{The Story of a Good Brahmin, my last post, should be read first, before reading this.}
Happiness or Reason? Civilization or Barbarism? Parliaments or Despotism? Hitler hated politics, by which we should understand, to use the modern term of disdain, gridlock. No Hitler preferred more direct means. Let’s take the unification of Germany as an example: that silly Parliament of Frankfurt (1848-49) accomplished nothing; it was old blood-and-iron Bismarck who really effected German unity. “The great questions of our day will not be settled by congresses and debate, but by blood and iron,” said the Iron Chancellor (and “better pointed bullets to pointed words”). What music to Hitler’s ears! These sentiments have a long tradition in Europe, and can be seen buried in the probably apocryphal statement of Louis XIV, “I am the state.” Against such notions the subject of this post labored might and mane. This will be the first of several posts discussing what is for me kind of an anti-hero, a man almost universally loathed among Christians, and I will admit, in the main justly so. I am speaking of François Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de guerre, Voltaire.
I make my students read Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities.” Berlin’s essay traces the modern academy’s most basic division back to a split in perception between Giambattista Vico and Voltaire: Vico put guarded stock in science and Cartesian reasoning (it could only give a skewed, partial picture of reality), and championed a marriage of the poetical with the rational in understanding human nature; Voltaire, conversely says Berlin, was the cold and calculated, a champion of Newton and a hater of obscurantism. After we discuss Berlin’s article, I give the students “The Story of a Good Brahmin.” After we read it I then ask: who wrote this, Vico or Voltaire? They all answer, Vico. It is a shock to them that Voltaire did.
While Voltaire is repeatedly cited as a champion of the Enlightenment (which he was) and the Enlightenment the first maturing of modernity (to be debated), and modernity as the triumph of scientism and progress, the “Good Brahmin” gives the lie to all of this, for as we can see, it wasn’t. Reason could lead to despair. All one has to do is couple this with Candide and we can see that Voltaire had a dim view of the human prospect. This was not always the case, as one can see by reading his story Zadig, but after the Lisbon earthquake and the Calas affair, Voltaire soured on progress. Voltaire’s problem, it should be noted, arose from his own misperceptions about the promise of reason, for to him it held as a promise only for the rational. And indeed he feared its wider dissemination to an extent. He once commented that not everyone should learn to read, for who would then chop wood. The irony is that in an age when everyone learned to read the need for chopping wood was greatly reduced. It is perhaps a commentary on our decline of culture that more and more people are having to find themselves needing to chop wood.
But the misperception was more than this, and actually would place Voltaire among the Romantic revolutionaries, as Berlin defined them in another of his essays, for Voltaire has separated the rational order from the proper human end of felicity, beatitude, or happiness. At the least, he has posed the questions that they are dissonant, and certainly seemingly incommensurable. Thus it is the Enlightenment itself (and we can find this mentality as well in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew) divorced reason from true pleasure. This notion of pleasure, however, should not be confused with the modern hedonist approaches to pleasure that are libertine in nature. For this pleasure – – promiscuity, gluttony, prodigality, the wanton imbibing of mind-altering substances – – had nothing whatsoever to do with happiness as thought of by the likes of Aristotle and Cicero, Petrarch and Leonardo Bruni, or even Montaigne and Locke, a happiness by aligning one’s sentiments, reason, and emotions with the greater harmony of the cosmos. This modern happiness is purely animalia, the consequence of divorcing reason from “the good life,” and seeing the human as nothing more than a more highly organized version of the brute. Ultimately, while such thinkers as Voltaire and Diderot would champion some types of republican reforms within France’s monarchical system, they were at once, by their divorce of reason from man’s true end, creating the basis for the secular nightmares that we have witnessed in this last century; and no doubt will see much more of in this one. For if we are but cattle, what we need are herders, and not parliaments.
