©Paul A. Bové
1354 Royal Oak Drive
Wexford, PA 15090
Henry Adams and Europe: A Reply
(ALA Boston May 29 2005)
Bombs educate vigorously—but what could be a greater condemnation of shock and awe than reducing bombing to the inferior and ineffective status of teaching? Professors in the Gymnasium educate vigorously as well—a fact that should make us suspect of both teachers and vigor.
In thinking of how little confidence Adams had in teaching, consider why. Moreover, consider that even though we earn our bread and Volvos in the pay of some university or college, we need not identify our intellectual obligations and our paid labor. Down that path lie either the incapacities promised by the pro-professionals among our leaders or the narcissism of our quest romance. That is, either we stand with Stanley Fish et al who tell us that we are just professionals so shut up about efficacy and politics or we welcome the liberal activist self-justification that we teach against oppression and empower our students. Of course, there are endless variations on these themes, chief among which is the altruistic claim that teachers have a vocation, a graceful career path, self-sacrificing and sure. Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac, has published Against Depression, a book at the center of which stands, according to Natalie Angier, a rather momentous demythication: “That Kramer has not been depressed may in fact allow him to resist doing what depressives, and those who love them, too readily do, which is romanticize and totemize and finally trivialize the illness.”[1] I find it immensely ironic that so many people who worry about Adams’ putative pessimism and political despair so embrace the inefficacy of their favored and final role as teacher.
Adams took teaching and education too seriously to be much of an example for those hooked on the disease. Adams had a mind that belongs to the intellectual class. For clear historical reasons, we have come to identify the term intellectual as a social category, as a role consequent upon a place within the order of production. However, it need not be that way; indeed, we should wonder if we do not harm ourselves by continuing to use this term in its modern and modernist meanings. In English, “intellectual,” as a substantive describing a certain kind of mind working person, is a 19th-century creation. Indeed, the term is notoriously part of the Dreyfus Affair. The time has come to revise our usage to get a clearer sense of the value that might inhere in the work of becoming and then being an intellectual. In partial fulfillment of my obligation to respond to Pierre and Arthur’s talks, and to resume the topic Adams and Europe, let me propose that Adams was an intellectual of the same general type as Vico. I insist that what it means to be an intellectual in this type is to be able to write an autobiography of a certain kind that we see ideally easily expressed in the call for papers to which Vico’s memoir is a response.
We might easily infer that Adams knowing Michelet knew Vico, but I do not claim influence especially since Adams never includes Vico’s autobiography in the list that includes Augustine, Franklin, Rousseau, and some few others. My aim is to point a direction for critical reflection, namely that Adams is an American intellectual but in the tradition of historical humanism embodied by Vico and instantiated by the latter’s ability to meet Porcía’s demands. It would not be too much to say that Adams’s ambiguous relation to things French comes from something like an antagonism to Descartes, to the analytic and geometric style so averse to historians and literary scholars such as Auerbach.
Porcía proposed that his readers take Vico’s autobiography as a model fulfilling his own editorial project. In Frisch and Bergin’s summary, here is the original call:
The prospective contributor is asked to relate the time and place of his birth, his parentage, and all the episodes of his life which make it remarkable or curious, so far as they can without shame be published to the world and to posterity. He is asked to weave into his narrative an exact and detailed account of all his studies. Beginning with grammar, let him say how it was taught him, whether by the methods in common use, or by some novel one; if the latter, whether it merits approval or not, and why. Proceeding thus from art to art, from science to science, let him point out the abuses and prejudices of schools and teachers, or praise their orderly curricula and sound methods, as the case may be. Let him say not only what is well and what is ill taught in the schools, but what is not taught there that should be. Let him then pass on to the particular art or science to which he has devoted himself; the authors he has followed or shunned, and why; the works he has published or is preparing; how they have been criticized, what he has said or might say in defense of them, and what he would now retract. Let him candidly confess his errors, and defend only what seems defensible after due consideration, “with generous neutrality.”[2]
Frisch and Bergin reserve Porcía’s most demanding requirement until the end: “Finally, it is emphasized that the proposal is addressed only to creative scholars. ‘Those who have published nothing but sonnets or the like slender poems, or legal books or treatises on moral theology, or other things of that sort, will find no place among our men of letters.”[3] Therefore, a hammer strikes against the professionals and the populists in their attitudes toward “intellectuals,” towards “creative scholars.”
I submit that Porcía’s call closely describes important elements of Adams’s Education. Moreover, it gives us an idea of how intellectuals live lives in terms foreign to the aesthetic narcissisms of self-conscious subjectivity. The final sharp distinction between Henry James and Henry Adams waits its author. Nonetheless, Adams’s mind is not indifferent or non-participatory; rather, it is as a mind, different. Over and again, one hears the dangerous populist call for engagement and participation as the measure of an intellectual’s worth within democracy. If recent politics have not taught us the dangers of populism, then a scholarly look at our Sorelian predecessors might clarify matters. More to the point, however, what appears to be distanced non-participation, such as Posnock claims for James, while it might aesthetically re-eroticize democracy, is in no way distant, as Redding suggests, from its essential place within the imperial regime of state power’s liberal democratic forms.
Vico and Adams, by contrast, recognize their double relation not only to those struggling to make their histories, but to those others who share in the qualities of mind that drove Machiavelli in exile to speak of communing with the great dead, alone, robed, in his candle-lit study. To put the matter as simply as possible, Adams educated his mind because it was an instrument best suited for thinking in the form of making. This puts him on the side of neither the philosophers nor the historians, but the poets—another fact that places him comfortably near the Neapolitan according to whom all secular peoples live only poetically. We normally think of Leibniz and Vico as among the last of those for whom knowledge existed as a unified field. Adams at times plays with this motif, not as an affective matter, but as a matter for thought in relation to the intellectual’s task of learning and thinking. Is this a romantic goal for democracy? Probably yes, but only because censors first wish to stop all thinking. The judge who imprisoned Gramsci did so not to prevent his activism but to stop his brain from working. Without mind, there is no creation, no making, no secular life, no poetry, and no democratic experiment.
To be an intellectual in Adams’s tradition is to be a creative scholar. What should concern us is that such lived activity appears to some of us as indifference or elitism or escapism. We should question how that perception has come about. Moreover, we should accept the gift that comes with rare minds that can display intellect’s ability to think matters through to the creation of tangible objects for thinking and learning. Take, for example, Adams’s remarkable portrait of Napoleon as Milton’s Satan and the chance this allows him to play the serpentine and more dangerous Talleyrand against the fierce and despairing Moloch. There are so many traces of mind working in such writing that we must conclude it is both a perfect embodiment of the historical complexity of human life forming itself in history—and so part of that process—as well as a very rich example of how humans have gone about thinking autopoetically. In essence, Adams’s Miltonic play allows him to think Napoleon and so all that Napoleon as historical figure—and I stress all possible elements of that phrase—might or does represent, whatever work it does or might do. Adams’s Napoleon is a problem for thought approached as a complex of historical poesis, requiring in turn epic poetry and philological method to ‘comprehend’ or ‘illuminate’ it. But comprehension and illumination are themselves also creations, work done in the areas of thinking and language, resources offered to others and based on the consequences of Adams’s own education—to say nothing of Milton’s and the scholars who have collected Bonaparte’s materials.
Most picturesque of all figures in modern history, Napoleon Bonaparte, like Milton’s Satan on his throne of state, although surrounded by a group of figures little less striking than himself, sat unapproachable on his bad eminence; or, when he moved, the dusky air felt an unusual weight. His conduct was often mysterious, and sometimes so arbitrary as to seem insane; but later years have thrown on it a lurid illumination. Without the mass of correspondence and of fragmentary writings collected under the Second Empire in not less than thirty-two volumes of printed works, the greatness of Napoleon’s energies or the quality of his mind would be impossible to comprehend.[4]
That Adams should present Napoleon as picturesque rather than sublime—despite his Satanic epic declension—is the first result of thinking, with particular effects as representation and important as a sign of thought that has come before, of judgment grown from careful knowing consideration. There is even more brilliance in Adams’s choice of ‘or,’—in “or, when he moved.” For why should the weight of air in movement seem an alternative to being unapproachable on his bad eminence? Why indeed except because these phrases are not descriptions but attempted figurations to catch not only Milton’s language but the varied ways in which Napoleon comes to mind as a problem for thought. If you will, here is some part of the creativity that Porcía demanded of his autographs. Of course, the scholarship is there as well. In a passage that anticipates such modern remarks as Edward Said’s gestures towards Napoleon’s record of Egypt’s invasion, Adams notes the essential role of edited texts, of assembled materials for study—alone for the creative mind the necessary anchor to the tasks of consequential illumination, weighty consideration. In that most typical of Adams moments, he tells us that Napoleon interests as energy but also as quality of mind. Moreover, these are no qualities of mere subjectivity, fit material for quest romance or cultural studies. That mind’s qualities form an imposing list: ambition, restlessness, selfishness, energy, genius, resources, ignorance, “and a moral sense which regarded truth and falsehood as equally useful modes of expression.”[5] They form not a subject but an historical political reality. It has returned from a seemingly original time to a present vulnerable because of its amnesia and ignorance: “such a combination of qualities,” Adams writes, “as Europe had forgotten since the Middle Ages, and could realize only by reviving the Eccelinos and Alberics[6] of the thirteenth century”—but now, of course, American characters had to face it down—if nothing else the mark of an American need for proper intellectuals.
If Milton plays Moloch against Lucifer, Adams plays Talleyrand against Napoleon, but Talleyrand is in some ways the greater figure and the greater sinner against history. For Henry Adams, who justified his partial support of the anti-Dreyfusards on the grounds of support for the French Republic, Talleyrand committed the gravest sin: he led Napoleon to destroy the republic. “Superior to Bonaparte in the breadth and steadiness of his purpose, Talleyrand was a theorist in his political principles; his statecraft was that of the old régime, and he never forgave himself for having once believed in a popular revolution.”
“[1] 'Against Depression': Anatomy of Severe Melancholy,” NATALIE ANGIER NY Times
May 22, 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/books/review/22ANGIERL.html
[2] P. 2f.
[3] P. 3.
[4] History, p. 227.
[5] History, p. 227.
[6] One of the three corrupt Roman families that created and used Popes, especially during the 10th century. Eccelinos held power for Frederick the Great in Italy during the 12th and early 13th centuries, of the Este famiy (Pound) and written of by Browning in Sordello.
