M O N TA I G N E Life without Law
* PIERRE MANENT Translated by Paul Seaton
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu Copyright Š 2020 by the University of Notre Dame Translated from the original French text by Paul Seaton. All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contents
Translator’s Foreword
Introduction: The Word and the Promise
PART 1
THE WAR OF HUMAN BEINGS
vii 1
1
To Save One’s Life
000
2
To Compare Oneself
000
P ART 2
THE POWER S OF THE WORD
3
From Rhetoric to Literature
000
4
The Word and Death
000
PART 3
THE MYSTERIES OF CUSTOM
5
A New World
000
6
Commanded Reason
000
7
Three Conditions of Human Beings
000
P ART 4
LIFE WITHOU T L AW
8
Governed Human Beings
000
9
Nature and Truth
000
Notes
000
Index
000
Introduction The Word and the Promise
If there is a shared diagnosis of the causes of the European malaise, no doubt it is the following: we have lost confidence in our own powers. One could also say: we have made promises that we cannot keep, we know that we cannot keep them, and we have neither the strength nor the courage to renew them or to conceive others. In a profound peace, in complete liberty, in a prosperity that is still enviable, we no longer have the strength to promise anything to ourselves, whereas in terrible disorders, in servitude and misery, our forebears conceived the hopes of science and power, of liberty and happiness, on which we have lived during three or four centuries. What has the promising and enterprising animal become? What has the European become? This profound change in our relationship to ourselves and to our future causes us to look with astonishment at who we were for so long a time, and it encourages us to consider attentively the one who promised, projected, and undertook. The promise that seemed so clear when it bore us becomes so mysterious when it abandons us! What did the promising animal then resemble? What did he promise, and how? How we would love to see with his eyes and to will with his will! To be sure, answers to such questions come in great number, clothed in majuscules. Our fathers promised themselves “the relief of man’s estate.”1 They promised that man would become, “as it were, the master and possessor of nature.” They promised us the freedom “to pursue happiness.” These promises, moreover, were not so poorly kept, but that does not tell us what was the source of the promise, what the one who promised such great things saw, and how he readied himself. 1
2 Introduction
To be sure, the promise aimed at something unseen, but it was not simply something conceived by the “imagination.” The one who promised intended to make it real, to “realize” the thing that was imagined, and he was confident in his ability to carry through with this realization. Is that all? No, it is not all, and, in fact, it misses the essential. What we just said only concerns ordinary promises, those that are inscribed within a given order of things and only aim to modify it, to simply draw from it something worthwhile. The promise that interests us, the promise that made us what we are, or still were yesterday, the promise that is coextensive with Europe, is something else as well because it is a promise that aimed to change the very order of human things. Where could such an idea have come from? The imagination of poets has always invented other worlds, but worlds in speech, or in sculpted stone or painted walls. But here it was a matter of really bringing into being a new world, or at least a renewed, or reformed, one. The last word is the best: not to invent elements of the human world that did not exist, but to radically reform, to give a new form to, the constituent elements of the human world, by radically reforming the political order, the religious order, and the order of knowledge. Perhaps one can say in a synthetic way that it was a matter of reforming actions and words and the way in which they were related or were connected to each other. The promise of modern Europe, the promise that astonishes us and that seems to have exhausted its strength, was the promise of a new action and a new word, the promise of a new relationship of word to action and of action to word. The last formulation, however, causes us to pause, to hesitate. Action and word, these are the two halves, distinct but inseparable, of man’s being. How can one change them without changing the central organ (if I can put it that way) of man’s humanity? If we radically reform that . . . then, adieu to man! This, however, is what we did, without abolishing humanity but by profoundly transforming the human world. Once again, how did we do that? Man is the speaking animal, and he is the acting animal. One cannot do anything to change that, except by destroying man. What one can change perhaps, what in fact we were able to change, was the relationship between the two. The simplest form of the relationship is distance. One can bring action closer to or move it farther from speech, and the same with speech vis-à-vis action. If, for example, the believer receives the rules of his action from a church that interprets scripture for him, the word that regulates action is doubly removed from the action that it regulates. Between word and action are the church and scripture. As everyone knows, it was by suppressing the medi-
Introduction 3
ation of the church that the Reformation brought the action of the Christian closer to the Christian Word. Let us take a closer look at this operation of the Reformation. Here we are not interested in the theological issues or in historical developments, but only in the human gesture implied in the Reformation. Calvin puts this gesture before our eyes in the very first chapter of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. He begins by observing that while God manifests himself to human beings in a thousand ways by his works, by their own fault human show themselves incapable of seeing such a clear thing. His works being ignored, God made himself known directly by his Word, “which is a more certain and familiar mark to know him.”2 We thus have scripture alone to know the divine truth. Calvin then objects to the “very pernicious error” of the Catholics, who make the interpretation of scripture depend upon the consent of the church, which is equivalent to subjecting the eternal truth to the “[good] pleasure of men.”3 To the objection, How, then, can we know that Scripture is the Word of God?, Calvin responds: “Scripture shows no less evidence of its truth than black or white things do of their colors, or sweet or bitter things of their taste.” At the end of the chapter, Calvin summarizes his argument by saying that, for the believer, God “gives himself to be as sensed by experience, as he declares himself by his word.”4 This very condensed summary brings to light the audacity of Calvin’s procedure. He suddenly places human beings—who wander about in ignorance of God or who, under the cover of the church, use scripture for their purposes—before the evidence of a “sensed” where experience merges with the Word. The demoralizing dispersion of the signs of truth suddenly gives way to adhesion to this truth without any distance. Reduced to its core, Calvin’s gesture consists in overcoming an infinite distance, in leading human beings from the greatest distance to proximity, and even coincidence, with God, or at least his Word. The decisive point does not reside, first of all, in the free interpretation of Scripture. “Christian liberty” is an effect before it is a cause. It results from the gesture by which the Reformer, intervening in the half-light in which the truth is both given and hides itself, separates the clear from the obscure and isolates a circle of light in which evidence reigns. It is true that contemporaries, and even more historians, have tended to see in the Reformation above all the liberation of the individual vis-à-vis an external rule and institution—in our language, a victory of autonomy over heteronomy. Be that as it may, this liberation presupposes taking up a position from which we relate the truth to the immediate evidence of a sense or a sentiment, and in this perspective we reject
4 Introduction
everything that introduces distance and mediation. The procedure of the Reformer thus proposes resolutely putting aside or even systematically eliminating everything that could hinder or complicate our ever-more-direct and -immediate grasp of the truth of things. The liberty in question, no doubt quite real, is suspended from the promise of coinciding with the truth that is, at last, entirely appropriated. Faith in the saving God finds its certification in the certainty of the believer’s personal salvation. To be sure, the Reformer does not enact this gesture except to liberate the truth from the human intermediaries who confiscate or disfigure it. His intention is certainly in this vein. He would be horrified by the “autonomy” of the modern subject. But by envisaging an appropriation without an intermediary, by promising it, he commands himself, and he commands us, to bring all the signs of truth toward ourselves, ever closer to us, to the point of coincidence itself, which entails reducing as much as possible the distances by which the human world is ordered and disordered. Sola scriptura contains the promise of a coincidence between the Christian and the truth, but the command to seek this coincidence engages us in a process that cannot end with the suppression of ecclesial mediation. It will not be long before scripture itself, at first the medium of this coincidence, becomes the obstacle to it. All the constitutive distances of the human world, of whatever order, are summoned to be suppressed. Such is the command, such is the promise. The commonplace according to which the Reformation inaugurated the modern revolution is thus well founded, as long as one specifies that the decisive gesture does not concern liberty but the truth, or our relationship to it. We will find a confirmation of this by considering another innovation, another reform, which is strictly contemporary with the Reformation, but whose project exclusively concerns this world, and even with a very sharp point directed against Christianity. I am speaking of Machiavelli’s enterprise, which aims at suppressing, or in any case reducing, the too great “gap” that the Christian religion installed between humans’ words and their deeds. Human beings speak in a certain way, and they act in another. Their words, however, are not without effect, since their actions are different from what they would be if they did not speak that way. For example, the Christian religion commands love of one’s enemies. Since this is not the best way of defending oneself, Christians continue to defend themselves against their enemies by the ordinary means, but they do so with a divided will, hence with lessened powers. The Christian word, as distant as it is, does not have the force to command
Introduction 5
action and get human beings to act like Christians, but it retains enough force to prohibit them from acting in accordance with their nature. Machiavelli therefore undertakes to bring to light what he calls the effectual truth of politi cal things,5 what one could call the art or logic of action when it is not shackled or falsified by any word, Christian or other. On Machiavelli’s horizon is a world where the human agent would coincide so perfectly with his action that he would not have any need of a word. Thus at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Luther and Calvin on one hand, Machiavelli on the other, make opposite claims, but claims that betray a strange resemblance. As we just saw, the principle of order reveals itself to be the principle of disorder, that is, the authority of Christian words which command without being obeyed. There is therefore an immense gap to overcome between Christian words and the real actions of human beings. While Luther and Calvin aim to suppress the obstacles that are placed between Christians and the Word of God, Machiavelli aims to suppress the obstacles placed between the prince, or the political agent, and the founding, or refounding, action that Europe needs. If one remains in the Catholic arrangement of things, the disorder cannot be overcome, because in it the Word is distinct but inseparable from the actions of Christians brought together in the church. Since the Catholic “circle” is formed of elements that need one another, it is impossible to rest on any one of them and there to find an incontestable foundation. Scripture founds and announces the church, and the church validates and interprets Scripture; in the same way, miracles confirm doctrine, and doctrine interprets miracles. Hence in the Catholic dispensation the connection between words and actions contains lots of play, and this play is the cause of a disorder in which it is impossible to remain indefinitely. Luther and Calvin on one hand, Machiavelli on the other, entertain opposed hopes and different ends; nonetheless they address the same command to humans, a human command bearing upon the human order: it is urgent to suppress the play and overcome the distance between action and word. This one and double command is the cause of the immense amplitude and ambiguity of the modern movement. The endeavor to overcome the Catholic disorder encounters the following operational necessity: in order to reduce the distance and play between words and actions, in order eventually to join them adequately, one must first rigorously separate them. In the Catholic disorder, or in the Catholic situation that appeared to be a disorder, action and word are distinct and inseparable as scripture and church are distinct and
6 Introduction
inseparable. In the reforming project, it is necessary to separate the action and the word that are confusedly mixed in the church in order to join them closely together in the immediate contact of the Christian with scripture alone. One could say in general terms that in the Catholic situation the two halves of the human world are distinct and inseparable, while in the modern project, which bears the Reformation and is borne by it, they are to be separated and joined anew—separanda et conjungenda. An unlimited process or movement is thus unleashed, because the two halves are never separated enough, nor ever joined enough. Never separated enough: the state is never neutral enough, and its actions are therefore never separated enough from civil society and its words. Never joined enough: the government is never representative enough, and its actions are never joined enough to civil society and its words. To be sure, here we will not get into the intertwined histories of the neutral state and representative government. However, we can make the following general observation: borne along by the movement I just characterized, we have never arrived at finding a stable formula, a stable arrangement, of separation and union between words and actions. Never has our effort to overcome the Catholic disorder allowed us to find repose in an assured order and a lasting equilibrium. Moreover, during all this time the Catholic church, constantly dying but still immortal, has not ceased to oppose to the current of the modern river the irregular obstacle of its singular association. Resistant to separation as well as joining, it is the great speed bump on the path towards this recomposition of the human world promised and commanded us by the Reformers. However, as imperious, as “revolutionary,” as the modern movement may be, as inaccessible as the repose of a stable order has remained, with a bit of attention we can recognize the most durably significant formula according to which words and actions have been separated and joined in modern Europe. That to which the modern regime tended, and in which for a long time it found all the stability that it could receive, was the reunion of the neutral or lay state and the nation of Christian mark.6 If we brush aside the clouds and the fog, if we attend to what truly ordered the history of modern Europe, then we encounter the association composed of the neutral state and the nation bound to a Christian confession. That’s it. The moment of the Reformation therefore does not merely provide the beginning and the impulse of the movement of modern Europe, but fixes, as it were, the terms of the European problem. However, the political agent and the religious person were not the only ones affected by the Catholic disorder, by
Introduction 7
the relaxed play between words and actions. While the former sought to liberate political action from every shackle issued by the word or action of the church, and the latter sought to experience the interior evidence of divine truth in the reading of scripture, how are those going to go about their lives who, lacking political ambition and little concerned with piety, nonetheless have to lead their lives? The gesture that we saw so well sketched by Calvin, the gesture consisting in bringing toward oneself the scattered signs of truth and separating from the confusion of the world the circle of the experience of truth, it is incumbent upon each to make, according to the character of his life. Yes, of course, but how? Machiavelli has nothing to say to the one without ambition, Calvin to him who is disinclined to piety. It would hardly be an exaggeration to maintain that the two together have nothing to say to the majority of human beings, who are not particularly concerned with the salvation of the city or their soul. However, is there no reform, no recomposition of the truth, for the one who is neither prince nor saint? Who would want to, or could, extend the reforming gesture to embrace the anecdotes of ordinary life and the little secrets of private life? But there was someone! The circle of the experience of the truth was redrawn for the ordinary person by a marvelously sure hand, by a reformer no less audacious than Machiavelli or Calvin. It is the thesis of this book that Montaigne was that reformer. Without anticipating the argument, it is permissible to insist on this capital point. While Machiavelli and the religious reformers redefined, more precisely “reformed,” objects that were already constituted and authorities that were powerfully established, Montaigne was constrained to produce the object and establish the authority in the name of which he re defined our relation to the truth. It is life itself in its ordinary tenor, in the vari ation of its humors and the irregularity of its accidents, that needs to be brought to light and, if I can put it this way, installed in a light that causes its fullness to appear, while preserving its imperfection. If it interests you to learn how Montaigne proceeded, you would do well, reader, to continue your reading.7