Heritage and Foundations

by Alain de Benoist

  Tragic philosophers refuse to portray situations as more pleasing than they are. For them, that which exists does not exist solely as a ‘fact’, but also as a reality to will. This does not mean that this reality cannot be changed. But that it can only be changed by overcoming it after having previously accepted it.

  Affirmation of the world’s constitution and what is produced within it, an authentic trait of tragic philosophy, above all characterises the thought of Lucretius, de Montaigne, and Nietzsche, but also that of Kierkegaard, Shestov, and Unamuno. The latter are ‘pseudo-tragic’ thinkers: they lack precisely this capacity and this will for affirmation of the real.

  ‘The logic of the worst’, writes Rosset, ‘therefore teaches the necessity of the link between tragic thought and affirmative thought’.

  Because the tragic does not add anything to the world, we could say that it begins where there is no longer anything to say or think. Because it is stripped of all rational and moral interpretation, it seems to be silent. Tragic discourse remains possible however, because it has at its disposal a word that allows it to ‘speak without saying anything, or to think without conceiving anything’. This word is ‘chance’.231

  For Clément Rosset, chance or hazard is not related to fortuitous encounters or to good and bad fortune. It simply designates the narrow field left to the disposition of tragic thought.

  And yet it is necessary to distinguish the ‘chance of events’, which follows the constitution of nature, and the ‘chance of origin’ which precedes it. Only the second operates here. One discovers it among the Sophists and in Lucretius, Montaigne, Pascal, Nietzsche. The tragic is no other thing than chance thus understood.

  The idea of ‘affirmed chance’ is translated by notions that characterise the tragic demeanour: tolerance, the creative faculty, a ‘certain way of laughing’.

  Man is free to the degree that he is capable of affirming and willing himself as he truly is — that is, to the degree that he assumes his tragic dimension.

  Non-tragic doctrines, by contrast, are intolerant by nature: their standards are in contradiction to the adverse ideologies with which they are necessarily concerned. Thus, the intellectual mentor of the ‘New Left’, Herbert Marcuse, writes: ‘Tolerance must henceforth be restricted to that which is tolerable’.

  The Master of Forms

  From this perspective, aesthetic creation can only be chance joined to chance. It anticipates chance and outplays it: art is tragic or it is not.

  As to the laughter of tragic thought, foreign to the subtle games of ‘sense’ and ‘non-sense’, it represents the victory of the reality of chaos over the appearance of order, that is to say, the recognition of chance or hazard as the ‘truth of what exists’. For there is no other order in the universe than that which we impose, by convention, for the convenience of analysis or for peace of mind. And this laughter is an exterminator to the degree that, by affirming everything that is, it also celebrates destiny.

  Every society thus draws its configuration and its ordering from the play of relations and forms that bind and unravel. Order is not received; it is created. In other words, it only exists as a result of the acts that establish it, that is to say, by the form of the relational activity between individuals or groups of individuals, legal and natural persons, social bodies, and institutions. The correlation between order and form is therefore obvious: we institute a social order by being a master of social forms. ‘Without formation’, writes Julien Freund, ‘knowledge is no more possible than action. Now, this formation consists in the organisation of the relations between things according to a principle or a sequence which is the condition of all intelligibility and all efficacy’ (L’essence du politique. Sirey, 1965).

  Not only does the human order owe as much to energy as to reason, it is also pure convention. Like art, it is its own model. It does not follow a plan established in advance; it does not fulfil a ‘contract’ to which man would only have the freedom to subscribe or not subscribe. He is no more the ‘reflection’ of a natural, anti-tragic arrangement of the world than he is an extension of law, morality, art, science, or economics. Along with politics, he is not an end in itself — but the result of an activity placed in service of a certain way of conceiving the relations between man and the universe, and the relations among men. It depends on the idea that one has of it, on the energy that one has available to realise this idea, and on the goal that one sets.

  There is no absolute, but we cannot live without an absolute — without something that surpasses us and motivates us in our most essential attitudes. No man escapes the problem of its transcendence. But for the first time, we are simultaneously conscious of the relativity of norms, and of their necessity. From here it ensues that a new ‘objectivity’ can only be born from a ‘heroic’ subjectivity: from a subjectivity consciously affirmed as a norm by someone who has such power that this affirmation will appear natural to everyone.

  Man is not master of his capacities, but he is master of the way they are used. He is the demiurge of forms, der Herr der Gestalten.232

  ‘Tragic philosophy’, says Clément Rosset, ‘appeared the day that the Greeks celebrated life, hazard, and death in one single festival’.

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  La logique du pire. Eléments pour une philosophie tragique, a study by Clément Rosset.233 PUF, 180 pages.

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  In L’anti-nature (PUF, 1973),234 Clément Rosset has refined and developed some of the leading ideas of the Logique du pire by throwing a retrospective look upon the history of philosophy and by opposing, in a relatively systematic fashion, ‘naturalist’ philosophies, which create meaning where man does not exist, and ‘artificial’ philosophies, which exclusively connect the existence of meaning to human actions. In 1976, he also published a short essay entitled Le réel et son double (Gallimard).235

  Culture and Civilisation

  Elias’s book is entitled La civilisation des mœurs.236 It would have been better to call it: ‘Les mœurs dans la civilisation’.237 It is in fact the first volume of a study entitled: Sur le procès de la civilisation (1939 and 1969).238

  Norbert Elias, seventy-nine years of age, has done all of his studies in Germany. He completed his thesis in Heidelberg under the direction of Alfred Weber, after pursuing the philosophy and psychology courses of Hönigswald, Rickert, Husserl, and Jaspers. Afterwards he lived in France and then Great Britain. He teaches courses at Leicester and The Hague. In regards to the sociology of knowledge, his name holds authority.

  His book takes up an idea familiar to modern sociology, to know that our day-to-day behaviour, even in its most simple, ‘natural’ forms (our way of eating, spitting, sleeping, blowing our nose, our sexual relations, our forms of aggression, etc.) constitute only one specific feature of our culture, which not only differs in strength from the behaviour of other cultures, but has also undergone important transformations over time.

  The first part is of the greatest interest. It analyses an important but frequently unrecognised subject: the antithesis between the notions of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’. This antithesis rests on two completely different conceptions of society.

  Among the French and English, relates Elias, the word civilisation ‘summarises in one single concept the topics of the nation’s pride, the progress of the west and of humanity in general’. Among the Germans (and also among the Italians), it ‘designates something of strong utility, certainly, but which is nevertheless of secondary importance: that which constitutes the exterior side of man, the surface of human existence. When Germany seeks to define itself, when it wants to express pride in its own realisations and its own nature, it employs the word culture’.

  Therefore, from one side of the Rhine to the other, the same terms do not have the same meaning, nor do they refer to the same realities.

  Spiritual Frontiers

  Civilisation is concerned with ‘recognised values’ which every man born in a civilised country can rely upon wi
thout himself having achieved any concrete accomplishment. But it takes more than being born in a country of high culture to be cultivated: ‘Culture does not designate the values of being a man, but the value and character of certain human productions’.

  The idea of civilisation, continues Elias, implies and includes that of ‘progress’. Thus, civilised man opposes himself to ‘primitive’ (previous) man. Civilisation ‘is in effect related to something fluctuating, in constant progression’. In contrast, the idea of culture revives in the present an eternal past; the ‘cultured’ man does not fundamentally distinguish himself from ‘original’ man: he merely actualises him.

  Furthermore, ‘the notion of civilisation effaces to a certain point the differences between peoples; in the sensibility of those who use the term, it places the accent on what is common to all men, or at least what should be (…) By contrast, the German notion of culture emphasises national differences, the particularities of groups. (It is thanks to this function that it may have assumed an importance surpassing, in the domain of ethnology and anthropology for example, the German linguistic zone)’.

  Norbert Elias relates this ‘semantic’ difference to the distinctive way that the French and German nations are formed.

  ‘Civilisation expresses the complacency of a people whose national borders and specific characteristics have not been called into questioned for centuries because they are definitively fixed; whereas the notion of culture belongs to a people who, in relation to other western people, have achieved unification and political consolidation very late, and whose limits have fluctuated for centuries and still threaten to do so.’

  ‘The notion of culture, henceforth, reflects the consciousness of a nation obliged to continually ask itself what its specific character consists in by ceaselessly seeking and consolidating its spiritual and political frontiers’.

  For this reason, although ‘the German may try to explain to the French and to the English what it means by “culture”, it is incapable of making them feel the specific lived experience of the national tradition, the emotive halo which surrounds this word for them (…) And the discussion gets lost if the German attempts to demonstrate why the notion of “civilisation” represents for them something of value, but a value of second rank’.

  In France, where it is the State that has created the nation, the court has been at once the complete cause and consequence of the irresistible tendency towards centralisation that has accompanied the successive expansions of the ‘pré carré’;239 as such, the court has been the crucible of a French civilisation which has been gradually elaborated while the regional cultures perish. Drawn into this gilded prison that constitutes the court of Versailles, the provincial aristocracies, a permanent danger for the authority of French crown, progressively polished themselves by contact with refined fashions and manners, which however only concern the exterior aspects of the personality. At the same time, incrementally accentuating the urbanisation and the ‘courtisation’ (Verhöflichung)240 of elites, the disparity between an urban milieu dominated by the bourgeoisie, and a rural milieu where landed aristocracy still live in symbiosis with the people, deepens.

  The Antithesis Shifts Towards a National Context

  In the seventeenth century, the radiance of ‘French courtliness’241 reached the whole of Europe. Princes from all the capitals came to ‘polish’ themselves in the salons where the intellectual spirit, if not the soul, flourished. To the foreigner, ‘honest people’ expressed themselves in French, the language whose use denotes belonging to a superior class (the same phenomenon will play out in nineteenth century France, accelerating the disappearance of regional dialects). ‘Nothing is more vulgar than to write letters in German’, asserted the fiancée of Gottsched in 1730 (a writer born near Königsberg). Leibniz himself wrote in French or Latin, rarely in German. In 1740, in his Lettres français et germaniques,242 E. de Mauvillon remarks: ‘There are some years that we do not say four words in German without adding two words of French’.

  Everything changes at the end of the century when the German literary movement appeared with Klopstock, Herder, Lessing, the poets of the Sturm und Drang, the young Goethe, early Schiller, etc. After having organised a ‘competition on the universality of the French language’, Frederic II is the first to become concerned with the ‘deculturation’ of Prussia. Alongside this (and contrary to what occurred in France, where the aristocracy had always defended national values), nationalism is reborn in reaction to the princes. It is an act of the middle class intelligentsia, conscious of expressing the hostility of the popular milieu against the ‘good manners’ of courtly society, which were deemed to be artificial and softening.

  In the writings of the ‘Hainbund’ (a league of poets from Göttingen) we find ‘manifestations of fierce hate against the princes, the aristocrats, the Gallomaniacs, the immorality of the courts, and cerebral rationalism’.

  In the period in which he composed his Götz von Berlichingen, Goethe recounts: ‘We were at Strasbourg on the French border, where we suddenly rid ourselves and became free of all things French. We have found their manner of living far too particular and aristocratic, we have found their poetry cold, their critique destructive, their philosophy abstruse and inadequate …’ (Dichtung und Wahrheit, book IX).243

  Kant writes: ‘We are cultivated to a high degree through arts and science, we are civilised to the point of satiety for all kinds of social grace and decency’.244

  For the French, the Germans are ‘heavy’ and ‘coarse’. They ‘lack finesse’. Their language is ‘barbaric’. Around 1790, numerous revolutionaries see the German language as a ‘slave idiom’. At the meeting of the Convention on 8 pluviôse year II245 (27 January 1794), Barère declares: ‘Emigration and hate for the Republic speak German’. For Rousseville, zealous propagator of the ideas of 1789 at Strasbourg, ‘the rude and difficult sound of German only seems fit for commanding slaves, expressing threats, and counting the blows of the stick’. (This did not stop the expatriate, Louis de Bonald, a catholic author and monarchist, from writing that of all the languages of Europe, German had been the one in which ‘the child of atheism and philosophy’ had made the most progress). For their part, the Germans reproached the French for completely sacrificing themselves to an ‘artificial politeness’, for lack of ‘simplicity’ and ‘sincerity’, for pushing social convention to the point of falsehood, and for exhibiting constant superficialities’, etc.

  Theodore Fontane writes in Ein Sommer in London (1852): ‘England is to Germany what form is to content, what appearance is to being. Unlike objects which, anywhere but in England, have a quality oriented to the essential, men are judged according to form, according to their most exterior packaging! There is no need for you to be a gentleman, all you have to do is have the means of appearing like one and then you are. You do not have to be in the right, all you have to do is observe the legal forms and you are right!’

  The antithesis culture/civilisation equally recovers, little by little, the opposition between the philosophies of life and the philosophies of the spirit. That is to say, between those of the ‘soul’ (Seele) and the ‘spirit’ (Geist), or interior sentiment and pure intellect.

  In 1914, the French set out to defend civilisation. The Germans declare a fight for culture.

  In 1929, the psychologist Ludwig Klages (1872–1955) published a book entitled: L’esprit comme antagoniste de l’âme (Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele).246 Civilisation, he explains, is related to man and to society ‘seen externally’: to the degree of technical evolution and of scientific knowledge, to the rules of manners and decency, to the forms of behaviour, etc. Culture is related to man and society ‘seen internally’: to the people’s soul, to deep sentiments, to essential values …

  Oswald Spengler approaches the same problem from a different angle: ‘I distinguish’, he declares, ‘the idea of a culture from its historical realisation. I oppose the first to the second, like the soul to the body’. In Le dé
clin de l’Occident,247 his principle work, cultures are defined as veritable ‘organisms’ of which universal history constitutes the ‘general biography’. Civilisations are only the ultimate forms, rigid and decadent. If cultures — organic, natural forms — are notably characterised by the persistence of ‘original countries’, in civilisations it is by contrast the ‘global village’ that predominates. Size and volume oppose the quality of life. The ‘soul of the culture’ (Kulturseele) disappears. Massive expansion248 engenders impotence. Society exists. But it no longer lives.

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  La civilisation des moeurs, a study by Norbert Elias.249 Calmann-Lévy, 344 pages.

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  The antithesis culture/civilisation has been the object of a detailed analysis (notably concerning its historical aspects) in: Alain de Benoist, ‘Culture’ (in Nouvelle école, Nr. 25–26, winter 1974–75). The same text also examines the antitheses of culture/unculture, culture/nature, and culture/politics. It shows that history creates words at the same time as words create history. On the same subject, cf. also Philippe Beneton: Histoire de mots: culture et civilisation250 (Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1975).

  The two other volumes that compose the work of Norbert Elias have appeared under the following titles: La société de cour (Calmann-Lévy, 1974) and La dynamique de l’Occident (Calmann-Lévy, 1976).251

  German Romanticism

  ‘In Germany’, writes Jacques Droz, Professor at the Sorbonne, ‘Romanticism must not be considered merely as an aesthetic or as a philosophy of sciences, but as a politic, which situates it at the heart of the European counter-revolutionary movement’.

  ‘We feel Romantic’, asserts Sébastien Mercier, ‘we do not define it’. For Paul Valéry, ‘it would be necessary to have lost all spirit of rigour to attempt to define Romanticism’. At the end of the eighteenth century, Friedrich von Schlegel confessed to his brother that he had filled no less than 125 pages in search for such a definition. In this literary form, which is also a manner of thinking, many have seen ‘a permanent state of sensibility, not a historical phenomenon’ (Paul Van Tieghem, Le romantisme dans la literature européenne. Albin-Michel, 1948).252