What doyouthink?
Rate this book
Les Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg#1-2
St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence
Written and set on the banks of the Neva, St Petersburg Dialogues is a startlingly relevant analysis of the human prospect in the twenty-first century. As the literary critic George Steiner has remarked, "the age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine and ubiquitous torture... nuclear threat, the ecological laying waste of our planet, the leap of endemic, possibly pandemic, illness out of the very matrix of libertarian progress" is exactly what Joseph de Maistre foretold. In the Dialogues Maistre addressed a number of topics that are discussed briefly or not at all in his other works already available in English. These include an apologetic for traditional Christian beliefs about providence, reflections on the social role of the public executioner and the "divinity" of war, a critique of John Locke's sensationalist psychology, meditations on prayer and sacrifice, and a mini-course on "illuminism." The literary form is that of the "philosophical conversation" – one that allowed Maistre to be deliberately provocative and to indulge his taste for paradox, a "methodical extravagance" that he judged particularly appropriate for the eighteenth-century salon. Translator and editor Richard Lebrun provides a full scholarly edition of this classic work, complete with an introduction, chronology, critical bibliography, and generous explanatory notes. The Dialogues will be of interest to scholars of literary history as well as the history of ideas.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1821
About the author
Joseph de Maistre
487books174followersA Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, writer, and philosopher. He was the most influential spokesmen for hierarchical political systems in the period immediately following the French Revolution of 1789. Despite his close personal and intellectual ties to France, Maistre remained throughout his life a loyal subject of the King of Sardinia, whom he served as member of the Savoy Senate (1787–1792), ambassador to Russia (1803–1817), and minister of state to the court in Turin (1817–1821).
Maistre argued for the restoration of hereditary monarchy, which he regarded as a divinely sanctioned institution, and for the indirect authority of the Pope over temporal matters. According to Maistre, only governments founded upon a Christian constitution, implicit in the customs and institutions of all European societies but especially in Catholic European monarchies, could avoid the disorder and bloodshed that followed the implementation of rationalist political programs, such as the 1789 revolution. Maistre was an enthusiastic proponent of the principle of hierarchical authority, which the Revolution sought to destroy; he extolled the monarchy, he exalted the privileges of the papacy, and he glorified God's providence.
Xavier de Maistrewas his younger brother.
Maistre argued for the restoration of hereditary monarchy, which he regarded as a divinely sanctioned institution, and for the indirect authority of the Pope over temporal matters. According to Maistre, only governments founded upon a Christian constitution, implicit in the customs and institutions of all European societies but especially in Catholic European monarchies, could avoid the disorder and bloodshed that followed the implementation of rationalist political programs, such as the 1789 revolution. Maistre was an enthusiastic proponent of the principle of hierarchical authority, which the Revolution sought to destroy; he extolled the monarchy, he exalted the privileges of the papacy, and he glorified God's providence.
Xavier de Maistrewas his younger brother.
Ratings&Reviews
Friends&Following
Create a free accountto discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
Read
August 14, 2024I do not know how representative these Petersburg dialogues are for the work of the conservative French writer Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821). I have the impression that his core themes are somewhat less discussed here and that he limits himself to loose shots. But perhaps that is due to the form. De Maistre has a count, a senator and a young nobleman in the then Russian capital of St. Petersburg (where de Maistre himself was stationed as a diplomat) have various conversations about all kinds of weighty themes, such as divine versus human justice, the usefulness of prayer and sacrifices, etc. Perhaps ‘conversations’ is not the right term, because each of the participants gives a shorter or longer speech, with the consequence that the topics sometimes get mixed up. Because of this fragmentation, consistency is rather hard to find.
What is striking are the recurring fierce attacks on Francis Bacon, John Locke and David Hume. These are not the classical Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, but they do belong to a tradition of a rationalistic-empiristic approach that was partly the breeding ground for the Enlightenment. Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau regularly gets slapped in the face, and that's remarkable because Rousseau partly distanced himself from Enlightenment. De Maistre's criticism (or at least of the characters he uses) almost always comes down to the same thing: science and empiricism in general are misleading at the very least, because they can never reveal the ultimate cause of phenomena (which, of course, can only be God). According to de Maistre, science and empiricist rationalism also assume too much that natural laws are unchangeable, causing them to ridiculize praying and rituals.
Now, although this is somewhat of a semantic discussion, de Maistre does touch some ground with his criticism of the universalistic ambitions and deterministic slant of science and empiricism, as is also recognized in contemporary philosophy. And so his pleas to see the world as a complex, unfathomable reality certainly is not lost on our time neither. Only with him, and with all reactionary movements that followed him, that is sufficient reason to simply push science and empiricism aside and swear by a vague form of religiosity (I have to concede that his argument on this in this book are somewhat ambiguous). And that is of course more than a bridge too far. I have the impression that de Maistre did like a bit of provocation. In any case, this book is quite interesting for those who like a Platonic dialogue/monologue, and a critical stand towards rationalism. But because of the fragmented and jerky argumentation style, this is quite tough reading.
What is striking are the recurring fierce attacks on Francis Bacon, John Locke and David Hume. These are not the classical Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, but they do belong to a tradition of a rationalistic-empiristic approach that was partly the breeding ground for the Enlightenment. Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau regularly gets slapped in the face, and that's remarkable because Rousseau partly distanced himself from Enlightenment. De Maistre's criticism (or at least of the characters he uses) almost always comes down to the same thing: science and empiricism in general are misleading at the very least, because they can never reveal the ultimate cause of phenomena (which, of course, can only be God). According to de Maistre, science and empiricist rationalism also assume too much that natural laws are unchangeable, causing them to ridiculize praying and rituals.
Now, although this is somewhat of a semantic discussion, de Maistre does touch some ground with his criticism of the universalistic ambitions and deterministic slant of science and empiricism, as is also recognized in contemporary philosophy. And so his pleas to see the world as a complex, unfathomable reality certainly is not lost on our time neither. Only with him, and with all reactionary movements that followed him, that is sufficient reason to simply push science and empiricism aside and swear by a vague form of religiosity (I have to concede that his argument on this in this book are somewhat ambiguous). And that is of course more than a bridge too far. I have the impression that de Maistre did like a bit of provocation. In any case, this book is quite interesting for those who like a Platonic dialogue/monologue, and a critical stand towards rationalism. But because of the fragmented and jerky argumentation style, this is quite tough reading.
December 15, 2017
The one book you'll ever need to read if you wish to understand the concept(s) of monarchical government.
Take notes inside the book or on a separate pad so you can keep up with the dialogue. De Maistre speaks through each character in his own way and at random points, but for the most part it is the Senator and the Count who hold his closest opinions.
Dark, brutal, religious but restrained. What I love about JDM is that he doesn't preach a sermon, instead he delivers an imposing three-pronged essay on the fundamental constructs of the best system of government to ever rule over humankind. Hands down, democracy doesn't stand a chance as long as this book is alive. Read.This.Book.
-bb
Take notes inside the book or on a separate pad so you can keep up with the dialogue. De Maistre speaks through each character in his own way and at random points, but for the most part it is the Senator and the Count who hold his closest opinions.
Dark, brutal, religious but restrained. What I love about JDM is that he doesn't preach a sermon, instead he delivers an imposing three-pronged essay on the fundamental constructs of the best system of government to ever rule over humankind. Hands down, democracy doesn't stand a chance as long as this book is alive. Read.This.Book.
-bb
July 28, 2022
Insofar as Joseph de Maistre has a reputation in the anglophone world, it’s as the arch-orthodox monarchist conservative. No sentimentality, no Whig background like his British opposite number, Burke: this is the dude who wrote a rhapsody to the hangman as the basis of the social order. Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay about Maistre as forerunner of fascism (Maistre might be “fash” but not like that); Hari Kunzru had his altright TV writer villain insert Maistre speeches into the mouth of his renegade cop character. An air of limpid, cultured menace — think Hannibal Lecter — lingers around him.
Well, here’s a weird one- this supposed arch-orthodox, who was, by all accounts, a sincere and fervent Catholic, was also an “Illuminist” and a member of a Masonic lodge. This is an odd one. Catholic reactionaries aren’t supposed to like the Masons. In the anglophone Protestant countries, that’s mostly down to Masonic anti-Catholicism- I remember older Catholic relatives (not reactionaries) telling me if I had to join a fraternal order, it should be the Knights of Columbus, not the Masons. In continental Europe it’s a little more complicated. By and large, French reactionary culture has despised the Masons and the Enlightenment culture it was tied to. The Vichy regime had to be asked by the Nazis to round up French Jews, but they went after the Masons all on their own. At the same time, you do get groups like the P2 Masonic lodge, which assisted neofascist coup attempts in Italy, and Maistre’s lifelong involvement with Masonry and other mystical strains that weren’t exactly Catholic. Some of Maistre’s works made their way to the Vatican’s naughty list, even as Catholic presses translated and published his works.
“Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg” was, I’ve read, the work Maistre was most proud of, his last statement. Beyond that hangman spiel, which comes from one of the early dialogues in this book, most of his work that gets circulated in academic circles is his earlier, more directly political stuff, regardless of what the man himself thought. This is probably in part because the dialogues here are… odd. Take the subtitle. “The temporal government of providence” – maybe it’s just grammatically awkward, and means “the way divine providence governs the affairs of time,” but as read in English, makes it sound like a time-bound governance system for the divine. That doesn’t make a lot of sense- as far as I can tell, one of the basic elements of divinity is that it’s not time-bound, not in the way human life is, at least.
That’s just the subtitle. The dialogues themselves are a discussion between three dudes: a young, somewhat naive but polite “Chevalier,” a somewhat sententious but right-headed older “Count,” and “the Senator,” and when he starts talking, The_Wisdom_Dispenser has logged on. The Senator is Maistre, explaining how despite how it all looks, God has it all in hand. But not in some easy peasant way! It’s not all rainbows and meeting your pets in heaven. It’s closer to a state of divine justice, everything working out according to God’s plan, in much the same way as the existence of the hangman, however repellent — because repellent! — holds up the social order, so does suffering hold up the general temporal order. Maistre never quite gets at why this supposedly all-powerful, all-good God decided to make a universe with sentient beings destined to run afoul of his rules and suffer for it. Presumably, if the Chevalier bothered to ask that, rather than just tell Senator Maistre he’s a genius after every answer, Maistre would do a shell game involving causality or something. The usual mystic stuff.
The theology isn’t interesting, though it is weirdly off in places, for this supposed arch-Catholic, and most of the weirdness comes from Maistre’s insistence that, on earth, it actually does all make sense. That seems to be where his “illuminism” comes in, though I’ll admit, I’m a neophyte with this stuff. A lot of mystics – from Renaissance magicians to the Freemasons (back before they became a social club) to the Five Percenters – seem to understand the principle of “as above, so below” (never got why that was so compelling to people) implied that just as heaven is rightly ordered (again… why?), so too is Earth, if only we could see it. Oftentimes, they imply that happiness, peace, even superhuman power comes with somehow “grokking” this truth in its fullness. No waiting for divine redistribution of fates in the afterlife! It’s interesting, but also sad, mostly in the way it asks a sad question… which is more pathetic? Thinking that a divine figure will arrange things just so, make things somehow make sense, after you die, or thinking that you will, learn, magic your way to making this world make sense while still in it, the way God supposedly wants you (and really only you, and other people cool enough to do the thing) to do? I’ll punt to where I usually do: at least orthodox religion, with its series of IOUs payable on some judgment day, have substantial real estate portfolios on this earth, more than most of the heterodox can say.
What intrigued me most about the Nights wasn’t its strangeness, but its continuities with other thought. Here, I’m influenced by a book I read back in my comprehensive exams days, when I ambitiously looked into all kinds of stuff my professors didn’t recommend or even know about, because, I don’t know, I did. One was a book on de Maistre’s influence by one Carolina Armenteros. It was a strange, fascinating book, that insisted that far from being a lonely figure on his mountain of Catholic reactionary obscurantism, Maistre was actually profoundly influential on French social and historical thought throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, his influence was less straightforwardly counter-enlightenment, in some easy “revolution and democracy equals bad, religion and monarchy equals good” kind of way, though he did believe those things. Rather, Maistre was important for his methodologies and research agendas, that generally complicated, and in some ways ran alongside, Enlightenment methodologies of social thought, rather than simply opposing them.
And in these dialogues, you can see it. Maistre despised most of the lumieres, the Rousseaus and Voltaires, but he did not altogether abandon their methods in favor because… what other options were there? He was too old and unadaptable for the Romantic route, like fellow French Catholic reactionary Chateaubriand would take (one of the reasons Berlin’s Maistre takes were so blazingly wrong- he places Maistre in his hall of fame of Romantic, anti-rational bad guys, and that dog won’t hunt). He wasn’t going to get over with his reactionary thought that way. He’s a little bit closer to Burke in this respect, in that he tries to lay down an alternative path to collecting, refining, and disseminating knowledge that will work for a literate public to whom you can’t simply wave a cross or a flag as an explanatory method. Burke is closer to romanticism, even populism, encouraging his epigones to try to track the capillary methods through which the “little platoons” create – maybe congeal is the right word, or generate, if we’re being more generous – the great organic tree of society.
But that’s not quite Maistre. In one sense of the word, Maistre was a rationalist: not in the degraded sense of “reasonable” (they’re not) but in terms of rationalist versus empiricist, working from first principles as opposed to from collecting observations. More than Voltaire or other salon Clever Dicks, Maistre hates Francis Bacon. But this isn’t for the usual “God is higher than Science” reasons we’re used to- it’s because Maistre believes he has a counter-science, a rationalist understanding of the universe superior to empiricism (not unlike Lyndon LaRouche, in this!). In his way, he was as devoted to the systematic exploration of the implications of his understanding as were any Enlightenment philosophes for theirs. This, presumably, is why the Soirees was his favorite work.
French historians and social scientists – Chateaubriand, Comte, Saint-Simon – did not reject Enlightenment empiricism as thoroughly as de Maistre did. It’s also possible to overstate de Maistre’s rejection of facts- he clearly was a great reader and collector of information, such as he had access to. What he had in common with later French historical social thought was a way of arranging his facts, using facticity strategically to counter other schema of thought, specifically, the Enlightenment thought of the revolutionary era, which threatened to become hegemonic in France, arguably in Europe. Later French social thinkers could, like de Maistre, take on board the trope of empirical facts pointing to a hidden hand, to forces that aligned human societies and history that can only be seen by a sort of negative inference, what the record shows is possible (and, more to the point, impossible). It’s not quite Hegel’s dialectic, or Smith’s invisible hand- it’s altogether woolier and, well, more esoteric than that- the idea that the scholar’s role is to uncover these esoteric forces (later given a boost by the ways in which stuff we can’t see, from germs to electromagnetic waves, really do affect our lives). They presume a hidden hand- maybe not Maistre’s divine providence, but something. Later social scientists could turn these intellectual practices towards goals that, had they been alive to see it, Maistre might disapprove and his lumiere enemies might like better, such as Comte’s rational society run by sociologist-priests. But they are still living in, attempting to explore and articulate, a world where knowledge makes itself known via the application of value-laden rationalistic schema giving order to the welter of fact. You can see how that might find itself even further down the road, with your Foucaults and LaTours, though I’d tend to think that would be more a legacy de Maistre left on French thought rather than direct influence.
Anyway! Who knows how much all of that really means. I do like spooky-ing up the French rationalist tradition. It’s no good taking people at their self-assessment without thorough examination, and the idea that the French really are more rational-as-in-reasonable than us Anglos never really washed. Rational as in schematic, sure… but their schemes might be weirder than all that. Among other things, rather disenchants our reactionary Lecter figure, too… That’s what allowed me to enjoy this as much as I did. Your mileage may vary. ****
Well, here’s a weird one- this supposed arch-orthodox, who was, by all accounts, a sincere and fervent Catholic, was also an “Illuminist” and a member of a Masonic lodge. This is an odd one. Catholic reactionaries aren’t supposed to like the Masons. In the anglophone Protestant countries, that’s mostly down to Masonic anti-Catholicism- I remember older Catholic relatives (not reactionaries) telling me if I had to join a fraternal order, it should be the Knights of Columbus, not the Masons. In continental Europe it’s a little more complicated. By and large, French reactionary culture has despised the Masons and the Enlightenment culture it was tied to. The Vichy regime had to be asked by the Nazis to round up French Jews, but they went after the Masons all on their own. At the same time, you do get groups like the P2 Masonic lodge, which assisted neofascist coup attempts in Italy, and Maistre’s lifelong involvement with Masonry and other mystical strains that weren’t exactly Catholic. Some of Maistre’s works made their way to the Vatican’s naughty list, even as Catholic presses translated and published his works.
“Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg” was, I’ve read, the work Maistre was most proud of, his last statement. Beyond that hangman spiel, which comes from one of the early dialogues in this book, most of his work that gets circulated in academic circles is his earlier, more directly political stuff, regardless of what the man himself thought. This is probably in part because the dialogues here are… odd. Take the subtitle. “The temporal government of providence” – maybe it’s just grammatically awkward, and means “the way divine providence governs the affairs of time,” but as read in English, makes it sound like a time-bound governance system for the divine. That doesn’t make a lot of sense- as far as I can tell, one of the basic elements of divinity is that it’s not time-bound, not in the way human life is, at least.
That’s just the subtitle. The dialogues themselves are a discussion between three dudes: a young, somewhat naive but polite “Chevalier,” a somewhat sententious but right-headed older “Count,” and “the Senator,” and when he starts talking, The_Wisdom_Dispenser has logged on. The Senator is Maistre, explaining how despite how it all looks, God has it all in hand. But not in some easy peasant way! It’s not all rainbows and meeting your pets in heaven. It’s closer to a state of divine justice, everything working out according to God’s plan, in much the same way as the existence of the hangman, however repellent — because repellent! — holds up the social order, so does suffering hold up the general temporal order. Maistre never quite gets at why this supposedly all-powerful, all-good God decided to make a universe with sentient beings destined to run afoul of his rules and suffer for it. Presumably, if the Chevalier bothered to ask that, rather than just tell Senator Maistre he’s a genius after every answer, Maistre would do a shell game involving causality or something. The usual mystic stuff.
The theology isn’t interesting, though it is weirdly off in places, for this supposed arch-Catholic, and most of the weirdness comes from Maistre’s insistence that, on earth, it actually does all make sense. That seems to be where his “illuminism” comes in, though I’ll admit, I’m a neophyte with this stuff. A lot of mystics – from Renaissance magicians to the Freemasons (back before they became a social club) to the Five Percenters – seem to understand the principle of “as above, so below” (never got why that was so compelling to people) implied that just as heaven is rightly ordered (again… why?), so too is Earth, if only we could see it. Oftentimes, they imply that happiness, peace, even superhuman power comes with somehow “grokking” this truth in its fullness. No waiting for divine redistribution of fates in the afterlife! It’s interesting, but also sad, mostly in the way it asks a sad question… which is more pathetic? Thinking that a divine figure will arrange things just so, make things somehow make sense, after you die, or thinking that you will, learn, magic your way to making this world make sense while still in it, the way God supposedly wants you (and really only you, and other people cool enough to do the thing) to do? I’ll punt to where I usually do: at least orthodox religion, with its series of IOUs payable on some judgment day, have substantial real estate portfolios on this earth, more than most of the heterodox can say.
What intrigued me most about the Nights wasn’t its strangeness, but its continuities with other thought. Here, I’m influenced by a book I read back in my comprehensive exams days, when I ambitiously looked into all kinds of stuff my professors didn’t recommend or even know about, because, I don’t know, I did. One was a book on de Maistre’s influence by one Carolina Armenteros. It was a strange, fascinating book, that insisted that far from being a lonely figure on his mountain of Catholic reactionary obscurantism, Maistre was actually profoundly influential on French social and historical thought throughout the nineteenth century. Moreover, his influence was less straightforwardly counter-enlightenment, in some easy “revolution and democracy equals bad, religion and monarchy equals good” kind of way, though he did believe those things. Rather, Maistre was important for his methodologies and research agendas, that generally complicated, and in some ways ran alongside, Enlightenment methodologies of social thought, rather than simply opposing them.
And in these dialogues, you can see it. Maistre despised most of the lumieres, the Rousseaus and Voltaires, but he did not altogether abandon their methods in favor because… what other options were there? He was too old and unadaptable for the Romantic route, like fellow French Catholic reactionary Chateaubriand would take (one of the reasons Berlin’s Maistre takes were so blazingly wrong- he places Maistre in his hall of fame of Romantic, anti-rational bad guys, and that dog won’t hunt). He wasn’t going to get over with his reactionary thought that way. He’s a little bit closer to Burke in this respect, in that he tries to lay down an alternative path to collecting, refining, and disseminating knowledge that will work for a literate public to whom you can’t simply wave a cross or a flag as an explanatory method. Burke is closer to romanticism, even populism, encouraging his epigones to try to track the capillary methods through which the “little platoons” create – maybe congeal is the right word, or generate, if we’re being more generous – the great organic tree of society.
But that’s not quite Maistre. In one sense of the word, Maistre was a rationalist: not in the degraded sense of “reasonable” (they’re not) but in terms of rationalist versus empiricist, working from first principles as opposed to from collecting observations. More than Voltaire or other salon Clever Dicks, Maistre hates Francis Bacon. But this isn’t for the usual “God is higher than Science” reasons we’re used to- it’s because Maistre believes he has a counter-science, a rationalist understanding of the universe superior to empiricism (not unlike Lyndon LaRouche, in this!). In his way, he was as devoted to the systematic exploration of the implications of his understanding as were any Enlightenment philosophes for theirs. This, presumably, is why the Soirees was his favorite work.
French historians and social scientists – Chateaubriand, Comte, Saint-Simon – did not reject Enlightenment empiricism as thoroughly as de Maistre did. It’s also possible to overstate de Maistre’s rejection of facts- he clearly was a great reader and collector of information, such as he had access to. What he had in common with later French historical social thought was a way of arranging his facts, using facticity strategically to counter other schema of thought, specifically, the Enlightenment thought of the revolutionary era, which threatened to become hegemonic in France, arguably in Europe. Later French social thinkers could, like de Maistre, take on board the trope of empirical facts pointing to a hidden hand, to forces that aligned human societies and history that can only be seen by a sort of negative inference, what the record shows is possible (and, more to the point, impossible). It’s not quite Hegel’s dialectic, or Smith’s invisible hand- it’s altogether woolier and, well, more esoteric than that- the idea that the scholar’s role is to uncover these esoteric forces (later given a boost by the ways in which stuff we can’t see, from germs to electromagnetic waves, really do affect our lives). They presume a hidden hand- maybe not Maistre’s divine providence, but something. Later social scientists could turn these intellectual practices towards goals that, had they been alive to see it, Maistre might disapprove and his lumiere enemies might like better, such as Comte’s rational society run by sociologist-priests. But they are still living in, attempting to explore and articulate, a world where knowledge makes itself known via the application of value-laden rationalistic schema giving order to the welter of fact. You can see how that might find itself even further down the road, with your Foucaults and LaTours, though I’d tend to think that would be more a legacy de Maistre left on French thought rather than direct influence.
Anyway! Who knows how much all of that really means. I do like spooky-ing up the French rationalist tradition. It’s no good taking people at their self-assessment without thorough examination, and the idea that the French really are more rational-as-in-reasonable than us Anglos never really washed. Rational as in schematic, sure… but their schemes might be weirder than all that. Among other things, rather disenchants our reactionary Lecter figure, too… That’s what allowed me to enjoy this as much as I did. Your mileage may vary. ****
January 2, 2020
this is certainly a work of its time, nevertheless it is a goldmine of truly timeless meditations on prayer, violence and sacrifice - also highly quotable. Altho a man of his time as a royalist statesmen and diplomat, De Maistre seems in many ways also a relic of an age past, a truly medieval spirit and a relentless persecutor of "tous les sophismes du raisonnement", i.e. 'philosophie': "Elle dessèche, elle racornit le coeur, et lorsequ'elle endurci un homme, elle croit avoir fait un sage", which also results in lots of sharp, oftentimes hilarious, polemics against the likes of Voltaire, Locke and Rousseau: "Tout ces philosophes du dernier siècle, sans excepter même les meilleurs, sont des poltrons qui ont peur des esprits"; this does certainly not apply to De Maistre himself, which is why he seems, among all his contemporaries, one of the few sane men left.
January 30, 2021
En su momento fue el libro más leído del mundo. Erige, piedra a piedra, un edificio de defensa del reaccionarismo que lo acerca a lo más parecido a una biblia contra la modernidad.
May 5, 2020
"Plato, talking somewhere of what it is most important for man to know, adds immediately, with that incisive simplicity natural to him, that these things are easily and perfectly learned if someone teaches them to us.* This is exactly right. It is, moreover, obviously apparent that the first men who repeopled the world after the great catastrophe needed miraculous help to conquer the diverse difficulties facing them. And notice, gentlemen, the splendid character of this argument! Do you want to prove it? Witnesses present themselves on every side: they never contradict one another, whereas witnesses of error are contradictory even when they lie. Listen to what wise antiquity has to say about the first men. It will tell you that they were wonderful men, whom beings of a superior order favored with the most important messages. There is unanimity on this point: initiates, philosophers, poets, history, myth, Asia and Europe speak with one voice. Such complete agreement of reason, revelation, and all human traditions constitutes a proof that cannot reasonably be contradicted. Thus, not only did men start with knowledge, but with a knowledge different from and superior to our own, since it penetrated more deeply, which made it the more dangerous. This is why science at the beginning was mysterious and confined within the temples, where the flame finally burned out when once it had no purpose other than to burn....
[* What follows is no less valuable; but, he says, no one will teach us unless God shows him the way. - Epinomis 989d.]
It is impossible to think of modern science without seeing it perpetually surrounded by all the apparatus of the mind and every kind of methodological aid.... So far as we can penetrate the mists of time to perceive the science of the earliest days, it always emerges free and independent, flying rather than walking, and presenting in its entire person something aerial and supernatural.... Yet, although it owed nothing to any man and knew no human support, it is no less the case that it possessed the rarest understanding. If you think of it, this is a convincing proof that ancient science had been freed from the travail imposed on our own and that nothing could be more mistaken than the calculations we make on the basis of modern experience....
If all men spring from the three couples who repeopled the world, and if humanity began with a science, the savage can be, as I have said, nothing more than a branch broken off from the social tree. Although it is incontestable, I could abandon the argument from science and rely on religion alone, which is of itself enough to exclude a state of savagery, however imperfectly. Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists. The poor man in his hut with straw alone to cover him is doubtless less learned than we are, yet more truly social if he attends his catechism class and profits from it. The most shameful errors, the most despicable cruelties have stained the history of Memphis, Athens, and Rome, but all the virtues together honor the huts of Paraguay.... We must then recognize that the state of civilization and science is in a certain sense the natural and primitive state of man.... Has not Voltaire himself (and nothing more need be said) admitted that the motto of every nation has always been, The golden age was the first to show itself on earth? So every nation has protested in unison against the hypothesis of an original state of barbarism, and surely this protest counts for something.
What does it matter at what point in time such and such a branch was broken from the tree? It has been, and that is enough for me: there is no doubt about the degradation and, I dare add, no doubt about the cause of the degradation, which could only have been a crime. Once the leader of a people had changed its moral character by some of those grave transgressions which are apparently now no longer possible, since happily we no longer know enough to become guilty to this degree, this leader passed on the curse to his posterity; and since every constant force is by nature accelerative because it is accumulative, this degradation bears constantly on his descendants until finally it makes them into what we call savages. It is this final degree of brutalization that Rousseau and his like call the state of nature. Two quite different causes have thrown an obfuscating cloud around the dreadful situation of the savages, one is ancient; the other belongs to our own age. In the first place, in its immense charity the Catholic Church has often, in talking of these men, imposed its desires upon reality. There was only too much truth in the first reaction of the Europeans, who refused in Columbus's time to recognize these degraded men peopling the New World as equals. The priests employed all their influence to contradict this opinion which favored too much the barbarous despotism of the new rulers. They cried out to the Spaniards, "No violence; the Scripture condemns it. If you cannot overthrow the idols in the hearts of these unfortunates, what good is it to destroy their wretched altars? To make them know and love God, you must take up other tactics and weapons." From deserts watered with their sweat and blood, they traveled to Madrid and Rome to ask for edicts and bulls against the pitiless greed which wanted to enslave the Indians. The merciful priest exalted them in order to make them precious; he played down the evil, he exaggerated the good, he stated as truth what he wished to be true; indeed, a reliable witness, Robertson, warns us in his History of America, that on this subject one must be suspicious of all the writers who belonged to the clergy, seeing that they are in general too favorable to the natives.
Another source of false judgments about them lies in the philosophy of our own age, which has made use of the savages to support its empty and culpable harangues against the social order; but even the slightest consideration is enough to put us on our guard against the errors of both charity and bad faith. It needs only a glance at the savage to see the curse written not only on his soul but on the external form of his body. He is a deformed child, sturdy and fierce, on whom the light of intelligence throws no more than a pale and fitful beam. A formidable hand weighing on these doomed races wipes out in them the two distinctive characteristics of our grandeur: foresight and perfectibility. The savage cuts the tree down to gather the fruit; he unyokes the ox that the missionary has just entrusted to him, and cooks it with wood from the plow. For over three centuries, he has known us without wanting anything from us except powder to kill his fellows and spirits to kill himself, yet he has never thought of making these things for himself: he relies for them on our greed, which will never fail him.
Just as the meanest and most revolting substances are nevertheless still capable of some degeneration, so the vices natural to humanity are still more corrupt in the savages. He is a thief, he is cruel, he is dissolute, but he is these things in a different way than we are. To be criminals, we surmount our nature: the savage follows it, he has an appetite for crime, and has no remorse at all. While the son kills his father to preserve him from the bothers of old age, his wife destroys in her womb the fruit of their brutal lust to escape the fatigues of suckling it. He tears out the bloody hair of his living enemy; he slits him open, roasts him and eats him while singing; if he comes across strong liquor, he drinks it to drunkenness, to fever, to death, equally deprived of the reason which rules men through fear and the instinct which saves animals through aversion. He is visibly doomed; he is flawed in the very depths of his moral being; he makes any observer tremble: but do we tremble at ourselves, in a way which would be very salutary? Do we think that with our intelligence, our morality, our sciences and our arts we are to primitive man what the savage is to us?
I cannot leave this subject without suggesting to you yet another important point. The barbarian, who is a kind of midway point between the civilized man and the savage, could and still can be civilized by any religion whatever, but the savage, properly speaking, has never been civilized except by Christianity. This is a miracle of the highest order, a kind of redemption, the exclusive prerogative of the true Church.... The savage must not be confused with the barbarian. In the one the germ of life is dying or dead; in the other it has been sown, and needs only time and circumstances to develop itself. At this point his language, which was degraded with the man, is reborn with him and perfects and enriches itself. If one wishes to call this a new language, I should agree: the phrase is right in one sense, but a sense very different from that which is taken by the modern sophists when they talk of new or invented languages.
No language could be invented, either by a single man, who would not be able to compel obedience, or by several men, who would not be able to understand one another. Nothing can be better said about words than what has been said by that which is called THE WORD. They are those whose goings forth have been from of old, from ever-lasting... who shall declare their generation?[Micah 5:2; Isaiah 53:8.] Already, in spite of the unhappy prejudices of the age, a natural philosopher - yes, truly, a natural philosopher - has taken upon himself to agree, with a timid intrepidity, that man first spoke because SOMEONE spoke to him. God bless the word SOMEONE, so useful on difficult occasions. While rendering this tentative effort all the justice it deserves, it is nevertheless necessary to admit that every philosopher of the last century, not even excepting the best, was chickenhearted, afraid of thought....
But before finishing on this subject, I should like to draw your attention to a thought that has always struck me. How is it that in the primitive languages of all the ancient peoples there are words which imply ideas foreign to these peoples?... These words... are obviously the remnants of more ancient languages that have been destroyed or forgotten....
Reading the modern metaphysicians, you will come across huge generalizations on the importance of symbols and on the advantages of what they call a philosophical language, which should be created a priori or perfected by philosophers. I do not want to throw myself into the question of the origins of language (the same question, incidentally, as that of innate ideas). What I can assure you of, since nothing is clearer, is the astonishing talent of infant nations in forming words and the total inability of philosophers to do likewise. I recall that Plato, in the most refined of ages, drew attention to this talent of nascent peoples. What is astonishing is that it has been said that they proceeded by way of deliberation, by virtue of an established system of agreement, although such a thing is strictly impossible from every point of view. Each language has its genius, and this genius is one and indivisible, so that it excludes any idea of composition, of arbitrary formation and of previous agreement....
Each language, taken separately, mirrors the spiritual realities that were present at its birth, and the more ancient the language, the more perceptible are these realities. You will not find any exception to the observation on which I have insisted so much, which is that the further back you go toward the ages of ignorance and barbarism which saw the birth of languages, the more logic and profundity you will find in the formation of words, and that this talent disappears conversely as you move toward the ages of civilization and science....
Languages have started, but not the word, not even with man. The one has necessarily preceded the other since the word is possible only through the WORD OF GOD. Every particular language comes into being like an animal, by birth and development, without which man would have passed from the state of aphonia to the use of speech. He has always talked, and it is sublime reason that prompted the Hebrews to call him a TALKING SOUL. When a new language emerges, it is born in the heart of a society which already has full possession of a language, and no word is invented arbitrarily in this formation; the new language uses the materials it finds around it or that it calls from further off; it lives off them, it chews them, it digests them; it never adopts them without modifying them to some degree....
In all the writings of the time on this interesting matter there has been continually expressed a wish for a philosophical language, but without any knowledge or even suspicion that the most philosophical language is that in which there is the least philosophy. Philosophy lacks two small things to be a creator of words - the intelligence to invent them and the power to make them used. If it sees a new object, it leafs through its dictionaries to find an ancient or a foreign word; and almost always it turns out badly.... If the right to create new expressions belonged to anyone, it would be to the great writers and not to the philosophers, who are in this respect peculiarly inept: yet the writers use this right only very sparingly, never in moments of inspiration and only for making nouns and adjectives; as for words themselves, they hardly dream of offering new ones. Indeed, this idea of new languages should be erased, except only in the sense I have just explained; or, to put this another way, the spoken word is eternal and every language is as old as the people who speak it.... It is certain that every nation has had the power of speech and that it has spoken precisely as much and as well as it thought; for it is equally foolish to believe either that a symbol can exist for an idea which does not exist or that an idea can exist without a symbol to express it.... "
[* What follows is no less valuable; but, he says, no one will teach us unless God shows him the way. - Epinomis 989d.]
It is impossible to think of modern science without seeing it perpetually surrounded by all the apparatus of the mind and every kind of methodological aid.... So far as we can penetrate the mists of time to perceive the science of the earliest days, it always emerges free and independent, flying rather than walking, and presenting in its entire person something aerial and supernatural.... Yet, although it owed nothing to any man and knew no human support, it is no less the case that it possessed the rarest understanding. If you think of it, this is a convincing proof that ancient science had been freed from the travail imposed on our own and that nothing could be more mistaken than the calculations we make on the basis of modern experience....
If all men spring from the three couples who repeopled the world, and if humanity began with a science, the savage can be, as I have said, nothing more than a branch broken off from the social tree. Although it is incontestable, I could abandon the argument from science and rely on religion alone, which is of itself enough to exclude a state of savagery, however imperfectly. Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists. The poor man in his hut with straw alone to cover him is doubtless less learned than we are, yet more truly social if he attends his catechism class and profits from it. The most shameful errors, the most despicable cruelties have stained the history of Memphis, Athens, and Rome, but all the virtues together honor the huts of Paraguay.... We must then recognize that the state of civilization and science is in a certain sense the natural and primitive state of man.... Has not Voltaire himself (and nothing more need be said) admitted that the motto of every nation has always been, The golden age was the first to show itself on earth? So every nation has protested in unison against the hypothesis of an original state of barbarism, and surely this protest counts for something.
What does it matter at what point in time such and such a branch was broken from the tree? It has been, and that is enough for me: there is no doubt about the degradation and, I dare add, no doubt about the cause of the degradation, which could only have been a crime. Once the leader of a people had changed its moral character by some of those grave transgressions which are apparently now no longer possible, since happily we no longer know enough to become guilty to this degree, this leader passed on the curse to his posterity; and since every constant force is by nature accelerative because it is accumulative, this degradation bears constantly on his descendants until finally it makes them into what we call savages. It is this final degree of brutalization that Rousseau and his like call the state of nature. Two quite different causes have thrown an obfuscating cloud around the dreadful situation of the savages, one is ancient; the other belongs to our own age. In the first place, in its immense charity the Catholic Church has often, in talking of these men, imposed its desires upon reality. There was only too much truth in the first reaction of the Europeans, who refused in Columbus's time to recognize these degraded men peopling the New World as equals. The priests employed all their influence to contradict this opinion which favored too much the barbarous despotism of the new rulers. They cried out to the Spaniards, "No violence; the Scripture condemns it. If you cannot overthrow the idols in the hearts of these unfortunates, what good is it to destroy their wretched altars? To make them know and love God, you must take up other tactics and weapons." From deserts watered with their sweat and blood, they traveled to Madrid and Rome to ask for edicts and bulls against the pitiless greed which wanted to enslave the Indians. The merciful priest exalted them in order to make them precious; he played down the evil, he exaggerated the good, he stated as truth what he wished to be true; indeed, a reliable witness, Robertson, warns us in his History of America, that on this subject one must be suspicious of all the writers who belonged to the clergy, seeing that they are in general too favorable to the natives.
Another source of false judgments about them lies in the philosophy of our own age, which has made use of the savages to support its empty and culpable harangues against the social order; but even the slightest consideration is enough to put us on our guard against the errors of both charity and bad faith. It needs only a glance at the savage to see the curse written not only on his soul but on the external form of his body. He is a deformed child, sturdy and fierce, on whom the light of intelligence throws no more than a pale and fitful beam. A formidable hand weighing on these doomed races wipes out in them the two distinctive characteristics of our grandeur: foresight and perfectibility. The savage cuts the tree down to gather the fruit; he unyokes the ox that the missionary has just entrusted to him, and cooks it with wood from the plow. For over three centuries, he has known us without wanting anything from us except powder to kill his fellows and spirits to kill himself, yet he has never thought of making these things for himself: he relies for them on our greed, which will never fail him.
Just as the meanest and most revolting substances are nevertheless still capable of some degeneration, so the vices natural to humanity are still more corrupt in the savages. He is a thief, he is cruel, he is dissolute, but he is these things in a different way than we are. To be criminals, we surmount our nature: the savage follows it, he has an appetite for crime, and has no remorse at all. While the son kills his father to preserve him from the bothers of old age, his wife destroys in her womb the fruit of their brutal lust to escape the fatigues of suckling it. He tears out the bloody hair of his living enemy; he slits him open, roasts him and eats him while singing; if he comes across strong liquor, he drinks it to drunkenness, to fever, to death, equally deprived of the reason which rules men through fear and the instinct which saves animals through aversion. He is visibly doomed; he is flawed in the very depths of his moral being; he makes any observer tremble: but do we tremble at ourselves, in a way which would be very salutary? Do we think that with our intelligence, our morality, our sciences and our arts we are to primitive man what the savage is to us?
I cannot leave this subject without suggesting to you yet another important point. The barbarian, who is a kind of midway point between the civilized man and the savage, could and still can be civilized by any religion whatever, but the savage, properly speaking, has never been civilized except by Christianity. This is a miracle of the highest order, a kind of redemption, the exclusive prerogative of the true Church.... The savage must not be confused with the barbarian. In the one the germ of life is dying or dead; in the other it has been sown, and needs only time and circumstances to develop itself. At this point his language, which was degraded with the man, is reborn with him and perfects and enriches itself. If one wishes to call this a new language, I should agree: the phrase is right in one sense, but a sense very different from that which is taken by the modern sophists when they talk of new or invented languages.
No language could be invented, either by a single man, who would not be able to compel obedience, or by several men, who would not be able to understand one another. Nothing can be better said about words than what has been said by that which is called THE WORD. They are those whose goings forth have been from of old, from ever-lasting... who shall declare their generation?[Micah 5:2; Isaiah 53:8.] Already, in spite of the unhappy prejudices of the age, a natural philosopher - yes, truly, a natural philosopher - has taken upon himself to agree, with a timid intrepidity, that man first spoke because SOMEONE spoke to him. God bless the word SOMEONE, so useful on difficult occasions. While rendering this tentative effort all the justice it deserves, it is nevertheless necessary to admit that every philosopher of the last century, not even excepting the best, was chickenhearted, afraid of thought....
But before finishing on this subject, I should like to draw your attention to a thought that has always struck me. How is it that in the primitive languages of all the ancient peoples there are words which imply ideas foreign to these peoples?... These words... are obviously the remnants of more ancient languages that have been destroyed or forgotten....
Reading the modern metaphysicians, you will come across huge generalizations on the importance of symbols and on the advantages of what they call a philosophical language, which should be created a priori or perfected by philosophers. I do not want to throw myself into the question of the origins of language (the same question, incidentally, as that of innate ideas). What I can assure you of, since nothing is clearer, is the astonishing talent of infant nations in forming words and the total inability of philosophers to do likewise. I recall that Plato, in the most refined of ages, drew attention to this talent of nascent peoples. What is astonishing is that it has been said that they proceeded by way of deliberation, by virtue of an established system of agreement, although such a thing is strictly impossible from every point of view. Each language has its genius, and this genius is one and indivisible, so that it excludes any idea of composition, of arbitrary formation and of previous agreement....
Each language, taken separately, mirrors the spiritual realities that were present at its birth, and the more ancient the language, the more perceptible are these realities. You will not find any exception to the observation on which I have insisted so much, which is that the further back you go toward the ages of ignorance and barbarism which saw the birth of languages, the more logic and profundity you will find in the formation of words, and that this talent disappears conversely as you move toward the ages of civilization and science....
Languages have started, but not the word, not even with man. The one has necessarily preceded the other since the word is possible only through the WORD OF GOD. Every particular language comes into being like an animal, by birth and development, without which man would have passed from the state of aphonia to the use of speech. He has always talked, and it is sublime reason that prompted the Hebrews to call him a TALKING SOUL. When a new language emerges, it is born in the heart of a society which already has full possession of a language, and no word is invented arbitrarily in this formation; the new language uses the materials it finds around it or that it calls from further off; it lives off them, it chews them, it digests them; it never adopts them without modifying them to some degree....
In all the writings of the time on this interesting matter there has been continually expressed a wish for a philosophical language, but without any knowledge or even suspicion that the most philosophical language is that in which there is the least philosophy. Philosophy lacks two small things to be a creator of words - the intelligence to invent them and the power to make them used. If it sees a new object, it leafs through its dictionaries to find an ancient or a foreign word; and almost always it turns out badly.... If the right to create new expressions belonged to anyone, it would be to the great writers and not to the philosophers, who are in this respect peculiarly inept: yet the writers use this right only very sparingly, never in moments of inspiration and only for making nouns and adjectives; as for words themselves, they hardly dream of offering new ones. Indeed, this idea of new languages should be erased, except only in the sense I have just explained; or, to put this another way, the spoken word is eternal and every language is as old as the people who speak it.... It is certain that every nation has had the power of speech and that it has spoken precisely as much and as well as it thought; for it is equally foolish to believe either that a symbol can exist for an idea which does not exist or that an idea can exist without a symbol to express it.... "
June 23, 2022
Sin duda el conde de Maistre es nuestro filósofo de cabecera. Gran escritor de brillante estilo, finísima alma y mente preclara. Este verdadero prócer plantea las cuestiones más candentes de la religión y la filosofía y responde de manera satisfactoria, utilizando el estilo platónico de los diálogos, muy fecundo para aprender filosofía.
De Maistre con mucho tino y elegancia cose a mandobles a los falsos astros de la modernidad (Locke, Hume, Voltaire…). Y muestra una erudición que los que se denominaban a sí mismos como “les philosophes” no tenían.
De Maistre con mucho tino y elegancia cose a mandobles a los falsos astros de la modernidad (Locke, Hume, Voltaire…). Y muestra una erudición que los que se denominaban a sí mismos como “les philosophes” no tenían.
May 17, 2020
Some parts are mildly repetitive with his other works, but he certainly surpasses them, engulfs and further develops them in this as his culminating masterpiece. Interesting philosophy of theodicy, temporal punishment for one's sins etc., etc. Would recommend. Not as argumentative as previous works, more of a lecture. Also more detailed 'philosophy' (of language, science, etc.) Each chapter is wonderfully self-contained, but doesn't really feel as though it works up to a complete conclusion (I think he died though, so that's forgiven). Not my favorite of his works, nor his most engaging, but certainly the most all-encompassing and comprehensive.
Read
July 28, 2024Rather tough work, partly philosophical, partly religious, with some provocative propositions, going against the tide of Enlightenment. More in my general account on Goodreads:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....
July 12, 2013
I picked up this book in a wonderful pocket edition in Spanish, which allowed me to read it in snatches. I believe it is better read thus, rather than in one sitting (I can't imagine reading 500+ pages of complex arguments in one go). The author, Count Joseph de Maistre, was a Catholic Savoyard nobleman who was born in the Ancién Régime's twilight and was almost buried by the revolutionary upheavals after 1789. Separated from his family and nearly broke, he endured a long odyssey through Europe, always escaping the revolutionaries just before their arrival into a territory, at last seeking refuge in Saint Petersburg where he quickly became a local fixture, well respected as a very learned man. His learning is visible in the St. Petersburg Dialogues, where he has three characters (the count- apparently himself-, the senator - an elderly Russian nobleman- and the knight -a young French soldier) meet at the Count's dacha for 11 nights to debate all sort of matters. They discuss the nature of Providence, and address the old question "why does the good man suffer, whereas the evildoer thrives?" in a very ingenious way. They discuss the origin of languages, the limits of science, the future of mankind. There is also a very long disquisition in which the Count tears Locke's "Treatise on Human Understanding" to tatters. The writing is wonderfully fluid and a character may talk about an issue for pages on end, but this is never boring because the arguments move forward very quickly. De Maistre was a great polemist and many of his arguments were apparently meant to shock the reader. This will happen at times even when the reader tends to agree with most of the Count's arguments (as in my case). Clearly, after the passing of Gilbert K. Chesterton (1930's) there hasn't been a worthy Catholic polemist willing to take on many of the fallacies of the modern mindset.
The Dialogues is, at its best, worthy of the Socratic dialogues on which it was modelled, although De Maistre is as guilty as Plato of never giving opposite viewpoints enough airtime. He may have been worried about fortifying them, which was opposite to his intention. De Maistre shows that religion doesn't have to be fair, only consistent. The Count, possessed of one of the bleakest views on nature imaginable, lived up to his own somber expectations. Having lived in exile for a quarter century, he died a few years after the Restoration, unable to enjoy the re-establishment of absolute monarchy and absolute religion.
I found the book to be very uplifting in the spiritual sense and very much enjoyed the robust argumentation.
The Dialogues is, at its best, worthy of the Socratic dialogues on which it was modelled, although De Maistre is as guilty as Plato of never giving opposite viewpoints enough airtime. He may have been worried about fortifying them, which was opposite to his intention. De Maistre shows that religion doesn't have to be fair, only consistent. The Count, possessed of one of the bleakest views on nature imaginable, lived up to his own somber expectations. Having lived in exile for a quarter century, he died a few years after the Restoration, unable to enjoy the re-establishment of absolute monarchy and absolute religion.
I found the book to be very uplifting in the spiritual sense and very much enjoyed the robust argumentation.
April 26, 2016
Couldn't even reach the end.
Most of what the author says can be easily contradicted and the few ideas that, in my opinion, make sense are acceptable for a man of the 18th century, but very outdated in this century.
The only way this novel can be considered interesting is as an historical document.
Most of what the author says can be easily contradicted and the few ideas that, in my opinion, make sense are acceptable for a man of the 18th century, but very outdated in this century.
The only way this novel can be considered interesting is as an historical document.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews