History, Freedom, and Utopia

...In broaching the subject about which I should like to converse with you, I should immediately point out that when I say "your opinion" I refer to those views you dwelled on recently...

...and it loses all its rights in the unlimited horizon of "historical perspectives" and "total" demands...

...This spring, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich will issue a selection of Chiaromonte's political and literary essays, entitled The Worm of Consciousness and Other Essays and edited by his wife Miriam Chiaromonte, copyright n 1976 by Miriam Chiaromonte...

...Be that as it may, I feel that the legend is indicative...

...He might not have attached any further significance to his act than that of paying his dues, in all good faith, to the contemporary political situation, confused as it may be...

...Nor does it prove that the workers of Detroit and Pittsburgh are Marxists without realizing it...

...We can produce real and sweeping changes, certainly, but we cannot be sure that the ultimate result will satisfy anything outside mere theory and abstract reasoning...

...There is the proletarian individual and there are proletarians, but the proletarian "class" is an abstraction...

...The "materialist" and "critical" revolutionary might go still further...

...after the Liberation without letting himself be recruited under the banner of a "cause...

...The more ambitious the plan, the more true this is...

...It is even doubtful that important social changes, the few periods of "progress" or of "happiness" we may experience, have been brought about by a conscious and deliberate effort of the will, and it is absolutely certain that they have not been produced by the political will of a party or a class...

...It also has a *An "adjustment"—the great principle of our times...

...All we can ask of him is to act truly (and effectively), in the bounds of possibility, to bring about the change he desires...

...And, indeed, what Marxist and Saint Simonian socialism requires is a "rational" adaptation* of man to industrial society, far more than the transformation of the entire structure...

...When we talk of human life, what will be (or must be) always entails the essential modification, if men want it to be...

...In The Republic a certain order of ideas obeys its own laws of necessity and gives itself a completed form perfectly (or almost perfectly) free from any other concern...

...This mystical appeal to `facts" beyond the limits of ordered discussion and "appearances" seems to me to be at the root of modern fanaticism, whether Communist or Fascist, pragmatic or "realist...

...Sartre's maxim "Man is responsible for the whole of humanity" strikes me as being the formula par excellence of modern sophistry and false mo197 rality...

...The whole Marxist critique of human attitudes is rooted in such a mentality, and this is one of the reasons I reject it so radically...

...It is an "appearance," a fact, not the manifestation of a hidden idea, and we can understand it only by examining it in relation to other "appearances...

...History, in short, is a sort of theoria...

...Myths, dreams, religions, superstitions, fear, cowardice, vices, and weaknesses have no less reality or importance than any "final explanation," or even than any obvious common-sense truth...

...On the contrary, faith can perfectly well be strengthened by it and established once and for all...

...To my mind this proves that a faith which started off by being secular and rational has been transformed into a religious faith and transported into the sphere of the Unchangeable and the Timeless, to which it should, by definition, be totally alien...

...All I am saying is that such a will has only a conceptual connection (and not a concrete and empirically demonstrable one) with the human reality from which it claims to originate and by way of which it justifies itself...

...But this does not mean that we can derive the one from the others or, still less, reduce the one to the others...

...But even in a nontyrannical state the same good citizen can easily be convicted of lack of perspicacity if he avoids (or fails) to take into account the full extent of social evils and to attack their "causes...

...The piece from this volume that appears below, with permission of the publishers, was written in 1951 (in Coletta, Livorno) as a letter to a friend, Andrea Caffi...

...The sophism of the pragmatist would prompt the reply that if we do not side with the proletariat or the democrats or some other ideological category we do nothing at all...

...Let me add that Ivan Karamazov's exclamation that the mere fact of hearing a child cry would be sufficiently outrageous to induce him to return his entrance ticket to Heaven has always struck me as both histrionic and incomprehensible—for I cannot imagine *Andrey Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky (1883-1954), the chief state prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of 1934 to 1938...

...In order to prefer the "final explanation" to "appearances," we must rely on authority and not on knowledge...

...For no man can remain completely outside it, being, after all, one among many others and not a privileged being destined never to make a mistake...

...No "reality" would be more monstrous or grotesque than the practical realization of Plato's Republic...

...To start with, the illusions men have about their "real" situation have no less "reality" (practical consequences) than their "final explanations," for in society we are faced with men's real errors no less than with their true opinions...

...by history...

...What disturbs me is the contemptuous contrast of the "final explanation" and "appearances...

...Believing, as I do, that such attitudes of mind are wrong, I am prepared to propose that we adopt as a principle the notion that "truth cannot be the daughter of time" and, consequently, that we make it a rule to exclude the "temporal" element from every judgment about what is true and what is false, what is good and what is bad, what is just and what is unjust, what is useful and what is useless...

...All we need to do is to protect an idea, be it true or false, with the hard shell of a system and to provide an alibi for our acts by placing ourselves symbolically on the "right side" (for example, that of the "oppressed" and of the "sense of history...

...The first explanation would be that the support of these organizations by the workers is genuine, real, and motivated by the interests and struggle of their class (which would mean that these same workers accept and support the most oppressive party and regime of modern times and, purely out of social resentment, pay little heed to the proletariat's mission to fight for freedom...

...The ideal statesman can decide to en198 NICOLA CHIAROMONTE courage reasonable inclinations and impose measures demanded by common sense...

...A certain "historical" mentality (not a historian's mentality) endows it with invaluable support, for it is by "temporalizing" every phenomenon and every argument that it is possible to maintain that what "seems" bad today will prove good tomorrow— or that a certain thought that seems to be correct "in reality" expresses only a momentary situation (or a particular interest...

...I see it as quite the contrary: as the statement of the dogmatic thinker who has opposed the ("apparent") reality of "appearances" with the "superior" truth of the system he has constructed...

...But it is also "apparent" that does not always lead him to subscribe to the notion of the "mission of the proletariat...

...This world is given to us in its entirety and forever—with its limits...

...Though he did not think of himself as a socialist, at least not in any doctrinal sense, he was a friend of Dissent and its editors until his death in 1972, honoring our pages with some of his most provocative essays...

...I do not see this as the calm assertion of the scientist who accounts for "appearances" by stating the truth that he has discovered and that he upholds against popular opinions or current ideas...

...I suggest that we could adopt such an attitude without any fear of forgetting the ephemeral, temporal, and eminently relative nature of each of our acts...

...In fact, this is a form of skepticism, but a very special form of skepticism, for it is counterbalanced by the obstinate belief that the final answer to every question will be provided by the "facts" themselves...

...The reasons are not merely polemical...

...I feel that there are two orders of ideas that prevent us from seeing a social fact as it is...

...But the duties of the "good citizen" end there...

...That we are the characters of a history is equally certain...

...it to have any such possible effect...

...I shall not trouble to defend the "popular" economist, who, as far as I know, could easily be wrong (or right...

...Far from it...

...This is to say that the "final explanation" of the workers' condition by the struggle between capitalism and proletariat is, in many cases, contrary to appearances...

...However intellectually satisfying it may be, the attitude that stresses the necessity of attacking "final" causes in the struggle for justice has a corollary that makes us pause...

...The "good citizen" I have in mind could perfectly well have fought in the Resistance out of a horror of Nazism, he could perfectly well have voted Socialist or even Communist (why not...

...Nicola Chiaromonte was one of the most admirable intellectual figures of our time-a man of complete honesty, a writer utterly committed to freedom, and radiant in his spiritual strength and independence...

...I have nothing against Utopias...

...On the other hand, the fact that American trade unions today have agreed to act within the existing organization of the state proves absolutely nothing with regard to the American workers' partiality for Standard Oil and the ideology of the National Association of Manufacturers...

...Between the two domains there is not only human liberty but also the contingency of the facts—their ambiguity, their "polyvalence," and their individuality, in other words their specific character...

...It would, of course, be wrong to say that this logical error damages faith...

...It contradicts both the experience we have of the nature of reality and the experience we have of the essence peculiar to every "ideal" construction...

...Beyond that, there are simply mental attitudes...

...That our being is temporal is a basic fact...

...Political regimes, attempts at action, present situations, social upheavals—there is nothing, not even the individual's thoughts and feelings (cf...

...The truth is, far from longing for Heaven, I simply want to see things as they are (and not as they are interpreted by me...

...It is as though he were proud of bowing before appearances and of regarding them as the final explanation...

...Your HISTORY, FREEDOM, AND UTOPIA 203...

...We might as well say that this will is Utopian, directed to an idea existing exclusively in the minds of those who invented it and who make it the object of an active faith...

...In other words, he would prefer people to think he has a hard heart and a "metaphysical" mind, rather than pretending that he believes in something he does not believe in simply out of fear of some ideological Jehovah...

...I am not saying that what I call the "pragmatic" Utopia has no historical justification...

...And yet there is no more majestic a monument to the human longing for justice and a city pervaded by reason...

...But if I give the same man the abolition of capitalism or the Socialist state, I no longer know what he will have...

...or, at least, all he can see in the present state of things is the negation (the absence) of his Idea, and he therefore tries more or less hopefully to destroy this negation...

...Reality," he believes, always remains the same...

...It is the theory (or the plan, say, to abolish private property) that is at stake, not the real happiness of the multitudes in whose name we are acting...

...I do not mean this or that view (with which I might even agree) on the present state of society, social justice, etc., so much as the general position you seemed to hold with a certain tenacity during the conversations we had lately and which, through my fault, were all too frequently interrupted...

...I can say more: I regard it as unfair to try to force me into the dilemma of either proclaiming that I endorse the total abolition of social oppression and all its causes or viewing myself as guilty of acts of oppression—and, more generally of social evils—for which I am not responsible and which I am far from sustaining or countenancing in my conscience and in my behavior...

...The idea of an "unconscious" or "objective" responsibility seems to me to be utterly unenlightened and to lead nowhere but to abusive criticism...

...I mean the awareness of the sacred boundary (the adjective is not exaggerated) that separates ideas from facts...

...Which allows me to say without seeming insolent that history as a science (and a love of the past which continues in the present) is useless—and this ought to be its glory...

...I do not scorn history as a discipline and as 200 NICOLA CHIAROMONTE knowledge of the past...

...Au...

...It expresses the baroque dissatisfaction with form, the idea that form is not enough and that it needs action, force, energy, movement...

...But the man convinced of being in possession of the "final explanation" will, in the long run, be exclusively concerned with eliminating the "appearances" that contradict him...

...Freud), which is not appraised in terms of an ulterior development that is more or less imaginary...

...It is a passion that, as Malraux pointed out, ends with the cinema, with the "dynamic" realism of phantoms flitting across the screen...

...It seems to me there are various ways of caring about the "public weal...

...Not long ago I came across the following quotation from Marx: The "popular" economist thinks he is making a great discovery when he dismisses the explanation of the "inner bond" by confidently saying that in appearance things are different...

...This seems to me to be proved, too, by the fact that the more or less murderous priests and fanatics who gain a hold in this domain acquire a strength by which they can keep in check for a long time "historical" factors, individual interests, common sense, and reason itself...

...The "passage to action" is entirely absent from such a construction, and if we ask "What real forces, what material means can we use to realize this Ideal State...

...It seems to me that common sense is closer to the Platonic Utopian than to the revolutionary, nihilistic, activistic Utopian...

...On the contrary, I respect it all the more because I am ignorant about it...

...2) a relativism, which claims to be absolute (and which seems rather fitful to me), respecting the order of ideas, that is, of propositions that we should consider true or false in the course of a discussion...

...From what is to what must be there is always a sudden leap, because of a transition from the domain of facts to the domain of the ideal (which we can also call "imaginary" or "unreal," if we like...

...What characterizes the human world is the impossibility of finding in it facts unaccompanied by an ideal image or an ideal image unsustained by facts...

...Moreover, when we talk about social reality and not about nature, the distinction between "appearances" and "reality" (not to mention the claim to possess the "final explanation") seems to me very dubious...

...In any case, I believe that the image of the "good citizen" is perfectly compatible with the attitude of the man who knows that the social reality surrounding him is very far from being "what it could be if men...

...Human existence, as we know, is uncertain, relative, transient...

...But it also seems to me to have HISTORY, FREEDOM, AND UTOPIA 199 another disadvantage: it debases and obscures our faculty of awareness and encourages a spirit not of revolt but of inertia...

...What we have then is the paradox of a faith based on the "event" over which the "event" has no control...

...The fanaticism I am talking about does not always assume a virulent form...

...We should, in short, consider only the phenomena, the facts and the individuals as they "appear" in the present and never as products of a "process" that prevents us from knowing what they are or what we should think of them, compelled as we are to judge them in function of the past and suspended toward the future or located in a present that is basically suspect, since it is transient...

...His philosopher-governors would turn into priests swollen with hypocrisy, and his guardians would be ruthless automata...

...that is, every criterion of just limit applicable within the established confines of human existence such as it is...

...He has the right to expect that no further demands be made on him...

...3) a dogmatism that, if not absolute, is at least fairly insistent about our moral duty to accept certain notions about the class struggle or private property, under pain of being classified with outcasts and monsters...

...Never before printed in America, it remains as fresh and pertinent as the day it was composed —I...

...But it remains a "statue of words" and not a "plan of action" or a "blueprint" to be carried out by the social machine...

...he has no programmatic love for the "proletariat" or hatred for the "bourgeoisie," but he expects each man to reveal in direct experience what we ought to think of him...

...The Republic is simply a model whose natural purpose is to inspire thoughts, not direct actions...

...If we were asked to account for the fact that the majority of the workers in France and Italy today belong to Stalinist organizations, we could choose between two "final explanations...

...It is evident that if we cease to regard a thought as such and look on it, instead, as a potential act, every single thought can be transformed into a "crime against humanity...

...The second explanation would be that their support is only apparent and artificial, that it is the result of a momentary mistake, which will be dispelled once the workers become aware of their true interests...

...Yet at that point the critic should also realize that we are leaving the realm of "sound empiricism" and what is "practical"—that is, what is possible in the more or less near future—in order to enter the domain of theories, of attitudes, and, finally, of intellectual speculation (if not pure imagination...

...He has a Utopia in his mind, and he has a longing for a reasonable and just society, but he knows that he can best express these two desires in his behavior toward his neighbors and in his words, that is, in his efforts to communicate to his fellow men his views on human existence, justice, honesty, and the like...

...He took part in the 1905 revolution in the ranks of the Mensheviks...

...H. My dear Andre,* If I have not written to you until today it is not out of laziness or forgetfulness, but because, after our frequent and somewhat inconclusive conversations, I felt I owed it to myself (and to you) to try to set forth, with what little order I can muster, the few reasons why I do not share your views on "revolution," "nihilism," and the duty of the "good citizen...

...Historical reasons put in an appearance only after the event...

...I am all in favor of Utopias—but Utopias that say what they are: ideal forms and models...

...it is this sublunary world which nothing in our experience shows us to be transformable, but which everything shows to be simply changing...

...But this is not necessarily true...

...It is not a notion on which we can base valid arguments...

...I am not saying (far from it) that you are guilty of such excesses...

...So it becomes easy to cut short any argument or even to discredit any objection by calling it "metaphysical" or an "intellectual" subtlety...

...I do not see how we can reproach such an individual for not having gone far enough, for not having fought for the radical abolition of all forms of injustice or (and this comes to the same thing) of their first cause...

...Our will can change very little, since we know very little about the roots of social change...

...To ask it to translate itself into action would be exactly the same thing as asking a statue to move...

...for if I say that the idea of a world without children crying seems to me tantamount to a world without any children at all, he is capable of replying that my vocation is that of child executioner...

...We should not deny a priori the possibility of their ever managing to create the Happy City...

...I simply mean that this sort of conclusion is inherent in a certain mentality that seems to me inappropriate: it appertains to church and state, not to free men...

...But the Republic is thought out in such a way that this kind of "realization" is inconceivable...

...But I am denying that it can satisfy the mind when the mind pauses and reflects upon the notions suggested to it, instead of allowing itself to be carried away by the romanticism of good intentions and the no less romantic idea of an "ideal" transfiguration of reality...

...it is dubious by definition...

...No, I am referring to "limit" in the radical sense of the word...

...To start with, there is the "public weal" of the citizen who, without bothering about "final explanations," finds that a certain injustice or form of oppression can and must be removed and who acts, with others, to eliminate it...

...For, still in accordance with the dictates of common sense, the "good citizen" believes in the reality of human consciousness...

...But it remains a pure possibility, an idea that is not self-contradictory and therefore cannot be rejected (unless we indulge in "realistic" comparisons with experience...

...It serves no purpose except to astonish us and make us aware of our smallness—it does this more directly than astronomy and other sciences, but in the same way...

...The attitude in question fails to take this into account...

...I don't know whether the modern passion for the fact and for "historical" action developed at the time when the famous anecdote was told about Michelangelo losing his temper with his statue of Moses because it wouldn't speak and striking it with a hammer...

...They appear to the historian, in whose eyes the present enjoys no privilege whatsoever (and, indeed, it is impossible to write the history of the present...

...It is because he has no preconceived contempt for men, nor any love for "humanity" in general, that the imaginary, but by no means implausible, "good citizen" does not consider men according to sociological classifications...

...For "appearances" bring to mind the political tactics by which the Communist parties gained control of the workers' organizations and the fact (which does not need to be explained by "final" causes) that these same parties do what they do for purely political motives (at least, to the extent that the "superior" political interests they serve allow them to do so), in order to retain the power they have thus acquired...

...Throughout this long discourse, what I have been trying to arrive at is the question of "limit...

...But in the "historicist" mentality history becomes what America is for the savages of Pascarella or prose for the bourgeois gentilhomme...

...The second order of ideas that strikes me as being a source of confusion, not to say of mental paralysis, leads to the widespread habit among our contemporaries of judging every problem concerning social reality in terms of history...

...Now, it does, indeed, seem that "appearances"—if we really can credit them—contradict both explanations, or, to be more exact, do not confirm either of them...

...Not so much in the sense of "knowing where to stop...

...An appreciation of Chiaromonte by Joseph Frank appeared in our Winter 1974 issue...

...And this makes the image of the germ totally misleading...

...We can add that if he is born in a dark and violent period of wars of religion or of ideology, he does not feel that the respect we owe to "the witnesses who die for their opinions" also demands that we share their beliefs...

...the only possible answer is "the human soul," or, in the words of Socrates, "the philosopherkings and the king-philosophers," which amounts to the same thing...

...The confusion of the "moral" with the "intellectual" seems to me especially mortifying...

...On the contrary, I am convinced that in this "nowhere" HISTORY, FREEDOM, AND UTOPIA 201 land lies the very source of human liberty, creativity, and spontaneity...

...On the other hand, it is obvious that the intellectual position of such a man is not very strong, especially if he tries to bring about a change in a tyrannical regime without challenging the political system itself...

...I am prepared to admit that hunger and the yearning for justice (or the resentment of injustice and privilege) are strong enough and legitimate enough passions to warrant harsh action and that they can turn into an impersonal will, which is necessarily insensitive to individual cases (for in actual fact this will to justice is a will of the state, and it ought really to be a pursuit of law...

...As far as I can *Andrea Caffi (1887-1955) was an Italian writer born in Russia...

...Judging" is perhaps too strong a word, for what we are actually faced with is a suspension of judgment about the future...

...The analogy between social life and plant life seems false to me...

...A volume of his writings, A Critique of Violence, with an introduction by Chiaromonte, was published in New York by Bobbs-Merrill in 1970...

...For I believe that no present judgment, no living attitude, no real action, is motivated by "historical" reasons...

...However, as a basis for our thoughts and our "existential" activities, historical knowledge seems to me to be of secondary importance and altogether inoperative...

...It can hardly be otherwise...

...He believes, too, that real transformations have to do with what men believe about reality, not with a mythical objective reality...

...In the first order, it is contended that what will be (or must be, more or less necessarily) is a seed contained in what is, and all we have to do to discover it is to go beyond appearances...

...understood," and who longs for a state of things very different from the present but refuses to believe (and couldn't believe even if he wanted to) that the problem could be solved by siding with a particular group or class...

...For it is obvious that if there are social laws analogous to natural ones we must come to terms with them, obey them, and adapt ourselves to them...

...For the unreal is undoubtedly a dimension of consciousness and of human existence, and it has an effectiveness of its own...

...I don't know whether or not common sense is a good guide in philosophy, but when it comes to matters 202 NICOLA CHIAROMONTE concerning collective life I tend to think it has unquestionable rights...

...It is only by excluding all awareness of psychological reality that the individual and individuals can be made to fit into a type or a class...

...gentle, nostalgic form, which consists in regarding the delays imposed by historical circumstances on the achievement of a goal deemed desirable or necessary as temporary refutations, which do not affect the essential part of the thesis—as deviations, after which history will resume its normal course...

...It is "apparent," for example, that the worker (or any other economically handicapped individual) is naturally inclined to demand the improvement of his condition...

...Finally, what I demand is the right to regard as false—or, rather, as equivocal—such notions as that of the class struggle, without being accused of being a tool of capitalism...

...What distresses me most about this triple combination is the moralism—or, rather, the substitution of the moral duty to take a particular side for the intellectual duty to accept only notions that are unequivocal...

...the ideologist consumed by the lust for power can only stop at the very end, and it is foolish to want to teach him a lesson...

...For if I give the man who can afford to buy only bread the possibility of buying cheese, I can be reasonably sure that he will be able to satisfy his appetite slightly better...

...In reality, however we formulate it, what will be always signifies what must be—a moral imperative that goes way beyond all previous reality...

...The "pure" ideologist, on the other hand, can never stop, for he expects from the future the fulfillment of an Idea...

...define it, this position seemed to me to consist of a combination of three elements: (1) philanthropy, that is to say, the insistence on the necessity of siding with those people whom the present organization (or disorganization) of society keeps in a state of social inferiority or economic oppression...

...Any idea can be invalidated if one considers all the possible reasons supporting it, just as any act can be made to appear criminal if one projects all the possible consequences deriving from it...

...Of course, men deserve to be trusted...

...This seems to me to be the case with every authentic idea, even ideas about society...

...These considerations do not appear to me to be irrelevant to the question of the "public weal" and justice in society...

...For the principle of tyranny is that only what is considered good by the authorities in power can be regarded as legitimate, the authorities remaining the sole arbiters of what is good," in other words, what is useful...

...He is partial enough to "appearances," alert enough to the complexity and diversity of facts, to think we should believe only in what appears to be true...

...But that procedure has no meaning —or, rather, it is the metaphysics of Vyshinsky.* At this point, moreover, the remedy is easy...

...And the most contradictory notion of all is that of an idea which is "realized...