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First Things
Books in Review
On Looking into the Abyss
Copyright
(c) 1994 First Things 45 (August/September 1994)
History and the Moral Imagination
On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society.
By Gertrude Himmelfarb. Knopf. 192 pp. $23.
Reviewed by J. Bottum
"Ideas," wrote the Victorian and Roman Catholic historian
Lord Acton, "have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity
of their own, in which men play the part of godfathers and godmothers more
than that of legitimate parents." Gertrude Himmelfarb has found repeated
occasion over the years to quote Acton's words, for they assign to ideas
the untimely logic and the illogical timeliness that are both required
for the intellectual history Professor Himmelfarb practices so well.
There is an old-fashioned sort of scholarship that studies ideas primarily
as logical. "Philosophy consists in the concepts of philosophers,
taken in the naked, impersonal necessity of both their contents and their
relations," Etienne Gilson declares in The Unity of Philosophical
Experience (a book whose title betrays on several counts just how old-fashioned
it has become). "The history of these concepts and of their relationships
is the history of philosophy itself." And there is another sort of
scholarship, only recently become old-fashioned, that studies ideas primarily
as temporal their contents predetermined by their presence at a moment
in the history of something transhistorical: the Spirit of Freedom, Rationality,
and Self- Consciousness, according to Hegel, or the economic class struggle,
according to Marx. Ideas as Lord Acton describes them, however, have both
an internal logic and an external timeliness, a content that is
independent of time (though its consequences unfold in time) and
an appearance at a particular moment in time for good historical reasons.
The job of the intellectual historian is to explore the intersection of
logic and time to explore, in Professor Himmelfarb's case, a Victorian
history in which Mill, Carlyle, Darwin, Newman, Arnold, and George Eliot
are neither timeless gods delivering ideas as Zeus delivered Athena nor
mindless puppets of history, but serious thinkers of serious purpose whose
lives and times naturally suggested topics for their thought and whose
influential thought itself constitutes an important part of history.
Postmodernist history, however, refuses to grant the reality of either
logic or time, though it does perhaps grant that history contains their
intersection. History for the postmodernists is a fiction of order, an
imposition of narrative and causal sequence on a set of historical documents
the interpretation of which is complicated by the fact that at a certain
point (somewhere around the Enlightenment, in our old- fashioned way of
dating) the documents begin to betray an awareness of themselves as historical.
History for the postmodernist is a novel by historians in which, three-quarters
of the way through, the characters discover they are characters in a novel.
That the single truth of manifold truthlessness had already been expressed
so often and so well would probably silence historians in a world in which
postmodernism had triumphed. Before that day of triumph, however, postmodernism
offers historians rewarding opportunities to shock and offend (without
risking the usual consequences of shocking and offending) by presenting
the histories of blasphemy, horror, insanity, silence, censorship, murder,
oppression, rape the darkness and the meanness that was always, for our
sins, present in the world. An interest in these histories is the origin
of the common cause made with postmodernism by feminist historians, who
at least (whatever one thinks of their political aims and historical techniques)
believe they have a moral responsibility to reclaim the neglected memory
of women oppressed in the past. Postmodernist historians can claim no such
responsibility; at last, they can only exploit the history of the neglected
and oppressed in order to disrupt any claim to historical understanding.
This immorality of deconstructive postmodernism is finally what concerns
Professor Himmelfarb in the opening and concluding essays of On Looking
into the Abyss. Her writing is charged with a moral sense that has
become weightier and more at the center of her thought since her Victorian
Minds in 1968'a gravitas more appropriate to her later years, as she
observes. The seven essays in On Looking into the Abyss were written
for various occasions, and their unity comes not so much from their similar
themes as from their similar moral weight. The book takes up several topics:
academic postmodernism; the relation of Hegel and the young Marx to the
collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe; Mill's "One Very
Simple Principle" in On Liberty (a text to which Professor
Himmelfarb has turned many times); "The Dark and Bloody Crossroads"
where nationalism and religion continue to meet despite Francis Fukuyama's
recent proclamation of the "End of History"; the disappearance
of footnotes in historical writing. But underlying them all is Professor
Himmelfarb's concern with ideas in history and our ability to learn from
them. Again and again, the essays appeal to three "notes" (as
John Henry Newman might have called them) of her faith in the importance
of history: a confidence in the possibility of the moral imagination; a
certainty in the meaningfulness of the Holocaust; and a belief in the small
but hard-won virtues of professionalism in the discipline of history.
In the French Revolution's "empire of light and reason,"
Edmund Burke complained, "all the decent drapery of life is to be
rudely torn off." "All the super-added ideas, furnished from
the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding
ratifies" are to be discarded. Burke's clothing metaphor is exact:
clothes, like morals, are super-added which is to say that morals, like
clothes, would be fripperies were it always light and warm. But we live
instead where it is too often cold and dark; beyond the French Revolution
Napoleon waits, as beyond the Russian Revolution Stalin waits. The "moral
imagination," a contemplation of feeling by an understanding accustomed
to consider actions in moral terms, Burke thinks to be our best protection
against tyranny.
Of course, the problem with moral imagination, as Professor Himmelfarb
observes, is that it takes hard work. "How the world is managed, and
why it was created, I cannot tell," A. E. Housman once gloomily wrote
(about minor errors in the editing of Latin manuscripts), "but it
is no feather-bed for the repose of sluggards." A morality derived
entirely from feeling the emotivism, for instance, that the Bloomsbury
Group thought they found in G. E. Moore makes judgment an easy matter of
aesthetic intuitions too much thought will only spoil. And a morality derived
entirely from reason the socialist ethics, for instance, the English Marxists
held in the 1930s'makes judgment an easy matter of asserting the need to
reform the whole society according to some rational principle. But a morality
based on the moral imagination requires both feeling and reason and long
practice in using them to form and act upon judgments.
This sort of moral art cannot be taught, though it can be learned.
In her essay "Of Heroes, Villains, and Valets," Professor Himmelfarb
examines recent biographers' disdain for public life. We "contemplate
with pleasure," the pre-Victorian lyricist Thomas Moore said of his
biography of Byron, "a great mind in its undress." Believing
we can see the real motives of public actors more clearly in their private
behavior, Lytton Strachey mocked the eminent Victorians with details from
their private lives. But it never occurred to either Moore or Strachey
that public life was not somehow the reason for biography. Recent biographers,
however, seem to deny the importance or even the reality of public life.
If biographies of the famous are still being written, Professor Himmelfarb
pointed out in her earlier Marriage and Morals among the Victorians,
it is not because biographers believe in public life but simply because
they have so much more material about the famous.
The denial of public life is a denial of heroes and villains, and the
denial of heroes and villains makes the moral imagination Professor Himmelfarb
demands impossible to learn. The dilemma of artistic practice is that the
apprentice is required at that initial moment in which he lacks all knowledge
in his chosen art to choose a master from whom to learn. By denying the
public stage on which historical heroes and villains appear, we deny any
chance for the ethical apprentice to learn the high-minded art of moral
judgment from the models of history. A proper view of history, H. G. Wells
claimed, would see Napoleon as a "cockerel on a dunghill" which
means Napoleon teaches nothing distinct from what Wells thought every public
actor teaches: the vanity of public actors.
Professor Himmelfarb draws the title of On Looking into the Abyss
from an essay by Lionel Trilling, from whose example she learned that moral
seriousness is the proper attitude of the critic and in whose essays she
finds the moral imagination at work. Called upon to teach modern literature,
Trilling discovered to his dismay that his students appreciated modernist
writing. "I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully
and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted
them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: "Interesting,
am I not?" The situation has worsened, Professor Himmelfarb observes,
for Trilling's students were at least reading modern literature. Students
today "are all too often reading books about how to read books."
The theory of literature has replaced literature with itself as the subject
of its own theory. Professor Himmelfarb is sharp, witty, and relentless
in denouncing the tail-swallowing of postmodernist theory and its further
domestication of the Abyss.
The glibness with which postmodernists accept the failure of beauty,
truth, and value stands in strange contrast to the feelings of the modernists
who first observed it. There is something deeply immoral in the pragmatic
amorality of the American deconstructionist Richard Rorty's "light-minded
estheticism" something much more immoral than Nietzsche's deliberate
anti-morality. "I myself, the one who has most single-handedly made
this tragedy of tragedies," Nietzsche declares in The Gay Science,
"I myself have killed all gods in the fourth act out of morality!
What should now become of the fifth act! Whence now take the tragic solution!
Must I begin to think about a comic solution?" But Nietzsche's laughter
originates in outrage, and is directed as much at himself as at others.
In the section of Twilight of the Idols entitled "Skirmishes
of an Untimely Man" (which may have suggested to Professor Himmelfarb
the "Untimely Thoughts" of her book's subtitle), Nietzsche announces
his disgust with the Victorians' Carlyle, Mill, "little moralistic
females a la Eliot" for their humorless failure to see they could
not preserve Christian morality without the Christian God. After the death
of God announced in The Gay Science, comedy alone remains; but it
is a sick comedy, and its sickness calls forth Zarathustra's mockery in
Nietzsche's next book. "And still laughed at the master who does not
laugh at himself," Nietzsche put in the epigraph to the second edition
of The Gay Science (published after Thus Spake Zarathustra).
After Nietzsche's mad, gigantic laughter, Rorty's impulse to "recontextualize
just for the hell of it" and to "josh" us out of serious
morality seems small and unrelated to the broad, open, Whitmanesque American
virtues it tries to evoke with its self-consciously hayseed colloquialisms.
It seems all the more immoral for its glib acceptance of Nietzsche's godless
Abyss.
Elizabeth Anscombe once suggested that somewhere between Mill and G.
E. Moore (probably, she says, with Sidgwick) a strange skew occurred, after
which no English academic moral philosopher can explain why "it cannot
be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that
someone who thinks otherwise is in error." In the same way that Anscombe
uses the murder of innocents as a touchstone by which to determine whether
there is something wrong with a moral philosophy, Professor Himmelfarb
uses the Holocaust to determine whether there is something wrong with a
method of doing history. If a history devoted to "fictive" techniques
and liberated from "fact fetishism" must twist and turn and violate
its own theory to distinguish the wrongness of the Holocaust the
Holocaust as wrong in particular and not as wrong simply by the wrongness
supposed to be present in all political events we must reject its way of
doing history.
Postmodernist philosophy is so truth-denying that it is hard to believe
any historians actually hold it. The dating of historical events is deconstructed,
Dominick LaCapra claims in a recent book on intellectual history, when
we recognize its dependence on the "convenient fiction" of a
dating system centered on the Birth of Christ. Professor Himmelfarb's response
of the unhistorical nature of dating French history with the Jewish calendar
misses just how radical is the epistemology of Jacques Derrida on which
LaCapra relies. The fact that there are infinitely many systems we could
use to measure or locate a thing in space and time does not prove the arbitrariness
of the thing's measure or location, but only of the choice of system to
express it. LaCapra's argument is persuasive only if the measured thing
has measure merely by virtue of our measuring it, location in time merely
by virtue of our dating it; it is persuasive, in other words, only if past
events have no reality independent of historians.
We really have a duty to maintain the reality of the past. In "Where
Have All the Footnotes Gone?"' a paean to Kate Turabian and the funniest
essay in On Looking into the Abyss' Professor Himmelfarb defines
professionalism in history as an act of faith in the discipline, respect
toward the reader, and duty to past lives. The hermeneutic circle consists
for historians in the fact that our present interests and assumptions,
the concern with which leads us to investigate the past, are precisely
what constitute our difference from that past. There is no easy escape
from this circle, neither in denying the originating importance of the
present nor in denying the real otherness of the past. Throughout her essays,
Professor Himmelfarb sees the exercise of the professional virtues as marking
the humility of the serious historian's humility that requires the rejection
of both the arrogant claim to recapture the past as it actually was and
the arrogant claim of the unreality of the past.
Jorge Luis Borges, whose strange, logic-game fiction contains the most
disturbing philosophical indictment of traditional history (just as his
involvement with totalitarianism, like Heidegger's and Paul de Man's, contains
a moral indictment of the denial of traditional history), entitles a brief
essay "The Modesty of History." Historians have always known,
Professor Himmelfarb writes, "what postmodernism professes to have
just discovered "that historical study is vulnerable to" the
fallibility and deficiency of the historical record; the fallibility and
selectivity inherent in the writing of history; and the fallibility and
subjectivity of the historian." Professor Himmelfarb herself has always
known it. Victorian England is now "a civilization lost beyond recovery,"
she wrote in her first book, published in 1952. We must suppose "a
past that was as complicated and varied as we know the present to be,"
she wrote in her fifth, published in 1984. But this gives no reason to
abandon the hard work of professional history. In On Looking into the
Abyss, her ninth book, Professor Himmelfarb demonstrates once again
the possibilities offered to the historian with moral imagination and a
modesty before the reality of the past.
J. Bottum contributed "Christians
and Postmoderns" to our February 1994 issue.
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Updated: 13 July 2002
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