“The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution” by Alexis de Tocqueville (translated by Arthur Goldhammer)

Tocqueville attempts to recount the milieu at the end of the Ancien Regime, which set the stage for the French Revolution’s dramatic sweep across the country. He begins, “Because men are no longer tied to one another by bonds of caste, class, guild, or family, they are only too apt to attend solely to their private interests, only too inclined to think exclusively of themselves and to withdraw into a narrow individualism that stifles all public virtue. Despotism, far from combatting this tendency, makes it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of all common passions, all mutual needs, all necessity to reach a common understanding, and all opportunity to act in concert. It immures them, as it were, to private life…. In this type of society, where nothing is fixed, everyone is racked constantly by the fear of falling lower in the social scale and by the ardor to rise…. These passions have spread readily to all classes, even those in which they were previously alien…. Despotism alone has the power to create the secrecy and the shadows in which greed can thrive and dishonest profits can be amassed in defiance of dishonor. Without despotism these selfish passions would be strong; with it they rule.”

Tocqueville contrasts the twin aims of liberty and equality, which helped to propel the revolution, “Only freedom can rescue citizens from the isolation in which the very independence of their condition has mired them…. Only freedom can substitute higher, more powerful passions for the love of material comforts and supply ambition with goals more worthy than the acquisition of wealth…. Democratic societies that are not free may yet be rich, refined, ornate, and even magnificent, powerful by dint of their homogeneous mass. One may find in such societies many private virtues, good fathers, honest merchants, and worthy landowners. One may even come across good Christians, since the true Christian’s homeland is not of this world…. But what one will never find in such societies, I make bold to assert, is great citizens, much less a great people, and I maintain without fear of contradiction that the common level of hearts and minds will steadily diminish so long as equality and despotism remain conjoined.” Tocqueville offers this preview, “The Revolution nevertheless pursued its own course. The monster reared its head, and its novel and terrifying features were revealed. After destroying political institutions, it abolished civil institutions. First it changed laws, then mores, customs, and even language. Having shredded the fabric of government, it undermined the foundations of society and ultimately went after God himself…. Since the French Revolution had as its objective not simply to change the existing government but to abolish the existing form of society, it was obliged simultaneously to attack all established powers, to undermine all acknowledged influences, to efface traditions, to renew mores and customs, and somehow to rid the human mind of all the ideas on which respect and obedience had previously been founded.”

Under the Ancien Regime, the centralization of governance preceded the revolution and abetted its rapid progress. The revolution swept away what was remaining in one foul swoop, “Clear away all this debris and you will see an immense and unified central government, which has drawn in and devoured all the bits of authority and influence that were once parceled out among a host of secondary powers, orders, classes, professions, families, and individuals—scattered, as it were, throughout the social body. No comparable power has existed in the world since the fall of the Roman Empire. The Revolution created this new power…. All strive to eliminate immunities and abolish privileges within their states. All blur distinctions of rank, equalize conditions, replace the aristocracy with functionaries, substitute uniform rules for local privileges, and impose unified government where once there was a diversity of powers…. Its sole effect was to abolish the political institutions, usually called feudal, that had for centuries reigned unopposed in most of the nations of Europe, and to replace them with a simpler and more uniform social and political order based on equality of conditions…. When a people destroys the aristocracy in its midst, it propels itself toward centralization…. There is a tendency for all the powers within it to become one.”

Tocqueville waxes on about the days of old, “The French in those days loved joy and adored pleasure. They may have been more undisciplined in their habits and more chaotic in their passions and ideas than Frenchmen today, but they knew nothing of the temperate and decent sensualism that we see today. In the upper classes, more time was spent in embellishing life rather than in making it comfortable, and in seeking distinction rather than acquiring wealth. Even in the middle classes, no one allowed himself to become completely absorbed in the pursuit of prosperity. Many people abandoned that pursuit in favor of loftier and more refined pleasures. Everyone invested in some good beyond money…. However subject the men of the Ancien Regime were to the will of the king, they were strangers to one kind of obedience: they did not know what it was to bow to an illegitimate or contested power, to a government that one barely honored and frequently scorned but to which one nevertheless submitted freely because of its power to help or harm…. Let us not despise our fathers; we have no right to do so. May it please God that we may recover, along with their prejudices and faults, a little of their grandeur!”

The bourgeoisie were a class in flux immediately preceding the revolution. “The immunities of all sorts that so regrettably separated the bourgeoisie from the common people tended to make the former into a false aristocracy that often exhibited the pride and recalcitrance of the true one. In each of the many small associations into which it was divided, one readily forgot the general good but was constantly preoccupied with its interests and rights as a body.” Tocqueville also gives a summation of the pitiful state of the aristocracy towards the end of the Ancien Regime, “Nobles who had not wanted bourgeois as partners or fellow citizens now had to face them as rivals, before long as enemies, and ultimately as masters. An alien power had freed them from the obligation to lead, protect, and assist their vassals, but since it had left them their pecuniary rights and honorific privileges, they judged that nothing had been lost. Since they continued to march at the head of every procession, they believed that they were still leaders, and indeed they continued to be surrounded by men to whom they referred in official documents as their subjects. Others were referred to as their vassals, their tenants, and their farmers. In reality, they had no followers. They were alone, and when the people at last rose up against them, they had no choice but to flee.”

Tocqueville turns his attention back to the shortsightedness of the bourgeoisie, “The bourgeois was as ardent in procuring exceptions as the nobleman was in maintaining his privileges. The peasants from whose ranks he sprang had become not only strangers to him but, in a sense, compete unknowns, and it was only after he had put arms in their hands that he realized he had aroused passions of which he had no inkling, which he was as powerless to restrain as to lead, and of which he was to become the victim after having been the promoter…. When the bourgeois had thus been isolated from the noble, and the peasant from the noble and bourgeois, and when, by a similar process within each class, there emerged distinct small groups almost as isolated from one another as the classes were, it became clear that the whole society had been reduced to a homogeneous mass with nothing to hold its parts together…. Thus, the princely magnificence of the whole edifice could collapse all at once, in the blink of an eye, the moment the society that served as its foundation began to tremble.”

Tocqueville squarely puts the blame on the philosophers, economists, writers, and intellectuals for fomenting the initial abstract ideas, which would be practically unleashed during the course of the revolution. “An aristocracy, when it is vigorous, does not merely take the lead in public affairs. It also shapes opinions, sets the tone for writers, and imparts authority to ideas…. What is more, the very aristocracy whose place the writers took encouraged the enterprise. It had so completely forgotten how general theories, once accepted, are inevitably transformed into political passions and actions that it treated as mere ingenious intellectual games the doctrines most hostile to its privileges and even its existence as a class…. Those who would become the victims of that revolution were totally unaware of this. They believed that the total and sudden transformation of such an old and complex society could be achieved without disruption, with the aid of reason and by its force alone…. When one studies the history of our Revolution, one finds that the spirit that guided it was precisely the same spirit that gave rise to so many abstract books on government: The same fondness for general theories, complete systems of legislation, and exact symmetry in the law; the same contempt for existing facts; the same confidence in theory; the same taste for the original, ingenious, and novel in institutions; the same urge to remake the entire constitution in accordance with the rules of logic and a coherent plan, rather than seek to amend its faulty parts.”

The revolution utterly destroyed the eminence of the Catholic Church in France. Tocqueville tracks the ebbs and flows of the institution of religion, “See how respect for religion has gradually regained its influence among the various classes of the nation as each of them acquired public experience in the harsh school of revolution…. Little by little, respect for religion progressed wherever men had something to lose in popular disorder, and disbelief disappeared, or at least went into hiding, as fear of revolution manifested itself.” However, during the revolution, men had initially fooled themselves with a new secular faith, “When religion deserted souls, it did not leave them, as so often happens, empty and debilitated. For a time they brimmed with new feelings and ideas, which temporarily took the place of religion and prevented any immediate lapse into depression…. They did not doubt the perfectibility or power of man…. These sentiments and passions had become for them a kind of new religion…. However, religious laws were abolished even as civil laws were overturned, so that the human mind lost its bearings altogether. It no longer knew what to hold on to or where to stop.”

Tocqueville recounts the folly of the masses. “People so ill-prepared to act for themselves could hardly expect to reform everything at once without destroying everything…. When the French rediscovered their love of political liberty, they had already conceived certain ideas about government that were not only not easy to reconcile with the existence of free institutions but almost hostile to them…. They had embraced the ideal of a society in which the sole aristocracy would consist of public officials and a single, all-powerful administration would control the state and be the guardian of individuals…. Hence, they sought to combine unlimited administrative centralization with a preponderant legislative body: bureaucratic administration and representative government. The nation as a body enjoyed all the rights of sovereignty, but each individual citizen was gripped in the tightest dependency.”

The French kings were not spared Tocqueville’s critique, “When the people witnessed the downfall and disappearance of the parlement, which was nearly as old as the monarchy itself and previously thought to be unshakable, they vaguely understood that a time of violence and hazard was approaching, one of those times in which everything becomes possible, when few things are so old as to be respectable or so new that they cannot be tried.” But for Tocqueville, it all led back to the follies of the armchair philosophers, rational idealists, and scribblers with their pens, “There is no more dangerous an example than that of violence exercised for good purposes by men of good will…. The contrast between the benign character of the theories and the violence of the acts, which was one of the strangest features of the French Revolution, will not surprise anyone who observes that the groundwork for the Revolution was laid by the most civilized classes of the nation and carried out by the coarsest and most uncultivated.” And for Tocqueville, the preeminent original sin was the consolidation of the levers of power across the French nation, which had its roots in the Ancien Regime, “Centralization was salvaged from the ruins and restored. And because it was raised up again, while everything that had once kept it in check still lay in ruins, what suddenly emerged from the entrails of a nation that had just overthrown the monarchy was a power more extensive, more minute, and more absolute than our kings had ever exercised…. His government died but his administration lived on, and since then, whenever anyone has tried to topple absolute power, he has merely placed Liberty’s head on a servile body.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Joshua” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction to the Books of the Prophets with a word of caution, “Given the immense historical distance that separates us from the prophets, it is hard to evaluate their reiterated claim that they are speaking God’s words. That claim is certainly much more than a pious fraud. There are indications that the prophets, or at least many of them, may have delivered their words in some sort of ecstatic state. It is quite conceivable that they felt they had heard God speaking to them in the precise words of Hebrew poetry—sometimes sublime poetry—or visionary prose that they conveyed to their audiences.” In his introduction to the Book of Joshua, Alter suggests, “Joshua is really two books, symmetrically divided into twelve chapters each. The first of these we may call the Book of Conquests…. The second half of Joshua can be given the rubric the Book of Apportionments.” Next, Alter relates a bit of historical fact, “What the last several decades of archaeological investigation have established is that there was no sweeping conquest of Canaan by invaders from the east in the late thirteenth century B.C.E.—which would have been the time of Joshua—and that many of the towns listed as objects of Israelite conquest were either uninhabited at this time or did not come under Israelite rule until considerably later…. If the Canaanites seem to have disappeared, it was not because they were extirpated but because they had been assimilated by the Israelites.”

In Joshua 1:18, Alter depicts the construction of the beginning of the book, “Only be strong and stalwart. The opening section of Joshua comprises four speeches: God to Joshua, Joshua to the people’s overseers, Joshua to the trans-Jordanian tribes, and the response of the trans-Jordanian tribes to Joshua. These interlocked speeches are meant to convey a sense of perfect solidarity on the eve of the conquest of the land.” In Joshua 3:1, Alter points out the emphatic application of repetition in the narration, “crossed over. The verb ‘avar, which means either to cross over or, as in verses 2 and 4, to pass through or over, is repeated eight times in this chapter, thus marking the episode as a portentous liminal moment when the people of Israel cross over from their long Wilderness wanderings into the land they have been promised.”

Alter frequently mentions the biblical technique of the envelope structure to frame narrative segments. In Joshua 22:1, he relates, “the Reubenites and the Gadites and to the half-tribe of Manasseh. The book began with the necessity of the trans-Jordanian tribes to join their brothers in the conquest of the land west of the Jordan. Now that the conquest is complete, we come back to these tribes, in an envelope structure, as they are sent back to their own territory.” Finally, Alter presents a recurring theme, which hangs over much of the book, in Joshua 23:1, “after the Lord had granted rest to Israel from all their enemies. This ringing declaration is subverted by the threat of exile that hovers over the end of the chapter. This is a tension that runs through both Joshua and Judges: God has enabled Israel to conquer all its enemies, yet the land is not completely conquered, and enemies threaten both within it and from surrounding nations.”

“Psychology and Alchemy” by C.G. Jung (translated by R.F.C. Hull)

This is Jung’s take on how the roots of alchemy and psychology are intimately intertwined. Of course, he weaves in his theories on archetypes, symbolism, religion, and the collective unconscious. Jung begins with the Self. “The self is a union of opposites par excellence…. The self, however, is absolutely paradoxical in that it represents in every respect thesis and antithesis, and at the same time synthesis…. Without the experience of opposites there is no experience of wholeness and hence no inner approach to the sacred figures. For this reason Christianity rightly insists on sinfulness and original sin, with the obvious intent of opening up the abyss of universal opposition in every individual…. Alchemy is rather like an undercurrent to the Christianity that ruled on the surface. It is to this surface as the dream is to consciousness…. The unconscious does not simply act contrary to the conscious mind but modifies it more in the manner of an opponent or partner.” The proto-chemistry elements of alchemy were fused with the symbolism of religious myths, digging into the unconscious nature of man. “Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes are concerned with the primordial images, and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative language.”

For Jung, the role of the archetypal shadow, his theory of opposites, and religious symbolism relate directly to the formation of alchemical studies. “The problem of opposites called up by the shadow plays a great—indeed, the decisive—role in alchemy, since it leads in the ultimate phase of the work to the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the hierosgamos or “chymical wedding.” Here the supreme opposites, male and female (as in the Chinese yang and yin), are melted into a unity purified of all opposition and therefore incorruptible.”

A large chunk of this book is devoted to analyzing the dreams of the Austrian physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. Jung mines these dreams for archetypal symbols and other hints at the unconscious. At one point, Jung relates, “The transferring of the water of life to the sister really means that the mother has been replaced by the anima…. This is really a normal life-process, but it usually takes place quite unconsciously. The anima is an archetype that is always present…. The mother is the first carrier of the anima-image, which gives her a fascinating quality in the eyes of the son. It is then transferred, via the sister and similar figures to the beloved…. By acknowledging the reality of the psyche and making it a co-determining ethical factor in our lives, we offend against the spirit of convention which for centuries has regulated psychic life from outside by means of institutions as well as by reason…. The water that the mother, the unconscious, pours into the basin belonging to the anima is an excellent symbol for the living power of the psyche…. [The alchemists] called it aqua nostra, mercurius vivus, argentum vivum, vinum ardens, aqua vitae, succus lanriae, and so on, by which they meant a living being not devoid of substance, as opposed to the rigid immateriality of mind in the abstract.”

Jung examines another of Pauli’s dreams, relating it explicitly to pagan myths. “Dionysus is the abyss of impassioned dissolution, where all human distinctions are merged in the animal divinity of the primordial psyche—a blissful and terrible experience. Humanity, huddling behind the walls of its culture, believes it has escaped this experience, until it succeeds in letting loose another orgy of bloodshed…. The intellect may be the devil, but the devil is the “strange son of chaos” who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother…. It must now be admitted that things exist in the psyche about which we know little or nothing at all, but which nevertheless affect our bodies in the most obstinate way, and that they possess at least as much reality as the things of the physical world.”

Pauli had many dreams centered around the mandala symbol. Jung relates, “A dmigs-pa (pronounced “migpa”), [is] a mental image, which can be built up only by a fully instructed lama through the power of imagination…. No mandala is like any other…. The true mandala is always an inner image, which is gradually built up through (active) imagination, at such times when psychic equilibrium is disturbed or when a thought cannot be found and must be sought for…. They are all based on a quaternary system, a quadratura circuli…. They are among the oldest religious symbols of humanity.”

Jung goes on to expound on the ambivalent role of intuition in the dream process, “We should not rise above the earth with the aid of “spiritual” intuitions and run away from hard reality, as so often happens with people who have brilliant intuitions. We can never reach the level of our intuitions and should therefore not identify ourselves with them. Only the gods can pass over the rainbow bridge; mortal men must stick to the earth and are subject to its laws…. Man’s earthiness is certainly a lamentable imperfection; but this very imperfection is part of his innate being, of his reality. He is compounded not only of his best intuitions, his highest ideals and aspirations, but also of the odious conditions of his existence…. Man may have lost his ancient saurian’s tail, but in its stead he has a chain hanging on to his psyche which binds him to the earth…. No noble, well-grown tree ever disowned its dark roots.” Here, in a footnote, Jung makes another explicit connection to the traditions of pagan myth, “The Homeric chain in alchemy is the series of great wise men, beginning with Hermes Trismegistus, which links earth with heaven. At the same time it is the chain of substances and different chemical states that appear in the course of the alchemical process.” Jung continues, “But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt.”

While using Pauli’s dreams as a jumping off point, Jung, again, riffs on the relation of the Self, the psyche, and the unconscious, “It would be wildly arbitrary and therefore unscientific to restrict the self to the limits of the individual psyche, quite apart from the fundamental fact that we have not the least knowledge of these limits, seeing that they also lie in the unconscious. We may be able to indicate the limits of consciousness, but the unconscious is simply the unknown psyche and for that very reason illimitable because indeterminable. Such being the case, we should not be in the least surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined by space and time…. When we attempt to give these numina the slip and angrily reject the alchemical gold which the unconscious offers, things do in fact go badly with us…. We can at least comfort ourselves with the reflection that the unconscious is a necessary evil which must be reckoned with, and that it would therefore be wiser to accompany it on some of its strange symbolic wanderings, even though their meaning be exceedingly questionable.”

In the latter part of this book, Jung dispenses with the dream interpretations and analyses directly alchemical symbolism, imagery, and processes. “The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language…. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery—his own unknown psychic background…. I am therefore inclined to assume that the real root of alchemy is to be sought less in philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators…. Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact that the experience had nothing to do with matter itself…. What he was really experiencing was his own unconscious…. The dread and resistance which every natural human being experiences when it comes to delving too deeply into himself is, at bottom, the fear of the journey to Hades…. That dark realm of the unknown, exercises a fascinating attraction that threatens to become the more overpowering the further he penetrates into it.”

After hundreds of pages analyzing specific alchemic imagery for their hidden meanings, in minute detail, Jung finishes this opus by bringing it back to the unity of the psyche, “Only by virtue of psychic existence do we have any “being” at all. Consciousness grasps only a fraction of its own nature, because it is the product of a preconscious psychic life which made the development of consciousness possible in the first place. Consciousness always succumbs to the delusion that it developed out of itself, but scientific knowledge is well aware that all consciousness rests on unconscious premises, in other words on a sort of unknown prima materia; and of this the alchemists said everything that we could possibly say about the unconscious…. We are then confronted with the underlying human psyche which, unlike consciousness, hardly changes at all in the course of many centuries…. From this point of view, the recent past and the present seem like episodes in a drama that began in the grey mists of antiquity and continues through the centuries into a remote future. This drama is an “Aurora consurgens”—the dawning of consciousness in mankind.” Jung continues with the historical development of alchemy, “Owing to the impersonal, purely objective nature of matter, it was the impersonal, collective archetypes that were projected…. The state of relative unconsciousness in which man found himself, and which he felt to be painful and in need of redemption, was reflected in matter and accordingly dealt with in matter…. The projection of the redeemer-image, i.e., the correspondence between Christ and the lapis, is therefore almost a psychological necessity, as is the parallelism between the redeeming opus or officium divinum and the mastery…. The Christian earns the fruits of grace ex opere operato, but the alchemist creates for himself—ex opere operantis in the most literal sense—a “panacea of life” which he regards either as a substitute for the Church’s means of grace or as the complement and parallel of the divine work of redemption that is continued in man.” 

Jung concludes by bringing it all back to modernity and man’s trouble with his own consciousness, “It seems to me of some importance, therefore, that a few individuals, or people individually, should begin to understand that there are contents which do not belong to the ego-personality, but must be ascribed to a psychic non-ego…. Of course, what we discover is there is nothing that can be held up to the masses—only some hidden thing that we can hold up to ourselves in solitude and in silence…. The psyche is a reality which we cannot grasp with our present means of understanding…. I hold the view that the alchemist’s hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone, was only in part an illusion…. The alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change…. In the last analysis, it is exceedingly doubtful whether human reason is a suitable instrument for this purpose. Not for nothing did alchemy style itself an “art,” feeling—and rightly so—that it was concerned with creative processes that can be truly grasped only by experience…. Experience, not books, is what leads to understanding.”

“The Anomaly” by Herve Le Tellier (translated by Adriana Hunter)

This novel is a page-turner that is part mystery and part philosophical meditation on the meanings of life. It follows a dizzying cast of characters, most aboard the same Air France flight 006, bound from Paris to JFK, when turbulence ensues and a mysterious event occurs. “To understand why Adrian Miller must answer the bulletproof charcoal-gray smartphone on this June 24, 2021, we must rewind to September 10, 2001, the day when, as the youngest postdoctoral researcher on Professor Robert Pozzi’s probabilities team, he was celebrating his twentieth birthday at MIT…. Adrian and Tina inventoried all the variables that could affect air traffic, and attributed them statistical values. They specified anything that could cause a catastrophe—even simply upsetting traffic flow—and surpassed the Pentagon’s expectations. Their model took into account absolutely everything: chains of events, means of communication, language barriers, different units (feet or meters?), pilot error, mechanical failure, technical problems, weather, sabotage, diversions, software piracy, faulty signaling, shortcomings in maintenance, and so much more … The two researchers identified thirty-seven basic protocols, with, in each case, between seven and twenty contingent pathways, in other words nearly five hundred basic situations, and as many responses…. But in April 2002, ten days after the report was submitted, the DoD sent it back with a question written in red felt pen: “What if we’re confronted with a case that fits none of the situations covered?””

The main conceit of the novel revolves around Nick Bostrom’s idea that all of humanity is actually living in a computer simulation of a higher intelligence. Assuming the energy of compute power in the future is cheap enough, that is actually statistically probable. “Adrian loathes this idea of a simulation, bearing in mind that he adopted Karl Popper as the leading light of his epistemology studies—the stalwart Popper, who felt a theory could be attributed no scientific weight if there was nothing to refute it … But Adrian can look at this question from every angle as much as he likes: all things being equal, the simplest explanation is often the right one. The simplest but the most uncomfortable: this plane’s appearance can’t be a bungle in the simulation—it would have been so easy to “erase” it, to rewind by a few seconds. No, it’s obviously a test: How will billions of virtual individuals react when confronted with their own virtuality?”

In the style of many novels these days, this plot-line goes meta—enveloping a book within the book. At least the fictional author doesn’t share a name with Le Tellier, “The anomaly is unlike anything Victor has produced before. It isn’t a novel, or a confession, or even a succession of unconnected dazzling sentences or brilliant truisms. It’s a strange book, thrillingly fast-paced, unputdownable, and between the lines she could see all of Miesel’s influences: Jankelevitch, Camus, Goncharov, and so many others.” Miesel, himself, later pontificates, “Nothing will change. We’ll wake up in the morning, we’ll go to work because we still have to pay the rent, we’ll eat and drink and make love just like before. We’ll carry on behaving as if we’re real. We’re blind to anything that could prove that we’re fooling ourselves. It’s only human. We’re not rational.”