Libertines dealt with excesses, be they sexual or skeptical. And contrary to the legend of classicism (which is supposed to promote a sense of haughty balance), moralists also dealt with excesses in a manner that was itself often excessive and certainly radical. (That is probably what charmed Nietzsche.) The moralists did not simply denounce particular and personal lifestyles; they investigated the common habits of human beings. More precisely, they tracked the multiple social stances that excessive self-love can take. Amour-propre is the founding category and the central focus of both moralist and libertine thought in the seventeenth century, and its analysis crucially involves a notion of excess, a human self that, in the expression of its interests, passions, and vices, disrupts and overflows itself.1
This new focus on the self involved a kind of early modern Copernican revolution: God was no longer imagined as being at the center of the universe, and instead every human being began to feel himself or herself to be the real center. So the doctrine of original sin was revisited and revised: it came to define a space punctuated with objects of a vain and self-centered desire, around which we propel ourselves in obedience to our passions, looking for more possession of goods or greater domination over people. Having lost confidence in the traditional theocentric cosmology, the modern world looked as if perpetually dislodged from its axis. This displacement is what the libertine writer, Cyrano de Bergerac enacts when his hero travels to the moon and discovers speaking birds who think of the earth as their moon. Not only is outer space the only place for freethinkers. In addition, everything is inscribed in a system of relativity. In sending his hero to the moon, Cyrano gives him the same kind of distant and literally detached position from the human world.
The scientific fantasy of a trip to the moon is also a moral discovery of a new vantage point from which we can look at human ways of being. The correct calculus begins to be of paramount importance. When La Fontaine attacks superstition, he also values sense perception as analyzed by reason. The fable “An Animal in the Moon” shows, for example, how to control accuracy in sense perception:
Mais aussi si l’on rectifie
L’image de l’objet sur son éloignement,
Sur le milieu qui l’environne,
Sur l’organe et sur l’instrument,
Les sens ne tromperont personne.
(One rectifies the image of an object according to its distance /to the medium that surrounds it / to the organ and the instrument.)
Moralists consider the world as a theater: from a distance that is sufficiently great to allow detachment, they observe a scene in which different social groups interact, in competitive fashion, driven sometimes by imitation, sometimes by rejection. So they have to investigate what it is that fundamentally moves people.
The view according to which human beings are driven by the search for their individual pleasures was in fact a view shared by libertine writers and moralists alike. With Pascal’s De l’esprit géométrique, however, it is taken in a very particular direction: as yet one more proof of human frailty manifested by the lack of any stability in one’s own pleasures. Pleasures are different for everyone and vary within each person—so diverse indeed that persons are as different from themselves at different periods as they are from other people.
In the general quest for a stability that should theoretically come from the fact of possession or domination, self-love plays a game of hide-and-seek: it cannot show too much of itself, but at the same time it definitely needs to be acknowledged and admired: as La Rochefoucauld puts it, “Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers” or “Self-love is subtler than the subtlest man of the world.” In this way, the “self” acquires a new autonomy. Moralists tell, and libertines advocate, the story of the self’s autonomous actions, its perilous adventures in the mobile world. These writers do not define good and evil; instead, they question how those terms are understood and defined. They posit a program of knowledge based on the operations of autonomous reason in interpreting human experience. Cartesianism made human consciousness the ground of knowledge: the moralists and libertines explore the nature of that ground.
Previously, moral doctrine was closely linked to theological and political power, which prescribed manners and behaviors for anybody who wanted to appear as a “good” man or woman. Yet, with the advent of Europe’s civil and religious wars in the sixteenth century, action in the name of moral “conscience” became a source of conflict and massacre rather than of peace and social harmony; hence, morality could no longer be sustained by specific religious or traditional communities. Before the Renaissance, morality rested on Christian beliefs, but from the Renaissance onward, in order to be a good Christian, belief on its own was insufficient; behavior, the display of moral conduct became paramount. In the seventeenth century, however, moral discourse shifted from fastidious prescription of rules to a form of deconstructing description; it offered ways of reading appearances rather than the prescribing of forms of behavior. The writer Saint-Evremond, who could himself be considered a moralist, compares the two great dramatists, Corneille and Racine. According to Saint-Evremond, Corneille depicts people as they should be, and Racine as they are: this reflects the shift from prescriptive education to critical anatomy. In the last edition of his Maxims, La Rochefoucauld chooses to begin with a bitter denunciation: “Our virtues are nothing but vices in disguise.” The form of the inaugural maxim itself is quite telling: “nothing but” reflects, in exemplary fashion, by the force its own example, the required movement of thought. The reader needs to experience this reductive movement from the exterior carapace of apparent virtues to what lies beneath it: the pulpy mass of vices. The “nothing but” invites and performs a stripping away of the “disguise,” the mask that enables humans to think of themselves as virtuous beings.
Increased social mobility had also encouraged some to step out of inherited roles, leading to a redefinition of the individual: less “Who am I?” than “Who could I become?” Vices and virtues that were supposed to be firmly opposed began to look like the results of a personal or social dynamic. As Pascal would to put it, “We do not keep ourselves virtuous by our own power, but by the counterbalance of two opposing vices, just as we stay upright between two contrary winds. Take one of these vices away and we fall into the other.”
There was a literary correlative to these new kinds of interest in the human self. Treatises inspired by philosophers such as Aristotle or theologians such as Thomas of Aquinas were gradually replaced by a diversity of genres no longer subject to the authority of scholars: maxims, portraits, short essays, fairy tales, fables, letters written by men and women sharing the pleasures of society. Another difference consisted in the moralists’ interest in the small truths (and illusions) of living instead of the great truth of Life, in everyday sensible questions more than in a metaphysical search for the underlying logic of reasoning. Historians of print culture have shown how the rise of books devoted to urbane moral doctrine took place at the expense of scholarly treatises in the second half of the seventeenth century. Instead of long and elaborate dissertations full of quotations and references, readers turned to short forms, without reverence for previous authorities. This in turn instituted a new type of cultural “authority,” which was shared by both moralists and libertines; even erudition was now at the service of polite society and urbane circles.
For such a society, it was not enough to perform one’s moral duty. One had to take pleasure in the very exercise of virtue: politeness was a social skill that made the virtues enjoyable. This engendered a social utility of pleasure, which would eventually permit the elaboration of what the eighteenth century would call “aesthetics.” It has sometimes been said that after the sixteenth century, an “aestheticizing” of social conduct increasingly prized grace, elegance, and style as the defining elements of social behavior, as can be seen in the various seventeenth-century treatises on civility (Faret’s L’honnête homme, 1630, or Courtin’s Nouveau traité de la civilité, 1671
). But the formula needs to be reversed: what would eventually be named “aesthetics” was, in the early modern period, shaped by the moral code of apparent disinterestedness and the social pleasure of politeness. In other words, it is important to understand the relation of the seventeenth century to what followed, that what was later to be called “aesthetic” was determined by the social, and not the other way round. The relevant code involved a kind of theatricalized stylistics of behavior designed to avoid blind submission to the power of self-interest: sometimes it can even take the shape of disinterestedness. “Self-interest speaks all manner of tongues and plays all manner of parts, even that of disinterestedness,” writes La Rochefoucauld. It is a question of social position and behavior: we can use our self-love if we know ourselves well enough to behave properly according to our social standing and that of the persons we are meeting, and thereby to make a good impression on others. The expression of my self must make the right impression on others: they are both elements of a kind of “social physics.”
If everyone is motivated only by self-interest and self-love, how is it still possible to live together? There are of course reciprocal needs. But that would not be enough to convince people who are always limited and constrained by all the other persons’ interests. According to moralists and libertine writers, there are two operations that allow for the constitution of a “community”: illusions about oneself, and the power of imagination. The kind of self-knowledge that, according to Descartes, was supposed to anchor our relation to the world is dismantled and even destroyed beyond repair by self-flattery and self-deception. As the author of tales of animality, La Fontaine could argue in favor of the existence of souls of animals against the division Descartes introduced between animal machines and human thought. This is a way of returning humans back to their animal nature, but also of depriving them of the illusory glory of their assumed superiority. Human consciousness is both necessary and inaccessible, as La Rochefoucauld claims in the maxim that headed the first edition of his book: “Self-love: we cannot sound the depths or pierce the darkness of its chasms. … There it is often invisible to itself.” In order to preserve our interests, we need to disguise ourselves; but “we are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end by disguising ourselves from ourselves.” Pascal puts it even more bluntly: in order not to see what seems annoying, “we agreeably gouge out our own eyes,” and he adds further on: “We are nothing but lies, duplicity, contradiction, and we hide and disguise ourselves from ourselves.”
La Bruyère portrays people so obsessed with their idées fixes that they simply do not notice around them the disgust, contempt, and rejection of others. For example, in Les caractères, he writes: “Gnathon lives for no one but himself, and the rest of the world are to him as if they did not exist. He is not satisfied with occupying the best seat at table, but he must take the seats of two other guests, and forgets that the dinner was not provided for him alone, but for the company as well. … At table his hands serve for a knife and fork; he paws the meat over and over again, and tears it to pieces, so that if the other guests wish to dine, it must be on his leavings. He does not spare them any of those filthy and disgusting habits which are enough to spoil the appetite of the most hungry; the gravy and sauce run over his chin and beard; if he takes part of a stew out of a dish, he spills it by the way over another dish and on the cloth, so you may distinguish him by his track.”
We can also run into the opposite obsession: people are so eager to be admired that they are ready to act, for example, as cowards if it means that they are in fact considered courageous, or even to lose their lives in order to live more completely in other people’s memory: “We even die gladly provided people talk about it,” Pascal claims. It means that everyone behaves according to reputation and flattery, like the crow that the fox fawns over in order to get to the cheese in La Fontaine’s famous fable. In this way of understanding the world, people are so keen on reputation that they feel and think according to collective constructions; hence, for instance, “some people would have never fallen in love if they had never heard of love.” This implies that self-interest opens up two contradictory paths: we deal only with our own pleasure as if nobody else really exists, or we find our own pleasure in recognition by others. This second path creates the possibility of reciprocal bonds: “Self-interest, blamed for all our misdeeds, often deserves credit for our good actions.”
Moralists disclose the fundamental contradiction of human beings: infatuated with one self, everyone desires to enforce an absolute power on others, but no self can really dispense with other people. Therefore, the establishment of a social and political order is necessary in order to adjust the disorder generated by original sin (but not address its root and real cause). In loving oneself with that infinite love that was destined only for God, human beings do not love anybody else. Yet self-love forges links between us in spite of our mutual hostility: we do not love other people because they are naturally loveable, we love other people so that they love us. Meanwhile, everyone has an interest in constituting a civil society that can work despite inequalities, since everyone is so vain as to enjoy even the slightest form of recognition and glory: “Such is our vanity that the good opinion of half a dozen of the people around us gives us pleasure and satisfaction.”
This leads Pascal and the moralists to attribute a fundamental psychological and social energy to imagination: “Imagination decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world’s supreme good.” Imagination fools reason, but it is also able to provide illusory satisfactions. Since an imaginary satisfaction is still a satisfaction, people at once enjoy it and yet blind themselves with its pitiful outcome. “The bonds securing men’s mutual respect … are bonds of imagination.” For these writers, imagination is granted a special standing among the human faculties. It means that it is also a way, for Pascal, to persuade people. He appeals to his readers’ imaginations with fictive experiences that constitute analogical examples on which to meditate: “Put it to the test: leave a king entirely alone … with complete leisure to think about himself, and you will see that a king without diversion is a very wretched man.” Just as Pascal the physicist proved the existence of a vacuum by testing the atmospheric pressure at the bottom and at the top of a mountain, Pascal the moralist shows the presence of the human void in evaluating the social pressure at the top and at the lowest point of diversion.
Cyrano de Bergerac wrote one of the first great science-fiction novels, a demonstration of his own powers of imagination. He actually insists himself on the power of imagination in one episode that presents an allegory: the narrator discovers that a tree of gold, emeralds, and pearls under which he was resting produces, as a fruit, a little man who tells him that he is a king and that the tree is composed of his people. And to prove it on the spot, the tree falls apart into little dancing men around him. Then the king and his people dance together so that “the dancers became confused with a much more rapid and more imperceptible motions; it seemed that the object of the ballet was to represent an enormous giant; for as they drew nearer each other and redoubled the swiftness of their movement they became so closely mingled that I perceived nothing but a great, open and almost transparent colossus. … The most agile of our little dancers leaped up with a flourish to the height and into the position needed to form a head, others hotter and not so loose formed the heart; and others much heavier only supplied the bones, the flesh and the plumpness.” Who are these little people who can form a complete body? Cyrano plays on what Descartes called “esprits animaux”: the little king claims that they are spirits, but not at all immaterial, they are animals just as human beings are animals. He also plays with the very idea of the body politic, as in Hobbes’s Leviathan frontispiece, where the sovereign’s body is composed of all his people. Who are these esprits animaux? Since they were born in the sun, explains the king, “where the principle of matter is action, our imagination is necessarily much more activ
e than that of the inhabitants of the opaque regions and the substance of our bodies is also much finer. Granted this, it inevitably follows that since our imagination meets no obstacle in the matter as it desires and since it is mistress of our whole mass, it causes this mass to pass, by moving all its particles, into the order necessary to create on a large scale the thing it has formed in little.” In the libertine way of thinking, the relation between being and appearance, between body and soul, deals with imagination and the speed it confers on matter. There is no stability of being, but only operations of provisory stabilization. We could say the same with the notion of “self”: the self characterizes what I think of as “me,” but its definition and its recognition depends on others. This is why reputation matters so much to us: we live in the mirror of others; we exist as an image in the imagination of others.
A History of Modern French Literature Page 29