By JOHN LYON
Remi Brague, The Legitimacy of the Human. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press; 2017. Translated by Paul Seaton.
“Who can tell mankind that it ought to have being?” From whence, in other words, the warrant for our being? The whatness of human being may be indubitable: We act, we do, in a more or less species-specific manner. But from whence our legitimacy?
We live in an intellectual climate in which the oxymoronic phrase “man makes himself” appears to dominate. (That “man makes himself,” Brague observes, “can be said, because language is an obedient child. But can it be thought?”) In this climate self-assurance ironically requires the periodic issuance of bills of rights, plus the deduction therefrom of ever more insistent consequences at law and in social order. We proclaim that we are and of necessity must be a righteous people. We celebrate various forms of humanism. We issue our own warrant for existence, but have come to increasingly fear that the warrant does not run very far. We loudly assert our dignity, yet anxiously if only semi-consciously ask of the legitimacy of the human.
With some obvious irony, Luther’s sic volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas might well stand as the humanist motto, an encapsulated, self-absorbed statement of willful immanence. The transcendent, on the other hand, is almost by definition enemy to humanist self-absorption. We are trying to destroy any transcendent warrant for authority, leaving only our will as guarantor. We have removed them, as exemplified in the initial qualification for the legitimacy of the English monarchy: “Dieu et mon Droit” (“God and my Right”). And as the heraldic depiction of the assertion suggests, what remains — “my right” — means as much “my (right) sword arm” as any abstract claim to transcendent justice.
The great question examined by Brague in this work stands thus: Can human rights be sustained, be legitimated, by anything less than the divine? Or, put variously by the author: “Is human life truly livable without the promise of an absolute joy?” Again: “Indeed, one has to ask, supposing that the existence of man is a good thing, for whom or what would it be good?” Other than the obvious reply that it would be good for man, we have come to care not. We are. “We” obviously exist; we are indubitably thing, and we ominously proclaim, assert, insist, rant that we are good. Q.E.D.
By our time much of the élan of humanism’s self-assurance has been stripped away, notably by the stupid and tragic events of the recent century: two world wars; totalitarian prescription of the meaning of all “rights,” and the proscription of any authority other than sheer force vested in “the party” interpreting these rights (in the name of “the people,” of course); the threat of nuclear devastation; the rape of nature (in the name of “the people,” of course, whether by capitalist or socialist sociopolitical regimes); the threat of the dissolution of national order and thus the basis for any practicable civil law and order.
Another of our disasters is that we have increasingly come to desire that all become cosmopolites, citizens of the universe, as some idiot — in the Greek sense of that word, i.e., a man without local political allegiance — insists to Socrates he will become and thus be shed of all local obligations. Socrates gently replies to this proto-libertarian that life is inevitably lived locally, and that the social and political world simply is not thus organized.
Brague cites the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground to the same effect: “It is even painful for us to be men, real men, made of flesh and blood; we’re ashamed of that, we consider it to be shameful, and we would like to be a sort of universal men, who do not exist.”
Of course, Socrates and Dostoyevsky had no knowledge of “social media.”
And, yes, underlying and driving all these disasters, lies the uncontrolled and perhaps uncontrollable growth of population, particularly in those areas of the world which imbibe hubris from us but, in the native form of claiming to have been deprived of their birthrights (whatever these might be) by white, male, European oppressors . . . for the supposedly dispossessed have created a world whose increasingly dominant cry is, “to the victims belong the spoils!”
We appear to have come full circle in the circus of humanist self-assurance and self-warranty.
And so, in our mutual despoliation, we have come to spawn agencies such as VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement), or to wallow in the adolescent prose of a character in D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: “If man was erased from the surface of the Earth, creation would continue in a marvelous way and begin a new chapter, this time without man. Man is one of the errors of creation, like the ichthyosaurs. If only he were to disappear, think of the magnificent things that would emerge from those now-freed days, things newly emerged from the creative fire” (Brague, p. 15).
In like manner, the author cites Lord Byron’s dialogue between Lucifer and Cain (in Cain: A Mystery, 1821): In the dialogue “the fallen angel unmasks sexual pleasure as ‘a pleasant degradation, a cheat that weakens and sullies us, a lure that encourages us to replenish the world with fresh bodies and souls, who are all predestined to be as weak and fragile as us, and as little likely to be happy.’ Cain replies that if this is so, he would prefer to die, ‘because to give life to those who can only suffer for so many years, then die, is nothing else, it seems to him, than to propagate death and multiply murders’” (sic) (pp. 53-54). Brague notes that this is the “oldest text of the modern age that I have been able to find that reconnects with this [Manichaean] theme, which is so frequent among the Gnostics.”
The enunciation of this penultimate ontological evil — the death wish of modern man — is concomitant with the proclamation of the death of God. The death of man: not just man as the object of knowledge/worship, as “man-in-literature” (cf. Brague’s passages re: Michel de Foucault’s appraisal, pp. 90-104), but also, with great foresight, man as a physiological species. Brague credits Leon Bloy (Le Fils de Louis XVI, 1900) as being the first to ask if there can be men without God, with Nicholas Berdyaev (1923) and André Malraux (1926) suggesting the same.
“The connection between the divine original and the human copy, the tie that entails that the death of God must necessarily entail that of man,” Brague writes, has a history as old as Xenophanes’ anthropomorphism or, more recently, Voltaire’s jibe that “if God created man in his image, man returned it to him in spades.” With Feuerbach, however, the figure of speech becomes more literal: Man projects his alienated qualities into the heavens and onto “the divine.”
Accusations directed at the intentions or mirage of divinity have a way of rebounding at times. Brague points out that Camille Desmoulins, editor of the comparatively moderate revolutionary journal Le Vieux Cordelier, ended his last article with the warning that “Les dieux ont soif” (“The gods are thirsty”). Shortly thereafter he was guillotined. Or, as Anatole France put it in his novel, Les dieux ont soif (1912), “gods are known by their appetites.
Indeed, Brague muses, “That creation in its entirety is the object of divine approbation is not obvious. That all men are embraced in this approval is even more difficult to admit. It would be easier to imagine that God loves certain men and hates others.” It is not, then, just any “divine” that will serve to authenticate man and underwrite his existence, for “to be created in the image of God” “is an expression whose meaning must vary depending upon the type of God one has in mind.” Concerning the account of creation in Genesis, Brague asks: “What earlier pessimism . . . did Genesis seek to oppose?”
“And we are here as on a darkling plain. . . .”
“Who can tell mankind that it ought to have being? In particular, who can tell us that it is good that we are, that our very existence, our possessing the characteristics that make us men, is good? Who other than God?”
The God of Genesis, who created ex nihilo, and found it all good.
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