochefoucauld, being himself an author of bitingly insightful aphorisms. Both authors used humor to disabuse their audience of the conventional moral assumptions. The same tactic was adopted by the next author we're going to cover. In their writings, the moralists put hypocrisy center stage, but only in a metaphorical sense. Moliere did it quite literally, as we'll see next time here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps. Sam.