Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought 9780226081328

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secular powers

secular powers Humility in Modern Political Thought

julie e. cooper

the university of chicago press Chicago and London

julie e. cooper is assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-08129-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-08132-8 (e-book) doi: 10.7208 / chicago / 9780226081328.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cooper, Julie E. Secular powers : humility in modern political thought / Julie E. Cooper. pages ; cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-08129-8 (cloth : alkaline paper) — isbn 978-0-226-08132-8 (e-book) 1. Modesty. 2. Humility. 3. Secularism—Europe—History. 4. Philosophy, European—17th century. 5. Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. 6. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677. 7. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. I. Title. bj1533.m73c66 2013 179'.9—dc23 2013011401 o This paper meets the requirements of ansi / niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my parents

contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 chapter 1 Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility 20 chapter 2 Modesty: Hobbes on How Mere Mortals Can Create a Mortal God 44 chapter 3 Humility: Spinoza on the Joys of Finitude 70 chapter 4 Self-Love: Rousseau on the Allure, and the Elusiveness, of Divine Self-SuYciency 105 conclusion A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty 140 Notes 159 Bibliography 213 Index 229

acknowledgments

In the Ethics, which was published anonymously, Spinoza cites an adage from Cicero to illustrate the power and pervasiveness of ambition. “As Cicero says, Every man is led by love of esteem, and the more so, the better he is. Even the philosophers who write books on how esteem is to be disdained put their names to these works” (DefAV XLIVE). Unlike Spinoza, I do not have the option of publishing this book anonymously. If, by putting my name on this work, I risk joining the ranks of the philosophers whose ambition Spinoza scorns, I also gain the opportunity to thank, by name, the many individuals and institutions without whose support I could not have completed this project. I first explored the themes that this book develops in a dissertation submitted to the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee—Fred Dolan, Wendy Brown, Vicky Kahn, and Marianne Constable—for their intellectual engagement and unstinting support. Over the course of the book’s completion, I have been provoked and inspired by colleagues in the scholarly communities to which I have been privileged to belong: the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University; the Political Science Department at Syracuse University; the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago; and, on a sabbatical leave in 2009–10, the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study. I owe my greatest professional and intellectual debts to my colleagues in political theory at the University of Chicago. Bob Gooding-Williams, Bernard Harcourt, Patchen Markell, John McCormick, Sankar Muthu, Jennifer Pitts, Nathan Tarcov, and Linda Zerilli all read multiple chapter drafts, and entertained my queries and confusions in countless hallway conversations. Their penetrating insights and sage counsel have enriched this book immeasurably. I am obliged to friends and colleagues who have commented on parts of the manuscript, and with whom I have had illuminating conversations about its themes: Tamar Abramov, Danielle Allen, Rick Avramenko, Chris Brooke, Mark Button, Ed Curley, Mary Dietz, Richard Flathman, Carlos Fraenkel, Dorit Geva, Yuval Jobani, Reha Kadakal, Vicky Kahn, Anna Kornbluh, Mogens Laerke, Mara Marin, Nedim Nomer, Joan Scott, Hasana Sharp, Quentin Skinner, Steven Smith, Sharon Stanley, Annie Stilz, Richard Strier, Jeanne Theoharis, Michael Walzer, Ian Wei, Yves Winter, Tara Zahra, Melissa Zinkin, Cathix

erine Zuckert, and John Zumbrunnen. When translating passages from early modern texts, I relied on Antonia Syson and David Petrain for Latin expertise, and Katherine Ibbett for French expertise. Keven Ruby provided invaluable assistance with citations and bibliography. Arash Abizadeh, Dan Garber, Stephen White, and Liz Wingrove read and commented on the entire manuscript at a workshop at the University of Chicago in Fall 2010. Their astute interventions, and those of the workshop audience, helped to clarify the book’s stakes, and sharpen the framing of its arguments. Special thanks go to Jimmy Klausen, who read several versions of the Rousseau chapter and, more important, provided electronic solidarity at critical junctures; and Shalini Satkunanandan, who read multiple drafts of the introduction, carrying on a running dialogue about religion, ethos, and fungibility. In a Spinozist spirit, I would also like to thank those who engaged my work anonymously through the peer review process. Portions of this book have been presented, in various incarnations, at various conferences and workshops. For their generous and thoughtful responses, I am grateful to all those who participated in the following exchanges: Workshop on the Politics of Time and Value, Yale University; Practical Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago; Political Theory Workshop, University of Chicago; Chicago Area Renaissance Society; Spinoza Day, Princeton University; Political Theory Workshop, Columbia University; Modern Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago; Political Theory Workshop, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Princeton Workshop on Jewish Thought; Spinoza and Modernity Colloquium, Colgate University; American Political Science Association; Renaissance Society of America; Western Political Science Association; and Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. The camaraderie of friends and family has sustained and enabled me through the years that this project has been a preoccupation. Alp Aker has long been my trusted consultant on matters scholarly, aesthetic, and aVective. His discerning judgment has saved me from many a misstep. Erica Werner has come to feel like kin, as if we had sprung from the same ancestral bulgur patch. Her wry sensibility is a constant source of levity and wisdom. My sister, Emily Cooper, has provided gracious and stylish hospitality in Givat Shmuel and Tel Aviv. My parents, Fredi and Heshie Cooper, are unparalleled in their capacity for love and unwavering in their support, encouragement, and enthusiasm. Combining modesty and irreverence in equal measure, they are also fun to be around. This book is dedicated to them. An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as a journal article: Julie E. Cooper, “Vainglory, Modesty, and Political Agency in the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes,” Review of Politics 72, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 241–69. x | Acknowledgments

introduction Two Chapters in the History of Humility I know how great is the eVort needed to convince the proud of the power and excellence of humility, an excellence which makes it soar above all the summits of this world, which sway in their temporal instability, overtopping them all with an eminence not arrogated by human pride, but granted by divine grace. For the King and Founder of this City which is our subject has revealed in the Scripture of his people this statement of the divine Law, “God resists the proud, but he gives grace to the humble.” This is God’s prerogative; but man’s arrogant spirit in its swelling pride has claimed it as its own, and delights to hear this verse quoted in its own praise: “To spare the conquered, and beat down the proud.” 1 For men, as they become at last weary of irregular justling, and hewing one another, and desire with all their hearts, to conforme themselves into one firme and lasting edifice; so for want, both of the art of making fit Lawes, to square their actions by, and also of humility, and patience, to suVer the rude and cumbersome points of their present greatnesse to be taken oV, they cannot without the help of a very able Architect, be compiled, into any other than a crasie building, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity.2

I begin with two accounts, from the history of Western political theory, of what humility means—of the reasons why, and the contexts in which, humility is a virtue. Augustine oVers what is arguably the canonical account of humility’s meaning and value. In City of God, Augustine equates humility with obedience to and love of God.3 On Augustine’s reading, the first sin, of Adam and Eve, illustrates why “humility is highly prized in the City of God and especially enjoined on the City of God during the time of its pilgrimage in this world.” 4 Citing the adage that “‘pride is the start of every sin,’” Augustine reads Adam and Eve’s fall as a willful defection from God, the “supreme and real ground of their being.” 5 Seduced by a delusional estimate of their capabilities (moral and otherwise), Adam and Eve dare to defy God’s prohibition. When Adam and Eve eat the 1

apple, however, they learn that self-mastery is illusory. Scarcely able to control their own bodies, Adam and Eve find themselves enslaved to the passions—a slavery far worse than the salutary subjection for which they were created. The elusiveness of autonomy reveals Adam’s folly in abandoning “the one who is really suYcient for him”—namely, God.6 If pride involves delusions of selfsuYciency, the humble own their inadequacy, and, consequently, submit to God. Only through this subjection can humans attain true exaltation. Thus, in a surprising way, there is something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation to abase it. It certainly appears somewhat paradoxical that exaltation abases and humility exalts. But devout humility makes the mind subject to what is superior. Nothing is superior to God; and that is why humility exalts the mind by making it subject to God.7 The humility / pride antithesis tracks a series of oppositions—between the city of God and the city of man; between love of God “carried as far as contempt of self ” and love of self “reaching the point of contempt for God”; between worship of God and self-worship.8 Making subjection to God and self-direction mutually exclusive, these oppositions deny human suYciency, and discredit human initiative. The humble recognize that “it is to man’s advantage to be in subjection to God, and it is calamitous for him to act according to his own will, and not to obey the will of his Creator.” 9 For humility’s Augustinian partisans, to assert human suYciency is to forsake God—indeed, to usurp divine prerogative.10 Thomas Hobbes oVers a less familiar paean to humility in De Cive. In that text, Hobbes defines humility as the acknowledgment that humans are naturally equal. When Hobbes enumerates the laws of nature, the rational “Conclusions, or Theoremes concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence” of humanity, he identifies the presumption of equality as a necessary condition for peace.11 If men consider themselves unequal, Hobbes contends, “they will struggle for power”; thus, “the pursuit of peace requires that they be regarded as equal.”12 In other words, reason, which dictates the pursuit of peace, also militates against pride. “And therefore the eighth precept of natural law is: everyone should be considered equal to everyone. Contrary to this law is PRIDE [superbia].”13 If pride—or the Aristotelian conviction that some are natural masters, others natural slaves—is inimical to peace, humility is eminently rational. When Hobbes adduces scriptural support for the laws of nature, he casts the eighth law of nature in positive terms, as an endorsement of humility. “Law 8, on acknowledging natural equality, i.e. on humility [de humilitate], is confirmed by” a plethora of scriptural verses.14 Hobbes adduces scriptural sup2 | Introduction

port for the laws of nature to demonstrate the identity of the natural law to the divine law. “The precepts for living derived from” the natural law “are the same as the precepts which have been promulgated by God’s own Majesty as the laws of the Kingdom of heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Prophets and Apostles.”15 Although Hobbes disclaims innovation, noting humility’s Christian pedigree, he does not share Augustine’s low estimation of human suYciency. In Hobbes’s account, cultivating the virtue of humility enables humans to achieve this-worldly aims (e.g., peace) without supernatural assistance. Indeed, Hobbes celebrates humility as a spur to, rather than a prophylactic against, independent human agency. For political purposes, Hobbes argues, reason is suYcient, enabling humans to construct and sustain a commonwealth. I have juxtaposed these accounts to highlight their continuities and discontinuities—and thereby introduce the discourse whose emergence and development, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is the subject of this book— the secular critique of pride. Augustine and Hobbes both profess Christian convictions, and both adduce scriptural support for their definition of humility. Yet they diVer regarding the possibility, and the desirability, of human independence from God. While Augustine contends that humans need God’s grace to be virtuous, Hobbes counters that natural reason suYces for the achievement of virtue.16 Unlike Augustine, Hobbes’s motivations for attacking pride and endorsing humility are secular—he hopes to encourage, rather than discredit, independent human agency. In other words, Hobbes mounts a secular critique of pride, a critique that subsequent political theorists will extend and develop. On my definition, a theory is secular if it conceives the political as a realm of human agency, independent of divine oversight or authorization. Secular theory need not be atheist—theological convictions can inspire claims for the autonomy of politics. Thus, in this book, the term “secular” is not synonymous with terms such as “atheist,” “libertine,” “antireligious,” “nonreligious,” “postreligious,” and so forth. Rather, the adjective “secular” describes a view, endorsed by theists and atheists alike, that politics is a human construction. On this definition, Hobbes is a secular theorist—he entrusts humans with the task of building, authorizing, and sustaining a political world. Yet Hobbes is also a fierce critic of pride. Indeed, Hobbes predicates political stability on the cultivation of (a certain kind of ) humility. In this book, I recover the secular critique of pride, recounting the surprising story of secular theorists’ attempt to enlist humility and related dispositions for emphatically non-Augustinian projects. I study this chapter within the history of philosophy because it provides a unique avenue of approach to questions that preoccupy us today, at a moment Introduction | 3

when secularism’s legitimacy and viability are increasingly in dispute: What does it mean to be secular? In other words, how have we come to see ourselves as self-authorizing political agents? Revisiting the secular critique of pride can help us to reframe debates about secularity’s origin, meaning, and prospects. Once we appreciate the historical significance of this tradition, we can tell an altogether diVerent story about the sources of secular political agency. Specifically, we can tell a story about the rise of secularity that resists the Augustinian conflation of human agency with pride.17 The secular turn rests on an estimation of human capability that is generous by Augustinian standards—but it also involves a new reckoning with human finitude. My wager, in this book, is that studying this historical episode will enable us to understand secular politics as a collective project powered by appreciation of our capabilities and our limits— not, as Augustinians have long argued, as a bid for self-aggrandizement.

Secular Powers In Secular Powers, I present an alternative genealogy of secular subjectivity, recovering a strand of early modern political theory that views acknowledgment of human finitude as a source for collective human empowerment. In this tradition, the critique of pride is not an atavism, a relic of traditional piety at odds with the ostensibly promethean aspirations of secular thought. Rather, puncturing delusions of grandeur is an integral part of secular projects to authorize, and encourage, human self-government. The theorists who figure in this genealogy—Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and JeanJacques Rousseau—understand that, if politics is a human prerogative, it must also be a human project. Canonical portraits have long depicted the secular subject as a stereotypical sovereign subject—an individual bent on mastery and blind to limitation. What these portraits fail to capture, however, is the insight, central to one strand of early modern political theory, that fantasies of omnipotence deplete human power. Precisely because secularity’s architects ask us not to rely on God, they must remind us that we are not Gods. To demonstrate that God-like mastery has not always been, and need not be, the pinnacle of secular aspiration, I marshal arguments both historical and theoretical. One of my primary goals is to present a revised history of humility’s fortunes within modern political thought. Readers who view humility through an Augustinian lens may be surprised to learn that secular political theorists enlisted modesty and humility for their projects. In Christian ethics, modesty and humility have traditionally expressed a theology of human dependence, as the passages from Augustine attest. For many seventeenth-century 4 | Introduction

philosophers, the Augustinian understanding of humility remained definitive. If this approach exhausted humility’s meaning, humility would appear to have no place in secular political theory. Admittedly, some modern philosophers reject humility wholesale, as a vestige of superstition that can neither be recast nor rehabilitated. Yet there are alternative voices within early modern political thought—philosophers who enlist these virtues for their own purposes, transforming them along the way. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau attack pride not, as an Augustinian would, as an aVront to God, but as an impediment to human power.18 Instead of abandoning the notion of finitude for a fantasy of absolute self-suYciency, these theorists refigure finitude, and reevaluate its political implications.19 Indeed, redefining terms (like “humility”) with Augustinian resonance is one way that early modern theorists envision, and cultivate, the power requisite for independent political agency. Although not immune to challenge, humility proves tricky to dispense with. Thus, humility’s “demise” is neither a foregone conclusion nor a historical inevitability. Indeed, from a theoretical perspective, humility’s persistence in secular political thought arguably proves more interesting than its alleged demise. Examining the reasons why modesty and humility remain compelling, and the kinds of revaluation to which they are susceptible, yields a counterintuitive take on the virtues themselves—they can be empowering, as well as self-abnegating. More important, appreciating the continued appeal, for secular theorists, of certain kinds of modesty and humility tells us something about their vision of individuality—namely, that it incorporates keen awareness of human limitation. The secular turn does not only reconfigure the institutional relationship between religion and state—it also celebrates, and tries to produce, certain kinds of individuals.20 In the tradition I excavate, the exemplary secular individual is often a modest individual. Thus, we caricature secular empowerment projects when we reduce them to a bid for sovereign mastery. In short, a revisionist history of modesty and humility yields striking theoretical conclusions. My primary theoretical aim is to capture a novel insight, which the non-Augustinian critique aVords, about the sources of secular agency: a sober appreciation of limits to human power is a necessary condition for realizing its full extent. At base, the secular project is a project of human empowerment. When it comes to politics, secular theorists contend, humans have the capacity to rule themselves. Yet secular theorists still need a vocabulary that can capture, and orient us toward, human limitation. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau need such a vocabulary because they understand that, if humans want to rule themselves, they must come to terms with their limitations. When God’s sovereignty no longer extends to the political, or God is no longer a Introduction | 5

sovereign, appreciating the limits to human power becomes just as important as grasping its extent. Thus, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau assert human finitude as vehemently as they assert human power. To make these twin assertions, they adapt the idiom that philosophers, moralists, and theologians have traditionally used to figure human limitation to their own (secular) purposes. Unlike their Augustinian counterparts, however, secular critics of pride do not posit a zero-sum relationship between autonomy and dependence, chastening and empowerment.21 Rather, the tradition’s central insight is that appreciating the limits to human power is a condition for realizing its full extent. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau chasten human pretension not to discredit, but rather to enhance, human power.22 Because delusions of grandeur squander human powers of political association, chastening vanity is integral to the project of justifying secular authority. By uncovering the contribution of these chastening projects to the constitution of secular subjectivity, I challenge narratives that equate secularization with self-deification. The most influential accounts of what it means to be secular found secularity on an experience—or, perhaps, a conviction—of absolute self-suYciency. To declare independence from God for political purposes, it is assumed, secularity’s early modern architects must have placed supreme confidence in human power. Indeed, a storied tradition narrates the rise of secularity as a usurpation of properties once reserved for God. From the moment of their inception, critics of secular projects have sought to discredit self-government by taxing its proponents with sinful pride. For seventeenth-century Augustinians, the only conceivable motive for asserting independence from God is the desire to supplant God. Forsaking moral animus for social scientific rigor, twentiethand twenty-first-century scholars have nevertheless relied on tropes of transfer and usurpation, tracing the migration of sovereignty from God to the state and the self. In this, more temperate, idiom, the secular individual is a sovereign individual—an autonomous, capacious agent who seeks ever-increasing power. For modernity’s critics and defenders, ideals of mastery, independence, control, and self-suYciency are the hallmarks of secular subjectivity. It is undeniable that promethean aspirations permeate texts of modern philosophy. The notion that secularity’s architects were besotted with human power does not come out of nowhere. Secular theorists do entertain fantasies of apotheosis—but, contrary to received wisdom, these fantasies neither exemplify nor exhaust secular subjectivity. Too often, unreflective (and, in many cases, unwitting) Augustinianism leads scholars to conclude that tropes of selfdeification provide the most telling index of secularity’s character. Yet passions 6 | Introduction

other than pride, and projects other than self-congratulation, have animated secular estimations of human power. Fixated on modernity’s ostensible hubris, received genealogies oVer impoverished accounts of the very phenomenon to which they rivet scholarly attention—namely, the vindication of human agency. We need a non-Augustinian genealogy of secularity—not because Augustinian assumptions are objectionable, antiquated, or theistic, but because they cannot account for the full spectrum of powerful selves on oVer in early modern political theory. The stereotypical sovereign individual does not exhaust secular subjectivity. Contemporary debates about secularity’s meaning and prospects remain trapped within frameworks inherited from Christian polemic, because we have failed to appreciate the ways that chastening and empowerment, finitude and sovereignty, were entwined in early modernity. Too often, scholars assume that we can, and must, choose between political theology and political theory, finitude and sovereignty. We should worry about secularity, it is implied, because its architects evinced no reservations about unfettered human power. Indeed, if we judge the project of mastery over nature corrosive of democracy and the environment, we must exit secularity—either by rehabilitating theocracy or by embracing a nontheistic ethos of nonsovereignty. If secular empowerment projects are not tantamount to hubris, however, concerns about overly robust constructions of agency need not drive us outside of or beyond secularity—for secularity’s ostensible architects shared these very concerns. Chastening human pride and individual vanity were central preoccupations of theorists who defined the political as a realm of human construction. Precisely because they aYrmed human agency, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau worried that humans would squander their power in delusions of grandeur. Recovering their insights can help us envision a broader range of alternatives to the stereotypical sovereign subject—expanding our horizons beyond theocracy and nonsovereignty—because it recalls diVerent, finite subjectivities at secularity’s inception. To resist the equation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity is not to deny that secularism has been complicit with Western imperialism, or that it has often professed an impossible, and disingenuous, neutrality. Hubris, self-delusion, and corruption are part and parcel of secularism, just as they are part and parcel of Christianity. But hubris, self-delusion, and corruption are not the whole of secularity, understood as a discursive regime, nor of secularism, understood as a political settlement. It would be premature to bid farewell to secularity when we have yet to engage the resources it aVords for thinking about the intersection of power and vulnerability. Introduction | 7

Modernity, History, Genealogy Because secularity positions itself as coming after, or, in some cases, superseding, traditional authority, debates about its complexion and ideological power turn on rival accounts of our historical location. My story about the fortunes of modesty and humility under secularity provides a fresh angle of approach to these debates. Beginning in the seventeenth century— one conventional starting point for modernity—this study presents a revised portrait of the rationalist philosophy often credited with secularity’s theoretical founding.23 In adopting the seventeenth century as a point of departure, I do not endorse the historical accuracy of this periodization against its myriad competitors—for establishing secularity’s precise historical origin is not my concern.24 Rather, I accept the convention in order to engage it—to challenge the stories told about what it means to be secular when we date secularity to the seventeenth century. Using Descartes as a touchstone, these stories often depict modernity as self-confident to the point of self-delusion. As Susan James observes, “The seventeenth century continues to be portrayed as the dawn of modernity, the cradle of a culture in which man becomes set over against nature and nature takes on a purely instrumental significance, and in which a range of emotional responses to the natural world give way to dispassionate calculations of utility.” 25 In other words, these stories blame seventeenth-century philosophers for introducing a set of impossible, incoherent, and dangerous ideals—ideals inimical to the very condition of human plurality. Scholars are not wrong to view a philosophy that aims at transparency, control, and invulnerability with suspicion. Scholars err, however, when they conclude that these aspirations exhaust or exemplify rationalist ethics. Thus, while I voice concerns (e.g., finitude) made familiar by contemporary critics of modernity, I challenge the historiography that provides the occasion for their critique. As Leo Strauss writes, “With the questioning of traditional philosophy the traditional understanding of the tradition becomes questionable.” 26 The conflation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity rests on a reductive caricature of seventeenth-century philosophy.27 I restore humility to the historiographical conversation to challenge this caricature. Contrary to what we have been taught to expect, seventeenth-century rationalism turns out to be a key site for the articulation of secular, philosophical ideals of humility. With this challenge, I expose the reliance of many secularization stories on a tendentious history of philosophy. Indeed, focusing on humility allows us to craft an especially pointed exposé, because it adjusts the scale of the inquiry into secularity’s meaning and 8 | Introduction

force. Secularization stories end up perpetuating reductive caricatures, in part, because they tend to unfold on a grand scale. To expose the lust for mastery that purportedly animates secular modernity, theorists have often felt the need to craft master narratives of sweeping scope.28 A methodological claim— secularity is the kind of phenomenon that can only be grasped on a grand scale—mirrors a substantive claim about secularity’s ostensible grandiosity. When working on a grand scale, the narrative arc matters more than the minutiae of any given period. Because I share concerns, voiced by many critics, about the elisions and omissions that riddle master narratives of secularity, I have opted to work on a minor scale.29 I zoom in on a specific historical period, and, more important, I zoom in on a constellation of passions that many would deem unworthy of sustained analysis. Exhortations to humility remind us that we are small—and, for political theorists trained to number obligation, legitimacy, justice, democracy, and toleration among the discipline’s central questions, the virtue itself is liable to appear paltry, beneath consideration. It is no surprise, then, that humility fails to register for many master narratives of secularity. When master narratives do address humility, they generally do so in passing, confident that we already know what humility means, and what work it has performed. By contrast, I scrutinize a discrete set of passions to expose our failure to understand what they mean, and what work they have done in articulations of modern subjectivity. The luster of master narratives dims when we expose the shortcuts, elisions, and uninterrogated assumptions on which they rely. One can only assume that we already know what humility means, and whether it thrives or withers in a secular age, if one forgets Nietzsche’s dictum that “only that which has no history is definable.”30 Theorists who accept the story of humility’s modern demise treat humility like a concept with a fixed, invariant meaning, and a fixed, invariant social function (namely, to encourage docile submission). To shatter these assumptions, I scrutinize, in minute detail, early modern debates about humility’s meaning and value. The details are crucial for a project of this kind—essentially, a case study in the Nietzschean theme of the revaluation of values—because they allow us to grasp nuances that master narratives miss. To recover neglected interpretive and evaluative contests, we need to muster erudition and return to the archive.31 Putting canonical figures like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau in dialogue with now forgotten peers, I uncover rhetorical, theological, and philosophical nuances that would otherwise fail to register for twenty-first-century readers. Over the course of the book’s narrative, I introduce an eccentric cast of characters, including philosophical lexicographers, Christian polemicists, and Enlightened plagiarists. Introduction | 9

Restoring these minor characters allows us to see that interpretations now considered authoritative were pioneered to meet the polemical exigencies of local struggles (e.g., defending Cartesians against charges of Spinozism). Thus, in many respects, my argument employs resources conventionally associated with the contextualist history of philosophy. Yet I reconstruct the intellectual contexts of canonical works not to determine what their authors intended to say, and thereby establish their (historically accurate) meaning, but rather to highlight the ways that meaning emerges through interpretation and contestation.32 Excavating forgotten struggles surrounding terms whose meaning and value we take for granted, I invite critical reflection on the stories we tell ourselves about how we arrived at the present juncture, and the constraints these stories place on our political, theoretical, and ethical options. In other words, I practice genealogy, by which I mean a method of historical inquiry that shatters the unitary veneer of received terms, like “humility” and “secularity.” To demonstrate that a term like “secularity” lacks a single correct definition, the genealogist disentangles strands that, over the course of history, have been woven into what looks like a seamless whole. This exercise in historical unraveling reveals the contestability of a given term’s meaning, and the contingencies that have united disparate elements under a given term’s banner.33 Instead of establishing, once and for all, a philosophically adequate definition of a term like “humility,” a genealogist recovers contests over humility’s meaning and value, contests in which philosophers bend inherited terms to their own purposes, only to meet with resistance from the accumulated weight of history, and from contemporaries with contrary purposes. My approach is genealogical, then, because I scour the archives for evidence of these contests, exploring the parties to whom humility proved attractive, the reasons why they found it compelling, and the projects for which they managed (or failed) to recruit it. The value of such an approach is often thought to reside in its ability to reveal the “secret” that our most cherished things “have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from alien forms.”34 As Raymond Geuss reminds us, however, to say that concepts lack intrinsic meaning is not to say that they are infinitely plastic. Although concepts are flexible they are not tabulae rasae. They carry their history with them. This history does not strictly determine how they must be used, but it does aVect to a very significant extent how easy or how diYcult it will be to modify them, changing their meaning and reference in one direction rather than another. There are limits to how far one can actually 10 | Introduction

succeed in reflecting and probably even more narrowly set limits to the extent to which one can gain any control.35 Nietzsche’s agonistic rhetoric notwithstanding, the “victory” in any interpretive contest is never total, for echoes of a term’s prior meanings will continue to resound.36 A term’s history places constraints on the uses to which it can plausibly be put, frustrating the eVorts of interpreters to impose new meanings at will. Thus, even while genealogy showcases contests of will, it reminds us that mastery is elusive—we can never achieve sovereignty over language.37 In Secular Powers, I undertake a project of historical recovery that yields intriguing discoveries about humility’s continued appeal for secular theorists, and its amenability to secular projects of human empowerment. At the same time, the book’s historical narrative confirms Geuss’s caution regarding the limits that history places on linguistic and interpretive malleability. Indeed, these limits are a critical part of the story. As we will see, convincing skeptical readers of the possibility, and the necessity, of secular humility proves challenging. More important, even committed secularists have trouble figuring human empowerment in strictly human terms, without recourse to tropes of self-deification. When enlisting inherited figures for secular projects, philosophers must contend with their traditional resonance, which cannot be muted at will. Thus, while I showcase philosophical projects to unleash the empowering potential of modesty and humility, I also note these values’ resistance to secular revaluation. By appreciating the sources and strength of this resistance, we can better understand why the equation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity has proved so tenacious, its deficits notwithstanding. Given that early moderns were unable to fully purge terms like “modesty,” “humility,” and “selflove” of Augustinian resonance, it is not altogether surprising that contemporary historiography remains captive to Augustinian assumptions. To challenge these assumptions, we need historical evidence of their inadequacy, but we also must appreciate their persistence through time. Thus, the critical force of genealogical inquiry is twofold: genealogy makes forgotten contents available for retrieval, but it also diagnoses obstacles to their contemporary resuscitation.

Reframing Political Theory’s Conception of Religion It is now scholarly orthodoxy that history has refuted secularization theory.38 Defying the predictions of classical secularization theory, religion has not withered away. If anything, religion’s political salience has increased. Introduction | 11

The very developments that have debunked secularization theory have enhanced the scholarly cachet of the term “secular,” as the relationship between religion and politics becomes newly urgent, and newly questionable. Recent years have witnessed an explosion of scholarship on “the secular” and cognate terms within political theory. Scholars have oVered revisionist accounts of secularization as a historical trajectory;39 they have exposed modernity’s (unwitting or disavowed) theological origins;40 they have detailed secularism’s support for Western hegemony;41 and they have argued that secularist political settlements must be refashioned or even abandoned.42 This book joins contemporary projects of rethinking secularity’s meaning, force, and prospects. Yet the point of the book is not to issue normative prescriptions regarding religion’s place in the public sphere. I refrain from prescription, in part, because a genealogical inquiry of this kind does not yield determinate policy conclusions. As we will see, scholars of diverse ideological and methodological commitments subscribe to the historical narrative that this book contests—a narrative that traces secularity’s emergence to the rise of a sovereign subject. Yet these scholars stake out radically diVerent positions on secularism’s appeal as a political doctrine. Convinced that “we are condemned to live an overlapping consensus,” some proponents of the received narrative uphold “the modern secular state” as the best alternative for “diverse democracies.” 43 Others who conflate secularity with sovereignty attack secularism as a hegemonic political project that imposes “categories of the secular and the religious in terms of which modern living is required to take place, and nonmodern peoples are invited to assess their adequacy.” 44 If one’s portrait of secular subjectivity does not entail a stance for or against secularist political arrangements, an alternative genealogy of said subject is still normative—for it challenges background assumptions that frame contemporary theoretical debate. Specifically, it challenges prevailing assumptions about what religion is, and how it shows up for politics and political theory. In this book, I focus on modesty and humility, rather than toleration or separation of church and state, in an eVort to restore emphatically religious questions (e.g., questions about the divine / human nexus) to political-theoretical analyses of secularity. When I say that I aim to put God back into the picture, I do not mean to suggest that students of secularity must adopt theistic convictions, or that political theology should supplant political theory. Rather, I remind readers that debates about secularism, secularization, and secularity invariably engage religious questions, because secularity involves a constant negotiation of the boundaries of divine and human jurisdiction. With this reminder, I contest the conception of religion that animates contemporary secularism debates—a conception that 12 | Introduction

flattens the questions religion poses for political theory, reducing religion’s challenge to one of pluralism.45 Too often, contemporary scholars forget that Judaism and Christianity have historically confronted political theorists with a distinctive challenge—namely, the challenge of reconciling human agency with divine sovereignty. Despite their divergent emphases, contemporary reassessments of all things secular share a presumption—namely, that religion becomes salient for modern politics with the emergence of religious diversity, and, in a pluralistic society, religion becomes salient for politics as a problem to be solved (or, less frequently, a resource to be exploited).46 For most political theorists, the theologico-political “problem” is an instance of the more general challenge of pluralism: how can we create, and sustain, democratic community given the fact of (religious) diVerence? That the diVerence in question is religious is almost incidental. Indeed, scholars have expressly denied that “secularism (or laïcité ) has to do with the relation of the state and religion”; rather, “it has to do with the (correct) response of the democratic state to diversity.” 47 Given the contingencies of Western history, and the intensity of conflict when salvation is at stake, religious diversity is a paradigmatic, and especially thorny, instance of diversity—but there is nothing distinctive about the political problems it poses, and the solutions to which it is susceptible. In short, many theorists treat religion as a fungible vector of diVerence, focusing on the citizen’s stance before partisans of competing creeds rather than her stance before God. Curiously, some of the most strident assertions of this position come from theorists who have developed a rich phenomenology of individual religious experience.48 Even while scholars acknowledge that religion provides a source of authority, meaning, or truth on an individual level, they assume that religion engages politics only when it becomes a vector of diVerence (e.g., when multiple truth claims conflict). In other words, scholars scant the likelihood that an individual’s orientation to God would impinge upon politics, absent sectarian diversity. The reduction of religion to a generic mark of diVerence is so deeply ingrained that scholars couch their inquiries in terms of pluralism even when addressing challenges, such as conflict between civil and clerical authority, or the place of theological argument in public debate, that arise in religiously homogenous societies.49 Whatever religion signifies for its adherents, for the political theorist, and for the state, religion signifies as a fungible marker of diVerence. It is no surprise that theorists are preoccupied with pluralism, given the prevalence of sectarian conflict in contemporary democracies. Nor is this preoccupation historically anomalous. Debates about religious toleration are a Introduction | 13

defining feature of modern political thought. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau expend immense energy—and display immense ingenuity—contending with challenges of sectarian diversity. Indeed, they are often credited with establishing theoretical foundations for modern regimes of toleration—for secularism and, Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s Erastianism notwithstanding, separation of church and state.50 If the present concern with accommodating religious pluralism is in no way unprecedented, what is new is the (near) exclusive preoccupation with this challenge. In this book, I remind readers of another challenge that religion has historically posed for politics.51 In the seventeenth century, theorists wrestled with a question that is arguably prior to the challenge of navigating religious diVerence—namely, the question of whether politics is a human prerogative. What is the place of human agency in a world ruled by God? The relationship of human politics to divine governance is the instigating, and the animating, question of secular political thought. By foregrounding this prior question, which insists on religion’s singularity, I resist the theoretical reduction of religion to an identity category, or a generic “moral source.” When early modern theorists debate humility’s meaning and value, they are not exercised by the challenge of religious pluralism. Rather, they are exercised by constraints that God’s putative sovereignty places on human agency and jurisdiction. Indeed, before grappling with the threat that sectarian diversity poses to political stability, theorists must contend with claims of divine sovereignty. That is, theorists must establish, justify, and defend the political realm that sectarian conflict threatens to destabilize. The project of justifying human political agency is more primary, in a logical, if not a historical, sense, than the project of managing sectarian diversity. Thus, early modern attempts to authorize human agency disclose facets of religion that are not strictly analogous to racial, ethnic, or gender identity. Nor are these facets identical to philosophical moral sources. Understood in these terms, religion casts a long shadow over the enterprise of human politics—namely, the threat of what Michael Walzer has called “antipolitics,” or “the idea that God is a ‘man of war’ (Exodus 15:3) and a supreme king—so what is there for human beings to do?” 52 As a marker of identity, religion can menace political coexistence—but a religion that aYrms divine sovereignty casts doubt on the value and legitimacy of human politics as such. In a culture whose formative texts ascribe sovereignty to God, human political agency is potentially suspect. To note this “antipolitical” tendency is not to say that, in Judaism and Christianity, orthodoxy invariably commits one to theocracy. As I argue throughout the book, theorists need not renounce theism (or orthodoxy, for that matter) to arrive at secular politics. Jewish and Christian texts contain assertive theocratic strands, but they also 14 | Introduction

provide resources for envisioning, and authorizing, secular politics. As we will see, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau enlist religious sources, concepts, and dispositions for secular projects. The resources on which Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau drew were considered minority or heterodox sources by many of their contemporaries, who accused them of impiety, atheism, and worse. As the intensity of these debates reveals, religious texts do not speak in unison when evaluating the legitimacy of human agency. Thus, I invoke the “antipolitical” impulse not to enshrine theocracy as the authentically religious position, but rather to highlight the distinctive form that political questions take in theoretical traditions shaped by figures of divine sovereignty. If Jewish and Christian texts allow for the justification of secular politics, they still place a justificatory burden on the secular theorist—namely, the burden of justifying independent human initiative. One could object that contemporary theorists neglect what I have called the prior question because it is no longer a live question for denizens of the “North Atlantic world.” 53 In wealthy Western democracies, one could argue, the legitimacy of secular agency is universally aYrmed, and a rough consensus has been reached regarding its sources and extent. Contemporary political theorists treat religion as a generic form of diVerence, then, because pluralism is the only remaining challenge that religion poses for democratic polities. As an empirical matter, the contention that the prior question has been decisively resolved (along secularist lines) is undoubtedly false. Many in the contemporary world reserve sovereignty for God. Of late, strident secularists have been all too eager to remind us of this fact. Since 9 / 11, the West’s self-appointed defenders have been vigilant against assaults on the autonomy of the political, sounding the alarm by raising the specter of political Islam.54 Today, theorists usually insist on religion’s singularity when rousing (on their view) criminally apathetic Westerners to a more ardent defense of political secularism. In other words, the insistence takes the form of a warning—“political theology is the primordial form of political thought and remains a live alternative for many peoples today”—that, to defend our exceptional way of life from external attack and internal subversion, we must defuse religion’s volatility.55 This assertion of religion’s singularity rests upon an impoverished, because ahistorical, conception of theocracy as religion’s primordial and permanent tendency, and it justifies an assertive, self-congratulatory secularism. Classing religion as a uniquely potent threat to social order prepares the call for religion’s containment using strategies (e.g., separation) that are purportedly the West’s exceptional patrimony. My point of departure, in this book, is less the empirical fact of what scholars have called, with a mix of bewilderment and condescension, “religious reIntroduction | 15

surgence,” than the poverty of the theoretical idioms we currently use to grasp religion’s political salience.56 It is increasingly apparent that the divine / human nexus remains an inescapable question for modern politics. Yet our theoretical idioms prove inadequate, precisely because they evade or refuse this question. It behooves contemporary theorists to acknowledge religion’s singularity not only because we live at a moment when we must respond to theocrats and those who conjure their menacing specter. We also need a more sophisticated conception of religion’s political salience if we are to appreciate what is really at stake in debates—about secularism and about sovereignty—among contemporary democratic theorists. It is understandable that theorists committed to pluralism would reduce religion to an identity category or a generic moral source—for, as post-9 / 11 polemics reveal, aYrming religion’s singularity runs the risk of inviting heightened scrutiny of religious persons. Yet one can aYrm religion’s singularity without indicting religion as an unparalleled threat to democratic community. In my view, denying religion’s fungibility involves acknowledging that religious discourse poses the question of the political and its authorization in distinctive ways. With unique directness, religion forces us to confront the divine / human nexus as a horizon of politics. We cannot debate religion’s political salience without engaging controversial questions about the sources and extent of human agency. Indeed, the move to frame secularism as a response to the challenge of diversity, rather than a rebuke to divine sovereignty, presupposes a controversial (namely, secular) stance on the legitimacy of human agency. Granted, regimes for the management of racial diversity may also presuppose a controversial stance on the divine / human nexus—for they develop within a secular frame. Yet acknowledging as much only strengthens my claim—for it demonstrates that distinctively religious questions are fundamental for modern, secular politics. When we define secularism as a regime for the management of generic diVerence, we deprive ourselves of theoretical resources for understanding why secularism proves so contentious. More important, we miss an occasion to interrogate assumptions that shape the discipline of political theory, determining what can show up as religious, or as political. The implications of sovereignty as a figure for human agency, and as a model of political power, are among the most contentious questions in democratic theory. Critics of sovereignty often cast themselves as defenders of human plurality. Yet, as we will see, their reservations reflect a more fundamental anxiety regarding the legitimacy of human assertion. In other words, what purports to be a defense of human plurality is actually a critique of human hubris. To understand why democratic theory remains haunted by the specter of human self-deification, we need to understand 16 | Introduction

secularity as a response to distinctively religious questions. In other words, we need to realize that, when we explore what it means to be secular, and whether we wish to remain secular, we are engaged in an ongoing negotiation of the bounds of human jurisdiction.

Synopsis I call this book an alternative genealogy of secular subjectivity because I use historical inquiry to revise our sense of how we arrived at the present juncture, and to advance a theoretical argument about the sources of secular agency. Before embarking upon this project, I oVer a preview of the way that historical narrative and theoretical argument intersect throughout the book’s chapters. Chapters 2, 3, and 4—dedicated to close readings of texts by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau—establish the book’s central insight regarding the sources and extent of secular powers. Each chapter oVers a diVerent take on the distinctive model of agency that the book excavates—a model in which acknowledgment of finitude enhances human power. While Hobbes oVers one of the earliest, and most forceful, arguments for politics as a realm of human construction, he makes consciousness of finitude a condition for collective agency. In a similar vein, Spinoza’s attitudes toward humility reflect his idiosyncratic vision of humans as finite modes of nature. Finally, Rousseau contends that finitude does not consign humans to weakness and dependence. As these chapters demonstrate, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau oVer a distinctive model of secular agency: they invite humans to act in concert to build and sustain a political world, but their invitations do not amount to self-deification. Indeed, humans can only develop their capacity for political agency if they acknowledge that, unlike God, their power is finite. By highlighting this shared vision of agency, I present unorthodox interpretations of three thinkers celebrated as paragons of liberal individualism. Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau break with Augustinian theology when they deny that finitude entails dependence on God. Yet, in various ways, each thinker insists that dependence on other humans is not only inevitable—it is actually a condition of enhanced agency. Thus, non-Augustinian critics of pride declare human independence from God without propounding a vision of complete individual autonomy. Recognizing that Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau renegotiate the terms of dependency tempers their purported individualism. An ethic of self-preservation can incorporate aYrmation of dependence— although this incorporation is not always seamless. Indeed, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau Introduction | 17

are not equally comfortable with the inevitability of interdependence. As I argue in chapter 4, Rousseau cannot abandon the fantasy of complete autonomy, even while he concedes its impossibility for finite beings. In chapters 2 and 3, I relate a historical narrative about humility’s contested place in early modern philosophy. In some ways, Hobbes best exemplifies the distinctive model of agency that this book recovers. Hobbes arrives at secular politics not by abandoning humility and deifying humanity, but rather by redefining modesty and humility as spurs to human agency. Yet Hobbes’s contemporaries are not all equally sanguine about the prospects for humility’s revaluation. As Spinoza demonstrates, in some quarters, attitudes toward humility do change in the seventeenth century. In Spinoza’s case, humility loses its appeal (although modesty does not). Yet Spinoza reclassifies humility for diVerent reasons, and with diVerent results, than one might expect. Spinoza demotes humility not because he denies human dependence, but because he would cultivate a more aYrmative disposition toward human finitude. I use Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s debate about humility to challenge the standard story of humility’s modern demise, recapitulated in chapter 1. The debate surrounding humility’s virtue is an intramural secular debate about the aVective dimensions of reconciliation to finitude—rather than a face-oV between secularists and theocrats. As Spinoza demonstrates, even when secular theorists discard humility, the gesture need not express lust for mastery or forgetting of human finitude. Indeed, Spinoza’s critique of humility debunks the notion that secular theorists invert or reverse traditional theology, putting humanity in God’s place. In chapter 4, devoted to Rousseau, I strike something of a deflationary note, acknowledging the diYculty, for theorists who wrestle with the Augustinian inheritance, of envisioning a powerful human who looks nothing like a God. Given Rousseau’s lament that typography has preserved “the dangerous dreams of Hobbes and Spinoza,” one might expect Rousseau to figure in my narrative as a rejoinder or rebuttal to Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s eVorts.57 Indeed, in secularist polemics, Rousseau has figured as the theorist whose sentimentality erodes “the great separation,” preparing the dangerous return of political theology, and as a craven moderate who betrays Spinoza’s radical Enlightenment.58 If, in my narrative, Rousseau does not represent a wrong turn or a betrayal, he does, nonetheless, expose limits to this tradition’s vitality. Rousseau betrays intense ambivalence about human weakness, and this ambivalence makes palpable tensions that run throughout the entire tradition of the non-Augustinian critique of pride. Rousseau decries weakness as a source of wickedness—as something that can and must be eliminated—but he also 18 | Introduction

celebrates weakness as the source of human happiness. Rousseau’s vacillation regarding weakness’s moral valence is a symptom of deeper uncertainty about whether full empowerment is available to, and appropriate for, human beings. Rousseau’s ambivalence puts the challenges that confront non-Augustinian projects on especially vivid display. As Rousseau reveals, the secular agency that Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau defend is a precarious achievement. Extending the historical narrative into the eighteenth century helps to explain why scholars have overlooked the contribution of modesty and humility to secular subjectivity. Rousseau’s predicament suggests the lack, in this period, of a suYciently sustained campaign to reinvigorate inherited figures, and thereby develop vital templates for secular empowerment. In the absence of such a campaign, it is not altogether surprising that contemporary scholars judge secularity proud. To challenge the hegemony of standard narratives, we must understand both their genesis and their tenacity. Non-Augustinian models of agency are appealing, especially in their promise to disrupt the theoretical and political stalemate between secular and theological foundations for politics. For this very reason, however, we need a sober assessment of the challenges that confront projects (both historical and contemporary) to imbue politics with an ethos of finitude.

Introduction | 19

chapter 1

Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility

In this chapter, I lay historical and theoretical groundwork for the book’s central argument—namely, that revisiting the history of modesty and humility requires us to think anew about secularity’s meaning and prospects. In the following pages, I rehearse a traditional story about humility’s alleged demise, and a traditional story about secularization—and I show how these stories have historically reinforced each other. I relate these stories here because they are the narratives that the book as a whole contests. Moreover, I juxtapose these stories to demonstrate their shared reliance on a canonical account of humility’s meaning, provenance, and history. If, as I demonstrate in subsequent chapters, the canonical account fails to capture the complex history of modern contests over modesty, humility, and self-love, then the narratives for which it has been adduced as evidence lose their authoritative veneer. The canonical understanding of humility, within seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century moral discourse, was the Augustinian account.1 For early modern Augustinians, humility (and, to a lesser extent, modesty) is a virtue because fallen human beings lack the ability to be moral without grace. In Augustinian paeans to humility, we find encapsulated an entire theology of human dependence. When moralists endorse humility, and when philosophers expound its definition, they meditate upon human finitude. In this period, discourses surrounding humility provide a privileged occasion for engaging crucial questions about human power: How far does it extend? By what is power limited? What is the ethical disposition consistent with these constraints? For early modern Augustinians, humility is the virtue that acknowledges the necessary relationship between human finitude and human dependence. The Augustinian approach to humility was influential enough that, in the eighteenth century, many critics of superstition accepted it whole cloth, only to invert its valuation. Philosophers, like David Hume, who sought to redeem human power from theological slander declared humility pernicious—or, at the very least, obsolete.2 Given these critics’ vociferousness, it is not altogether 20

surprising that contemporary scholars generally find it inconceivable that humility played a role in the constitution of the modern subject.3 I recapitulate the story of humility’s alleged refutation at the hands of Hume et al. to make a theoretical point: secularization stories rely on a set of uninterrogated assumptions—about humility and pride, Christianity and paganism, autonomy and dependence—inherited from Augustinian polemic. The (by now standard) story of humility’s modern demise supports—indeed, is occasionally adduced as evidence for—one of the most influential narratives of secularization, namely, the narrative that makes the stereotypical sovereign subject the protagonist of modernity. With their Augustinian forbears, proponents of this narrative imagine that doing away with God is only conceivable if one exudes confidence, verging on pride, in human moral capacities. Arguments for humility play no role in the development of a secular worldview, these scholars assume, because they associate secularity with claims to absolute self-suYciency. Thus, the chapter highlights implicit resonances between secularization stories and stories of humility’s modern demise, and explicit borrowings from the latter by the former. It is my wager that, given the resonance between these stories, if the narrative about humility proves inadequate, then secularization stories lose their cachet as authoritative accounts of the sources of modern subjectivity. Yet I do not evoke these resonances solely to prepare a challenge to the equation of secularization with self-deification. I also trace this history to remind readers that it is diYcult to dislodge Augustinian assumptions about humility. To defend secular agency against Augustinian aspersions without reproducing Augustinian terms, we need to appreciate historical and theoretical factors that have made Augustinian assumptions so resilient. A term like “humility” has a history, a history that places constraints on the uses to which it can credibly be put. Given the connotations that words like “modesty” and “humility” have traditionally borne, and the kinds of projects for which they have traditionally been recruited, it is tricky (but by no means impossible) to extract them from an Augustinian frame. Thus, reconstructing the history of modesty and humility helps to explain why standard secularization stories retain intuitive plausibility even if, on closer inspection, they cannot capture the full range of secular empowerment projects.

Modesty and Humility in Early Modern Thought The fathers of the Primitive Church, are frequent in observing upon the ancientes both of Greece and Rome, that many of them did excell in most Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 21

of the morall vertues for which they were much rewarded with temporall blessings by the open hand of almightie God; but that the vertue of humilitie, was soe farre from being possessed and practised by any of them, as that they had not soe much as any apprehention, nor did they frame any conceite at all thereof, and therefore hath not this vertue, any name at all in either of those ancient, and learned tongues.4

In early modern philosophy and theology, discourses surrounding humility (and, to a lesser extent, modesty) were important vehicles for illustrating human finitude and articulating its moral, political, and theological implications. In this period, the exercise of defining humility was often part of a larger project to generate an exhaustive catalog of the passions and the virtues. Seventeenth-century philosophers classed modesty and humility as passions, or emotional responses to the individual’s felt lack of power. Located at the intersection of the somatic, the aVective, and the cognitive, passions “represent things as good or evil for us, and are therefore seen as objects of inclination or aversion.” 5 Although passion is essential to human flourishing, seventeenth-century philosophers argued, it tends to lead us astray, inspiring powerful, but self-destructive, impulses. The taxonomy of the passions—an integral part of early modern philosophical treatises—is not merely a classificatory exercise, then. It also has a strong ethical dimension (even for critics of traditional moralism, such as Spinoza). Thus, in early modern philosophical discourse, modesty and humility were not only classed as passions—they were almost unanimously hailed as moral virtues. For Augustinians, humility was a signature of Christian ethics, the virtue that unites correct self-assessment with reverence toward God. Nicolas Malebranche oVers a graphic illustration, in Meditations Concerning Humility and Repentance, of the pessimistic assessment of human capability that underlies Augustinian ethics of humility: We have seen in the fore-going Consideration that Man, in himself, is a meer Nothing, that he is made up of Weakness, Infirmity, and Darkness, that he receives Life, Sense and Motion, continually from God, that he owes to him his whole Being and all his Faculties. And therefore he is certainly under the highest Obligations of Love and Gratitude to God, since he depends so absolutely upon him, as he is a Creature: But if we consider him as the Son of a sinful Father, and as a Sinner himself, we shall find so great a multiplicity of essential and indispensible Duties which he owes to God and at the same time so great a want of Power, and so much unworthiness to perform them, that so far is he from being able to do his Duty, that even 22 | Chapter 1

his performances would be rejected, if Christ our Mediator had not merited Grace for him by his Death.6 To cultivate the virtue of humility, Malebranche counsels, Christians must take the full measure of their weakness, and, having owned their “want of power,” they must aYrm dependence on God. Debates about humility’s meaning and provenance prove significant for my purposes, then, because they are a site at which Christians have traditionally asserted a reciprocal relationship between human finitude and divine sovereignty. I invoke Malebranche not only to establish that humility was a key concept for early modern articulations of finitude (and, as such, should interest contemporary scholars of secularity). I also highlight the persistent association, in this period, of humility with a particular understanding of finitude—namely, an Augustinian theology of reliance on divine grace.7 This association appears most vividly in the topos that provides this section’s epigraph—the topos that, glossing I Corinthians 8:1 (“Knowledge puVeth up, but charity edifieth”), opposes Christian humility to pagan pride. From Augustine onward, claims that humility is the exclusive province of revealed religion have punctuated polemics against secular philosophy.8 In City of God, Augustine famously condemns pride, or “the fundamental disorder that orders all things to self,” 9 as “‘the start of every kind of sin.’ ”10 Although Augustine allows that pagans can act for the common good, he denies their actions the status of genuine virtue. Indeed, Augustine dismisses pagan virtue “as an instance of superbia, pride, ordering all things to self.”11 If pagans arrogantly believe that virtue is within human power, Christian virtue, by contrast, acknowledges human dependence, forsaking the aspiration to self-suYciency. Augustine’s polemic oVers readers a stark and binary alternative: either one aYrms dependence on God, or one asserts a radical (and, from Augustine’s perspective, delusional) self-suYciency.12 As Augustine establishes the terms of the debate, humility provides the litmus test separating Christianity from paganism. “The name of the virtue that totally opposes all normal or classical moral schemes is humility.”13 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many thinkers adopted Augustine’s Christian humility / pagan pride antithesis as the authoritative framework for understanding humility.14 Following Augustine, Cartesian rationalists, Quietist mystics, philosophical lexicographers, and professed opponents of superstition all consider humility the signature Christian virtue. To take one example: Arnold Geulincx, a Dutch Cartesian who extols humility as “the most exalted of the Cardinal Virtues,” contends that, bereft of revelation, pagan phiToward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 23

losophers could not appreciate the virtues of humility. “Christians alone here are wise in some respects by virtue of their Religion.”15 Their diligence and ingenuity notwithstanding, pagans “went so utterly astray” in their pursuit of self-knowledge because “self-love seduced them all.”16 In a similar vein, Jacques Abbadie, a French Cartesian, qualifies praise for Stoic morality with censure of pagan pride. Although the most sublime of ancient philosophies, Stoicism was not blameless: “It could Elevate Man, but failed to Humble him.”17 Revealed morality, by contrast, strikes the proper balance between human dignity and human depravity: It raises him in such a manner as not to puV him up with Pride, and humbles him so as to make him lose nothing of his proper Dignity: It divests him of his Pride, by communicating to him real Glory, and raises his Excellency in forming his Humility by this Divine Commerce of our souls with GOD, which Religion acquainted us with.18 François Fénelon, the Quietist theologian and proponent of pure (or disinterested) love, also invokes this commonplace, recoiling from the suggestion that pagan philosophers endorsed something akin to humility. As Fénelon concedes, Plato instructs readers to love the good for its own sake, and imputes virtue to those capable of disinterest. Yet Fénelon dismisses pagan encomiums to disinterest as masks for inveterate pride—for “any love without grace, and apart from God, can never be anything but a disguised form of self-love [amour-propre]. There is nothing but the infinitely perfect Being who can, as object through his infinite perfection, and as cause through his infinite power, raise us outside of ourselves, and make us prefer that which is not ourselves to our very own being.”19 That this topos proved compelling to Cartesians and Quietists alike attests its power and versatility. Cartesians and Quietists are located at opposite poles on the spectrum of Christian conceptions of agency—the former impute a modicum of moral capacity to humans; the latter deny it altogether. For Cartesians like Geulincx and Abbadie, encomiums to humility reflect the conviction that grace must supplement human eVort. By contrast, a mystic like Fénelon reserves humility for those who adopt a stance of sheer passivity: “The truly humble man does nothing, and opposes nothing.” 20 Moreover, Cartesians and Quietists oVer divergent accounts of the ethical conduct that humility requires. Geulincx’s humility is not an ascetic virtue: “Humility does not require anyone positively to despise himself, to defame himself, scourge himself, or treat himself badly in some way or other. That is in itself not Humility, but the height of insanity, for Reason in itself demands no such thing.” 21 24 | Chapter 1

By contrast, Fénelon implores Christ for help in practicing self-mortification. “O abject and humble Savior, give me the knowledge of true Christians and the taste for self-contempt; and let me learn the lesson incomprehensible to the human spirit, which is to die to myself through mortification, through true humility!” 22 While Cartesians and Quietists debate the extent of moral capacity and the demands of moral conduct, they nevertheless concur regarding humility’s provenance—and, by extension, its relationship to power. A form of right self-knowledge, humility involves the recognition—which escapes unaided reason—that humans need divine assistance. For Cartesians and Quietists alike, the transcendent God provides the only counter to human selfaggrandizement. Admittedly, the commonplace that opposed Judeo-Christian humility to pagan pride was not the only construction of humility circulating in this period. On the evidence of early modern philosophical dictionaries, one strand within the philosophical community defined humility without express reference to God or revelation. In the Lexicon Philosophicum (1662), Micraelius defines humility as acknowledgment of limitation, without invoking God as the standard with reference to which humans are judged wanting. “Humility is that whereby, having contemplated our weakness, we keep ourselves far from arrogance within the bounds of duty.” 23 In a similar vein, the Lexicon Philosophicum (1675) of P. Godartis defines humility as acknowledgment of worthlessness. “Humility is the virtue whereby someone is not puVed up because of his own distinction. Or the virtue inclining toward acknowledging one’s worthlessness, and declaring it outwardly, with frankness.” 24 The assumption that humans are worthless, and that morality requires one to confess as much, could easily reflect Christian convictions. On this view, the “worthlessness” that Godartis instructs us to acknowledge would be synonymous with “unworthiness in the sight of God,” whose acknowledgment John Milton requires, in On Christian Doctrine.25 Although Godartis declines to specify the commitments, theological or otherwise, that inform his definition, the entry on humility in Chauvin’s Lexicon Rationale (1692) provides evidence to suggest that contemporary readers would likely interpret “worthlessness” through a Christian lens. In Lexicon Rationale, Chauvin opens with a nontheistic definition, noting the conventional association of humility with modesty and moderation. “Humility is commonly believed to relate to modesty, and for this reason to temperance, as a potential part of it; and it is said to restrain the motions of hope and audacity, or to restrain the spirit that is puYng itself up, lest we promise ourselves more than is right.” 26 Unlike Micraelius and Godartis, however, Chauvin derives proper self-estimation from a reverent disposition toward God. “Reverence Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 25

for God is the beginning and root of humility.” 27 Chauvin synthesizes definitions that gloss humility as a disposition toward the self with definitions that make humility a function of the self ’s disposition toward God. For Chauvin, Micraelius / Godartis and Geulincx (whose arguments he paraphrases without attribution) do not represent two competing schools of thought regarding humility. Rather, they constitute a single, theistic tradition—indeed, the only possible tradition. The ease with which Chauvin co-opts nontheistic definitions of humility attests the prestige of the topos that credits scripture with revealing humility’s possibility and value. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, then, humility was not just any virtue—for thinkers upholding a variety of philosophical and theological commitments, it was the signature of Christian ethics. Christian enthusiasm for humility derived from a distinctive assessment of the self and its power (or lack thereof ). Humility’s early modern proponents counsel readers to acknowledge (varying degrees of ) dependence on God. Moreover, if humility, and the conceptions of agency on which it rests, are the exclusive province of revealed religion, so is acknowledgment of finitude. Christians invoke the pagan pride / Christian humility antithesis to deny the possibility of alternative figurations of finitude. Through unaided reason, Augustinians argue, humans can take the measure of their abilities. To grasp human limitation, however, revelation is required. Absent orthodox theological convictions, these thinkers warn, humans are liable to harbor delusional estimates of their moral capacities. Although modesty occupies a venerable position within the moral, philosophical, and theological discourse of the period, it does not have as lofty, or as exclusive, a pedigree as humility. On the one hand, there is a broad consensus that modesty is humility’s companion virtue. Citing Augustine, the Jesuit Rodríguez defines modesty as the ethical and bodily comportment that expresses sincere humility. “For the present, this rule of S. Augustine shall suYce in generall, which is ordinarily receaved and followed by the holy Fathers and Masters of Spirituall life. Let there appeare in your exteriour, humility accompanyed with gravity & religious maturity, and you will not fayle of that modesty which is required.” 28 On Rodríguez’s account, modesty has an Augustinian pedigree, and pride of place in Christian ethics as humility’s companion virtue. Yet modesty’s provenance diVers from that of humility. Seventeenth-century theorists did not consider modesty an exclusively Christian virtue, available only through revelation.29 Indeed, theologians who deny that pagans could understand humility are willing to concede that they understood modesty. “The wisest of the old Pagans,” Pelling reports, “spake many good things of Sobriety, Modesty, and moderation of Mind; and of the government of Mens 26 | Chapter 1

Desires; which may be applied to this Vertue [humility] by way of accommodation; but I do not find that they hit rightly upon this most amiable perfection, Humility.” 30 Here, pagans can approximate to humility by cultivating modesty, but they cannot achieve genuine humility, presumably because they lack Christian revelation. Like Pelling, Chauvin credits pagans with a sophisticated understanding of modesty. Indeed, he cites Aristotle as the authority on modesty—even though, by his admission, the word “modesty” does not appear in Aristotle’s corpus. In the entry on modestia, Chauvin writes, “Thus, this virtue limits every person to the bounds of his station or condition, so that he does not seek more than he ought or is fitting. About this virtue, see Aristotle’s Ethics Book 4 Chapters 3 and 4. And, because modesty does not diVer in kind from magnanimity, he [Aristotle] did not find a name [for this virtue] among the Greeks.” 31 In the case of “humility,” the word’s absence from pagan lexicons confirms the pagans’ benighted ignorance of Christ. In the case of “modesty,” however, the lack of a precise Greek equivalent confirms the virtue’s importance for pagans. Chauvin’s determination to provide a Greek lineage for modesty suggests that this virtue occupied a somewhat diVerent place than humility in the ethical imagination of the period. Although modesty is a virtue for Christians, the virtues of modesty are discernible to unaided reason, according to Pelling and Chauvin. Thus, while modesty belongs to the same aVective constellation as humility, it does not bear quite the same resonance, in early modern discourse, as a signature of Christian conviction. That the pagan philosophy / Christian humility topos proved useful for Christians of all stripes is one measure of the continued prestige of Augustinian ethics in the seventeenth century. To fully grasp the topos’s historical and theoretical tenacity, however, we must appreciate its appeal for modern opponents of Christian asceticism. In the eighteenth century, humility’s fiercest critics (like David Hume) invoked the pagan philosophy / Christian humility antithesis only to invert its valuation.32 Inextricably bound up with a theology that denies human agency, eighteenth-century critics argued, humility has no place in modern ethics. Contemporary scholars tend to take these critiques at face value, treating them as the uncontroversial, authoritative account of early modern philosophical attitudes toward humility. Consequently, they narrate the rise of the modern subject as a story of humility’s demise, and pride’s vindication. Yet the story that founds modern subjectivity on pride’s rehabilitation is little more than an updated rendition of the Augustinian topos. The example of David Hume shows how the conventional story of humility’s modern demise confirms the worst suspicions of humility’s Christian proponents, even while it repeats their account of humility’s provenance. For Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 27

David Hume, humility is an artifact of (false) religion and, as such, becomes obsolete with the advent of naturalistic ethics. Hume sets out to redeem pride from the aspersions of “religious declaimers” who decry the heroic virtues “as purely pagan and natural, and represent to us the excellency of the Christian religion, which places humility in the rank of virtues, and corrects the judgment of the world, and even of philosophers.” 33 While Hume allows that select readers “may here be supriz’d to hear me talk of virtue as exciting pride, which they look upon as a vice,” their surprise merely betrays their religious indoctrination—readers will balk at Hume’s assertions because they are “accustom’d to the style of the schools and pulpit.” 34 By contrast, “Where men judge of things by their natural, unprejudiced reason, without the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion,” they acknowledge the merits of proper pride, dismissing humility and “the whole train of monkish virtues” as useless, even pernicious.35 Hume’s enthusiasm for pride, and disdain for humility, reflect a self-conscious break with religious ethics thought to stunt human flourishing.36 Indeed, Hume’s attack on humility seems calculated to confirm Christian suspicions that rejecting orthodoxy deprives one of resources, and motivation, to fathom the self ’s limits. According to Hume, it is generally acknowledged that “a certain degree of generous pride or self-value is so requisite, that the absence of it in the mind displeases, after the same manner as the want of a nose, eye, or any of the most material features of the face or members of the body.” 37 For Hume, pride’s allure is patently obvious—so obvious that the “absolute want of spirit and dignity of character” deforms the self, just as the want of a nose deforms the face.38 Rational people agree that we have reason to feel good about ourselves—dwelling on our limitations serves no purpose, ethical or otherwise. The story that Hume tells about the demise of the “monkish virtues” is a classic “subtraction story.” 39 With emancipation from the shackles of superstition— which denies human power, and inhibits human flourishing—the self ’s true value becomes manifest. On Hume’s narrative, dignity is the telos of modern philosophy, and the truth of human nature. Because humility is inherently theistic, as its partisans claim, it is the first casualty of modern attempts to redeem human power from theological slander. Yet Hume’s dismissal of the monkish virtues is not merely a classic subtraction story. For most scholars, it is the classic account of humility’s diminished stature in modernity. Hume’s embrace of proper pride is thought to epitomize modern, secular attitudes toward the self and its power.40 “If there is any general consensus to be found about its [humility’s] status as a virtue, it is its wholesale rejection. . . . Humility serves ‘no manner of purpose’ and reveals only a fault in one’s character, an incapacity 28 | Chapter 1

to engage in great actions. So abandon it.” 41 Admittedly, scholars who credit moderns with abandoning humility have not fabricated a myth from whole cloth. Even before Hume, some philosophers rejected humility as a vestige of superstition that could neither be recast nor rehabilitated.42 Humility’s virtues are indeed subject to renewed debate in early modernity. Yet the subtraction story underestimates the contentiousness of these debates, crediting modern philosophers with a unanimous and unequivocal rejection of humility. Thus, the subtraction story’s appeal derives not only from its ability to capture the sincere and vociferous animus against humility of theorists such as Machiavelli and Hume, but also from its familiar Augustinian resonance. As humility’s seventeenth-century partisans predicted, absent the doctrines of sin and grace, humans are blind to their limitations, and pride is redeemed (or so the subtraction theorists argue). Yet the story of how virtues like modesty and humility get redefined, revalued, and, in some cases, rejected, in early modernity is significantly more complicated than these narratives allow. The eclipse of humility is neither a logical nor a historical inevitability. I demonstrate as much in subsequent chapters. Before I embark upon this demonstration, however, I must illustrate the extent to which, and the ways in which, conventional secularization stories incorporate Augustinian accounts of humility’s meaning, provenance, and history.

Secular Subjects, Sovereign Subjects Critics have long identified pride as an animating spirit of modern rationalism, from Descartes onward. In the seventeenth century, Christian apologists adapted Augustinian attacks on pagan pride to the exigencies of polemical campaigns against controversial figures, such as Hobbes and Spinoza. Echoes of this complaint continue to resound (in more temperate tones) today. Contemporary theorists routinely tax modernity with unwarranted, and unbecoming, “self-confidence.” 43 On this view, shared by Christian and postmodern theorists alike, seventeenth-century philosophy rests upon a novel (and, from this perspective, inflated) estimation of human capacities, especially the capacities of human reason. Taken with the prospect of rational control, seventeenth-century philosophy appears “naïve, touchingly confident in mankind’s epistemological powers, complacently anthropocentric, arrogantly orientated towards an instrumental project of mastery of the non-human world.” 44 Moreover, to carry out these ambitious projects, modern philosophers have purportedly conjured a “Teflon subject”—“the assertive, disengaged self who generates distance from its background (tradition, embodiment) and foreToward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 29

ground (external nature, other subjects) in the name of an accelerating mastery of them.” 45 Thus, to locate modernity’s advent in the seventeenth century is generally to prepare an objection to modernity in the name of a more chastened conception of reason’s purview.46 Conventional scholarly wisdom holds seventeenth-century philosophy responsible for enshrining the sovereign subject, and holds the sovereign subject responsible for all manner of modern ills. A philosophy for which mastery is the signature ambition, critics warn, is a philosophy that has lost touch with human limitation, inspiring delusional and destructive projects for human dominion. Needless to say, a “Teflon subject” is not a humble subject. Nor is he an orthodox Christian subject. The notion that seventeenth-century philosophers invented, and lionized, the sovereign subject was pervasive well before the recent explosion of scholarship on all things secular. Once we appreciate the figure’s Augustinian resonance, however, its appeal for secularization stories becomes readily apparent. Indeed, it should come as no surprise that contemporary scholarship on secularity, secularism, and secularization tends to assume that the sovereign subject is a secular subject, and the secular subject is a sovereign subject. Admittedly, the story that takes the sovereign subject as its protagonist is only one of several secularization stories. Many scholars have explained secularization without reference to changing notions of subjectivity, focusing instead on sociological and material factors, such as the diVerentiation of functional spheres.47 The conviction that sovereign subjectivity provides an index of secularity is arguably more prominent among theorists indebted to traditions of German philosophy.48 Moreover, there are multiple ways to narrate the concomitant rise of sovereignty and secularity. One can identify mastery of nature as a central aspiration of modernity without casting secularization as a bid for self-deification, or as a transfer of theological contents to social and political contexts.49 We must beware of implying that everyone who conjures the specter of the sovereign subject believes that said subject became sovereign through an act of literal self-deification. Endorsing received portraits of modern subjectivity does not commit one to a particular secularization story even if, as I argue, these portraits resonate strongly with Augustinian invectives against pride. To appreciate the Augustinian resonance of these portraits, we must first survey expressly theological renditions of the secular subject / sovereign subject equation. Christian political theorists have not hesitated to brand the sovereign self “proud, characterized by superbia. The self lives in a world shorn of transcendence.” 50 It is no accident that the sovereign self exhibits pride if, as these theorists suggest, that subject’s emergence is best narrated as a tale of brazen 30 | Chapter 1

usurpation. At the dawn of modernity, it is argued, the “logic of sovereignty came unbound and migrated”—first sovereign states, and then sovereign selves, usurped properties, such as power and will, previously reserved for the nominalist God.51 When contemporary Christians tax secularism with overweening pride, they update Augustinian rhetoric, figuring the turn away from God as a turn toward the self. For Augustinian critics of secularism, autonomy becomes alluring as a means to dethrone God, and usurp God’s place. “Man must himself become a God against the Creator God in order to strip himself of any indebtedness, whether to Creator or other persons.” 52 In an Augustinian idiom, secularization is tantamount to human self-deification. It is hardly surprising that Christian political theorists tax secularity with sinful pride. Yet the conflation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity is not the exclusive preserve of professed Augustinians. Narratives that— explicitly or implicitly—identify sovereign mastery as secularity’s animating impulse remain authoritative for many of secularism’s postmodern and left critics. The figure of the sovereign subject derives authority, within contemporary theory, from the prestige of the sources (including Heidegger, Schmitt, Arendt, Foucault, and the Frankfurt school) on which its critics draw. According to one such critique, the ontological turn within contemporary theory is the “result of a growing propensity to interrogate more carefully those ‘entities’ presupposed by our typical ways of seeing and doing in the modern world.” 53 Foremost among the entities slated for interrogation is the sovereign subject, whom postmodern theorists tax not with sin, but with an impossible and dangerous ideal. Contemporary projects to cultivate a democratic ethos often position themselves as correctives to the “ontological figure of humans as sovereign entities,” which figure, they argue, is an unfortunate byproduct of secularization.54 “The loss of Christianity’s promise of immortal life had to be compensated for by the promise of an unending expansion of human capacities and well-being. The anxiety of finitude was thus displaced by a will to dominate.” 55 In a similar vein, anthropologists challenge the universality and neutrality of the vision of subjectivity they attribute to secular modernity—but their challenge merely enshrines the notion that sovereignty exhausts secular subjectivity.56 When unmasking the “operation of modern secular power” on its colonial others, anthropologists oVer a tendentious vision of secularity’s self-conception, a vision in which certain subjectivities (namely, sovereign subjectivities) “are authorized and others made the object of reform and subject to the ‘civility’ of secular norms and conventions.” 57 Postmodern theorists are disinclined to question the historical accuracy and theoretical adequacy of the “Teflon subject” moniker, because calls for attunement to finitude would lose Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 31

urgency if they did not appear as correctives to an earlier, ethically suspect, forgetting of finitude. To fully grasp the appeal of a proud, powerful self as the protagonist of secularization stories, however, we must examine a work that has quickly become the canonical treatment of secularity, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. The conviction that Cartesian subjectivity was “the actual experience of modern selfhood,” as opposed to “a prejudicial and inaccurate model common to a certain class of philosophers,” finds its most forceful expression in A Secular Age.58 Taylor updates the standard story, in part, by translating it into a new rhetorical register, employing an idiosyncratic set of tropes to illustrate modern subjectivity. Taylor studiously avoids the rhetoric of sovereign subjectivity—not to mention the corollary tropes of transfer, usurpation, and self-deification. Yet, in A Secular Age, he oVers an (undeniably sophisticated) rendition of the story that enshrines a masterful subject at the heart of modern secularity. For Taylor, secularization involves an anthropocentric turn that dignifies human power. In Taylor’s framework, “what it is to believe” in a given society—as opposed to the content or pervasiveness of religious belief—provides the criterion of its secularity.59 Thus, Taylor’s inquiry centers not on the retreat of religion from the public square or the decline in religious belief (which he dubs secularity one and two, respectively), but on what he calls “secularity three”: “Secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place.” 60 On Taylor’s argument, “a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos” was a “crucial condition” for the rise of secularity three.61 Indeed, Taylor makes the emergence of a certain kind of powerful self a prime index of secularity. As Taylor’s narrative illustrates, received assumptions about humility’s meaning, provenance, and history shape notions of secularity, and received assumptions about secularity shape notions of humility’s modern career. Taylor frames A Secular Age as a response to the following question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but inescapable?” 62 To explain this transformation, Taylor introduces two models of what it feels like to be a self. In the premodern world, Taylor contends, selves were “porous,” vulnerable to the agency of spirits, demons, forces, and objects. In modernity, by contrast, the self is “buVered”—bounded, impermeable, and disengaged. The modern self can cultivate distance from its body, from the external world, from other people—in short, “from everything outside the mind.” 63 This distancing is a condition of possibility for a new experience of mastery and selfsuYciency. On Taylor’s description, “The buVered identity, capable of disci32 | Chapter 1

plined control and benevolence, generated its own sense of dignity and power, its own inner satisfactions.” 64 BuVering is a necessary, although not a suYcient, condition for the rise of humanist worldviews, then, because only a self capable of “giving its own autonomous order to its life” can conceive of doing without God.65 On Taylor’s narrative, “a sense of power, of capacity, in being able to order our world and ourselves” fueled the rise of humanist alternatives to orthodox Christianity—and the availability of humanist alternatives spurred a dynamic of pluralization that is the hallmark of a secular age.66 Although Taylor labors to revise secularization theory, he scarcely revises canonical portraits of the secular subject. Like other theorists of secularity, Taylor ascribes unprecedented self-confidence to secular individuals. Granted, Taylor’s modern subject is “buVered” rather than “sovereign.” 67 With this shift in nomenclature, Taylor mutes connotations of self-deification that suVuse the figure of sovereignty. Deriving power from a stance of disengagement, rather than a project of quasi-divine rule, Taylor’s buVered self can “tap immense inner resources of benevolence and sympathy, empowering him / her to act for universal human good on an unprecedented scale.” 68 For these reasons, the buVered self deserves our (qualified) respect. Jettisoning the rhetoric of “sovereignty” for that of “buVering” does not, however, diminish that subject’s formidable stature. Moreover, the narrative of porosity’s eclipse and buVering’s ascendance locates vulnerability, limitation, and enchantment on the premodern side of the ledger, crediting secularity with invulnerability, power, and self-suYciency.69 In the story that Taylor relates, vulnerability is a relic of lost naïveté, while invulnerability represents an enticing innovation. What distinguishes secularity, on Taylor’s account, is a new experience of power and capacity rather than a new experience of finitude. In other words, “pride has its place” in the constitution of secular subjectivity, but humility does not. Granted, Taylor would not put things so starkly. To Taylor’s credit, he takes pains to diVerentiate his position from that of Augustinian polemic, which, he tells us, resurfaced in the nineteenth century as Christianity came under attack from emergent humanisms. Confronted with apostates’ claims that reason had discredited religion, Taylor reports, nineteenth-century Christians responded with accusations that apostasy was “the simple fruit of pride.” 70 Against the apostates, Taylor denies that their “deconversions” “are motivated by clear reason.” 71 Against their Christian critics, however, Taylor denies that exclusive humanism—the ethical stance whose increasing reputability defines a secular age—results from sinful pride. To say that “the move from orthodoxy is actuated by pride is invalid,” Taylor argues.72 Unlike nineteenth-century Christian apologists, Taylor recognizes that admiToward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 33

rable ideals—ideals of honesty, integrity, benevolence, and solidarity—have lured many away from the church. Yet this recognition does not prevent Taylor from reserving space for (a more palatable version of ) pride in his own secularization narrative. “In the whole aetiological story of how these frameworks arose,” Taylor writes, “pride has its place.” 73 Indeed, on Taylor’s reading, modernity’s noble ideals are inextricably linked to humanist self-confidence. “Being one of these”—a “free, invulnerable, disengaged agent”—is appealing because it aVords moderns “a certain pride.” 74 We are able to conceive the possibility of exclusive humanism, Taylor contends, because we feel good about our moral capacities—and we embrace humanism because denial of transcendence enhances these good feelings. Although Taylor rejects vulgar Augustinian polemic, he still invokes (no longer sinful) pride to explain the rise of a secular society. To put it another way, when Taylor narrates the rise of the buVered self as a vindication of proper pride, he presents an updated rendition of the story of humility’s modern demise, familiar from Hume. Indeed, when Taylor identifies negative motives for the abandonment of Christianity and adoption of exclusive humanism, he cites Hume as an authority on modern subjectivity. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Taylor writes, disgust with Christian asceticism led people to abandon the church, as Hume’s case demonstrates.75 Taylor takes Hume’s dismissal of the monkish virtues as evidence for what actually happened to humility in early modernity. Admittedly, Hume’s disdain for humility does not exhaust the positions that, on Taylor’s account, buVered subjects adopted toward orthodox Christianity in this period. Taylor notes that some “had no diYculty combining their adherence to faith and civilization.” 76 Yet, for Taylor, Hume’s disdain for humility provides the textbook example of elite disaVection from orthodox Christianity. To tell the story of the rise of exclusive humanism, Taylor can think of no example more apt than Hume’s dismissal of the monkish virtues. In sum, Taylor relies on the canonical account of humility’s meaning, provenance, and history for explanatory power and ethical cachet. Citing Hume as an authority, Taylor finds it inconceivable that humility played a role in the constitution of secular subjectivity. Peter Gordon perfectly captures the polemical thrust of Taylor’s verdict on secularity when he observes, “Taylor seems to think that traditional theism was the sole bulwark against human selfaggrandizement.” 77 To appreciate the stakes of Taylor’s adaptation of Augustinian humility tropes, it proves helpful to linger a moment on Gordon’s critique of A Secular Age. Gordon challenges Taylor’s reflexive equation of humanism with arrogant self-assertion. In a brief rejoinder that encapsulates many of the 34 | Chapter 1

themes of this book, Gordon insists that “naturalism has its own humility.” 78 Enumerating the blows that the Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian “revolutions” dealt to humanity’s exalted self-conception, Gordon asks, “Is it truly inconceivable that with the rise of thoroughgoing naturalism one might find oneself moved to a keener modesty or even something like gratitude for what nature has given?” 79 With Gordon, I read Taylor as answering resoundingly in the negative. Taylor really does find it inconceivable that the rise of humanist alternatives to orthodoxy could intensify consciousness of finitude. Yet I would amend Gordon’s account ever so slightly, calling readers’ attention to a passage from A Secular Age that only amplifies Gordon’s fundamental objection. Although humility plays no role in Taylor’s genealogy of secular subjectivity, Taylor does, in passing, endorse humility as a virtue for our current, secular age. Why does Taylor invoke humility at the end of his long march through modernity, and what work does he assign it to perform? After exposing the diYculty that Christians and humanists alike have resolving contemporary moral dilemmas, Taylor recommends humility to all parties within the immanent frame. “Both sides need a good dose of humility, that is, realism,” Taylor counsels, about their inability to marshal knock-down arguments.80 Here, humility means a realistic assessment of possibilities for definitive resolution of contentious issues. In a secular age, Taylor contends, these possibilities are slim, because a secular society is “a pluralist world in which many forms of belief and unbelief jostle, and hence fragilize each other.” 81 With the claim that diversity is a signature of secularity, Taylor does not only present an empirical observation about the impossibility of achieving unanimity in advanced capitalist democracies. Taylor also makes a phenomenological claim about the way that living in a pluralistic society colors one’s convictions and identity. Taylor coins the term “fragilization”—or “the undermining sense that others think diVerently”—to capture this hallmark of the buVered self ’s experience.82 Naïve belief is impossible in a secular age, Taylor contends, for the believer is constantly confronted with rival stances whose claims she must entertain. Humility is a virtue for a secular age, then, because it recasts contests between partisans of divergent creeds in less polemical, and less adversarial, terms. If debates between believers and humanists are undertaken in a spirit of humility, Taylor asserts, “we find that both sides are fragilized; and the issue is rather reshaped in a new form: not who has the final decisive argument in its armory,” but rather who oVers a compelling response to shared moral dilemmas.83 When Taylor invokes humility as a virtue for navigating pluralism, he highlights one of the many ironies that propel his story. Although secularization’s trajectory moves in the direction of ever increasing power and pride, the expeToward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 35

rience of buVered subjectivity is not without inner tensions. Taylor’s powerful subjects can imagine doing without God. Yet the project of doing without God sparks a “nova eVect,” an inexorable proliferation of ethical options, with the result that buVered selves are liable to doubt the validity of their own convictions when confronted with the ethical stances of peers.84 Her power notwithstanding, the buVered self is not immune to confusion, melancholy, and malaise—to a nagging sense that something is missing in the wake of God’s retreat. Indeed, the fragility that surrounds beliefs and identities in a secular age, and the humility it requires, could suggest that Gordon’s judgment is unfounded: Taylor actually does appreciate “the deepened experience of humiliation and decentering that accompanied the loss of axiomatic religion.” 85 On closer inspection, however, Taylor’s oVhand endorsement of humility only confirms Gordon’s suspicion that Taylor finds naturalistic humility inconceivable. When Taylor invites atheists and believers to undertake sustained dialogue, he endorses something akin to what contemporary political theorists have called “democratic humility.” 86 Democratic humility is a response to pluralism— loosening the hold of dogmatic identities—rather than a response to finitude.87 To say, as Taylor does, that humility enhances pluralistic dialogue is not to say, as Gordon does, that naturalism has its own humility. Gordon insists on the possibility of naturalistic humility because he believes that God’s absence can inspire a distinctive, ethically compelling, way of living our finitude. “To conceive of oneself as a purely material being of flesh and bone is to understand oneself as more porous to one’s surroundings, not less so, since one is metaphysically of the same substance as the world.” 88 Naturalistic humility is thus an existential or ontological virtue, as much as it is a political virtue. Taylor relies on humility to facilitate democratic conversation, but he does not envision a form of humility that could do the existential work of decentering the human perspective. That humility plays such a small role in Taylor’s response to secularity’s ethical dilemmas reflects the (Augustinian) constraints on his theoretical imagination. Given Taylor’s warning that Nietzschean self-assertion breeds violence, one might expect him to search for ways to vivify consciousness of vulnerability among atheists. Yet Taylor does not devote energy to identifying nontheistic resources for cultivating something akin to naturalist humility. Taylor shirks the task because he believes that the transcendent God provides the only counter to human self-aggrandizement. Thus, although Taylor values “democratic humility” as a resource for navigating the shoals of pluralism, he does not, and perhaps cannot, envision a humility that would articulate human finitude without reference to a transcendent God. With the contention that the transcendent God alone can humble, we return 36 | Chapter 1

to the Augustinian topos. Recall Abbadie’s contention that unaided reason can fathom human capability, but cannot grasp human limitation. Although Taylor appears unsympathetic to “hyper-Augustinianism,” his portrait of secular selfhood revives the Augustinian suspicion that, absent theistic convictions, humans are prone to self-congratulation.89 The lack of anything like naturalistic humility in A Secular Age suggests that, for Taylor, secularity is irremediably anthropocentric—unless one lives it with what he calls “an open spin.” Although all contemporary Westerners inhabit “the immanent frame”—a Wittgensteinian background shaped in part by the self ’s buVering—“some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some live it as closed.” 90 Individuals who remain open to transcendence can “break out” of the frame’s anthropocentric constraints, accessing a transcendent reality: In our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality. We all have some sense of this, which emerges in our identifying and recognizing some mode of what I have called fullness, and seeking to attain it. Modes of fullness recognized by exclusive humanisms, and others that remain within the immanent frame, are therefore responding to transcendent reality, but misrecognizing it. They are shutting out crucial features of it. So the structural characteristic of the religious (re)conversions that I described above, that one feels oneself to be breaking out of a narrower frame into a broader field, which makes sense of things in a diVerent way, corresponds to reality.91 If buVering cannot be undone—sprites and fairies no longer “exist,” even for Catholics—contemporary theists can access a horizon beyond the human, or so Taylor contends. Recognizing a transcendent horizon is the only way to get outside of ourselves, Taylor implies, and we need to get outside of ourselves to satisfy our ethical and moral aspirations. In other words, exclusive humanism proves morally deficient precisely because it denies the reality of transcendence. On Taylor’s diagnosis, exclusive humanism sets up exacting moral standards, but deprives humanity of resources needed for their achievement. Humanism appeals to pride—leaving us “with our own high sense of self-worth to keep us from backsliding, a high notion of human worth to inspire us forward.” 92 But, Taylor argues, pride is not enough. “The most exigent, lofty sense of self-worth has limitations,” limitations for which only “unconditional love,” grounded in the recognition that humans bear God’s image, can compensate.93 Cast in these terms, the Augustinianism of Taylor’s fundamental reservation regarding secularity—pride is all that humanism can marshal, but pride is insuYcient— becomes apparent. One could object that Taylor is scarcely representative of contemporary disToward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 37

courses of secularity, given his express theism. Admittedly, Taylor’s sectarian commitments render his position unique in certain respects.94 Many scholars who depict the secular subject as a sovereign subject would resist Taylor’s exhortation that “we open ourselves to God, which means, in fact, overstepping the limits set in theory by exclusive humanisms.” 95 Yet theorists who deny God’s existence still accept Taylor’s Augustinian diagnosis of secularity’s predicament and possibilities. Theists, atheists, and nontheistic spiritualists share Taylor’s account of secularity’s historical location—after humility’s demise— and his account of secularity’s strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, Taylor oVers the most sophisticated and comprehensive statement of a contemporary consensus: secularity is good at empowering humans, and bad at chastening them. Humility is what we lack, and it is what we need, but absent an embrace of religion or a religion substitute, we are without resources for humility’s cultivation. I have examined Taylor’s position at length both because of its prestige, and because its theism makes the Augustinianism of reigning assumptions about secularity all the more palpable. Indeed, the prestige of A Secular Age derives in part from its ability to confirm inherited assumptions about secularity’s limitations. Yet there is another reason for the ubiquity and persistence of these assumptions, which I must address in conclusion. The specter of sovereign mastery has captivated the contemporary theoretical imagination in part because it captures promethean aspirations that permeate early modern texts. Descartes really does promise that practical philosophy will make us, “as it were, the lords and masters of nature.” 96 Hobbes really does compare the contract that founds the commonwealth to “that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.” 97 Thus, the standard portrait of secularity is not without foundation. Yet one can acknowledge modern aspirations to mastery without concluding—as many theorists do—that these are the sole or most characteristic modern aspirations. Mastery is an important part of the modern story, but it is not the whole story. Moreover, if aspirations to mastery are neither the sole nor the most characteristic modern aspirations, then it would be a mistake to assume, as many theorists do, that received interpretive frameworks can explain their sources and significance. Extant frameworks do not provide the necessary historical and theoretical resources to make sense of promethean impulses, precisely because they rely on Augustinian assumptions. As a brief glimpse at the case of Francis Bacon reveals, modern claims for human mastery exceed interpretive binaries inherited from Augustine. Grappling with Bacon will establish the need for a non-Augustinian genealogy of secularity, and introduce some of the challenges that confront such a project. 38 | Chapter 1

Coda: Humble Dominion? In “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature,” an essay that asserts human dignity and rehabilitates vanity, David Hume hails Francis Bacon as an avatar of human wisdom.98 Against philosophers who “have insisted so much on the selfishness of man,” Hume oVers a resounding defense of human dignity, which he celebrates as the most eVective spur to virtue.99 I must, however, be of the opinion, that the sentiments of those, who are inclined to think favourably of mankind, are more advantageous to virtue, than the contrary principles, which give us a mean opinion of our nature. When a man is prepossessed with a high notion of his rank and character in the creation, he will naturally endeavour to act up to it, and will scorn to do a base or vicious action, which might sink him below that figure which he makes in his own imagination.100 Hume does not only commend humanist self-confidence as a vehicle to virtue. He also insists that a high sense of self-worth is warranted—even though human knowledge falls short of “perfect wisdom,” even though humans are prone to self-love.101 Given Hume’s enthusiasm for human capabilities, it is scarcely surprising that he concludes this brief essay with a rebuttal to philosophical laments about vainglory. To denigrate human nature by exposing the vanity that lurks behind apparent virtue is to commit a “fallacy,” Hume argues: Vanity is so closely allied to virtue, and to love the fame of laudable actions approaches so near the love of laudable actions for their own sake, that these passions are more capable of mixture, than any other kinds of aVection; and it is almost impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former. . . . To love the glory of virtuous deeds is a sure proof of the love of virtue.102 Hume’s defense of vanity, here, is of a piece with his aforementioned rehabilitation of proper pride. Yet again, Hume takes up the mantle of human dignity, in an attempt to liberate modern readers from thralldom to gloomy moralists. Significantly, Hume enlists Bacon for this campaign against humility and for proper pride. Granted, Hume’s reference to Bacon in this essay is only in passing. Yet, in this context, the choice of Bacon is significant, for it suggests that Hume considers Bacon a paragon—perhaps even a proponent—of human dignity. At first blush, Hume’s veneration for Bacon is predictable. The Bacon of popular imagination—a scientist / statesman committed to human progress— Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 39

can easily serve the humanist cause. After all, on canonical accounts, Bacon is “the very epitome of the modern scientific domination of nature and humankind.”103 In his plan for “The Great Renewal” (1620), an ambitious program to “make a general Renewal of the sciences and arts and of all human learning, beginning from correct foundations,” Bacon heralds the conquest of nature.104 To fulfill his practical ambitions, Bacon adopts an unabashedly instrumental stance. The requisite knowledge of causes comes from studying nature not “free and unconstrained,” but rather “confined and harassed, when it is forced from its own condition by art and human agency, and pressured and molded.”105 Moreover, Bacon makes outsize promises for the technical manipulation of nature, holding out the prospect of “a lineage of discoveries which may in some part conquer and subdue the misery and poverty of man.”106 On closer inspection, however, Hume’s reverence for Bacon is surprising. For Bacon repeatedly professes humility. Echoing I Corinthians 8:1, Bacon warns that pursuit of knowledge risks inflating the ego with sinful pride.107 We also humbly pray that the human may not overshadow the divine, and that from the revelation of the ways of sense and the brighter burning of the natural light, the darkness of unbelief in the face of the mysteries of God may not arise in our hearts. Rather we pray that from a clear understanding, purged of fantasy and vanity, yet subject still to the oracles of God and wholly committed to them, we may give to faith all that belongs to faith. And finally we pray that when we have extracted from knowledge the poison infused by the serpent which swells and inflates the human mind, we may not be wise with too high or too great a wisdom, but may cultivate the truth in all charity.108 Here, Bacon betrays anxiety that the project of human empowerment could inspire blasphemous anthropocentrism (the human overshadowing the divine). To avert this prospect, Bacon recommends humility, or the recognition that human wisdom cannot penetrate “the mysteries of God.” Indeed, Bacon warns readers not to “imagine or conceive of our Renewal as something as infinite and superhuman, when in fact it is the end of unending error, and the right goal, and accepts the limitations of mortality and humanity.”109 Humility is a key virtue for natural philosophers, then, because reason and revelation dictate that science remain within proper—that is, human—bounds. Yet, for Bacon, humility does not only mean acknowledging limits to science’s legitimate jurisdiction. An ethic of humility is also a constituent of the inductive method that promises to improve humanity’s estate. Because induction requires the natural philosopher to bracket opinion, hesitation, and 40 | Chapter 1

fancy, Bacon hails his method as “a true and proper humiliation of the human spirit.”110 Here, humility involves protocols of steadfastness and discipline essential for persevering on the arduous path to discovery. “And as we use humility in discovery,” Bacon adds, “we have followed it also in teaching.”111 To “enlighten the minds of others,” Bacon writes in a straightforward, impersonal, and unadorned style that invites critical collaboration.112 Indeed, natural philosophers must acknowledge the possibility of error when they disseminate their findings: “Hence our mistakes may be noted and removed before they infect the body of science too deeply; and anyone else may easily and readily take over our labors.”113 On Bacon’s argument, humility sustains a scientific community that aims at collective enhancement of human life. “We are laying the foundations not of a sect or of a dogma, but of human progress and empowerment.”114 Because “nature is conquered only by obedience,” humility is required to achieve “those two goals of man, knowledge and power.”115 One might expect Bacon’s commitment to humility to lower his standing in Hume’s estimation. Given Hume’s determination to recast virtue along less cloistered, more aYrmative lines, how can he venerate Bacon as a paragon of human wisdom? Perhaps Hume can maintain his admiration for Bacon because he fails to grasp Bacon’s investment in humility. As historians have noted, “For the Enlightenment Bacon became a generalized culture-hero, hailed as a founder of the new science but not drawn on in any detail.”116 If Hume venerates Bacon as a “generalized cultural hero,” then he would likely overlook Bacon’s professions of humility. Bacon’s investment in humility would not register for Hume because it contravenes Hume’s views on the stature of modern science. Indeed, the humble facets of Baconian natural philosophy are hard to see, let alone make sense of, if one reads through an Augustinian lens, as Hume does. Bacon presents the curious spectacle of a staunch proponent of human dominion who nevertheless professes humility. Bacon would prove something of a conundrum for standard genealogies of secularity—whose authors share many of the same blind spots as Hume—if only they could grasp his humility. Grappling with Bacon’s encomium to humility would challenge Hume’s, and our own, assumptions about the relationship between humility and power. If we tarry with Bacon’s invocation of humility, his case challenges the stories surveyed in this chapter, because it is a case in which an architect of modern subjectivity professes humility. Indeed, as a virtue for natural philosophers, humility is arguably a component of the most stereotypical sovereign subjectivity, dedicated to instrumental mastery over nature. If we take Bacon’s exhortations to humility at face value, and take his exhortations to conquest at face value, we would have to reserve room for humility, alongside pride, in genealogies Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 41

of modern subjectivity. Of course, by putting things in this way, readers might object, I have won the battle but lost the war. In Bacon’s case, paying attention to humility would not yield especially novel conclusions about the complexion of modern selfhood. Moreover, if Bacon recruits humility for a project of human dominion, we have reason to wonder whether he has drained the term of meaning and force. If humility is an instrument for the maximization of power, does humility retain intrinsic value? Concerns such as these have led scholars who revere Bacon as a modernist pioneer to read Bacon’s professions of humility—and his treatment of Christianity more generally—as cynical concessions to dominant mores.117 Another interpretive tack is available, however, to those who accord significance to Bacon’s professions of humility. Bacon’s investment in humility could inspire doubts about whether his ideal scientist actually conforms to the stereotype of the sovereign subject. On this reading, in The New Organon, “humiliation of the spirit” releases scientific inquiry from dependence on God without deifying humanity. Indeed, humans only achieve technical prowess when they humbly “obey,” devoting themselves to the disciplines and demands of the scientific endeavor. The unexpected sources of scientific power would require us to reevaluate the kinds of mastery, and the extent of the mastery, toward which modern science aspires. In other words, putting humility back in the picture, courtesy of Bacon, would yield novel conclusions about the range of powerful selves on oVer in texts of modern philosophy. I have glossed divergent approaches to interpreting Bacon not to endorse one of them as correct (although my sympathies lay with the latter). Rather, I hope to suggest the kinds of questions that arise when we pay attention to humility’s place in texts of early modern philosophy. If we resist the narrative of humility’s modern demise, we will encounter questions that are not usually posed in debates about secularity. Does the stereotypical sovereign subject exhaust secular subjectivity? From what ethical sources do modern aspirations to autonomy draw sustenance? To what kinds of agency do secular theorists aspire? Moreover, glossing these interpretive approaches indicates some of the challenges that confront a project, such as this one, to identify an alternative genealogy of secular subjectivity. It would be rash to discount the worry that secular theorists instrumentalize humility, and thereby deprive it of intrinsic value. As Bacon suggests, the fact that a philosopher professes humility does not immunize him from temptations to mastery. Indeed, Descartes, the other ostensible paragon of instrumental mastery, also aYrms humility’s virtues, going so far as to insist that “the most generous people are usually also the most humble.”118 Thus, the task for an alternative genealogy is not only to demon42 | Chapter 1

strate that secular theorists have endorsed humility—it is to examine what they have done with these endorsements. On the one hand, acknowledging the unexpected sources of secular agency can temper received portraits of secular subjectivity. Putting humility back in the picture suggests a more compelling vision of secular freedom, power, and agency—a vision responsive to postmodern and Christian critiques of secularism. On the other hand, the excesses of secular philosophy can provide ammunition to humility’s critics. Examining cases, such as Bacon’s, in which humility is bound up with the rhetoric of human dominion reminds us that humility—and attunement to finitude more generally—is not a panacea. Professions of humility do not automatically, or invariably, yield results palatable to contemporary sensibilities. And when these professions yield unpalatable results, it is not necessarily because the humility in question is false or insincere. If Bacon helps demonstrate the need for a non-Augustinian genealogy of secularity, the genealogy itself begins with the case of his amanuensis, Thomas Hobbes. Bacon is not, ultimately, the most compelling figure for such a genealogy, given his enthusiasm for conquest and dominion. Hobbes proves a more promising candidate, using modesty and humility to articulate a figure of human agency that resists the mastery / dependence binary. As I argue in the next chapter, Hobbes vindicates human agency without enthroning humans in a position of sovereign mastery.

Toward a Revised History of Modesty and Humility | 43

chapter 2 Modesty hobbes on how mere mortals can create a mortal god

Thomas Hobbes oVers one of the earliest and most influential arguments for politics as a realm of human construction. Hobbes famously describes the state as “an Artificiall man” created by human beings, from human resources (L 81).1 Man is both the “Matter” from which the commonwealth is made and its “Artificer” (L 82). Moreover, with the erection of a commonwealth, humans create an entity more resilient than the divine creation that provides its template (i.e., natural man). Hobbes’s great feat, in Leviathan, is to generate an artificial man—“of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defense it was intended”—from finite human material (L 81). A bold proponent of human empowerment, Hobbes promises that we can rectify nature’s deficits by imitating—or, perhaps, rivaling—God. Hobbes reveres the state as a “Mortall God,” and compares the “Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united,” to “that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation” (L 227, 81–82). Ignoring what is perhaps the more obvious biblical analogue to the founding covenant—namely, the Sinai covenant— Hobbes vaunts human agency when he compares the agreements that found the state to divine creation ex nihilo.2 If Leviathan’s introduction provides a secular manifesto of sorts, declaring human independence from God for political purposes, it risks confirming Augustinian suspicions about the sources of secular agency. Hobbes appears unable to envision human independence from God without ascribing God-like power to human beings. On the evidence of Leviathan’s introduction, one could argue, the secular turn is founded upon a proud overestimation of human power. Without denying that Hobbes’s rhetorical flourishes reflect an impulse to exalt humanity, in this chapter, I highlight a less flashy if more characteristic impulse running throughout Leviathan—the impulse to chasten human pretension. By examining Hobbes’s chastening project, I argue, we can develop a new and more compelling way to interpret Hobbes—an interpretation that refutes, rather than confirms, the charge that secularity is irremediably proud. 44

On my reading, Hobbes justifies secular politics not by abandoning humility and deifying humanity, but rather by redefining modesty and humility as spurs to human agency. Indeed, in many respects, Hobbes oVers the most straightforward example of the model of secular agency to which this book is dedicated—a model in which acknowledgment of finitude is a condition for collective agency. Hobbes invites humans to act in concert without divine guidance or authorization. However, because delusions of grandeur sap human power, Hobbes cautions, humans can only exercise their political prerogatives when they abjure pretensions to mastery. “Soveraign Power . . . is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it”—but its greatness is a specifically human greatness (L 260). Thus, Hobbes weds an ambitious claim for human politics to a reminder that we can only sustain great power if we acknowledge that we are mere mortals. With this reminder, Hobbes crafts an emphatically non-Augustinian portrait of the sources of secular agency. In Hobbes’s case, the justification for human agency involves a new reckoning with power’s limits, a reckoning that invites us to exercise, rather than abdicate, the capabilities we possess. Scrutinizing modesty’s place in Hobbes’s texts yields a radical rethinking of the scope and aims of his political project. On my reading, Hobbes does not merely endorse modesty as a virtue for obedient subjects. Hobbes’s claims for the power of human artifice, and the possibilities of human mastery, are more modest than one might expect from a theorist who compares the original contract to divine fiat. Received portraits of Hobbes as a confident archrationalist who “seeks to make man master and possessor of nature” cannot capture Hobbes’s investment in modesty and humility.3 Hobbes extols the power of human artifice, but he recognizes that human artifacts cannot render their makers omnipotent or invulnerable, precisely because, unlike God, humans are ineluctably finite.4 As Hobbes concedes, “The condition of man in this life shall never be without Inconveniences” (L 260). Thus, in Leviathan, the political task is not to enthrone humans in sovereign invulnerability but rather to achieve the right balance between bodily security and consciousness of vulnerability (both equal vulnerability as individuals and absolute vulnerability as humans). I arrive at this new interpretation of Hobbes, and his significance for genealogies of secularity, by engaging critically with traditions that identify “vainglory” as a key term for the interpretation of Leviathan. Hobbes scholars have long insisted that, “as its very title expresses, it [Leviathan] is directed primarily against the passion of ‘pride.’ ” 5 It is a commonplace that Leviathan aims to subdue vainglory, which threatens political community as the dominant, Modesty | 45

and most dangerous passion,6 or the passion to which all others can be reduced.7 Scholars who accord vainglory pride of place generally assume that Leviathan oVers a definitive “solution” to the “problem” of pride.8 On this view, Hobbes arranges society so as to reduce detrimental consequences of the passions, but he concedes that destructive passions can neither be corrected nor disciplined—and, more important, they need not be disciplined. The sovereign must marshal suYcient power to contain unruly passions, but he or she (or they) need not encourage subjects to cultivate a measured self-estimate. Although scholars have long cataloged liabilities of vainglory, few have thought to examine Hobbes’s treatment of pride’s traditional antonyms.9 The fact that scholars have lavished attention upon Hobbes’s critique of vainglory, while ignoring his engagement with the contrary virtues of modesty and humility, reflects pervasive assumptions about Hobbes’s approach to managing the passions.10 Specifically, it reflects the assumption that Hobbes solves the problem of vainglory through strategic deployment of force, without trying to foster modesty in political subjects. On my reading, however, Hobbes never promises that such a solution is possible. As scholars who showcase Hobbes’s reliance on the rhetorical tradition have demonstrated, even the most fearsome sovereign is vulnerable if subjects entertain subversive opinions and nurture corrosive vices.11 As a theorist of political obligation, then, Hobbes’s task is not complete once he has discredited vainglory. Hobbes must also craft, and cultivate, “civic virtues”—and modesty, properly defined, is one virtue that Hobbes would cultivate.12 Modesty and humility must be redefined, because Hobbes recognizes that, for political purposes, unreconstructed humility is as dangerous as pride. During the English Civil War, Puritan divines extolled the virtue of humility in an eVort to encourage, and justify, seditious claims of conscience. Yet, by Hobbes’s admission, in a stable commonwealth, it proves diYcult to cultivate modesty and humility. Ironically, the commonwealth oVers new inducements to pride, for security breeds smugness and complacency. In this sense, Hobbes’s ostensible “solution” is actually part of the problem. Although inconveniences are greatly reduced in the commonwealth, the commonwealth is no panacea—the political forms that Hobbes devises are not without their own liabilities. Moreover, the theology that Hobbes deploys to mitigate these liabilities—a theology drawn from the book of Job—exposes limits to the state’s ability to solve fundamental human problems, precisely because it posts limits to human mastery. In Job, God’s transcendence creates space for human agency. But Job asserts a categorical distinction between divine and human creativity. Humans can create a “Mortall God,” but they remain subject to an immortal God who is not of human creation, and who is beyond human con46 | Chapter 2

trol (L 227). As the ironic twists and turns in Hobbes’s story reveal, secular theorists need to be modest about their ability to recruit modesty and humility for secular projects.

Vainglory In Leviathan, vainglory is one symptom of the ill fit between human nature and communal life. According to Hobbes, the passions make it diYcult for men to live together without (artificially constituted) authority.13 Although Hobbes imputes corrosive power to many passions, he singles out three for opprobrium: “So that in the nature of man, we find three principall causes of quarell. First, Competition; Secondly, DiYdence; Thirdly, Glory” (L 185). On the evidence of this passage, Hobbes does not consider glory the sole, or even the most, incendiary passion, but he does eye it warily. What accounts for this wariness? As Hobbes explains in Leviathan’s catalog of the passions, glory is the delightful sensation that accompanies aYrmation of one’s power. “Joy, arising from imagination of a mans own power and ability, is that exultation of the mind which is called GLORYING” (L 124–25).14 According to Hobbes, humans like to feel powerful. Indeed, the allure of potency is seductive. Individuals who relish the sensation of power are liable to aVect powers that they lack, and be taken in by their own masquerade. Hobbes laments the propensity toward delusions of grandeur in the passage’s continuation, which distinguishes “glory” from its groundless counterpart, “vainglory.” Hobbes says that glorying, if grounded upon the experience of his own former actions, is the same with Confidence; but if grounded on the flattery of others; or onely supposed by himself, for delight in the consequences of it, is called VAINE-GLORY: which name is properly given; because a well grounded Confidence begetteth Attempt; whereas the supposing of power does not, and is therefore rightly called Vaine. (L 125) When Hobbes distinguishes glory from vainglory, he admits the possibility of well-founded confidence. When individuals correctly estimate their abilities, it is legitimate to revel in the self ’s power.15 Although, to the best of my knowledge, the term “self-esteem” never appears in Hobbes’s English works, this passage could suggest that Hobbes endorses “right self-esteem.”16 It is incontrovertible that Hobbes admits the possibility of legitimate “confidence” (DH 52–53). Moreover, as scholars have argued, Hobbes envisions a Modesty | 47

political role for grounded glory—“a Glory, or Pride in appearing not to need to breake” a covenant is one of two potential supports of obligation (L 200).17 But given the rarity of “Generosity,” Hobbes argues, glory’s political potential is limited—rather, “The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear” (L 200). Thus, although Hobbes admits that glory can support obligation, he does not accord glory pride of place in the catalog of civic virtue. Indeed, Hobbes is wary of relying on glory not only because pursuit of “Wealth, Command, or sensuall Pleasure” has dulled most men’s capacity for generosity, but also because glory is a slippery passion (L 200). After all, Hobbes identifies glory—not vainglory—as a principal incitement to the war of all against all. In the state of nature, “Glory” provokes quarrels surrounding “Reputation”: men are liable to attack “for trifles, as a word, a smile, a diVerent opinion, and any other signe of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflexion in their Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, or their Name” (L 185). In the passage cited above, Hobbes exculpates glory, distinguishing grounded confidence from groundless delusions. Yet in the state of nature, glory is hardly innocent. Given Hobbes’s fastidiousness with definitions, his decision to identify glory as a “principal cause of quarrel” is significant. Hobbes betrays ambivalence about glory, precisely because glory is volatile, liable to devolve into vainglory. Indeed, in Elements of Law, Hobbes emphasizes the proximity of the two passions: “This passion [glory], by them whom it displeaseth, is called pride: by them whom it pleaseth, it is termed a just valuation of himself ” (EL 50). Here, Hobbes suggests that “glory” and “pride” are two names for the same passion, confirming the adage that “men give diVerent names, to one and the same thing, from the diVerence of their own passions” (L 165).18 Given that Hobbes uses “glory” to indicate both a just self-estimate and an irrational incitement to war, we should hesitate before concluding that glory always “pleases” Hobbes. If, as Hobbes suggests, vainglory is groundless glory, why do individuals exult in their power when they have no grounds to do so? Moreover, why is groundless glory dangerous? If vainglory is really “vain” (that is, empty or fruitless), it seems unlikely to incite violence. In the passage under discussion, Hobbes concedes that, while the vain overestimate their prowess, their delusions rarely “begetteth Attempt,” because overestimation takes place in the imagination. If the vain hesitate to attempt bold feats, they seem unlikely culprits for the violence that plagues the state of nature. Yet, as we have seen, Hobbes blames glory for an epidemic of aggression. To understand how “vain” glory could incite violence, it helps to realize that Hobbes identifies two strands of vainglory. This distinction is clearest in Elements of Law, where Hobbes oVers a 48 | Chapter 2

threefold taxonomy of glory that disappears in subsequent iterations of the argument. In Elements, Hobbes makes a distinction among three terms: “glory,” “false glory,” and “vain glory.” False glory is derived “not from any conscience of our own actions, but from fame and trust of others, whereby one may think well of himself, and yet be deceived” (EL 50). The deceived undertake feats destined to meet with “ill-success” (EL 50). By contrast, vain glory is a form of harmless daydreaming that “begetteth no appetite or endeavour to any further attempt . . . as when a man imagineth himself to do the actions whereof he readeth in some romant” (EL 50–51).19 The vain do not risk hazardous ventures—they rest content with quotidian aVectation.20 In Leviathan, Hobbes maintains the distinction between glory that inspires rash ventures and glory that bears no fruit, but he abandons the term “false glory,” classing both phenomena as instances of vainglory. As Hobbes explains in Leviathan, some vain men (akin to the “vainglorious” from Elements) recognize the groundlessness of their self-estimate, and hesitate to act lest their pretensions be exposed. “Vain-glorious men, such as without being conscious to themselves of great suYciency, delight in supposing themselves gallant men, are enclined onely to ostentation; but not to attempt: Because when danger or diYculty appears, they look for nothing but to have their insuYciency discovered” (L 163). When a grandiose daydreamer shrinks from combat, he betrays a modicum of self-consciousness. However, Hobbes recognizes that many harbor delusions of grandeur, and in their case, vainglory resembles the Elements’ false glory. When the vain credit their delusions, they are liable to attempt feats that exceed their abilities. Vain-glorious men, such as estimate their suYciency by the flattery of other men, or the fortune of some precedent action, without assured ground of hope from the true knowledge of themselves, are enclined to rash engaging; and in the approach of danger, or diYculty, to retire if they can: because not seeing the way of safety, they will rather hazard their honour, which may be salved with an excuse; than their lives, for which no salve is suYcient. (L 163–64) When the vain lack “true knowledge of themselves,” they are not idle, pretentious daydreamers—they are pugnacious, rash engagers. Although rash men are capable of rational behavior (i.e., retreat) once battle is joined, their reservations come too late, after violence has been unleashed. Although some forms of vainglory prove harmless, delusional vainglory breeds instability because men who overestimate their abilities attack at the slightest aVront, and, once unleashed, violence is not easily quelled.21 Modesty | 49

Moreover, if we examine Hobbes’s indictment of delusional vainglory, we see that the passion has two distinct, but mutually reinforcing, sources. Delusions of grandeur may result from social dynamics (“the flattery of other men”), but men are susceptible to such flattery because they lack “true knowledge of themselves.” Hobbes tackles social inducements to vanity when he depicts a state of nature riven by conflicts of honor. In the state of nature, lust for prestige wreaks havoc because there is no agreed standard of measure. As Hobbes reminds readers, “The question who is the better man, has no place in the condition of meer Nature” (L 211). But even though natural equality renders questions of comparative worth moot, men continue to pose them, with disastrous results. The vainglorious demand confirmation of their superiority and, when disappointed, attack those with the temerity to disrespect them. In the absence of an arbiter, disputes surrounding reputation escalate into mortal combat: Men have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all. For every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he sets upon himself: And upon all signes of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavours, as far as he dares (which amongst them that have no common power, to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other,) to extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommage; and from others, by the example. (L 185) As Sheldon Wolin has argued, these conflicts expose the instability of definitions in Hobbes’s conventionalist account of language.22 On this account, nature provides no metric for evaluation. Given nature’s silence, men are free to devise personal standards; given human passion, these standards clash. In the absence of a natural, and therefore uncontroversial, definition of words like “honorable” and “dishonorable,” the only way to achieve peace is to enforce conventional definitions. A “power able to over-awe them all” is a necessary counter to semantic anarchy, of which vanity is both a source and a symptom. If Hobbes’s attacks on vainglory were merely designed to spotlight the anarchy latent in language, then vainglory would be susceptible to a relatively straightforward solution: appointing a “Great Definer” to promulgate, and enforce, a public table of values.23 But as a critic of vanity, Hobbes does not only expose the need for authoritative standards. When Hobbes bemoans inordinate sensitivity to petty slights, he also diagnoses a propensity toward selfdelusion, men’s inability or refusal to achieve “true knowledge of themselves.” As Hobbes intimates, the “true knowledge” that escapes the vain is knowledge 50 | Chapter 2

of equality. Examined from this angle, vainglory involves refusal to acknowledge that humans are equal, because they are equally vulnerable.24 Indeed, Hobbes condemns “vain conceipt” as the passion “which may perhaps make such equality incredible” (L 183–84). In the state of nature, refusal to acknowledge equality incites conflict because the vain, oblivious to their frailty, attack on the slightest pretext. As Hobbes explains, “Generally all vainglorious men, (unlesse they be withal timorous,) are subject to Anger”—men who harbor delusions of superiority are especially testy, and men who harbor delusions of invulnerability are especially belligerent (L 342). Of course, in the state of nature, vanity contains a (potential) corrective. When belligerent men exorcise petty slights by attacking peers, they find themselves caught in escalating battles, battles that ultimately present a more dire threat to self-esteem: human mortality.25 As Leo Strauss reconstructs this chastening confrontation, the specter of violent death lifts the veil from men’s eyes, piercing delusions of invulnerability. “The ideal condition for self-knowledge is, therefore, unforeseen mortal danger,” because unforeseen mortal danger forces acknowledgment—first visceral, then rational—of one’s limitations.26 In the face of imminent death, Hobbes wagers, even the most stubborn braggarts will forsake the dubious pleasures of overestimation for a more realistic self-assessment. It is in this sense that Strauss asserts, “Reason is modesty. This formulation sums up the spirit of Hobbes’ philosophy.” 27 If vanity expresses deep resentment against equality, then the project of taming vanity is more complicated than it first appears. As Hobbes defines it, vanity is a passion with (at least) two aspects, and, as a “solution,” the “Great Definer” only addresses one aspect, leaving the more fundamental problem, the problem of self-delusion, unaddressed. The sovereign can discourage contests of honor by regulating protocols of esteem, but, as I argue below, regulation will likely falter absent prior acknowledgment of equality. The subjects most likely to observe the sovereign’s protocol are those who acknowledge equality, and therefore acknowledge the sovereign’s legitimacy. In other words, a definitive “solution” to the problem of pride would require that subjects forsake delusions of grandeur for “true knowledge of themselves.”

Modesty Consequently, we must determine what Hobbes considers “true” self-knowledge, and investigate its potential sources. The place to look is the laws of nature, which Hobbes enumerates in an eVort “to craft the means of civil peace and so forestall within a citizenry the emergence of pernicious disModesty | 51

positions that would threaten to dissolve the commonwealth.” 28 In Hobbes’s taxonomy, modesty is the virtue of individuals who correctly assess their power, and their position vis-à-vis peers. Hobbes endorses modesty when he insists, against Aristotle, that we admit natural equality. “If Nature therefore have made men equall, that equalitie is to be acknowledged: or if Nature have made men unequall; yet because men that think themselves equall, will not enter into conditions of Peace, but upon Equall termes, such equalitie must be admitted” (L 211). If vainglory, which Hobbes classes as an inaccurate self-estimate, tends “to the excluding of natural equality,” then an accurate self-estimate would involve acknowledgment of equality (EL 96). When Hobbes enumerates the laws of nature, he defines the normative practice of equality as a practice of modesty, and he classes this practice as the antithesis of “arrogance” and “pride” (L 217). The ninth law of nature asserts human equality and enjoins “every man” to “acknowledge other for his Equall by nature. The breach of this Precept is Pride” (L 211).29 The tenth law of nature details the conduct that follows from acknowledgment of equality. As Hobbes explains, acknowledging equality entails proportionality in the transfer of rights that founds the commonwealth. One who refuses to treat peers equitably, holding on to rights that others have forfeited, “makes nonsense of the equality recognized in the previous article” (DC 50).30 Thus, the tenth law of nature prohibits the subject of contract from reserving rights that he would deny others. Hobbes deems observers of this protocol modest: “The observers of this law, are those we call Modest, and the breakers Arrogant men” (L 212). Thus, as a preliminary approximation, we can say that Hobbes bestows the title “modest” on those who observe equity in the transfer of rights.31 However, to better appreciate the distinctiveness of Hobbes’s conception of modesty, we must explore seventeenth-century connotations of modesty. Hobbes exploits modesty’s contemporary cachet—but, at base, he is engaged in a project of redefinition.32 In seventeenth-century English, “modesty” signifies a protocol of women’s deportment,33 a protocol for scholarly disputation,34 an ethos of moderation and temperance,35 and a topos of prefatory rhetoric.36 Multiple constructions of modesty circulated in the seventeenth century, and the sources from which they derive—classical antiquity and Christian ethics—account for divergent emphases. Classical ethics bequeath the association of modesty with moderation, and classical rhetoric recommends aVected professions of inadequacy as a means of ingratiating oneself with an audience. By contrast, Christian ethics associate modesty, defined as a mode of virtuous comportment, with humility, defined as aYrmation of sinfulness and dependence on God. In the words of a 52 | Chapter 2

seventeenth-century theologian, “Let there appeare in your exteriour, humility accompanyed with gravity & religious maturity, and you will not fayle of that modesty which is required.” 37 At first blush, the tenth law of nature appears to amplify modesty’s classical connotations while muting its Christian resonance. After all, Hobbes defines “modesty” as a practice of equity rather than a mode of comportment. The argument that Hobbes adopts a classical definition of “modesty” finds support in Elements of Law, where Hobbes couches the injunction to an egalitarian transfer of rights—“Whatsoever right any man requireth to retain, he allow every other man to retain the same”—in the rubric of “distributive justice,” equity, and proportionality (EL 94). In Elements, observance of egalitarian protocols “is properly termed EQUITY,” and their breach, “ENCROACHING” (EL 94). The charged language of pride, arrogance, and modesty is nowhere to be found in the Elements’ catalog of the laws of nature. However, in parallel passages from De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes abandons the equity / encroaching antithesis for the modesty / arrogance antithesis—later texts uphold egalitarian transfer of rights as the prime instance of modesty, and dismiss attempts to reserve rights as examples of arrogance.38 The various iterations of Hobbes’s theory feature the same law of nature, but the law’s resonance shifts in later texts with the introduction of a vocabulary freighted with ethical and religious connotations. Hobbes’s preference for this vocabulary militates against the conclusion that classical moderation exhausts Hobbesian modesty. Clearly, Hobbes appreciates modesty’s classical pedigree, and moderation is one component of modesty.39 But Hobbes also exploits modesty’s Christian resonance. If equity or proportionality exhausted the conduct that Hobbes is trying to capture, and endorse, in Leviathan’s tenth law of nature, he would have retained the Elements’ equity / encroaching antithesis. That Hobbes does not retain this antithesis, but replaces it with the modesty / arrogance antithesis, suggests that the law’s observance involves something more than a practice of proportionality or moderation—namely, it involves a distinctive self-relation. Indeed, when Hobbes catalogs the laws of nature, he explicitly links the practice of equity to cultivation of an egalitarian disposition. “On this [ninth] law,” which demands acknowledgment of equality, “dependeth another [the tenth],” which requires egalitarian transfer of rights—and those who violate the latter “do contrary to the precedent law, that commandeth the acknowledgement of naturall equalitie” (L 211, 212). In other words, acknowledgment of equality entails the practice of modesty—and, as Hobbes explains in De Cive, this acknowledgment springs from accurate self-estimation: “One man practices the equality of nature, and allows others everything which he allows himself; Modesty | 53

this is the mark of a modest man, one who has a true estimate of his own capacities [quod modesti hominis est, & vires suas recte aestimantis]” (DC 26). Here, Hobbes explicitly links modesty as a practice of equity and modesty as a virtue of self-estimation. Unlike their deluded peers, the modest correctly assess their capacities, and this “true estimate” finds expression in equitable distribution of rights. The argument that Hobbes would exploit ethical connotations of modesty finds further support in the fact that Hobbes retains the alliance between modesty and humility familiar from Christian ethics. When Hobbes asserts that acknowledgment of equality entails egalitarian transfer of rights, he asserts a relationship of entailment between humility and modesty—for Hobbes defines “humility” as acknowledgment of equality.40 In De Cive, to demonstrate the identity of the natural and divine laws, Hobbes cites verses from Matthew, Proverbs, and Isaiah as scriptural support for “Law 8,41 on acknowledging natural equality, i.e. on humility [de humilitate]” (DC 62).42 Moreover, just as Hobbes identifies modesty as a condition of political agency, so does he class humility as a source and support of authority, hailing it as one of the “first Elements of Power” (L 710–11). While modesty excludes mortification and abasement—in Hobbes’s taxonomy, “modesty” is not synonymous with “dejection”—it is animated by a kind of humility, namely, consciousness of equality.43 As a theorist of civic virtue, Hobbes retains traditional moral vocabulary only to recast it for his own purposes. Allusions to Christian ethics serve Hobbes’s rhetorical and political purposes, because they address an audience that professes humility but whose delusions of theological grandeur stoked the English Civil War (e.g., contemporary Protestants).44 Given that Protestant exhortations to humility failed to temper—and may have encouraged—seditious claims of conscience during the English Civil War, Protestant humility leaves something to be desired as a political disposition. Critics often read Hobbes’s indictment of pride as evidence of a debt “to an old Christian, even papal tradition.” 45 But Hobbesian modesty and humility are not identical to Protestant, let alone “papal,” modesty and humility. Indeed, for political purposes, unreconstructed humility is as dangerous as pride. As a critic of vainglory, then, Hobbes’s task is not complete once he has discredited the aristocratic cult of glory.46 Hobbes must also contend with political limitations of a prominent contemporary antidote to vainglory—namely, the modesty and humility celebrated by Protestant divines. What are the political liabilities of radical Protestant humility? In the seventeenth century, English Protestants embellish the canonical critique of pride— 54 | Chapter 2

articulated most forcefully in Augustine’s City of God—with graphic catalogs of human impotence and depravity. Citing the biblical admonition that “‘pride is the start of every sin,’ ” Augustine interprets Adam and Eve’s disobedience as a turn away from God (to whom humans should rightfully defer) and toward themselves.47 Following Augustine, English Protestants trace sin to pride— “There is scarce a sin to be thought on that is not a spawn in the bowels of Pride”—and they define pride as insubordination motivated by delusions of self-suYciency.48 As Richard Baxter (1615–91), a prominent Puritan theologian (and critic of Hobbes),49 explains in A Christian Directory, Pride causeth men to set up their supposed Worth and Goodness above or against the Lord: So that they make themselves their principal End, and practice that which some of late presume to teach, that it is not God that can or ought to be mans End, but himself alone: As if we were made only for our selves, and not for our Creator; Pride makes men so considerable in their own esteem, that they live wholly to themselves, as if the world were to stand or fall with them.50 To counter pride, Protestant divines prescribe self-mortification, instructing believers to confess worthlessness and dependence on God. “You should most strive, for such a [s]ight of your sinfulness and nothingness, as will teach you highly to esteem of Christ, and to loath your selves, and take your selves to be as vile and sinful as you are. . . . This is the Humility which you must labour for.” 51 The egalitarian tendencies of Protestantism notwithstanding, seventeenth-century divines also invoke humility to buttress, and reconcile believers to, (purportedly natural) hierarchies.52 More important, in the tradition that Augustine inaugurates, and seventeenth-century Protestants embellish, injunctions to humility serve to discredit—and discourage—human initiative. On Augustine’s interpretation, Genesis exposes the inadequacy of human reason, will, and power, and, consequently, the folly of forsaking divine oversight for self-direction. In the seventeenth century, Richard Allestree, a Royalist divine, condenses Augustinian admonitions against human initiative into a pithy motto: God, “able to do all things, and we able to do nothing.” 53 In this tradition, the humble submit to divine guidance. Yet, in a striking twist, in seventeenth-century England, exhortations to humble deference license claims of conscience against the state that, from Hobbes’s perspective, appear indistinguishable from brazen selfassertion.54 Allestree’s Royalism notwithstanding, he comes in for sustained attack in Behemoth, for his conception of humility entails a distinction between active and passive obedience that seditious Presbyterians can invoke to justify Modesty | 55

rebellion.55 Indeed, Puritans who share Allestree’s convictions regarding human inadequacy, but make no profession of Royalism, contend that humility requires resistance to commands that conflict with God’s laws. In A Christian Directory, Baxter anticipates and refutes the objections of an imaginary critic who, voicing a Hobbesian suspicion, dismisses conscientious disobedience as the worst form of pride. Baxter counters that “it is no Pride to prefer God before men; and to fear damnation more than imprisonment or death”—for it would be absurd to insist that “humility required us to please and obey men at the price of the loss of our salvation.” 56 Baxter instructs believers to exercise discretion, pleading “conscience and the commands of the God of Heaven” when confronted with laws that run counter to God’s commands.57 The humility that Augustine bequeaths to seventeenth-century Protestants cannot support the modes of obligation that Hobbes would justify. Protestant humility cannot ground a Hobbesian theory of obligation, because, with its insistence on human inadequacy, it denies the capacity to create worthwhile institutions without divine guidance—the very capacity to which Hobbes appeals.58 Leviathan imagines the commonwealth as an artifice of human design. Hobbes trusts that the story he tells about the commonwealth’s genesis through contract will oVer a more powerful rationale for obligation than would an argument from nature. Yet Protestant encomiums to humility, which showcase human “vilenesse, iniquities, transgressions, and sinnes,” are liable to mute the appeal from artifice, because they deny that humans can create worthwhile institutions without divine guidance.59 Thus, Hobbes resists, and revises, the claim that pride is irremediable without God’s grace, because this claim inhibits modes of collective agency on which the state is founded, and from which obligation derives. Moreover, unreconstructed humility erodes the bonds of obligation because, as Allestree and Baxter demonstrate, it justifies passive obedience, and even conscientious disobedience, when the sovereign’s commands (appear to) conflict with God’s. As Hobbes defines it, modesty is not a mark of distinction that elevates self-appointed saints above the political world—rather, it is a disposition that enables ordinary mortals to build and sustain a political world. To support Leviathan’s argument for obligation, then, Hobbes crafts an ethos of modesty that provides an alternative to Protestant humility and the aristocratic cult of glory—an ethos in which consciousness of individual vulnerability elicits recognition of collective power. Although Hobbes asserts individual weakness, he rejects theological assertions of human “insuYciency and impotencie to good.” 60 Against Augustinian traditions, Hobbes would encourage humans to act in concert without divine oversight. 56 | Chapter 2

Moreover, I say that Hobbes would foster modesty because, on his account, modesty runs counter to our natural tendencies. Hobbes allows that, in the state of nature, some “would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds”— some are naturally modest (L 185). Yet, to Hobbes’s chagrin, the naturally modest are rare: “For the Lawes of Nature (as Justice, Equity, Modesty, Mercy, and (in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to,) of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like” (L 223). Having reconstructed modesty and humility, how will Hobbes cultivate these “qualities that dispose men to peace, and to obedience” (L 314)? Hobbes indicates potential sources of modesty when he relates the story of the commonwealth by institution—which is, implicitly, a story about chastening pride. (Hobbes tells more than one story about the commonwealth’s genesis—a commonwealth can also arise by acquisition—but the stories have roughly the same moral when it comes to questions of modesty.)61 As Hobbes’s narrative begins, pride plagues the state of nature, slights proliferate, and individuals squander their power in irrational contests of honor. In these contests, combatants experience a passion, fear of violent death, which pierces delusions of grandeur, sparks rational assessment, and moves men to associate.62 In this narrative, political agency derives from consciousness of individual frailty. Instead of sulking, individuals attuned to their limitations can ameliorate their predicament through collective exercise of power. Indeed, chastened mortals can muster resources to create a mortal God—without the immortal God’s direction. Hobbes’s great feat in Leviathan is to generate formidable power from meager ingredients. While Protestant divines dismiss the claim that humans can perform worthwhile deeds without divine guidance as a form of pride, Hobbes worries that pride inhibits political agency. Thus, Hobbes would chasten human pretension in order to enhance human power.

The Law of Honor Readers persuaded of Hobbes’s investment in modesty may wonder whether Hobbes sees the need for an ongoing project to cultivate modesty. Granted, Hobbes appeals to modesty to tell a story about the sources of obligation—but he “needs to appeal to it just once, for the purpose of founding a state so constituted that the problems created by passionate men are solved once and for all.” 63 On this interpretation, Hobbes invokes modesty to explain the commonwealth’s generation—individuals who own their limitations perceive the need for a state, and individuals who aYrm equality do what it takes Modesty | 57

to create a state (i.e., equitable transfer of rights). However, Hobbes can dispense with modesty when accounting for the state’s stability. If the sovereign is suYciently powerful, and institutional constraints well engineered, political stability can be achieved even if subjects nurture pride—for the specter of punishment will deter public bids for glory. To determine whether a campaign to foster modesty is indispensable, we must examine the “law of honor,” a protocol that Hobbes devises to regulate social practices of esteem. Although the law of honor has received scant attention in the critical literature, it epitomizes the approach to pride that scholars usually impute to Hobbes.64 Laws of honor neither correct, nor countervail, vanity. Rather, they appeal to vanity, in hopes that it can be directed into more productive channels. Clearly, this approach, which uses reward and punishment to redirect the passions onto salutary “objects,” is a centerpiece of Hobbes’s theoretical repertoire (L 82). But the law of honor is not Hobbes’s last word on wrestling with the challenges of pride. Hobbes never hails the law of honor as a definitive “solution” to the problem of pride. By Hobbes’s admission, laws of honor may frustrate the end for which they were established—namely, peace— for they are liable to exacerbate, rather than redirect, the passion of vainglory. Given Hobbes’s ultimate ambivalence about laws of honor, why does he entertain the possibility that they could temper ravages of pride? In Leviathan, Hobbes numbers conferral of honorary titles (e.g., duke, earl, baron) among the “incommunicable and inseparable” prerogatives of sovereignty— prerogatives the sovereign cannot cede without abdicating sovereignty (L 256). Hobbes instructs the sovereign to confer honorary titles because he wagers that strict canons of protocol will mute the controversies that would arise were private evaluations to proliferate. Considering what values men are naturally apt to set upon themselves; what respect they look for from others; and how little they value other men; from whence continually arise amongst them, Emulation, Quarrels, Factions, and at last Warre, to the destroying of one another, and diminution of their strength against a Common Enemy; It is necessary that there be Laws of Honour, and a publique rate of the worth of such men as have deserved, or are able to deserve well of the Commonwealth; and that there be force in the hands of some or other, to put those Lawes in execution. (L 235–36) In the state of nature, men assert their value only to be snubbed by peers who subscribe to alternative metrics. In the commonwealth, however, the sovereign ordains the subject’s value, putting a stop to the proliferation of clashing standards. Again, one might wonder why Hobbes endorses honors of any kind. 58 | Chapter 2

Abolishing honors would seem more consistent with Hobbes’s injunction to aYrm equality. Hobbes’s egalitarianism notwithstanding, he is willing to experiment with political dignities because he appreciates the stubbornness of vanity. Convinced that few can abide a regime of stark equality, Hobbes wagers that the sovereign’s law of honor is a safe way to sate persistent cravings for glory. The law of honor is safe, in Hobbes’s initial estimation, because titles are conventional—they neither recognize, nor create, intrinsic diVerences between subjects. As Hobbes explains, “A Soveraigne doth Honour a Subject, with whatsoever Title, or OYce, or Employment, or Action, that he himselfe will have taken for a signe of his will to Honour him” (L 154). Honorary titles signify “favour in the Common-wealth”—they tell us something about the sovereign’s will, without revealing anything about the honoree’s lineage or aptitude (L 154).65 Reflecting the sovereign’s “will to Honour,” rather than the honoree’s intrinsic merits, titles engage subjects’ desire for reputation, even while they direct attention away from the subject’s natural endowments, toward the sovereign’s (artificial) standards. Defined this way, titles deprive subjects of occasion to boast of inherent superiority—or even of prerogative. When Hobbes relates the history of heraldry, he locates the political eYcacy of titles in their lack of significant political prerogatives. Following John Selden, Hobbes traces a history of heraldic deflation, in which titles were evacuated of their original prerogatives. “By occasion of trouble, and for reasons of good and peaceable government,” titles that formerly conferred “OYce, and Command,” were stripped of their perquisites and “turned into meer Titles; serving for the most part, to distinguish the precedence, place, and order of subjects in the Commonwealth” (L 159). “Meer Titles” promote “good and peaceable government,” for they lower the stakes, minimizing controversy and invidious comparisons. The law of honor could seem to exemplify strategies of political pacification that scholars impute to Hobbes: “non-regenerative” politics 66 and a public / private split.67 On this view, Hobbes arranges society so as to minimize destructive consequences of vainglory, but he concedes that vainglory is intractable. Instead of disciplining the passions, Hobbes reserves the public sphere for the sovereign’s evaluations, and he relegates personal evaluations (some of which may be vainglorious) to the private sphere. In other words, honorary titles are masks that display “the publique worth of a man,” but subjects are free to glory privately (L 152).68 Although this interpretation has intuitive plausibility, upon closer examination, it appears questionable. As Hobbes acknowledges, honorary titles not only conceal passion behind an impenetrable wall of protocol—they also circulate on the public stage. Once in circulation, Modesty | 59

their meaning is constituted through “the opinion of the beholders” as much as through sovereign fiat (L 400).69 Modest subjects read titles as a political expression of natural equality.70 However, subjects who harbor private delusions of grandeur are liable to misinterpret titles as tokens of innate distinction, and these misinterpretations have devastating, and public, consequences. When Hobbes catalogs the causes of crime, he concedes that vainglory is liable to surface in public, even where laws of honor are in place. By Hobbes’s admission, vainglory is a prime cause of criminality within the commonwealth. Because the vainglorious overestimate their savvy (“a false presumption of their own Wisedome”) and underestimate the vigilance of the police, they are prone to criminal activity (L 341–42). Hobbes complains: Of the Passions that most frequently are causes of Crime, one, is Vain-glory, or a foolish over-rating of their own worth; as if diVerence of worth, were an eVect of their wit, or riches, or bloud, or some other naturall quality, not depending on the Will of those that have the Soveraign Authority. From whence proceedeth a Presumption that the punishments ordained by the Lawes, and extended generally to all Subjects, ought not to be inflicted on them, with the same rigour they are inflicted on poore, obscure, and simple men, comprehended under the name of the Vulgar. (L 341) Here, Hobbes concedes that distinctions designed to promote peace can exacerbate vainglory, prompting criminal malfeasance. Individuals who crave approbation are liable to mistake artificial inequality (“diVerence of worth”) for evidence of inherent superiority (“an eVect of their wit, or riches, or bloud, or some other naturall quality”). In this case, the vanity that titles were designed to channel leads subjects to misinterpret their significance, and place themselves above the law. Although titles are arbitrary, signifying nothing but the sovereign’s will to honor, in practice, titles work because they flatter pretensions to distinction. If titles are to sate subjects’ lust for glory, they cannot be perceived as empty. But when the vain misread titles as tokens of innate distinction, they are liable to break the law. Moreover, if titles are to be considered honorable, they must also be rare. But, by Hobbes’s admission, the rarity of titles creates another set of problems, for many who crave recognition will “have to be passed over; for they are not all what they believe themselves to be, and even if they were, there are too many of them to be all employed in public oYce”—and the sense of “personal insult” leads the losers to “passionately expect opportunities for revolution” (DC 138). If subjects must already be modest to decipher the law of honor, the law has limited power to contain vanity. Enforcing protocols of pre60 | Chapter 2

cedence mutes ostentation, but it does not touch the more fundamental problem of which vanity is a symptom—the problem of delusional overestimation. To address the problem of self-delusion, Hobbes will have to discipline vainglory, and foster the contrary virtues of modesty and humility. Hobbes’s more categorical pronouncements regarding glory have led scholars to conclude that vainglory is universal, uniform, and immutable.71 However, as my analysis reveals, all are not equally susceptible to vanity—the state of nature contains “a few men, more modest [modestiores] than everybody else” (DC 53). Moreover, vainglory is not uniform. People exhibit vainglory in diVerent ways, and in diVerent measures, and variation derives not only from individuals’ diverse constitutions, but also from discrepancies in exposure to social practices that nurture vanity (e.g., flattery, Presbyterian theology, the literary genre of romance). Because vainglory is not just a brute fact of nature, but assumes varying forms given social circumstances, it is susceptible to more radical forms of therapy than channeling or redirection. By Hobbes’s admission, the vainglory to which youth are prone “is corrected often times by Age, and Employment” (L 125). If vanity thrives on misguided educational practices, then vanity is susceptible to educational correction—which is not synonymous with eradication, although it promises a more thoroughgoing intervention than laws of honor. Further, “cultural transformation” through education is a necessary supplement to coercion because, by Hobbes’s admission, laws do not reliably produce the aVective and intellectual dispositions on which they depend.72 “The grounds of these [the sovereign’s] Rights, have the rather need to be diligently, and truly taught; because they cannot be maintained by any Civill Law, or terrour of legal punishment” (L 377). Hobbes specifies virtues requisite for political subjection when he enumerates “those things that Weaken, or tend to the DISSOLUTION of a Common-wealth”: the commonwealth’s vulnerability to “intestine disorder” derives from “want, both of the art of making fit Lawes, to square their actions by, and also of humility, and patience, to suVer the rude and cumbersome points of their present greatnesse to be taken oV ” (L 363). By Hobbes’s admission, both deterrence (“fit Lawes”) and civic virtue (“humility”) are required to sustain the commonwealth. However, having cast aside Augustinian humility and attendant disciplines of self-mortification, how will Hobbes cultivate acknowledgment, and practice, of equality? In the story that Hobbes tells about the state of nature, a very particular kind of fear, the fear of unanticipated violent death, chastens the proud.73 Although the sovereign has myriad legal and political tools at his disposal, he cannot readily inspire the fear of unanticipated violent death. Nor would it be in his interest to do so—for the commonwealth’s legitimacy Modesty | 61

derives from the predictability it introduces into human aVairs. Entering the commonwealth, individuals trade fear of violent death for fear of punishment. On Hobbes’s view, this trade represents a good bargain because punishment follows a predictable logic, and can therefore be avoided by prudent subjects:74 Sometimes a man desires to know the event of an action; and then he thinketh of some like action past, and the events thereof one after another; supposing like events will follow like actions. As he that foresees what wil become of a Criminal, re-cons what he has seen follow on the like Crime before; having this order of thoughts, The Crime, the OYcer, the Prison, the Judge, and the Gallowes. (L 97) But man’s natural condition is so harrowing, and so humbling, because it is utterly unpredictable. If modesty results from visceral experience of existential insecurity, then there are no easy political antidotes to vanity. This limit to sovereign power reveals a tension within Hobbes’s theory of obligation. For Hobbes, “security of a mans person, in his life,” is “the motive, and end for which this renouncing, and transferring of Right is introduced” (L 192). In the state of nature, modesty results from visceral experience of existential insecurity. But in a commonwealth that supports a transparent, equitable legal system, subjects have no cause to fear unanticipated violent death. With the advent of bodily security, consciousness of mortality (and, by extension, aYrmation of equality) is liable to dwindle. In the commonwealth, subjects gain opportunities to pursue the complacency-inducing satisfactions of “commodious living”—and, on Hobbes’s diagnosis, sated subjects are smug, ostentatious, and arrogant (L 188). Given Hobbes’s qualms about contentment, readers should hesitate before branding him a bourgeois apologist.75 Hobbes often complains that security and satiety breed dispositions inimical to civic virtue: “Man is then most troublesome, when he is most at ease: for then it is that he loves to shew his Wisdome, and controule the Actions of them that governe the Common-wealth” (L 226).76 The more secure the commonwealth, the more vulnerable it is to corrosion by pride. Thus, Hobbes’s ostensible “solution” is part of the problem. Security is the end of political association, but security can breed smugness, complacency, and “ignorance.” 77

Dust and Ashes Acknowledging that security is no panacea leads us to adopt a revised account of Hobbes’s project, in Leviathan. The commonwealth aims not, as some have suggested, to free subjects from feelings of insecurity and fear,78 62 | Chapter 2

but rather to achieve the right balance between bodily security and consciousness of vulnerability (both equal vulnerability as individuals and absolute vulnerability as humans). Although Hobbes promises subjects “perpetuall, and not temporary security,” he concedes liabilities of founding a state on a campaign to eliminate feelings of vulnerability (L 248). Indeed, security is liable to be “temporary” if subjects forget the state’s ultimate justification—that is, if they forget that they are mere mortals—because smug subjects are unwilling to do the work required to sustain the commonwealth. Consequently, Hobbes must devise strategies for recalling subjects to their limitations without exposing them to violent death (and the state to dissolution). Hobbes’s challenge is to envision (and, ultimately, create) a culture hospitable to modesty, a culture in which subjects can recognize limits to their power as individuals, even while they aYrm both the necessity and the possibility of exercising power collectively to sustain political community. Given the seductiveness of aristocratic glory and Protestant humility, this is a formidable challenge. However, Hobbes is determined to identify resources for cultivating modesty—sources that expose individual vulnerability without denying human powers of collective agency. Presumably, reading Leviathan, a text that “recalls man to his littleness, his imperfection, his mortality, while at the same time recognizing his importance to himself,” could serve this purpose.79 But Hobbes acknowledges that subjects consumed by the comforts and demands of civilized life are easily “diverted from the deep meditation, which the learning of truth, not only in the matter of Naturall Justice, but also of all other Sciences necessarily requireth” (L 384). If security breeds subjects too complacent to heed philosophical arguments for equality, it behooves Hobbes to identify alternative chastening discourses. Given the composition of Hobbes’s audience, and given Hobbes’s “top-down” theory of education, he relies heavily on theological discourses, which the sovereign can disseminate to “Divines in the Pulpit” who shape public opinion (L 384).80 Hobbes finds a biblical alternative to Augustinian self-mortification in the book of Job, a canonical text that held sway with contemporary Protestants. When Hobbes identifies the source of Leviathan’s titular metaphor, he intimates that Job is the authoritative biblical treatment of the political challenges posed by pride: Hitherto I have set forth the nature of Man, (whose Pride and other Passions have compelled him to submit himselfe to Government;) together with the great power of his Governour, whom I compared to Leviathan, taking that comparison out of the two last verses of the one and fortieth of Modesty | 63

Job; where God having set forth the great power of Leviathan, called him King of the Proud. There is nothing, saith he, on earth to be compared with him. He is made so as not to be afraid. Hee seeth every high thing below him; and is King of all the children of pride. (L 362) Scholars usually read this allusion as a boast vaunting the sovereign’s solution to the problem of pride.81 On this reading, Job confirms Hobbes’s “nonregenerative” approach to politics. The sovereign need not cultivate modesty, because if he is suYciently powerful, he will cow proud subjects. But this interpretation misses the passage’s equivocal tone—for acknowledgment of the commonwealth’s fragility tempers Hobbes’s celebration of sovereignty. His “great power” notwithstanding, the king “is mortall, and subject to decay,” and Hobbes enumerates threats to his viability in the chapter to which this passage provides a transition, “Of those things that Weaken, or tend to the DISSOLUTION of a Common-wealth” (L 362, 363). As Hobbes understands, dissolution is likely if the sovereign relies solely on deterrent power. Given the allusion’s context and force, we should hesitate before concluding that Hobbes reads Job as an endorsement of coercive solutions to the problem of pride. Rather, Job is the authoritative biblical text on pride because it oVers a chastening dramatization of the reciprocal relationship between divine omnipotence and human finitude. As W. H. Greenleaf has argued, Hobbes’s aYnity for Job reflects his preference for Ockhamist over Augustinian traditions of theology.82 While Augustinians insist that divine omnipotence entails human impotence, Ockhamists contend that God is so powerful, and so unfathomable, that humans are left no choice but to manage their own aVairs, because God is unavailable for consultation. (As Hobbes develops this line of argument, submitting political life to divine direction betrays sinful pride, because it presumes that humans can know God.)83 In Leviathan, Hobbes interprets Job within a broadly Ockhamist frame, as a testament to God’s unfathomable power. Theological merits aside, Job’s unfathomable God is useful for political purposes. An unfathomable God leaves room for human agency, but the recognition that God is unfathomable exposes limits to human agency—limits that underscore the need for modesty. On Hobbes’s interpretation, Job aYrms God’s sovereignty by nature, and oVers a graphic exposé of what life is like for subjects of an omnipotent God. Hobbes ascribes two forms of sovereignty to God. God reigns over all who “acknowledge his Providence, by the naturall Dictates of Right Reason,” but God also reigns over “one peculiar Nation (the Jewes)” through positive laws whose legitimacy derives from consent (L 397).84 While God’s sovereignty over 64 | Chapter 2

the Jews has contractual underpinnings, God’s sovereignty by nature derives from God’s “Power Irresistible”—God has the “Right to All things,” including the right to “reigne over all the rest,” because God alone has the power to rule over all (L 397). As Hobbes explains, “But if God has the right to reign on the basis of his omnipotence, it is evident that men incur the obligation to obey him because of their weakness” (DC 174). Hobbes cites Job to illustrate God’s prerogatives as sovereign by nature. Job teaches that even the virtuous can suVer at God’s hands, because God’s “Right of AZicting, is not always derived from mens Sinne, but from Gods Power” (L 398). Thus, when Job demands an explanation for his ordeal, God confirms Job’s innocence, but nevertheless justifies Job’s “AZiction by arguments drawn from his Power” (L 398). Job’s ordeal demonstrates that insecurity is the fate of subjects in God’s kingdom by nature, because “the right to do anything whatsoever is an essential and direct attribute of omnipotence” (DC 31). Prosperity, piety, and the amenities of civilized life do not render Job invulnerable. At the same time, Job’s recognition that he is subject to the whims of an omnipotent God does not prove debilitating. In the book’s epilogue, Job embraces worldly commerce with renewed vigor. However, unlike the bourgeois, of whom Hobbes is justly suspicious, Job does not grow smug with renewed prosperity. Of course, Job is not the only subject in God’s kingdom by nature. Although Job is exceptionally virtuous, and his ordeal exceptionally harrowing, as subjects of an omnipotent God, all humans are vulnerable to similar tribulations. Thus, Hobbes cites Job not to elicit pity for an unlucky man, but rather to remind readers that, as limited beings, their lot is as precarious as Job’s. How does asserting human vulnerability at the hands of an omnipotent God advance Hobbes’s project of cultivating modesty? Job teaches that political subjection does not exempt individuals from natural subjection to God. Indeed, individuals inhabit two kingdoms simultaneously (the natural and the political), but in this case, dual subjection does not threaten divided loyalties or conflicting jurisdictions. God’s sovereignty by nature does not undermine human sovereignty because the only laws incumbent upon God’s natural subjects are the laws of nature—laws that indicate both the commonwealth’s desirability and the means of its achievement. Thus, reminding political subjects that they are subject to God is another way of stressing their obligation to uphold the laws of nature (including the tenth law, modesty). If “fear, or the awareness of one’s own weakness (in the face of divine power)” binds individuals to the laws of nature, then the omnipotent God of Job provides a key supplement to sovereign power, working on the theological register to cultivate civic virtue (DC 175). Modesty | 65

As an exegete of Job, Hobbes assigns distinct, but complementary, portfolios to the mortal and immortal Gods. The mortal god deploys the threat of punishment to achieve security and predictability. Unpredictable by definition, the immortal God deploys the “argument from power” to expose limits to human powers of mastery. Although individuals may find security in political subjection, they are also subject to a sovereign not of their own creation. Hobbes hopes the realization that humans are but “dust and ashes” will elicit ongoing confirmation of the need to erect and sustain a commonwealth, but it will also ensure that subjects exercise their power with due modesty—without succumbing to the delusion that, because they can create a state, they are like God, invulnerable and no longer in need of a state.85 To put it another way, Job counters two forms of forgetting that menace established commonwealths: forgetting that humans are equal, and forgetting that humans are human. Job attacks the propensity for delusional overestimation that Hobbes diagnoses as the root of vainglory. In a stable commonwealth that reduces the threat of violent death, subjects are liable to forget that they are equally mortal. As an exegete of Job, Hobbes mobilizes theological convictions and religious aVect to secure compliance with the laws of nature—laws that require aYrmation and practice of equality. Through a confrontation with divine power, Job achieves the “true knowledge” of himself that eludes the vain. Properly interpreted, the book of Job has the potential to inspire a similar reckoning among subjects. But Job’s assertion of divine sovereignty also counters the tendency to forget the qualitative diVerence between human and divine creativity. The God of Job posts absolute limits to human power. Even when humans acknowledge equality, and act in concert to reduce the likelihood of violent death, they remain subject to God’s unfathomable power. One might worry that exposing humanity’s ineluctable vulnerability could breed disaVection. After all, why would subjects invest in a commonwealth that cannot insulate them from divine violence?86 But acknowledging God’s sovereignty by nature is a potential prophylactic against disaVection, for it checks the tendency to mistake the mortal God for the immortal God. On my reading, subjects who acknowledge God’s sovereignty by nature are likely to have more realistic expectations regarding the degree of security that a state can provide, and the “inconveniences” that are the price of security. The modest acknowledge that, as authors of sovereignty, humans can mitigate their predicament, but they cannot master it, for they remain subject to forces beyond human control. Thus, subjects who understand that individual vulnerability necessitates the state’s creation, but that, as a human artifice, the state cannot extinguish human vulnerability (for “nothing can be immortall, which mortals 66 | Chapter 2

make”), are better poised to accept the inevitable disappointments of political life (L 363).87 In sum, Job aVords theological resources for cultivating modesty because it dramatizes individual weakness without ceding the political realm to divine oversight.

Conclusion Once we appreciate Hobbes’s investment in modesty as a virtue for political subjects, we can see that Hobbes’s claims for the power of human artifice, and the possibilities of human mastery, are more modest than scholars have realized. Readers who accept my characterization of Hobbes’s project may nevertheless judge Hobbes unduly sanguine about its prospects for success with Protestant readers, who would likely find invocations of a transcendent God unpersuasive, coming from a notorious materialist like Hobbes. As history attests, clerics greeted Leviathan with suspicion, horror, and outrage, Hobbes’s theistic rhetoric notwithstanding.88 But Hobbes is not as deluded about his audience as Leviathan’s reception history might suggest. Precisely because Hobbes appreciates the threat posed by an independent, university-educated clergy, he addresses Leviathan to the sovereign—who has the right “to be Judge of what Opinions and Doctrines are averse, and what conducing to Peace; and consequently, on what occasions, how farre, and what, men are to be trusted withall, in speaking to Multitudes of people” (L 233). Hobbes oVers his interpretation of Job in the guise of a public theology that the sovereign can endorse—and that the sovereign may endorse, if he or she (or they) grasps its political merits. Thus, as an exegete of Job, Hobbes does not purport to have devised a foolproof solution to the problem of pride, guaranteed to persuade all clerics. After all, on my reading, Hobbes never promises foolproof solutions—rather, he reminds readers that disappointment and inconvenience are inevitable. Having raised the specter of the sovereign’s censorship rights, however, one might worry about the appeal of Hobbesian humility for a very diVerent seventeenth-century audience: proponents of the freedom to philosophize.89 Philosophers who uphold more robust conceptions of freedom are liable to read Hobbes’s ethos of humility as yet another gambit for getting individuals to author their own subjection. On this reading, Hobbes’s enthusiasm for humility is of a piece with his political authoritarianism. As a matter of fact, Hobbes’s immediate audience included one of the most vocal critics of humility, and one of the most vocal proponents of the freedom to philosophize— namely, Baruch Spinoza. Although Spinoza remains indebted to Hobbes for Modesty | 67

the architecture of his political theory, he does not accept Hobbes’s contention that humility is a moral virtue, let alone an “Immutable and Eternall” law (L 215). In the Ethics, Spinoza declares that “humility is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason” (IVP53).90 As we will see, Spinoza’s reservations about humility are quite complex. As prelude to an analysis of these reservations, in the next chapter, I want to briefly note a set of political concerns that informs Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s divergent assessments of humility. The controversy surrounding humility’s place within the table of secular virtue is one instance of a more fundamental debate about the political valence of fear and, by extension, the aVective sources of political stability. While Hobbes appeals to fear as the cement of political obligation, Spinoza questions the stability of a polity founded upon fear. In Leviathan, anxious meditation on mortality inspires recognition of human equality and, by extension, sustains political community. Without denying the motivational force of a more aYrmative appeal, Hobbes nevertheless insists that, when binding men to their covenants, the “Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear” (L 200). Hobbesian philosophy functions as a memento mori, recalling subjects to their finitude in an eVort to secure their obligation. By contrast, in the Ethics, Spinoza states, “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (IVP67). If Spinoza disdains Hobbes’s preoccupation with mortality, he does not contest the political salience of finitude. To discourage morbid fascination with death is not to invite denial of finitude. Rather, Spinoza would change finitude’s emotional valence. If finitude is to deliver on its non-Augustinian promise of empowerment through limitation, Spinoza argues, it must be experienced as joyful, because feelings of fear only diminish us. Although Spinoza concedes fear’s instrumental value as a spur to obedience among the vulgar, he denies that it can serve as the ground for a truly stable political community. Like the biblical prophets whose checkered career Spinoza details in the Theologico-Political Treatise, Hobbes exploits sad passions to secure political cohesion. Yet, on Spinoza’s view, the polity founded on fear is authoritarian, and therefore unstable. As Spinoza declares in the Theologico-Political Treatise, the state’s “ultimate purpose is not to exercise dominion nor to restrain men by fear and deprive them of independence, but on the contrary to free every man from fear so that he may live in security as far as is possible, that is, so that he may best preserve his own natural right to exist and to act, without harm to himself and to others.” 91 If Hobbes and Spinoza debate finitude’s emotional valence and the wisdom of founding a state upon fear, they agree that politics is a realm of human construction. In other words, Hobbes and Spinoza are both secular theorists, 68 | Chapter 2

and, in their own way, each makes acknowledgment of finitude a crucial component of secular empowerment projects. Thus, it would be a mistake to read Hobbes’s endorsement of humility as an atavism, a vestige of Augustinianism that betrays his failure to adopt a truly secular stance. The debate between Hobbes and Spinoza is an intramural secular debate about the aVective dimensions of reconciliation to finitude. As the Hobbes / Spinoza controversy reveals, the debate over humility’s virtues does not invariably pit secularists against theocrats. In this period, theocrats are not humility’s lone partisans, nor are secular theorists unanimous in denying humility’s virtue. We need a historically accurate map of the battle lines in this debate in order to grasp the motivation for and meaning of Spinoza’s reclassification of humility. As I argue in the next chapter, even when secular theorists discard humility, the gesture need not express lust for mastery or forgetting of finitude. When Spinoza removes humility from the column of the virtues, he presents a vision of secular agency that, like Hobbes’s, exceeds the binary opposition, inherited from Augustinian theology, between autonomy and dependence.

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chapter 3 Humility spinoza on the joys of finitude

In the Ethics, Spinoza makes the blunt declaration that “Humility is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason” (IVP53).1 With this declaration, Spinoza appears to stake out a position unprecedented within the annals of Jewish and Christian philosophy.2 If Machiavelli worries that humility saps martial valor, and Hobbes and Descartes allow that humility can be excessive, Spinoza is arguably the first philosopher to categorically deny humility’s virtue. Spinoza is also, on influential interpretations, the first secular individual, who “articulated and exemplified in his person what was to emerge in time as the overriding principle of modern life” when he forsook sectarian aYliation after his excommunication from Amsterdam’s Jewish community.3 When coupled with his reputation as a secularist avant la lettre, Spinoza’s unceremonious demotion of humility makes him seem like a poster child for the twin narratives that this book contests—the story of humility’s modern demise, and the story that dates secularity to the rise of a sovereign self. Indeed, from the moment of the Ethics’ publication, critics have lodged versions of this very accusation—citing Spinoza’s apparent disdain for humility as evidence that he deposes God only to put humanity in God’s place. Even more than Hobbes, Spinoza appears to confirm suspicions that secularity is irremediably proud. In other words, Spinoza presents an especially diYcult case for the argument, advanced in this book, that modesty and humility have a role to play in the constitution of secular subjectivity. I tackle Spinoza’s critique of humility precisely because, on a superficial reading, it appears to confirm the standard story of humility’s modern obsolescence. On closer inspection, I argue, Spinoza’s case challenges, rather than confirms, received histories of humility. Narratives, redolent of Hume, that make humility’s obsolescence patently obvious cannot do justice to Spinoza’s complex negotiation with humility, in the Ethics. Once we appreciate the nuances of Spinoza’s position on humility, we can relate an altogether new story about humility’s contested status in this period. As Spinoza demonstrates, the prospect of humility’s revaluation does not entice all seventeenth-century philosophers. Yet we can acknowledge 70

mounting reservations about humility without concluding that secularity enthrones humanity in a position of sovereign mastery. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza denies humility’s virtue. Yet Spinoza reclassifies the virtue commonly hailed as revelation’s ethical signature not because he entertains fantasies of human self-suYciency. Rather, Spinoza denies humility’s virtues in an eVort to recast finitude’s emotional valence, making it a source of strength rather than an occasion for self-reproach. Spinoza is a crucial figure for a revised history of humility, then, because he demonstrates that reservations about humility need not express delusions of omnipotence. To capture Spinoza’s position on self-estimation in all of its complexity, I recapitulate the debate between Spinoza and his first Christian critics surrounding humility’s virtues (or lack thereof ). The Ethics was an immediate succès de scandale, provoking fierce opposition. In the late seventeenth century, Christians of various sectarian and philosophical commitments sounded the alarm that Spinoza’s philosophy was incoherent and dangerous, subversive of all morality.4 Although Spinoza’s earliest critics were mystics who employed Scholastic terminology, Spinoza’s most tenacious critics were Christians motivated, in part, by apologetic concerns—namely, the need to rebut charges that Cartesian rationalism culminates in Spinozism.5 At a moment when Descartes’s philosophy appeared suspect, attacking Spinoza was one way that Cartesians defended Descartes’s Christian bona fides. From the moment of its posthumous publication, in 1677, the Ethics provoked accusations of pride from these quarters. With the declaration that “humility is not a virtue,” Spinoza appears to confirm his critics’ worst suspicions. For Spinoza’s detractors, the express dismissal of humility is symptomatic of a more fundamental arrogance at the Ethics’ heart: denial of a transcendent God. On this view, pride is both a motivation for, and a liability of, Spinoza’s immanent turn. Yet while Spinoza’s critics press accusations of pride, they also encounter passages in the Ethics that appear to rehabilitate, rather than refute, humility. For a critic of humility, Spinoza says things that sound, to Christian ears, curiously humble. Struggling to make sense of what seem, from a Christian perspective, like blatant contradictions, Spinoza’s detractors direct our attention to facets of Spinoza’s argument that exceed the terms of Augustinian polemic (in which humility is the only bulwark against self-deification). Precisely because they are tendentious, tailored to political and theological exigencies of post-Cartesian controversies, the Ethics’ earliest refutations reveal nuances of Spinoza’s arguments that escape twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics. Too often, the conviction that humility is not, in fact, a virtue leads twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers to hasty conclusions about what Humility | 71

humility means, and why Spinoza dismisses it. In the seventeenth century, by contrast, partisans of humility assumed that Spinoza’s arguments to the contrary must be faulty. Searching for textual evidence to vindicate this assumption, they fixated on passages that appear congenial to humility. The polemicists exploited these passages to convict Spinoza of philosophical error. For the most part, the polemicists’ objections lack philosophical merit. Spinoza’s logic is not, in fact, faulty. Yet the polemic still provides us with invaluable information about Spinoza’s position on humility, for it alerts us to facets of the Ethics’ argument that confound Augustinian expectations. Spinoza’s detractors have trouble making sense of his position precisely because, contrary to what Augustine has led them to expect, Spinoza is a critic, rather than a champion, of pride. In this chapter, my project is less to refute the refutations than to treat them as barometers registering the subtlety of Spinoza’s negotiation with religious ethics. Reading the refutations in this way, I present an interpretation of Spinoza that counters the triumphalist narrative favored by previous scholars of Spinoza’s early modern reception. The anti-Spinoza polemic has been the nearexclusive preserve of scholars who venerate Spinoza as a modernist revolutionary who demolished benighted superstition, ushering in a new era of freedom, equality, liberalism, and secularism. Curiously, situating Spinoza in his historical context only exacerbates the hagiographic and proleptic tendencies that have long plagued Spinoza scholarship. By contrast, I return to the antiSpinoza polemic to unsettle, rather than amplify, modernist self-confidence. As I see it, the anti-Spinoza polemic helps us to appreciate ways in which Spinoza’s texts resist neat oppositions (e.g., humility versus pride, religious versus secular)—whether Augustinian or Enlightened in origin. Without denying Spinoza’s secularity or minimizing his challenge to biblical theology, I contend that, to envision secular agency, Spinoza must retain and rework some of humility’s traditional connotations. Thus, Spinoza is not persuasively cast as a modernist revolutionary or as a partisan of robust self-esteem.6 With this rejoinder to interpretations that hail Spinoza as a founder of liberal individualism, I join a growing movement to read him, instead, as a dissenter from counterproductive ideals of human dignity.7 In what follows, I read Spinoza as a non-Augustinian critic of pride, showing how his reservations about humility reflect his conviction that, to enhance human power, he must chasten human pretension. To deflate human vanity and the prejudices it sustains, Spinoza discredits Christian humility, which fosters anthropocentric delusions that sap human power. Humility inspires skepticism not only because it makes us feel bad about ourselves, but also be72 | Chapter 3

cause it makes us feel good about ourselves in the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. To enhance human powers of political agency, Spinoza replaces the spurious joys of humility with the genuine joys of self-aYrmation. Yet the turn from humility to self-aYrmation is not a turn away from finitude. Rather, Spinoza revalues finitude’s emotional valence, promising that individuals who aYrm human limitation will experience acquiescentia in se ipso—the aVect opposed to humility, often translated (misleadingly, in my view) as “self-esteem.” In the Ethics, Spinoza invites a reckoning with power’s limits—a reckoning that (unlike humility) promises to empower to the extent that it is joyous.

Sovereignty and Superbia in the Seventeenth-Century Anti-Spinoza Polemic In Le Nouvel Atheisme Renversé, François Lamy dismisses Spinoza’s metaphysics as an elaborate and disingenuous justification for a grave moral failing (namely, inability to abide Christian asceticism).8 Although Spinoza employs a traditional moral idiom, speaking incessantly about virtue, love of God, and salvation, he perverts these terms’ meaning. In its proper, Christian signification, Lamy writes, virtue “consists of neglecting one’s own interests, of forgetting oneself, of renouncing oneself and sacrificing oneself for the service of God and of one’s neighbor.” 9 In Spinoza’s deceptive and dangerous lexicon, by contrast, virtue is synonymous with pursuit of self-interest: “Virtue consists only in working for one’s own preservation, and seeking one’s own interests.”10 Spinoza’s repeated encomiums to virtue threaten to conceal the vicious pride that animates his system, Lamy warns. While Christian virtue prescribes a stern discipline, on Spinoza’s definition, virtue literally demands nothing of us, for we behave virtuously by following the laws of our nature. Lamy is as alarmed by Spinoza’s (mis)appropriation of Christian ethical vocabulary as he is by Spinoza’s frontal assault on foundational tenets of Christian theology, like miracles and incarnation, for he worries that readers will be seduced to libertinage by Spinoza’s language (a “language capable of dazzling and fostering illusion”).11 Unable to abide ascetic renunciation, Spinoza tacitly redefines virtue and, in the process, licenses unrepentant pride. “In Spinoza’s dictionary, virtue, piety, and love of God, are nothing but genuine self-love [amour propre].”12 On Lamy’s reading, Spinoza’s license to pride follows necessarily from his denial of divine transcendence. Christians revere God as the “sovereign master and moderator of the universe.”13 Indeed, atheists shrink from God precisely because he is “a judge,” “a master,” “a severe legislator,” “a powerful King”—in a word, a sovereign.14 God’s “wise government of the universe” and his proviHumility | 73

dential oversight are “so inconvenient for self-love [amour propre],” according to Lamy, because they impose severe constraints on human agency.15 In accord with reason, Christianity teaches that humans need government, but the very facets of human nature that necessitate government render humans incapable of self-rule: Christian morality hides neither our maladies, nor our weaknesses; it acquaints us with our disgrace and our estrangement from God, the dissoluteness and corruption of our nature, the injuries and the enfeeblement of our liberty for the good; but it teaches us [the existence of ] a wise mediator, a powerful repairer, a charitable physician, an excellent liberator.16 A theology of divine transcendence counters pride, or the delusion that humans are capable of self-direction, because it upholds divine rule as necessary (but unmerited) compensation for human depravity. If Lamy chastens human vanity, exposing flaws irremediable without God’s grace, his litany of human depravity also elevates humans to a privileged position within God’s providential scheme. Lamy’s divine sovereign is “suYciently wise to prescribe a fitting end for each being, and suYciently free and suYciently powerful to guide each thing to its end.”17 Humans are subject to judgment because God has assigned them a lofty end, endowing them with freedom (a faculty susceptible to abuse). Thus, in the same breath that Lamy laments human depravity, he celebrates humanity’s privilege as God’s favorites. It is indubitable, Lamy asserts, that God “has made man for him: that is to say, for a served and honored being.”18 Lamy’s theology of divine transcendence is simultaneously deflationary and inflationary, mingling exhortations to humility with assertions of human privilege. Significantly, Lamy identifies parallel impulses toward inflation and deflation in Spinoza’s metaphysics. Lamy locates the deflationary force of Spinoza’s system in the adamant refusal to grant humanity a privileged position within nature. When Spinoza equates God with nature, he not only dethrones God, he also deprives humans of the lofty perch they occupy in Christian theology. The doctrine of substance transforms “man into beast, after having transformed God into a machine. In two words, this is the summary of the entirety of Spinoza’s religion and morality.”19 Christians contend that humans are the pinnacle of God’s creation—for theology teaches that “God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God” (IApp). By contrast, Spinoza rejects the idea of a transcendent creator—and, to Lamy’s chagrin, Spinoza’s mechanical God does not prefer humans to animals or inanimate objects. Lamy mockingly paraphrases Spinoza’s arguments in the appendix to 74 | Chapter 3

Part I of the Ethics: “Honestly, men are quite mistaken to believe themselves so distinguished and so favored by God, and to imagine that he has more consideration for them than he has for ants and for plants.” 20 Throughout Le Nouvel, Lamy warns that Spinoza’s naturalism and determinism render morality incoherent—why issue rules of conduct for beings whose actions are determined by forces beyond their control? Here, however, Lamy’s polemic reads like an expression of wounded vanity, prompted by Spinoza’s systematic, and, from a Christian perspective, degrading, withdrawal of human privilege.21 Given Lamy’s complaint that Spinoza reduces humans to beasts, one might expect him to retract (or at least temper) his accusation of pride. After all, what grounds do humans have for glory if, from God’s perspective, they are indistinguishable from rocks and trees? Yet, in an ingenious polemical twist, Lamy contends that Spinoza’s withdrawal of human privilege is precisely what invites self-celebration. In other words, it is as a critic of sovereignty (both divine sovereignty over creation, and human sovereignty within nature) that Spinoza founds the sovereign self. Although a theory of immanence deprives humans of their status as God’s favorites, the loss of anthropocentric privilege liberates humans from the burdens of obligation and dependence. As Lamy explains, in Spinoza’s system, virtue is its own reward—it aims at human purposes, rather than, as in Christianity, at divine reward: The reward for virtue, he says, is virtue itself: that is to say, that this virtue which, to speak frankly, is nothing other than self-love [amour propre]; this virtue, I say, is our end and our sovereign good; so that according to this tale, man is his own sovereign good. In good faith, can one experience as many weaknesses and miseries as we are aware of every day and credit this extravagant thought? It is impossible that Spinoza has not been frightened by it himself; and it is apparently to ease this fear that he is going to speak to us about the divine law in a somewhat diVerent manner.22 On Lamy’s interpretation, Spinoza’s ethic of self-interest is tantamount to pride because it considers human ends the ultimate ends, and because the claim that humans are capable of serving as ends accords them significantly more agency than traditional theology allows, with its litany of sin and depravity. In sum, Spinoza “overturns all religion and morality,” for he installs humans in a position of sovereignty—a position previously reserved for God—and invites them to celebrate their power, instead of wallowing in weakness.23 It is no accident that Lamy figures Spinoza’s purported inversion of traditional morality as an expression of pride since, on traditional definitions, pride is an inversion of the rightful order of things. In pride, humans forsake God, Humility | 75

their true ground, and attempt to ground themselves. Writing in this (Augustinian) tradition, Lamy figures atheism as a project of reversal. If Spinoza’s thesis regarding the political origins of morality is to gain credibility, Lamy argues, Spinoza must first overturn received ideas. “But as this thesis would not be at all sustainable if one allowed common ideas regarding the nature of God and that of man to subsist, one must begin by overturning them.” 24 Indeed, Spinoza’s system constitutes just such a reversal—Lamy bemoans the “upheaval his system has caused in religion, morality, and everything one has known thus far about the nature of this world.” 25 And in a moment of supreme pique, Lamy dismisses Spinoza’s ravings as “aberrations, extravagances of an overturned brain.” 26 Lamy paints Spinoza’s ethics as the mirror image of religious ethics. If Christian theology teaches that humans can accomplish nothing without divine direction, Spinoza must assert absolute self-suYciency. If Christian theology aYrms divine sovereignty, Spinoza must elevate humanity to the position of sovereign good. Moreover, with the title Le Nouvel Atheisme Renversé, Lamy casts his own project as one of reversal.27 By Lamy’s admission, he and Spinoza are engaged in the same project—both would overturn (renverser) a metaphysical system. In Lamy’s case, however, the project of overturning eVects a return, for Lamy rights the moral edifice that Spinoza has brazenly inverted. Lamy’s polemic provides one possible genealogy for received portraits of secular subjectivity—portraits that equate the secular subject with the sovereign subject. The only conceivable motive for throwing oV the yoke of divine sovereignty, for Lamy, is the desire to enshrine humanity as the sovereign good. Tracing this narrative’s seventeenth-century genealogy reminds us that its origins are political, located in a public controversy surrounding the Christian bona fides of Cartesian philosophy. Given Lamy’s apologetic agenda, it is scarcely surprising that his accusations can miss the mark. The figure of usurpation poorly captures the aspirations of a theory, like Spinoza’s, that denies divine sovereignty. How can humans seize the throne if God was never king to begin with? Lamy’s polemic is revealing, however, because his best insights, as a reader of the Ethics, resist the terms of his own polemic. On some level, Lamy understands that Spinoza’s refusal of divine sovereignty not only withdraws God’s prerogatives as king, it also discredits the figure of royal power. Even Lamy has an inkling that Spinoza’s rejection of divine sovereignty is not persuasively figured as an inversion or reversal of traditional theology. If Spinoza’s fiercest opponents have trouble upholding the party line about his impious reversal of traditional morality, it is because Spinoza’s naturalism deprives humans of grounds for pride, making aYrmation of finitude an ethical imperative. 76 | Chapter 3

Humilitas Spinoza’s declaration that “Humility is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason” simultaneously scandalized and confirmed the suspicions of his seventeenth-century detractors, who read it as an open proclamation of atheism (one of the few in the Ethics) (IVP53). Like Lamy, Pierre Poiret complains that Spinoza uses religious language to create a pious façade liable to deceive all but the initiated, who understand that, by “God,” “justice,” and “love of God,” Spinoza means something diVerent from his theistic peers.28 Like Lamy, Poiret proceeds to expose “the worse than Satanic Spinozist impiety” lurking behind conventional, apparently anodyne, terms.29 Yet when it comes to IVP53, Poiret’s exposés are unnecessary, for with this proposition, Poiret contends, Spinoza openly professes impiety: Sometimes he openly manifests impiety, namely when he attacked Christian virtues from which the world clearly shrinks, as, for example, humility, repentance, and the like: for then that impious one not only openly scorns these virtues, but he also dishonors them as evils: But when he discusses virtues or truths with which the world, however corrupt, nonetheless wishes itself to be considered and seen as endowed, such as Justice, Love of God, God’s existence, and that we must love him; then through a most deceitful hypocrisy he employs and commends these words, but with terrible impiety, he substitutes for them other most false and atheistic concepts, [concepts] for himself and his people wickedly comprehended and everywhere most cunningly expressed; but for the rest, from whom he might otherwise fear the customary punishments for atheists—suitable to produce a smokescreen.30 For Poiret, Spinoza’s candor regarding humility provides an index of societal corruption—which is apparently not so thoroughgoing that one can openly deny God’s existence, or disparage justice. Throughout the Ethics, Spinoza pays lip service to virtues that retain social cachet. But when it comes to humility, Poiret contends, Spinoza need not dissemble, for humility has already become risible. Although Spinoza does not rest content with mockery, going so far as to brand humility evil, he is no renegade; indeed, he flatters the prejudices of a sophisticated audience when he denies humility’s virtue. Twentieth-century scholars also read IVP53 as an open repudiation of religious ethics. On one influential interpretation, Spinoza follows Hobbes and derives the virtues from self-interest; but unlike Hobbes, Spinoza arrives at startling conclusions, for he “goes beyond Hobbes also in openly rejecting Humility | 77

certain elements of traditional Christian morality.” 31 That is, scholars not only adduce Spinoza’s “rejection” of humility as evidence that he breaks with religious morality—they also adduce this rejection as evidence that his critique of religion is more candid, and more thoroughgoing, than those of his peers. Indeed, scholars hail Spinoza as the lone critic of humility within early modern philosophy. Of course, Machiavelli, whom Spinoza cites approvingly in the Political Treatise, famously laments that the premium placed upon “humility, abjectness, and contempt of things human” in Christian societies diminished love of republican freedom, not to mention the martial valor required to secure and sustain such freedom.32 But Machiavelli merely questions the compatibility of humility with republican valor—and he hedges his critique with a profession of Christianity’s truth, and a claim that, properly interpreted, Christianity allows patriotic fervor.33 Although contemporary scholars occasionally read Spinoza’s reclassification of humility as a return to classical magnanimity—a return that could reflect a debt to Machiavelli—more often, they take it as evidence that Spinoza wrote before his time, anticipating the dominant trends of modern philosophy.34 Scholars frequently contend that, as a critic of humility, Spinoza mounts a joyous “celebration of the self ” that anticipates those of Hume,35 J. S. Mill,36 and, above all, Nietzsche.37 At first blush, scholars who anoint Spinoza Nietzsche’s precursor appear to repeat Poiret’s verdict verbatim. For twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars, as for Poiret, IVP53 reveals Spinoza to be an uncompromising, and forthright, opponent of Christian virtue. On closer examination, however, IVP53’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception diVers in significant ways from its seventeenth-century reception. Contemporary scholars rarely examine Spinoza’s definition of humility in detail; they assume that we already know what humility means, why Spinoza disdains it, and what results from its revaluation (namely, self-assertion and will to power). By contrast, seventeenth-century critics devoted significant energy to scrutinizing, and challenging, the philosophical cogency of IVP53. Unlike twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers, humility’s seventeenth-century partisans were reluctant to conclude that IVP53 constitutes an unequivocal or decisive refutation of humility. In “Definitions of the AVects,” a condensed recapitulation of the aVects derived in the propositions of Part III, Spinoza defines humility (humilitas) as “a sadness born of the fact that a man considers his own lack of power, or weakness [impotentiam, sive imbecillitatem]” (DefAV XXVI).38 When Spinoza equates humility with contemplation of the self ’s “lack of power, or weakness,” he remains within conventional philosophical idiom.39 As we saw in chapter 1, seventeenth-century philosophical lexicons define humility as perception of 78 | Chapter 3

weakness, and, their authors’ piety notwithstanding, they frequently neglect to invoke a transcendent God as the standard against which humans are judged deficient. Yet Spinoza oVers a polemical emendation of conventional definitions when he classes perception of weakness as sad. As Poiret understands, this controversial characterization of humility’s emotional valence is what allows Spinoza to conclude that humility is not a virtue. “In order to weaken more solid virtues, he contrived to define them through sadness, which he supposed to be an imperfection, or rather, an evil; so that he would impress upon readers that virtues are vices.” 40 Alert to the significance that tristitia, or sadness, bears in Spinoza’s lexicon, Poiret objects that “both of the Spinozist definitions, of sadness and of humility, are false”—Spinoza errs both when he equates humility with sadness and when he equates sadness with diminution of power.41 To appreciate the force of Poiret’s objection, and understand why, within Spinoza’s system, classifying humility as a sad passion transfers it from the column of the virtues, we must clarify Spinoza’s aVective terminology. For Spinoza, aVectivity is a function of humanity’s position within the causal nexus that is God or Nature. Because humans are finite modes of nature subject to external determination, human powers of perseverance fluctuate as things happen to the self, and as the self makes things happen. As the individual interacts with a world indiVerent to his projects, and either submits to external causes or loosens their hold, the body’s power fluctuates, and these fluctuations are accompanied mentally by ideas. AVectivity tracks these fluctuations: “By aVect I understand aVections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these aVections” (IIID3). In joy, the self ’s power to persevere in being increases—“Joy is a man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection”; conversely, sadness results when an encounter with an external body diminishes the self ’s power to persevere—“Sadness is a man’s passage from a greater to a lesser perfection” (DefAV II, III).42 On Spinoza’s definition, aVects can be active or passive. One acts when one produces eVects that follow solely from one’s nature, and one is acted upon “when something happens in us, or something follows from our nature, of which we are only a partial cause” (IIID2). Recall that Spinoza defines virtue as power (IVD8), and equates acting from virtue with “acting, living, and preserving our being (these three signify the same thing) by the guidance of reason, from the foundation of seeking one’s own advantage” (IVP24). On this definition, no sad aVects prove virtuous, because sad aVects are passions, and virtue correlates with activity (IIIP59). As a passion in which the self appears to be the agent of its own demise, however, humility poses grave philosophical conundrums, as does suicide, which Spinoza is Humility | 79

notoriously hard-pressed to explain.43 If, as the conatus doctrine contends, humans necessarily strive to persevere in their being, then humility appears to run counter to (human) nature. In humility, the image of one’s weakness restrains one’s power of acting. Although the humble possess an inadequate idea of their power, their self-assessment is “accurate,” in the sense that they are actually as weak as they imagine: For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily imagines; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do. For so long as he imagines that he cannot do this or that, he is not determined to do it, and consequently it is impossible for him to do it. (DefAV XXVIIIE) Dwelling on one’s weakness appears self-destructive, for imagining that one’s power is limited eVectively limits one’s power.44 On Spinoza’s logic, however, self-destruction is impossible: “No thing can be destroyed except through an external cause” (IIIP4). Spinoza marshals an argument about the nature of definition—a proper definition “posits the thing’s essence, and does not take it away”—to insist that forces that hamper one’s endeavor to persevere must be defined as external to the self (IIIP4D). For Spinoza, what looks like self-destruction is actually a self “defeated by causes external” (IVP20S).45 In suicide, for example, the self is a patient, suVering at the hands of external forces, rather than the agent of its own demise. Similarly, in humility, external forces restrain the self ’s striving to imagine things that posit its power. “So when we say that the mind, in considering itself, imagines its lack of power, we are saying nothing but that the mind’s striving to imagine something which posits its power of acting is restrained, or (by P11S) that it is saddened” (IIIP55D). On this diagnosis, we experience humility when the self is too weak to resist external forces. Humility is not a virtue, then, because it “does not arise from a true reflection, or reason”; the very fact that the humble man perceives a lack of power reveals that he does not understand his essence, or power (IVP53D). Spinoza reaches this scandalous conclusion by undertaking a conventional philosophical project, the project of enumerating the aVects. As a taxonomist of the aVects, Spinoza joins “a long and palimpsestic tradition of attempts to provide a comprehensive classification of key emotions in terms of which all variants can be analysed,” a tradition that stretches back to Aristotle, but gains vitality in the seventeenth century.46 Passiones Animae, the Latin translation of Descartes’s Les Passions de L’Ame, provides the most immediate template for Spinoza’s project of defining and classifying the aVects.47 Although Spinoza 80 | Chapter 3

engages in a conventional exercise, he insinuates criticisms of his predecessors, including Descartes, with certain definitions, like the definition of humility, that revise received views on the emotions. Indeed, in a gloss on IIIP55, the proposition from which Spinoza derives the definition of humility, Christoph Wittich48 complains that Spinoza’s definition compares unfavorably to that of Descartes—the definition “is defective and mutilated, which will be readily apparent, if anyone wishes to compare it to Descartes’ definition in article 55.” 49 Why does Spinoza’s definition appear defective, from a Cartesian perspective? In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes catalogs two variants of humility, one virtuous, one vicious.50 Descartes aligns virtuous humility with generosity, an aVect extolled as “the key to all the other virtues and a general remedy for every disorder of the passions.” 51 “The virtue of properly estimating oneself,” 52 generosity is an aVect with two components—aYrmation of human freedom as the sole basis for moral judgment and the “constant resolution to use it [freedom] well.” 53 Although generosity “causes a person’s self-esteem to be as great as it may legitimately be [s’estime au plus haut point qu’il se peut legitimement estimer],” it is a fundamentally egalitarian virtue, for the generous acknowledge that, humanity’s manifest failings notwithstanding, all are capable of willing virtuously.54 Given the egalitarian thrust of generosity, it is not surprising that “the most generous people are usually also the most humble”—those who feel good about themselves for the right reasons do not contemn others, for they own their moral lapses.55 As Descartes defines it, virtuous humility involves acknowledging that all are susceptible to failures of self-mastery: We have humility as a virtue [l’humilité vertueuse / humilitas honesta] when, as a result of reflecting on the infirmity of our nature and on the wrongs we may previously have done, or are capable of doing (wrongs which are no less serious than those which others may do), we do not prefer ourselves to anyone else and we think that since others have free will just as much as we do, they may use it just as well as we use ours.56 For Descartes, there is “only one thing in us which could give us good reason for esteeming ourselves, namely, the exercise of our free will and the control we have over our volitions”; thus, individuals are (equally) limited because they are (equally) prone to abuse their freedom.57 Although freedom distinguishes humanity as a species, it provides no grounds for individual distinction, because all are equally free. In virtuous humility, we aYrm our freedom by acknowledging its potential for abuse; but humility becomes vicious when feelings of weakness lead one to forget, or abdicate, the freedom that “renders us in a certain way like God by making us masters of ourselves.” 58 On Descartes’s Humility | 81

definition, “Abjectness, or humility as a vice [la bassesse ou l’humilité vicieuse / Abjectionem aut Humilitatem vitiosam], consists chiefly in a feeling of weakness or irresolution, together with an incapacity to refrain from actions which we know we shall regret later on, as if we lacked the full use of our free will.” 59 When Descartes defines humility, he does not illustrate human finitude with express reference to God. Unlike hyper-Augustinian peers, Descartes does not yoke humility to a litany of human depravity. Rather, God enters the picture when Descartes enumerates the causes for legitimate self-esteem—and he enters the picture as a template for human aspiration. Granted, freedom opens humans to blame as well as praise. Unlike God, humans can will wrongly (hence the need for humility). Yet Descartes invokes God to hail mastery as an appropriate, even admirable, ideal—not, as a hyper-Augustinian would, to dismiss mastery as a form of pride. Indeed, Descartes cautions against excessive humility because it leads us to forsake ideals of sovereignty. Although Descartes aspires to God-like self-mastery, he avoids the sin of pride, on Lamy’s view, because the aspiration attests Descartes’s belief in a transcendent, providential God. In the same breath, Descartes acknowledges human (moral) frailty (we do not always will virtuously) and asserts human privilege within nature (our volitions are free). When Descartes defines humility as a way of honoring freedom in the breach, he betrays what Spinoza will condemn as vanity in the appendix to Part I of the Ethics.60 In that text, Spinoza targets a prejudice that hinders reception of his philosophical system, the prejudice that nature acts, as humans do, to achieve a set goal. All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God. (IApp) The fundamental prejudice arises when humans, ignorant of natural causality, generalize from their experience of agency, and it persists because humans relish the privileged position they occupy in this imaginary scheme. The prejudice’s origins dovetail with those of religious belief, whose seeds Spinoza traces to human conceit. When humans first stumbled upon resources they could exploit to their advantage, they imagined that someone must have created these resources for a reason, and invented anthropomorphic creator gods “endowed with human freedom” (IApp).61 But religion not only makes God over in humanity’s 82 | Chapter 3

image, it also puts humanity at the center of God’s creation, insisting that God acts for humanity’s sake. Because “the origin of our most fundamental metaphysical and ethical errors” lies “in a human hubris which not only tries to secure humanity an exceptional place in nature but also attempts to cast both God and nature in its own human image,” chastening vanity emerges as a central component of Spinoza’s philosophical project.62 Ironically, to deflate human pride, Spinoza must discredit extant discourses of humility, because they express an anthropocentric theology. For Descartes, God provides the lone template for human freedom, with the perverse result that humility is consistent with aspirations to God-like mastery. From Spinoza’s perspective, Descartes’s commitment to free will works at cross-purposes to the humility he professes. At first blush, it may strain credulity to read Spinoza’s reclassification of humility as one component of a chastening project. Critics who cast Spinoza as a proto-Nietzschean theorist of “self-realization” contend that Spinoza objects to humility because it leads people to “concentrate on their lowliness, on their weaknesses and limitations,” making them feel bad about themselves.63 On this reading, the problem with humility is that it degrades humans, not that it flatters them. Linguistic convention reflects this understanding of humility—for “we call him humble who quite often blushes, who confesses his own vices and tells the virtues of others, who yields to all, and finally, who walks with head bowed, and neglects to adorn himself ” (DefAV XXIXE). Admittedly, this interpretation captures a central concern of Spinoza’s—namely, his concern to counter ascetic doctrines that deplete human power. As Spinoza reminds readers, “No deity, nor anyone else, unless he is envious, takes pleasure in my lack of power and my misfortune; nor does he ascribe to virtue our tears, sighs, fear, and other things of that kind, which are signs of a weak mind” (IVP45S). Yet one can appreciate Spinoza’s scorn for ascetic self-mortification while acknowledging that he is a dogged opponent of human hubris. Indeed, Spinoza must target vanity for the same reason that he must target asceticism—to “enable the most potent human community possible.” 64 To Spinoza’s chagrin, traditional ways of gratifying human vanity have the perverse eVect of diminishing human power.65 Thus, Spinoza reassesses humility’s value not only because its partisans make us feel bad about ourselves, but also because they invite us to feel good about ourselves in the wrong way, and for the wrong reasons. Following Augustine, Christians have long contended that “there is something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation to abase it.” 66 Poiret invokes this paradoxical commonplace when he rebuts Spinoza’s definition of humility: Humility | 83

It is even more false, to say that humility is a sadness arising from the fact that a man considers his own lack of power: when it is more truly a happiness arising from the fact that a man, with light and divine grace, considers that he, as far as he himself is concerned, is absolutely, down to the innermost recesses of his being, nothing and can do nothing; but God from his benevolent power exists and works all things in him, if only he does not resist God through an absurd fiction of his own power.67 Humility is joyous, on Poiret’s account, because the realization that we are nothing provides an occasion for appreciating God’s benevolence. Moreover, humility exalts, because it clears the way for God to exercise power for and within us. If Descartes exudes significantly more confidence in human reason than Poiret, he shares Poiret’s conviction that humility is a source of surpassing joy. For Descartes, humility is joyous, because the most generous are the most humble, and humility elevates, because it disciplines the faculty that, when properly directed, allows us to achieve God-like self-mastery. Thus, when Spinoza describes humility as a sad passion, he not only oVers a scientific account of the aVect’s dynamics, he also exposes the self-defeating vanity that suVuses extant discourses of humility. Doctrines of free will and divine grace foster delusions of grandeur that diminish us, because they lead us to mistake the sources and extent of our power. By denying humility the status of virtue, Spinoza forecloses certain kinds of self-celebration, as much as he dignifies new forms of self-love. In the heat of the seventeenth-century polemic, Spinoza’s critics took the latter move as evidence of sinful pride. Yet, more than twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars, many of whom disdain humility, Spinoza’s seventeenth-century antagonists were alert to the chastening impulses that animate Spinoza’s philosophy—impulses that they found perplexing, coming from a professed critic of humility.

Humility Is a Virtue: Refuting IVP53 Spinoza’s seventeenth-century detractors are convinced that humility is rational and, consequently, that it is impossible to mount a cogent philosophical argument to the contrary. Poiret and Wittich both conclude that Spinoza has failed to demonstrate that humility is not a virtue. Wittich says of IVP53, “But we deny that from this follows that proposition that he proposed is to be demonstrated by him.” 68 Yet as Poiret and Wittich examine Spinoza’s deductions, outrage gives way to consternation, for, his express denunciation notwithstanding, Spinoza says things that sound, to Christian ears, curiously 84 | Chapter 3

humble. The anti-Spinoza polemic provides an important counterweight to twentieth- and twenty-first-century interpretations of IVP53, not because it correctly identifies flaws in Spinoza’s logic, but because, in its inability to follow Spinoza’s logic, it highlights the idiosyncrasy of Spinoza’s position, its resistance to Augustinian binaries. Partisans of humility find ample fodder for their refutations when, prompted by political considerations, Spinoza qualifies his assessment of humility. To both the dismay and the pleasure of his critics, Spinoza insists that transferring humility from the column of the virtues does not deprive the aVect of political value. In IVP54S, Spinoza aYrms the value of humility and repentance, aVects he has just classed as passions, as bulwarks of political religion in the prophetic tradition.69 Because men rarely live from the dictate of reason, these two aVects, humility and repentance, and in addition, hope and fear, bring more advantage than disadvantage. So since men must sin, they ought rather to sin in that direction. If weak-minded men were all equally proud, ashamed of nothing, and afraid of nothing, how could they be united or restrained by any bonds? The mob is terrifying, if unafraid. So it is no wonder that the prophets, who considered the common advantage, not that of the few, commended humility, repentance, and reverence so greatly. Really, those who are subject to these aVects can be guided far more easily than others, so that in the end they may live from the guidance of reason, that is, may be free and enjoy the life of the blessed. (IVP54S) Wittich reads the concession that humility proves politically useful as a retraction, Spinoza’s attempt to mitigate (“He wants somehow to heal his words and attempts to soften them”) IVP53, and its implicit slight to the prophets.70 That Spinoza shrinks from the consequences of his most outrageous assertions fails to mollify Wittich, however. Spinoza’s political endorsement of humility is, after all, a concession, and a grudging one at that (“since men must sin”). Humility proves politically salutary, Spinoza allows, given the rabble’s enslavement to the passions. In other words, Spinoza makes humility’s value contingent upon the level of popular ethical development. When Spinoza credits the prophets with discovering the utility of “humility and repentance, and in addition, hope and fear,” he extols prophetic political acumen in language that echoes the preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise. In that text, Spinoza explains that vacillation between the twin emotions of hope and fear renders individuals prey to superstition, the “prop and stay” of despotism.71 On Spinoza’s diagnosis, despotism is unstable, for the very aVects Humility | 85

that make the superstitious easy marks for tyrants also make them unpredictable, unreliable, and ungovernable.72 When Spinoza commends prophets for exploiting the aVects of hope and fear, he aligns prophetic politics with tyranny. Thus, the allusion to the Theologico-Political Treatise would only seem to amplify the grudging nature of Spinoza’s concession. Under certain circumstances— for example, when “the task of establishing a wise system of laws and of keeping the government in the hands of the whole community was quite beyond” the Hebrews—it is advisable to exploit humility.73 Yet this exploitation will not yield optimal political stability. “Harmony is also commonly born of fear, but then it is without trust” (IVAppXVI).74 The prophets deployed humility to manage a specific political predicament, the predicament of an immature people—and Spinoza trusts that people can mature, and hold sovereignty in common. On Wittich’s view, by contrast, humility is required not by the demands of a contingent historical situation, but by the ontological predicament of fallen humanity. “But the prophets did not only want to consider the common advantage, but rather, because they judged that there is no man but that humility and repentance would be extremely necessary for him (since all men deviate from the ways of God), they commended sadness in accordance with God as the origin of the heart’s conversion to God.” 75 Humility is not merely an instrument of political pacification, Wittich counters—it is a prerequisite for salvation. Although Wittich laments Spinoza’s reduction of humility to a political tool, he is equally dismayed by Spinoza’s failure to consistently uphold the position that humility’s value is purely instrumental. In the first paragraph of IVP54S, Spinoza embraces humility from cynical political calculations. In the second paragraph, however, he reserves a lofty role for humility with the suggestion that prophetic religion can establish conditions for the eventual development of rationality. Humility is necessary “because men rarely live from the dictate of reason,” but if successfully exploited, Spinoza appears to suggest, humility prepares its own overcoming, for the humble can be educated to reason, freedom, and virtue. If Spinoza admits that humility prepares freedom and blessedness, Wittich objects, how can he insist that humility is not a virtue? Because if it is true, which Spinoza adds: Really, those who are subject to these aVects can be guided far more easily than others, so that in the end they may live from the guidance of reason, that is, may be free and enjoy the life of the blessed; thus those aVects are necessary for him, and much more, if without them it is impossible that someone should live according to the guidance of the holy spirit, which is certainly demanded of those who hope for and eagerly desire a better life after this one.76 86 | Chapter 3

To achieve his stated goal of rational enfranchisement—which Wittich takes the liberty of translating into Christian terms—Spinoza needs to acknowledge that humility is indispensable. As IVP54S demonstrates, to say that “humility is not a virtue” is not to deny humility a place in ethics—rather, it is to confine humility’s place to the calculation of political advantage. As Wittich’s objections reveal, however, humility threatens to overstep the bounds of a politics founded upon prophetic charisma. If the humble “can be guided far more easily than others” toward freedom and “the life of the blessed,” Wittich objects, on what grounds would Spinoza deny humility’s virtues? In other words, Spinoza should be more enthusiastic about humility, since he appears unable to fulfill his political and ethical aspirations without it. Indeed, if Spinoza aims to enlighten the vulgar, not merely cow them into submission, Spinoza must rely on something akin to rational humility. This challenge grows increasingly pointed once we appreciate just how uneasily Spinoza’s endorsement of prophetic politics fits with his analysis of humility’s aVective dynamics. As Spinoza defines it, humility seems ill suited to advance the linked projects of political restraint and rational enfranchisement. On the one hand, the instrumental deployment of humility is consistent with Spinoza’s broader strategy for governing the masses. Politics must have recourse to coercion, Spinoza contends, to impel the irrational to behave in accordance with reason’s dictates.77 Yet Spinoza does not only exploit passion to elicit conduct, on the part of the vulgar, that mimics rational conduct. He also promises that, through the work of ethics, we can transform sad passions into actions.78 Thus, when Spinoza holds out the prospect of rationality to the humble, he does not necessarily betray his considered ethical convictions. On the other hand, by Spinoza’s admission, passive humility is hardly an ideal vehicle for restraining the mob. When Spinoza commends humility as a tool of political pacification (and, by extension, of rational enfranchisement), he asks humility to do something that it is not capable of doing, on his own account of aVective dynamics. Humility appears an unlikely candidate both because it is rare, and because its dynamics are almost indistinguishable from those of pride. Convinced that the mind necessarily strives to “imagine only those things which posit its power of acting,” Spinoza dismisses humility as a curio: These aVects—humility and despondency—are very rare. For human nature, considered in itself, strains against them, as far as it can (see P13 and P54). So those who are believed to be most despondent and humble are usually most ambitious and envious. (DefAV XXIX) Humility | 87

With the declaration that humility is rare, Spinoza solves a philosophical conundrum, but he also exposes a political predicament—namely, the dearth of antidotes to pride. If professions of humility are usually disingenuous, then envy and ambition—the very aVects that make men “troublesome to one another”—are pervasive (IIIP55S). The situation is scarcely improved on the rare occasions when humility is sincere. Spinoza presents a two-pronged argument for humility’s impotence as a counter to pride. First, Spinoza appraises the relative tenacity of the two passions. As a joyous passion, “pride is stronger than despondency” (IVP56S). If individuals strive to prolong and enhance joy, even at great cost to their interests, then exhortations to humility will likely founder, for individuals resist crushing feelings of weakness. Second, in the unlikely event that a sovereign manages to humble subjects, the political prognosis is scarcely improved, for humility and despondency exhibit the same destabilizing dynamics as pride. Humility is not merely a mask for ambition and envy; sincere despondency also produces envy, for “sadness born of a man’s false opinion that he is below others” generates resentment of imagined superiors (IVP57S). “Although despondency is contrary to pride,” Spinoza explains, “the despondent man is still very like the proud one”—both exhibit acute envy, and both undervalue peers (IVP57S). If one credits Spinoza’s analysis of aVective dynamics, humility cannot easily do the political work of checking pride and cementing social bonds. Indeed, Spinoza’s analysis of humility could seem to strengthen Wittich’s objection. Because passionate humility generates envy and competition, something akin to rational humility is required to unite, restrain, and enlighten the mob. Why does Spinoza commend humility as an instrument of political pacification if he knows that humility is liable to exacerbate political instability? On one reading, the qualified endorsement of humility exposes Spinoza’s irrational fear of the unafraid masses, and his irrational pessimism about prospects for their enlightenment.79 By contrast, if we entertain Wittich’s objections, we can venture an alternative interpretation, in which IVP54S reveals Spinoza’s ambivalence about humility. As a critic of human vanity, there are aspects of humility, as traditionally defined, that Spinoza may want, or need, to retain, and not only for reasons of political exigency. In other words, it may be harder for Spinoza to extricate himself from humility, and all that it has historically connoted, than contemporary scholars realize. Can Spinoza cultivate appreciation for human finitude while maintaining that humility is not a virtue? To frame the question this way is to assume that Spinoza wants to cultivate appreciation for human finitude. But in the seventeenth century, this assump88 | Chapter 3

tion was controversial. On Wittich’s interpretation, when Spinoza denies humility’s virtues, in IVP53, he denies human limitation: I consider this proposition clearly false and pernicious. I say false, because reason commands that man contemplate himself as he is, to such an extent that, if he discovers any imperfection or lack of power in himself, he acknowledge it willingly. It is also pernicious, because it paves the way to pride, which is the source of many evils.80 On Wittich’s reading, to say that humility is not a virtue is to invite delusional overestimation of human capability. In IVP53, Spinoza orients readers toward human power, to the exclusion of its deficits, an orientation that fosters pride.81 As Lamy suspects, there is no room for acknowledgment of finitude in a theory of immanence; when Spinoza denies the possibility of rational humility, he withdraws the possibility of rationally assessing our limitations and, consequently, of imputing moral significance to them. Yet when Spinoza’s critics confront IVP53D (the demonstration of the proposition that humility is not a virtue), they are forced to concede that he does acknowledge finitude—which acknowledgment, they object, mires him in contradiction. In IVP53D, Spinoza distinguishes humility, or self-diminishing wallowing in frailty, from the rational recognition that one’s power is finite.82 As Spinoza explains, the individual who perceives his lack of power does not, strictly speaking, understand himself: “So if a man, in considering himself [se ipsum contemplatur], perceives [ percipit] some lack of power of his, this is not because he understands himself [se intelligit], but because his power of acting is restrained” (IVP53D). At the same time, Spinoza allows that rational selfassessment includes understanding that others’ power exceeds one’s own. As Spinoza reminds readers, “There is no singular thing in Nature than which there is not another more powerful and stronger” (IVA1). Thus, accurate selfassessment involves recognition of the fact that one’s power is often outclassed: But if we suppose that the man conceives [concipere] his lack of power because he understands [intelligit] something more powerful than himself, by the knowledge [cognitione] of which he determines his power of acting, then we conceive nothing but that the man understands himself distinctly [homo se ipsum distincte intelligit] or (by P26) that his power of acting is aided. (IVP53D) Although, strictly speaking, we cannot understand our lack of power, we can understand that we are finite modes of nature and, as such, subject to external determination and, ultimately, destruction. As Spinoza reminds readers, “The Humility | 89

force by which a man perseveres in existing is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes” (IVP3). While humility and despondency register a diminution in the self ’s power, adequate appraisal of the self ’s situation as a finite mode of nature actually increases the self ’s power; consequently, rational acknowledgment of finitude cannot be sad, in the strict sense. Although diminution of the self ’s power is sad, finitude is not sad in and of itself; understanding both the extent of, and the limits to, human power enhances that power.83 Confronted with Spinoza’s aYrmation of human finitude, Poiret objects that IVP53D does not make sense because it recuperates, rather than rejects, humility. With the attribution of rationality to a “man who conceives his lack of power because he understands something more powerful than himself, by the knowledge of which he determines his power of acting,” Poiret contends, Spinoza betrays his investment in rational humility even if, for perverse, atheistic reasons, he refuses to call the disposition by its rightful name. Spinoza’s reclassification of humility turns on the claim that one cannot understand one’s lack of power. On Poiret’s reading, Spinoza fails to uphold this claim in IVP53D, for he writes as if we can understand our deficits. What is the force of the claim that a man understands himself distinctly by understanding “something more powerful than himself, by the knowledge of which he determines his power of acting,” Poiret objects, if not to aYrm that a man can understand his lack of power? Very well, what do you want? Such a contemplation of human power, is contemplation of the power of a more powerful Being and of man’s own weakness that arises from truth, but not from ignorance or non-understanding; why then don’t you conclude that humility is not your imaginary sadness, but that it arises from reason or understanding? . . . For what is greater delirium than to have shown in the example that contemplation of our weakness can arise from true understanding: and nevertheless, to conclude, without adducing of any reason, that it is not a virtue, because it does not arise from reason or understanding?84 As Poiret reads IVP53D, Spinoza stands convicted of self-contradiction and, more important, moral turpitude—only a sworn enemy of virtue would allow that “contemplation of our weakness can arise from true understanding” while denying that contemplation the status of virtue. Poiret’s objection rests on a disingenuous gloss that ignores the technical meaning of intelligere within Spinoza’s system. If Poiret does not persuade that Spinoza’s logic is faulty, he nevertheless isolates something that is genuinely perplexing, from a Christian perspective, about IVP53D. How does a conception of one’s lack of power that 90 | Chapter 3

arises from understanding something more powerful than oneself diVer from what others have called rational humility? If we entertain Poiret’s objection, we can see that Spinoza’s position exceeds the binaries of Augustinian polemic. On Spinoza’s account, to say that humility is not a virtue is neither to deny the finitude of human power nor to deprive its acknowledgment of ethical significance. As Wittich and Poiret concede, Spinoza ascribes ethical value to acknowledgment of finitude. From an Augustinian perspective—in which the only options are humility and pride—Spinoza’s position makes no sense. From Spinoza’s perspective, however, an ethic of human finitude does not entail endorsement of humility. Indeed, Spinoza reclassifies humility because it oVers the wrong way to orient ourselves to human limitation. Spinoza’s reclassification of humility is more than a terminological sleight of hand, substituting a new name for what theologians (and Hobbes and Descartes) call rational humility. Rather, Spinoza recasts the emotional valence of finitude, making knowledge of finitude a source of strength rather than an occasion for self-reproach. Having removed humility from the column of the virtues, Spinoza relies on acquiescentia, the aVect he classifies as humility’s opposite, to encourage proper self-estimation.

Acquiescentia in se ipso Scholars who credit Spinoza with the opening salvo in the modern campaign against religious ethics frequently adduce Spinoza’s ostensible enthusiasm for “self-esteem” as supporting evidence. As scholars in this tradition love to remind readers, Spinoza pronounces self-esteem “to be the highest thing we can hope for.”85 On this view, Spinoza’s endorsement of self-esteem is unequivocal, and follows directly from his rejection of humility. Having discredited Christian asceticism, scholars argue, Spinoza proceeds to introduce an alternative (i.e., modern, secular) table of values in which self-aYrmation holds pride of place. In these arguments, “self-esteem” is a translation of the Latin term acquiescentia in se ipso, which Spinoza uses to designate the aVect opposed to humility and repentance (the two “Christian virtues” that, to Poiret’s chagrin, Spinoza openly dismisses). Yet, as I demonstrate, the aVect that Spinoza purportedly celebrates, acquiescentia in se ipso, is not persuasively translated as “self-esteem.” Moreover, Spinoza’s celebration of this aVect is in no way unqualified. Rather, Spinoza undertakes a delicate negotiation with an aVect whose polyvalence he is at pains to demonstrate, and whose liabilities he decries with such vehemence that he risks his credentials as a dispassionate analyst of the passions. Once we appreciate Spinoza’s ambivalence about Humility | 91

acquiescentia, we can see that the very feature of Spinoza’s argument that his seventeenth-century critics single out for abuse—namely, the worrisome proximity of acquiescentia to pride—is one of his central concerns. Precisely because he is an enthusiast for the individual and his power, Spinoza is keenly aware that self-aYrmation can go awry. At the same time, Spinoza uses the prospect of active acquiescentia to reconcile readers to finitude. When Spinoza extols active acquiescentia, he identifies a new basis for self-aYrmation—namely, human participation in nature. If Poiret invites us to rejoice in divine benevolence, and Descartes invites us to derive satisfaction from human transcendence of nature, Spinoza invites us to draw strength from the fact that we are finite beings subject to natural causation. Alert to the nuances of Spinoza’s ethic of acquiescentia, we can see that the secular self whose power Spinoza would enhance, and whose interests Spinoza dignifies, bears little resemblance to the stereotypical sovereign subject. What does acquiescentia in se ipso mean? This is both a question of translation and a question about Spinoza’s presentation of the aVect. Acquiescentia in se ipso proves diYcult to translate, for it is of modern provenance, a neologism coined by Henry Desmarets, the Latin translator of Descartes’s Les Passions de l’Ame, to render “satisfaction de soy-mesme.” 86 Edwin Curley, translator of the authoritative English edition of the Ethics, concedes that “self-satisfaction” would be a “reasonable” translation of acquiescentia in se ipso; but self-satisfaction “has acquired negative connotations which are inappropriate,” so he translates the term as “self-esteem.” 87 Curley’s translation obscures the connection between acquiescentia in se ipso, an aVect cataloged in Part III of the Ethics, and acquiescentia animi (in Curley, “satisfaction of mind”), the joy that attends intuitive knowledge in Parts IV and V—a connection that lends the term novel, and idiosyncratic, semantic resonance. Moreover, Curley’s decision betrays the (mistaken) conviction that, in Spinoza’s lexicon, acquiescentia’s connotations are uniformly positive. In the Ethics, acquiescentia in se ipso has both positive and negative connotations. When Spinoza analyzes this aVect, he lapses into uncharacteristic imprecision, treating acquiescentia in se ipso as synonymous with philautia (IIIP55S), amor sui (DefAV XXVII), superbia (DefAV XXVII), vana gloria (IVP58), and gloria (VP36S). That Spinoza uses the term acquiescentia in se ipso to designate both active and passive variants of the aVect, and as a synonym for terms, like superbia, whose connotations are always negative, attests the aVect’s polyvalence. Moreover, acquiescentia in se ipso is an aVect with two antonyms. Spinoza opposes acquiescentia in se ipso to humility and to repentance—and the term’s connotations vary depending on the antithesis in 92 | Chapter 3

which it appears: “Acquiescentia in se ipso is opposed to humility, insofar as we understand by it a joy born of the fact that we consider our power of acting. But insofar as we also understand by it a joy, accompanied by the idea of some deed which we believe we have done from a free decision of the mind, it is opposed to repentance” (DefAV XXVIE).88 By Spinoza’s admission, he departs from taxonomical convention when he opposes humility to acquiescentia in se ipso rather than pride (superbia). Spinoza rejects the humility / pride antithesis because, strictly speaking, pride, or “thinking more highly of oneself than is just, out of love of oneself,” has no opposite; it is impossible to think too little of oneself (DefAV XXVIII). With this taxonomical choice, Spinoza not only exposes the incoherence of humility. He also intimates a semantic distinction between superbia and acquiescentia in se ipso, identifying multiple forms of self-aYrmation, with multiple ethical valences. For Poiret, by contrast, the diVerence between acquiescentia in se ipso and pride proves negligible. While Spinoza ostensibly upholds acquiescentia as “the foundation and complement of all virtue and good, which he commends as the highest prize and reward,” Poiret dismisses acquiescentia as “an abominable vice, head and root of all of them, and true atheism.” 89 Poiret equates acquiescentia with atheism because, on his view, upholding acquiescentia in se ipso as the pinnacle of human aspiration makes humanity an end unto itself, imputing to humans the suYciency properly reserved for God. Against Spinoza, who evacuates final causality from God or Nature, Poiret contends that God derives satisfaction from himself precisely because, unlike created beings, he can posit himself as goal and end. For if indeed the essence of God may possess itself, or know and think itself, rejoice in itself, and be suYcient unto itself; therefore it is satisfying to itself, therefore it is content with its very self, therefore it has itself for the object and goal of its own thought and acquiescentia, and to such an extent it is its very own goal and end, which could be said of no created things.90 To say that a man can derive satisfaction from himself is to say that, like God, he can legitimately posit himself as end and goal. Indeed, it is to put humanity in God’s place: Spinoza “did away with the divine end, in order to substitute a human and diabolical end.” 91 In sum, Poiret equates acquiescentia in se ipso with pride, in the traditional sense of turning away from God, toward the self. Consequently, acquiescentia in se ipso can never be legitimate. True acquiescentia derives not from the self, Poiret concludes, but from dependence on God: “Acquiescentia, in truth, is joy arising from the fact that man, looking upon Humility | 93

his own nothing and his own weakness, contemplates God’s free and powerful pleasure, from which he himself is constituted and has and is able to do all things.” 92 With this assertion, Poiret adopts the conservative position in an intramural Christian debate about the legitimacy of self-aYrmation. Although Spinoza’s Christian critics agree that Spinozist self-aYrmation is tantamount to pride, they diVer on the legitimacy of other forms of self-love. If Poiret confronts us with a stark choice between humility and pride, Cartesians, who celebrate human reason, maintain a distinction between vicious pride and legitimate selflove. Thus, unlike Poiret, Wittich considers the claim that the self is a source of acquiescentia uncontroversial. In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes extols selfsatisfaction—or the “internal satisfaction” we feel on contemplating “a good done by ourselves”—as “the sweetest of all joys, because its cause depends only on ourselves.” 93 Yet Descartes allows that the passion can “produce a kind of vanity and impertinent arrogance [un orgeuil & une arrogance impertinente]” when actions that give satisfaction do not warrant moral approval.94 Wittich trusts that Descartes has found a way to keep self-satisfaction within proper bounds—namely, by reserving acquiescentia for deeds that truly merit approbation. In Passions of the Soul, Wittich contends, Descartes “founds acquiescentia in semetipso on virtue and good deeds.” 95 In the Ethics, by contrast, Spinoza divorces self-aYrmation from moral judgment. When Spinoza defines acquiescentia as “joy born of the fact that we consider our power of acting,” Wittich objects, he revels in brute force (DefAV XXVIE). “But then it can be criticized with respect to the following, because in this way acquiescentia in semetipso is not distinguished from pride, and because just as those who behave correctly, so those who behave badly, can rejoice in their power of acting.” 96 To identify the self ’s power of action as a source of supreme joy is to celebrate the mere fact of potency, Wittich objects, rather than its power for good. In the heat of the polemic, Poiret and Wittich fail to realize that Spinoza shares their concern about the proximity of acquiescentia to pride (even while he rejects the theology on which they rely to keep acquiescentia within proper bounds). In other words, the very thing that critics identify as cause for concern—namely, acquiescentia’s volatility—is a central worry of Spinoza’s. In the “Definition of the AVects,” Spinoza states both that “pride is born of acquiescentia in se ipso,” echoing Descartes and Wittich, and that pride “can also be defined as love of oneself or acquiescentia in se ipso,” echoing Poiret (XXVIIIE). Dispensing with the figure of divine sovereignty, Spinoza can accord greater dignity to self-aYrmation than his Christian peers, for whom divine reward remains the highest aspiration. Yet to assert, as Spinoza does, that a strong sense 94 | Chapter 3

of self is the only conceivable “dividend” of human striving, is not to embrace acquiescentia indiscriminately. Nor is it to install humanity at the center of the universe. Precisely because Spinoza does not rely on God to compensate for human failings, he must deflate exaggerated, anthropocentric delusions. Thus, Spinoza secularizes self-love not by rehabilitating pride, but rather by developing an idiosyncratic criterion for distinguishing self-love from pride. Against Descartes, Spinoza rejects a voluntarist criterion for diagnosing, and containing, acquiescentia’s instability. Indeed, when Spinoza deduces the definition of acquiescentia, he indicts voluntarist delusions as a source of that very instability. Spinoza introduces acquiescentia in se ipso in a passage devoted to the imitation of the aVects, the propensity to adopt the emotions of peers, as if by contagion. This propensity makes individuals crave social approbation. When an individual imagines that he has garnered praise, “he will be aVected with joy accompanied by the idea of himself as cause, or he will regard himself with joy” (IIIP30). In this aVect, which Spinoza calls love of esteem ( gloria), the image of the self as a recipient of praise—that is, as a source of others’ joy—causes an individual to “imitate” his peers’ joy and, consequently, to rejoice in, or love, himself. Spinoza proceeds to distinguish love of esteem from acquiescentia in se ipso, or “joy accompanied by the idea of an internal cause,” independent of the belief that one has garnered praise (IIIP30S).97 With this definition, Spinoza appears to share Descartes’s conviction that acquiescentia is a self-reliant form of self-love, unlike glory. Moreover, Spinoza follows Descartes when he classes acquiescentia and repentance as aVects that involve the image of the self as a free agent. When opposed to repentance, acquiescentia is a “joy, accompanied by the idea of some deed which we believe we have done from a free decision of the mind” (DefAV XXVIE). As Spinoza elaborates the dynamics of passionate acquiescentia, however, he subverts Descartes’s assumptions, demonstrating that acquiescentia’s instability derives from its mistaken association with the will. Given the obstacles that imagination poses to sound judgment, it is no surprise that a man who imagines himself to be free “can often be the cause both of his own sadness and his own joy,” and that the illusion of freedom breeds unique intensity of aVect—“because men believe themselves free, these aVects are very violent (see P49)” (IIIP51S). One who imagines that he can initiate spontaneous action exaggerates his causal agency, with the result that he has only himself to blame when things go wrong, and only himself to applaud when they go right. While Descartes values this intensity as a spur to virtue, Spinoza worries that acquiescentia is violent because insatiable. On Spinoza’s diagnosis, the joy that accompanies “the idea of oneself as cause” cannot satisfy the craving for individual Humility | 95

aYrmation, and is liable to produce competition for (what appear to be) more gratifying forms of aYrmation (IIIP51S). Defined as the antithesis to repentance, acquiescentia in se ipso signifies a sense of self derived from membership in the sole species that (purports to) exercise free will.98 Spinoza denies that humans are capable of such control, and that the prospect of control could satisfy the individual’s desire for aYrmation—for, as Descartes reminds us, all humans possess free will. In IIIP55, the proposition that introduces the acquiescentia / humility antithesis, Spinoza concludes that “men are naturally inclined to hate and envy” (IIIP55S). On Spinoza’s view, the gambit by means of which Descartes would keep self-aYrmation from spiraling into pride—namely, reminding individuals that they are equal, because free—is liable to produce insatiable lust for distinction.99 Asserting human freedom fails to gratify the individual’s desire for aYrmation, because few consider membership in a distinguished species cause for celebration. “But if he relates what he aYrms of himself to the universal idea of man or animal, he will not be so greatly gladdened” (IIIP55S). The dynamics of passionate acquiescentia reveal that equality is a condition of possibility for envy: “No one envies another’s virtue unless he is an equal” (IIIP55C2). Humans do not “envy trees their height, or lions their strength,” but they do resent peers’ achievements (IIIP55S2). To maintain and enhance their sense of self, individuals must feel special when compared to other humans, not merely by virtue of being human. Why are the joys that result from imagining things held in common so paltry? The belief that social distinction certifies the self ’s power reflects the structure of the imagination. When one imagines, the mind has “images” of external things, but these images reflect the constitution of the aVected body—they neither represent external things as they really are nor communicate the self ’s essence. For this reason, inadequate ideas indicate “the present constitution of the human body . . . not distinctly, but confusedly” (IVP1S). By definition, imagination does not yield clear and distinct self-knowledge. Nevertheless, acquiescentia in se ipso proves tenacious, and inimical to community, because the individual’s sense of self is proportional to his ability to distinctly imagine his power. For whenever anyone imagines his own actions, he is aVected with joy (by P53), and with a greater joy, the more his actions express perfection, and the more distinctly he imagines them, that is (by IIP40S1), the more he can distinguish them as singular things. So everyone will have the greatest gladness from considering himself, when he considers something in himself which he denies concerning others. (IIIP55S) 96 | Chapter 3

Because the passionate lack a clear and distinct idea of the self ’s power, they imagine that social distinction is the ideal vehicle for self-knowledge.100 Although Spinoza defines acquiescentia in se ipso as a form of self-love—“joy arising from considering ourselves, is called self-love [Philautia] or acquiescentia in se ipso”—his elaboration of the aVect’s dynamics suggests that, in passionate acquiescentia, self-consideration proceeds through public self-display (IIIP55S). “And since this [acquiescentia in se ipso] is renewed as often as a man considers his virtues, or his power of acting, it also happens that everyone is anxious to tell his own deeds, and show oV his powers, both of body and of mind and that men, for this reason, are troublesome to one another” (IIIP55S). Here, the individual who would contemplate himself struts before an audience. Given the structure of the imagination, the endeavor for self-aYrmation necessarily escalates into a quest for social distinction. Moreover, Spinoza objects, the image of ourselves as free agents does not yield the promised “sweetest of all joys”; it yields a paltry and fleeting joy, since peers cannot be trusted to mirror our cherished self-image. As Spinoza reminds readers, the things that a man “believes will make for joy or sadness, and which he therefore strives to promote or prevent (by P28), are often only imaginary” (IIIP51S). From the perspective of the imagination, the self appears stronger the more it stands out. But competition for prestige incites social dynamics that diminish the self ’s power: He who exults at being esteemed [ gloriatur] by the multitude is made anxious daily, strives, acts, and schemes, in order to preserve his reputation. For the multitude is fickle and inconstant; unless one’s reputation is guarded, it is quickly destroyed. Indeed, because everyone desires to secure the applause of the multitude, each one willingly puts down the reputation of the other. And since the struggle is over a good thought to be the highest, this gives way to a monstrous lust of each to crush the other in any way possible. The one who at last emerges as victor exults more in having harmed the other than in having benefited himself. This love of esteem [ gloria], or acquiescentia, then, is really empty, because it is nothing. (IVP58S) Passive acquiescentia exhibits a paradoxical dynamic: other people constitute the audience that is a condition of possibility for self-aYrmation, but one can never be confident that one is special when one’s sense of self depends on peers. With a fierceness to rival Hobbes’s, Spinoza indicts acquiescentia in se ipso as one of the “main causes” of social conflict (IVP34D). With this vehement critique, Spinoza betrays profound anxiety about the diYculty of containing acquiescentia within proper bounds—an anxiety that seems misplaced for a Humility | 97

philosopher who deems emotions artifacts of nature. Against traditional moralists, who censure human frailty, Spinoza promises a dispassionate analysis of the passions, vowing to consider “human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies” (IIIPref ). But in IVP57S, the myriad “evils of pride”—“it would take too long to enumerate” them—so exercise Spinoza that he comes perilously close to moralism inconsistent with a geometric ethos.101 Spinoza concludes his attack on pride with a preemptive clarification—he reaYrms his commitment to the project of considering “men’s aVects and properties just like other natural things,” lest readers struck by his fulminations imagine that his “purpose was only to tell about men’s vices and their absurd deeds” (IVP57S). What is it about pride, in particular, that so disconcerts Spinoza? Recall that acquiescentia in se ipso is both a source of, and synonym for, pride. For Spinoza, self-aYrmation is both an aspiration and a source of anxiety. Upholding autonomy as an ethical ideal, Spinoza asserts that humans can derive satisfaction from themselves, independent of divine grace or social approbation; but because he recognizes limits to human power, understanding, and judgment, he worries that extolling autonomy could invite vanity and pride. Both for historical reasons (the tenacity of Augustinian assumptions) and for theoretical reasons (the dynamics of the passions), it is hard to feel good about ourselves for the right reasons. Yet Spinoza does not forsake ideals of self-aYrmation. Unlike Hobbes, who relies on modesty, humility, and fear to countervail glory, Spinoza would establish self-aYrmation on correct foundations. In Spinoza’s system, “the desire by which a man is said to act, and that by which he is said to be acted on, are one and the same” (VP4S). The conatus doctrine dictates that humans want to aYrm their power—this desire prevails both when humans act, and when they are acted upon. To moderate passive acquiescentia, Spinoza teaches individuals to reorient desire, weaning them from spurious joys that diminish their power. The desire that seeks satisfaction in social distinction can find more sustained gratification in active forms of self-aYrmation. In this sense, passive acquiescentia in se ipso, vanity (vana gloria), and pride (superbia) are tractable precisely because they are not merely proximate to rational acquiescentia—they express the same desire in passive form. Cartesians would contain self-satisfaction’s potential for escalation by yoking it to humility, or subjecting it to moral judgment. By contrast, Spinoza would gratify the desire for self that finds inadequate expression in pride. To experience a truly gratifying acquiescentia, Spinoza contends, the self must become stronger, increasing its power with respect to external causes. If “man’s true power of acting, or virtue, is reason itself (by IIIP3), which 98 | Chapter 3

man considers clearly and distinctly,” then “Acquiescentia in se ipso can arise from reason, and only that acquiescentia which does arise from reason is the greatest there can be” (IVP52D, IVP52). Active acquiescentia in se ipso surpasses the ephemeral joys of social distinction, for it expresses a “true,” rather than an imaginary, assessment of the self ’s power. But rational acquiescentia in se ipso is not only the “greatest acquiescentia there can be,” it is also the pinnacle of human aspiration. “Acquiescentia in se ipso is really the highest thing we can hope for. For (as we have shown in P25) no one strives to preserve his being for the sake of any end” (IVP52D). In a nonteleological system, a strong sense of self is the only conceivable “incitement” to or “result” of the striving to persevere in one’s being. There is no reason to strive to persevere in being, other than the inherent pleasures of selfhood. Spinoza’s ethic is one of individual empowerment. Yet the individual for whom self-aYrmation is the highest hope bears scant resemblance to the formidable sovereign subject of received secularization stories. Spinoza’s strong individual is strikingly impersonal and fundamentally egalitarian. Indeed, when Spinoza extols the acquiescentia that arises from reason, he promises a heightened sense of self to those who exercise reason, a capacity common to all. According to Spinoza, humans diVer to the extent that they are acted upon by external causes. “Insofar as men are torn by aVects which are passions, they can be contrary to one another” (IVP34). Rational individuals merit the characterization because they act, in the technical sense—“a man acts entirely from the laws of his own nature when he lives according to the guidance of reason” (IVP35C1). Since rationality is an expression of human nature, and human nature alone, all rational individuals agree with one another (IVP35D). “Only insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, must they always agree in nature” (IVP35). Thus, two individuals living wholly under the guidance of reason would agree entirely in nature. Granted, living wholly under the guidance of reason is an unattainable ideal, since finite beings cannot escape external determination. Nevertheless, Spinoza holds out the prospect of absolute agreement as the strongest possible support for the individual’s perseverance in being. Man, I say, can wish for nothing more helpful to the preservation of his being than that all should so agree in all things that the minds and bodies of all would compose, as it were, one mind and one body; that all should strive together, as far as they can, to preserve their being; and that all, together, should seek for themselves the common advantage of all. (IVP18S) If living under the guidance of reason facilitates union, and those who live under the guidance of reason enjoy the greatest acquiescentia in se ipso, then the Humility | 99

self whose power yields unsurpassed joy is strikingly impersonal. A man with the strongest possible sense of self understands that “man’s greatest good is common to all,” and that self-interest dictates establishing conditions so all can achieve virtue (IVP36S). One could object that the acquiescentia that arises from reason cannot be wholly impersonal, for, on the evidence of IVP52S, active acquiescentia in se ipso is not divorced from dynamics of recognition. Here, Spinoza makes the aVect’s strength proportional to recognition: “Because this acquiescentia is more and more encouraged and strengthened by praise (by IIIP53C), and on the other hand, more and more upset by blame (by IIIP55C), we are guided most by love of esteem [ gloria] and can hardly bear a life in disgrace” (IVP52S). With this gesture toward recognition, Spinoza appears to conflate joys that arise from reason with the ephemeral joys of social approbation. Yet this appearance is misleading—because the glory that encourages active acquiescentia is itself an active aVect. “Love of esteem [ gloria] is not contrary to reason, but can arise from it” (IVP58). If vainglory is an “acquiescentia in se ipso that is encouraged only by the opinion of the multitude,” active glory is an acquiescentia in se ipso founded upon the good opinion of rational men, who scorn social prestige (IVP58S). A man who lives under the guidance of reason appears in public not to win celebrity, but to forge community, and this desire “to join others to himself in friendship” is honorable, or worthy of praise (IVP37S1). The esteem that men who live under the guidance of reason seek is a form of acquiescentia in se ipso, because living in community with rational men enhances the individual’s powers of perseverance.102 This esteem is impersonal, however, because peers esteem one’s desire for, and pursuit of, friendship—that is, they esteem one’s reason.103 As Spinoza declaims, nothing is “more useful to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason” (IVP35C1). Spinoza’s enthusiasm for acquiescentia reflects a recognition of human interdependence and a commitment to egalitarian community—not, as Poiret complained, an aspiration to divine self-suYciency. If friendship proves useful because humans agree in nature, it proves necessary given the manifest limits to individual power: “Only by joining forces can they avoid the dangers which threaten on all sides” (IVP35S). When Spinoza reserves the greatest acquiescentia in se ipso for those who behave honorably, pursuing bonds of friendship, he predicates self-aYrmation on acknowledgment of finitude.104 To have an adequate idea of the self ’s power is to understand that, as finite modes of nature, humans cannot be truly self-reliant. In IVAppXXXII, Spinoza promises acquiescentia to those who understand that humans cannot escape vulnerability to external causes: 100 | Chapter 3

But human power is very limited and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes. So we do not have an absolute power to adapt things outside us to our use. Nevertheless, we shall bear calmly those things which happen to us contrary to what the principle of our advantage demands, if we are conscious that we have done our duty, that the power we have could not have extended itself to the point where we could have avoided these things, and that we are a part of the whole of Nature, whose order we follow. If we understand this clearly and distinctly, that part of us which is defined by understanding, that is, the better part of us, will be entirely satisfied [acquiescet] with this, and will strive to persevere in that satisfaction [acquiescentia]. For insofar as we understand, we can want nothing but what is necessary, nor absolutely be satisfied [acquiescere] with anything except what is true. Hence, insofar as we understand these things rightly, the striving of the better part of us agrees with the order of the whole of Nature. Duty requires that we exercise our power to its full extent, but we can only maximize our capacities if we aYrm participation in nature. Individuals who harbor delusions of omnipotence will be saddened when their impotence is exposed, with the result that their power is diminished. By contrast, individuals who appreciate limits to human power will experience satisfaction through its proper exercise. When Spinoza extols acquiescentia in se ipso, he not only asserts human power—he also invites a reckoning with its limits, a reckoning that promises to empower to the extent that it is joyous.105 Against his Christian peers, Spinoza refuses to call rational assessment of finitude “humility,” since a man who “conceives his lack of power because he understands something more powerful than himself, by the knowledge of which he determines his power of acting,” understands himself distinctly, with the result that “his power of acting is aided” (IVP53D). But Spinoza neither denies human finitude, nor deprives its aYrmation of ethical significance. Indeed, it is precisely when Spinoza appears most enthusiastic about the self and its power that he insists most forcefully on human limitation. Regnant secularization stories have taught us to expect the empowered self to resemble the omnipotent God—invulnerable, self-suYcient, domineering. Spinoza’s philosophy confounds these expectations. Indeed, Spinoza’s central insight appears paradoxical from an Augustinian perspective: the stronger the self becomes, the more its boundaries dissolve in recognition of the interdependence of finite modes. This dynamic of self-enhancement and self-dissolution is at work in VP27, where Spinoza reveals the possibility of an even more gratifying acquiescentia than rational acquiescentia in se ipso. “The greatest satisfaction of Humility | 101

mind [Mentis acquiescentia] there can be arises from the third kind of knowledge.”106 As a component of a perfectionist ethic available only to the few, the third kind of knowledge could implicate acquiescentia in arrogance of a very diVerent sort than Spinoza warns against in Part III. When Spinoza extols acquiescentia animi, he makes extravagant claims for the joys that come from perfecting one’s epistemological capacities. With these claims, Spinoza arguably denies the natural equality whose aYrmation Hobbes associates with modesty and humility. Without denying that Spinoza elevates philosophers above the vulgar, I would nevertheless argue that his treatment of acquiescentia mentis is consistent with the project of cultivating egalitarian friendship. Reserving salvation for the few107 is consistent with egalitarian politics because the substance of morality remains the same for those who achieve the second and the third kinds of knowledge, although the latter have more power to pursue friendship.108 While epistemological perfection yields unsurpassed acquiescentia, it provides no grounds for individual self-assertion. The third kind of knowledge yields unsurpassed acquiescentia precisely because it discloses, in immediate fashion, the relationship between singular things and the substance of which they are modes. Moreover, as the aVective intensity of acquiescentia increases, the self ’s centrality wanes. Acquiescentia mentis involves self-satisfaction—Spinoza refers the reader to DefAV XXV, the definition of acquiescentia in se ipso—because those who achieve intuitive knowledge know that they have done so, and are gratified by this knowledge. However, in acquiescentia mentis, joy is “accompanied by the idea of oneself, and consequently (by P30) it is also accompanied by the idea of God, as its cause,” with the result that it is inseparable from intellectual love of God (VP32D).109 “Thus, self-love, thought and lived to its final conclusion, is transformed into the most selfless love of God.”110 In its highest manifestation, Spinozist self-aYrmation involves acknowledging that one is a finite mode of nature—not a sovereign who rules over nature.

Conclusion: Spinoza and Secularity Without denying or diminishing Spinoza’s secularity, this chapter oVers a rejoinder to narratives that lionize Spinoza as the founder of modern secularism and, trading on Spinoza’s cachet, enshrine an especially strident secularism as one of the “oYcial values of a major part of the world after 1945.”111 To take one example: Jonathan Israel, the historian who has done the most to draw scholarly attention to Spinoza’s early modern reception, venerates Spinoza as “the philosopher who, more than any other, forged the basic metaphysical groundplan, exclusively secular moral values, and culture of individual 102 | Chapter 3

liberty, democratic politics, and freedom of thought and the press that embody today the defining core values of modern secular egalitarianism.”112 With this grandiose attribution, Israel credits Spinoza with a revolutionary transformation of social and political life. The lesson that Israel derives from his survey of Spinoza’s early modern reception is that Spinoza repudiated “almost the entire belief-system of the society around” him, replacing benighted superstition with the internally consistent and philosophically defensible system that is radical Enlightenment.113 On this view, the values of secularism, freedom, democracy, and egalitarianism are inextricably linked as necessary entailments of Spinoza’s one-substance monism. That radical Enlightenment comes as a package deal, free from ambiguity or internal dissension, is, for Israel, evidence of its “universal validity and superiority.”114 The prospect—or, depending on one’s perspective, the threat—of a fundamental reversal animates both the seventeenth-century anti-Spinoza polemic and contemporary Spinoza hagiography. Israel repeats the favorite tropes of the anti-Spinoza polemic, only to invert their valuation. If Israel and the polemicists agree that Spinoza has overturned traditional morality, Israel sees this as cause for celebration rather than condemnation. Israel’s project is, like Lamy’s, one of reversal.115 Moreover, the model of secularism that emerges from this narrative is one that Spinoza’s detractors would likely recognize as a confirmation of their admonitions against proud atheism—a secularism that refuses all debts to the past, dismissing religion as benighted superstition. In this chapter, I have showcased one aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy that is not persuasively cast as a reversal, inversion, or overturning of religious norms. To say that “humility is not a virtue,” and that acquiescentia “is really the highest thing we can hope for,” is not to invert religious ethics, rehabilitating the disposition that Augustinians decried as pride. Nor do Spinoza’s declarations dethrone God only to put humanity in God’s place. Moreover, I have made this argument using the very texts whose significance, according to Israel, lies in their demonstration of Spinoza’s revolutionary overthrow. When confronted with the Ethics, even polemicists have trouble toeing the Augustinian party line. Augustinians have to strain to figure Spinoza’s position as one of reversal precisely because, as they intuit, it is not the mirror image of their own.116 Thus, the very texts that Israel invokes to cast Spinoza as a revolutionary expose the reductionism of his brief for Western secularism. To insist upon the complexity of Spinoza’s position is not to open it, or secularity, to attack.117 If anything, my nonrevolutionary Spinoza is more “radical” than Israel’s, because he exceeds, rather than inverts, received ethical frameworks. For Spinoza’s acolytes and detractors, the revolutionary gesture is to Humility | 103

rehabilitate values that Christians have traditionally denigrated. By contrast, I locate Spinoza’s radicalism in his attempt to reframe the question of human finitude, refusing the Augustinian demand to choose between humility and pride. Reading Spinoza as a radical, rather than a “revolutionary,” enables us to understand secularity not as liberation from benighted superstition, but as a new experience of finitude and its constraints. As a critic of humility, Spinoza participates in an ongoing debate about whether it is legitimate for humans to aYrm themselves and, if so, on what basis. Although Spinoza reaches emphatically non-Augustinian conclusions, he shares many concerns about the dangers of exaggerated fantasies of autonomy. On my reading, secularity aVords a compelling new way to understand the relationship between agency and dependence—and, as such, it enables us to resist demands to choose between humility and pride, God and man, theocracy and secularism, barbarism and Enlightenment. Dispensing with tropes that figure secularity as a revolutionary overthrow also allows us to relate a less Manichean story about these debates’ legacy for the eighteenth century. Israel can depict Spinoza’s secular turn as a revolution without remainder because he attributes the remainders—the less palatable aspects of Enlightenment culture and politics—to the disappointing “moderate Enlightenment.” Spearheaded by Rousseau, the moderate Enlightenment compromises, even betrays, Spinoza’s radical insights, making Enlightenment complicit with many forms of hierarchy. Asserting an “irresolvable duality” between these two opposed camps, Israel invites us to choose between them, insulating Spinoza from critique, and opening Rousseau to abuse.118 If Spinoza is not, however, the revolutionary of Israel’s fantasy, then neither is Rousseau the reactionary. As we will see in the next chapter, Rousseau does not betray the tradition of the non-Augustinian critique of pride. Rather, Rousseau makes visible, and exacerbates, the ambivalence about self-aYrmation that we have already discerned in Spinoza’s texts. This ambivalence is especially pronounced in Rousseau’s texts given his extreme wariness regarding (interpersonal) dependence, and given his reliance on a theology of divine order. In his ambivalence, Rousseau exposes some of the challenges that confront projects to imagine a powerful human who looks nothing like a God. We must appreciate these challenges if we are to understand why the equation of secular subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity has been so tenacious—and if we are to counter this equation without further entrenching its binary assumptions.

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chapter 4 Self-Love rousseau on the allure, and the elusiveness, of divine self- sufficiency

Let us be humble [ humbles] so that we may be virtuous; let us see our weakness [faiblesse], and we shall be strong [forts]. As you have said, we increase our strength by recognizing our weakness [faiblesse].1

The question of individual autonomy—is complete autonomy possible, or desirable, for human beings?—is at the heart of Rousseau’s political thought. For Rousseau, the question of autonomy is, at base, a question about finitude and its constraints. On Rousseau’s analysis, autonomy is only possible if humans can achieve full empowerment without omnipotence. By full empowerment without omnipotence, I mean the ability of finite beings to feel strong and self-suYcient. Although illness, mortality, and suVering are inevitable for finite beings, a proponent of full empowerment allows, we can still prevent the kinds of weakness that breed interpersonal dependence. At times, Rousseau heralds the prospect of full empowerment. Decrying weakness as a source of dependence and corruption, Rousseau contends that it is possible, and morally imperative, to eliminate feelings of inadequacy. By ordering the passions, Rousseau promises, we can live lives in which we always feel strong, never weak. At other moments, however, Rousseau concedes that weakness, and the dependence it entails, are inevitable for finite beings. This concession occasions a celebration of sorts, because Rousseau hails relationships of mutual dependence as the key to human happiness. In short, Rousseau appears incapable of deciding whether weakness is a plight that can and should be overcome, or a felicitous constituent of human experience. What kind of ideal is full empowerment, and why does it inspire such ambivalence? When Rousseau examines the prospects for full empowerment, he entertains theological questions about humanity’s place within the divine order, our resemblance, or lack thereof, to the omnipotent God. Indeed, when 105

Rousseau tries to evoke a vision of full empowerment, he vacillates regarding whether this ideal can be articulated in strictly human terms. On the one hand, Rousseau reserves strength for individuals who embrace humanity’s divinely ordained location. Emile’s tutor bestows a lone precept on his pupil: “Be a man.” 2 With this imperative, the tutor warns that aspirations to transcend the human condition breed misery. In these passages, Rousseau sounds like a staunch nonAugustinian critic of pride. At the same time, Rousseau says, of moments of consummate happiness, “As long as this state lasts we are self-suYcient like God.” 3 Rousseau never promises immortality, nor does he credit humans with a quantum of power to rival that of God. Yet Rousseau does suggest that the (fleeting) experience of satiety gives us (ephemeral) access to something like divine self-suYciency. With this rhetorical flourish, Rousseau acknowledges that his ideal of self-suYciency is rather ambitious. Rousseau knows that he is making an extravagant claim for human suYciency—a claim liable to rankle Augustinian sensibilities, and confirm Augustinian suspicions. Sounding like the stereotypical secularist of Augustinian nightmares, Rousseau implies that strength, in the full sense, raises humans to an exalted, Godlike stature. In this chapter, I examine Rousseau’s ambivalence about full empowerment in order to understand the theoretical and rhetorical challenges confronting the non-Augustinian critique of pride, as well as its historical development. Rousseau is not unique in his ambivalence, nor is he the only non-Augustinian critic of pride to play with tropes of self-deification. Yet this tradition’s characteristic tensions are more pronounced in Rousseau’s texts, given his intense concern with dependence, and his compulsive need to measure humanity against divine standards. These characteristic tensions are on especially vivid display in Rousseau’s vexed attempt to envision a strong human being. Analyzing Rousseau’s depiction of empowered individuals, I diagnose a failure, on the part of nonAugustinian critics, to envision a strong human being who looks nothing like a God. Like Hobbes and Spinoza, Rousseau undertakes a project whose nonAugustinianism was patent to contemporary clerics, who responded to his work with stock accusations of pride.4 Upon Emile’s publication, the “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” provoked fierce clerical censure. Significantly, the theological doctrines that provoked clerics—denial of grace and original sin—are doctrines that classify Rousseau’s political theory as secular. When Rousseau denies grace, he credits humans with the ability to achieve virtue without divine assistance. Indeed, “full empowerment without omnipotence” could serve as a secular motto: finitude does not preclude human agency. When clerics accuse Rousseau of pride, they (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) 106 | Chapter 4

gloss secularization as self-deification. In the best Augustinian fashion, clerics read Rousseau’s heresy as evidence of a more fundamental desire, inspired by pride, to throw oV the divine yoke.5 Although Rousseau rebuts clerical accusations of atheism, he does not wholly reject the traditional theological framing of the question about human suYciency. Like his Augustinian critics, Rousseau asks whether secular agency involves aspirations to transcend humanity’s divinely ordained location. (Granted, Rousseau recasts the question in his own terms—the independence whose possibility and moral valence he debates is independence from other humans rather than independence from God. Rousseau takes the latter independence for granted.) Moreover, although Rousseau answers in the negative, his answer is neither unhesitating nor unqualified. We can grasp Rousseau’s hesitations and qualifications by examining his reliance on figures of theological provenance (such as order, humility, self-love, and divine omnipotence). Rousseau uses tropes drawn from the Augustinian critique of pride to simultaneously flaunt the boldness of his claim for human suYciency and profess allegiance to a theology of divine order. These tropes appeal to Rousseau because they resonate with some of his intuitions (e.g., full empowerment may elude ordinary mortals). Given their traditional resonance, however, these tropes also thwart Rousseau’s attempt to figure human power in non-Augustinian terms. Rousseau cannot easily retain connotations that serve his purposes while muting those that do not. For theorists (Rousseau included) who measure humanity against a divine standard, it is hard to imagine that we could do without God without becoming like God ourselves. In what follows, I examine Rousseau’s delicate negotiation with the Augustinian inheritance, focusing on aspects of that negotiation that make it hard to uphold the conviction that finite beings can be strong and self-suYcient. I begin by situating Rousseau within contexts of French theology, demonstrating his ongoing concern with pride in the theological sense—our aVective disposition to humanity’s divinely ordained location. The tenor of that disposition turns, in large part, on whether our location permits us to feel strong. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau evokes an epoch in which humans experienced consummate strength. That Rousseau must imagine a subhuman (a primitive savage) to illustrate this possibility inspires doubts about the availability of full empowerment to regular (i.e., self-conscious) humans.6 These doubts intensify in Emile. Throughout Emile, Rousseau employs an expressly theological register to evaluate finitude and its constraints—namely, a comparison of finite humanity to the omnipotent God. Having framed the question in these terms, Rousseau cannot dispel the neo-Augustinian suspicion that finitude entails weakness Self-Love | 107

and dependence (on other people). Indeed, Rousseau ultimately qualifies his promise of full empowerment, conceding the inevitability of dependence for self-conscious beings. Palatable though it may be to contemporary sensibilities, this aYrmation of intersubjective vulnerability does not represent Rousseau’s final position on weakness’s moral valence. Rousseau can neither deliver on the promise of full empowerment nor abandon the fantasy of a mortal who is not weak. To rescue the theoretical possibility of full empowerment, Rousseau conjures superhuman authority figures (such as the tutor, the lawgiver, and Wolmar). On one level, Rousseau’s recourse to the superhuman constitutes a valiant attempt to figure empowerment in terms other than those of literal self-deification. Yet to capture these figures’ extraordinary stature, Rousseau compares them (yet again) to the omnipotent God. Indeed, Rousseau finds it diYcult to figure human empowerment (however elusive) without using God as a template. Just as Rousseau cannot dispel the Augustinian suspicion (finitude entails dependence), so he cannot avoid the temptation Augustinians warn against (aspiring to transcend humanity’s location).7

Amour-propre and Amour de soi in the Encyclopédie It is not uncommon for scholars to identify Rousseau as one of the earliest and most enthusiastic proponents of self-esteem. With the assertion that Rousseau “sought to cultivate a self-love that would shore up selfconfidence and independence,” scholars depict Rousseau as repudiating a dreary ethic of self-mortification.8 While Christians condemn self-love unequivocally, Rousseau distinguishes good self-love (amour de soi) from bad (amour-propre). With this epoch-making distinction, scholars contend, Rousseau vanquished traditional morality, introducing a humanist ethos that prevails to this day. “Perhaps more than anyone else, it was Rousseau who prompted the reformulation of the basic moral polarity from the traditional conception, that is, love of others (good) versus love of self (bad), to the contemporary one, that is, good self-love versus bad self-love.” 9 When scholars congratulate Rousseau for rehabilitating self-love, they credit him with a deliberate secularization of ethical norms. Like the philosophes, who “dared to love themselves,” Rousseau sought to redeem the self ’s value from theological slander. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, scholars argue, the “championing of self-love and justification of self-interest were natural outgrowths of a larger campaign to reclaim human nature after centuries of Christian messages of self-abnegation.”10 Cast as an early proponent of amour de soi, Rousseau plays a key role in stories that equate secular subjectivity with robust self-esteem. 108 | Chapter 4

Yet Rousseau’s enthusiasm for amour de soi is scarcely as unprecedented, or as “daring,” as these critics suggest. Rousseau neither invented the distinction between amour-propre and amour de soi nor was he the first to ascribe moral value to the latter. In the late seventeenth century, French theologians influenced by Augustine and Descartes developed an optimistic theology that derived virtue from pursuit of self-interest. Although these theologians admonished against amour-propre, they argued that legitimate self-love (amour de soi) entails love of God—just as love of God entails legitimate self-love. That the Encyclopédie entry on “AMOUR-PROPRE & de nous-mêmes” plagiarizes from these texts attests their prestige within Rousseau’s intellectual milieu. Contrary to what twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars suggest, in this milieu, the mere fact that a philosopher endorses self-love does not provide evidence that he is atheist, heterodox, neo-pagan, or secular. Indeed, as the Encyclopédie demonstrates, enthusiasm for self-love is entirely consistent with an orthodox Christian theology that reserves agency to God. The Encyclopédie entry on “AMOUR-PROPRE & de nous-mêmes” plagiarizes shamelessly from (at least) two sources, Jacques Abbadie’s L’Art de se Connaître Soi-Même (1692) and Nicolas Malebranche’s Traité de Morale (1684).11 It is no accident that the Encyclopedist takes Abbadie and Malebranche as exponents of a single position on self-love. During the querelle du pur amour, which raged from 1697 to 1699, Malebranche insisted that his principles “combine perfectly with those of Abbadie, or, rather, with those of all the philosophers and theologians who do not flout metaphysics.”12 The querelle, which pitted Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, against Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, culminated with oYcial condemnation of Fénelon’s doctrine of “pure love”—which instructs believers to love God “as infinitely perfect in himself, without regard for the good that can come to us from him.”13 Malebranche entered the fray reluctantly, provoked by François Lamy, who wrote as a partisan of Fénelon’s disinterested love.14 To dispel misconceptions that he endorsed Lamy’s (and Fénelon’s) discredited standard of pure love, Malebranche argued, in the Traité de l’amour de Dieu (1697), that even the purest love is not devoid of interest. Although the Malebranche / Lamy exchange constitutes a sidebar to the querelle between Fénelon and Bossuet, it is significant for our purposes as a key to these controversies’ legacy for eighteenth-century philosophy. In the lexicon of Jansenist moralists, amour-propre was opposed to charity, and inimical to virtue, as a love so consuming that no aVection remained for God. “By the end of the [seventeenth] century, however, amour-propre is rehabilitated.”15 That the Encyclopedist plagiarizes from Malebranche and Abbadie—partisans of this rehabilitation—attests the continued prestige, in the eighteenth century, Self-Love | 109

of the theological tradition they represent. Endorsing the latter, relatively optimistic strand of moral thought, the Encyclopedist adopts an expressly polemical stance. He will counter “several Philosophes” who have misconstrued self-love.16 To rebut these misguided philosophers, the Encyclopedist plunders a tradition that boasts an Augustinian pedigree: “It seems to me that I read all of that in Saint Augustine,” Malebranche says of Abbadie.17 The bulk of the Encyclopédie entry copies nearly verbatim part 2, chapters 6 through 8, of Abbadie’s L’Art de se Connaître Soi-Même. In that text, Abbadie counters litanies of human depravity with theological assertions of human dignity, toward the end of recuperating moral agency.18 To rebut “the dangerous Morality of some, who have pretended to annihilate the Excellency of all the Vertues upon this principle, That they all proceeded from the Womb of Selflove, and were grounded merely in Interest,” Abbadie celebrates self-love as “an Inclination of a most Divine and Heavenly Extraction.”19 We only love ourselves, Abbadie contends, because God loves us—and because we love ourselves, we have the desire, and the motivation, to pursue truly advantageous ends. On Abbadie’s definition, amour de nous-mêmes is the natural inclination, antecedent to “intellectual Reflections,” to pursue happiness, pleasure, and the good.20 Although self-regarding passions are innocent by nature, “thro’ an EVect of our Corruption, they are perverted to be instruments of our Damage and Prejudice; which happens when false Goods excite in our Heart reall AVections.” 21 Guided by reason, self-love impels one to seek God, the self ’s highest good. Corrupt self-love (amour-propre), however, seeks satisfaction in finite goods, such as trivial status distinctions. If amour-propre glories in social position, legitimate self-love sustains egalitarian respect. As Abbadie reminds readers, all humans command respect as bearers of (divinely bestowed) dignity: “ ’Tis certain, that every Man which wears a Head, may justly demand this sentiment of us, when we consider his Excellence, and natural Dignity. We owe Esteem and Admiration to those Perfections which GOD has pleas’d to endow a Man with.” 22 That all passions reduce to self-interest is no cause for lament, according to Abbadie, because amour de nous-mêmes grounds morality, and inspires mutual respect. When selecting passages to excerpt from L’Art de se Connaître Soi-Même, the Encyclopedist betrays more interest in self-love’s ability to mediate love of God than the social relationships that proper self-knowledge sustains. Like Abbadie, the Encyclopédie invokes the distinction between amour-propre and amour de nous-mêmes to defend the possibility of self-love that is not solipsistic. While “the passions that come from self-love give us over to things, pride [amourpropre] wants things to give themselves over to us, and makes itself the center of 110 | Chapter 4

everything.” 23 Humans can love themselves without indulging in vicious selfdeification because legitimate self-love draws one outside of oneself, toward God.24 Indeed, as Abbadie teaches, and the Encyclopédie repeats, it is impossible to love oneself to excess, for boundless self-love attests one’s capacity to love God, an infinite object. Thus, the strictures of theologians who oppose love of self to love of God prove unfounded. In the lexicons of Abbadie and the Encyclopédie, “to love oneself as one must” is synonymous with “loving God”: It is also a great folly to oppose love of self [l’amour de nous-mêmes] to divine love, when the former is well regulated: for what is it to love oneself as one should? It is to love God; and what is it to love God? It is to love oneself as one should. Love of God is the correct meaning of love of ourselves; it is its spirit and perfection. When love of ourselves turns toward other objects, it does not warrant being called love; it is more dangerous than the most cruel hatred: but when love of ourselves turns toward God, it merges with divine love.25 Without denying that self-love can go awry, Abbadie and the Encyclopédie neutralize the threat that amour de soi poses to piety. Against proponents of pure love, Abbadie and the Encyclopédie hail the natural inclination to pursue happiness as a means to moral perfection. Lest Abbadie’s enthusiasm for self-love inspire a cavalier attitude toward religious devotion, the Encyclopedist enlists Malebranche to caution that virtuous pursuit of self-interest demands sacrifice, humility, and submission. The Encyclopédie entry concludes with a list of duties owed oneself—a list that repeats, almost verbatim, large swaths of part 2, chapter 14 of Malebranche’s Traité de Morale.26 With Abbadie, Malebranche deems self-love ethically neutral. “One cannot cease loving oneself,” Malebranche declares, and the Encyclopedist repeats; God has implanted a natural instinct to pursue happiness.27 If humans have no choice but to pursue happiness, they achieve virtue when, “aided by grace,” they regulate self-love in accordance with reason.28 From the fact that humans love themselves, Malebranche and the Encyclopedist contend, it follows that humans are obligated to pursue perfection, “which principally consists in a perfect conformity of our will to order.” 29 In Malebranche’s lexicon, “order” and “reason” are near synonyms: humanity’s principal duty, and sole path to virtue, “is to love Reason, or rather, to love Order.” 30 The virtuous recognize that “the order is immutable and necessary”; consequently, they accept divine judgment with consummate humility.31 Following Malebranche, the Encyclopedist instructs the reader to “compare oneself to order to humble and to despise oneself.” 32 From the perspective of eternity, Malebranche and Self-Love | 111

the Encyclopedist promise, love of order satisfies the self ’s boundless desire. In the short term, however, a person who loves order practices self-restraint, choosing “to sacrifice his present pleasures to future pleasures, to make himself miserable for a while, in order to be happy for all eternity.” 33 The Encyclopedist betrays scant investment in theological doctrines that undergird Malebranche’s encomium to order. The entry elides Malebranche’s exhortations to imitation of Christ, and omits the most patently “occasionalist” passage from chapter 14 of the Traité de Morale. Occasionalism, Malebranche’s philosophical signature, “is the doctrine that all creatures, finite entities that they are, are absolutely devoid of any causal eYcacy, and that God is the only true causal agent.” 34 In The Search after Truth, Malebranche establishes that “there is only one true cause because there is only one true God; that the nature or power of each thing is nothing but the will of God; that all natural causes are not true causes but only occasional causes.” 35 Malebranche’s radically theocentric philosophy deprives finite beings of agency; divine omnipotence means “it is God who does all.” 36 In the passage from the Traité that the Encyclopedist omits, Malebranche asserts the impotence of created beings: “For we are not a law unto ourselves, nor a good unto ourselves. God alone possesses power; hence He alone is lovable, He alone is formidable. Invincibly we want to be happy; thus we ought to obey His law inviolably.” 37 To enlighten one’s amourpropre, one must dwell incessantly upon God’s omnipotence, the justice of his judgments, and the rewards and punishments they entail. Although the Encyclopedist mutes the theocentrism of the sources from which he plagiarizes, he cannot dispense altogether with Malebranche’s theological commitments. The Encyclopédie invokes a theological tradition that promises surpassing joy to individuals who aYrm God’s causal monopoly. While Malebranche evinces confidence in reason, he insists that “man is utterly unable to do Good, but through a new supply of Grace, which illuminates him by its Light, and attracts him by its Sweetness; for, by himself, he is only able to sin.” 38 Indeed, Malebranche weds recuperation of self-love to a fairly pessimistic theology. Malebranche reminds readers that “man, in himself is a meer Nothing, that he is made up of Weakness, Infirmity and Darkness, that he receives Life, Sense and Motion, continually from God, that he owes to him his whole Being and all his Faculties.” 39 Readers conversant in controversies surrounding pure love—presumably, most philosophically sophisticated eighteenth-century readers—would grasp the theological foundations on which the rehabilitation of self-love rests, the Encyclopedist’s strategic excisions notwithstanding. Thus, the Encyclopédie entry belies the scholarly commonplace that eighteenth-century enthusiasm for self-interest counters 112 | Chapter 4

Augustinian counsels of self-abnegation. In the texts from which the Encyclopédie plagiarizes, and in the Encyclopédie itself, justifications for self-interest culminate with exhortations to humility and repentance. In this tradition, the sin is not to display a lively regard for one’s interest, but rather to disregard one’s true interests by shirking dependence on God. For scholars seeking evidence of secularization, the relevant question is not “self-love, for or against?” Rather, the question is whether proponents of self-love aYrm or deny human agency.

The Secularization of Self-Love? Read against this prominent contemporary vindication of selflove, Rousseau’s distinction between amour-propre and amour de soi, in the Second Discourse, is striking for its silence regarding God. While the Encyclopédie makes the correspondence between self-love and love of God a primary gambit for self-love’s rehabilitation, Rousseau neglects to mention God when he catalogs the varieties of self-love. Amour propre and Amour de soi-même, two very diVerent passions in their nature and their eVects, should not be confused. Self-love is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to attend to its self-preservation and which, guided in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amour propre is only a relative sentiment, factitious, and born in society, which inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else, inspires men with all the evils they do one another, and is the genuine source of honor.40 On the evidence of the Second Discourse, one could conclude that Rousseau has “secularized” the critique of pride by “bracketing” God—making amourpropre a topic for moral psychology rather than theology.41 As an anatomist of amour-propre, Rousseau confronts the phenomenon of dependence, but the dependence he invites us to confess and, ultimately, eliminate, is reliance on public opinion—not dependence on divine power. On this reading, Rousseau continues Abbadie’s project of securing egalitarian respect, even while he dispenses with the theological edifice that, in L’Art de se Connaître Soi-Même (and the Encyclopédie), guarantees human dignity. To put it another way, one could argue that Rousseau innovates by purging self-love of theological connotations. Scholars who contend that Rousseau’s excursions against amour-propre constitute “the foundation on which his social, political, and moral philosophy rests” tend to interpret Rousseau in this way.42 Structural parallels with Christian narratives of the Fall notwithstanding, Self-Love | 113

Rousseau’s theory of amour-propre is said to rest on “essentially secular and naturalistic presuppositions.” 43 It is a commonplace that, as a moral psychologist, Rousseau diagnoses a fundamental problem—namely, the emergence and escalation of amour-propre in civil society—to which his positive political theory provides the solution. For scholars in this tradition, critical debate turns on amour-propre’s “essence” and, more important, Rousseau’s evaluation of the passion.44 Although scholars diVer on the “solutions” to which amourpropre is susceptible, they agree that, in Rousseau’s texts, the “problem” that amour-propre poses is a social and political problem—namely, the problem of lust for recognition. The most sophisticated and comprehensive work in this genre, Frederick Neuhouser’s Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love, makes patent the assumptions with which many contemporary scholars operate. Neuhouser opens by oVering a pair of synonyms for inflamed amour-propre: The central thesis of Rousseau’s Second Discourse is that amour-propre in its “inflamed,” or corrupted, manifestations—what earlier thinkers called pride or vanity—is the principal source of an array of evils so widespread that they can easily appear to be necessary features of the human condition: enslavement (or domination), conflict, vice, misery, and self-estrangement.45 Here, Neuhouser assumes that amour-propre is synonymous with pride, and, more important, that pride is synonymous with vanity. Moreover, Neuhouser treats all three terms (“pride,” “vanity,” and “amour-propre”) as instances of the “drive for recognition”—as if this drive exhausts, and has always exhausted, these terms’ meanings.46 For French theologians, however, amour-propre and pride signify (among other things) the aspiration to become like God. These theological connotations have vanished from Neuhouser’s lexicon, presumably because he believes that they have vanished from Rousseau’s lexicon. On Neuhouser’s reading, Rousseau has divorced amour-propre from a critique of “the generic pride of man as such,” 47 with the result that he can address the former in purely “secular, naturalistic” terms. The ever-growing volume of this literature, and the vibrancy of its internal debates, suggests that, as a theorist of amour-propre, Rousseau develops a rich moral psychology that can be profitably analyzed independent of historical and theological context. Yet contrary to what Neuhouser implies, pride—defined as the aspiration “to raise ourselves above our nature”—has neither vanished from Rousseau’s lexicon nor disappeared as an object of theoretical concern.48 Indeed, Rousseau remains conversant in theological debates surrounding selflove, as a look beyond the Second Discourse reveals. In Emile, the Savoyard vicar identifies honoring God as a “natural consequence of self-love [l’amour de 114 | Chapter 4

soi]” and, at the conclusion of the vicar’s profession, the tutor anticipates that Emile will learn to confound “the love of the Author of his being” with “that same love of self [amour de soi]” (E 278, 314). In Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau orchestrates a sequel of sorts to the querelle du pur amour, in which Julie and her correspondents debate the possibility of nonquietist humility.49 As someone conversant in these debates, Rousseau employs the full range of meanings that pride has traditionally borne. Indeed, on occasion, Rousseau treats amour-propre as a synonym for pride, defined as the aspiration to transcend humanity.50 The more characteristic relationship between amour-propre and pride in Rousseau’s texts, however, is genealogical. We can see as much in the Second Discourse, where Rousseau identifies something like generic human pride as a condition of possibility for the development of amour-propre. When Rousseau relates the story of humanity’s transformation into self-conscious, property-acquiring beings, he contends that humanity’s latent faculties develop in response to natural exigency (e.g., the height of fruit-bearing trees). With the development of these faculties, and their deployment to trick and trap animals, humans experience pride (orgeuil), or recognition of their species’ superiority. “This is how his first look at himself aroused the first movement of pride [orgeuil] in him; this is how, while as yet scarcely able to discriminate ranks, and considering himself in the first rank as a species, he was from afar preparing to claim his rank as an individual” (SD 162). Here, pride is about humanity’s place within the divine order—not about relative social standing. In no way delusional—humans really do enjoy sovereignty within nature—pride nevertheless poses dangers, precisely because it develops faculties of comparative reasoning requisite for social competition.51 That consciousness of humanity’s divinely ordained location opens the door to individual vanity suggests the diYculty of resting content with humanity’s place. The very qualities that establish human superiority ensure that (legitimate) pride is fleeting—generic species superiority rarely satisfies self-conscious beings. Actual humans, as opposed to primitive savages, need to feel special as individuals—and, as we will see, the disappointments of passionate human existence can lead individuals to covet superhuman status. Thus, in Rousseau’s narrative, amour-propre derives from a more fundamental disposition, a pride in human distinction that can easily devolve into resentment of human limitation. To relate a story about the genesis of amour-propre, Rousseau must engage a version of the traditional theological question about pride: what is the individual’s aVective disposition toward humanity’s divinely ordained location? As the passage from the Second Discourse suggests, the challenge of reconciling individuals to humanity’s absolute standing is genealogically prior to, and Self-Love | 115

conceptually more fundamental than, the challenge of taming relative evaluation. To emphasize Rousseau’s preoccupation with pride is not, however, to deny that he expends immense theoretical energy, and displays immense theoretical creativity, wrestling with dynamics of recognition. Clearly, Rousseau has identified an aspect of amour-propre that can be analyzed independently of the theological questions that exercised Abbadie and Malebranche. While appreciative of the insights aVorded by studies that treat Rousseau as a theorist of recognition, I highlight Rousseau’s preoccupation with pride to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the historical transformation in which he participates. Rousseau’s stance toward the tradition summarized in the Encyclopédie is not one of rejection, abandonment, or supercession. If Rousseau uses the term “amour-propre” to showcase dynamics of recognition, he adapts other elements from this tradition (e.g., order, humility, pride) to develop a non-Augustinian version of a traditional moral imperative—the imperative to accept humanity’s divinely ordained location. Read against his Christian contemporaries, Rousseau’s “innovation” lies less in his rehabilitation of self-love than in his contention that conformity to order will free humans from weakness and dependence.52 In other words, Rousseau “secularizes” the discourse of self-love not by forsaking theology for moral psychology, but by developing a theology that makes room for human agency.

The Second Discourse: Full Empowerment without Omnipotence Generic human pride remains a preoccupation of Rousseau’s because, as he argues in the Second Discourse, our cognitive and aVective dispositions toward finitude color our prospects for independence. If we judge our finite resources deficient, Rousseau worries, we will strive to supplement them in ways that solidify bonds of interpersonal dependence, and exacerbate inequality. Yet, in the Second Discourse, Rousseau denies that dependence is inevitable for finite beings. Indeed, Rousseau promises that humans can be fully empowered even though they are finite. By nature, humans possess resources adequate to their (natural) needs. Mired in relations of dependence, however, most humans ignore this fact, judging their natural endowments woefully inadequate. Thus, the tale of inequality’s emergence is also a tale about the way that, in the course of human development, individuals have come to apprehend—and to resent—their finitude. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau not only traces the genesis of this resentment—at moments, he joins the chorus of complaint. If the Second Discourse introduces a bold vision of human 116 | Chapter 4

empowerment, it also shows how hard it can be for civilized men to uphold the non-Augustinian conviction that finitude is a source of strength. At the heart of Rousseau’s conjectural history, in the Second Discourse, is the premise that humans are naturally self-suYcient. In that text, Rousseau sets out to retrieve possibilities of human existence obscured by the duplicity of contemporary society. Self-suYciency is foremost among these possibilities. By nature, primitive man was “subject to few passions and self-suYcient”—that is, he had no “need of others of his kind” (SD 157). With this paean to primitive self-suYciency, Rousseau breaks with Augustinian theology, insisting that finitude does not entail dependence (on God or other people). Moreover, Rousseau imagines the subjective experience of a primitive savage as one of almost unlimited potency. Although savage man begins “with purely animal functions,” he diVers from animals in that he can resist nature’s dictates: “Nature commands every animal, and the Beast obeys. Man experiences the same impression, but he recognizes himself free to acquiesce or to resist” (SD 142, 141). Humans do not merely possess the faculty of volition—by necessity, they are aware of this unique endowment.53 The spirituality of man’s soul lies in “the consciousness of this freedom” or, to put it another way, “the sentiment of this power [ puissance]” (SD 141). When Rousseau locates human distinction in free agency, he upholds consciousness of power as humanity’s defining trait. Given the basic structure of savage man’s desires, which “do not exceed his Physical needs,” his experience of power is one of amplitude and abundance (SD 142). With this portrait of nascent man, Rousseau presents a heady vision of full empowerment without omnipotence. Although nature places objective constraints on what humans can do and become, individuals are not doomed to suVer pangs of inadequacy. For a primitive savage, Rousseau contends, nature’s absolute limits occasion no complaints, because they do not register as a lack. To defend this expansive claim for the possibilities of human empowerment, Rousseau distinguishes natural from artificial weakness. Primitive savages experience their endowments as suYcient, Rousseau argues, because natural weakness is the only weakness to which they are subject. Sources of natural weakness include aging, illness, and mortality. In the pristine state of nature, as in civilized society, human beings confront “formidable enemies” against which they have few lines of defense (SD 136). Indeed, Rousseau bewails “natural infirmities [infirmités], childhood, old age, and illnesses of every kind” as “melancholy signs of our weakness [ faiblesse]” (SD 136). “The simple, uniform, and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature” fortifies “nascent men” against illness, but it cannot immunize them against nonage, senescence, and mortality (SD 161, Self-Love | 117

138). Nor can it shield savages from suVering, pain, and passivity.54 Indeed, when Rousseau imputes pity, or “the internal impulsion of commiseration,” to natural man, he contends that, prior to the advent of reason, individuals are sensitive to pain (SD 127). “A disposition suited to beings as weak [ faibles] and as subject to so many ills as we are,” pity addresses human beings’ inexorable passivity (SD 152). On Rousseau’s depiction, then, nascent man is vulnerable, but he does not feel weak, because his natural frailty does not prevent him from satisfying his needs. (For example, aging does not frustrate primitive projects, according to Rousseau, because desire diminishes in proportion to declining ability to secure satisfaction.) Nascent man’s “sentiment of power” is also bolstered by his cognitive limitations, which preclude consciousness of finitude. Savages are oblivious to natural constraints on their endeavor to persevere, as the example of death reveals: “they eventually expire without anyone’s noticing that they are ceasing to be, and almost without noticing it themselves” (SD 137).55 With this portrait of blissful oblivion, Rousseau contends that “beings as weak and as subject to so many ills as we are” are nevertheless capable of self-suYciency. Thus, one lesson of Rousseau’s return to nature is that natural weakness need not constitute an insuperable obstacle to human flourishing, or an insuperable objection to humanity’s station. In principle, vulnerable mortals can be happy and free. In the Second Discourse, the primary impediments to human freedom derive from artificial—surplus or self-imposed—weakness. Civilized man is weak in two senses, according to Rousseau. With the advent of technology, man “becomes weak [ faible], timorous, groveling,” allowing native capacities to fall into desuetude (SD 138–39).56 But civilized man is also weak because he is subject to myriad and insatiable needs. “A relative sentiment, factitious, and born in society, which inclines every individual to set greater store by himself than by anyone else,” amour-propre makes individuals needy, because it creates desires that cannot be satisfied by a lone individual (SD 218). With “amour-propre interested,” man, “who had previously been free and independent, is now so to speak subjugated by a multitude of new needs to the whole of Nature, and especially to those of his kind, whose slave he in a sense becomes even by becoming their master” (SD 170). Beings with amour-propre crave material goods whose production requires collaboration, and, by definition, they crave social esteem. Thus, beings with amour-propre depend on others to maintain their standard of living and, more fundamentally, their sense of self. Civilized man “is capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment” (SD 187). Regardless of their social status, beings with amour-propre are liable 118 | Chapter 4

to feel bad about themselves, because their native endowments are insuYcient to meet their existential and emotional needs. On this narrative, dependence results not from humanity’s inherent limitations, but from “artificial” desires for the assistance and esteem of peers. Having distinguished natural from artificial weakness, Rousseau appears, at first glance, to indict the latter and exculpate the former. Rousseau’s (remarkably bold) claim is that hunger, pain, illness, and mortality place no constraints on individual self-suYciency. Moreover, if the kinds of weakness that encourage dependence are artificial, they are avoidable, and, more important, they are bound up in paradoxical ways with the development of human potential. Humans make themselves weak, Rousseau suggests, by honing capabilities that, on a superficial level, appear to make them stronger. As Rousseau narrates human history, nature instigates the development of human faculties by placing obstacles (e.g., tall trees, ferocious animals) in nascent man’s path. Yet nature does not confront humanity with insurmountable obstacles. “Only nature is capable of exactly adapting means to ends, and matching force to resistance.” 57 With the advent of relative comparison, however, humans begin to confront challenges they cannot meet. Although human faculties develop proportionally in response to natural obstacles, they do not expand in proportion to artificial desires, nor could they so expand—because imagination extends desire over an infinite domain.58 To say that weakness is artificial is therefore to say that faculties that facilitate human mastery also create individual dependence. In other words, it is to highlight the irony of perfectibility, which is, of course, a central theme of the Second Discourse. “It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all of man’s miseries” (SD 141). Perfectibility threatens human happiness because, while expansive (“almost unlimited”), it is not, in fact, unlimited. Unlike the animals, we know that we are powerful, and that we can change nature at will—but, unlike the animals, we confront absolute limits to our power when we attempt projects that exceed our capabilities. With this genealogy of artificial weakness, Rousseau exposes the ambivalent quality of human sovereignty within nature. By making ourselves powerful, Rousseau warns, we risk making ourselves vulnerable to interpersonal dependence. Rousseau ostensibly presents this caution not to lament humanity’s divinely ordained location, but to emphasize human responsibility for the current predicament. Yet, throughout the Second Discourse, Rousseau betrays discomfort with aspects of humanity’s location. For someone who contends that finitude is not inimical to self-suYciency, Rousseau seems unduly agitated by the prospect of death. Although natural infirmity does not dismay nascent men, it disSelf-Love | 119

mays Rousseau, who possesses knowledge that his putative ancestors lacked— “knowledge of death, and of its terrors” (SD 142). Natural weakness inspires “melancholy” and fear in Rousseau—indeed, Rousseau confronts natural weakness as an “enemy.” That Rousseau shudders while cataloging infirmities that, he argues, would not register as such for nascent man suggests (unwitting or disavowed?) equivocation regarding nature’s goodness. Rousseau professes to “have shown,” in the Second Discourse, “that except for death, which is an evil almost solely because of the preparations made in anticipation of it, most of our physical evils are also of our own making.” 59 Although Rousseau ascribes the bulk of death’s terrors to social convention, he is reluctant to credit humans with all of death’s sting. Death constitutes an evil “almost solely”—but not entirely—because of human intervention. Similarly, Rousseau hesitates to depict primitive savages as wholly innocent of death. Nascent men expire “almost [ presque] without their noticing it themselves.” In these passages, Rousseau refuses to reject outright the notion that mortality mars humanity’s natural condition. (Indeed, it would be diYcult for a theorist who upholds “the sweet sentiment of existence, independent of any other sensation” as justification for human existence to embrace death wholeheartedly.)60 For Rousseau, the mere fact of mortality—independent of human convention—constitutes an aVront. In these moments of equivocation, Rousseau has trouble upholding the staunch non-Augustinian position that full empowerment is available to finite beings. If Rousseau’s real worry is artificial weakness—which is practically synonymous with dependence—why does finitude chafe so much? One could read Rousseau’s chagrin at mortality as a damning inconsistency, a violation of his professed commitment to natural goodness. Alternatively, one could read Rousseau’s anxiety as a symptom of his historical location: within a society structured by inequality and its attendant epistemological, emotional, and psychic deformations. On this reading, Rousseau’s conjectural history provides an exculpatory explanation for his own discomfort with death. For the Second Discourse not only laments the creation of passions unknown to nature. It also shows how, with the development of such passions, nature itself becomes a problem. One of Rousseau’s central claims in the Second Discourse is that nature only achieves salience for individuals given a certain level, and a certain kind, of human development. By Rousseau’s admission, nature establishes “diVerences in age, health, strengths of Body, and qualities of Mind, or of Soul” (SD 131). Yet these diVerences lack “reality and influence” in the absence of social institutions that reward their exploitation (SD 157). With the advent of property, however, natural aptitudes surface, to the detriment of equality: 120 | Chapter 4

This is how natural inequality imperceptibly unfolds together with unequal associations, and the diVerences between men, developed by their diVerent circumstances, become more perceptible, more permanent in their eVects, and begin to exercise a corresponding influence on the fate of individuals. (SD 170)61 As the example of natural inequality reveals, human intervention is required to make certain facets of nature “real.” Like natural inequality, natural infirmity only manifests given a certain level of human development. “The knowledge of death, and of its terrors, is one of man’s first acquisitions on moving away from the animal condition” (SD 142). Like natural inequality, natural infirmity smarts once it is palpable—knowledge of death is apparently coextensive with fear of death. If this reading rescues Rousseau from contradiction, it does so at a price: exposing the diYculty, for conscious beings, of wholeheartedly embracing finitude. To establish the theoretical possibility of full empowerment without omnipotence, Rousseau must envision a primitive savage. The savage is essentially a subhuman—although the savage experiences himself as free, he lacks the full self-consciousness that comes with the further unfolding of perfectibility. On one level, recourse to the subhuman constitutes a valiant eVort to envision human power along non-Augustinian lines. Having rejected the doctrine of original sin, Rousseau simultaneously asserts the possibility of full empowerment and denies that a fully empowered human would look like God. Yet the primitive savage is not, ultimately, the most compelling rejoinder to the accusation that independence is tantamount to self-deification. Although Rousseau resists the trope of self-deification, he still implies that autonomy is in some sense inhuman—and that finitude is what frustrates autonomy. Rousseau’s reliance on this figure raises doubts about whether full empowerment is available to self-conscious beings—that is, to recognizable humans. After all, humans apprehend their finitude at a very early stage in Rousseau’s narrative— knowledge of death “is one of man’s first acquisitions.” Abolishing property, or distributing it more equitably, would presumably do little to moderate humanity’s fearful disposition toward death. (Indeed, mortality would appear to threaten the cheerful tranquility of the “Golden Age,” a phase within the state of nature in which individuals enjoy relative self-suYciency, even though self-consciousness has kicked in.)62 For self-conscious beings, death smarts as a symbol of nature’s inexorability, its ultimate resistance to human manipulation. Thus, Rousseau’s narrative appears to make ignorance of finitude a condition of possibility for full empowerment. Self-Love | 121

If full empowerment is unavailable to recognizable humans, are we bound to resent our situation, as Rousseau does? I pose this question less to highlight the tragic gap between theory and practice than to signal Rousseau’s ambivalence regarding weakness. At times, Rousseau suggests that weakness is inconsequential—we can insulate ourselves from artificial weakness, and, so insulated, we will appreciate our natural endowments. At other moments, however, Rousseau implies that natural weakness is invariably cause for complaint. At these moments, Rousseau has trouble dispelling the Augustinian suspicion that finitude entails dependence. To understand why this suspicion persists, Rousseau’s non-Augustinian convictions notwithstanding, I turn to Emile.

Emile: Measuring Human Power against Divine Standards Rousseau betrays heightened ambivalence about full empowerment in Emile. In that text, Rousseau condemns weakness as the source of “all wickedness” (making full empowerment a moral imperative) and celebrates weakness as the source of our “frail happiness” (making full empowerment morally suspect) (E 67, 221). Moreover, in each passage, Rousseau uses the same literary device to assess the moral valence of weakness—he contrasts finite human power with divine omnipotence. If Emile’s anatomy of weakness revolves around many of the same distinctions employed in the Second Discourse (natural / artificial, absolute / relative), it embeds these distinctions in an expressly theological register. To examine the prospects for human strength, Rousseau conjures the specter of divine omnipotence, and to establish the grounds for human happiness, he counsels fealty to divine order. Given that Rousseau predicates strength, freedom, and virtue on overcoming pride—or discontent with humanity’s location—it is not altogether surprising that he has recourse to theological rhetoric in Emile. Yet the recruitment of theological figures for non-Augustinian projects is not without peril. On the one hand, the God / man comparison risks conflating finitude with weakness, plunging humans into dejection (abdication of power). On the other hand, the comparison risks making divine self-suYciency seem like a legitimate aspiration for humans, inviting fantasies of self-deification (overestimation of power). Succumbing to either danger—dejection or self-deification—would compromise the project of full empowerment without omnipotence. In Emile, Rousseau undertakes a delicate negotiation with inherited tropes—a negotiation that makes figuring secular agency in strictly human terms something of a challenge. Alert to these challenges, we begin to see why non-Augustinian projects 122 | Chapter 4

to dispel the penumbra of suspicion surrounding secularity have not gained more traction, historically. Rousseau gets lured into these rhetorical thickets because, like Hobbes and Spinoza before him, he chastens to empower. In the valedictory oration delivered upon Emile’s departure for his travels, the tutor condenses his moral teaching into a concise precept: “Be a man” (E 445).63 The exhortation to “be a man” is the only guideline that Emile needs on the journey that certifies his readiness for marriage, for “it comprehends all the others” (E 445). With this comprehensive precept, the tutor does not assert the superiority of authentic individuality to absorption by social roles. Rousseau scholars have long identified the man / citizen antithesis as the opposition on which Rousseau’s political theory turns. Struck by Rousseau’s declaration that “one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time,” scholars debate whether Rousseau asserts incompatibility between civic allegiance and individual freedom, or whether he reconciles the claims of the state and the self (E 39).64 In the tutor’s valedictory instruction, however, the imperative “be a man” does not mean “instead of (or in addition to) being a citizen”; it means “rest content with humanity, instead of yearning to become like God.” 65 Thus, the tutor elaborates upon his precept by delineating the narrow confines of the “human estate”: Restrain your heart within the limits of your condition. Study and know these limits. However narrow they may be, a man is not unhappy as long as he closes himself up within them. He is unhappy only when he wants to go out beyond them. He is unhappy only when, in his senseless desires, he puts in the rank of the possible what is not possible. He is unhappy when he forgets his human estate in order to forge for himself imaginary estates from which he always falls back into his own. (E 445–46) To deny the fact of human limitation is to attempt self-deification: “A king wants to be God only when he believes he is no longer a man” (E 446).66 With this example, Rousseau aligns his maxim with traditional critiques of pride. Indeed, the tutor condemns “the illusions of pride [orgeuil]” as “the source of our greatest ills” (E 446). To “be a man,” Emile must imitate the “wise man” who “stays in his place” (E 446). Staying in place is both a moral imperative and a vehicle for empowerment. The wise man who stays in place “is actually more powerful and richer than we are to the extent that he desires less than we do” (E 446). When Rousseau extols the wise man’s power, he repeats central insights of the non-Augustinian critique of pride: “You diminish your strength if your Self-Love | 123

pride [orgeuil] is extended farther than it” (E 81). To reconcile individuals to humanity’s divinely ordained location, Rousseau holds out the prospect of a specifically human power: strength is available even to “a mortal and perishable being” like man (E 446). How does Rousseau understand human finitude such that it does not preclude strength? And, if strength is theoretically possible for humans, why does finitude occasion such ambivalence? To answer these questions, we must analyze Rousseau’s anatomy of human weakness. As in the Second Discourse, Rousseau’s expansive claims for human power rest on a distinction between natural or absolute weakness, and artificial or relative weakness. According to Rousseau, nature sets absolute bounds to human power. From the etymological association of “virtue” with “strength,” Rousseau concludes that “virtue belongs only to a being that is weak [ faible] by nature and strong by will” (E 444).67 For human beings, certain kinds of weakness are inevitable—but this fact does not preclude the achievement of certain kinds of strength. Rousseau identifies (at least) three ways in which nature constrains human power: the providential order proves immune to human folly; mortality subjects humans to the yoke of necessity; and the sequence of human development renders children dependent.68 The impregnability of the divine order attests God’s wisdom and humanity’s weakness. Although, on the testimony of the Savoyard vicar, man is “the king of the earth he inhabits,” man has negligible influence on the shape of the whole, given divinely ordained limits to human power (E 277). Humanity merits the “first rank” of sovereignty by virtue of freedom and intelligence (E 277). Too often, however, humans fail to master their passions, and the result is rampant disorder. “Concert reigns among the elements, and men are in chaos!” (E 278). Although the vicar laments human misery, he insists that it provides no grounds to doubt God’s providential solicitude. God established order in nature and “took certain measures so that nothing could disturb that order,” least of all human willfulness (E 276). Man is “a being so weak [ faible]” that he can abuse his freedom without disrupting nature’s harmony or imperiling the species (E 281). Providence endows man with freedom in the hopes that he will do good, “but it has limited his strength to such an extent that the abuse of freedom it reserves for him cannot disturb the general order” (E 281).69 God gave humans enough power to injure themselves, but not enough to ruin things for everyone else. Given divinely imposed limits on human power, humanity’s position combines sovereignty with slavery. Although poised to rule the earth, humans are enslaved by “the infirmities [infirmités] of human nature, distasteful objects, images of suVering” (E 218). Indeed, Rousseau figures “the human condition” 124 | Chapter 4

as a house of bondage (E 443). By Rousseau’s admission, “the fate of man is to suVer at all times, the very care of his preservation is connected with pain” (E 48). Rousseau repeatedly, and emphatically, underscores human vulnerability. “What does not admit of exceptions, however, is man’s subjection to the ills of his species, to the accidents, to the dangers of life, finally to death” (E 131). To illustrate the inherent fragility of the human constitution, Rousseau employs figures of the yoke and the chain. To be human is to bear “the harsh yoke which nature imposes on man, the heavy yoke of necessity under which every finite being must bend” (E 91).70 Here, humans suVer at the mercy of “alien causes” whose power exceeds their own (E 80). Figured this way, finitude does not reflect a deficiency within human power; rather, it reflects nature’s inexorability. When Rousseau measures humanity’s “natural strength [ forces naturelles],” he distinguishes two experiences of constraint (E 83). To suVer is to confront the power of the external world; by contrast, to feel weak is to judge one’s own power deficient. On Rousseau’s argument, there is a palpable diVerence between feeling chained and feeling deficient. The tutor’s pedagogical devices employ “the chains of necessity” to keep the young Emile in place (E 187). While necessity’s yoke is “heavy,” and its law “hard,” it does not inspire resentment in a properly raised child, or so Rousseau contends (E 161, 83). “Accustomed to submitting to the law of necessity without resistance,” Emile experiences finitude as a fact rather than an aVront (E 208). Although the power of external causes may make Emile feel small, it should not, Rousseau argues, make him feel inadequate. Feeling “weak,” by contrast, does sting, for it reveals disorder within the self. Rousseau introduces the notion of relative weakness to account for feelings of inadequacy, and to elaborate their moral implications. “When it is said that man is weak [ faible], what is meant? This word weak indicates a relation, a relation obtaining within the being to which one applies it” (E 81). Rousseau’s account of child development illustrates the distinction between absolute and relative weakness. According to Rousseau, “The whole course of life up to adolescence is a time of weakness [ faiblesse]” (E 165). In the child’s case, natural weakness is both absolute (compared to adults) and relative (to the child’s needs, which he cannot satisfy without assistance). At the age of twelve or thirteen, however, “the growing animal, still weak absolutely [absolument faible], becomes strong relatively”—the child has more power than is required to meet his needs (E 165). Even at this moment of surplus power, the child is weaker, by an objective standard, than an adult. Defining weakness in relative terms introduces the prospect of self-imposed infirmity.71 At certain stages of human development (e.g., infancy), the indiSelf-Love | 125

vidual’s weakness is wholly natural, a function of bodily constitution. In adults, however, relative weakness is largely self-inflicted, a function of undisciplined desire. “It is our passions that make us weak [ faibles]” (E 165). Defining weakness in relative terms makes humanity complicit in its own impotence, and, for that reason, it enables Rousseau to extend the promise of strength to finite beings. If most weakness is relative, a function of disordered desire, then strength is possible through desire’s reordering. Although we always remain subject to external causation, we can put our aVective house in order, eliminating feelings of inadequacy. Thus, the notion of relative weakness proves essential for Rousseau’s argument that, in principle, finitude does not consign humans to impotence. Defining weakness in relative terms provides crucial ammunition for the claim that full empowerment is possible without omnipotence. Rousseau would insist on this possibility for, as his account of human development reveals, it is a prerequisite for freedom, “the first of all goods” (E 84). Rousseau’s fundamental assumption is that we must be strong to be free. To articulate the conditions of such freedom, Rousseau juxtaposes human finitude with divine omnipotence. With this rhetorical figure, which recurs throughout Emile, Rousseau injects a theological note into his analysis of weakness—the question of human strength is, at some level, a question about humanity’s location with respect to God. As Emile unfolds, Rousseau exploits this figure’s duplicity, invoking the God / man comparison when he wants to illustrate the amplitude of human power, and when he wants to accentuate its absolute limits. Thus, by tracing Rousseau’s deployment of this figure over the course of Emile’s development, we can grasp his deep ambivalence about human empowerment. In his first invocation of this figure, Rousseau uses the example of the infant, who is “weak absolutely,” to make an expansive claim for human power—for the possibility, and the necessity, of insulation from (relative) weakness. From the moment of birth, the tutor’s pedagogical devices target weakness as subversive of freedom. “Since the first condition of man is want and weakness [ faiblesse], his first voices are complaint and tears” (E 65). On Rousseau’s narrative, the individual is needy but helpless upon entrance into the world. An infant is weak because he feels the pressure of needs (e.g., hunger, thirst) that he cannot satisfy on his own. On Rousseau’s interpretation, the baby’s tears register protest against this insuYciency.72 As the crying baby demonstrates, to lack control of one’s life, in the throes of insatiable desire, causes “pain” and “discomfort” (E 65). When Rousseau depicts the infant’s misery as a function of his weakness, he identifies weakness as cause for complaint.73 Like the wailing child, Rousseau judges the weakling’s state to be an unhappy one: “Is there 126 | Chapter 4

in the world a weaker [ plus faible] being, a more miserable one, one more at the mercy of everything surrounding him, who has a greater need of pity, care, and protection, than a child?” (E 88). With this interpretation of child development, Rousseau betrays a deeply ingrained assumption: inextricably linked to need and, consequently, to pain, weakness is miserable. Although the child’s weakness is a function of his bodily constitution, it has moral ramifications. Precisely because weakness inspires misery, and the miserable implore others for relief, weakness initiates the infant into the social order. When adults respond to a baby’s cries, they unwittingly impart lessons about dynamics of command and obedience. To Rousseau’s chagrin, most child-rearing practices instill artificial desires that sustain a corrupt social order. When caretakers obey their charge’s plaints as if they were orders, they inspire a notion of domination that might not otherwise arise but, once ingrained, is nearly impossible to extirpate. “Thus, from their own weakness [ faiblesse], which is in the first place the source of the feeling of their dependence, is subsequently born the idea of empire and domination” (E 66). Only a weakling can conceive the project of dominating others, Rousseau contends, because domination is an expression of need. From the child’s example, Rousseau concludes that weakness is morally hazardous. Rousseau declaims: “All wickedness comes from weakness [ faiblesse]. The child is wicked only because he is weak. Make him strong; he will be good. He who could do everything would never do harm. Of all the attributes of the all-powerful divinity, goodness is the one without which one can least conceive it” (E 67). Grounding a moral admonition on a theological proposition, Rousseau articulates a fundamental maxim: power correlates with goodness.74 An omnipotent being has no occasion to commit injury, because an omnipotent being has no needs. By contrast, a being subject to pain, privation, and frustration is liable to exploit or abuse those on whom he depends. The conviction that power correlates with goodness leads Rousseau to make human empowerment a moral imperative. At this stage of child development, weakness has no redeeming value. From a moral and political perspective, Rousseau contends, full empowerment is essential, for it mitigates against relations of domination and subordination. As a staunch critic of weakness, Rousseau could pass for the stereotypical secularist of Augustinian nightmares.75 After all, Rousseau prescribes a curriculum whose express goal is to make the child strong like God—and thereby minimize dependence and its mirror image, domination. Indeed, with this rhetorical flourish, Rousseau seems to court the accusation of self-deification that has historically dogged secular theorists. Moreover, when Rousseau recommends this empowerment curriculum, he Self-Love | 127

denies that weakness is integral to human experience. It is worth pausing to appreciate the boldness of this claim. Rousseau holds out the prospect of complete insulation from weakness. If we “measure the radius of our sphere and stay in the center like the insect in the middle of his web,” Rousseau declaims, “we shall always be suYcient unto ourselves; and we shall not have to complain of our weakness [ faiblesse], for we shall never feel it” (E 81). Characteristically, Rousseau assumes that if we could feel it, we would complain. Yet we have no legitimate cause for complaint, Rousseau hastens to add, because we can readily insulate ourselves from debilitating feelings. Here, Rousseau makes the extravagant promise that, by disciplining desire, we can live a life in which we always feel strong, never weak. “Diminish desires, and you will increase strength” (E 165). If a man in the throes of desire is liable to judge his native endowments inadequate, Rousseau argues, a man who “wants only what he can do” will feel strong and free (E 84). Thus, human wisdom consists “in diminishing the excess of the desires over the faculties and putting power and will in perfect equality. It is only then that, with all the powers in action, the soul will nevertheless remain peaceful and that man will be well-ordered” (E 80). With the promise of insulation from weakness, Rousseau declares full empowerment a live possibility and moral imperative for finite beings. Yet the comparison with God also intimates the folly of such aspirations. The child’s example ostensibly demonstrates that it is not weakness itself, but rather the conduct it elicits, that instills lust for domination. Yet the child only falls prey to desires for domination because, unlike God, he is finite. Does the moral hazard of weakness derive from the disproportion between need and desire, or from the finitude of human power? No matter how deftly the tutor orchestrates empowering episodes for his pupil, Emile will never be omnipotent—he will inevitably encounter things he cannot do. How capable would an individual have to feel to elude the lure of exploitation? When Rousseau recalls the absolute gulf between divine and human power, he inspires doubts about the possibility of a human suYciently strong to ensure moral goodness. Here, we see a characteristic tension within Rousseau’s anatomy of weakness. Rousseau uses figures that are theologically freighted, and that highlight absolute limits to human power, to advance the claim that (relative) weakness is extrinsic to a fully realized human life. In the child’s case, the comparison with God injects an ambivalent note into an otherwise brazen exhortation to full empowerment. This ambivalence derives in part from the Augustinian resonance of Rousseau’s theology of divine omnipotence. Rousseau still needs the omnipotent God as the guarantor of the providential order.76 As the font of order, God 128 | Chapter 4

secures objective moral standards and places objective constraints on human power.77 The omnipotent God is the only figure available to Rousseau to serve this dual function of establishing objectivity and guaranteeing nature’s goodness. If Rousseau needs a figure of Augustinian provenance to set bounds to human power, he denies that objective constraints preclude human freedom. Yet Rousseau’s project of cultivating the proper disposition toward finitude is complicated by the Augustinian resonance of the theology of divine order. Having undertaken this project of cultivation, it is hard for Rousseau to dispel the suspicion that, more than relative weakness, finitude is what matters. Regardless of how we order the passions, are humans bound to feel deficient, when compared to God? In other words, Rousseau’s theological rhetoric threatens to collapse the distinction between relative and absolute weakness on which the promise of full empowerment rests. Rousseau blurs the distinction between relative and absolute weakness when he adapts the Augustinian rhetoric of divine order. In the passage cited above, Rousseau instructs individuals to become strong by putting “power and desire in equilibrium”—not by measuring themselves against objectively weaker beings (E 80). At the heart of the injunction to become strong by ordering the passions, however, lies a claim about humanity’s place within the divine order. The project of restraining desire is only necessary because imagination habitually transgresses the bounds of our “natural strength” (E 83). “The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite” (E 81). Perfectibility notwithstanding, human power will never reach the point where it can satisfy imagination’s every whim. Thus, before he can teach us to restrain desire, Rousseau must establish the reality of human limitation. To attenuate weakness, Rousseau instructs, we must accept divinely imposed limits to human power. “O man, draw up your existence within yourself, and you will no longer be miserable. Remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the chain of being. Nothing will be able to make you leave it” (E 83). Significantly, to delineate the bounds of human power, Rousseau borrows a figure from the Christian critique of pride. In this passage, the rebellious angel illustrates the relativity of weakness: He whose needs surpass his strength, be he an elephant or a lion, be he a conqueror or a hero, be he a god, is a weak [ faible] being. The rebellious angel who misapprehended his nature was weaker [ plus faible] than the happy mortal who lives in peace according to his nature. Man is very strong when he is contented with being what he is; he is very weak [ faible] when he wants to raise himself above humanity. (E 81) Self-Love | 129

Because weakness is relative, happy mortals prove stronger than beings (such as angels) who occupy a higher rung in the chain of being. At the same time, humans only surpass the angels if they accept their divinely ordained position. Cast in these terms, the project of human empowerment has two, inextricably linked, components: reconciliation with finitude and ordering the passions. Indeed, passion only emerges as a target of pedagogical intervention because it makes finitude palpable in ways that smart. Again, “The real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite.” Through the imagination, humans participate in infinitude. Yet the failure of reality to conform to imagination forces us to confront our finitude. On Rousseau’s account, this confrontation is liable to exacerbate feelings of inadequacy. “No longer seeing the country we have already crossed, we count it for nothing; what remains to cross ceaselessly grows and extends” (E 81). A man who feels deficient is liable to resent the finitude that is weakness’s condition of possibility. Cursing humanity’s position within the divine order, the passionate will despair of empowerment, full or partial. “Not omnipotent, they believe they are impotent” (E 88). With this anatomy of weakness, Rousseau diagnoses the twin perils of sovereign subjectivity: pride and dejection. Absent humility, sovereignty is miserable and selfundermining; with excess humility, sovereignty is elusive, even nonexistent. The theology of divine order would appear to suit Rousseau’s purposes, then, because a certain kind of humility is a condition of possibility for strength. When Rousseau exhorts individuals to “remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the chain of being,” he echoes the chastening rhetoric of Julie’s revered Fénelon. True humility, Fénelon contends, “in no way consists, as people imagine, in performing external acts of humility, although that is good, but in staying in one’s place.” 78 In Emile, Rousseau makes the audacious wager that he can recruit hyper-Augustinian tropes of humility for the nonAugustinian project of bolstering individual autonomy. The wager is audacious because it requires juggling things that are hard to balance: humility and a claim to human suYciency that could easily appear proud. The provocation of using inherited tropes in counterintuitive ways presumably accounts for much of their appeal. As Emile’s narrative unfolds, however, these tropes resist Rousseau’s attempt at resignification. As Rousseau’s eventual qualifications and retractions reveal, it is diYcult for a partisan of divine order to uphold an expansive notion of full empowerment. At the dawn of Emile’s adolescence, Rousseau qualifies his initial, extravagant promise of strength, suggesting that a humanity invested in happiness cannot, and should not, dispense with weakness. If, as an analyst of infant development, Rousseau indicts weakness as a force for moral corruption, as an 130 | Chapter 4

analyst of adolescent sexuality, he embraces weakness as an essential constituent of human experience. It is man’s weakness [ faiblesse] which makes him sociable; it is our common miseries which turn our hearts to humanity; we would owe humanity nothing if we were not men. Every attachment is a sign of insuYciency. If each of us had no need of others, he would hardly think of uniting himself with them. Thus from our very infirmity is born our frail happiness. A truly happy being is a solitary being. God alone enjoys an absolute happiness. But who among us has the idea of it? If some imperfect being could suYce unto himself, what would he enjoy according to us? He would be alone, he would be miserable. I do not conceive how someone who needs nothing can love anything. I do not conceive how someone who loves nothing can be happy. (E 221)79 Like the infant, the adolescent is weak because insuYcient (“every attachment is a sign of insuYciency”). Like the infant, the adolescent finds the experience of insuYciency miserable (“it is our common miseries which turn our hearts to humanity”). In the adolescent’s case, however, misery binds him to others in relationships that promise to attenuate, if not eliminate, suVering. When Rousseau recuperates weakness as a spur to sociability, he retracts the promise of insulation from weakness. Although Rousseau’s phenomenology of weakness remains consistent, he now invokes divine perfection to emphasize the gulf that separates God from humanity—and, by extension, the elusiveness of self-suYciency. Here, the comparison between man and God makes explicit what remained implicit in the discussion of childhood—the suspicion (now a conviction) that weakness is integral to human experience. Passionate attachments are a condition of human happiness, Rousseau argues, because, unlike God, humans are finite (that is, insuYcient). To forgo sociability would be to attempt self-deification—and thereby succumb to a misery with no potential for redemption. Complete empowerment appears impossible—and, more important, undesirable—for finite beings. With this volte-face on the value of weakness, Rousseau revives the Augustinian suspicion that finitude entails dependence, only to recast it by replacing dependence on God with dependence on other humans. To contemporary sensibilities, this embrace of intersubjective dependence proves more palatable than Rousseau’s earlier cult of strength, for it tempers solipsistic tendencies within Rousseau’s ideal of autonomy. Indeed, sympathetic scholars have read this passage as Rousseau’s considered opinion on the moral valence of weakness. On this interpretation, which does not lack for textual support, RousSelf-Love | 131

seau considers weakness perilous at some stages of human development, salutary (or, at least, inescapable) at others.80 Full empowerment is only possible, and pedagogically appropriate, for young children. Activating passions that had previously lain dormant, adolescence reveals new dimensions of human weakness—namely, our need for sexual union and, ultimately, for citizenship. On this reading, then, Rousseau outlines a two-stage pedagogy in which training for self-suYciency (manhood) yields to recognition of mutual dependence (citizenship). Emile’s real moral, for scholars such as Neuhouser, is that interpersonal dependence is consistent with a form of autonomy: The ideal of perfect self-suYciency that guides the first stage of Emile’s education cannot be realized by human beings for, as Rousseau makes clear in Book IV, our passionate nature—our possession of both the sexual drive and amour-propre—means that, for beings like us, complete self-suYciency is a false ideal. Moreover, this ideal is false not only because it is impossible to achieve but also because it is undesirable.81 Neuhouser is correct to observe that Rousseau denies the possibility of complete self-suYciency. Yet it would be premature to conclude, on the basis of the passage in question, that Rousseau deems complete self-suYciency undesirable. As the repeated invocation of the God / man comparison reveals, Rousseau remains conflicted about weakness and dependence—more conflicted than Neuhouser allows. Throughout Emile, Rousseau vacillates regarding the place of weakness: Is weakness a source of wickedness or a promise of happiness? Should we eliminate weakness, or embrace it? This vacillation manifests in Rousseau’s divergent assessments of weakness over the course of Emile’s development—but it also surfaces in the theological rhetoric employed throughout Emile. That Rousseau repeatedly measures human power against the standard of divine omnipotence suggests that the issue is less one of developmental stages, more one of humanity’s inherent possibilities. At every stage of life, Rousseau wonders whether finitude precludes strength and independence. Admittedly, emphasizing Rousseau’s theological frame could strengthen the contention that he dismisses self-suYciency as a false, because undesirable, ideal. If Rousseau asserts an unbridgeable gulf between divine omnipotence and human finitude, one could argue, he cannot endorse self-suYciency as a legitimate human aspiration. Yet the God / man comparison cuts both ways. On the one hand, the comparison highlights the distance between God and humanity. On the other hand, it intimates their proximity—for it presumes that there are valid grounds for comparing human freedom to divine perfection. Just as Rousseau cannot 132 | Chapter 4

purge the neo-Augustinian suspicion (finitude entails dependence) from his anatomy of weakness, so he cannot purge the hint of self-deification from his ideal of autonomy. Thus, rather than read any one passage as representing Rousseau’s final position on finitude and its constraints, I read his compulsive repetition of the God / man comparison as a sign of persistent ambivalence. Indeed, when Rousseau returns to this simile at Emile’s conclusion, he appears considerably less sanguine about human beings’ inescapable weakness. Upon returning from his travels, Emile professes to have withdrawn “from dependence on man,” forsaking the chains of opinion for the chains of necessity (E 472). In response, the tutor is “glad to hear a man’s speeches come from your mouth and to see a man’s sentiments in your heart” (E 473). When Emile declares his independence, he confirms the success of the tutor’s empowerment regimen—for he has become a man. Significantly, Emile asserts his manhood by measuring his proximity to and distance from God: “This, my father, is my chosen course. If I were without passions, I would, in my condition as a man, be independent like God himself; for I would never have to struggle against destiny. At least I have no more than one chain. It is the only one I shall ever bear, and I can glory in it. Come, then, give me Sophie, and I am free.” (E 472–73) Here, Rousseau defines the human condition in ways that both deny the possibility of complete independence and flaunt aYnities between human freedom and divine self-suYciency. On the one hand, Emile concedes the impossibility of full empowerment for passionate beings. Given the inexorability of passion, Emile cannot escape dependence. Certain forms of sociability are indispensable—Emile will pity the suVering, he will marry, and he will uphold the laws. Yet neither Emile nor his tutor embraces sociability unequivocally. Indeed, they both insist that dependence on men is consistent with freedom only when kept to a bare minimum. The wise man acknowledges his debt to his country, fulfilling obligations to compatriots, even while he realizes that, to be truly free, “he ought to enslave himself ” to “the eternal laws of nature and order”—not the positive laws of the state (E 473). Thus, Emile hardly concludes with a resounding celebration of dependence. Emile seems proud that he approximates to divine self-suYciency, and dismayed that his approximation falls short. The chains of necessity provide Emile with grounds for glory, but he bears them grudgingly (“at least I have no more than one”). Emile would prefer to be independent like God—but given the inevitability of constraint, he will opt for the lightest fetter. Self-Love | 133

On Rousseau’s analysis, resentment of finitude reflects a surfeit of desire over capability—that is, it reflects relative weakness. Man only resents finitude because imagination allows him to entertain delusions of escaping the human condition. “If we were satisfied to be what we are, we would not have to lament our fate. But to seek an imaginary well-being, we give ourselves countless real ills” (E 281). If Emile’s struggle with necessity betrays resentment of finitude, then the chains of necessity are not the only constraints on his power. Emile is also thwarted by something that cannot be figured as a chain—namely, feelings of inadequacy when compared to God, who bears no chains. That Emile, the paragon of freedom, suVers from finitude reveals just how hard it is for a man to rest content with humanity. Emile has eliminated dependence to the extent possible for a run-of-the-mill human—but he still struggles with necessity’s yoke. Thus, although Emile is as powerful—and, consequently, as happy and good—as an ordinary man can be, he is not fully empowered. Pangs of inadequacy color his boldest declarations of freedom. Emile’s struggle with destiny demonstrates the exacting standard of strength required to sustain freedom. Because humans can approximate to, but never reach, divine self-suYciency, they will always be vulnerable to the kinds of weakness that compromise independence. Throughout Emile, Rousseau proves unable to escape from the shadow of the omnipotent God. The repeated comparison of man to God injects a faint note of regret in what purports to be a resounding vindication of human nature: “If only we could be independent like God in our mortal condition.” Rousseau can neither deliver on the promise of complete insulation from weakness nor abandon the fantasy of full empowerment. Given the anxieties that the omnipotent God inspires, one could wonder why God remains central to Rousseau’s figuration of human finitude. After all, neither alternative is especially appealing when one measures humanity against God. Humans are either deficient compared to God, with the result that agency is in doubt, or they are improbably strong, with the result that freedom verges on solipsism. (No wonder Rousseau betrays persistent ambivalence, throughout Emile, about finitude and its constraints.) Rousseau’s reliance on these figures suggests the paucity of (rhetorical and conceptual) alternatives in this intellectual milieu, the lack of a figure capable of securing the providential order, and chastening human pride. To appreciate the diYculty of crafting compelling alternatives, we must examine Rousseau’s (valiant but failed) attempt to envision human empowerment without immediate reference to the omnipotent God: the superhumans (the tutor, the lawgiver, Wolmar). 134 | Chapter 4

Superhuman Authority, Secular Authority Emile not only lives in God’s shadow—he also lives in the tutor’s shadow, beseeching him, at the story’s conclusion, to “remain the master of the young masters” (E 480). In Emile, as in the Social Contract and Julie, Rousseau predicates the success of the enterprise on the intervention of an authority figure who is mortal, but who nevertheless enjoys unparalleled power and independence. Rousseau delivers the exhortation to “be a man” in the voice of a man “who is more than a man” (namely, the tutor) (E 50). To create an individual willing to stay in place, Rousseau must imagine a figure whose position within the divine order is indeterminate. If Emile despairs of consummate strength, his tutor achieves it, enabling Rousseau to deliver on the promise of full empowerment without omnipotence. That Rousseau must imagine a superhuman to deliver on this promise, however, merely underscores the challenge of figuring human empowerment in mundane terms. Struck by Rousseau’s reliance on charismatic authority figures, scholars have puzzled over apparent tensions between will and authority, autonomy and education, at the heart of his political theory. On one influential interpretation, Rousseau’s conviction that “an ordered existence is needed to support men in a free condition” leads him to declare that “authentic authority liberates.” 82 Assuming that authority is required to bend the will to order, a question nevertheless remains regarding the type of authority that Rousseau enlists for this project. Clearly, the fantasy of a mortal who displays an extraordinary, improbable capacity for wisdom and control captivates Rousseau. Who is this figure, and why does Rousseau predicate the success of his moral and political projects on his intervention? In Emile, Rousseau takes pains to distinguish the tutor’s authority from that of ordinary mortals, and from that of God. When the tutor expounds the place of Fénelon’s Telemachus in Emile’s curriculum, he expressly refuses the status of divinity. “Besides, since Emile is not a king and I am not a god, we do not fret about not being able to imitate Telemachus and Mentor in the good that they did for men” (E 467). Although the tutor identifies with humanity, and professes satisfaction with his location—“no one has less desire to leave it”—his position remains indeterminate (E 467). Is the tutor really a man? When the tutor lists credentials for his job, he identifies several qualifications for the task of making a man. “A governor! O what a sublime soul . . . in truth, to make a man, one must be either a father or more than a man oneself ” (E 49–50). Here, Rousseau equates authority that is more than human with the natural Self-Love | 135

authority of a father. Elsewhere, Rousseau demystifies the tutor’s qualifications: “Remember that before daring to undertake the formation of a man, one must have made oneself a man” (E 95).83 Yet this reminder only heightens the tutor’s mystique. How could a man educate himself, without the guidance of a tutor or father? Here, the tutor epitomizes manhood—but his spontaneous generation only heightens the sense that he is extraordinary. Rousseau oVers a more detailed portrait of the nature and sources of superhuman authority in the character of Wolmar, Julie’s husband. Wolmar presides over an idyllic, because rational and orderly, household at Clarens. On the testimony of Julie and Saint-Preux, Wolmar can follow the dictates of reason because he is nearly exempt from passion. As Julie notes, “However carefully I may have observed him, I have been able to discover no passion of any kind in him except the one he has for me.” 84 If, as Rousseau contends, “it is our passions that make us weak [ faible], because to satisfy them we would need more strength than nature gives us,” Wolmar is distinguished from ordinary mortals by the fact that he is not weak (E 165).85 Wolmar is mortal. Yet, unlike Emile, Wolmar never feels inadequate or deficient, because his desires do not exceed his capabilities. Through the character of Wolmar, Rousseau identifies dispassion as the condition of possibility for consummate human strength.86 Free from relative weakness, Wolmar maintains order in his soul, and, as a result, he maintains an orderly household. “The order he has brought into his house is the image of the one that prevails in his heart, and seems to imitate in a small household the order established in the governance of the earth.” 87 Although Wolmar has created an environment that “corresponds to man’s veritable destination,” he does not have the power to vanquish death, because death remains part of humanity’s destination.88 (Indeed, Julie dies at the end of the novel.) Thus, the power that Rousseau imputes to Wolmar is the power to abide, rather than overturn, human finitude.89 Cast in these terms, the superhumans emerge as paragons of full empowerment without omnipotence. The fantasy of a mortal who is not weak has an iron grip on Rousseau’s theoretical imagination, because it allows him to rescue the theoretical possibility of full empowerment—and, by extension, the possibility of happiness, virtue, and freedom. Indeed, the only mortal for whom finitude is neither an objection nor an aVront is an individual who never feels weak—a subhuman (a primitive savage) or a superhuman (Wolmar). On one level, Rousseau’s investment in these characters attests his determination to envision human empowerment in non-Augustinian terms. The omnipotent God is not the only template for human power. The superhumans allow us to envision a masterful agency that is emphatically finite. Yet Rousseau proves un136 | Chapter 4

able to capture the superhumans’ distinctiveness without recourse to the very figure whose implications we have pursued in this chapter: the omnipotent God. In a letter detailing the order that prevails at Clarens, Saint-Preux ascribes God-like happiness to Wolmar: “Alone among mortals, he is master of his own felicity, because he is happy like God himself, without desiring more than what he already has.” 90 Recall Emile’s profession that he would, in his “condition as a man, be independent like God himself,” if only he “were without passions” (E 472). On the testimony of Saint-Preux, Wolmar appears to have achieved the God-like independence that eludes Emile. Passages such as these have led scholars to conclude that, possessed of “all the attributes that Rousseau ascribed to God, self-suYciency, justice, love of order,” “Wolmar is God.” 91 If Rousseau intimates a strong resemblance between Wolmar and God, in the Social Contract, he casts the lawgiver as a god substitute. “It would require gods to give men laws,” but since the gods are unavailable, Rousseau enlists the lawgiver, an exceptional human whose charisma derives from the (false) claim to divine inspiration.92 In his depiction of superhuman authority, Rousseau cannot mute the suspicion—or, perhaps, the boast—that full empowerment allows mortals to approximate to divine self-suYciency. Rousseau’s reliance on superhuman authority is one index of his staunch secularity. Confronted with human weakness, Rousseau resists the urge to enlist the actual God for moral and political projects, as an Augustinian would, opting instead to generate the requisite authority from charismatic mortals. Superhuman authority is a constituent of secular agency—even if the lawgiver exploits vulgar religious belief—because it presupposes human independence from God. Although, on one level, Rousseau regrets the absence of a God or gods who could bestow a perfect constitution on each nation, on another level, he celebrates God’s absence, for it creates space for human agency. In the absence of an interventionist God, humans must rely on finite resources to maintain order within the self and within society. Yet Rousseau has trouble muting the suspicion, or quashing the hope, that secular agency transcends the constraints to which ordinary mortals are subject. The suspicion persists both because Rousseau relies on charismatic authority to sustain order, and because he cannot convey the extraordinary nature of such authority without invoking God. When Rousseau invokes the superhuman to rescue full empowerment, he betrays despair regarding the resources of ordinary mortals. If full empowerment is possible without omnipotence, it is not, ultimately, possible for mundane humans. Granted, the practical impossibility of full empowerment could exculpate Rousseau on charges of flirting with self-deification. Rousseau insists Self-Love | 137

that we need superhumans for extraordinary tasks like founding a state, one could argue, even while he reminds run-of-the-mill citizens that we are mere mortals. With this reminder, Rousseau exhibits the tragic sensibility that makes his moral psychology so incisive. Its merit notwithstanding, this interpretation overlooks the fact that Emile cannot refrain from comparing himself to God— and, unlike Wolmar, he finds himself wanting. Rousseau is a non-Augustinian critic of pride who chastens to empower. Yet he recalls us to our finitude in ways liable to make us crave something like omnipotence. Even if Rousseau does not expect us to become superhuman, let alone divine, by establishing the theoretical possibility of full empowerment in this way, he upholds an ideal liable to inspire resentment in ordinary mortals (as Emile attests).93 After all, weakness and dependence might not seem tragic if we did not harbor the fantasy of consummate strength. It is no wonder that a theorist who makes full empowerment a condition of happiness and virtue cannot shake the suspicion that we need to become strong like God in order to do without God.

Conclusion This chapter strikes something of a deflationary note. In the genealogy that I have traced, Rousseau provides occasion to chasten readers’ enthusiasm for the non-Augustinian critique of pride. (Although it would be presumptuous to assume that such enthusiasm has been generated.) More than Hobbes and Spinoza, Rousseau finds it hard to figure empowerment in strictly human terms, averting charges of self-deification. Yet the point of the chapter is neither to discredit this tradition nor to indict Rousseau. Rather, it is to highlight some of the challenges—both theoretical and historical—that this tradition confronts. From a theoretical perspective, Rousseau’s ambivalence attests the diYculty of imbuing politics with an ethos of finitude. Attacking pride does not immunize Rousseau against aspirations to a strength whose suitability for ordinary mortals remains questionable. The tutor instructs Emile to “be a man”—to accept humanity’s divinely ordained location and, by extension, feel strong. Yet Rousseau cannot shake the suspicion that consummate strength elevates humans to something like divine self-suYciency. Unable to figure empowerment in strictly human terms, Rousseau invites resentment about the gap separating mundane reality from lofty ideals. Even Rousseau, the staunch defender of natural goodness, tends to chafe under finitude’s constraints. As Rousseau’s case reveals, chastening to empower is a daunting project. In a cultural milieu that upholds God as the standard of perfection, finitude is liable to seem like 138 | Chapter 4

cause for complaint or evidence of depravity—even to philosophers who reject a theology of human dependence. The secular agency whose possibility Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau defend is a precarious achievement. With this reading of Rousseau, I inject a note of caution into this genealogy: we should hesitate before concluding that (secular) alternatives to the sovereign subject are readily articulated, let alone achieved. To frame this caution in historical terms: Rousseau’s case reminds us of the accumulated weight of Augustinian assumptions, against which secular theorists struggle. Despite valiant eVorts to think otherwise, Rousseau has trouble imagining a powerful human who looks nothing like a God. Rousseau is arguably more vulnerable on this score than Hobbes or Spinoza, given his theology of divine order, and his conviction that dependence invites domination. With the promise that we might never feel weak, Rousseau presents a more exacting standard for empowerment than Hobbes or Spinoza—a standard whose liabilities he concedes, in tragic moods. In other respects, however, Rousseau’s predicament is exemplary of challenges confronting a tradition whose project requires the revaluation of inherited values. Rhetorical figures invite highly inventive forms of revision—but they are not infinitely plastic. When revaluing terms like “modesty” and “humility,” “pride” and “self-love,” philosophers cannot easily retain connotations that prove congenial to secular projects while muting those that do not. Rousseau’s predicament suggests certain limits to this tradition’s vitality when confronting the challenge of resignification. In a period when it is widely believed that revelation provides the lone resource for figuring human finitude, it is crucial to reinvigorate tropes of modesty and humility. Rousseau’s inability to emerge from God’s shadow is one symptom of the absence of a sustained campaign to reinvigorate inherited figures, and thereby develop alternative templates for human empowerment. Although Rousseau tries to envision human agency in recognizably human terms, he cannot resist the lure of the divine / human comparison. Extending this book’s historical narrative into the eighteenth century exposes the lack of a suYciently pointed and forceful rejoinder to the Augustinian accusation that secularity is irremediably proud. In the absence of a sustained campaign to develop resources that the non-Augustinian critique of pride aVords for envisioning secular agency, it is not altogether surprising that contemporary political theorists remain fixated on the sovereign subject as a signature of secularity.

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conclusion

A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty

I want to end this book on something of a chastened note. As should be clear by now, ending on a chastened note is not an admission of failure, nor does it constitute a quietist retreat from political contestation. If there is one conviction aYrmed repeatedly and unanimously throughout the book, it is that acknowledging one’s limitations is a source of power. Lest readers harbor unrealistic expectations about the kinds of political guidance that a story like this oVers, and the practical conclusions it yields, I end with a meditation on its limitations, and those of the tradition it recovers. Certain things remain beyond non-Augustinian critics’ power. Yet the tradition’s limitations also derive from the powers it can (inadvertently) generate, not all of which are consistent with the tradition’s egalitarian commitments. Accepting the premise that modesty and humility are sources of empowerment does not require one to endorse every exercise of power that these virtues facilitate. We need to have appropriately modest ambitions for a project of this kind both because there are limits to what non-Augustinian critics can do, and because some of what they end up doing—and what gets done to and with them—frustrates their stated aims. In this book, I have recovered a novel and compelling way to understand human empowerment in a secular frame. Convinced that delusions of omnipotence deplete human agency, non-Augustinian critics of pride chasten human pretension to enhance human power. To generate the power requisite for self-rule, they argue, humans need not be invincible. Indeed, secular theorists simultaneously deny that divine sovereignty extends to the political realm, and that political agency elevates humans to divine stature. From the moment of secularity’s inception, secular theorists have oVered diverse models of human agency, and diverse narratives about the sources of human strength. The stereotypical sovereign subject is not the lone template for secular subjectivity. Moreover, when I relate this alternative story about the sources of secular agency, I identify a more compelling basis on which to evaluate secularity. On my reading, secularity’s justification rests neither on its triumph over superstition nor on its ability to restore dignity to individuals stunted by ascetic mortification. 140

Nor does secularity’s value derive solely from its ability to deliver on a promise of toleration. Rather, secularity oVers an enticing vision of collective agency, a vision that does not install humanity at the center of the universe. To assert, as secular theorists do, that humans can create political community is not to invite promethean fantasies of remaking the world, and ourselves, at will. If the model of agency that this book recovers is compelling, the story of its articulation and development nevertheless remains a modest one. When I note a certain modesty in the book’s narrative arc, I do not mean to suggest that Hobbes and Spinoza have failed, or that Rousseau has betrayed them, or even, more plausibly, that aggressive Enlightenment secularisms have muted their legacy. Rather, I mean to remind readers just how hard it is for philosophers writing at this historical juncture to figure human empowerment in strictly human terms. My story is modest, then, in that it does not credit Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau with a decisive and revolutionary overthrow that vanquishes competing conceptions of human finitude. Indeed, the constraints that history and language place on philosophical projects of revaluation are a crucial part of my story. As secular critics of pride, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau put a traditional discourse to novel and brazen use. Yet they never fully master the traditions with which they wrestle—nor could they, for humans lack complete sovereignty within language. In practice, this lack of mastery means that none of the book’s protagonists completely dispels the suspicion that political agency elevates humans to divine stature.1 Moreover, announcing a politics of finitude does not immunize these theorists against aspirations to sovereignty. The book’s narrative is propelled not only by the discovery that limitation can be empowering in the absence of divine grace. Its drama also derives from the ambivalence that this discovery inspires, and the conundrums that ensue when philosophers try to honor it. This book’s narrative is also modest because its contours are shaped by historical contingencies, ironic twists, and unintended consequences. In closing, I want to relate one final story about modesty’s modern career, a story that emphasizes some of the ironic or unintended consequences of observing modest protocols. In the pages that follow, I relate a story about modesty as a philosophical virtue—about the attempts of Hobbes and Spinoza (but not, as we will see, Rousseau) to embody ideals of modesty when writing, publishing, and disseminating philosophical texts. This story provides further evidence for the book’s central argument—namely, that secular philosophers celebrate modesty as a source of human empowerment. When establishing protocols for the publication and dissemination of philosophical texts, Hobbes and Spinoza explicitly state that modesty is a source of individual and collective power. A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 141

Observing protocols of modesty strengthens the individual’s power of selfpreservation, Hobbes and Spinoza contend, because it fosters enabling community. At the same time, by tracing unintended consequences of Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s professions of modesty, I show that modesty is bound up with power in ways that are appealing and in ways that are not—and one cannot always tell the diVerence in advance. As a vehicle for empowerment through limitation, modesty expresses Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s egalitarian commitments, but it also garners them an authority that they arguably do not seek, and would in all likelihood disavow. This story about philosophical modesty aVords insights into the challenges that confront contemporary projects to imbue politics with an ethos of finitude. In the chapter’s final section, I turn from modesty as a philosophical ethos to contemporary ethos theory, in an eVort to show how a genealogical story like the one that I have related can reframe contemporary debate about the politics of finitude.

Modesty as a Philosophical Virtue From the moment of Leviathan’s publication, critics have accused Hobbes of overweening ambition. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes’s detractors complained that Leviathan was the centerpiece of a campaign to dethrone reigning authorities and, ultimately, rule the world. “It appeares that the end he proposes to himselfe (in his Leviathan) is, that the World should be regulated exactly, by that modell which he there exhibits, and that his reason should be the governing Reason of Mankind.” 2 Accusations of vanity were one (potent) weapon in a broader campaign, waged by Hobbes’s antagonists within the universities (foremost among them John Wallis and Seth Ward) to discredit Leviathan.3 In Hobbius Heauton-Timorumenos (1662), Wallis accuses Hobbes of setting himself up as “the sole Dictator in Philosophy; Civil and Natural”: He would be thought, of All that are, or ever have been, the onely knowing Man. And he doth not spare to professe, upon all occasions, How incomparably he thinks Himself to have surpassed All, Ancient, Modern, Schools, Academies, Persons, Societies, Philosophers, Divines, Heathens, Christians; How Despicable he thinks all Their writings, in comparison of His; and what Hopes he hath, that, by the Soveraign command of Some Absolute Prince, all other Doctrines being exploded, his new Dictates should be peremptorily imposed, to be alone taught in all Schools, and Pulpits, and universally submitted to.4 To Wallis, Hobbes’s assault on the universities betrays an inflated estimate of his own genius. Ward concurs, making the sardonic suggestion that Hobbes’s 142 | Conclusion

“(sober and modest) designe” is to supplant Aristotle’s hegemony with his own.5 “The only thing which paines him” about the extant university curriculum, Ward insists, “is the desire that Aristotelity may be changed into Hobbeity, & insteed of the Stagyrite, the world may adore the great Malmesburian Phylosopher.” 6 When Ward dismisses Hobbes’s philosophy as mere “Hobbeity,” he parodies Hobbes’s own attacks on Scholasticism. In Leviathan, Hobbes complains that universities have demoted philosophy to “a handmaid to the Romane Religion,” and reduced its study to a cult of Aristotle’s personality. Hobbes says of the university curriculum, “And since the Authority of Aristotle is onely current there, that study is not properly Philosophy, (the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors,) but Aristotelity.” 7 When Wallis dismisses Leviathan as “Hobbeity,” he accuses Hobbes of violating his own philosophical protocols. As Hobbes’s proposals “concerning the publick reading of his Leviathan” reveal, he covets the very authority he professes to disdain—the institutional hegemony and personal celebrity of an Aristotle.8 From the moment of Spinoza’s death, the architects of his posthumous reputation have vaunted his modesty. Jarig Jelles, author of the preface to Spinoza’s Opera Posthuma (1677), secured pride of place in the Spinoza hagiography for an anecdote celebrating Spinoza’s unparalleled modesty. Jelles’s (apologetic) preface, which asserts the congruence of Spinoza’s ethics with Christian morality, opens with a brief biography cataloging Spinoza’s texts.9 To explain why the title page of the Opera Posthuma identifies Spinoza using his initials (B. d. S.), rather than his full name, Jelles relates this deathbed scenario: In the front of the book and elsewhere, the author’s name is shown only by its initial letters, for no other reason, than because shortly before his death he expressly asked that his name not be aYxed to the Ethics, whose publication he commissioned; but the reason why he prohibited it, as it seems, is none other than because he did not want his teaching called after his name.10 Spinoza’s first biographer, J. M. Lucas, repeats the story, glossing Spinoza’s predilection for anonymity as a component of his philosophical ethos. “He had such a great propensity not to do anything for the sake of being regarded and admired by the people, that when dying he requested that his name should not be put on his Ethics, saying that such aVectations were unworthy of a philosopher.”11 Pierre Bayle strikes a skeptical note when he relates the anecdote in the Dictionnaire Historique Et Critique. In keeping with his hostile stance throughout the Spinoza entry, Bayle is reluctant to credit Spinoza with modesty. On Bayle’s rendition, Spinoza’s reputation for modesty is an artifact of his partisans’ apologetics. “His friends claim that, for reasons of modesty, he did A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 143

not wish to give his name to a sect.”12 It is ironic, Bayle contends, that Spinoza’s followers touted his reluctance to found a sect—for his (incoherent) philosophy has scarcely found suYcient adherents to constitute a sect.13 Although judgments of modesty and pride loom large in both authors’ reception, Hobbes and Spinoza have garnered diametrically opposed reputations. Posterity casts Hobbes as a conceited braggart guilty of “magisterial haughtinesse.”14 By contrast, Spinoza appears as a meek and saintly atheist who shunned renown.15 For our purposes, the justice of these judgments is less significant than what they reveal about modesty’s normative status in early modern philosophy. As these polemics reveal, in the seventeenth century, modesty is not only (or even primarily) a feminine virtue—rather, it is a crucial and widely accepted component of the conduct becoming a philosopher.16 Nor is modesty the exclusive preserve of hyper-Augustinians who define it as the outward expression of humble submission. If modesty’s virtues are uncontroversial in the period, philosophers diVer on what norms of modesty require, and whether Hobbes and Spinoza comply with them. Given Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s brazen assaults on traditional authority, their motives for publication come in for heightened scrutiny. Hobbes’s critics insist that lust for glory is the only conceivable motive for a text, like Leviathan, that aims to supplant the university curriculum—and Spinoza’s defenders recall his commitment to anonymity to forestall similar attacks on the Ethics. Thus, Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s modesty is at issue because they develop ambitious philosophical systems that threaten established authority. Significantly, Hobbes and Spinoza believe that modesty is not only consistent with their philosophical ambitions—modesty is a privileged expression of the normative commitments that animate their audacious projects. In this vein, each theorist professes modesty. As Hobbes insists, “My acquaintance know that I am naturally of modest rather than of boasting speech.”17 Moreover, Hobbes and Spinoza oVer strikingly similar accounts of the authority that they hope to establish by observing modest protocols—an authority that presents an egalitarian alternative to hierarchical cults of personality. Whence this shared enthusiasm for modesty? This enthusiasm derives, in part, from a distinctive (and strongly rationalist) conception of philosophy’s purview. In Hobbes’s idiom, philosophy is both humble—its foundations “poor, arid, and in appearance deformed [humilia, arida, et pene deformia]”— and modest, withdrawing the author as an object of readers’ fascination.18 For a text to count as philosophy, on this definition, its persuasive force must derive from arguments taken “from the thing it selfe, or from the principles of naturall Reason”—not from the author’s charisma.19 Thus, Hobbes reserves the mantle of science for discourses that begin by settling definitions. When 144 | Conclusion

discourse begins otherwise—with the author’s personal convictions or a received nostrum—“then the Discourse is not so much concerning the Thing, as the Person” who speaks.20 Discourse “concerning the person” can elicit faith in the speaker, but cannot convey scientific knowledge of its ostensible object. If “the nature” of philosophy “dependeth not on Authors,” as Hobbes contends, impersonality is a criterion distinguishing philosophy, which yields knowledge, from texts whose authority derives from opinion or belief. In a similar vein, Spinoza contends that, to grasp “matters open to intellectual perception, whereof we can readily form a clear conception,” we need not “enquire into the author’s life, pursuits and character, the language in which he wrote, and for whom and when, nor what happened to his book, nor its diVerent readings, nor how it came to be accepted and by what council.” 21 The force of a philosophical argument is independent of its author’s identity, status, or cachet. Indeed, on canonical interpretations, Spinoza uses geometric method to erase all signs of subjectivity in the Ethics, emphasizing the eternal necessity of philosophical truth.22 Thus, observing protocols of authorial modesty is one way that Hobbes and Spinoza certify that their texts are genuinely philosophical. But the shared commitment to modesty not only expresses philosophical rationalism. It also advances a polemical, and political, critique of discourses, such as prophecy and Scholasticism, that solicit readers’ awestruck veneration. To critics who tax proponents of human agency with sinful pride, Hobbes and Spinoza reply that secular philosophy is more modest than prophecy or Scholasticism (i.e., “vain philosophy”). In Hobbes’s lexicon, the epithet “vain philosophy,” which he takes from Paul, has (at least) two meanings: Scholasticism is vain because it traYcs in empty, insignificant language, and it encourages individual vanity because it sustains the ambitions of a clerical elite.23 These claims are not unrelated: an incoherent philosophy like Scholasticism arms clerics with potent tools of mystification. To see how the emptiness of traditional theology confers charismatic authority on its exponents, we must revisit Spinoza’s analysis of prophecy. In Spinoza’s texts, prophets epitomize the charismatic authority that bona fide philosophers refuse. On Spinoza’s definition, a modest prophet is a contradiction in terms. A prophet is “one who has a revelation of God’s decrees which he interprets to others who have not had this revelation, and who accept it solely in reliance on the prophet’s authority and the confidence he enjoys.” 24 By definition, a prophet possesses privileged knowledge. Moreover, a prophet’s authority is necessarily personal, because those “who have not had this revelation” have no basis other than prophetic charisma on which to evaluate his or her claims. (The masses heed a prophet when they believe that he is “endowed A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 145

with some extraordinary quality,” that, like Moses, “he surpassed all others in divine power.”)25 Thus, Spinoza deems prophecy a product of the “imagination,” which is a technical term in his system indicating the inadequate knowledge that comes from quotidian experience.26 “Imagination by itself, unlike every clear and distinct idea, does not of its own nature carry certainty with it”—hence the need for signs and portents to secure the prophet’s (and the people’s) assent.27 Precisely because a prophet’s audience must take his or her claims on faith, they remain forever in his or her thrall, with no possibility of graduating from tutelage: Now if those who listen to prophets were themselves to become prophets just as those who listen to philosophers become philosophers, the prophet would not be an interpreter of divine decrees; for his hearers would rely not on the testimony and authority of the prophet but on the divine revelation itself and on their own inward testimony, just as the prophet does.28 In prophecy, the opacity of imaginative discourse establishes a (false) epistemological hierarchy between the prophet and his audience—a hierarchy that supports stratified social and political relations. When Spinoza contrasts the pedagogical styles of prophets and philosophers, he oVers two competing visions of authority: one (prophetic) is personal and hierarchical, the other (philosophical) impersonal and egalitarian. Unlike prophecy, which keeps listeners in thrall to a charismatic personality, philosophy enfranchises students, preparing them to graduate from tutelage. That “those who listen to philosophers become philosophers” themselves is a function of what philosophers teach. Rational argument is transparent: “The rest of mankind can apprehend and be convinced of what they [philosophers] teach with an assurance in no way inferior to theirs, and it is not through mere faith that they do so.” 29 Yet philosophy’s egalitarian promise is also a function of the style in which philosophers teach; as in prophecy, style and substance are inextricably linked. Because philosophical knowledge is, in principle, available to all, philosophers can boast of no privileged insight that would justify putting themselves at the center of their texts. Indeed, if a philosopher wants his text to count as philosophy, he must address readers as a modest friend rather than a prophet. A philosopher withdraws himself as an object of readers’ fascination, according to Spinoza, by observing pedagogical protocols consistent with modesty. In the Ethics, Spinoza defines “Human kindness, or modesty [Humanitas, seu Modestia]” as “a desire to do what pleases men and not do what displeases them” (DefAV XLIII).30 Spinoza classes modesty as the active analogue to the passion of ambition, or the “excessive desire for esteem” (DefAV XLIV). As 146 | Conclusion

an active emotion—a joy that we experience when we understand, or act— modesty is a virtue.31 Recall Spinoza’s contention that “virtue is human power itself, which is defined by man’s essence alone (by D8), that is (by IIIP7), solely by the striving by which man strives to persevere in his being” (IVP20D). Observing protocols of modesty enhances the individual’s power to persevere in being because it links him in enabling friendships. Significantly, Spinoza uses the example of anonymous publication to illustrate protocols consistent with modesty, and to distinguish them from the craven practice of the ambitious. To underscore ambition’s indomitable strength, Spinoza cites Cicero. “As Cicero says, Every man is led by love of esteem [ gloria], and the more so, the better he is. Even the philosophers who write books on how esteem is to be disdained put their names to these works” (DefAV XLIVE). For Spinoza (if not for Cicero), publishing under one’s own name is a sign that the author craves the wrong kind of esteem from peers, in the wrong measure.32 Unlike the ambitious, the modest publish anonymously, declining credit for ideas they disseminate: Modesty, that is, the desire to please men which is determined by reason, is related to morality (as we said in P37S1). But if it arises from an aVect, it is ambition, or a desire by which men generally arouse discord and seditions, from a false appearance of morality. For one who desires to aid others by advice or by action, so that they may enjoy the highest good together, will aim chiefly at arousing their love for him, but not at leading them into admiration so that his teaching will be called after his name [ut disciplina ex ipso habeat vocabulum]. Nor will he give any cause for envy. Again, in common conversations he will beware of relating men’s vices, and will take care to speak only sparingly of a man’s lack of power, but generously of the man’s virtue, or power, and how it can be perfected, so that men, moved not by fear or aversion, but only by an aVect of Joy, may strive to live as far as they can according to the rule of reason. (IVAppXXV) Here, Spinoza oVers an idealized portrait of his own practice in the Ethics. With this example, Spinoza identifies modesty as a virtue incumbent upon philosophers.33 More important, Spinoza ascribes political value to the philosopher’s distinctive pedagogical practice (e.g., anonymous publication).34 Anonymous publication enhances political stability, for it resists dynamics that “arouse discord and seditions”—the modest give no cause for envy. Moreover, anonymous publication enfranchises readers. A man who lives according to the guidance of reason possesses a good—namely, understanding—that can and should be held in common. Thus, he will necessarily “strive to bring it about that men live according to the guidance of reason” (IVP37D). The modest A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 147

enhance their own power to persevere in being by inviting others to live according to the guidance of reason—for “there is no singular thing in Nature which is more useful to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason” (IVP35C1). In this passage, Spinoza oVers one of the most explicit statements of the conviction that animates the non-Augustinian critique of pride: modesty is a vehicle for collective empowerment. What does Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s shared enthusiasm for modesty tell us about modesty’s place in modernity, and its relationship to power?35 Hobbes and Spinoza uphold modesty as a philosophical virtue, not because “the self is hateful,” as Pascal declaims.36 Philosophical anonymity does not express the conviction that humans are worthless, undeserving of recognition. On the contrary, publishing anonymously is a vehicle for independent human assertion, for the creation of robust community. Thus, modesty is a key component of ambitious philosophical programs that aim to enhance human capacities for self-rule. Hobbes and Spinoza develop comprehensive philosophical systems that establish new criteria for political legitimacy. In this tradition, to say that a philosopher is modest is not to say that he confines his inquiries to discrete questions, or that he declines to make audacious promises.37 Observing protocols of modesty does not doom one to correspondingly modest insights. Moreover, in this tradition, modesty is a guise of authority. For Hobbes and Spinoza, observing protocols of modesty is part of a secular project to discredit existing authorities (e.g., Scholasticism and prophecy) and establish political and philosophical community on new foundations. When philosophers publish anonymously, they seek to foster egalitarian communities of greater stability than the hierarchical institutions they would supplant. In sum, modesty is public, assertive, and political—a disposition that enables one to engage the world more eVectively. In many respects, the power that Hobbes and Spinoza impute to philosophical modesty is alluring. As proponents and practitioners of philosophical modesty, Hobbes and Spinoza promise an end to authoritarian cults of personality, and, in their place, collective empowerment through egalitarian friendship. Yet modesty does not always deliver on its egalitarian promise without, at the same time, producing ironic and unintended consequences. As reception history reveals, Hobbes and Spinoza did not perfectly realize their stated intentions for the dissemination of their texts. Despite eVorts to discourage readers’ veneration, Hobbes and Spinoza garnered immense celebrity. For most seventeenth-century readers, Hobbes’s professions of modesty were scarcely credible. Confronted with Hobbes’s boasts, and his expressly Platonic aspirations for Leviathan, readers were disinclined to credit him with a sincere at148 | Conclusion

tempt at self-eVacement. Twentieth-century scholarship seconds this verdict, anointing Hobbes the founder of an epic tradition in which “lust for renown” is the informing intention governing political thought.38 Precisely because readers believed that Spinoza exemplified the modesty he endorsed, they made his reserve a basis for posthumous celebrity.39 In their zeal to canonize Spinoza, his partisans failed to honor his convictions.40 Twentieth-century scholarship only amplifies the cult of Spinoza’s personality, adducing the more sensational episodes from his biography as evidence that he “articulated and exemplified in his person what was to emerge in time as the overriding principle of modern life” (namely, the principle of secular individualism).41 Moreover, as Rousseau demonstrates, Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s notoriety was already something of a watchword in the eighteenth century. In the First Discourse, Rousseau indicts the art of typography for preserving the “famed writings” of Hobbes and Spinoza, writings “of which our Forefathers’ ignorance and rusticity would have been incapable,” and without which we would have been better oV.42 As the vicissitudes of reception demonstrate, declarations of modesty can have unintended, even perverse, consequences. The very act of instructing his literary executors to omit his full name on the Opera Posthuma provided Spinoza’s acolytes with fodder for a cult of personality. I have invoked Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s celebrity to highlight the role that unintended consequences have played in modesty’s modern career. Yet the inevitability of unintended consequences—insuYcient or false modesty, betrayal by uncomprehending or obsequious readers, and so forth—is not the only lesson of this story. As this story reveals, the commitment to impersonality can be consistent with (unwitting or disavowed?) aspirations to sovereignty. When Hobbes and Spinoza profess modesty, they try to control their texts’ reception. Spinoza addresses readers as a modest friend, rather than a celebrity, in hopes that readers will graduate from tutelage and swell the ranks of the rational. This (wellintentioned) gesture seeks to enfranchise, but, at the same time, it seeks to anticipate, and therefore insulate Spinoza from, the vicissitudes of literary reception. Of course, as biblical exegetes, Hobbes and Spinoza are acutely aware that texts are subject to interpretation and contestation. As proponents of philosophical modesty, however, Hobbes and Spinoza appear reluctant to embrace the loss of control that publication entails. To say that Hobbes and Spinoza have not fully reckoned with limits to authorial sovereignty is not to accuse them of an ethical failing. Indeed, the assumptions embedded in grammar, with its subject / object logic, make it nigh impossible to dispel the fantasy of authorial control.43 Yet to appreciate the nuances of modesty’s modern career, we must remain alert to impulses to mastery that suVuse the declaration “I A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 149

am your modest friend.” As this story reveals, modesty empowers in multiple ways, and toward multiple ends—and its proponents may not achieve perfect lucidity about the tenor of their own projects. Given the ironic twists of modesty’s modern career, Rousseau’s marked demotion of modesty could seem like a wise, even inevitable, move. Whereas Hobbes professes modesty, Rousseau boasts that he is “no more susceptible to vanity than to modesty.” 44 Given that, during Rousseau’s lifetime, his notoriety outweighed his renown, Rousseau is not without reservations about philosophical celebrity.45 Yet Rousseau rejects seventeenth-century norms for the conduct becoming a philosopher, relegating modesty to the ranks of female coquetterie. In Rousseau’s lexicon, “modestie” is synonymous with “pudeur,” as the following passage from the Letter to D’Alembert demonstrates:46 Even if it could be denied that a special sentiment of chasteness [ pudeur] was natural to women, would it be any the less true that in society their lot ought to be a domestic and retired life, and that they ought to be raised in principles appropriate to it? If the timidity, chasteness [ pudeur], and modesty [modestie] which are proper to them are social inventions, it is in society’s interest that women acquire these qualities; they must be cultivated in women, and any woman who disdains them oVends good morals (manners).47 For our purposes, Rousseau’s strategic concession to sophisticated opinion— which dismisses chastity as a social construction—is less significant than his conflation of modesty with chastity.48 If Spinoza values modesty as a spur to egalitarian friendship (among men), Rousseau hails modesty as a guarantor of the natural order in heterosexual relations. Precisely because modesty is a signature female virtue, it has no place in a philosophical ethos. The theatrical ruses that women employ to perform their “natural” role—veils, tricks, fear, and reserve—make modesty inimical to the philosophical vocation of truthfulness.49 Here, the only power that modesty confers is women’s power to will their own submission.50 Having relegated modesty to the domestic sphere, Rousseau rehabilitates signed publication and autobiographical exhibitionism as philosophical protocols. Against Spinoza, Rousseau presents a principled critique of anonymous publication. Scholars have argued that Rousseau “names himself as the author of his works in an attempt to combine eVectiveness with responsibility”—he hopes to engage readers, and he feels an ethical obligation to stand behind his words.51 Yet Rousseau does not merely insist on publishing under his own name. In a series of autobiographies, Rousseau invites fascination with his unique personality. “But I am made unlike any one I have ever met; I will even 150 | Conclusion

venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am diVerent.”52 In Rousseau’s oeuvre, the self secures both the possibility and the coherence of the system. Because knowledge of humanity’s original constitution is only available to the man of nature, the system that develops that knowledge is necessarily a self-portrait. If the circumstances of Rousseau’s life prove uniquely propitious for the project of studying human nature, the success of this project provides no grounds for pride, or so Rousseau argues. Like Augustine, from whom Rousseau borrows his title (The Confessions), Rousseau touts autobiographical confession as a counter to pride. According to Rousseau, his autobiographical compulsion is an extension of his egalitarian convictions—for his autobiographies teach that he is no better than anyone else, and neither are you.53 Extending the story of modesty as a philosophical virtue into the eighteenth century risks turning the story into the predictable one of modesty’s modern obsolescence. On this reading, Rousseau would serve as a harbinger of modesty’s waning appeal for modern philosophers. A vestige of Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s outmoded rationalism, modesty has no use for philosophers who renounce the project of reducing politics to a science.54 Yet I want to use Rousseau’s exhibitionist turn to provide a very diVerent coda to this story. On my reading, Rousseau demonstrates that abandoning modesty for self-disclosure does not insulate the philosopher from unwitting or disavowed aspirations to mastery. As an autobiographer, Rousseau arguably discourages readers’ veneration by exposing his most shameful proclivities and craven betrayals. Yet if Rousseau invites scorn and derision, he does not embrace “the risks of authorship” with any more enthusiasm or equanimity than Hobbes or Spinoza.55 Like his modest forbears, Rousseau tries to anticipate and compensate for the contingencies of literary reception. Rousseau’s anxiety about interpretation and misinterpretation is on vivid display in the Confessions. Rousseau concludes that text by dramatizing the disappointing response he received when he read the manuscript aloud to his so-called friends. “Thus I concluded my reading, and everyone was silent. Mme d’Egmont was the only person who seemed moved. She trembled visibly but quickly controlled herself, and remained quiet, as did the rest of the company. Such was the advantage I derived from my reading and my declaration.” 56 That Rousseau explicitly thematizes his text’s (failed) reception attests his acute awareness that, by appearing in public, he has ceded control over his persona. At the same time, Rousseau remains in thrall to the fantasy of authorial control. Although Rousseau concedes the failure of his autobiographical project, he cannot desist from it, precisely because he holds out hope that greater transparency will secure the desired reception.57 Thus, it A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 151

would be naïve to conclude, from the recognition that professions of modesty can express aspirations to mastery, that we can avoid these conundrums by forsaking modesty for autobiographical exhibitionism. Indeed, this conclusion would repeat the controlling gesture its proponents seek to avoid. My goal in highlighting ironic and unforeseen twists in modesty’s modern career is not to discredit modesty as a philosophical ideal. Rather, it is to heighten critical awareness of challenges that confront theoretical projects to envision and uphold a modest ethos.

Ethos and the Politics of Finitude As the previous episode demonstrates, saying “I am modest” does not always make it so. In certain historical and intellectual contexts, the declaration can misfire, producing unintended, even perverse, consequences. Moreover, the declaration risks self-contradiction, because it betrays the speaker’s (perhaps inescapable) investment in sovereign command. Again, to recognize that professors of modesty can exert the very authority that they disavow is not to accuse them of bad faith or hypocrisy. Rather, it is to remind readers sympathetic to modesty and humility that it can be diYcult to embody these ideals, let alone deliver on their political promise. We seldom know in advance whether professions of modesty will elicit egalitarian friendship, or whether they will elicit starstruck veneration. In conclusion, I want to mobilize these cautionary insights while engaging contemporary democratic theorists, in an eVort to suggest ways that a historical narrative of this kind can help to reframe contemporary debate. The primary contribution of this book’s alternative genealogy is not, I would argue, to rehabilitate humility as a democratic virtue, and thereby provide a basis (e.g., shared enthusiasm for humility) for agonistic respect between Christians and partisans of nontheistic creeds. Rather, the value of a genealogy derives from its ability to expose the contests, contingencies, and ironic twists that have shaped humility’s modern career. In other words, a genealogy alerts readers sympathetic to modesty and humility to the challenges that have historically confronted secular projects to infuse politics with an ethos of finitude. These challenges stem, in part, from the continued hegemony of Augustinian frameworks. Precisely because the story I relate has the potential to generate excitement about the varied forms that secular subjectivity has historically taken, it should inspire wariness, among contemporary theorists, of contesting ideals of sovereignty in ways that further entrench Augustinian assumptions. Today, in certain quarters, political theorists are eager to rehabilitate modesty and humility as democratic virtues.58 The impulse to enlist modesty and 152 | Conclusion

humility for democratic politics is part of a broader initiative, associated with the “ethical turn,” to imbue politics with consciousness of finitude. An “adequate response” to the challenges of contemporary life, so-called ethos theorists argue, “lies in the cultivation of a distinctive ethos of generosity within late-modern citizenship,” one source of which is attunement to finitude.59 Although I admire these theorists’ ethos of generous citizenship, I worry that that their vision of what finitude can do for politics is both too narrow and too optimistic, precisely because it relies on the reductionist historical narrative that I have contested. To see how reliance on such a narrative shapes contemporary theorists’ sense of the pressing theoretical challenges, and the available theoretical options, I focus on Stephen White’s exemplary ethos of finitude.60 White puts finitude front and center in an eVort to cultivate the requisite sense of connection between individuals separated by ethnic, racial, geographic, and class divides. “A vivification of our finitude draws from and then helps strengthen a thread of commonality among those who equally share a common fate.” 61 Insulated from many forms of vulnerability, White argues, privileged citizens of wealthy Western democracies find it hard to experience empathy with, and extend generosity toward, those who do not have the luxury of such insulation. Reminding the privileged of our “common subjection” to death promises to provide “a foothold for a subtle sense of community,” White contends, by opening lines of imaginative identification with others.62 At first blush, theorists of finitude could seem like the contemporary heirs to the non-Augustinian critique of pride.63 Ethos theorists identify (nontheistic) sources that can “figure persuasively a sense of limits upon agents,” and they ascribe egalitarian political promise to consciousness of finitude.64 In many ways, contemporary projects to imbue politics with an ethos of finitude recall the eVorts of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau to envision the agency of finite beings. Yet White arrives at an appreciation of finitude’s political salience via a very diVerent historiographic route than the one I have charted. Couching his intervention as a corrective to the overweening arrogance of modern subjectivity, White subscribes to the very narrative that this book contests. Indeed, White invokes the standard story that equates modern subjectivity with sovereign subjectivity to motivate his ostensible recovery of finitude as an orienting figure. In this vein, White celebrates “the distinctive role that the consciousness of mortality can play in persistently interrupting that smooth imaginary of a sovereign self who continually sees itself as one step ahead of the constitutive entanglement of ‘identity / diVerence.’ ” 65 On White’s narrative, religion once served to chasten pride and enable sustaining community. Yet in a misguided embrace of sovereignty, moderns denied human limitation, with disastrous A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 153

results—namely, an untrammeled will to domination. The task that confronts contemporary scholars is to recover religious wisdom about human limitation— taking “religious views more seriously”—while jettisoning religion’s heavy (because, in a pluralistic society, divisive) theistic baggage.66 Thus, White develops an ethos of finitude that “parallels,” and “functions comparably” to, religious ethics.67 Here, White casts ethos as a religion substitute that promises to infuse late modernity with dispositions that early moderns willfully forgot.68 White’s reliance on this narrative deprives him of theoretical insights that could help him envision a richer, but for that reason more sober, politics of finitude. White’s historical narrative commits him to an unnecessarily reductive account of the relationship between finitude and agency. On White’s narrative, finitude and agency derive from (historically and ontologically) distinct sources. If the “capacious agent” is “that preeminent modern source,” human mortality is a traditional source whose virtues late moderns are only now relearning.69 The contemporary challenge, according to White, is to craft an ethos that draws on both sources, with the result that agency sheds unbecoming and destructive urges to sovereign mastery. “The goal we imagine is one of living in a way that balances these two sources of ourselves.” 70 The exhortation to strike a balance between capacious agency and “subjection to death” presupposes a strict division of labor between these (apparently countervailing) forces. On White’s account, finitude serves exclusively as a limit or brake; he invokes finitude when he wants to “dampen” and deflate, not when he wants to empower. For White, finitude is literally a drag—consciousness of mortality “generates a subtle, but persistent drag on our modern temptation to imagine ourselves as sovereign actors.” 71 When White recommends that we balance capaciousness and finitude in a contemporary ethos, he assumes that, throughout modernity, these figures have been separated. In this book, I have worked to complicate such divisions of labor by exposing the inadequacy of the historical narratives from which they derive. Consciousness of finitude is not missing from “the mainstream, modern conception of the self ”—it is not something late moderns need to import from an external (pseudoreligious) source.72 Some of the earliest and most influential articulations of secular subjectivity insist on human finitude. Yet readers who expect a secular ethic of finitude to function comparably to its orthodox analogue may have trouble recognizing as much. Secular humility can be hard for contemporary readers to see precisely because it is not the functional equivalent of Augustinian humility. While Augustinians invoke humility to “dampen” and discourage human agency, Hobbes invokes humility as a spur to collective political assertion. The move to enlist ethos as a religion substitute betrays 154 | Conclusion

a misunderstanding of religion—a failure to recognize that consciousness of finitude functions diVerently in Augustinian contexts, precisely because Augustinian theology frames the question of politics and its authorization as an aVront to divine sovereignty. Because White scants the significance of the historical episode that I have examined, he overlooks the theoretical insight it aVords—namely, that limitation can be empowering.73 Contrary to what Augustinian polemic has led us to expect, finitude is not just a limit, brake, or check on agency; it is itself a source of agency. To borrow an example from Spinoza: when a man “conceives his lack of power because he understands something more powerful than himself, by the knowledge of which he determines his power of acting, then we conceive nothing but that the man understands himself distinctly or (by P26) that his power of acting is aided” (IVP53D). In this case, consciousness of finitude does not supervene on and check a prior surge of capability. Rather, knowledge of finitude is coextensive with the feeling of capability—we experience joy when we achieve adequate understanding of our situation as finite modes of nature, and joy is enlivening. White’s rhetoric of “balancing”—which envisions consciousness of finitude as the counterweight to a prior experience of capaciousness—cannot capture the dynamics of Spinoza’s example. Working with a narrative that restricts finitude’s role to that of a check or brake, White misses positive theoretical resources that a more nuanced genealogy aVords. Given that White is not an Augustinian—he would not forsake the figure of capacious agency—the notion of empowerment through limitation could enhance his theoretical repertoire. White’s ethos would arguably be more compelling if it encouraged an aYrmative disposition toward finitude, figuring it as a source of, rather than a brake against, enlivening momentum. At the same time, White’s reliance on received characterizations of secular subjectivity leads him to overlook vestiges of sovereignty within his own ethos of finitude. The conviction that figures of finitude serve only to brake, check, or limit makes it hard to grasp controlling impulses that can suVuse professions of modesty and humility. White’s ethos demands that we work on ourselves. To resist the seductive lure of the image of myself as a sovereign, I must meditate quietly and persistently on my mortality. The balancing act that aims “at interrupting and slackening the momentum of the self that would be sovereign” requires substantial powers of self-mastery.74 In a sense, ethos theorists ask us to control our controlling impulses by meditating on our ultimate lack of control. With this exhortation, White betrays a curious investment in sovereign mastery.75 Understanding that finitude can be a source of, as well as a counterweight to, power will not eliminate these unwitting or A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 155

inadvertent investments. With a more nuanced account of finitude’s relationship to power, however, we may develop a sober appreciation of the range of powers with which finitude has historically been implicated. Such an appreciation could strengthen ethos theory—precisely because it might temper its optimism. When read against the narrative advanced in this book, White appears unduly sanguine about the prospects for a contemporary politics of finitude. Too often, White proceeds as if we can resist the lure of sovereignty merely by orienting politics around figures that have historically been cast as sovereignty’s opposites.76 Yet the story that I have told in this book suggests otherwise. By scrutinizing the surprising twists and turns of humility’s modern career, I have shown that sovereign mastery does not exhaust secular subjectivity. Yet, as my story reveals, more compelling visions of secular subjectivity are sometimes bound up with more reductive visions in ways that their authors do not intend or anticipate. Thus, the book’s narrative yields a theoretical caution: undertaking a politics of finitude does not immunize one against temptations to mastery. Moreover, the book’s narrative yields a caution about the persistence of inherited assumptions. As White’s text demonstrates, the master narrative that taxes modern philosophy with consummate arrogance remains, if not hegemonic, highly influential. In other words, Hobbes’s, Spinoza’s, and Rousseau’s ingenious revaluations proved no match for accumulated weight of history and tradition. Scholars who reject Augustinian theology still have trouble envisioning the secular turn as something other than a bid to usurp God’s sovereignty. While secularity aVords more attractive ethical possibilities than sovereign mastery, the prospect of their achievement can be daunting, in part due to the continuing power of Augustinian assumptions. Although these assumptions are diYcult to dislodge, I would argue that we need to disrupt them to foster a more vital contemporary political ethic. If we contest ideals of sovereignty by taking up the mantle of purportedly antithetical ideals (e.g., finitude), we are liable to get stuck within terms of debate inherited from Christian polemic— terms that cannot capture secularity’s political promise or peril. White’s animating question is a version of the traditional Augustinian question: Can secularity chasten? In a nontheistic framework, can humans apprehend and acknowledge their limits? Or does getting rid of God elevate humanity to divine stature? White oVers a non-Augustinian answer to this question—he identifies nontheistic resources for puncturing delusions of grandeur. As a rejoinder to Augustinian objections against secularity, White’s answer is compelling (as are his eloquent evocations of human fragility). Yet my primary goal, in this book, has been to reframe the question—not to provide an answer capable 156 | Conclusion

of meeting Augustinian objections. To reframe the question, we need to resist the historical narratives from which it derives. We did not arrive at our current (political and theoretical) predicament because modern philosophers arrogantly disdained religion and forgot finitude. Rather, our current predicament constitutes one episode in an ongoing struggle over how to understand finitude and its constraints. If we understand our historical location in these terms, the pressing challenge is not to recall what moderns forgot, and find a nontheistic substitute for the religion whose authority they ostensibly demolished. (Indeed, the conviction that a religion substitute is possible—that we can devise nontheistic equivalents to theistic functions—betrays a failure to appreciate religion’s singularity.) Rather, the challenge is to confront the Augustinian inheritance head-on, and to loosen its hold on our theoretical imagination. As a first step in this direction, we must call the Augustinian question into question.77 Why do we persist in examining secular agency through a lens that opposes sovereignty to finitude, chastening to empowerment? What notion of our historical location do these antitheses sustain, and what anxieties about politics do they perpetuate? The narrative that I have related in this book can serve as a prelude to such inquiries. In conclusion, I want to return to the motto from Leo Strauss cited in the book’s introduction: “With the questioning of traditional philosophy the traditional understanding of the tradition becomes questionable.” 78 We live at a moment when venerable traditions of modern philosophy—secularity and sovereignty foremost among them—have come in for relentless questioning. The presumed alliance between secularity and sovereignty has cast a penumbra of suspicion over secular agency. Tarred with the brush of sovereignty, secularity is blamed for fostering impossible fantasies of inviolability and invulnerability, fantasies inimical to the very condition of human plurality. My task, in this book, has been to demonstrate that the traditional understanding of these modern traditions is flawed. The most prominent narratives of secularization present a distorted picture of what sovereignty and secularity have meant, historically, and how they relate to each other. Yet exposing flaws in the traditional understanding of the tradition does not, in and of itself, rehabilitate these modern traditions. Once we have excavated a nontraditional understanding of secularity, there is more work to be done to ascertain whether secularity so understood is adequate to present political and theoretical challenges. Thus, my narrative does not culminate in a neo-traditionalist call for a return to modern philosophy. Indeed, a genealogy of this kind complicates the project of return, because it deprives us of A Modest Tale about Theoretical Modesty | 157

the ready alternatives available under the traditional dispensation. Sovereignty acquires a diVerent resonance when it incorporates, instead of being opposed to, finitude—and secularity acquires a diVerent resonance when it is no longer judged as an arrogant bid for human mastery. In the wake of this genealogy, there is no stable or uncontroversial concept of secularity to which we could return.79 Thus, it would be a mistake to think that we can now restore secularity’s “traditional” contents—because the “tradition” was constituted as such by the very narratives I have challenged. If we cannot return to a pristine secularity, we can shift the historical and theoretical terrain on which we debate what it means to be secular, and whether secular is still how we want to be. For too long, we have worried that, if left to their own devices, humans will usurp divine prerogative. Given the formative power of Augustinian theology, this worry is hard to dispel. Moreover, given the grotesque abuses of human power that history has witnessed, this worry is in many respects prescient. Yet just as we must be vigilant against the abuse of human power, we must be vigilant lest the specter of self-deification encourage an abdication of human power, and of politics. A profound suspicion of politics lies at the heart of regnant discourses of secularity. From Augustine onward, theorists have warned that the exercise of human agency will lead us to forget our finitude. To combat the threat of superhuman pretension, theorists in this vein have relied on religion or, in recent times, a religion substitute. Yet for those who want to remain secular, the challenge is not to devise newer, better ways to chasten secularity’s excesses, but rather to understand that secularity is not necessarily something that needs to be tamed. In other words, we must remember the formative secular project: envisioning a powerful human who looks nothing like a God. With greater lucidity about our historical location, we can resist the Augustinian demand to choose between God and man, humility and pride, sovereignty and finitude. Such resistance is a condition of possibility for invigorating secular projects today—that is, for coming to terms with the notion that politics is both a human prerogative and a finite human project. Admittedly, a story whose primary lessons surround the tenacity of inherited assumptions, and the challenge of wrestling with and against them, is less stirring than a story that promises a revolutionary overthrow, a decisive vindication, or a seamless reconciliation. Yet confining our eVorts to the human sphere, and relying on finite human power, means forgoing such satisfactions. To paraphrase Hobbes, “The condition of man in this life shall never be without Inconveniences,” any more than it can dispense with “desire” and “fear.” 80

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notes

i n t rod u ct i o n 1 Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, ed. Henry S. Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 5. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 363. 3 For humility as submission to authority, see J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink, “Humility in Pascal and Augustine,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 19, no. 1 (1968): 41–56. 4 Augustine, City of God, 573. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 572. 8 Ibid., 593. 9 Ibid., 571. See also Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 58, 69: “Christian humility consists in being willing to receive what we cannot get for ourselves.” 10 To claim that Augustine asserts human dependence is not to deny that, from the twentieth century onward, many self-professed Augustinians have been liberals, even secularists. Augustine’s legacy for politics remains fiercely contested. While some scholars contend that “Augustinian Christianity suspends politics altogether,” others, writing in the wake of Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr., contend that it recommends a realism consistent with various forms of political liberalism. See Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 220. Without denying the presence of liberal strands within contemporary Augustinianism, I emphasize aspects of Augustine’s thought that resist secular appropriation. I emphasize these aspects in part for heuristic purposes, in part because they informed the responses of early modern Christians to post-Cartesian philosophy. 11 Hobbes, Leviathan, 217. 12 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50. 13 Ibid., 50. 14 Ibid., 62. The passages cited include Matt. 5:3; Prov. 6:16–19, 16:5, 11:2; Isa. 40:3. 15 Hobbes, On the Citizen, 58. 16 Hobbes calls the dispositions required by the laws of nature “virtues” in On the Citizen, 55. 17 Following Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, I treat secularity as a historiographic category and interpretive frame—“a lingua franca in which influential narratives of modernity, development, and progress have been constructed.” Paraphrasing Craig Calhoun, Hurd contends that secularism is best understood not as “the solution to the puzzle [of politics and religion],” but as “the discourse within which struggles to settle the 159

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question are most commonly waged.” Secularism “is a language in which moral and political questions are defined, contested, settled, and legitimated.” See Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 14–15. I make a similar claim about the term “secularity,” which refers not to a political doctrine surrounding the relationship of religion and state, but to the condition of being secular—the ontological and epistemological constraints imposed by the assumption that politics is a human prerogative. With this usage, I follow Charles Taylor, who defines “secularity” as “the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual, or religious experience takes place.” See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 3. As we will see in chap. 1, for early modern philosophers, humility is an emotional index of power, or the lack thereof. To take two examples: Hobbes defines “glory” as “Joy, arising from imagination of a mans own power and ability.” Hobbes, Leviathan, 125. If glory registers the feeling of power, humility registers its absence. “The passion contrary to glory, proceeding from the apprehension of our own infirmity, is called HUMILITY.” Thomas Hobbes, “Human Nature” and “De Corpore Politico,” ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 51. Similarly, Spinoza defines humility as “a sadness born of the fact that a man considers his own lack of power, or weakness.” Benedictus de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The “Ethics” and Other Works, trans. and ed. Edwin M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), DefAV XXVI. Given the association, in early modern philosophy, of humility with assessments of power, debates surrounding humility’s value turn out to be a fruitful site at which to examine philosophical conceptions of the constraints that finitude places on human agency. For a similar argument about the role that acknowledgment of finitude plays in the development of early modern mathematics, see Matthew L. Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 8. See Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 191: “Secular liberalism cannot be addressed simply as a doctrine of the state, or as a set of juridical conventions: in its vast implications, it defines, in eVect, something like a form of life.” Although I share Mahmood’s understanding of the kind of phenomenon that secularity is (a “form of life”), I challenge her conflation of secularity with sovereignty. Mahmood paints a caricatured portrait of secular subjectivity when she asserts, “It is clear that certain virtues (such as humility, modesty, and shyness) have lost their value in the liberal imagination and are considered emblematic of passivity and inaction, especially if they don’t uphold the autonomy of the individual” (174). Thus, to grant that humility plays a role in the constitution of secular subjectivity is not to replace the sovereign subject with a passive subject. One group of scholars challenges received portraits of modern subjectivity by arguing that, in the early modern period, thinkers deployed tropes of passivity to resist the “naturalization of the dissociated, self-interested individual.” Scott P. Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. As reconstructed by Gordon, the passivity trope depicts “the agent as more pas-

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sively prompted than actively choosing, more ‘acted by another’ than acting freely” (5). In other words, the passive self ’s power derives from external forces, such as divine grace. Carving out space for passivity and dispossession within modernity, Gordon denies that agency is synonymous with autonomy. For similar arguments, see Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), chap. 3; and Charly J. Coleman, “The Value of Dispossession: Rethinking Discourses of Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century France,” Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2005): 299–326. Although I share these scholars’ concern to highlight the diverse conceptions of agency on oVer in early modernity, I worry that they contest sovereignty’s hegemony in ways that further entrench received assumptions about power and vulnerability— specifically, the assumption that one can, and must, choose between them. The humility whose contribution I document is not tantamount to passivity. Rather, it confines human eVort within the realm of the possible, and thereby enhances (unaided) human power. Gordon’s passive self derives power from submission to external forces; my humble self derives power from within, through recognition of its own limits. Confronted with this formulation, one might worry that Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau subject humility to an instrumental calculus. If one exploits humility to increase power, one arguably evacuates humility of normative content. More important, one arguably stands guilty of pride. I do not deny the possibility of humility’s instrumentalization, nor is this move absent from these theorists’ theoretical repertoires. (See my discussion of Bacon, in chapter 1, and Spinoza, in chapter 3.) Yet, in the tradition that I reconstruct throughout this book, theorists ascribe normative content to humility. Hobbes best exemplifies this noninstrumental approach to humility. Hobbes includes modesty and humility among the laws of nature, which “are Immutable and Eternall; For Injustice, Ingratitude, Arrogance, Pride, Iniquity, Acception of persons, and the rest, can never be made lawfull.” Hobbes, Leviathan, 215. For debates surrounding this historiographical convention, see Stephen E. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 8–13. The tendency, among theorists who reject the seventeenth century as modernity’s start date, is to adopt an earlier moment of origination. For example, Leo Strauss credits Machiavelli with modernity’s foundation. See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 177–78. Following Hans Blumenberg, Michael Gillespie locates modernity’s “early, ‘preconscious’ development” in debates surrounding medieval nominalism. Michael A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 19. Marcel Gauchet oVers perhaps the earliest start date for secularity, locating its origins in the emergence of transcendent Gods in the axial age. See Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 17. Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 10. Notes to Pages 6–8 | 161

27 Here, I echo claims that received narratives underestimate “the complexity of earlymodern debates about the self.” See S. James, Passion and Action, 17–18, 244, 247, 252. See also Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 28 For a defense of master narratives, see Charles Taylor, “Afterword: Apologia Pro Libro Suo,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 300–301. 29 For an exposé of Charles Taylor’s historical elisions and omissions, see Jon Butler, “Disquieted History in A Secular Age,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 193–216 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Jonathan Sheehan, “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, 217–42 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 30 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 80. 31 See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–40. 32 In other words, my primary task is not to determine what Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau “writing at the time when they wrote for the specific audience they had in mind—could in practice have intended to communicate by issuing their given utterances.” Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 87. In recent years, Skinner has relaxed the strict division of labor between historical inquiry and normative argument that he endorsed in his early methodological essays. Indeed, Skinner characterizes his current method as “genealogical.” Although Skinner accords normative force to history when he embraces genealogy, he shrinks from the most radical implication of Nietzschean genealogy—namely, that “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” (See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 154.) For the argument that “the truly critical aspect of Nietzsche’s method . . . is missing from Skinner’s text, which appears to embrace a more general historical method than that of Nietzschean genealogy,” see Melissa Lane, “Doing Our Own Thinking for Ourselves: On Quentin Skinner’s Genealogical Turn,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 1 (2012): 80. 33 See Raymond Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” European Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1994): 282: “Starting from the present state of, say, Christianity (or of whatever else is the object of genealogical analysis), the genealogy works its way backward in time, recounting the episodes of struggle between diVerent wills, each trying to impose its interpretation or meaning on the Christianity that existed at its time, and thereby disentangling the separate strands of meaning that have come together in a (contingent) unity in the present.” 34 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 142. 35 Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10. See also 71–72. 36 See Geuss, “Nietzsche and Genealogy,” 281–82. 162 | Notes to Pages 8–11

37 See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 162–64. 38 For a concise overview of secularization theory’s waning appeal, see Steven B. Smith, “Secularization and Its Discontents,” Political Theory 39, no. 2 (April 2011): 276–87. 39 See Taylor, Secular Age; Gauchet, Disenchantment; John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006); and Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos; Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 40 See Gillespie, Theological Origins; Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007); and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 41 See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Mahmood, Politics of Piety; and Hurd, Politics of Secularism. 42 See William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Steven D. Smith, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); and JeVrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 43 Charles Taylor, “Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 48, 51. 44 Asad, Formations, 14. 45 Granted, it is diYcult for moderns to conceive religion as something other than an identity category, given that the modern study of religion is comparative and ethnographic in origin. See Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 24: “To sum up the key characteristic of the transformation of the concept of religion in the early modern age, one could perhaps speak of its externalization.” Approaching religion from the vantage point of an external observer, rather than a loyal adherent, modern scholars redefine religion as a public activity that takes diVerent forms in diVerent historical contexts. Thus, although I would contest the reduction of religion to identity, I realize that the very term makes this reduction hard to resist. Moreover, I do not oVer an alternative definition of religion, because I do not believe that the forms of life that we currently group under this rubric share a single definition. As many have noted, “The modern concept of religion more generally is not a neutral or timeless category but instead a modern, European creation, and a Protestant one at that.” See Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1. Again, while I would resist the imposition of Protestant categories on non-Protestant texts, practices, and experiences, I grant that, by using the very term “religion,” I risk entrenching Protestant norms. Although mindful of these and other problems that the term “religion” creates, I see no alternative but to use it. When I use the term “religion” in the following pages, I restrict its referent to Judaism and Christianity in the historical periods and geographical regions that the book covers. 46 See Craig J. Calhoun, “Secularism, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere,” in Rethinking Notes to Pages 11–13 | 163

Secularism, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 77, 75: “Religion appears in liberal theory first and foremost as an occasion for tolerance and neutrality.” Liberal theory sets the terms for contemporary debate, with the result that theorists who reject liberal neutrality as a false and counterproductive ideal nevertheless continue to see “religious diversity” (as opposed to what Calhoun calls “faith itself ”) as “the main issue” for political theorists. 47 Taylor, “Why We Need,” 36; see also 51. 48 Here, I refer to Charles Taylor. In A Secular Age, Taylor dates secularity to the rise of a self so powerful that she can conceive of forsaking God—and her ability to entertain humanist alternatives sparks a pluralization of reputable ethical stances. Under background conditions of unprecedented diversity, religion becomes a component of social identity, a marker that distinguishes one from peers upholding alternative commitments. (Of course, religion is not only a marker of social identity for Taylor—it also orients one to what is genuinely transcendent.) Taylor not only observes the conflation of religion with identity under secularity. In “Why We Need,” he endorses this conflation as a vehicle for toleration. After all, treating Christians diVerently than, say, women, would violate secularism’s commitment to neutrality. Thus, secularism requires the state (and the political theorist) to treat religion as a fungible marker of diVerence. Taylor (who follows Rawls) is not alone in thinking that incorporating religion in a generic umbrella category (e.g., “comprehensive doctrine”) promotes pluralism. Although William Connolly disclaims political secularism, inviting theists to confess their metaphysical commitments in public, he shares Taylor’s conviction that, to enhance democratic discourse, we must subsume religion under a more capacious umbrella category. In Why I Am Not a Secularist, Connolly professes generosity toward Christians, whose perspectives he deems worthy of public airing. Yet he overlooks the possibility that lumping Christian practice together with “micropolitics and self-artistry,” “the visceral register of thinking and intersubjectivity,” and non-Kantian philosophy does violence to Christian self-understandings (33). A term like “ethos” functions as the aVective analogue to Rawls’s comprehensive doctrine, refusing distinctions between dispositions that originate in religious and philosophical contexts. Like Rawls and Taylor, Connolly minimizes these distinctions because he aspires to “a more vibrant public pluralism” (6). Because Connolly reads religion as an instance of (metaphysical) diversity, he cannot but consider religion a problem to be solved, or a resource to be exploited. To ask whether an ethos “provides an existential basis for democratic politics” is, in eVect, to assign political theory the task of solving the “problem” of religion (39). 49 Here, I refer to John Rawls. When I identify pluralism as Rawls’s animating concern, I depart from other interpreters. Following Calhoun, one could argue that, for Rawls, “faith itself ” is the “main issue” for political theorists rather than religious diversity. See Calhoun, “Secularism, Citizenship, and the Public Sphere,” 75, 81. On this reading, epistemological concerns motivate Rawls’s exclusion of religious reasons from public discourse. Rawls reserves the public sphere for public reason not because he fears sectarian conflict, but because religious discourse does not meet the standards for public justification. Without denying that centrality of these epistemo164 | Notes to Page 13

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logical concerns, I would nevertheless argue that, in Rawls’s narration, these concerns only become pressing in a religiously diverse society. Rawls’s Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) opens with a history that traces shifting relations between religion, politics, and philosophy from the latter’s inception in ancient Greece. Rawls identifies “the Reformation and its aftermath, with the long controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” as “the historical origin of political liberalism” (xxvi). For Rawls, the historical shift that occasioned the distinctive set of “problems” confronting modern political philosophy was the demise of a civic religion designed to secure social cohesion, and the rise of, and rift within, “an authoritative, Salvationist, and expansionist religion” (i.e., Christianity) (xxv). In the Reformation’s wake, individuals convinced that they were in possession of truth had to find ways to coexist with neighbors convinced of rival truths. Thus, to establish conditions for political stability, modern philosophers must grapple with “the fact of reasonable pluralism.” In this narrative, religion’s epistemological deficits only become politically salient when religion is controversial. Moreover, Rawls responds to the uniquely modern predicament by subsuming religion under an umbrella category (e.g., comprehensive doctrine), the force of which is to assert that, for political purposes, the source from which citizens derive concepts of the good is irrelevant. For Rawls, the issue is not that religion is religious; it is that, as one of many sources from which citizens derive metaphysical commitments, religion is controversial. For one example of such an attribution, see Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 199, 203. With this reminder, I echo Eric Gregory’s caution that contemporary debates about religion in the public sphere “may obscure ways that religious legacies shape modern politics more than we care to imagine.” Like Gregory, I appreciate the “practical and theoretical significance” of these debates “for pluralist societies”—but I share his worry that they divert scholarly attention from more fundamental questions about “the nature of authority” and “the nature of God.” See Eric Gregory, “Review Essay: The Jewish Roots of the Modern Republic,” Harvard Theological Review 105, no. 3 (2012): 380. See Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), xii–xiii. Walzer’s term is useful in that it captures the penumbra of suspicion that divine sovereignty casts over human political projects. Walzer errs, however, when he reads theocratic opposition to human political agency as opposition to politics as such. To reserve sovereignty for God is not to reject politics tout court; rather, it is to endorse an alternative to secular conceptions of politics. Thus, the position that Walzer identifies is better termed “antihuman politics.” Taylor, Secular Age, 1. See Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5, 7; and Gillespie, Theological Origins, 286–94. Lilla, Stillborn God, 306–7. Indeed, as Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has argued, political scientists misinterpret “religious resurgence” precisely because they fail to appreciate the ways in which the osNotes to Pages 14–16 | 165

tensible “resurgence” challenges dominant conceptions of religion. See Hurd, Politics of Secularism, 12: “If what is identified as religious resurgence is a political contestation of the fundamental contours and content of the secular, then this contest signals the disruption of preexisting standards of what religion is and how it relates to politics.” 57 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 61–62. 58 See Lilla, Stillborn God; and Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

c ha pt e r 1: t o ward a revi s ed h i sto ry of mod est y and h u m i l i t y 1 I confine my discussion of traditional, theological ethics of humility to Christianity. Readers may conclude that I focus on Christianity because humility is a Christian innovation, unknown to Judaism, which advocates a more life-aYrming ethic. Indeed, the assumption that ideals of humility are foreign to Judaism has led some to interpret Spinoza’s disdain for humility as evidence of fealty to Jewish tradition. See Lenn E. Goodman, “What Does Spinoza’s Ethics Contribute to Jewish Philosophy?,” in Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy, ed. Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 40. In fact, while ideals of humility gain greater prominence in Christian traditions, they originate and flourish in Jewish texts. See Bernard Steinberg, “Humility,” in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs, ed. Arthur Allen Cohen and Paul R. Mendes-Flohr, 429–33 (New York: Scribner, 1987); Daniel Frank, “Humility as a Virtue: A Maimonidean Critique of Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Moses Maimonides and His Time, ed. Eric L. Ormsby, 89–100 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989); Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Majesty and Humility,” Tradition 17, no. 2 (1978): 25–37; George N. Schlesinger, “Humility,” Tradition 27, no. 3 (1993): 4–12; Daniel Statman, “On Several Solutions to the Paradox of Humility in Jewish Sources” [in Hebrew], Iyyun 44 (October 1995): 355–70; and Daniel M. Nelson, “The Virtue of Humility in Judaism: A Critique of Rationalist Hermeneutics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 13, no. 2 (October 1985): 298–311. If humility plays an important role within Jewish ethics, it is nevertheless true that received portraits of secularity draw almost exclusively on Christian sources. Hence, I focus almost exclusively on Christian humility in this book. 2 Twentieth-century analytic philosophers express a very diVerent set of reservations regarding humility. Namely, they debate whether humility is a coherent concept and, consequently, whether it is a virtue. How can an accomplished individual who knows that she is accomplished be humble? See Norvin Richards, Humility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Julia Driver, “The Virtues of Ignorance,” Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 7 (July 1989): 373–84; Joseph Kupfer, “The Moral Perspective of Humility,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84, no. 3 (September 2003): 249–69; and Daniel Statman, “Modesty, Pride and Realistic Self-Assessment,” Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 169 (October 1992): 420–38. Humility’s philosophical coherence is not my concern in this chapter. 166 | Notes to Pages 18–20

3 One could object that one of the most prominent secularization stories incorporates humility—namely, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. On Weber’s narrative, ascetic disciplines like humility enable forms of worldliness at odds with the express goals of their architects and adherents. For Weber’s discussion of humility, see The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 52, 71, 102, 113, 137, and 169. In Weber’s story, practices of humility inadvertently create subjects possessed of aptitudes requisite for capitalist accumulation. “The cultural consequences of the Reformation were to a great extent . . . unforeseen and even unwished for results of the labours of the reformers” (90). Although it is not without ironic twists, my narrative centers on the express statements of philosophers and theologians. Unlike Weber, I trace explicit revisions in humility’s meaning, value, and, most important, its relationship to power. Given that language exceeds the intentions of its users, and given the contingencies of reading and reception, these figurations were not always successful. They too have had unintended consequences, and these contingencies are an important part of my story. But the story’s point of departure is the conscious revaluation of humility by secular theorists. 4 F. Alfonso Rodríguez, A Treatise of Humility (Saint-Omer, 1632), preface. For pagan pride, see also 4–6. For a diVerent version of this topos, see Edward Pelling, A Practical Discourse upon Humility (London, 1694), 1–4. 5 Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 4. 6 Nicolas Malebranche, Christian Conferences Demonstrating the Truth of the Christian Religion and Morality, to Which Is Added His Meditations on Humility and Repentance (London, 1695), 379. 7 See John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), 73: “Augustinian humility is not a purely moral characteristic which may belong to any man without regard to his religion. It has nothing to do with self-depreciation. It is the humility of the believer as such, the manward aspect of faith in God as the source of all good, the necessary implication of acceptance of the doctrine of grace.” For Augustine’s revaluation of the Latin term “humilis”—his transformation of humilitas into a distinctively Christian ethical stance and a distinctively Christian rhetorical style—see Erich Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” in Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). 8 On Christopher Brooke’s reading, the Augustinian polemic against philosophical pride targets Stoicism, and its claim that emotions are subject to human control, in particular. See Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), xiv, 7, 10. 9 Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 49. 10 Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, ed. Henry S. Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), citing Ecclus. 10:13; see also 477. My account here follows Herdt, Putting on Virtue, chap. 2. 11 Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 50. The claim that pagans did not, and could not, know Notes to Pages 21–23 | 167

from humility is a polemical accusation designed to discredit pagan philosophy and validate Christian ethics. I present this topos not to endorse it as a historically accurate representation of pagan ethics, but rather to illustrate one influential (but polemical) account of humility’s meaning and provenance. Moreover, one can say that pagans ignored or denied the virtues of humility (as some contemporary scholars do), while acknowledging that Greeks carried on a nuanced dialogue about the dangers of hubris. In classical Greek texts, hubris is not primarily a religious term, nor is it a synonym for pride. Rather, “hubris” means “having energy or power and misusing it self-indulgently. English expressions which might be used to translate the word, in some contexts at least, are ‘animal spirits,’ ‘exuberance,’ ‘ebullience,’ ‘bounciness,’ ‘bumptiousness,’ ‘egotism’; but hybris is a harsher, more pejorative word than any of these.” Douglas M. MacDowell, “ ‘Hybris’ in Athens,” Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 23, no. 1 (April 1976): 21. See also N. R. E. Fisher, “‘Hybris’ and Dishonour: I,” Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 23, no. 2 (October 1976): 177–93; N. R. E. Fisher, “ ‘Hybris’ and Dishonour: II,” Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 26, no. 1 (April 1979): 32–47; and J. M. J. Murphy, “Hubris and Superbia: DiVering Greek and Roman Attitudes Concerning Arrogant Pride,” Ancient World 28, no. 1 (1997): 73–81. For hubris as a legal oVense that enabled prosecution of a wide range of deliberately insulting behaviors, especially acts causing sexual dishonor, see David Cohen, “Sexuality, Violence, and the Athenian Law of ‘Hubris,’” Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 38, no. 2 (October 1991): 171–88. For the threat that hubris poses to contemporary democracy, see Mark E. Button, “ ‘Hubris Breeds the Tyrant’: The Anti-politics of Hubris from Thebes to Abu Ghraib,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 8, no. 2 (June 2012): 305–32. From an Augustinian perspective, the Athenian law of hubris, which proscribes gratuitously insulting behavior, would not provide evidence of pagan humility, precisely because it centers on social relations rather than humanity’s stance before the divine. 12 Augustine’s anatomy of self-love is more nuanced than my (admittedly cursory) account suggests. See Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 37, 137–38. As O’Donovan demonstrates, self-love has multiple connotations, and multiple moral valences, for Augustine. Throughout his corpus, Augustine endorses a eudaemonist ethic, aligning right self-love with love of God. The famous antithesis between love of self as the foundation of the earthly city and love of God as the foundation of the heavenly city represents a late development in Augustine’s philosophy. 13 Richard Strier, “Milton against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire E. McEachern and Debora K. Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 260. Strier argues that theologians who oppose Christian humility to pagan pride are correct: “There is no conception of humility, of selfdisparagement as a virtue (rather than, as in Socrates, a strategy), in classical ethics. The whole idea is foreign to the heroic code, where the ideal is fully to enact one’s excellence, and it is equally foreign to classical philosophy” (ibid., 260). For the claim that humility is, in fact, unknown to pagans, see also Herdt, Putting on Virtue; Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return?,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth H. Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 107; Jay Newman, “Humility and Self-Realization,” 168 | Notes to Page 23

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Journal of Value Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1982): 277; and Pierre Manent, The City of Man (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 24–25. For the contrary view, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), 2: “Of most Western religion, Greek, Hebrew, and Christian, the lowering of man in his own eyes, it may on the whole be said, has been the first, though not always the final, concern.” For the history of this topos in the Renaissance, see Strier, “Milton against Humility,” 259–60. For “a brief conceptual history of humility,” see Mark E. Button, “‘A Monkish Kind of Virtue’? For and against Humility,” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 840–68. Arnold Geulincx, Ethics, ed. Han van Ruler, Anthony Uhlmann, and Martin Wilson, trans. Martin Wilson (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2006), 29, 9. For the relationship between Geulincx and Spinoza, see Mark Aalderink, “Spinoza and Geulincx on the Human Condition, Passions, and Love,” Studia Spinozana, no. 15 (1999): 67–88; Han van Ruler, “Geulincx and Spinoza: Books, Backgrounds and Biographies,” Studia Spinozana, no. 15 (1999): 89–106; and Bernard Rousset, Geulincx Entre Descartes Et Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1999). Geulincx, Ethics, 9. Jacques Abbadie, The Art of Knowing One-self; or, An Enquiry into the Sources of Morality in Two Parts (Oxford, 1698), 2. Ibid., 3. François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, “Sur Le Pur Amour,” in Oeuvres, ed. Jacques Le Brun, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1983), 670: “Tout amour sans grace, et hors de Dieu, ne peut jamais être qu’un amour-propre déguisé. Il n’y a que l’Être infiniment parfait qui puisse, comme objet par son infinie perfection, et comme cause par son infinie puissance, nous enlever hors de nousmêmes, et nous faire préférer ce qui n’est pas nous à notre propre être.” Unless otherwise noted, throughout this book, translations from Latin and French are my own. In all cases, such as this one, where a footnote reference includes the French or Latin original, the English translation to which the note refers is my own translation. François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, “De l’Humilité,” in Oeuvres, ed. Jacques Le Brun, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1983), 692: “Le vrai humble ne fait rien, et ne s’oppose à rien.” Given these divergent estimations of human agency, it is unsurprising that François Lamy identifies Abbadie as a sworn opponent of Fénelon’s pure love. See chap. 4. Geulincx, Ethics, 29. Fénelon, “De l’Humilité,” 694: “Ô Sauveur abject et humble, donnez-moi la science des véritables chrétiens et le goût du mépris de moi-même; et que j’apprenne la leçon incompréhensible à l’esprit humain, qui est de mourir à soi-même par la mortification, par la veritable humilité.” Johann Micraelius, Lexicon Philosophicum Terminorum Philosophis Usitatorum (Düsseldorf, DE: Stern-Verlag Janssen, 1966), 575: “HUMILITAS est, qua tenuitatem nostram intuiti, procul ab arrogantia intra oYcii metas nos continemus.” Pierre Godart, P. Godartij Lexicon Philosophicum: Item, Accuratissima Totius Philosophiae Summa, vol. 2 (Paris, 1675), 57: “HUMILITAS est Virtus qua quis ob suam Notes to Pages 23–25 | 169

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excellentiam non eVertur. Seu Virtus inclinans ad sui vilitatem agnoscendam, exteriusque ingenue profitendam.” John Milton, A Treatise on Christian Doctrine: Compiled from the Holy Scriptures Alone, trans. Charles R. Sumner (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, 1825), 268: “Humility is that whereby we acknowledge our unworthiness in the sight of God.” Etienne Chauvin, Lexicon Rationale Sive Thesauraus Philosophicus (Rotterdam, 1692), s.v. “humilitas”: “HUMILITAS vulgo creditur pertinere ad modestiam, adeoque & ad temperantiam, tanquam eius pars potentialis; & dicitur moderari motus spei ac audaciae, seu moderari spiritum sese eVerentem, ne plura nobis polliceamur quam par est.” Ibid. “Humilitatis principium & radix est Dei reverentia.” F. Alfonso Rodríguez, A Treatise of Modesty and Silence (Saint-Omer, 1632), 2. See also 24–25. Nor was modesty defined as an exclusively female virtue. Today, scholars often assume that modesty was traditionally classed as a female virtue. In seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century philosophy, however, modesty is not explicitly gendered. Or, if modesty is gendered, it is gendered male. See Rodríguez, Treatise of Modesty and Silence, 25: “When there is within a masculine solid vertue, there will presently shine forth a constant gravity & solidity in our speech and lookes, and maturity in our gate, our gestures, and all our motions: the weight and gravity of the interiour, sends forth solidity and maturity to the exterior. And this is that modesty which our B. Father requires of us, proceeding from peace and true humility of the soule.” This philosophical definition of modesty as a male virtue persisted well into the eighteenth century. The editors of the Encyclopédie distinguish “modestie,” which is gender-neutral, from “pudeur,” which is an exclusively female virtue. Drawing on classical etymology, the Encyclopedist defines “modestie” as “moderation of the spirit, whereby, in respecting others, we respect ourselves.” Here, modesty is defined as the antithesis of vanity and ambition. Chevalier de Jaucourt Louis, “Modesty,” Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert—Collaborative Translation Project, February 1, 2003, http: // hdl.handle.net / 2027 / spo.did2222.0000.039. Citing Rousseau as an authority, the entry on “pudeur” asserts a natural, and universal, “disgust for female incontinence.” Chevalier de Jaucourt Louis, “Modesty,” Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert —Collaborative Translation Project, April 1, 2009, http: // hdl.handle.net / 2027 / spo.did2222.0001.077. Rousseau is arguably the philosopher responsible for extinguishing the modern understanding of modesty as a philosophical (and therefore male) virtue. In Rousseau’s texts, “modestie” is relegated to the ranks of female coquetterie, used as a synonym for “pudeur.” Pelling, Practical Discourse upon Humility, 1–2. Pelling endorses modesty as a virtue for Christians at 149. Chauvin, Lexicon Rationale Sive Thesauraus Philosophicus, s.v. “modestia”: “Sic unumquemque haec virtus suae stationis vel conditionis finibus coercet, ne plura, quam debet, vel decet, expetat. De hac Aristoteles 4. Ethic. c. 3 & 4. Et, quandoquidem a magnanimitate specie non diVert, eapropter apud Graecos nomen non invenit.” In the same period, Rousseau invoked the Christian humility / pagan philosophy topos in a more traditional way, to expose the pretensions of contemporary philosophy. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Observations by Jean-Jacques Rousseau of

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Geneva,” in The “Discourses” and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 40–41, 44. Rousseau appears to share the view that humility was unknown to the pagans. Rousseau is aware of, and impressed by, Socratic ignorance, but he does not describe Socrates’s epistemological stance as “humble.” See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts” or “First Discourse,” in The “Discourses” and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David F. Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.3.2, 382–83. See also John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty” and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 69–70. Hume, Treatise, 194. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Jerome B. Schneewind (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 73. While Hume dismisses humility, he contends that norms of etiquette require a “strong bias” toward modesty in one’s “outward behavior”; “but this excludes not a noble pride and spirit, which may openly display itself in its full extent, when one lies under calumny or oppression of any kind” (ibid., 70). In A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.3.2, Hume makes it clear that the modesty required by manners is purely superficial, and need not (indeed, should not) be sincere. See Robert A. Manzer, “Hume on Pride and Love of Fame,” Polity 28, no. 3 (April 1996): 352–53. See Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 308, 314. Hume, Enquiry, 63. Admittedly, I oVer a cursory account of Hume’s attitude toward pride. For accounts that capture Hume’s ambivalence toward pride, see Manzer, “Hume on Pride and Love of Fame,” 333–55; and Andrew Sabl, “Noble Infirmity: Love of Fame in Hume,” Political Theory 34, no. 5 (October 2006): 542–68. For philosophical reconstructions of Hume’s views on pride, see Donald Davidson, “Hume’s Cognitive Theory of Pride,” Journal of Philosophy 73, no. 19 (November 4, 1976): 744–57; and Annette Baier, “Hume’s Analysis of Pride,” Journal of Philosophy 75, no. 1 (January 1978): 27–40. See also Lovejoy, Reflections, 181–93. Hume, Enquiry, 63. For “subtraction stories,” see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 22: “I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed oV, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this process—modernity or secularity—is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside.” See Mary M. Keys, “Humility and Greatness of Soul,” Perspectives on Political Science 37, no. 4 (September 2008): 218: “In this harsh judgment, Hume is far from a lone philosophic voice. From its very genesis, modern ethical and political thought has been punctuated by critiques of humility, from Machiavelli’s implicit assault to Spinoza’s, Hume’s, and Nietzsche’s explicit attacks.” See also Button, “Monkish Virtue,” 844; Richards, Humility, 168; and Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1984), 135. Notes to Page 28 | 171

41 Jeanine Grenberg, Kant and the Ethics of Humility: A Story of Dependence, Corruption, and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1, 2. 42 For one prominent example, see Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 131–32. Rousseau echoes Machiavelli’s complaint that Christian valorization of humility has sapped the martial spirit required to sustain republican virtue. See JeanJacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148–49. As I argue in chapter 4, Rousseau proves more congenial to humility in texts such as Julie. 43 See Stephen K. White, Sustaining AYrmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. 44 Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1. 45 White, Sustaining AYrmation, 4. For the sovereign self and its conceits, see also Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 10–11. 46 For a prime example of the view that tracing modernity’s origins to the seventeenth century constitutes an indictment, see Stephen E. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), x–xi, 41–43. To salvage modernity from postmodern critiques, Toulmin identifies an alternative origin point for modernity in Renaissance humanism. On Toulmin’s account, Renaissance humanism is modest, while seventeenth-century philosophy is ambitious; humanism appreciates human limits, while philosophy is dogmatic. Toulmin delivers a vision of modernity more palatable to contemporary audiences by recurring to the Renaissance, but he does so in ways that reinforce reductive stereotypes about seventeenth-century philosophy. Toulmin perpetuates these stereotypes because he overlooks the theoretical possibility for which this book argues—that modesty is an integral constituent of ambitious philosophical systems. 47 For an overview and critique of sociological theories of secularization, see Taylor, Secular Age, 425–37. 48 For the origins, in Weimar Germany, of a portrait of modernity that “plays on the ancient prejudice of the humble soul against the crime of hubris,” see Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 202. 49 To take one example: Although Hans Blumenberg rebuts Carl Schmitt’s claim that modern political thought constitutes an illegitimate and disavowed appropriation of essentially theological contents, he shares the view that modernity is characterized by the “self-assertion of reason through the mastery and alteration of reality.” See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 137–38. For a somewhat diVerent example, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos; Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 356–57. On Yovel’s rendition, “Secularization involves the demand of the individual Self to experience, interpret, confirm, or otherwise judge whatever is presented to him or her as a binding tradition or cultural vindication.” Yet Yovel traces the lineage of this empowered, independent self to crypto-Jewish Marra172 | Notes to Pages 29–30

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nos. In other words, Yovel arrives at a familiar destination via an unfamiliar, because Jewish, route—a route that omits the Augustinian rhetoric of self-deification. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 204. For the express charge that “a certain sort of triumphalist and narrow secularism” is animated by a “drive for sovereign control,” see Elshtain, Sovereignty, 248. See also 160–61, 163, 258. For a more polemical example, see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 440: “The Cartesian subject only exists as the sinful subject.” Elshtain, Sovereignty, 159. Ibid., 160; see also 158. White, Sustaining AYrmation, 4. Stephen K. White, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 24. Ibid., 12. Here, White summarizes a tradition of twentieth-century criticism of modernity indebted to Horkheimer and Adorno, Heidegger, and Foucault. For example, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 174. Saba Mahmood, “Can Secularism Be Other-Wise?,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 294. This is not to deny that contemporary secularism upholds various “conceits” that license imperial projects. For secularism’s conceits, see Wendy Brown, “Civilizational Delusions: Secularism, Tolerance, Equality,” Theory & Event 15, no. 2 (2012). Peter E. Gordon, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (2008): 668. Taylor, Secular Age, 3. Ibid. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 262. Ibid., 38–39. Ibid., 300. I emphasize buVering to highlight the centrality of a particular experience of selfhood to Taylor’s account of what it means to be secular. On Taylor’s argument, “A crucial condition for this [exclusive humanism] was a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos” (27). Yet the rise of the buVered self does not, in and of itself, cause secularity. Rather, the self is one factor in a complicated causal story about the internal development of Western Christianity, whose nuances and ironies I elide here. In Sources of the Self, Taylor uses the metaphor of “punctuality” to illustrate the disengaged modern self. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 49, 161, 171–72. For the claim that Taylor’s critique of the disengagement model targets an “impossible aspiration to achieve a kind of masterful or sovereign agency,” see Markell, Bound by Recognition, 42–43. Markell makes the further claim that, in his attempt to elude Notes to Pages 30–33 | 173

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sovereign mastery, Taylor defines recognition in ways that (unwittingly) repeat that very assertion, albeit in diVerent form. Taylor, Secular Age, 261–62. See Mahmood, “Can Secularism Be Other-Wise?,” 293–94. Taylor, Secular Age, 386. Ibid., 387. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.; see also 301. Ibid., 263. Ibid., 264. P. E. Gordon, “Place of the Sacred,” 668. Ibid., 667. Ibid., 668. Taylor, Secular Age, 675. Ibid., 531. See also Charles Taylor, “Afterword: Apologia Pro Libro Suo,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 306. Taylor, Secular Age, 304. Ibid., 675. Taylor’s expressly Catholic writings reveal the extent to which he has redefined humility as a way of living one’s identity (e.g., “believer,” “nonbeliever”) in a pluralist society. See Charles Taylor, A Catholic Modernity? Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, with Responses by William M. Shea, Rosemary Luling Haughton, George Marsden, Jean Bethke Elshtain, ed. James Heft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 26. Confronted with the moral achievements of modern humanism, Taylor argues, Catholics must own the historical failings of the church and, more important, embrace aspects of modernity that advance gospel teachings. In a secular age, “the Christian conscience experiences a mixture of humility and unease: The humility in realizing that the break with Christendom was necessary for this great expansion of gospel-inspired actions; the unease in the sense that the denial of transcendence places this action under threat.” Here, to be humble is to acknowledge the moral achievements of people who do not share your metaphysical commitments. For the “nova eVect,” see Taylor, Secular Age, 299; Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 104–5. P. E. Gordon, “Place of the Sacred,” 668. The humility that Taylor recommends to inhabitants of the immanent frame recalls the eVorts of democratic theorists to recast humility “as an active civic virtue and political ethos geared toward facilitating attentiveness, listening, and mutual understanding among and between plural others.” Button, “Monkish Virtue,” 849. Significantly, “Democratic humility, as a public ethos, is less immediately opposed to individual pride . . . than it is to political and cultural forms of complacency.” Ibid., 851. See also Mark E. Button, Contract, Culture, and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 229–36.

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87 Of course, a theoretical analysis of pluralism can incorporate a notion of finitude, tacit or explicit. On some theories, the fact of pluralism is itself a function of the finitude of human reason. Rawls’s concept of the “burdens of judgment,” or the sources of reasonable disagreement in a free society, arguably relies on a claim of this type. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 58: “DiVerent conceptions of the world can reasonably be elaborated from diVerent standpoints and diversity arises in part from our distinct perspectives. It is unrealistic—or worse, it arouses mutual suspicion and hostility—to suppose that all our diVerences are rooted solely in ignorance and perversity, or else in the rivalries for power, status, or economic gain.” Without denying that a claim of this kind animates Taylor’s liberalism, I would nevertheless insist on the diVerence between using “secular” humility to mediate public disagreement (as Taylor does) and using it to articulate humanity’s ontological situation (as Gordon does). 88 P. E. Gordon, “Place of the Sacred,” 667. 89 For “hyper-Augustinianism,” see Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 16–17. 90 Taylor, Secular Age, 543–44. 91 Ibid., 768. 92 Taylor, Catholic Modernity?, 34. 93 Ibid., 32, 33. See White, Sustaining AYrmation, 67; and Taylor, Sources of the Self, 516, 518, 520–21. 94 For the claim that A Secular Age aims “to imbue the present with a liberal Catholic conception of it as the domain of lost transcendence and community, which remains locked in rivalry with the post-Protestant conception of modernity as the ‘unfinished Enlightenment project,’” see Ian Hunter, “Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Secularization in Early Modern Germany,” Modern Intellectual History 8, no. 3 (2011): 638. 95 Taylor, Catholic Modernity?, 35. For a defense of Taylor against the charge that he wields God as “a strong ontological trump card,” see White, Sustaining AYrmation, 62. 96 René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert StoothoV, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 142–43. 97 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 82. 98 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), 83. 99 Ibid., 85. 100 Ibid., 81. 101 Ibid., 83. 102 Ibid., 86. 103 Markku Peltonen, introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1. In this vein, Hume credits Bacon with establishing science on sound foundations. See Hume, Treatise, 5. 104 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2; see also 16. 105 Ibid., 20–21. Notes to Pages 36–40 | 175

106 Ibid., 19; see also 13. 107 For Baconian humility, see John Channing Briggs, “Bacon’s Science and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 181–82: “The new sons of science must follow the Apostle Paul’s example of humility in I Corinthians: they must strive to endure all things, even as their obedience to nature brings ever greater control and comfort.” For Bacon’s departure from the modesty topos familiar from classical rhetoric, see Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 104–5, 112, 118. 108 Bacon, New Organon, 12. 109 Ibid., 13; see also 15. 110 Ibid., 11. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 13. 115 Ibid., 24; see also 16, 33. 116 Brian Vickers, “Francis Bacon and the Progress of Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (July 1992): 511. 117 See Timothy H. Paterson, “On the Role of Christianity in the Political Philosophy of Francis Bacon,” Polity 19, no. 3 (April 1987): 419–42. 118 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert StoothoV, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 385.

chapter 2: modesty: hobbes on how mere mortals can create a mortal god 1 Hobbes citations refer to the following editions: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), hereafter Leviathan, or L; Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (“De Homine” and “De Cive”), ed. Bernard Gert, De Homine trans. Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998), hereafter De Homine, or DH; Thomas Hobbes, “Human Nature” and “De Corpore Politico,” ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), hereafter Elements of Law, or EL; and Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), hereafter De Cive, or DC. 2 Hobbes’s comparison seems less bold if we recall the Renaissance commonplace that compares artistic creativity to divine creativity. For one example of this topos, see Sir Philip Sidney, “Defence of Poesie,” “Astrophil and Stella” and Other Writings, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (London: Everyman, 1997), 89. For the trope of imitation of God in the humanist tradition, as well as Hobbes’s debt to said tradition, see Ted H. Miller, Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), chap. 4. 3 Michael A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 42; see also 209, 222, 231, 254; Leo Strauss, The Political Phi176 | Notes to Pages 40–45

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losophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 105–7, 168; and Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self (New York: Basic Books, 2008), xiv–xv, 148, 159–60, 188, 204–5. For an especially sophisticated and insightful analysis of Hobbes’s God-rivaling ambitions, see Miller, Mortal Gods, 5, 50, 61, 70, 76. Here, I echo Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7, 12, 134–35, 172. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 55. See also Joshua Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 57. For vainglory as the dominant passion, see Strauss, Political Philosophy, 50; Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone, 50; Daniel M. Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 45, 80; Richard Tuck, “The Utopianism of Leviathan,” in “Leviathan” after 350 Years, ed. Tom Sorell and Luc Foisneau (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 131; Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 35–36; Aloysius Martinich, The Two Gods of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 49–50; Gabriella Slomp, “Hobbes on Glory and Civil Strife,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 181, 190, 192; and Gillespie, Theological Origins, 241–42. Jean Hampton characterizes this position as “the passions account of conflict”; see Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 63–64. For a view that says that glory looms even larger in Elements of Law and De Cive than it does in Leviathan, see F. S. McNeilly, The Anatomy of “Leviathan” (London: Macmillan, 1968), 146, 163; and Gabriella Slomp, Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 85. For vainglory as the fundamental passion, see Strauss, Political Philosophy, 12; Stephen Holmes, Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 85–86; and Haig Patapan, “ ‘Lord Over the Children of Pride’: The Vaine-Glorious Rhetoric of Hobbes’s Leviathan,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, no. 1 (2000): 78–79. For the problem / solution rubric, see Strauss, Political Philosophy, 13; Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone, 11, 48, 50, 57, 59, 63, 70; Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 4, 13, 22, 115, 132; Patapan, “ ‘Lord Over the Children of Pride,’ ” 74, 80, 91; and Slomp, “Hobbes on Glory and Civil Strife,” 196. Leo Strauss is one of the few scholars who appreciate Hobbes’s investment in modesty. See Strauss, Political Philosophy, 127; and Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 93, 97. While Strauss argues that Hobbes equates reason with modesty, he considers Hobbes’s political project thoroughly immodest. See Political Philosophy, 107: Hobbes inaugurates the modern quest for boundless progress, a quest made possible by the belief that man “can extend the limits of his power at will.” Although I am indebted Notes to Pages 45–46 | 177

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to Strauss for highlighting Hobbes’s investment in modesty, I diVer on what that investment reveals about Hobbes’s views on the possibility, and the desirability, of human mastery. For an example of this oversight, see Michael P. Foley, “Thomas Aquinas’ Novel Modesty,” History of Political Thought 25, no. 3 (2004): 402. For the importance of opinion, belief, and virtue, see Mary G. Dietz, “Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen,” in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); David Johnston, The Rhetoric of “Leviathan”: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); James R. Martel, Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); and Slomp, Thomas Hobbes. Dietz, “Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen,” 91–92, 96. I use male pronouns to refer to Hobbes’s generic political subject because I am persuaded by Carole Pateman’s argument that the original contract excludes women. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). However, because modesty is a virtue for Hobbesian subjects, the question of that subject’s gender is more complicated than it first appears—for, in some contexts, modesty is considered a female virtue. (Although, as I argued in chapter 1, it is anachronistic to assume that modesty was an exclusively female virtue in early modernity. In the philosophical discourse of the period, at least, modesty was an emphatically male virtue.) Harvey Mansfield has noted Hobbes’s redefinition of masculinity with chagrin—according to Mansfield, Hobbes ushers in the unfortunate cult of the “sensitive man.” See Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 166–74. Feminists might share Mansfield’s chagrin, albeit for diVerent reasons. Feminists who deplore the cult of female modesty might worry that Hobbes would deprive (modest) men of the agency that has historically been withheld from (modest) women. Yet Hobbesian modesty is not synonymous with passivity; rather, modesty is a precondition for certain kinds of collective agency. Hobbes’s definition of glory shifts from Elements of Law to Leviathan. In Elements (50), Hobbes defines glory in comparative terms: “GLORY, or internal gloriation or triumph of the mind, is that passion which proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our own power, above the power of him that contendeth with us.” By contrast, in Leviathan, individuals need not outdo peers in order to experience, and exult in, their power. Here, I depart from Slomp, who argues that, despite superficial diVerences, Hobbes’s definition of glory remains constant. See “Hobbes on Glory and Civil Strife,” 184. See Elements of Law, 50. The first use of “self-esteem” recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1657, and the second is 1667, from Milton’s Paradise Lost (VIII 572). The absence of the term “self-esteem” from Hobbes’s English corpus is not altogether surprising, given that “self-esteem” enters the language after Leviathan’s publication. Yet some translators depict Hobbes as a proponent of self-esteem. See Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (“De Homine” and “De Cive”), ed. Bernard Gert, De Homine trans. Charles T. Wood,

178 | Notes to Pages 46–47

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T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998): “Proper self-esteem, however [sui autem aestimatio justa], is not a perturbation, but a state of mind that ought to be. Those, moreover, who estimate their own worth correctly [qui autem recte se aestimant], do so on the basis of their past deeds, and so, what they have done, they dare to try again” (De Homine, 60–61). Following Strauss, Political Philosophy, 55–56, who characterizes “justa sui aestimatio” as “colorless” (i.e., lacking connotations of superiority or magnanimity), I would translate the phrase from De Homine as “proper self-estimation” rather than “proper self-esteem.” In Hobbes’s texts, “aestimo” and “aestimatio” are used with a variety of modifiers to indicate correct, exaggerated, negative, and groundless evaluations. For examples, see Thomas Hobbes, “De Cive”: The Latin Version, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 96; Thomas Hobbes, Opera Philosophica, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 3 (Aalen, DE: Scientia, 1966), 59, 99. For Hobbes, “aestimo” has a broad range of meaning—it does not always carry the positive connotation of “prizing” (or valuing highly), but can also bear a more neutral meaning (“to appraise,” “to estimate”). My translation would bring Hobbes’s position in De Homine in line with the position that he takes in De Cive, where he uses the same Latin construction (“vires suas recte aestimantis”) to describe those who value themselves correctly as modest. See Hobbes, “De Cive”: Latin Version, 93. In De Cive, this construction lacks the celebratory connotations associated with the English term “self-esteem.” Thanks to Antonia Syson, Quentin Skinner, and, especially, Edwin Curley, for help with this question. See Michael Walzer, “Good Aristocrats / Bad Aristocrats: Thomas Hobbes and Early Modern Political Culture,” in In the Presence of the Past: Essays in Honor of Frank Manuel, ed. Richard Bienvenu and Mordechai Feingold, 41–53 (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); Keith Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” in Hobbes Studies, ed. Keith C. Brown, 185–236 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965); and Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 127–33. For pride as an intensification of vainglory, see Leviathan, 140. For “glory” and “pride” used as synonyms, see 200. See also 211, 215, 223, 407, 414, 426, 539. For the relationship between vainglory and the literary genre of romance, see Victoria A. Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), chap. 6; and Hobbes, Elements of Law, 63. See Elements of Law, 51. Hobbes articulates this insight about the destructiveness of vainglory in the language of natural theology. See Leviathan, 407: “Pride” is naturally punished with “Ruine.” Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 257. See also Pettit, Made with Words, 92–97. Wolin, Politics and Vision, 260. See Leviathan, 183. On the aVront of mortality, see Luc Foisneau, Hobbes Et La Toute-puissance De Dieu (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). Strauss, Political Philosophy, 19. See also Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 92. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 97. On this point, see also Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), 120: “The faculty to think objecNotes to Pages 48–51 | 179

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tively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.” Dietz, “Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen,” 102. See Joel Kidder, “Acknowledgements of Equals: Hobbes’s Ninth Law of Nature,” Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 131 (April 1983): 133–46. See also Elements of Law, 94. One could object that I place inordinate emphasis on modesty, which is, after all, just one of the laws of nature. But in privileging modesty, I follow Hobbes, who contends that the ninth law “encompasses all the other laws within itself.” De Cive, 62. Thus, I diVer from those who contend that individual laws of nature do not merit discussion since they are merely “conventional rules of social behavior.” See Johnston, Rhetoric of “Leviathan,” 41; and Tom Sorell, “Hobbes’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 128, 132. See Anne Laurence, “Women, Godliness and Personal Appearance in SeventeenthCentury England,” Women’s History Review 15, no. 1 (March 2006): 69–81; Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992), 169. Joris van Eijnatten, “From Modesty to Mediocrity: Regulating Public Dispute, 1670–1840: The Case of Dutch Divines,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 2 (April 2002): 310–32. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 79–81; and Stephane Gerson, “In Praise of Modest Men: Self-Display and Self-EVacement in Nineteenth-Century France,” French History 20, no. 2 (June 2006): 182–203. See Ernst Robert Curtius and Willard R. Trask, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 83; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 362, 377; and Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). F. Alfonso Rodríguez, A Treatise of Modesty and Silence (Saint-Omer, 1632), 2. See De Cive, 50; and Leviathan, 212. For moderation as a component of modesty, see Elements of Law, 78; De Cive, 50; Leviathan, 185; and McNeilly, Anatomy of “Leviathan,” 140. Hobbes’s definition of “humility” appears to shift from Elements to De Cive. In Elements (51), “humility” signifies recognition of weakness—“The passion contrary to glory, proceeding from apprehension of our own infirmity, is called HUMILITY by those by whom it is approved; by the rest, DEJECTION and poorness; which conception may be well or ill grounded.” In De Cive, by contrast, “humility” signifies recognition of equality. Yet the association of humility with equality is present elsewhere in Elements, suggesting both that Hobbes’s definition remains constant and that the definition links recognition of weakness to aYrmation of equality. See Elements of Law, 100–101: the humble are “contented with equality.” Hobbes’s numbering shifts—law eight in De Cive is law nine in Leviathan.

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42 Hobbes does not define “humility” in Leviathan. When Hobbes enumerates the laws of nature, in chapter 15, he defines refusal to aYrm equality as “pride,” but he neglects to provide a positive term that signifies acknowledgment of equality. Humility’s absence could suggest that the disposition is incidental to Hobbes’s political projects in Leviathan. (Thus, Mary Dietz appreciates Hobbes’s endorsement of modesty, but she erroneously states that Hobbes has removed humility from the catalog of virtues. See Dietz, “Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen,” 103.) Although humility is absent from the catalog of the laws of nature in chapter 15, it reappears in chapter 31. See Leviathan, 399. Here, Hobbes asserts the identity of the divine law with “the same Lawes of Nature, of which I have spoken already in the 14. and 15. Chapters of this Treatise,” and then proceeds to list the laws, including the law requiring humility. For other references to humility in Leviathan, see 153, 363, 399, 403, 406, 576, 710, 711. 43 For dejection, see Leviathan, 125. 44 See Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 25, 47, 51–52, 53. See also Robert P. Kraynak, “Hobbes’s Behemoth and the Argument for Absolutism,” American Political Science Review 76, no. 4 (December 1982): 837–47. 45 Holmes, Passions and Constraint, 96. See also Martinich, Two Gods, 74, 48–50; and Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 62, 63–64, 130, 161. 46 For Hobbes’s critique of aristocratic culture, see Dietz, “Hobbes’s Subject as Citizen,” 107; Strauss, Political Philosophy, 50, 55, 113–14; and Deborah Baumgold, Hobbes’s Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 122, 124. 47 Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, ed. Henry S. Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 571. 48 Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London, 1673), chap. 4, pt. 5, §§ 83, 86. 49 Baxter was a key player in the earliest attempt to censor Leviathan, in 1654–55. For details of this censorship campaign, see John Parkin, “The Reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg, 441–51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and JeVrey R. Collins, “Silencing Thomas Hobbes: The Presbyterians and Leviathan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg, 478–99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 50 Baxter, Directory, chap. 4, pt. 5, § 11. 51 Ibid., chap. 4, pt. 5, § 86. 52 For humility as a stance that social inferiors must adopt toward superiors, see Richard Allestree, The Whole Duty of Man (London, 1664), 34; and Baxter, Directory, chap. 4, pt. 5, §§ 3, 5, 87. For the uniqueness of Hobbes’s egalitarian concern in the seventeenth century, see Strauss, Political Philosophy, 167–68. 53 Allestree, Duty, 32. 54 For the enabling power of humility and related “passivity tropes” among English Protestants, see chap. 3, Gross, Secret History. 55 See Hobbes, Behemoth, 47–53; and JeVrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 85. 56 Baxter, Directory, chap. 4, pt. 5, § 7. 57 Ibid., chap. 4, pt. 5, § 20. Notes to Pages 54–56 | 181

58 For one example of Protestant disparagement of human achievement, contemporaneous with Hobbes, see Allestree, Duty, 33: “The best of our works are so full of infirmity and pollution, that if we compare them with that perfection and purity which is in God, we may truly say with the Prophet, All our righteousness are as filthy rages, Isaiah 64.6. And therefore to pride our selves in them, is the same madness, that it would be in a begger to brag of his apparel, when it is nothing but vile rages and tatters.” 59 Robert Bolton, Helpes to Humiliation (London, 1630), 11–12. 60 Baxter, Directory, chap. 4, pt. 5, § 35. 61 To be clear, I focus on the stories Hobbes tells in Leviathan about the commonwealth’s genesis—the rhetorical appeals Hobbes makes to encourage readers to think diVerently about obligation. Admittedly, Hobbes’s account of the commonwealth by acquisition could suggest that Hobbes makes two distinct appeals to readers, one of which undermines the argument that Hobbes values modesty. The individual who acquires sovereignty through violent conquest is presumably immodest. Yet I would challenge the assumption that Hobbes’s allowance for a commonwealth by acquisition constitutes an endorsement of immodesty. Hobbes’s commitment to stability yields competing imperatives. On the one hand, Hobbes would discredit, and discourage, glory-seeking rebellion. On the other hand, Hobbes concedes the legitimacy of a commonwealth by acquisition to remove any pretext for disobedience on the part of subjects (many of whom live in states founded upon violent conquest). While Hobbes retroactively justifies usurpation if the conquered consent to the conqueror’s dominion, in the reply to the fool, Hobbes expressly condemns usurpation as an irrational, self-contradictory violation of the laws of nature (205–6). Given Hobbes’s reply to the fool, it is a stretch to say that he admires glory-seeking rebellion. Indeed, Hobbes goes out of his way to remind readers that a sovereign by acquisition’s legitimacy derives not from his feat of conquest, but from the fact that individuals “do authorize all the actions of that Man, or Assembly, that hath their lives and liberty in his power” (252). Once authorized, the sovereign by acquisition has the same rights, and the same responsibilities, as the sovereign by institution— both are “obliged by the Law of Nature,” which enjoins modesty (376). 62 Hobbes identifies “Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living” as another passion “that encline[s] men to Peace.” Leviathan, 188. I focus on the peace-inclining potential of “Feare of Death” because, as I explain below, Hobbes betrays ambivalence regarding “commodious living.” 63 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 30. 64 The exceptions to this neglect are Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker, 161–65; and Thomas, “Social Origins,” 231. Most scholars overlook the laws of honor because, following Macpherson, they read the Hobbesian sovereign as a mechanism designed to stabilize, and perpetuate, a competitive market in honor. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 37–38, 44–45, 96, 105. 65 When Hobbes identifies the sovereign as the sole “fountain of Honour,” he positions himself squarely within the state-centered protocol for heraldry that developed 182 | Notes to Pages 56–59

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in Tudor England (L 238). However, Hobbes departs from contemporary protocol when he defines honor as an arbitrary creation of sovereign will. Even in the increasingly state-centered system that prevailed in Tudor-Stuart England, honorary titles were still conferred to ratify and authenticate the honoree’s (preexisting) wisdom and virtue. See Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642, Past and Present Supplements 3 (Oxford: Past and Present Society, 1978). Wolin, Politics and Vision, 267, 273. See Richard E. Flathman, Thomas Hobbes: Skepticism, Individuality, and Chastened Politics (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993). Admittedly, this interpretation finds support in Hobbes. See De Cive, 148. As Hobbes argues, “A signe is not a signe to him that giveth it, but to him to whom it is made; that is, to the spectator.” Leviathan, 401. See also Martel, Subverting the Leviathan, 34, 38, 55. When properly decoded, the law of honor aYrms natural equality. See Leviathan, 237–38. For one example of such pronouncements, see De Cive, 23. See Johnston, Rhetoric of “Leviathan,” 128–33. Here, I follow Strauss, Political Philosophy, 19. For the predictability and transparency of Hobbes’s system of punishments as a response to the existential insecurity diagnosed in the book of Job, see Keally McBride, “State of Insecurity: The Trial of Job and Secular Political Order,” Perspectives on Politics 6, no. 1 (2008): 11–20. For the argument that Hobbes is a bourgeois philosopher, see Macpherson, Political Theory, chap. 2; Strauss, Political Philosophy, 118, 121; and Michael Bray, “Macpherson Restored? Hobbes and the Question of Social Origins,” History of Political Thought 28, no. 1 (2007): 56–90. See also Leviathan, 375, 384, 387, 677; De Cive, 138; De Homine, 66; and Thomas Hobbes, Hobbes’s Thucydides, ed. Richard Schlatter (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975), 13. For a warning that security can lull subjects into forgetting the sources of legislative authority, see Leviathan, 320. See Tuck, “Utopianism of Leviathan,” 138. Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 163. See also Behemoth, 39–40, 59, 144, 159–60. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 23–24; and Samuel I. Mintz, “Leviathan as Metaphor,” Hobbes Studies 2 (1989): 3–9. William H. Greenleaf, “A Note on Hobbes and the Book of Job,” Anales De La Catedra Francisco Suarez 14 (1974): 10–34. See also Frank M. Coleman, “Thomas Hobbes and the Hebraic Bible,” History of Political Thought 25, no. 4 (2004): 642–69; Gillespie, Theological Origins, 248; and Elshtain, Sovereignty, 39–40. See Gordon Hull, “‘Against This Empusa’: Hobbes’s Leviathan and the Book of Job,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10, no. 1 (2002): 3–29. Hobbes reserves subjection in God’s kingdom by nature for theists. Strictly speaking, Notes to Pages 59–64 | 183

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atheists are God’s enemies, rather than God’s subjects, although atheists are still subject to God’s power (as are inanimate objects). See Leviathan, 395: “Whether men will or not, they must be subject alwayes to the Divine Power. By denying the Existence, or Providence of God, men may shake oV their Ease, but not their Yoke.” Job 42:6 (KJV). For a contrary view, which sees Hobbes as appealing to human pride, and exploiting the temptation to prometheanism, see Norman Jacobson, Pride and Solace: The Functions and Limits of Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 53; George Shulman, “Hobbes, Puritans, and Promethean Politics,” Political Theory 16, no. 3 (1988): 426–43; and George Shulman, “Metaphor and Modernization in the Political Thought of Thomas Hobbes,” Political Theory 17, no. 3 (1989): 392–416. For the claim that subjects who crave perfect security will not give allegiance to a state that can only provide imperfect security, see Peter J. Ahrensdorf, “The Fear of Death and the Longing for Immortality: Hobbes and Thucydides on Human Nature and the Problem of Anarchy,” American Political Science Review 94, no. 3 (2000): 579–93. On the inevitability of imperfection and disappointment, see Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association, 162; and Victoria Silver, “A Matter of Interpretation,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (October 1993): 160–71. See Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). For the argument that the sovereign’s “right to enforce doctrine is essentially negative, and was intended above all to stop non-sovereigns” from imposing their ideological agendas on the public, see Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 74, 88–91. On this reading, Hobbes is more tolerant than a superficial reading of Leviathan would suggest. Indeed, his position bears some aYnity to Spinoza’s, for Spinoza also uses a strong state to protect heterodox opinion from clerical censure. Benedictus de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The “Ethics” and Other Works, trans. and ed. Edwin M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Spinoza does, however, class modesty as a virtue. For a discussion of Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s agreement regarding modesty, see the conclusion. Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 223.

c ha pt e r 3: h u m i l i t y: s p i no za o n t h e jo y s o f fin it ud e 1 Spinoza citations refer to the following editions: Benedictus de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The “Ethics” and Other Works, trans. and ed. Edwin M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), hereafter Ethics and cited parenthetically in the text; and Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), hereafter Theological. When citing passages from the Ethics, I use the standard system of referencing the part and the proposition number rather than the page number. This system uses the following abbreviations: Axiom (A), Definition of the AVects (DefAV ), Demonstration (D), Proposition (P), and Scholium (S). For example, IVP53D refers to the demonstration of Part IV 184 | Notes to Pages 66–70

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Proposition 53. Throughout the book, all citations using this system are references to Spinoza’s Ethics. Is Spinoza’s position on humility actually unprecedented within traditions of Jewish and Christian philosophy? One of the propositions condemned in the Paris Condemnation of 1277 reads as follows: “Quod humilitas, prout quis non ostentat ea que habet, sed uilipendit et humiliat se, non est uirtus.—Error, si intelligatur: nec uirtus nec actus uirtuosus.” David Piché, La Condamnation Parisienne De 1277: Nouvelle Édition Du Texte Latin: Traduction, Introduction Et Commentaires (Paris: Vrin, 1999), 313, Capitulum XX, “Errores de uitiis et uirtutibus,” 8 (171). Historians debate the source of the condemned propositions. While the condemnation appears to target Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, many of the propositions condemned do not represent their actual views (or those held by any scholar at the University of Paris). Even if no scholar at the University of Paris expressly denied humility’s virtue, the condemnation demonstrates that, for medieval Christians, it was not inconceivable that some would (mistakenly) class humility as a vice. See also Bonnie D. Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 68–76, esp. 73: “Siger had not taught that humility was not a virtue: he had presented it as the virtue of the mediocre and hence as a less perfect virtue than magnanimity.” I am indebted to Ian Wei for guidance on this point. See Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 172–77. For a comprehensive bibliography of the anti-Spinoza polemic, see Fritz Bamberger, Spinoza & Anti-Spinoza Literature: The Printed Literature of Spinozism, 1665–1832, ed. Laurel S. Wolfson and David J. Gilner (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2003). For historical background to the controversy surrounding the Ethics, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 485–91; Paul Vernière, Spinoza Et La Pensée Française Avant La Révolution (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954); Christiane Hubert, Les Premières Réfutations De Spinoza: Aubert De Versé, Wittich, Lamy (Sorbonne: Presses de l’Université de Paris, 1994); Albert G. A. Balz, “Cartesian Refutations of Spinoza,” Philosophical Review 46, no. 5 (1937): 461–84; and Syliane Malinowski-Charles, “Réfutations de Spinoza divin dans les premières réfutations de Spinoza,” Dialogue 50, no. 3 (September 2011): 423–42. For the argument that Spinoza elevates “self-esteem properly understood” to “the first virtue of the democratic individual,” see Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the “Ethics” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 201. See also Lewis S. Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 204; Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 16; and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), xvi. For the claim that Spinoza mounts a fierce indictment of human “hubris,” and, consequently, “rejects any notion of human dignity,” see Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “SpiNotes to Pages 70–72 | 185

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noza’s Anti-Humanism: An Outline,” in The Rationalists: Between Tradition and Innovation, ed. Carlos Fraenkel, Dario Perinetti, and Justin E. H. Smith (Dordrecht, NL: Springer Netherlands, 2010), 148. For Spinoza as a critic of hubris, see also Nancy Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 158; and Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 88, 185–88. In Le Nouvel Atheisme Renversé (1696), the Benedictine monk François Lamy (1636– 1711) refuted the Ethics in an eVort to defend Descartes’s Christian bona fides, and demonstrate the apologetic eYcacy of the very forms of rationalism that other Christians had condemned as proud. Le Nouvel Atheisme Renversé was written with Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s encouragement, as part of a quasi-oYcial church campaign, and came fortified with approbations from luminaries of French Catholicism. For Le Nouvel’s publication history, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 488–91; and Vernière, Spinoza Et La Pensée, 240–50. Lamy began Le Nouvel in 1686, but censorship authorities and the Sorbonne withheld approval when Lamy tried to publish in 1688. Censors professed alarm at Lamy’s use of Spinoza’s method to refute Spinoza— Lamy’s geometric method was liable to have unintended consequences, seducing readers to Spinozism. According to Vernière, however, the real motive for suppressing publication was the censors’ hostility to Cartesianism. Consequently, Le Nouvel was not published until 1696, when, alarmed by the inroads that Spinozism had made into French society, leading clerics saw the need for a direct refutation of Spinoza’s doctrines. François Lamy, Le Nouvel Atheisme Renversé, ou Refutation Du Sistême De Spinosa, Tiree Pour La Plùpart, De La Conoissance De La Nature De l’Homme (Paris, 1696), 56: “consiste à négliger ses propres interêts, à s’oublier soi-même, à se renoncer soimême à se sacrifier soi-même pour le service de Dieu & du prochain.” Ibid., 443: “La vertu ne consiste qu’à travailler a sa propre conservation, & qu’à chercher ses propres interêts.” See also Le Nouvel, 56. Ibid., 55: “langage capable d’eblouir & de faire illusion.” Ibid., 443: “La vertu, la pieté & l’amour de Dieu, ne sont dans la dictionaire de Spinosa, qu’un veritable amour propre.” See also Balz, “Cartesian Refutations of Spinoza,” 474, 476. Lamy, Le Nouvel, 430: “souverain maître & moderateur de l’univers.” Ibid., 430, 452: “juge,” “maître,” “severe législateur,” “Roi puissant.” Ibid., 85–86: “sage gouvernement de l’univers”; “si incommode à l’amour propre.” Ibid., 446: “Elle [la Morale Chrétienne] ne dissimule ni nos maladies, ni nos foiblesses; elle nous fait conoître nôtre disgrace & nôtre éloignement de Dieu, le déreglement & la corruption de nôtre nature, les blessures & l’afoiblissement de nôtre liberté pour le bien; mais elle nous enseigne un sage médiateur, un puissant réparateur, un charitable médecin, un excellent libérateur.” Ibid., 41: “assez sage pour prescrire à chaque être un fin convenable, & assez libre & assez puissant pour conduire chaque chose à sa fin.” Ibid., 411: “a fait l’homme pour lui: je veux dire pour un être servi & honoré.” See also Le Nouvel, 23. Lamy, Le Nouvel, 445: “l’homme en bête, après avoir transformé Dieu en machine.

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C’est en deux mots l’abrégé de toute la religion & de toute la Morale de Spinosa.” See also Le Nouvel, 508. Lamy, Le Nouvel, 38: “Sans mentir les hommes se trompent bien, de se croire si distinguez & si favorisez de Dieu, & de s’imaginer qu’il ait pour eux plus d’égards que pour les fourmis & pour les plantes.” See Hubert, Premières Réfutations, 135. Lamy, Le Nouvel, 58: “Le prix de la vertu, dit-il, est la vertu même: c’est-à-dire, que cette vertu qui à parler nettement, n’est que l’amour propre; cette vertu, dis-je, est notre fin & notre souverain bien; de sorte qu’à ce conte, l’homme est à lui-même son souverain bien. De bon foi peut-on éprouver autant de foiblesses & de miseres que nous en sentons tous les jours, & donner dans cette extravagante pensée? Il n’est pas possible que Spinosa n’en ait été éfraié lui-même; & c’est aparemment à dessein de l’adoucir, qu’il nous va parler de la loi Divine d’un air un peu diferent.” Ibid., 66: “renverse toute la Religion & toute la Morale.” Ibid., 85: “Mais comme cette thêse ne seroit nullement soûtenable, si on lassoit subsister les idées communes de la nature de Dieu, & de celle de l’homme; il faut commencer par les renverser.” Ibid., 10: “bouleversement que son sistême a fait dans la Religion, dans la Morale & dans tout ce qu’on a connu, jusques ici, de la nature de ce monde.” Ibid., 145: “égaremens, extravagances d’une cervelle renversée.” For Lamy’s project as one of reversal, see also Lamy, Le Nouvel, 87, 235, 237, 501. Spinoza also uses the rhetoric of reversal in Ethics, IApp, to describe the distortions of the fundamental epistemological prejudice. In Cogitationes Rationales de Deo, Animo, et Malo (1685), the first systematic refutation of the Ethics to issue from French Protestantism, Pierre Poiret (1646–1719) accused Spinoza of squandering his undeniable talent by erecting a vain monument to human prowess. Poiret was not an érudit, but a “medieval” who mingled scholastic apparatus with language drawn from Descartes (whom he quickly disavowed). See Vernière, Spinoza Et La Pensée, 49, 50, 52; and Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 474–75. Pierre Poiret, Cogitationes Rationales De Deo, Anima, Et Malo (Amsterdam, 1685), 75: “impietatis Spinozianae plusquam Satanicae.” For the charge that Spinoza changes the meaning of traditional terms, see also Hubert, Premières Réfutations, 48; and Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique Et Critique, vol. 13 (Paris: Desoer Libraire, 1820), 430. In DefAV XXE, Spinoza rebuts charges of definitional innovation: “I intend to indicate these things by words whose usual meaning is not entirely opposed to the meaning with which I wish to use them.” Poiret, Cogitationes, 74: “Impietatem nonunquam aperte propalat, videlicet quando Virtutes Christianas a quibus mundus manifeste abhorret, quales sunt humilitas, poenitentia, & simile impugnavit: tunc enim eas impius non tantum aperte deridet, sed & easdem pro malis traducit: ubi vero agit de virtutibus vel veritatibus quibus mundus, utut corruptus, vult tamen haberi & videri praeditus, quales sunt Justicia, Amor Dei, Deum esse, & amandum esse; tunc ex hypocrisi fallacissima has equidem voces adhibet & commendat, sed impietate horrenda, alios falsissimos atque atheisticos conceptus illi substituit, sibi suisque improbe intellectos, & ubique astutissime expressos; caeteris vero, a quibus cateroquin poenas atheis solitas timeret, fuco faciendo aptos.” Notes to Pages 75–77 | 187

31 See Edwin M. Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s “Ethics” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 126. See also Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life, 178; and Don Garrett, “Spinoza’s Ethical Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 305. For a contrary view, which sees nothing surprising in Spinoza’s catalog of the virtues, see Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, vol. 2 (New York: Meridian Books, 1969), 223. 32 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2:2. 33 For Machiavelli as the lone dissenter from the favorable evaluation of humility in Renaissance moralism, see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80. For the relationship between Spinoza and Machiavelli, see Edwin M. Curley, “Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Khan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garret, 315–42 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 34 For Spinoza as a proponent of classical magnanimity, see Jay Newman, “Humility and Self-realization,” Journal of Value Inquiry 16, no. 4 (1982): 277; Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza and Spinozism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 127–28; and Wolfson, Philosophy of Spinoza, 2:220. 35 Newman, “Humility and Self-Realization,” 275. 36 Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, 198–99. 37 Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life, 148. See also Newman, “Humility and SelfRealization,” 175; and Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method, 126. For a more nuanced account of Spinoza’s relationship to Nietzsche, and Nietzsche’s relationship to humility, see Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 3. 38 Spinoza derives the definition of humility in the scholium to IIIP55, “When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.” Here, Spinoza oVers a slightly diVerent definition of the aVect: “This sadness, accompanied by the idea of our own weakness is called humility.” 39 Thus, Newman is wrong to lament the ostensible “arbitrariness of Spinoza’s definition of humility.” “Humility and Self-Realization,” 276–77. On Newman’s reading, Spinoza attempts to pass oV his (idiosyncratic) definition of humility as if it were standard. With this move, Newman argues, Spinoza makes a radical “departure from and repudiation of the traditional Jewish-Christian understanding of humility,” because his “primary motive is that of a moralist and critic of popular religion.” For the claim that Spinoza’s definition targets biblical morality, see also Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life, 178; and Garrett, “Spinoza’s Ethical Theory,” 305. Yet, contrary to these interpretations, Spinoza neither fabricates a new definition from whole cloth nor takes popular superstition as his primary target. Although Spinoza is aware that popular religion exploits humility, his definition is a polemical emendation of philosophical definitions, like those of Descartes, which met with approval from (many) Christian readers. 40 Poiret, Cogitationes, 593: “Ut enervaret virtutes solidiores, excogitavit, se illas definiturum per Tristitiam, quam supposuit imperfectionem, imo malum esse; ut inculcaret Lectoribus virtutes esse vitia.” 188 | Notes to Pages 78–79

41 Ibid.: “falsae sunt utraeque Spinozianae definitiones, Tristitiae & Humilitatis.” 42 This formulation relies on Susan James, “Freedom, Slavery, and the Passions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s “Ethics,” ed. Olli Koistinen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 233. 43 For Spinoza’s notoriously feeble explanation of suicide, see IVP20S. 44 Although, strictly speaking, it is impossible to think too little of oneself, “if we attend to those things which depend only on opinion,” we will be forced to acknowledge that social dynamics can generate unwarranted underestimation, and the resulting aVect, despondency (abjectio), is the opposite of pride (DefAV XXVIIIE). (Spinoza introduces the despondency-pride antithesis as a substitute for the customary humility-pride antithesis, which he rejects.) “Despondency is thinking less highly of oneself than is just, out of sadness” (DefAV XXIX). In Spinoza’s catalog, despondency is an intensification of humility, fostered by dynamics of social competition. “It can happen that, while someone sad considers his weakness,” he mistakenly imagines that he is more forlorn than he actually is (DefAV XXVIIIE). Overcome by sadness, the despondent mistakenly imagine that peers disdain them, or they misjudge their future potential, or, inhibited by shame, they decline to attempt feats that peers have accomplished. 45 For a counterargument that discerns “a possibility for self-destruction” within the Spinozist subject, see Judith Butler, “The Desire to Live: Spinoza’s Ethics under Pressure,” in Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850, ed. Victoria A. Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 111–30. 46 Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 4. For the project of enumerating the passions in seventeenth-century philosophy, see also Carole Talon-Hugon, Descartes Ou Les Passions Rêvées Par La Raison: Essai Sur La Théorie Des Passions De Descartes Et De Quelques-Uns De Ses Contemporains (Paris: Vrin, 2002). For philosophical problems posed by Spinoza’s catalog of the aVects, see Michael LebuVe, “The Anatomy of the Passions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s “Ethics,” ed. Olli Koistinen, 188–222 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 47 See Stephen H. Voss, “How Spinoza Enumerated the AVects,” Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 63, no. 2 (1981): 167–79; and “On the Authority of the Passiones Animae,” Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 75, no. 2 (1993): 160–78. For the relationship between Spinoza and Descartes, see also Wolfson, Philosophy of Spinoza, 2:160– 78; and Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza’s “Ethics” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 79. 48 Like Lamy, Christoph Wittich (1625–87) penned Anti-Spinoza (1690) to vindicate Descartes; unlike the Catholic Lamy, Wittich espoused a liberal Cocceian theology that put him at odds with orthodox Dutch Calvinists. For Wittich’s biography, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 25–29; and Massimiliano Savini, “Notes Au Sujet De La Publication De l’Anti-Spinoza De Christoph Wittich,” Nouvelles De La Republique Des Lettres, no. 2 (2000): 79–96. Rumors of Wittich’s closet Spinozism are debunked in H. J. Siebrand, Spinoza and the Netherlanders: An Inquiry into the Early Reception of His Philosophy of Religion (Assen, NL: Van Gorcum, 1988), 95–119. 49 Christoph Wittich, Anti-Spinoza Sive Examen Ethices Benedicti De Spinoza Et ComNotes to Pages 79–81 | 189

mentarius De Deo Et Ejus Attributis (Amsterdam, 1690), 213: “manca sit & mutila, quod facile apparebit, si quis conferre voluerit ea, quae habet des Cartes art. 55.” The article number appears to be a typographical error; Descartes defines virtuous humility in article 155, not article 55. 50 In the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, an early Dutch text that is of scholarly interest largely as an “immature,” nongeometric precursor to the Ethics, Spinoza follows Descartes and admits virtuous and vicious forms of humility. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza contends that humility (nederigheid) is legitimate when it expresses accurate assessment of the self ’s limitations. Benedictus de Spinoza, The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. and ed. Edwin M. Curley, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 111: “Humility exists when someone knows his own imperfection, without regard to [others’] disdain of him; it does not extend to anything outside the humble man.” If “true humility” involves accurate assessment of one’s limitations, its illegitimate counterpart, which Spinoza calls “selfdepreciation” (strafbare nederigheid; thought to be a translation of abjectio), involves sincere self-underestimation, or the erroneous belief that one is more limited than one actually is. See Spinoza, Collected Works: “Self-depreciation exists when someone attributes to himself an imperfection that does not belong to him.” Numerous diYculties surround the Short Treatise’s manuscript tradition, and scholars have long debated whether Spinoza wrote the original in Latin or Dutch. (For the textual issues, see Spinoza, Collected Works, 1:46–53; and Abraham Wolf, introduction to Spinoza’s “Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing,” by Benedictus de Spinoza, trans. and ed. Abraham Wolf, ciii–cxxviii [London: A. and C. Black, 1910].) Nevertheless, scholars have been struck by the fact that, in this early work, Spinoza oVers a favorable evaluation of humility seemingly at odds with his mature position in the Ethics. Indeed, Spinoza’s position on humility has led scholars to posit a Christian influence on the Short Treatise. See Charles Appuhn, Spinoza (Paris: A. Delpeuch, 1927), 23–25; and Wolf, introduction to Spinoza’s “Short Treatise,” cxxvii. If Spinoza’s evaluation of humility changes in the Ethics, his position on acknowledgment of finitude does not. In both texts, Spinoza contends that having an accurate assessment of one’s power, or the lack thereof, “is the chief means of attaining our perfection. For if we know our power and perfection accurately, we thereby see clearly what we must do to attain our good end. And again, if we know our defect and lack of power, we see what we must avoid.” Spinoza, Collected Works, 1:112. In other words, the substance of Spinoza’s position on self-evaluation does not change as he matures, although his terminology does; in his mature works, he declines to call proper self-estimation “humility.” Wolf has argued that, in the Ethics, “the good side of ‘true humility’ has been joined to ‘self-respect’ to constitute acquiescentia in se ipso, the contentment resulting from a just estimate of one’s powers.” See “Commentary,” in Spinoza’s “Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing,” trans. and ed. Abraham Wolf (London: A. and C. Black, 1910), 212. My argument echoes Wolf ’s. 51 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert StoothoV, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), art. 161. 52 Matthew L. Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, 190 | Notes to Page 81

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and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 45, 48. For generosity in Descartes, see Lloyd, Part of Nature, 82; Victoria A. Kahn, “Happy Tears: Baroque Politics in Descartes’s Passions De l’Âme,” in Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850, ed. Victoria A. Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli, 93–110 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 152–56. See also Susan James, “Reason, the Passions, and the Good Life,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1369. Descartes, Passions of the Soul, art. 153. Ibid., art. 153. In art. 161, however, Descartes identifies lineage as a source of generosity. Ibid., art. 155. Ibid. See also art. 205, where “modesty” and “humility” are used as synonyms, and equated with shame. Ibid., art. 152. Ibid.: “il nous rend en quelque façon semblables à Dieu, en nous faisant maistres de nous mesmes.” Ibid., art. 159. While Spinoza follows Descartes and catalogs two distinct aVects, humility and despondency (abjectio)—or “thinking less highly of oneself than is just, out of sadness”—he rejects Descartes’s taxonomy. In Spinoza’s catalog, the diVerence between despondency and humility is a diVerence of degree (“despondency is born of humility”) rather than a diVerence between virtue and vice (DefAV XXVIIIE). For the counterargument that, “for all of Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian flourishes, his views on the will are much closer to those of Descartes than is often supposed,” see John Cottingham, “The Intellect, the Will, and the Passions: Spinoza’s Critique of Descartes,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26, no. 2 (April 1998): 239–57. For anthropomorphism (or theological narcissism) as a fundamental cognitive structure, see letter 56 in Benedictus de Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 277: “I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would likewise say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that God’s nature is eminently circular. In this way each would ascribe to God its own attributes, assuming itself to be like God and regarding everything else as ill-formed.” Melamed, “Spinoza’s Anti-humanism,” 150. Newman, “Humility and Self-Realization,” 277. Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, 86. Ibid., see 86–87: “The premise of the politics of renaturalization is that self-deification breeds self-contempt.” Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, ed. Henry S. Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 572. Poiret, Cogitationes, 594: “Falsius est, Humilitatem esse Tristitiam ex eo ortam quod homo suam contempletur impotentiam: cum verius sit Laetitia ex eo orta, quod homo, lumine & gratia divina, contempletur se a se ipso quidem absolutissime, ad ultimos usque recessus, nihil esse & nihil posse; sed Deum ex benevola potentia esse & operari in ipso omnia, modo ipse per absurdam potentiae propriae fictionem Deo non resistat.” Notes to Pages 81–84 | 191

68 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 273: “Negamus inde sequi hanc Propositionem, quam proposuit sibi demonstrandam.” 69 It is unpersuasive to gloss Spinoza’s reclassification of humility as a critique of “popular religion,” as Newman does. See Newman, “Humility and Self-Realization,” 277. Granted, Spinoza traces humility’s lineage to the prophetic tradition, and he complains that, by inflating humility’s value, the prophets have opened the door to hypocrisy and corruption. See IVAppXXII: “In despondency, there is a false appearance of morality and religion.” In this passage, however, Spinoza accords humility value as a support of popular religion. Indeed, it is precisely in popular—i.e., political— religion that humility has a place. Given mass irrationality, “popular religion” can establish political conditions for the eventual flourishing of “true religion,” in which humility has no place. 70 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 275: “mederi quodammodo vult dictis, eaque emollire conatur.” 71 Spinoza, Theological, 3. 72 See also Spinoza, Theological, 1: Subjects “wavering between the emotions of hope and fear” are extremely fickle—they may obey their rulers, but they are just as likely to transfer their loyalties to upstarts bent on sedition. See also Spinoza, Ethics, IVP47. 73 Spinoza, Theological, 64. 74 See also Spinoza, Ethics, IVP63S. 75 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 275: “Sed Prophetae non tantum communi utilitati voluerunt consulere, sed quia judicarunt, nullum esse hominem, cum omnes deviaverint a viis Dei, quin Humilitas & Poenitentia illi sit summopere necessaria, commendarunt Tristitiam secundum Deum, tanquam originem conversionis cordis ad Deum.” 76 Ibid.: “Quod si verum est, quod subjungit Spinoza: Et revera, qui hisce aVectibus sunt obnoxii, multo facilius, quam alii duci possunt, ut liberi sint, & beatorum vita fruantur; necessarii ergo sunt illi, & multo magis, si absque illis fieri nequeat, ut aliquis ex ductu Spiritus Sancti vivat, quod omnino requiritur ab iis, qui meliorem post hanc exspectant vitam & anhelant.” (Italics are a quotation from the Ethics. In my translation of Wittich’s Latin, I have inserted Curley’s translation of the cited passage from Spinoza.) 77 Spinoza, Theological, 176–77; and Spinoza, Ethics, IVP37S2. 78 See Spinoza, Ethics, VP3. 79 Warren Montag complains that IVP54S betrays Spinoza’s laudable democratic commitments. Warren Montag, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999), 79–80: “Spinoza has come perilously close to oVering a Platonic theory of ‘noble fictions’ to be repeated to the many to secure their obedience: the masses must be taught that weakness is good and power bad, above all they must be made to live in fear in order themselves not to be a cause of fear.” In his more characteristic moods, Montag asserts, Spinoza wants the multitude to remain fearsome as a check to state power. For the view that humility is a passion appropriate to theocracy, see Alexandre Matheron, Individu Et Communauté Chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988), 435, 451. 80 Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 273: “Hanc Propositionem & falsam & perniciosam plane censeo. Falsam dico, quia ratio jubet, ut homo semetipsum contempletur, qualis est, adeoque ut, si imperfectionem & impotentiam in se deprehendat, eam libens agnoscat. 192 | Notes to Pages 84–89

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Perniciosa quoque est, quod planam viam sternat ad superbiam, quae multorum malorum est origo.” In a similar vein, contemporary critics contend that, as an empirical matter, Spinoza says that we always do dwell on our strengths and that, as an ethical matter, we always should dwell on our strengths. See Wolf, “Commentary,” in Spinoza’s “Short Treatise,” 212. See also Newman, “Humility and Self-Realization,” 277. For a more nuanced account, see Bernard Rousset, “Eléments Et Hypothèses Pour Une Analyse Des Rédactions Successives De Ethique IV,” Cahiers Spinoza, no. 5 (1984–85): 143–44. For the definition of finitude, see Spinoza, Ethics, ID2: “That thing is said to be finite in its own kind that can be limited by another of its own nature.” Feuer cannot fathom the joy that attends rational aYrmation of human finitude. Feuer laments Spinoza’s failure to fully incarnate the liberal positions that he purportedly anticipates. According to Feuer, Spinoza’s political thought anticipates the liberalism of the French and American Revolutions, which dignify self-assertion. However, Spinoza’s metaphysical determinism humiliates man; instead of assuming his full dignity as an autonomous individual, Spinoza abases himself before God and necessity. See Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, 242: “Spinoza had forgotten the clear courage of the free man: ‘Humility is not a virtue, that is to say, it does not spring from reason.’” Feuer insists that “the thought of our finitude then must pain and torment us,” but this resentment of finitude is the antithesis of the freedom that Spinoza extols. Poiret, Cogitationes, 594–95: “Bene, quid ergo tibi vis? talis potentiae humanae consideratio, est potentiae Entis potentioris & impotentiae hominis propriae consideratio, eaque ex veritate, non autem ex ignorantia vel non intellectione oritur; cur igitur non concludis humilitatem non esse imaginariam tuam Tristitiam, sed illam ex ratione sive ex intellectione oriri? . . . Quod enim majus delirium, quam instantia ostendisse contemplationem impotentiae nostrae posse ex intellectione vera oriri: & nihilominus, sine ulla rationis ullius allegatione concludere, eam non esse virtutem, quia ex ratione sive ex intellectione non oritur?” Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method, 127. For Spinoza as an unequivocal enthusiast for self-esteem, see also Feuer, Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, 204; and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life, 148–49, 178, 201. By contrast, Steven Nadler appreciates that acquiescentia is both an action and a passion. See Steven M. Nadler, Spinoza’s “Ethics”: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 233–34. For a more extensive and sophisticated analysis of acquiescentia that has influenced my own, see Laurent Bove, La Stratégie du Conatus: AYrmation et Résistance Chez Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1996), 77–125. On this point, I follow Giuseppina Totaro, “‘Acquiescentia’ Dans La Cinquième Partie De l’Ethique De Spinoza,” Revue Philosophique De La France Et De l’Etranger 119, no. 1 (1994): 65–79. Spinoza, Collected Works, 1:655. Margaret Wilson proposes “self-contentment” as a translation. See “Spinoza’s Theory of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 127. Harry Frankfurt proposes a literal translation. See Harry G. Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right, ed. Debra Satz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, Notes to Pages 89–92 | 193

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2006), 17: “There is something to be said for a bluntly literal construction of his Latin. That would have Spinoza mean that the highest good consists in acquiescence to oneself—that is, in acquiescence to being the person that one is, perhaps not enthusiastically but nonetheless with a willing acceptance of the motives and dispositions by which one is moved in what one does.” In the “Definition of the AVects,” Spinoza suggests that acquiescentia’s primary meaning is the meaning it bears when opposed to humility. At DefAV XXV, Spinoza recurs to the definition introduced in the humility / acquiescentia opposition: “Acquiescentia in se ipso is a joy born of the fact that a man considers himself and his own power of acting.” In the passage cited, and in all subsequent citations from the Ethics where the Latin term “acquiescentia” appears, I have altered Curley’s translation, replacing the English term “self-esteem” with Spinoza’s Latin original. I have chosen to replace Curley’s translation of the term “acquiescentia” with Spinoza’s original Latin to highlight the diYculties, discussed above, surrounding the term’s translation. Poiret, Cogitationes, 161: “fundamentum & complementum omnis virtutis & boni, quam tanquam summum brabeum & praemium”; “vitium, caput & radix omnium, verusque Atheismus.” Ibid.: “Nam essentia Dei siquidem se ipsam possideat, sive se noscat & cogitet, se ipsa gaudeat, sibique ipsi suYciens sit; ergo acquiescet sibi, ergo contenta est se ipsa, ergo se ipsam pro objecto & scopo suae cognitionis & acquiescentiae habet, estque adeo scopus & finis sui ipsius, quod de nullis rebus productis dici posset.” Ibid., 162: “Divinum sustulit finem, ut humanum & diabolicum supponeret.” Ibid.: “Acquiescentia vere sit Laetitia orta ex eo quod homo suum nihil suamque impotentiam & nihilitatem intuens, Dei placitum liberum & potens, a quo ipse constituitur, subsistit, omnia habet & potest, contemplatur.” See also Poiret, Cogitationes, 386: “Atque huic acquiescere, hoc est, contentum esse hanc praerogativum a Deo accepisse; plura externa & creata non optare; sed tantum conari ut hujus bono usu, (a quo vel ad quem nos cogere non pendet ab ullo,) id in nobis juxta voluntatem Dei sequatur quod ei placuit, & hoc etiam esse contentum.” Descartes, Passions of the Soul, art. 63, 190. Ibid., art. 190. In other words, Descartes is not an unqualified enthusiast for selfesteem. According to Charles Taylor, “the great emphasis he places on the satisfactions of self-esteem in describing the rewards of the good life” reveals that “Descartes’ ethical theory is already moving in [the] orbit” of the “modern theme of the dignity of the human person.” When Taylor credits Descartes with a “great shift” in conceptions of selfhood, he overlooks Descartes’s ambivalence about self-satisfaction. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 152. See also Lloyd, Part of Nature, 101–3, 153, 159. Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 228: “Acquiescentiam in semetipso fundat super virtute & recte factis.” See also Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 193: “Acquiescentia in se ipso melius quoque ex Cart. art. 190. intelligitur, quam ex hoc Auctore. Acquiescentia enim secundum Cartesium est species Laetitiae, quam quis concipit ex eo, quod constanter virtuti institerit, ex qua facile natura poeniteniae potest intelligi.” Wittich, Anti-Spinoza, 228: “At tunc in ea reprehendi posset, quod sic Acquiescentia in semetipso non distinguatur a Superbia, quodque tam illi qui recte, quam qui male fecerunt, possint laetari in sua agendi potentia.”

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97 This proposition is confusing because Spinoza defines both gloria and acquiescentia in se ipso as “joy, accompanied by the idea of an internal cause.” In DefAV XXX, Spinoza’s definition of gloria better captures the aVect’s reliance on social approbation. Gloria is “a joy accompanied by the idea of some action of ours which we imagine others praise.” Curley surveys this proposition’s vexed manuscript history in Spinoza, Collected Works, 1:511. 98 See Lloyd, Part of Nature, 158–59: “Cartesian minds rest their self-esteem on” the transcendence of nature “and the prospects of control which go with it.” 99 For the claim that the illusion of freedom exacerbates human pride, see Bove, La Stratégie du Conatus, 91–92. 100 Here I follow Bove, La Stratégie du Conatus, 86–90. 101 In VP10, Spinoza explains that one can remedy one’s passions by “ordering and connecting the aVections of the body according to the order of the intellect.” In the scholium, Spinoza recommends that one order one’s thoughts by focusing on the constructive potential of the aVect to be moderated, rather than its potential for abuse, so that one is “determined to acting through an aVect of joy.” “For example, if someone sees that he pursues esteem [ gloriam] too much, he should think of its correct use, the end for which it ought to be pursued, and the means by which it can be acquired, not of its misuse and emptiness, and men’s inconstancy, or other things of this kind, which only someone sick of mind thinks of ” (VP10S). As a critic of pride, it is not clear that Spinoza applies his own maxim consistently. 102 See also Spinoza, Ethics, VP10, where “mutual friendship and common society” are linked to a form of acquiescentia animi: “the highest acquiescentia of mind [animi acquiescentia] stems from the right principle of living.” 103 My argument here is indebted to Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, esp. chap. 4, “Desire for Recognition? Butler, Hegel, and Spinoza.” 104 On this point, see Daniel Garber, “Dr. Fischelson’s Dilemma: Spinoza on Freedom and Sociability,” in Spinoza on Reason and the “Free Man”: Ethica IV: Papers Presented at the Fourth Jerusalem Conference, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel and Gideon Segal, vol. 4, 183–208 (New York: Little Room Press, 2004). 105 Here, I follow Lloyd, Part of Nature, 159: “Spinozistic minds rest their self-esteem on knowing their status as ideas of bodies of a suYciently complex structure to allow the formation of the common notions of reason. They esteem themselves for the capacity this brings to understand their interdependence with other things and to strengthen their powers by collaboration with the minds of similarly structured bodies. . . . It is a strength that comes from the understanding of interconnections, from the understanding of necessities—not from thinking ourselves exempt from them. We remain part of nature.” 106 I will not enter contentious critical debates surrounding what the third kind of knowledge is, and how it facilitates blessedness and the mind’s eternity, confining my remarks to the implications of its association with acquiescentia for the argument presented thus far. For a systematic and comprehensive account of the relationship between acquiescentia in se ipso, acquiescentia animi, and the mind’s eternity, on which my own argument relies, see Donald Rutherford, “Salvation as a State of Mind: The Place of Acquiescentia in Spinoza’s Ethics,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 Notes to Pages 95–102 | 195

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(October 1999): 447–73. For the argument that Spinoza’s account of salvation is both coherent and plausible, see Michael LebuVe, “Spinoza’s Summum Bonum,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 86, no. 2 (June 2005): 243–66. Although see the Theologico-Political Treatise, chapter 15, for the (scriptural) argument that salvation is available to all through obedience alone. For an attempt to fathom the significance of this claim within Spinoza’s system, see Alexandre Matheron, Le Christ Et Le Salut Des Ignorants Chez Spinoza (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971). Does possession of the third kind of knowledge elevate the philosopher to a privileged role in society? Without denying that Spinoza reserves acquiescentia animi for the few (and bracketing the question of whether anyone has ever achieved the third kind of knowledge), I would nevertheless argue that upholding this perfectionist ideal is consistent with egalitarian politics. Extolling acquiescentia animi is consistent with egalitarian politics, for the desire to know things by the third kind of knowledge can only arise from the second kind of knowledge, which inspires us to form bonds of friendship (VP28). If, as Spinoza contends, a man who lives from the guidance of reason “hates no one, is angry with no one, envies no one, is indignant with no one, scorns no one, and is not at all proud [minimeque superbiat],” adopting a measured self-estimate is a precondition for knowing, and loving, God (IVP73S). Moreover, achieving the third kind of knowledge does not change the substance of morality. Invoking the “good which follows from mutual friendship and common society,” Spinoza contends that “the highest satisfaction of mind [animi acquiescentia] stems from the right principle of living (by IVP52)” (VP10S). If possession of the third kind of knowledge does not alter or supplant the dictates of reason, it does prove significantly more powerful than the second kind of knowledge, with the result that its possessor is better able to pursue friendship (VP20S, VP36S). On this reading, there is nothing especially “political” about the third kind of knowledge; this knowledge concerns the relationship between God and man rather than relations between men. For an alternative reading, which contends that the third kind of knowledge is eminently political, see Hasana Sharp, “Feeling Justice: The Reorientation of Possessive Desire in Spinoza,” International Studies in Philosophy 37, no. 2 (2005): 113–30; and Filippo Del Lucchese, “Democracy, Multitudo and the Third Kind of Knowledge in the Works of Spinoza,” European Journal of Political Theory 8, no. 3 (July 2009): 339–63. See also Spinoza, Ethics, IVAppIV and VP36S. Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, 203. Jonathan I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 235. Ibid., 241. For arguments that credit Spinoza with the secularization of Judaism, see Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1, chap. 7; and Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity, xiii. In certain respects, Israel’s attribution of the French Revolution’s paternity to Spinoza is an update of Feuer’s argument in Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism. Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 220. Admittedly, Israel neither equates Enlighten-

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ment with atheism nor denies the role that Protestants played in its propagation. See Israel, Revolution of the Mind, 20–24. Israel, Revolution of the Mind, xiv. For a critique of Israel’s “package logic,” see Samuel Moyn, “Mind the Enlightenment,” Nation, May 12, 2010. For an even more explicit contemporary echo of the anti-Spinoza polemic, from a very diVerent ideological vantage point than Israel’s, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 77. Spinoza’s “is a philosophy that renewed the splendors of revolutionary humanism, putting humanity and nature in the position of God, transforming the world into a territory of practice, and aYrming the democracy of the multitude as the absolute form of politics.” For Spinoza’s relationship to Augustinianism, see Milad Doueihi, Augustine and Spinoza (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Nor is it to imply, with Harry Wolfson, that Spinoza’s Ethics is a pastiche drawn from earlier philosophical sources. Israel, Revolution of the Mind, 18.

c ha pt e r 4 : s el f- l o ve: r o u s s eau o n t h e a l lure, a n d t he e lu s i ve ness , o f d i vi ne sel f- su ff ic ien c y 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 553, 562. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 445, hereafter Emile, or E. 3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), 89; see also 31, 101. 4 For one example, see Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont’s condemnation of Emile, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes de J. J. Rousseau, Avec des Notes Historiques, vol. 2 (Paris: Furne, 1835), 747: “Saint Paul a prédit, M.T.C.F., qu’il viendroit des jours périlleux où il y auroit des gens amateurs d’eux-mêmes, fiers, superbes, blasphémateurs, impies, calomniateurs, enflés d’orgeuil, amateurs des voluptés plutôt que de Dieu; des hommes d’un esprit corrumpu, et pervertis dans la foi. Et dans quels temps malhereux cette prediction s’est-elle accomplie plus à la lettre que dans les nôtres!” 5 See Rousseau, Œuvres Complètes, 2:747: “Tantôt, aVectant un air de profondeur et de sublimité dans ses vues, elle feint de remonter aux premiers principes de nos connoissances, et pretend s’en autoriser pour secouer un joug qui, selon elle, déshonore l’humanité, la Divinité même.” 6 To be clear, I refer to humans in the pristine state of nature as “subhuman” to note a parallel with the other group of finite beings to whom Rousseau ascribes selfsuYciency—authority figures like Emile’s tutor, the lawgiver, and Wolmar—whom I dub “superhumans.” I do not mean to invoke the literature on Rousseau’s relationship to early modern racial, anthropological, and zoological discourses. See Robert Wokler, “Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited,” Daedalus 107, no. 3 (Summer 1978): 107–34. In my idiom, subhumans are not members of “inferior races,” nor are they hominids from an earlier stage of Notes to Pages 103–7 | 197

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the species’ evolution. Subhumans are finite human beings who, before dynamics of perfectibility unfold, lack full self-consciousness and, as a result, experience full empowerment. As readers will observe, I devote scant attention to The Social Contract in this chapter. (Throughout the chapter, citations of this work refer to “The Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]; hereafter Social Contract, or SC.) I choose not to examine that text at length, because it does not directly address my central concern: finitude and its constraints. One could object that Rousseau addresses this question in The Social Contract, albeit indirectly. Establishing the reciprocal relationship between autonomy and dependence is undeniably a central project of Rousseau’s in The Social Contract. See Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 216: “Rational authority, for Rousseau, is possible only intersubjectively—that is, as a network of relations of recognition among individual subjects, in which the sovereignty of each and the subjection of each to the whole are simultaneously acknowledged.” Readers who note Rousseau’s reconciliation of sovereignty with subjection may conclude that he is more sanguine about weakness than I suggest in this chapter. Admittedly, my argument does not fully capture Rousseau’s position in The Social Contract. In what follows, I do not purport to encompass all of Rousseau’s texts. Rousseau’s self-representation notwithstanding, I do not approach his oeuvre as a coherent “system.” Thus, I take a somewhat diVerent position on the “man / citizen” debate than Neuhouser. See Rousseau’s Theodicy, 21, 172. While I agree that Rousseau does not force us to choose between becoming a man and becoming a citizen, I read Emile’s citizenship as grudging or, more charitably, minimal. A citizen who heeds the tutor’s caution that “freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man” is not a citizen who places an absolute premium on public business, as The Social Contract demands (E 473; SC 113). The only dependence that Emile embraces is dependence on Sophie—that is, a heteronormative dependence that preserves the illusion of male strength. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), 146. Laurence D. Cooper, “Rousseau on Self-Love: What We’ve Learned, What We Might Have Learned,” Review of Politics 60, no. 4 (1998): 661–62. In Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life, Cooper concedes that Rousseau was not the first to defend self-love, but he identifies Rousseau’s predecessors as the architects of “classical moral philosophy” (i.e., pagans). Laurence D. Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 170n82. For a similar argument regarding Rousseau’s departure from “the orthodox Christian line,” see Lilla, Stillborn God, 126. For a more nuanced account of Rousseau’s relationship to Christian ethics, see Christopher Brooke, “Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 114. Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 10.

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11 The entry is attributed to M. L’Abbé Yvon (1714–91). For Yvon’s contributions to the Encyclopédie, see Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 130, 136. For Yvon’s biography, see Frank A. Kafker, The Encyclopedists as a Group: A Collective Biography of the Authors of the “Encyclopédie” (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996), 77, 103–4. Thanks to Graham Finlay for suggesting that I look at the Encyclopédie. 12 Nicolas Malebranche, “Lettre II à Fr. Lamy,” in Œuvres Complètes, ed. André Robinet, vol. 14 (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 85: “s’accomodent parfaitement avec ceux d’Abbadie, ou plûtôt avec ceux de tous les Philosophes & Théologiens, qui n’outrent point la Métaphysique.” For a brief summary of the querelle du pur amour, see Pierre Force, SelfInterest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 183–94; and John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), 255–97. 13 The words are Fénelon’s, cited in Charly J. Coleman, “The Value of Dispossession: Rethinking Discourses of Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century France,” Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2005): 312. 14 In the third volume of his ethical treatise, De la Conoissance de Soi-Meme (Paris: N. LeClerc, 1701; first published in 1697), Lamy hailed Malebranche as a proponent of pure love, citing passages from Malebranche’s works to counter the contention (which Lamy attributed to Abbadie) that “l’amour propre se transforme ouvertement en amour de Dieu” (479). Malebranche replied with the Traité de l’amour de Dieu (1697), in which he disavowed the doctrine of pure love. The polemic continued in the fifth volume of Lamy’s La Conoissance (1698), which attacked Malebranche, and in Malebranche’s reply, Trois lettres au R. P. Lamy (1698), which endorsed Abbadie’s position. Malebranche and Lamy exchanged further accusations, but a general ban on debating pur amour put an end to their polemic in 1700. For details of the Malebranche / Lamy exchange, see Nicolas Malebranche, Œuvres Complètes, vol. 14 (Paris: Vrin, 1963), v–xxxiii. 15 Anthony Levi, “Amour-propre: The Rise of an Ethical Concept,” Month 21, no. 5 (1959): 292. For the prehistory of the amour-propre / amour de soi distinction, see Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith, 64n47. For the history of amour-propre in the seventeenth century, see Anthony Levi, French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585 to 1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 225–33; Jean Lafond, “Avatars De l’ Humanisme Chrétien (1590–1710): Amour De Soi Et Amour-propre,” in Politiques De l’Intérêt, ed. Christian Lazzeri and Dominique Reynié (Paris: Annales Littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté, 1998), 261–76; Nannerl O. Keohane, “‘The Masterpiece of Policy in Our Century’: Rousseau on the Morality of the Enlightenment,” Political Theory 6, no. 4 (November 1978): 457–84; Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the “First Discourse” to the “Social Contract,” 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 66–67; and Hans-Jürgen Fuchs, Entfremdung Und Narzissmus: Semantische Untersuchungen Zur Geschichte Der “Selbstbezogenheit” Als Vorgeschichte Von Französisch “Amour Propre” (Stuttgart, DE: Metzler, 1977). 16 Encyclopédie Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts Et Des Métiers, facsimile of the first edition of 1751–1780, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, DE: Friedrich Framman Verlag, 1966), 371: “plusieurs Philosophes.” Notes to Pages 109–10 | 199

17 Nicolas Malebranche, “Lettre I à Fr. Lamy,” in Œuvres Complètes, ed. André Robinet, vol. 14 (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 42: “Il me semble que j’ai lû tout cela dans Saint Augustin.” For the relationship between Augustinian and Epicurean doctrines of self-interest, see Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith, 49, 51, 57, 190–91. 18 For Abbadie’s philosophy, see Isaac Nakhimovsky, “The Enlightened Epicureanism of Jacques Abbadie: L’Art De Se Connoître Soi-même and the Morality of Self-Interest,” History of European Ideas 29, no. 1 (2003): 1–14; and Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961), lectures 4–5. For Abbadie’s contribution to an optimistic turn within seventeenth-century Calvinism, see Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 13, 14, 17; Ruth Whelan, “From Christian Apologetics to Enlightened Deism: The Case of Jacques Abbadie (1656–1727),” Modern Language Review 87, no. 1 (January 1992): 32–40; and “Between Two Worlds: The Political Theory of Jacques Abbadie,” LIAS 14, no. 2 (1987): 143–56. 19 Jacques Abbadie, The Art of Knowing One-self; or, An Enquiry into the Sources of Morality in Two Parts (Oxford, 1698), 44–45. 20 Ibid., 44. 21 Ibid., 125. 22 Ibid., 234. See also 16, 66. 23 Encyclopédie, 1:371: “les passions qui viennent de l’amour de nous-mêmes nous donnent aux choses, l’amour-propre veut que les choses se donnent à nous, & se fait le centre de tout.” 24 See Abbadie, Art of Knowing One-self, 133–34: “I also grant, That had Man been made to be a Rival of the Deity, he would not be oblig’d to love himself without Measure; because then Self-love would stand in competition, and interfere with the Love of God: But Man naturally loves himself, with so great Vehemency, meerly that he may be capable of loving God. The unmeasurable Measure of Self-love, and these kind of infinite Desires, are the only links that tye, and unite him to God.” 25 Encyclopédie, 1:372: “s’aimer soi-même comme il faut” is synonymous with “aimer Dieu.” “Aussi est-ce un grand égarement d’opposer l’amour de nous-mêmes à l’amour divin, quand celui-là est bien reglé: car qu’est-ce que s’aimer soi-même comme il faut? C’est aimer Dieu; & qu’est-ce qu’aimer Dieu? C’est aimer soi-même comme il faut. L’amour de Dieu est le bon sens de l’amour de nous-mêmes; c’en est l’esprit & la perfection. Quand l’amour de nous-mêmes se tourne vers d’autres objets, il ne mérite pas d’être appellé amour; il est plus dangereux que la haine la plus cruelle: mais quand l’amour de nous-mêmes se tourne vers Dieu, il se confond avec l’amour divin.” 26 Thanks to Christopher Brooke for identifying the source from which Yvon plagiarized. 27 Encyclopédie, 1:374: “on ne peut cesser de s’aimer.” 28 Ibid.: “secouru par la grace.” 29 Ibid.: “qui consiste principalement dans une parfaite conformité de notre volonté avec l’ordre.” 30 Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics, trans. Craig Walton (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993), 49. For the meaning of “order,” see also Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth, trans. and ed. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 618: “If it is true, then, that God, who is the universal Being, contains all beings within Himself in an intel200 | Notes to Pages 110–11

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ligible fashion, and that all these intelligible beings that have a necessary existence in God are not in every sense equally perfect, it is clear that there will be a necessary and immutable order among them, and that just as there are necessary and eternal truths because there are relations of magnitude among intelligible beings, there must also be a necessary and immutable order because of the relations of perfection among these same beings. An immutable order has it, then, that minds are more noble than bodies, as it is a necessary truth that twice two is four, or that twice two is not five.” Encyclopédie, 1:374: “l’ordre est immuable & nécessaire.” Ibid.: “se comparer à l’ordre pour s’humilier & se mépriser.” Ibid.: “sacrifier ses plaisirs présens aux plaisirs futurs, se rendre malhereux pour un tems, afin d’être heureux pendant l’éternité.” Steven M. Nadler, “Malebranche on Causation,” in The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven M. Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115. Malebranche, Search after Truth, 448. Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics, 115. Ibid., 221. Nicolas Malebranche, Christian Conferences Demonstrating the Truth of the Christian Religion and Morality, to Which Is Added His Meditations on Humility and Repentance (London, 1695), 374. For the importance of grace in Malebranche’s philosophy, see also Patrick Riley, “Malebranche’s Moral Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 223; and Malebranche, Search after Truth, 287. Malebranche, Christian Conferences, 379. Moreover, Malebranche dismisses pretensions to independence, or the “self-subsistence of our being,” as sinful selfdeification—“in a sense we wish to be like gods.” Malebranche, Search after Truth, 288; see also 180. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men” or “Second Discourse,” in The “Discourses” and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 218, hereafter Second Discourse, or SD. Here, I refer to Patrick Riley’s notion of secularization, in The General Will before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine into the Civic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). For Riley, secularizing figures like Montesquieu and Rousseau “‘bracket’ God wholly out of ” arguments where God once figured, translating theological concepts into a social and political idiom. Ibid., 52; see also 145. Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy, 1. For amour-propre as “the ultimate cause of all the trouble,” see also John Charvet, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 26, 59. Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy, 2. On canonical interpretations, amour-propre poses intractable problems, problems that can only be solved through extirpation. For this view, see Charvet, Social Problem, 86. On revisionist accounts, by contrast, amour-propre is a neutral passion that assumes “inflamed” and benign forms. As both an impediment to and condition of possibility for social relations, amour-propre cannot, and should not, be extirpated; rather, Notes to Pages 111–14 | 201

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it must be cultivated toward rational agency and freedom. For the argument that Rousseau ascribes both positive and negative valence to amour-propre, see N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005), 71–72, 105–6; Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 116, 120–36; Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 100–104; Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy; and L. D. Cooper, Rousseau, 114. See also Niko Kolodny, “The Explanation of Amour-Propre,” Philosophical Review 119, no. 2 (April 2010): 165–200. Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy, 1–2. Ibid., 1. For pride versus vanity, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, “ ‘Pride’ in Eighteenth-Century Thought,” in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), 62– 63: In the eighteenth century, “two diVerent—though not unrelated— conceptions, or rather groups of conceptions, were expressed by the word” “pride.” On the one hand, “pride” signified the passion that inspires individual craving for esteem, admiration, and applause. Yet eighteenth-century theorists were also preoccupied with “the generic pride of man as such,” or an inflated sense of the species’s worth. I contend that Rousseau grapples with pride in both senses of the word. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes,” in The “Discourses” and Other Early Political Writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 109. Of course, the desire to transcend human nature is not the only meaning that “pride” bears in Rousseau’s texts. Neuhouser examines some of pride’s other, recognition-related, meanings at length. See, for example, Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy, 104–16. An avid reader of Fénelon, Julie nevertheless professes a theology that seems closer to that of Abbadie in its acceptance of interested love. See Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Heloise, 483–84. Although Julie dismisses quietism as a guise for moralism, her increasing religious fervor alarms her correspondents, who warn that even the most self-interested devotion risks devolving into quietism. While Claire and Saint-Preux consider “Christian humility”—“this dangerous virtue”—the province of Port-Royal and the cloister, Julie defends a form of humility that evinces confidence in human moral capacities without denying the need for grace. See Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Heloise, 208, 410, 549, 552–53. Rousseau’s personal theology diverges from Julie’s on many points. Yet her convictions warrant respect, he implies, because they inspire her to consummate virtue. (For an attempt to discern Rousseau’s personal theology, see Victor Gourevitch, “Rousseau on Providence,” Review of Metaphysics 53, no. 3 [March 2000]: 565–611.) For one example, see Rousseau, Emile, 296. After embarking on his critique of revealed religion, the Savoyard vicar states, “I did not begin with all these reflections. I was carried along by the prejudices of education and by that dangerous amour-propre which always wants to carry man above his sphere, and, unable to raise my feeble conceptions up to the great Being, I made an eVort to lower Him down to my level.” See Maurizio Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the “Well-Ordered Society,” trans. Derek Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 62: “The only lesson that man should derive from contemplating his rank in the universe is the need for hu-

202 | Notes to Pages 114–15

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53 54 55 56 57

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mility. Rousseau accepts the idea of the pre-eminence of the human species but does not find that suYcient justification for man being proud of himself as a species.” This interpretation finds support at Rousseau, Emile, 277–78. Yet, in the passage from Emile, Rousseau cautions that we are unlikely to learn the right lesson. Although the Savoyard vicar rests content with human sovereignty, he concedes that many individuals are proud, craving superhuman status. Paradoxically, it is hard for humans to accept their divinely ordained place, precisely because it is the best place—a place that makes passion, self-consciousness, and their attendant challenges inevitable. To be sure, humility alone will not free us from weakness and dependence. Rousseau also outlines legal and institutional remedies for dependence. In Julie, for example, order finds concrete expression in the institutional arrangements at Clarens— arrangements that empower their inhabitants. Here, I follow Charvet, Social Problem, 9–10, 15. See Rousseau, Second Discourse, 42: “The only evils he fears are pain, and hunger.” See also Rousseau, Second Discourse, 142. See also Rousseau, Second Discourse, 135, 151. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Letter from J. J. Rousseau to M. De Voltaire,” in The “Discourses” and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 237. See J. Cohen, Rousseau, 121. Rousseau, “Letter to Voltaire,” 234. Ibid., 235. See also Rousseau, Second Discourse, 158–59. See Rousseau, Second Discourse, 167. See also Rousseau, Emile, 42. For debates about man and citizen, see Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy, 155–61, 171–73; and Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 13, 42, 91–92, 254. On this point, I follow Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy, 21–22. See also Rousseau, Emile, 281, 294: “Not to be contented with my condition is to want no longer to be a man, it is to want something other than what is, it is to want disorder and evil.” See also Rousseau, Emile, 87. See also Rousseau, Emile, 83. There is a fourth dimension of natural weakness operative in Emile: the weakness of women. Although all humans are weak by nature, “women are weaker” than men— and Rousseau credits nature with this power diVerential (E 449). On Rousseau’s account, sexual relations require an agent and a patient, and it is women’s lot to be “passive and weak” (E 358). By “an invariable law of nature,” however, women’s weakness proves to be a source of covert power (E 360). In sexual relations, “the stronger appears to be master but actually depends upon the weaker,” because women have the power to charm men (E 360). Through the practice of modesty, women elicit male advances without appearing to do so—in other words, a woman will “consent to let him be the stronger” (E 360). If male strength is founded upon female consent, however, it begins to appear less “natural”—as does female weakness. Throughout Notes to Pages 116–24 | 203

69 70 71 72 73 74

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his account of sexual relations, Rousseau blurs the line between the natural and the artificial. The diYculty of determining whether female weakness is natural or voluntary parallels the diYculty of distinguishing between relative and absolute weakness. See Elizabeth R. Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). See Rousseau, “Letter to Voltaire,” 240. See also Rousseau, Emile, 83, 161, 187, 208, 472, 473. See Rousseau, Emile, 239: “How is it they do not see that the weakness of which they complain is their own work.” See also Rousseau, Emile, 84. See Rousseau, Emile, 78: the progress of the child’s strength “makes complaint less necessary.” See Rousseau, Reveries, 101: “If I had been invisible and powerful like God, I should have been good and beneficent like him. It is strength and freedom which make really good men; weakness and slavery have never produced anything but evil-doers.” See also Rousseau, Emile, 282. Here, I take my notion of secularism from Talal Asad, who reconstructs “the secular viewpoint held by many,” which conceives pain, suVering, and passivity as impediments to human agency. On this definition of secular rationality, pain is always disabling, never empowering. Within a conventional secular frame, it is assumed “that the agent always seeks to overcome pain conceived as object and state of passivity.” Indeed, the (purportedly) hegemonic secular ontology conceives empowerment as “a metaphysical quality defining secular human agency, its objective as well as precondition.” Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79, 84, 79. Although Rousseau rejects progressive histories that move inexorably from weakness to strength, he often seems to share the secularist disdain for weakness. Like Asad’s stereotypical secularist, Rousseau tends to judge lack, insuYciency, and privation as painful, and he takes it as axiomatic that pain is a sensation from which we shrink. (For examples of Rousseau’s “secularist” distaste for pain, see E 80, 131, 443.) Yet, as we will see, stereotypical secularism is not the whole of Rousseau’s position. Although I share Asad’s desire to expand our notions of agency beyond “the secular viewpoint held by many,” I challenge the notion that this view is actually hegemonic within secularity. Determined to expose secularism’s conceits, Asad perpetuates a reductionist stereotype of secular agency. See Rousseau, “Letter to Voltaire,” 240. See Rousseau, Social Contract, 66. François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon, “De l’Humilité,” in Oeuvres, ed. Jacques Le Brun, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1983), 690: “ne consiste point, comme l’on s’imagine, à faire des actes extérieurs d’humilité, quoique cela soit bon, mais démeurer à sa place.” See also Fénelon, “De l’Humilité,” 691: “ils ne font que rester en leur place.” For an opposing claim regarding human happiness, see Rousseau, Reveries, 89. See Rousseau, Emile, 165, 68, 91, 224. Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy, 21. See also 156, 256–57.

204 | Notes to Pages 124–32

82 Shklar, Men and Citizens, 162. See also Riley, General Will, 243–45. 83 See also Rousseau, Emile, 97. 84 Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Heloise, 304–5. See also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse: Lettres De Deux Amants Habitants D’une Petite Ville Au Pied Des Alpes (Paris: Garnier, 1988), 474, 574. 85 See also Rousseau, Reveries, 103: “The man whose power sets him above humanity must himself be above all human weaknesses, or this excess of power will only serve to sink him lower than his fellows, and lower than he would himself have been had he remained their equal.” 86 For dispassion as a prerequisite for superhuman authority, see Rousseau, Social Contract, 68–69. 87 Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Heloise, 305–6. See also Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, 474. 88 Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Heloise, 363. See also Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, 532–33. 89 Admittedly, Wolmar professes sorrow upon Julie’s death. Unlike the other mourners, however, Wolmar is unable to cry. Wolmar remains eminently rational in his grief: “By assisting those whom Julie loved, I feel I honor her better than with tears.” Indeed, Wolmar’s “cold sorrow” irritates Julie’s cousin, who is demonstrative in her grief. See Rousseau, Julie; or, The New Heloise, 606, 578, 611. 90 Ibid., 384. See also Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, 598. 91 See Shklar, Men and Citizens, 136, 135: “The reason Wolmar does not believe in God is that he is God to all intents and purposes.” 92 Rousseau, Social Contract, 69. 93 The figure of the subhuman inspires a parallel resentment. See Rousseau, Second Discourse, 133: “You might perhaps wish to be able to go backward.” Here, Rousseau walks a fine line between social criticism and self-beratement.

conclusion: a modest tale about theoretical modesty 1 Even Spinoza, the most thoroughgoing critic of divine sovereignty and related anthropomorphisms, dabbles in the rhetoric of self-deification. In the Ethics, Spinoza approvingly cites the adage, which “is in almost everyone’s mouth,” that “man is a God to man” (IVP35S). (And, unlike Hobbes, he neglects to add that “Man is a wolf to Man.” See Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 3.) 2 Seth Ward, Vindiciæ Academiarum: Containing Some Briefe Animadversions upon Mr. Websters Book, Stiled, The Examination of Academies (Oxford, 1654), 51–52. 3 Accusations of vanity were merely one vehicle that Ward and Wallis used to put distance between their own experimental (and potentially controversial) philosophy and Hobbism. See Siegmund Probst, “Infinity and Creation: The Origin of the Controversy between Thomas Hobbes and the Savilian Professors Seth Ward and John Wallis,” British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 3 (1993): 271–79. For the authoritative account of the anti-Hobbes polemic, see Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962). Notes to Pages 135–42 | 205

4 John Wallis, Hobbius Heauton-Timorumenos; or, A Consideration of Mr. Hobbes His Dialogves in an Epistolary Discourse, Addressed, to the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esq (Oxford, 1662), 4, 3. 5 Ward, Vindiciæ Academiarum, 52. 6 Ibid., 58. 7 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 688. 8 Ward, Vindiciæ Academiarum, 58. For Hobbes’s rebuttal of these charges, see Julie E. Cooper, “Thomas Hobbes on the Political Theorist’s Vocation,” Historical Journal 50, no. 3 (2007): 519–47. Richard Tuck implicitly rebuts these charges when he argues that Hobbes cedes doctrinal control to the sovereign to deprive philosophers of public authority. See Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 49. On Tuck’s interpretation, making Leviathan the dominant public philosophy would actually diminish Hobbes’s public profile. 9 For Jelles’s role in the publication of the Ethics, see Giuseppina Totaro, introduction to Opera Posthuma: Amsterdam 1677; Riproduzione Fotografica Integrale, by Benedictus de Spinoza, ed. Giuseppina Totaro (Macerata, IT: Quodlibet, 2008); and F. Akkerman and H. G. Hubbeling, “The Preface to Spinoza’s Posthumous Works 1677 and Its Author Jarig Jelles (c. 1619 / 1620–1683),” LIAS 6 (1979): 103–73. The preface, which Jelles wrote in Dutch for the De nagelate schriften, was translated into Latin by Lodewijk Meyer. 10 Benedictus de Spinoza, Opera Posthuma: Quorum Series Post Praefationem Exhibetur (Amsterdam, 1677), 3–4: “Nomen Auctoris in libri fronte, & alibi literis duntaxat initialibus indicatum, non alia de causa, quam quia paulo ante obitum expresse petiit, ne Nomen suum Ethicae, cujus impressionem mandabat, praefigeretur; cur autem prohibuerit, nulla alia, ut quidem videtur, ratio est, quam quia noluit, ut Disciplina ex ipso haberet vocabulum.” Jelles provides textual support to demonstrate that the Opera Posthuma’s title page honors the philosophical convictions expressed therein. See Spinoza, Opera Posthuma, 4: “Dicit etenim in Appendice quartae parties Ethices capite vigesimo quinto, quod, qui alios consilio, aut re iuvare cupiunt, ut simul summo fruantur bono, minime studebunt, ut Disciplina ex ipsis habeat vocabulum; sed insuper in tertis Ethices parte AVectuum Definit. XLIV ubi quid sit ambitio explicat, eos, qui tale quid patrant, non obscure, ut Gloriae cupidos, accusat.” 11 Jean M. Lucas, The Oldest Biography of Spinoza, trans. and ed. Abraham Wolf (New York: Dial Press, 1927), 62. The Lucas biography was written in 1677–78, but was not published until 1719. The anecdote does not appear in Colerus’s biography. For modesty, see also Lucas, Oldest Biography of Spinoza, 44. 12 Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique Et Critique, vol. 13 (Paris: Desoer Libraire, 1820), 418: “Ses amis prétendent que par modestie il souhaita de ne pas donner son nom à une secte.” 13 On Leo Strauss’s influential interpretation, Spinoza published anonymously— and deployed rhetorical strategies of esotericism—to avoid persecution. Spinoza’s seventeenth-century reception provides an important counterweight to the Straussian approach, for it highlights Spinoza’s principled, rather than prudential, motivations for anonymity. Impressed by Spinoza’s willingness to disseminate contro206 | Notes to Pages 142–44

14 15

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versial ideas, his seventeenth-century partisans judged him insuYciently prudent. In the (anonymously published) Theologico-Political Treatise, Lucas relates, Spinoza “revealed to everybody what people wanted to be kept secret.” See Lucas, Oldest Biography, 7. Bayle also notes Spinoza’s hatred of dissimulation; see Bayle, Dictionnaire, 13:416. Moreover, Lucas is not unfamiliar with the prudential considerations for anonymity. By Lucas’s admission, he published his own biography of Spinoza anonymously, for fear of persecution. (See Lucas, Oldest Biography, 44.) Yet Lucas refuses to attribute such considerations to Spinoza. Rather, he argues that principled conviction impelled Spinoza to disseminate ideas without taking credit for them. Interpretations, such as Leo Strauss’s, that reduce the motives for anonymous publication to fear of persecution have obscured principled arguments for modesty (which is not synonymous with caution) as a philosophical and political protocol. Interestingly, Strauss’s arguments, in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), echo those of Pierre Poiret and the anti-Spinoza polemic. See Pierre Poiret, Cogitationes Rationales De Deo, Anima, Et Malo (Amsterdam, 1685), 79: “timuit enim continuo ne ejus patefieret Atheismus: quae causa fuit cur dum viveret, Ethicam suam, Atheismi curriculum absolutum, noluerit edi, quamvis eam Atheismi propagandi gratia, publicari percuperet, ut patet ex eo, quid moriturus ejus editionem commendarit, addita prohibitione nominis Spinozae exprimendi.” (Note: The pagination is faulty in this edition, and there is more than one page 79. The passage cited appears on the second page 79 in this edition.) For a historical account of the tactics employed to evade censorship and disseminate Spinoza’s works, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 275–94. John Eachard, Mr. Hobbs’s State of Nature Considered in a Dialogue between Philautus and Timothy to Which Are Added Five Letters (London, 1672). Granted, the provenance of these characterizations goes a long way toward explaining their divergence—Hobbes’s detractors excoriate his pride, while Spinoza’s defenders vaunt his modesty. One can certainly find passages absolving Hobbes of arrogance in the Hobbes hagiography, just as one finds accusations of theological (but seldom personal) pride in the anti-Spinoza polemic. For the attempt to exonerate Hobbes, see John Aubrey, “Brief Lives”: Chiefly of Contemporaries, Set Down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696, ed. Andrew Clark, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 336, 340, 373. For accusations of pride in the anti-Spinoza polemic, see the discussion of François Lamy, in chapter 3. For modesty and anonymity as norms of scholarly deportment for seventeenthcentury Jesuit natural philosophers, see Michael J. Gorman, “Mathematics and Modesty in the Society of Jesus: The Problems of Christoph Grienberger,” in The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives, ed. Mordechai Feingold, Archimedes 6 (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 1–120. Thomas Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Savilian Professors of Mathematics, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 7 (Aalen, DE: Scientia, 1966), 337. For professions of modesty, see also 332, 335, 336. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 1 (Aalen, DE: Scientia, 1966), 2. Notes to Page 144 | 207

19 Hobbes, Leviathan, 133. 20 Ibid., 132. 21 Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 98. 22 See Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951), 25, 227, 234–35; Leon Roth, Spinoza, Descartes, & Maimonides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 43; and Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 139, 141. 23 For the reference to Paul, see Hobbes, Leviathan, 696. 24 Spinoza, Theological, 231n2; see also 9–10. 25 Ibid., 63, 64. 26 See Benedictus de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The “Ethics” and Other Works, trans. and ed. Edwin M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), IIP40S2. 27 Spinoza, Theological, 21. 28 Ibid., 231n2. For a similar passage, see Hobbes, Leviathan, 32. 29 Spinoza, Theological, 10. 30 In A Spinoza Reader, Edwin Curley translates “modestia” as “courtesy.” I have modified his translation throughout, substituting “modesty” for “courtesy.” Early modern biographies of Spinoza support my translation; both Lucas and Bayle use the French term “modestie” to describe Spinoza. 31 Because modesty is a joy that we feel when we act, it is no longer allied with humility, which Spinoza notoriously classes as a passion. For Spinoza, “modestia” is synonymous with “humanitas” rather than (as in Hobbes and Descartes) “humilitas.” 32 On Spinoza’s view, ambition is not only self-contradictory, it is also self-undermining, because it erodes social comity. When ambition runs rampant, envy flourishes, with the result that no one reaps acclaim. See Spinoza, Ethics, IIIP31S: “When all wish to be praised, or loved, by all, they hate one another.” 33 For a more extensive analysis of Spinoza’s conception of philosophical citizenship, see Julie E. Cooper, “Freedom of Speech and Philosophical Citizenship in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise,” Law, Culture & the Humanities 2, no. 1 (February 2006): 91–114. 34 For a contemporary Spinozist politics of impersonality, see Hasana Sharp, “The Impersonal Is Political: Spinoza and a Feminist Politics of Imperceptibility,” Hypatia 24, no. 4 (November 2009): 84–103. 35 On authorial modesty as a component of a “vision of intellectual progress and, indeed, of modernity” in early modern France, see GeoVrey Turnovsky, “Authorial Modesty and Its Readers: Mondanité and Modernity in Seventeenth-Century France,” Modern Language Quarterly 72, no. 4 (December 2011): 462. 36 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 201. 37 Indeed, Hobbes deems his science “infallible.” See Hobbes, Leviathan, 117, 682. 38 Sheldon S. Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 4. 39 Spinoza’s celebrity was not only posthumous. See Wim Klever, “Spinoza’s Fame in 1667,” Studia Spinozana, no. 5 (1989): 359–64. 208 | Notes to Pages 144–49

40 Jelles understands that venerating Spinoza dishonors his convictions. See Spinoza, Opera Posthuma, 1: “Et quamvis libri, in quo cuncta fere Mathematice demonstrantur, parum intersit, ut sciatur, quibus parentibus ejus Auctor fuerit ortus, quamque vitae inierit rationem (haec enim satis superque ex his scriptis manifesta est) non inutile tamen fore visum est, haec pauca de ejus Vita narrare.” On this point, see also Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (New York: Nextbook, 2006). 41 Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 1:177. 42 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts” or “First Discourse,” in The “Discourses” and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26. 43 See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols” / “The Anti-Christ,” trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 48: “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” 44 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Christopher Kelly, Judith K. Bush, and Roger D. Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), 106. 45 See Rousseau’s retrospective assessment of the First Discourse, the text that made his name. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 32. For celebrity, see also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Preface to the Neuchâtel Edition of the Confessions,” in Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 645. 46 On the evidence of the Encyclopédie, Rousseau’s position on modesty is anomalous in the period. See Encyclopédie Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts Et Des Métiers, Facsimile of the First Edition of 1751–1780, vol. 10 (Stuttgart, DE: Friedrich Framman Verlag, 1966), 601. In the Encyclopédie, modesty is not without a theatrical dimension—yet it remains a male virtue, relied upon to keep ambition in check. By contrast, in the Encyclopédie, “pudeur” is the natural shame that sustains female honor. See Encyclopédie, 13:553. 47 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: “Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre,” trans. Allan Bloom (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 87. 48 For an analysis of Rousseau’s equivocation on this point, see Elizabeth R. Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 180. 49 See Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: “Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre,” 83, 84, 87, 130; and Rousseau, Second Discourse, 122, 155. 50 See Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: “Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre,” 86. To be clear—the fact that Spinoza defines modesty as a male virtue does not exonerate him of sexism. In the Political Treatise, Spinoza expressly denies that women have equal political rights. See Benedictus de Spinoza, Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 136–37. 51 Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to the Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 27. 52 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. John M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 17. Notes to Pages 149–51 | 209

53 See Rousseau, Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 17: “But let each one of them reveal his heart at the foot of Thy throne with equal sincerity, and may any man who dares, say, ‘I was a better man than he.’” 54 On this point, see Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 126. 55 Kelly, Rousseau as Author, 19. Kelly credits Rousseau with such an embrace. Yet, for Kelly, the risk in question is the Straussian risk of persecution for controversial and heterodox ideas. Kelly ignores the existential risks of authorship—the loss of control and the threat to the self ’s integrity that authorship entails. 56 Rousseau, Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 606. 57 Failed reception emerges as the theme of Rousseau’s subsequent autobiographical excursions, especially Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues. Significantly, the dialogue portion of that text ends with the promise of an infinite series of memoirs, written by Rousseau’s partisans, to counter his enemies’ calumny. See Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge, 244. That Rousseau’s self-portrait concludes with a call for further portraiture reflects his awareness that, on some level, he is asking biography to do something that it is not capable of doing—namely, render the self transparent. 58 For one example, see Mark E. Button, “‘A Monkish Kind of Virtue’? For and against Humility,” Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 840–68; and Contract, Culture, and Citizenship: Transformative Liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 229–36. To be clear, the embrace of humility is in no way unanimous among contemporary political theorists. From a diVerent corner of the contemporary theoretical map, scholars have argued the contrary position—namely, that democracy requires a more robust sense of honor. See Robert K. Faulkner, The Case for Greatness: Honorable Ambition and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Sharon R. Krause, Liberalism with Honor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 59 Stephen K. White, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), x. 60 For the contemporary embrace of finitude, see Bonnie Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism,” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 41, no. 1 (2010): 1–33. Other prominent contemporary theorists of finitude include Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004); and William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 61 White, Ethos, 74. 62 Ibid., 75, 74. 63 Indeed, White endorses humility as a democratic virtue. See Ethos, 25. 64 Ibid., 62. 65 Ibid., 68. 66 Ibid., 54. 67 Ibid., 62, 72. 210 | Notes to Pages 151–54

68 White adopts this framing, in part, because he responds to the theistic challenge posed by Charles Taylor and others. See Ethos, 62. 69 Ibid., 66; see also 65. 70 Ibid., 66. 71 Stephen K. White, “Fullness and Dearth: Depth Experience and Democratic Life,” American Political Science Review 104, no. 4 (November 2010): 808. 72 White, Ethos, 33. 73 White engages with Hobbes in passing, but he judges Hobbes’s treatment of finitude insuYcient for his purposes. See Ethos, 63–64. 74 Ibid., 69. 75 On this point, I follow Bonnie Honig. See Bonnie Honig, “The Politics of Ethos,” European Journal of Political Theory 10, no. 3 (July 2011): 424–25. Honig says of White’s ethos, “There is a paradoxical self-mastery in the moment of its attenuation, a paradoxical self-orientation in the moment of encounter.” 76 Admittedly, White does express “skepticism” about the eVectiveness of the ethos he recommends. See White, Ethos, 73. 77 Here, I echo Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 138–39. 78 Leo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 10. 79 See Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols” / “The Anti-Christ,” 51: “We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!” 80 Hobbes, Leviathan, 260, 130.

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index

Abbadie, Jacques, 24, 37, 109–10, 113, 116, 199n14, 200n24, 202n49 acquiescentia animi, 102, 195n106, 196n108 acquiescentia in se ipso, 73, 91–102, 190n50, 193n87, 194n88, 195n106 acquiescentia mentis, 102 Adam and Eve, Augustine on, 1–2, 55 Adorno, Theodor, 173n55 agency, human: Augustinian discouragement of, 154–55, 158; Cartesians’ and Quietists’ conceptions of, 24; collective, 17, 56, 63, 141, 154; dependence in relation to, 104; divine sovereignty and, 13, 14–15, 16, 140, 165n52; eighteenth-century critics of humility and, 27; empowerment and, 204n75; Encyclopédie on amour-propre and, 113; finitude as source of, 17, 155; Hobbes’s model of, 3, 18, 43, 44, 45; Job’s unfathomable God and, 64; Lamy on God’s constraints on, 74; Malebranche’s occasionalism and, 112; passivity and, 160n21, 204n75; received genealogies’ impoverished accounts of, 7; Rousseau’s project of empowerment and, 106–7, 116, 117, 122, 134, 136, 137, 139; secular theory and, 3, 4, 7, 42, 140; Spinoza on, 69, 72; in White’s ethos theory, 154. See also power, human Ahrensdorf, Peter J., 184n86 Allestree, Richard, 55–56, 182n58 amour de nous-mêmes, 110–11 amour de soi, 108–9, 111, 113, 114–15 amour-propre, 108–10, 112, 113–16, 118–19, 132, 201n42, 201n44, 202n50 anonymous publication, 143–44, 147, 148, 149, 150, 206n13 antipolitics, 14, 15, 165n52

Arendt, Hannah, 31 Aristotle: cited on modesty by Chauvin, 27; classification of emotions by, 80; Hobbes and institutional authority of, 143; natural inequality and, 2, 52 Asad, Talal, 204n75 atheism: Hobbes on, 183n84; Lamy on, 73, 76; Rousseau accused of, 15, 107, 109; secular theory and, 3, 38; Spinoza accused of, 15, 77, 93, 103, 144; Taylor on humility and, 36 Augustine: City of God, 1–2, 23, 55; French theologians of self-love and, 109; on humility, 1–2, 3, 4–5, 56, 167n7; on pride, 1–2, 4, 23, 55, 151, 167n8; on selflove, 168n12 Augustinian assumptions: continuing weight of, 11, 139, 152, 156, 157, 158; dependence on God and, 17; discrediting human initiative, 55; Encyclopedist on self-love and, 110, 112–13; Hobbes and, 44, 45, 56, 64, 69; of Hume, 41; about humility, 4, 20–21, 71, 154; about modesty, 4, 20, 21, 26; pagan philosophy / Christian humility topos, 27–28; Rousseau’s negotiation with, 106–8, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122–23, 127, 128–29, 130, 133, 136, 137, 139; on secularity as self-deification, 6–7, 21, 31, 106–7; secular subject as sovereign subject and, 30, 38; Spinoza’s argument about humility and, 85, 91, 103–4; Spinoza’s empowered self and, 98, 101; Taylor and, 33–34, 36–37, 38. See also hyper-Augustinianism; nonAugustinian critique of pride Augustinians, early modern: attacking pride, 29, 30; on desire to supplant God, 6; on humility, 20–21, 22–23

229

Augustinians, from twentieth century on: as critics of secularism, 31; liberal, 159n10 authoritarianism: of Hobbes, 67; Spinoza on, 68 autonomy: Augustinian critics of secularism on, 31; interpretations of Bacon and, 42; non-Augustinian critique of pride and, 17–18; Rousseau on, 18, 105, 121, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135; Spinoza on potential dangers of, 104 Bacon, Francis, 38, 39–43 Batnitzky, Leora, 163n45 Baxter, Richard, 55, 56, 181n49 Bayle, Pierre, 143–44, 206n13, 208n30 Behemoth (Hobbes), 55–56 Blumenberg, Hans, 161n24, 172n49 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 109, 186n8 Briggs, John Channing, 176n107 Brooke, Christopher, 167n8 buffered self, 32–33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 173nn66–67 Calhoun, Craig J., 159n17, 163n46, 164n49 Cartesian rationalists: humility as virtue for, 23–24, 25, 98; pride / self-love distinction for, 94; rebutting charges of Spinozism, 10, 71, 76, 186n8. See also Abbadie, Jacques; Descartes, René; rationalism; Wittich, Christoph Cartesian subjectivity, 32, 173n50 Charvet, John, 201n44 chastening, and secular subjectivity, 6, 7; Hobbes and, 6, 7, 44, 51, 57, 63, 64; persistent Augustinian assumptions and, 157; Rousseau and, 6, 7, 130, 134, 138; Spinoza and, 6, 7, 83, 84; Taylor and, 38 Chauvin, Etienne, 25–26, 27 civic virtue: democratic theorists on humility as, 174n86; Hobbes on, 46, 48, 54, 61, 62 collective agency, 17, 56, 63, 141, 154 commonwealth, 3, 38, 44, 46, 52, 56, 57–60, 61–63, 64, 66 230 | Index

conatus doctrine, 80, 98 Connolly, William, 164n48 contextualist history of philosophy, 10 Cooper, Laurence D., 198n9 Cottingham, John, 191n60 Curley, Edwin, 92, 194n88, 208n30 d’Alembert, Jean, 150 De Cive (Hobbes): on humility, 2–3, 54, 180n40; on modesty, 53–54 democracy: modern secular state and, 12; narratives crediting Spinoza with, 103, 197n115; pluralism and, 13, 174n86; Taylor on humility and, 36, 174n86 democratic theory: modesty and humility as virtues in, 152–53, 174n86, 210n63; reframing contemporary debate in, 152; sovereign subject and, 31; specter of self-deification in, 16–17 dependence: break with Augustinian theology and, 17–18; on God, 17, 113, 117 dependence in Rousseau’s philosophy, 17–18; autonomy and, 18, 132, 133; children and, 124, 127; domination and, 139; empowerment and, 134, 138; finitude and, 116–17, 122, 139; intense concern with, 104, 106; legal and institutional remedies for, 203n52; on public opinion, 113; sociability and, 131, 133; weakness and, 105, 108, 118–19, 120; wickedness and, 127 Descartes, René: acquiescentia in se ipso and, 94–96; dawn of modernity and, 8, 29; French theologians of self-love and, 109; human transcendence of nature and, 92; on humility, 42, 70, 81–82, 83, 84, 190n50; Les Passions de l’Ame (Passiones Animae), 80, 81, 92, 94; promethean aspirations of, 38; Spinoza’s taxonomy of affects and, 80–82. See also Cartesian rationalists Desmarets, Henry, 92 Dietz, Mary, 181n42 dignity: Abbadie on, 110, 113; Hume on,

39; secularity and, 140; Spinoza on, 72, 185n7 diversity: modern democratic state and, 12, 13; religious, 13–14, 163n46, 164n48, 164n49. See also pluralism divine sovereignty: human agency and, 13, 14–15, 16, 140, 165n52; human finitude and, 5–6, 23, 155; secular turn as usurpation of, 6, 31, 156, 158; Spinoza as critic of, 75. See also power, of God; sovereignty egalitarianism: Abbadie on self-love and, 110, 113; Descartes’s view of generosity and, 81; of ethos theorists, 153; of non-Augustinian critics, 140, 142, 144; philosophical anonymity and, 148; in Protestantism, 55; Rousseau’s claim of, 151, 210n53; Spinoza’s modern reception and, 103; in Spinoza’s philosophy, 99, 100, 102, 146, 150, 196n108 Elements of Law (Hobbes): glory in, 48–49, 178n14; humility in, 180n40; modesty in, 53 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 173n50 Emile (Rousseau), 106, 107, 114–15, 122–38, 197n6, 198n7, 202nn50–51, 203n65, 203n68, 204n71, 204n73 empowerment, 5–6, 7; absence of alternative templates for, 139; Asad on secular human agency and, 204n75; Augustinian inheritance about, 157; Bacon’s profession of humility and, 40, 41; difficulty of figuring in strictly human terms, 141; Hobbes as proponent of, 44; humility and secular projects of, 11, 21, 69, 140; limitation as source of, 140, 141, 155–56; modesty as source of, 140, 141–42, 148, 150; novel secular understanding of, 140–41; Rousseau on, 105–8, 116–24, 126, 127–30, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137–38, 139, 197n6; Spinoza on limitation and, 68, 73, 101; Spinoza’s ethic of, 99; Taylor on secularity and, 38. See also power, human

Encyclopédie, 109–13, 116, 209n46 Enlightenment, moderate and radical, 18, 41, 103, 104, 141, 175n94 equality in Hobbes’s thought: fear of death and, 68; forgetting of, in stable commonwealth, 66; founding of a state and, 57–58; humility as recognition of, 2, 180n40; law of honor and, 59, 183n70; modesty as practice of, 52, 53–54, 60, 61–62, 63; natural, 2, 50, 52, 53, 60, 66, 183n70; as necessary condition for peace, 2; pride as refusal to affirm, 181n42; Spinoza’s arguable denial of, 102; vainglory as refusal to acknowledge, 51, 52. See also humility in Hobbes’s thought equality in Rousseau’s thought. See inequality equality in Spinoza’s thought: denying Hobbes’s natural equality, 102; envy and, 96 ethos theory, contemporary, 142, 152–57. See also White, Stephen K. fear: Hobbes on, 48, 61, 68, 158; Rousseau on, 120, 121; Spinoza on, 68, 85–86, 192n79 Fénelon, François, 24, 25, 109, 130, 135, 202n49 Feuer, Lewis S., 193n83, 196n112 finitude: acquiescentia in se ipso and, 92; Augustinian account of humility and, 20; Augustinian warning about human agency and, 158; contemporary debate about politics of, 142; early modern theorists’ reevaluation of, 5, 6, 7, 17–18, 141, 160n18; early modern thought on humility and, 22, 23, 26; ethos and the politics of, 152–57; Gordon on ethical way of living with, 36; Hobbesian philosophy and, 5, 6, 17, 45, 68, 69, 153, 158, 211n73; Malebranche’s occasionalism and, 112; pluralism and, 175n87; Rousseau’s view of (see Rousseau on finitude); as source of agency, 155; as Index | 231

finitude (continued) source of power, 155–56; sovereign subject and, 31–32, 157, 158; Spinoza’s definition of, 193n82; Spinoza’s view of, 18, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 88–91, 100–101, 102, 104, 153, 193nn82–83; Taylor’s view of humility and, 35, 36 Foucault, Michel, 31, 173n55 fragilization, 35 Frankfurt, Harry G., 193n87 Frankfurt school, 31 freedom: amour-propre and, 201n44; Descartes on, 81–82, 83, 96; Hobbesian humility and, 67; Lamy on, 74; Machiavelli on, 78; Rousseau on, 118, 122, 123, 124, 126, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 198n7, 204n74; Spinoza on, 68, 86, 87, 95–96, 97 free will: Descartes on, 81, 82, 83, 96; Rousseau on, 117; Spinoza on, 83, 84 French Revolution, and Spinoza, 196n112 Fromm, Erich, 179n27 Gauchet, Marcel, 161n24 genealogy of secularity: alternative, 12, 17, 42–43, 152, 155, 157–58; Hobbes’s significance for, 45; method of, 10–11, 162n32; neglected sources for, 9–10; nonAugustinian, 4, 7, 38, 43, 45; normative character of, 12, 162n32; of Taylor, 35 Geulincx, Arnold, 23–24, 26 Geuss, Raymond, 10–11, 162n33 Gillespie, Michael A., 161n24 glory: Hobbes on, 47–48, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 98, 178n14; Spinoza on, 92, 95, 97, 100, 195n97, 195n101. See also vainglory Godartis, P., 25, 26 Gordon, Peter, 34–35, 36, 175n87 Gordon, Scott P., 160n21 grace, divine: Augustinian theology of reliance on, 20, 23, 29, 167n7; Cartesians’ view of human effort and, 24; empowerment in the absence of, 141; Encyclopedist on self-love and, 111; Lamy on 232 | Index

human depravity and, 74; Malebranche on, 112; Poiret on humility and, 84; Rousseau’s denial of, 106; Rousseau’s Julie and, 202n49; Spinoza on, 98 Greenleaf, W. H., 64 Gregory, Eric, 165n51 Hardt, Michael, 197n115 Heidegger, Martin, 31, 173n55 Herdt, Jennifer A., 159n9 Hobbes, Thomas, 43, 44–69; accused of arrogance, 144, 148–49, 207n15; Augustinian attacks on, 29; bourgeois and, 62, 65; chastening project of, 44–45, 57; controversy with Spinoza, 67–69; Erastianism of, 14; finitude in philosophy of, 5, 6, 7, 17, 45, 68, 69, 153, 158, 211n73; God-rivaling ambitions of, 44, 176n3; promethean aspirations of, 38; religious resources used by, 15; Rousseau on, 18, 149; sectarian diversity and, 14; as secular theorist, 68–69, 141; on weakness, 56, 65, 67. See also Behemoth; De Cive; Elements of Law; equality in Hobbes’s thought; humility in Hobbes’s thought; Leviathan; modesty in Hobbes’s thought; power in Hobbes’s thought; pride in Hobbes’s thought Honig, Bonnie, 211n75 honor, law of, 57–61, 182nn64–65, 183n70 Horkheimer, Max, 173n55 hubris: classical Greek meaning of, 167n11; modernity and, 7, 172n48; Spinoza and, 83, 185n7 humanism: Hobbes’s debt to, 176n2; of Hume, 39, 40; of Renaissance, modesty and, 172n46; revolutionary, attributed to Spinoza, 197n115; of Rousseau, 108; Taylor on, 33, 34–35, 37, 38, 173n66, 174n83; trope of imitation of God in, 176n2 Hume, David: admiration for Bacon, 39–40, 41, 175n103; as critic of humility, 20–21, 27–29, 171n40; on modesty,

171n35; Spinoza’s “rejection” of humility and, 78; Taylor’s citation of, 34 humility: alleged demise of, 5, 9, 18, 20–21, 27, 34, 38, 70; Augustine on, 1–2, 3, 4–5, 56, 167n7; Augustinian assumptions about, 4, 20–21, 71, 154; Bacon’s professions of, 40–43, 176n107; Cartesians on self-satisfaction and, 98; in Christian versus Jewish tradition, 166n1; continued appeal to secular theorists, 5, 11, 152–53, 210n58; as democratic virtue, 152–53, 174n86, 210n63; Descartes on, 42, 70, 81–82, 83, 84, 190n50; in early modern thought, 4–6, 9–10, 21–29, 160n18, 160n21; Encyclopedist on, 111, 113; Fénelon on, 130; Fromm on reason and, 179n27; genealogy of, 10, 152; Herdt on Christian concept of, 159n9; Hume’s dismissal of, 20–21, 27–29, 171n40; instrumental versus normative, 161n22; Malebranche on, 111; modern critics of, 171n40; modesty as companion virtue of, 26; modesty in Christian ethics and, 52–53, 54; pagan philosophy opposed to, 23–24, 26–28, 167n11, 168n13, 170n32; resistance to secular revaluation, 11, 139; restored to historiographical conversation, 8–9; seventeenth-century Protestant, political liabilities of, 54–57, 63; Taylor on, 32, 33, 35–37, 174n83, 174n86, 175n87; twentieth-century analytic philosophers on, 166n2; Weber on capitalism and, 167n3. See also power and humility humility in Hobbes’s thought, 2–3; excessive, 70; fostering of, 61; freedom to philosophize and, 67; Hobbes’s authoritarianism and, 67; Hobbes’s redefinition of, 18, 43, 45, 46–47, 57; instrumentalization and, 161n22; power and, 160n18; Spinoza’s reservations about, 18, 67–69; as spur to collective assertion, 154. See also equality in Hobbes’s thought

humility in Rousseau’s thought, 105, 115, 116, 130, 172n42, 202n49, 202n51, 203n52 humility in Spinoza’s thought, 17, 18, 67–73, 77–84, 171n40; acquiescentia in se ipso opposed to, 92–93, 96, 194n88; critics’ objections to IVP53 and, 84–91; debate with first Christian critics of, 71–72; definition of, 78–79, 81, 160n18, 188nn38–39, 191n59; denied the status of a virtue, 67–68, 69, 71–72, 77–78, 79, 80, 84, 85, 87, 89, 103; despondency and, 88, 90, 189n44, 191n59; finitude and, 18, 101, 104, 160n18; IVP53 on, 68, 70, 77–78, 79, 80, 155; modesty and, 208n31; as political tool, 85–88, 192n69, 192n79; refusing Augustinian humility / pride antithesis, 104; seeming contradictions of, 71–72; Short Treatise on, 190n50; twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars on, 77–78, 84, 85; unprecedented position on, 70, 185n2 Hunter, Ian, 175n94 Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman, 159n17, 165n56 hyper-Augustinianism, 37, 82, 130, 144 immanent frame, 35, 37, 174n86 individualism, 17, 72, 149 inequality: Aristotle on, 2, 52; Rousseau on, 116, 120–21 Israel, Jonathan, 102–3, 104, 196nn112–13 James, Susan, 8 Jelles, Jarig, 143, 209n40 Job, 46, 63–67, 183n74 Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (Rousseau), 115, 130, 135, 136, 202n49, 205n89 Kelly, Christopher, 210n55 Kent, Bonnie D., 185n2 Keys, Mary M., 171n40 Lamy, François, 73–76, 82, 89, 103, 109, 186n8, 199n14 Index | 233

Lane, Melissa, 162n32 lawgiver, in Social Contract, 134, 137 law of honor, 57–61, 182nn64–65, 183n70 laws of nature, Hobbes on, 51–52, 53, 54, 180nn31–32; God of Job and, 65, 66; humility and, 2–3, 159n16, 161n22, 181n42; modesty and, 52, 53, 57, 161n22, 180n31, 182n61 Lazier, Benjamin, 172n48 Leviathan (Hobbes), 44–48, 182nn61–62; addressed to the sovereign, 67; antagonists’ campaign to discredit, 142–43, 144, 206n8; book of Job and, 63–65; clerics’ outraged reaction to, 67; on fear sustaining political community, 68; glory and vainglory in, 47–48, 49–50, 51, 61, 178n14; humility and, 181n42; law of honor and, 58–60; modesty and, 52, 53, 56–57, 63, 182n61; Platonic aspirations for, 148; project of, 62–65 lexicographers, humility as virtue for, 23, 25–26 liberalism: Augustinianism and, 159n10; Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau and, 17; Mahmood on, 160n20; Rawls on, 164n49 limitation, human, 5–6; power resulting from acknowledgment of, 140, 141, 155–56; Rousseau on, 123, 129. See also dependence; finitude; humility Lovejoy, Arthur O., 167n13, 202n47 Lucas, J. M., 143, 206n13, 208n30 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 29, 70, 78, 161n24, 171n40, 172n42 Mahmood, Saba, 160n20 Malebranche, Nicolas, 22–23, 109–10, 111–12, 116, 199n14, 200n30 Mansfield, Harvey C., 178n13 Markell, Patchen, 173n67 Melamed, Yitzhak Y., 185n7 Micraelius, Johann, 25, 26 Milbank, John, 173n50 Mill, J. S., 78 Milton, John, 25, 170n25 234 | Index

modernity: contemporary critics of, 8, 29; ethos as a religion substitute in, 154–55, 211n68; humility’s diminished stature in, 28–29, 171n40; impact on colonial others, 31; modesty’s place in, 148, 208n35; sovereign subject as protagonist of, 21; starting point for, 8, 30, 161n24, 172n46; subtraction stories of Taylor and, 171n39; Taylor’s buffered self in, 32–33, 173nn66–67; Taylor’s domain of transcendence and, 175n94; theological origins of, 12; twentieth-century criticism of, 173n55 modesty: Augustinian account of, 4, 20, 21, 26; capacities for self-rule and, 148; in Chauvin’s definition of humility, 25; in contemporary political theory, 152–53; continued appeal to secular theorists, 5; in early modern thought, 22, 26–27, 29; Encyclopédie on, 209n46; gender and, 144, 150, 170n29, 178n13; Gordon on naturalism and, 35; Hume’s bias toward etiquette of, 171n35; integral to philosophical ambition, 172n46; law of honor and, 60–61; Mahmood on secular liberalism and, 160n20; multiple seventeenth-century constructions of, 52–53; as norm for seventeenth-century philosophers, 144, 207n16; as philosophical virtue, 141–52; Renaissance humanism and, 172n46; resistance to secular revaluation, 11, 139; Rousseau and, 150–51, 170n29, 203n68; Spinoza on, 18, 146–50, 208nn30–31; unintended consequences of, 148–50, 151–52 modesty in Hobbes’s thought, 51–54, 56–57; claims for human mastery and, 43, 45, 67; on cultivation of, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67; Hobbes’s redefinition of, 18, 45, 46–47, 52, 57, 178n13; Hobbes’s view of reason and, 51; Job’s unfathomable God and, 64, 66, 67; laws of nature and, 52, 53, 57, 161n22, 180n31, 182n61; protocols of, 141–42,

144–45, 148–50, 208n37; Strauss on, 177n9 monkish virtues, 28, 34 Montag, Warren, 192n79 mortal God, 46, 57, 66 mortality: Rousseau on, 119–20, 121, 124, 125, 136, 205n89; in White’s ethos theory, 153, 154, 155 naturalism: of Rousseau’s theory of amour-propre, 114; of Spinoza, 75, 76 naturalistic humility, 35, 36, 37 natural law. See laws of nature, Hobbes on Negri, Antonio, 197n115 Neuhouser, Frederick, 114, 132, 198n7, 202n48 neutrality: religion in liberal theory and, 163n46; secularism and impossible claim of, 7; Taylor on, 164n48 Newman, Jay, 188n39, 192n69 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 159n10 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on definability, 9, 11; genealogy of, 162n32; on grammar, 209n43; humility and, 36, 78, 83, 171n40; on real and apparent worlds, 211n79 non-Augustinian critique of pride, 3–4, 6, 17–18, 139, 140, 141; contemporary ethos theory and, 153; Rousseau and, 104, 106, 113, 123–24, 138; Spinoza and, 72–73, 104, 148 occasionalism, 112 Ockhamist theology, 64 O’Donovan, Oliver, 167n12 ontological turn within contemporary theory, 31 original sin, Rousseau’s denial of, 106, 121 pagans: humility unavailable to, 26–27, 167n11, 168n13, 170n32; modesty credited to, 26–27; pride attributed to, 21, 23–24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 167n11, 168n13; self-love and, 198n9 Paris Condemnation of 1277, 185n2

Pascal, Blaise, 235 passions: Hobbes on, 45–46, 47 (see also fear; glory; vainglory); Rousseau on, 124, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 137; seventeenth-century philosophers on, 22; Spinoza on humility as, 79, 208n31 (see also humility in Spinoza’s thought) passivity, 118, 160nn20–21, 203n68, 204n75 Pateman, Carole, 178n13 Pelling, Edward, 26–27 perfectibility, Rousseau on, 119, 121, 129 Plato, 24 pluralism: critique of hubris and, 16; democratic humility and, 36, 174n86; finitude and, 175n87; general challenge of, 13; Rawls’s concerns and, 164n49, 175n87; reducing religion’s challenge to one of, 13–14, 15, 16, 164n48, 165n51; sovereignty and, 157; of Taylor’s secular age, 33, 35–36. See also diversity Poiret, Pierre, 77, 78, 79, 83–84, 90–91, 92, 93–94, 100, 187n28, 206n13 postmodern theorists: humility and, 43; on inflated estimation of human capacities, 29, 172n46; on sovereign subject, 31–32 power, human: appreciation of limits to, 4, 5–6, 17, 160n21; critics of secularity and, 6–7; depleted by fantasies of omnipotence, 4, 140; historical abuses of, 158; modesty and, 142, 148; previously reserved for God, 31; pride as impediment to, 4, 5, 7; resulting from acknowledgment of limitations, 140, 141, 155–56; Taylor on modern self and, 32, 33, 35–36, 38. See also agency, human; empowerment; sovereignty power, of God, 65, 66, 84. See also divine sovereignty power and humility, 20, 160n18, 160n21; Bacon on, 40, 41, 42; Cartesians and Quietists on, 25; Hume’s dismissal of humility and, 28; Malebranche on, 22–23; in Spinoza’s thought, 72–73, 78–79, 80, 83, 84, 160n18 Index | 235

power in Hobbes’s thought: commonwealth and, 57, 63; equality and, 2; glory and, 47, 178n14; God-rivaling ambitions and, 44; limits of, 4, 5–6, 7, 45, 66, 177n9; modesty and, 52; of sovereign, 45–46 power in Rousseau’s thought: authority figures and, 135, 136, 205n85; divine omnipotence and, 132, 134, 136–37, 139; goodness and, 127; limits to, 4, 5–6, 7, 119, 121–22, 124–25; primitive savage and, 117, 118; in sexual relations, 203n68. See also Rousseau on human weakness power in Spinoza’s thought: acquiescentia in se ipso and, 194n88; humility and, 72–73, 78–79, 80, 83, 84, 160n18; limits to, 4, 5–6, 7; self-affirmation and, 73, 78; self-evaluation and, 89–91, 92, 94, 96–97, 98–101, 155, 190n50, 195n105; vanity and, 83; virtue and, 79, 147 pride: amour-propre as, 114; Augustine on, 1–2, 4, 23, 55, 151, 167n8; Augustinians’ accusation of, 6, 31, 139, 158; Bacon’s warning against, 40; Cartesians on, 94; eighteenth-century conceptions of, 202n47; Encyclopedist on, 110–11; English Protestants on sin of, 54–55, 56; Hobbes accused of, 145, 207n15; Hume’s attitude toward, 28, 39, 46, 171n35, 171n37; pagan, 21, 23–24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 167n11, 168n13; rehabilitated with humility’s demise, 27–28, 29; resistance to secular revaluation, 139; Rousseau accused of, 106–7; Rousseau’s autobiographical compulsion and, 151; secular critique of, 3, 4, 5, 7, 141; secularization narrative and, 21, 153–54; sovereign self and, 30–31; Spinoza accused of, 29, 70, 71, 73–74, 75–76, 84, 89, 92, 93–94, 145, 207n15; Taylor on, 33–34, 37. See also hubris; non-Augustinian critique of pride pride in Hobbes’s thought, 2; book of Job and, 63–64, 184n85; destructive236 | Index

ness of, 179n21; equality and, 2, 181n42; glory and, 179n18; indictment of, 3, 54; law of honor and, 58; modesty and, 52, 57, 58; obligation and, 48; Ockhamist views and, 64; overestimation of human power and, 44; solution to problem of, 45–46, 51, 67; the state and, 56, 62; vainglory and, 179n18. See also vainglory pride in Rousseau’s thought, 107, 114–16, 122, 123–24, 129, 130, 134, 138, 202n51, 202nn47–48 pride in Spinoza’s thought: affirmation of finitude and, 76; concern about acquiescentia and, 94–95, 96, 98, 195n101; criticism of, 72, 83; despondency and, 88, 189n44; humility and, 87–88, 93, 103, 104 primitive savages. See subhumans promethean aspirations, 6, 38, 40, 141, 184n85 prophets, Spinoza on, 85–86, 145–46, 148 punishment, Hobbes on, 62, 66, 183n74 pure love ( pur amour), 109, 111, 112, 115, 199n14 Quietist mystics, 23, 24, 25, 115, 202n49 rationalism: pride as animating spirit of, 29; secular ideals of humility in, 8. See also Cartesian rationalists Rawls, John, 164n48, 164n49, 175n87 reason: Augustine on inadequacy of, 55; contemporary theorists’ chastened conception of, 29; Encyclopedist on self-love and, 111; Hobbes on, 2, 3, 51; Rousseau on self-love and, 113; Rousseau’s Wolmar and, 136, 205n89; seventeenth-century confidence about, 29–30; Spinoza’s philosophy and, 98–100, 147–48, 196n108 Reformation: Rawls on political liberalism and, 164n49; Weber on capitalism and, 167n3

religion: challenge of pluralism for, 13–14, 15, 16, 164n48, 165n51; to combat superhuman pretension, 158; as identity category, 14, 16, 163n45, 164n48; modern concept of, 163n45; reframing political theory’s conception of, 11–17 repentance, Spinoza on, 91, 92–93, 95, 96 Riley, Patrick, 201n41 Rodríguez, F. Alfonso, 26, 170n29 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18–19, 105–39; accused of pride, 106–7; ambivalence of, 18–19, 104, 105–6, 172n42; on amour-propre / amour de soi distinction, 113; authority figures in works of, 134– 38; autobiographies of, 150–52, 210n55, 210n57; Christian humility / pagan philosophy topos and, 170n32; Confessions, 151; divine order and, 104, 105–6, 107, 115, 116, 122, 124, 129–30, 135, 139; First Discourse, 149; on Hobbes and Spinoza, 18, 149; humility in thought of, 105, 115, 116, 130, 172n42, 202n49, 202n51, 203n52; Letter to D’Alembert, 150; man / citizen antithesis of, 123, 132; moderate Enlightenment and, 104; modesty and, 150–51, 170n29, 203n68; on mortality, 119–20, 121, 124, 125, 136, 205n89; on pride, 107, 114–16, 122, 123–24, 129, 130, 134, 138, 202n51, 202nn47–48; on property, 120–21; religious resources used by, 15; Second Discourse, 107, 113, 114, 115–22, 124, 205n93; sectarian diversity and, 14; as secular critic of pride, 141; on self-love, 108–9, 113–16, 198n9; The Social Contract, 135, 137, 198n7. See also Emile; Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse; power in Rousseau’s thought Rousseau on finitude, 5, 6, 7; autonomy and, 18, 105, 121; dependence and, 107–8, 116–17, 120, 122, 131, 134, 138–39; human agency and, 106; human power and, 124, 125, 126, 128; subhumans’ unawareness and, 118, 121, 136, 197n6; superhumans and, 136; theology of divine order and, 129, 130, 132–33, 134

Rousseau on human weakness: ambivalence and, 18–19; dependence and, 105, 107–8; divine order and, 116; exacting standard for empowerment and, 139; finitude and, 17, 107–8; natural versus artificial, 117–21, 122, 124; passions and, 136; relative versus absolute, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 134; as spur to sociability, 131–32; stereotypical secularism and, 204n75; superhumans and, 136, 137, 138, 205n85; wickedness and, 18–19, 127, 132, 204n74; of women, 203n68 Schmitt, Carl, 31, 172n49 Scholasticism, 71, 145, 148 secular, the: defined, 3; explosion of scholarship on, 12 Secular Age, A (Taylor), 32–38, 164n48, 173n66, 174n83, 175n94 secular critique of pride. See nonAugustinian critique of pride secularism: assertive, self-congratulatory, 15; Augustinian critics of, 31; contemporary disputes about, 3–4, 12; distinguished from secularity, 7; flaws of, 7, 12; Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau credited with, 14; Hurd on discourse of, 159n17; as political project, 12, 152; post-9 / 11, 15, 16 secularity: defined, 159n17; distinguished from secularism, 7; justification of, 140–41; modesty as key component of, 148; negotiation of divine / human boundaries in, 12, 17; prior question about, 14, 15; questioning traditional understanding of, 157–58; rationalist philosophy credited with founding of, 8; Rousseau’s reliance on superhuman authority and, 137; as self-sufficiency, 6; sovereignty and, 157; Spinoza’s radicalism and, 102–4; Taylor’s canonical treatment of, 32–38 (see also Taylor, Charles). See also genealogy of secularity Index | 237

secularization narratives, 21; Augustinian resonance of, 29, 30; elisions and omissions in, 9, 162n27; humility and, 9, 20, 21, 29, 70; pride and, 21, 153–54; revisionist, 12; self-deification and, 6; sovereign subject and, 12, 21, 30, 70, 99, 153–54; sovereignty / secularity relation and, 157; Spinoza’s self-affirming individual and, 99, 101; of Taylor, 32, 34 secular subject, as sovereign subject, 6, 30–33, 38, 42, 70, 76, 104, 140 secular subjectivity: alternative genealogy of, 17, 42–43, 152, 154; conflation with sovereign subjectivity, 8, 11; hallmarks of, 6; human finitude and, 154; Mahmood on loss of humility in, 160n20; Rousseau on self-love and, 108; sovereign mastery and, 156; Spinoza’s demotion of humility and, 70; Taylor’s view of humility and, 34; White’s reliance on received characterizations of, 155 secular theory, 140–41; continued appeal of modesty and humility in, 5; defined, 3; human agency and, 3, 4, 7, 42, 140; struggling against Augustinian assumptions, 139 Selden, John, 59 self-affirmation, Spinoza on, 73, 91–94, 96–100, 102, 104 self-confidence: humanist, 34, 39; modernist, 29, 33, 72 self-deification: democratic theory haunted by, 16–17; Encyclopedist on, 111; fearing the specter of, 158; humility as Augustinian bulwark against, 71; inherited tropes of, 11; Malebranche’s dismissal of, 201n39; narratives equating human sufficiency with, 6–7, 21; Rousseau’s project of empowerment and, 106, 107, 108, 121, 122, 123, 127, 131, 133, 137, 138; secular agency not amounting to, 17; secularization as, 31; self-contempt and, 191n65; sovereign subject and, 30; Spinoza’s allusion to, 205n1; Taylor’s avoidance of, 32, 33 238 | Index

self-esteem: in Curley’s translation of the Ethics, 92, 194n88; Descartes on, 81, 82, 194n94, 195n98; Hobbes and, 47, 178n16; Rousseau as early proponent of, 108; Spinoza’s thought and, 72, 73, 91, 92, 185n6 self-love: Abbadie on, 109, 110–11, 200n24; Augustine and, 109, 168n12; Christian condemnation of, 108; Encyclopédie on, 109–13; Malebranche on, 109–10, 111–12; resistance to secular revaluation, 139; Rousseau on, 108–9, 113–16, 198n9 self-sufficiency: Augustine on, 2, 3, 23; English Protestants on pride and, 55, 182n58; Lamy on Spinoza and, 76; narratives associating secularity with, 6, 21; Poiret’s attack on Spinoza and, 93, 100; Rousseau on, 105, 106, 107, 117, 118, 119, 121, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 197n6; of Taylor’s buffered self, 32, 33 separation of church and state, 12, 14 Siger of Brabant, 185n2 Skinner, Quentin, 162n32 Slomp, Gabriella, 178n14 Smith, Steven B., 185n6 sovereign of Hobbes’s commonwealth: censorship rights of, 67, 184n89; Leviathan addressed to, 67; power of, 45–46 sovereign subject: Bacon’s ideal scientist and, 42; contemporary theorists of secularity and, 30–33, 139, 140, 153–54, 173n50; Lamy’s attack on Spinoza and, 75; Rousseau on twin perils of, 130; of secularization narratives, 12, 21, 30, 70, 99, 153–54; secular subject as, 6, 30–33, 38, 42, 70, 76, 104, 140; Spinoza’s secular self and, 92, 99; Taylor’s avoidance of rhetoric of, 32, 33 sovereignty: ascribed to God by Hobbes, 64–66; authorial, of Hobbes and Spinoza, 149; contemporary theorists’ assumptions and, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158; as figure for human agency, 16;

finitude and, 157, 158; of humans within nature, 115, 119, 124; migration from God to the state and the self, 6, 31; Rousseau’s reconciliation of subjection with, 198n7; secular theorists’ remaining aspirations to, 141. See also divine sovereignty; power, human Spinoza, Baruch, 70–104; accused of pride, 29, 70, 71, 73–74, 75–76, 84, 89, 92, 93–94, 145, 207n15; affective taxonomy of, 80–81; affective terminology of, 79–80; on ambition, 147, 208n32; anonymous publication and, 143–44, 147, 148, 149, 206n13; on anthropocentric theology, 82–83, 191n61, 205n1; contemporary hagiography of, 102–3, 149, 196nn112–13; controversy with Hobbes, 67–69; Erastianism of, 14; Ethics, 70–73, 143–48 (see also acquiescentia in se ipso; humility in Spinoza’s thought; power in Spinoza’s thought); on finitude, 18, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 88–91, 100–101, 102, 104, 153, 193nn82–83; as first secular individual, 70; on impersonality of philosophy, 145, 146; on modesty, 18, 146–50, 208nn30–31; modesty attributed to, 143–44, 145, 149, 206n13, 207n15, 209n40; as non-Augustinian critic of pride, 72–73, 104, 148; Opera Posthuma, 143, 149, 206n10, 209n40; the passions and, 22, 79, 208n31 (see also humility in Spinoza’s thought); Political Treatise, 78, 209n50; protocols of modesty and, 141–42; radicalism of, 18, 103–4; religious resources used by, 15; on repentance, 91, 92–93, 95, 96; Rousseau on, 18, 149; sectarian diversity and, 14; secularity and, 68–69, 72, 102–4; seventeenth-century polemic against, 71–72, 73–76, 77, 78, 103; TheologicoPolitical Treatise, 68, 85–86, 196n107, 206n13; on third kind of knowledge, 102, 195n106, 196n108; on weakness, 78–79, 80, 81–82, 83, 88, 89; women’s

political rights denied by, 209n50. See also humility in Spinoza’s thought; power in Spinoza’s thought; pride in Spinoza’s thought state of nature, of Hobbes: fear in, 61; glory in, 48; modesty in, 57, 61, 62; vanity in, 50, 51, 58 state of nature, of Rousseau, 117–18, 119, 121 Stoicism, 24, 167n8 Strauss, Leo: on Hobbes’s philosophy, 51, 177n9; on origin of modernity, 161n24; on Spinoza’s anonymous publication, 206n13; on traditional understanding of the tradition, 8, 157 Strier, Richard, 167n13 Stroumsa, Guy G., 163n45 subhumans, 107, 121, 136, 197n6, 205n93 subtraction stories, 28, 29, 171n39 suicide, Spinoza on, 79–80 superhumans, 108, 134–38, 197n6 superstition: humility as vestige of, 29; professed opponents of, 20, 23, 28; secularity and triumph over, 140; Spinoza on, 85–86 Taylor, Charles: on Descartes’s conception of selfhood, 194n94; A Secular Age, 32–38, 164n48, 173n66, 174n83, 175n94; secularity defined by, 159n17; on subtraction stories, 171n39; White’s response to, 211n68 Teflon subject, 29–30, 31 toleration, 12, 13–14, 141, 163n46, 164n48, 164n49 Toulmin, Steven E., 172n46 Tuck, Richard, 184n89, 206n8 Turnovsky, Geoffrey, 208n35 tutor, in Emile, 134–36, 138 vainglory: Hobbes on, 45–46, 47–51, 52, 54, 58, 60, 61, 66, 179n21; Spinoza’s acquiescentia in se ipso and, 100. See also glory; pride vain philosophy, 145 Index | 239

vanity: Hobbes accused of, 142, 205n3; Hobbes on, 50, 58, 59, 60–61, 62, 145; Hume’s defense of, 39; Rousseau’s Second Discourse and, 114, 115; Spinoza on, 72, 82–83, 84, 98. See also vainglory Vernière, Paul, 186n8 Viroli, Maurizio, 202n51 virtue: Augustine on, 3, 23; Descartes on, 81; Hobbes on, 3, 159n16; Hume on, 39, 41; Mahmood on secular liberalism and, 160n20; Malebranche on, 111; modesty and humility as, in early modern philosophy, 22; Rousseau on, 105, 106, 113, 122, 124, 136, 138, 202n49; Spinoza on, 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 100, 147. See also civic virtue

240 | Index

Wallis, John, 142–43, 205n3 Walzer, Michael, 14, 165n52 Ward, Seth, 142–43, 205n3 weakness: Hobbes on, 56, 65, 67; Malebranche on, 22–23, 112; Rousseau on (see Rousseau on human weakness); Spinoza on, 78–79, 80, 81–82, 83, 88, 89 Weber, Max, 167n3 White, Stephen K., 153–57, 173n53, 173n55, 175n95, 210n63, 211n68, 211n73, 211nn75–76 Wittich, Christoph, 81, 84, 85, 86–87, 88, 89, 91, 94, 189n48 Wolin, Sheldon, 50 Wolmar, 134, 136, 137, 138, 205n89 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 172n49