Joseph Fouché, Duc d’Otrante, was one of the most complex figures to emerge from the French revolutionary period. Son of a Nantes sea captain and merchant who worked in the transatlantic (including slave) trade triangle, a student under the relatively progressive Catholic Oratorian order, a teacher of physical sciences at Arras (where he befriended Robespierre), a moderate Girondin, then an ardent Jacobin champion of the Cult of Reason, as well as dechristianization and the Terror, a key architect of the Thermidorian Reaction, the man who by some accounts informed on his old ultra-left associate Babeuf, later the feared chief of police under Napoleon, and finally a Bourbon asset: to pin Fouché to any one of his constantly shifting allegiances would be an exercise in immense folly, and no brief introduction can properly convey his chameleonic and endlessly controversial character. Nevertheless, whatever office Fouché found himself occupying, he often played his role to the fullest extent of his capabilities. Born from his time as the Jacobin représentant-en-mission in Lyon (which had revolted against the National Convention in late 1793), the Instruction adressée aux autorités constituées des Départemens de Rhône et de Loire was issued with his signature of approval and displays stylistic clues that point to his authorship of the document. The Austrian novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig writes;

Fouché differed from the famous revolutionary champions Robespierre and Danton in that he was not mealy-mouthed about the questions of the Church and of private property. Danton respectfully declared that private property was “inviolable”; but Fouché’s program was in this matter, too, resolutely radical, was socialist, was what we should nowadays call bolshevik. The first unflinchingly clear communist manifesto of modern times is, in reality, not the famous document of that name issued by Karl Marx, nor yet Georg Büchner’s Hessische Landbote, but a pronunciamento which socialist historiographers seem determined to overlook, that ‘Instruction’ issued in Lyons signed by both Collot d’Herbois and Fouché, but indubitably compiled by Fouché alone. This energetic document, one of the most astounding of the revolution, and in its requirements a century in advance of its time, is unquestionably worth dragging out of its obscurity. Even if its historical significance is impaired by the fact that in after years the Duke of Otranto was so strenuous in his repudiation of the demands made by the simple citizen Joseph Fouché — nevertheless, if we disregard this, if we pay no heed to what happened afterwards, it is a confession of faith which stamps its author as, at the time of writing, the most clear-headed socialist and communist of the revolution. It was not Marat, and it was not Chaumette, who voiced the boldest claims of the French revolution, but Joseph Fouché; and the wording of the original text throws more light than pages of description could do upon a character which is elusive, as a rule, because of the man’s predilection for the twilight.1

It is my opinion that Zweig somewhat overstates the “communist” in Fouché, since elsewhere (though in a formal capacity) Fouché writes,

“Vous respecterez les propriétés. L’idée du pillage ne peut entrer que dans les âmes viles et méprisables. Le républicain n’a besoin que de pain et de fer, et plein de confiance en la générosité nationale, il sacrifie sans inquiétude, sans réserve au salut de la république.”2

Forssell, another, more critical biographer, notes;

Fouché’s economic programme in Nevers and Moulins was, moreover, quite simple, namely, to take from the superfluity of the well-to-do and to give to the poor; indeed, he reinstituted by means of the Revolution Committees a systematic persecution of all who had comfortable means, since he saw in their prosperity another line of defence for the aristocracy and the opponents of the democratic Republic. If anyone let portions of his land lie fallow, these were at the mercy of the first person who wished to use them. Anyone who suspended work in his factory was punished under suspicion of plotting against the public. Capital was heavily taxed. The reason given for the spoliation was public charity, the relief of the aged, fatherless, destitute and poor. It was a brutal beginning to the measure that the Convention was to carry through in May 1794, for placing the public care of the poor on a democratic basis. But Fouché cannot be called a Socialist. His aim was limited to a fairer division of property, and he scarcely thought of allowing the State to take over the nation's supplies and means of production.3

Nonetheless, Fouché’s emphasis on discipline and uncompromising terror is perfectly clear. Despite his seemingly exemplary zeal for the Jacobin cause, hatred for the superfluous rich and the clergy, and the extraordinarily fervent rhetoric found in his writing from this period, the full text of the Instruction has thus far (to my knowledge) remained untranslated. I am attempting to ameliorate this, and perhaps with effort we can glean some insight into the man whose terror earned him the sobriquet “le Mitrailleur de Lyon”4, this man who would come to be hated and feared by innumerable. “He was to be the only man to play a crucial part in the destruction of the two great tyrants of his age. ‘Within the space of a fortnight,’ said Robespierre, ‘Fouché’s head must fall on the scaffold, or mine will’ - and it was Robespierre who went to the guillotine. ‘I should have hanged him; that was my intention,’ said Bonaparte over and over again — brooding on St Helena. ‘If I had won at Waterloo, I should have had him shot at once.’”5

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INSTRUCTION

ADDRESSED TO THE CONSTITUENT AUTHORITIES

Of the departments of Rhône and Loire, and principally to the Municipalities of the Countryside, and to the Revolutionary Committees,

BY THE TEMPORARY COMMISSION OF REPUBLICAN OVERSIGHT, ESTABLISHED IN VILLE-AFFRANCHIE6 by the Representatives of the People.

THE GOAL OF THE REVOLUTION

IS THE HAPPINESS OF THE PEOPLE

VILLE-AFFRANCHIE,
From the Republican Printing House of TOURNACHON-MOLIN,
Merciere Street No. 51

The Representatives of the People attached to the Army of the Alps, and in the various departments of the Republic, are occupied with tireless zeal in restoring the order disturbed by the infamous rebellion of the Lyonnais; in punishing the traitors, in pursuing the conspirators; in rekindling the energy of the Sans-Culottes; in securing the provisioning of the army and of the citizens; and above all in indemnifying the poor and suffering portion of the People for the losses occasioned them by the crimes of the rich counter-revolutionaries.

To assist themselves in labors so manifold and so important, they have surrounded themselves with patriots pure and proven; they have organized a Commission of Sans-Culottes, charged with cooperating with them, with relieving them of the multitude of details that would consume time better given to great views and great operations; with impressing, beneath their eyes, the revolutionary movement upon the regenerated authorities, and with taking, in concert with them, all the measures of public safety that circumstances may require, or that a foresighted patriotism shall inspire.

The Commission feels all the grandeur of the mission to which it is called; it will answer to the confidence and to the designs of the Representatives of the People; but at the commencement of its labors, it feels also that it is indispensable for it to join to its own oversight that of the Authorities, of the revolutionary Committees, of the popular Societies, and of all the citizens; it believes it necessary to make known to them the spirit that must animate them today, the principal operations to which they must devote themselves, and finally all that the Republic has the right to expect, not only from their civic virtue, but from that profound sentiment of indignation, from that generous desire for vengeance which has been imprinted upon their hearts, the crimes and the rebellion whereof their country has been the theatre.

It is with this view that the present instruction has been drawn up. It will be divided into several sections. The Commission urges each of the Societies, each of the individuals who shall read it, to steep themselves in the spirit that has dictated it; but it warns them at the same time that, in pointing out to them the goal toward which they must strive, it does not mean to prescribe to them the bounds at which they must stop; everything is permitted to those who act in the direction of the revolution; there is no other danger for the Republican than to lag behind the laws of the Republic; whoever anticipates them, outstrips them; whoever even seems to overshoot the goal has often not yet reached it. So long as there shall be a single unhappy being upon the earth, there will yet be steps to take in the career of liberty.

§. I.

On the Revolutionary Spirit

The Revolution is made for the People; it is the happiness of the People that is its aim; it is the love of the People that is the touchstone of the revolutionary spirit.

It is easy enough to understand that by the people one does not mean that class privileged by its riches, which had usurped all the enjoyments of life and all the goods of Society. The people is the whole body of French Citizens; the People is above all the immense class of the poor, that class which gives men to the Fatherland and defenders to our frontiers, which nourishes society by its labors, which adorns it by its talents, which graces it and honors it by its virtues; the Revolution would be a political and moral monster if it had taken for its aim to secure the felicity of a few hundred individuals and to consolidate the misery of twenty-four million citizens; it would therefore have been a mockery insulting to humanity to invoke ceaselessly the name of equality, while immense intervals of happiness still separated man from man, and while one saw smothered, beneath the distinctions of opulence and of poverty, of felicity and of misery, the declaration of rights which recognized no other distinctions than those of talents and of virtues.

Those who from the very origin of the Revolution knew how to grasp its spirit and to favor its progress; these must have seen that it tended to make the inhuman monstrosities vanish from the soil of France; these have seen that if a perfect equality of happiness was unhappily impossible among men, it was at least possible to draw the intervals closer together; they have seen that there was a frightful disproportion between the labors of the cultivator and the artisan and the meager wage he drew from them; they have seen with indignation that he whose robust hands gave bread to his fellow citizens often lacked it himself, and watered it with his tears even more than with his sweat; they have cast the gaze of philanthropy and of humanity over the countryside, into the workshops, into the granaries, into the cellars of indigence, and beside that labor which ought always to have been accompanied by ease, they have seen the rags of misery, the pallor of hunger; they have heard the sorrowful complaints of want, the sharp cries of sickness.

On the other hand, they have seen in the houses of riches, of idleness, and of vice all the refinement of a barbarous luxury; and that which ought to have been the reward of industry and of virtue, they have seen lavished upon the bloodsuckers of the people, upon villains covered with opprobrium and with gilding, and fattened more upon the substance of the wretched than upon the insolent luxury of their feasts.

Finally, to crown the infamy7, they have seen the contempt of these haughty ones pursue the poor man into his cottage; they have seen these monsters, instead of softening at the sight of evils that their luxury alone had caused, aggravate them by their disdain, believe themselves dishonored if they were approached by misfortune, and grow indignant if they had breathed the same air as the poor.

In this universal overturning of principles, in this degradation of humanity, in this humiliation of virtue, a change was needed, a total revolution; for one cannot dither with principles. To leave standing in France a single fundamental abuse would have been to invite all the others to be reborn: it is the hydra all of whose heads must be struck off, under pain of seeing them all spring up again; it is the trunk of a poisoned tree which, in regaining its shade, sows anew about itself the germs of death that will in their turn beget others.

The bourgeois aristocracy, had it lived, would soon have produced the financial aristocracy: this last would have engendered the aristocracy of nobility; for the rich man is not slow to regard himself as being of a different clay from other men: from usurpation to usurpation, one would have come to the point of deeming it necessary to consecrate them by some new institutions; behold the clergy and its dogmas resurrected: and that is not all. An altar set up in isolation within a Republic may suffer a shock and be overturned upon itself. They would have given it a throne to prop it up, that the two might shore each other up reciprocally, and behold us at royalty; such is the inevitable march; thus from abyss to abyss they would have led France back beneath the execrable yoke she had but just shaken off; and doubt not, Citizens, that the monsters would have weighed it down still further; that they would have aggravated the burden of your ills8, the better to prevent you from lifting them. They would have punished you for your ancient élans towards liberty. The wheels, the dungeons, the forced labors, the mortmain, the tithes, the tailles9, behold the prospect, behold the coronation of an incomplete Revolution.

Such are the evils from which those who founded the Republic have saved you: the gratitude you owe them imposes great obligations upon you: they are sweet to fulfill: make your happiness; they shall have the only reward they expect.

Republicans, to be worthy of that name, begin by feeling your dignity, raise your head with pride, and let it be read in your eyes that you understand at last who you are and what the Republic is; for make no mistake, to be truly a Republican each citizen must undergo and work within himself a revolution equal to that which has changed the face of France; there is nothing, no, absolutely nothing in common between the slave of a tyrant and the inhabitant of a free state; this latter’s habits, his principles, his sentiments, his actions, all must be new; you were oppressed: you must crush your oppressors. You were slaves of superstition: you must henceforth have no other worship than that of liberty, no other morality than that of nature. You were strangers to the functions of war: all Frenchmen henceforth are soldiers. You lived in ignorance: to secure the conquest of your rights you must instruct yourselves; you knew no fatherland, never had its sweet voice resounded in your hearts; today you must know none but her; you must see her, hear her, and adore her in all things; the magistrate keeps watch, the ploughman sows, the soldier fights, the Citizen breathes for her alone: her sacred image mingles itself with all his actions, adds to his pleasures, repays him for his pains. — Long live the Republic, long live the People: behold his rallying cry, the expression of his joy, the recompense of his sorrows; every man to whom this enthusiasm should be foreign, who knows other pleasures, other cares than the happiness of the people; every man who opens his soul to the cold speculations of self-interest; every man who calculates what a piece of land, an office, a talent is worth to him, and who can for one instant separate that idea from the idea of the general good; every man who does not feel his blood boil at the mere name of tyranny, of slavery, of opulence; every man who has tears to give to the enemies of the people, who does not reserve all his sensibility for the victims of despotism and for the martyrs of liberty; all men so made, and who dare to call themselves Republicans, have lied to nature and to their own hearts; let them flee the soil of liberty; they will not be slow to be discovered, and to water it with their impure blood. The Republic will no longer have in her bosom any but free men; she is determined to exterminate all the rest, and to acknowledge as her children none but those who shall know how to live, to fight, and to die for her.

§. II.

Arresting of Suspected Persons

From the simple and luminous principles we have just recalled to you, it follows that the republican can no longer live alongside slavery; the latter, by its crimes and its baseness has worn out our patience; for five years we have held out our arms to it: it has disdained our overtures; it is time that it expiate its disdain, and that it learn at the least the price of liberty through the forced sacrifice of its own. It is here that the desire for a legitimate vengeance becomes an imperious need for whoever consults the public interest; for the public interest demands that terror be spread among the enemies, that all the threads of the conspiracies they weave be broken, that they be punished for their crimes, and that they be deprived of a happiness they do not wish to know. It is in this great measure prescribed by the decrees of the National Convention that the zeal and the patriotic activity of the Municipalities and of the revolutionary Authorities must above all appear; it is here that all considerations, all individual attachments must vanish; it is here that the voice of blood itself falls silent before the voice of the fatherland; you dwell in a country that an infamous rebellion has defiled. Well then, CITIZENS, Magistrates of the People, all those who contributed, in a direct or an indirect manner, to the rebellion must bear their heads to the scaffold. It is for you to deliver them into the hands of the national vengeance.

We do not speak to you here only of priests, of nobles, of the relatives of émigrés, of administrators and other perjured officials upon whom the law has expressly pronounced; we presume that in this regard you have done your duty. You answer for it with your heads; but we speak to you especially of all those men who, without being named expressly in the decrees, are marked out by them for national surveillance; we speak to you of those hypocrites who had nothing but the words “respect for the laws and for persons” upon their lips, and who every day oppressed your persons and violated, in respect of the wretched, the most sacred of laws, those of humanity and of nature; we speak to you of those men, hard and insensitive by habit and by station, who cannot love the revolution, because it thwarts their prejudices, because it annihilates their hopes, and because it kills their cupidity; these are those beings who styled themselves men of law, and who ought to have been called men of blood, who lived only off the dissensions of their brothers and off the eternal sustenance they provided to discord and to hatred; these are all those running hounds of feudalism, who kept a register of what the exactions, the knaveries, the usurpations of your tyrants were worth to them, and who founded the hope of their dinner upon your tears and upon your sighs; these are all those fanatical beings who declared themselves for priests in rebellion against the law; these, finally, are all those who, at the time of liberty’s struggle against the aristocrats of Lyon, showed for the scoundrels a criminal tenderness, a parricidal interest; what need is there to say more to you? If you are patriots, you will know how to distinguish your friends; you will sequester all the rest.

You will not be foolish enough to regard as acts of patriotism certain forced and outward actions, by which the traitors have often sought to better deceive you. Here is the language that most of them will hold to you: “But what is there to reproach us with? We have always shown ourselves well; we have done our service in the National Guard; we have paid all our contributions; we have laid offerings upon the altar of the Fatherland; we have even sent our children to the defense of the frontiers; what is demanded, what more is wanted of us?” You will answer them: it matters little to us; patriotism lies in the heart; all that you boast of there, the villains who have betrayed us, the Lafayettes, the Dumouriezs, the Custines, had done still more of it; you have never loved the People, you have treated Equality as a chimera, you have dared to smile at the name of Sans-Culottes; you have had your superfluity while beside your brothers who were dying of hunger; you are not worthy to keep company with them, and since you have disdained to seat them at your table, they vomit you forever from their bosom, and condemn you in your turn to wear the irons that your carelessness or your criminal maneuvers were preparing for them.

REPUBLICANS, behold your duties; let no consideration stop you; neither age, nor sex, nor kinship must hold you back; act without fear, respect none but the Sans-Culottes, and that the thunderbolt may never go astray in your hands, remember the motto that the banners of the Sans-Culottes bear: PEACE TO THE COTTAGES, WAR ON THE CHÂTEAUX.

§. III.

Revolutionary Tax upon the Rich

The expenses of the war must be defrayed, and all the costs of the revolution provided for; who shall come to the aid of the Fatherland and its needs, if not the rich? If they are aristocrats, it is just that they pay for a war that they alone and their adherents have stirred up; if they are patriots, you will anticipate their wishes by asking them to make of their riches the only use that befits Republicans; that is to say, a use of service to the Republic; thus nothing can dispense you from promptly establishing this tax; here there must be no exemption; every man who is above need must contribute to this extraordinary aid; this tax must be proportioned to the great needs of the fatherland; thus you must begin by determining, in a grand and truly revolutionary manner, the sum that each individual must put in common for the polity10; it is not here a question of mathematical exactitude, nor of that timorous scruple with which one must work in the apportionment of the public contributions; this is an extraordinary measure that must bear the character of the circumstances that command it. Act, then, on a grand scale; take everything that a citizen has that is useless; for the superfluous is an evident and gratuitous violation of the rights of the People. Every man who has beyond his needs cannot use it; he can only abuse it: thus, in leaving him what is strictly necessary to him, all the rest belongs to the Republic and to its unfortunate members.

Here, in this regard, is the course that the Municipalities and revolutionary Committees are to hold: they must, in the sincerity of their soul, and after having stripped themselves of all spirit of favor, of hatred, and of partiality, examine what are the real needs of each family, determine them according to the number of children and of necessary employees, weigh the gains and the profits that the revolution must in all likelihood have brought into the house, and fix all that exceeds them as a tribute of justice owed to the revolution.

It is necessary, in this measure, to follow a scale graduated upon revolutionary proportions; he who has ten thousand livres of income, for example, must pay at least thirty thousand livres; for it is evident that he was able to find, in the years preceding, or will find, in the years to come, out of his revenue, the wherewithal to establish the expenditure necessary for a Republican.

We give notice at the same time to the Municipalities and revolutionary Committees that it is not only upon this object that the tax established upon the rich must bear. All the materials in which they overflow, and which may be useful to the defenders of the fatherland, the fatherland reclaims at this instant; thus there are people who have ridiculous hoards of sheets, of shirts, of napkins, and of shoes; all these objects, and others like them, are by right the matter of the revolutionary requisitions; by what right would a man keep in his cupboards superfluous furniture and garments, when his fellow citizens, who shed their blood to defend his properties, lacked the things most indispensable to life, to health, to the satisfaction of the most ordinary needs?

There is yet a precious material to be requisitioned: it is those vile and corrupting metals which the Republican disdains, which he esteems only insofar as they serve him to win soldiers to liberty and deserters from slavery; it was permitted to kings to gird their brows with a crown of gold, and to drink in precious cups the blood, the sweat, and the tears of the people. But the Republican must know none but iron; it is with this metal, richer because it is more useful, that he makes his fields fruitful and that he assails his enemies; the ploughshare and the sword are his favorite instruments; Sparta began to be a slave when Athens had dazzled her eyes with the spectacle of her metals. French Republicans, raise your soul above these insignificant and vile enjoyments which, by an apparatus of pomp and of luxury, tend only to confirm the ancient inequality among men; so that thus, at your voice, all these metals may flow into the national treasury, and there receiving the imprint of the Republic; and after having been purified by fire, they may flow only for the general good; steel, iron, and the Republic will be triumphant.

§. IV.

On the Provisioning of the Markets, and on the Measures to be Taken concerning Subsistences

The great hope of the counter-revolutionaries was to starve the people; they counted upon the Rich Proprietors, upon the great Farmers, upon the hoarders, and they dared to believe that famine would conquer France for slavery; the National Convention has foiled their projects; it has decreed, or rather it has proclaimed the great principle, that the productions of the French territory belong to France, subject to the indemnity owed to the cultivator; the people has therefore an assured right over the fruits it brings forth; it is therefore no longer exposed to seeing the grain that its labors have produced fatten a few privileged tyrants and a few dozen oppressor proprietors; it is therefore no longer permitted for an iniquitous owner to lay down the law to the people, and to keep in his pay laborious men upon whom alone his existence depends. Such are the fundamental principles with which the authorities and the Citizens must steep themselves; for a man will never be free so long as he believes that his existence, and that of his family, depend upon the caprice of another man.

This being laid down, the revolutionary Committees, or the Committees of subsistence, must especially occupy themselves with the care of provisioning the markets.

It is there that the tributes of the earth must be brought, since it is there that, without distinction of rich or poor, all the citizens go to provision themselves; there have been, we know, censuses ordered by the law, but cupidity has caused false declarations to be made. The patriots must verify them and pitilessly confiscate all that shall be marked with the seal of imposture; for the rest, the good citizens of the countryside must recall that it falls to them to provision the armies and the towns, that the armies and the towns work also for the countryside; that it is they who defend it, and who, in exchange for its provisions, render it useful tributes and a necessary protection.

Citizens of the countryside, we have already told you: favor the circulation of subsistences, and you will find, in a just return on the part of the consumers, the reward of the zeal you will have brought to the execution of laws whose infraction would cause your ruin.

§. V.

Extirpation of Fanaticism

The Priests are the sole causes of the misfortunes of France; it is they who, for thirteen hundred years, have raised up by degrees the edifice of our slavery, have adorned it with all the sacred baubles that could steal away its defects from the eye of reason and from the scythe of philosophy; it is they who have enslaved the human mind beneath their imbecile prejudices, and who, to crown the infamy, have sanctified, by their blessed impostures, the errors with which they have intoxicated the centuries. It is evident that the revolution, which is the triumph of enlightenment, can behold only with indignation the all-too-long death-throes of this handful of liars; their reign expires and gives way to the empire of good sense and of reason: it is the duty of Patriots to hasten its progress, and to insinuate into the minds of their less enlightened fellow citizens the reforming principles of the French revolution.

And first, Citizens, the relations of God to man are relations purely inward, which have no need, in order to be sincere, of the pomp of worship and of the visible monuments of superstition; you will begin by sending to the treasury of the Republic all the vessels, all the ornaments of gold and silver that may flatter the vanity of the priests, but that are null for the truly religious man and for the Being he claims to honor. You will annihilate all the outward symbols of religion that cover the roads and the public squares, because the roads and the public squares are the property of all Frenchmen, and because, all Frenchmen not having the same worship, by uselessly flattering the credulity of some, you would attack the rights and offend the eyes of others; because France recognizes no dominant religion, and because, tolerating them all, she must permit none to usurp over its rivals a supremacy, a preponderant authority, nor, consequently, any of the outward signs that presuppose it.

Republicans, we speak to you here the language of truth; we owe it to you whole and entire. When France was but a kingdom, when there existed for you no fatherland, your souls, ardent and sensitive, had need perhaps of some extraordinary nourishment, and you found that nourishment in the superstitious practices of certain virtues you had forged for yourselves; and in its moments of dejection and fatigue, your generous heart reposed with pleasure in the ideas of a happiness you could not find upon the earth; but there are for the Republican unspeakable joys, which seize the imagination, which fill the soul, and which, raising it by noble and lofty sensations above itself, bring it really nearer to that supreme essence from which it flows; the Republican has no other divinity than his fatherland, no other idol than liberty; the Republican is essentially religious, for he is good, just, courageous; the patriot honors virtue, respects old age, consoles misfortune, relieves indigence, punishes treasons. What fairer homage to the Divinity! The patriot has not the folly to claim to adore Him by practices useless to humanity and fatal to himself; he does not condemn himself to an apparent celibacy in order to give himself the more freely to debaucheries: a worthy child of nature, a useful member of society, he makes the happiness of a virtuous wife, he raises numerous children in the severe principles of morality and of republicanism; and when he reaches the end of his career, he bequeaths to his children, poor like himself, the examples of the virtues he has given them, and to the fatherland the hope of seeing him reborn in children worthy of him.

Return into your own heart, brave and generous Republicans, and tell us which you would rather resemble: those execrable bigots, or those patriot men of whom we have just retraced for you a faint image? Well then! Learn that those villains had still the audacity to damn eternally the men who had devoted themselves to your happiness, who concerned themselves with your liberty, and who preached and established the restoration of your rights: in truth, several have already made honorable amends to the human race for the impostures they had preached to it; several have abjured the sacrilegious profession that laid upon them the obligation of deceiving and persecuting their fellows; soon their example will be followed by all those in whom the priestly cap has not yet extinguished all the lights of reason, nor even smothered the voice of their own well-understood interest. As for the others, they will not be slow to learn that the Republic will no longer nourish idlers, nor traitors, nor impostors; and all the communes of the Republic will not be slow to imitate that of Paris, which, upon the ruins of a Gothic church, has just raised a temple to reason.

Republicans, in tracing for you rapidly this overview of your duties, the Temporary Commission of Republican Oversight repeats to you that it has neither been able, nor claimed, to tell you everything: there are things that can only be hinted at, but that are grasped by the penetrating eye of patriotism, which well knows how to make its profit of them. Be vigilant; you all have great wrongs to atone for; the crimes of the Lyonnais rebels are your own. If you had that proud and republican attitude which heralds and characterizes the free man, never would villains have dared to attempt an effort against the fatherland, or at the least they would not have had a single minute to applaud themselves for it. Regain then promptly, on the road of liberty, all the ground you have lost there, and reconquer, by force of virtues and patriotic efforts, the esteem and the confidence of France; the National Convention, the Representatives of the People, have their eyes upon you, upon your magistrates; the account they will require of you will be the more severe in proportion as you have the more faults to have pardoned. And we, who are the intermediaries between them and you, we whom they have charged to watch over you, to instruct you, we swear to you that our gaze will not stray for one instant from off you, that we will employ with severity all the authority that is delegated to us, and that we will punish as perfidy all that, in other circumstances, you might have called slowness, weakness, or negligence: the time of half-measures and of equivocations is past. Help us to strike the great blows, or you will be the first to bear them. LIBERTY OR DEATH: reflect, and choose.

Signed: Duhamel, President. Perrotin, Vice-President. Guion, Sadet, Boissière, Agar, Marcillat, Théret, Fusil, Vauquois, Richard, Laffaye, Verd, Procurator-General, Duviquet, Secretary-General.

The Commission decrees that the present Instruction shall be submitted to the approval of the Representatives of the People, to be printed and posted.

Done in Commission, at Ville-Affranchie, the 26th of Brumaire, the second year of the French Republic, one, indivisible, and democratic.

Signed: Duhamel, President. Verd, Procurator-General. Duviquet, Secretary-General.

In approval of the Decree. Signed: Collot-d’Herbois, Fouché, Representatives of the People.

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4

Roughly, “the machine-gunner of Lyon”; Fouché had Lyonnais executed by having them bound together in front of a cannon and shot by grapeshot all at once. Writing to the National Convention on October 13th 1793, he proclaimed, « On rougit ici d’être riche et l’on s’honore d’être pauvre. » Other Jacobins, such as Robespierre, decried the brutality taking place in Lyon.

This paper argues that Beck is fundamentally correct about the existence of the conflict but is too harsh with his conclusion, while more recent reconciliations by Ripstein and Korsgaard are certainly insightful but unable to entirely explain away the strain in the theory. Ripstein’s two-register strategy fails at the point where Kant’s sign perspective seems to specify the moral content of the spectator enthusiasm, and Korsgaard’s juridical/moral distinction succeeds at the textual level but only by relocating the issue to a deeper level of Kant’s practical philosophy. The argument against Korsgaard here owes much to a critique advanced by Katrin Flikschuh, who has argued that Korsgaard’s reading ignores Kant’s emphasis on publicly reasoned reform.7 Building on these criticisms and developments, I argue that the contradiction between the Doctrine of Right and the Conflict is not a mistake or awkwardness that can be dissolved by careful and systematic categorization, but a structural feature of Kant’s late political thought, a location where his conceptions of moral right and juridical right fail to fully integrate. The contradiction is tangible, as Beck recognized, but it is not the failure of Kantian ethics to deal with conflicting duties; instead, I suppose it is a determinate result with corresponding philosophical content.

Kant’s denial of a right to revolution in the Doctrine of Right follows from the structure of his juridical theory. Right is the sum of the conditions under which the choice of one can be united with the choice of another under a universal law of freedom (6:230). Public right is the system of laws that makes such union possible for a people under a constitution, and the sovereign is the head of state in whom the united will of the people is represented for the purpose of public lawgiving. A right of resistance against the sovereign would require a juridical authority above the sovereign capable of judging when resistance is permitted, which would in turn require its own sovereign, and so on indefinitely. Obviously, this would introduce a paradox in locating the source of authority. There can be “no right of sedition,” he writes, “still less to rebellion, and least of all there is a right against the head of a state as an individual person (the monarch), to attack his person or even his life on the pretext that he has abused his authority.” (6:320). The reason for this is that any such right would have to be enshrined in law, which is impossible because “[f]or a people to be authorized to resist [the sovereign], there would have to be a public law permitting it to resist, that is, the highest legislation would have to contain a provision that it is not the highest”, which would be “self-contradictory” (6:320). The conclusion is quite severe: the people must endure even the most intolerable abuse of supreme power, reform must come from the sovereign alone, and the execution of Louis XVI by the hands of French revolutionaries is not simply a political catastrophe but a transgression of a different and higher order from ordinary murder, the highest treason, since it dissolves the very framework within which wrong is juridically determined (6:320–322). Kant staunchly refuses to logically contradict his conception of sovereignty and right in this juridical context, though the resulting conclusion seems exceedingly conservative in content.

The Conflict of the Faculties, Part 2, takes up a different question. As the title of the section suggests, Kant asks whether the human race is morally progressing, and whether we can possibly know this. He determines that direct moral progress cannot be empirically established, since we lack the historical perspective from which the relevant comparisons could be drawn. But there can be an event that functions as a sign of history, a “signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, et prognostikon“, indicating the moral capacity and predisposition of the human race. The event Kant identifies is not the French Revolution as such, since he is at pains to distinguish the revolutionary act from the sign:

The revolution of a gifted people which have seen unfolding in our day may succeed or miscarry; it may be filled with misery and atrocities to the point that a right-thinking human being, were he boldly to hope to execute it successfully the second time, would never resolve to make the experiment at such cost - this revolution, I say, nonetheless finds in the hearts of all spectators (who are not engaged in this game themselves) a wishful participation that borders closely on enthusiasm the very expression of which is fraught with danger; this sympathy, therefore, can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race. (7:85)

The sign is, as mentioned previously, the spectator response, and what the sign reveals is “a moral predisposition in the human race.” Kant proceeds to specify what the predisposition consists in: a recognition of “the right of every people to give itself a civil constitution of the kind that it sees fit” and an aversion to offensive war (7:85). This disposition seemingly possesses a specific moral content and direction.

Kant further develops the structure of the sign in the paragraphs that follow. He emphasizes that the enthusiasm cannot be explained as self-interest or factional sympathy, since the spectators are geographically and politically distant from the events and the public expression of their sympathy carries genuine risk (7:86). He also emphasizes that what is being signaled is progress in the species rather than in particular individuals, and that the progress in question is moral (i.e. universal and reflective of the state of humanity as a whole) rather than only civilizational (7:88). The explication of the sign is thus not a vague rhetorical gesture by Kant, but a specific philosophical claim about what the species has revealed of itself and its progress through reaction to this particular event. As Seebohm puts it, what Kant ascribes to both the revolutionaries and to the sympathetic spectators is a “genuine enthusiasm” that is rationally tracked to the recognition of moral content rather than reducible to pathology or self-interest.8

The teleological framework that makes the sign perspective intelligible is older than the Conflict itself. In “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784), Kant had already proposed that the highest problem nature has set for the human race is the achievement of a universal civil society administering right (8:22). The progressive history of the species is, in this conception, the gradual unfolding of the capacities necessary for the species to constitute itself politically in a way adequate to its rational nature (8:17–22). The civil constitution Kant has in mind is the moral telos of human historical development. By the time of the Conflict fourteen years later, this framework provides the standard against which the French Revolution can be read as a sign of progress: it is a sign because the moral predisposition it reveals, one responsive to the people’s claim to constitute itself politically, is the kind necessary for the species to advance toward its rational end.

The apparent contradiction can now be stated more specifically. The Doctrine of Right holds that a people has no juridical right to constitute itself politically against the existing sovereign, because such a right would dissolve the conditions of right through contradiction. The Conflict, on the other hand, drawing on Kant’s older teleological framework, holds that the moral disposition revealed by the spectator enthusiasm is a sympathetic recognition of the people’s claim to constitute itself politically, and that this disposition indicates the species’ moral progress toward its rational telos. The question is whether these two positions can be held together.

Ripstein’s reconciliation has two components. The positive account interprets the Doctrine of Right as deriving public legality from the principle of right alone, with no appeal to moral worth or substantive conceptions of the good.9 Right concerns only the external relations of choice; the sovereign is necessary not because of any virtue it possesses but because the determinacy of right itself requires an authoritative interpreter and enforcer of the laws under which persons can coexist as free. Ripstein presses this further than the standard juridical reading: legality, he writes, is in Kant’s conception “the general precondition of the moral authorization to use force. The entire point of the argument is to show that there can be no moral authorization to use force except a legal one.”10 Hence the flat verdict: “The juridical nature of Kant’s argument leads to an exceptionless formulation: there can be no right to revolution.”11 The matching account of the Conflict draws on a parallel between the sign doctrine and reflective judgment, which interprets its object through concepts the understanding could not produce alone. The sign of history is, in Ripstein’s reading, a reflective judgment of the same type as the teleological judgments of the third Critique: it does not claim the French Revolution is juridically permissible or morally laudable, only that the spectator response can be interpreted as evidence of a moral disposition under the regulative idea of historical progress toward a juridical condition adequate to humanity’s rational nature. The Doctrine of Right tells us what right requires, while the Conflict tells us what we can reflectively interpret events as indicating. The two texts answer different questions at different normative levels, and thus the contradiction is done away with.

However, it would seem further textual evidence undermines the strictly reflective confinement Ripstein’s categorization entails, and this failure is due to the manner in which Kant specifies what spectator enthusiasm reveals. A sign of history is the inference from an event to a postulated underlying cause not directly displayed. The structure is inference to the best explanation: given the disinterested character of the participation, where spectators have nothing material to gain and public expression carries political risk, the only adequate explanation is a moral disposition in humanity capable of being moved by the spectacle. The crucial question is what the disposition is a disposition to. Kant’s answer is explicit: it responds to “the right of every people to give itself a civil constitution of the kind that it sees fit” (7:85). The spectators are not moved by a generic moral fact or illusion. They are moved by the specific moral significance Kant identifies as the people’s assertion of its right to constitute itself politically. But this is precisely the assertion and right the Doctrine of Right has theoretically declared juridically impossible.

Proponents of the dual register perspective will respond that the disposition lies wholly in the spectators, not the actors, and reveals a capacity for moral feeling rather than endorsement of any specific juridical claim. This seems to fail, however, given the intentional structure of the feeling Kant identifies. The closest analogue in his system is respect (Achtung). In the Groundwork footnote at 4:401, respect is a specific category of feeling (Kant separates it from a kind which can be reduced to inclination or fear) not “received through means of influence” but instead “self-wrought by means of a rational concept”, that is, it is the consciousness of one’s will being subordinated to law. In the second Critique’s analysis of the incentives of pure practical reason (5:71–89), respect is again a feeling not pathological but produced by the moral law itself in our sensible nature. Its defining feature, in both texts, is cognitive content: it is responsive to the moral law as recognized by reason, not to anything merely sensibly given.12

The spectator enthusiasm in the Conflict seemingly has structural content which mirrors Achtung. Kant stresses that it cannot be explained pathologically (the spectators have no self-interest, and the expression is dangerous), that it is universal in its scope, and that it corresponds to a specific moral feature of the event. To read the enthusiasm as simply sentimental, or as an irrational reaction to a morally illusory event, would deny it the specific content that allows Kant to treat it as evidence of moral disposition rather than a matter of historical interest. The morally responsive structure presupposes that what the spectators respond to has the moral character their response treats it as having. If the people has no such right, then the spectators are being moved by a moral illusion, and Kant would simply say, at most, that the enthusiasm reveals a tendency to be moved by morally compelling appearances even when those appearances are illusory. But he says no such thing; as mentioned before, he asserts that the sympathy “can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race.” Kant’s claim is thus seemingly evaluative: the spectators are correctly cognizing something moral, and their disposition is morally significant because it is responsive to a moral feature. If the moral feature does not exist, the predisposition Kant infers does not have the cognitive content and justification he consequently attributes to it.

Ripstein’s defense would argue that this argument functions on a misunderstanding of reflective judgment, which is supposed to interpret its object under a regulative idea without committing to any determinative claim about it. The teleological judgments of the third Critique do not commit Kant to the determinative reality of purposes in nature; by parallel, the sign of history should not commit him to the determinative reality of any right asserted by the revolutionaries. The parallel is forced at three points. First, the teleological judgments of the third Critique are reflections on nature, where the regulative restriction holds because purposiveness in nature is what we cannot determinatively know. The sign of history is reflection on a phenomenon of moral consciousness, the enthusiasm of disinterested spectators, and the standards of moral evaluation are not optional for moral phenomena in the way purposive ascription is optional for natural ones. When the object of reflection is itself a deliverance of practical reason, the reflection is governed by the constitutive standards of practical reason rather than by a regulative idea of nature’s purposiveness. Second, Kant’s own modal language inside the sign doctrine is determinative rather than regulative. The revolutionary enthusiasm and sympathy “can have no other cause than a moral predisposition in the human race” (7:85). This is a modal claim contingent on the content which rouses enthusiasm, and it excludes alternative explanations unless we assume Kant is being careless with language. Compare the regulative formulations of the third Critique, which preserve the as-if structure: nature is to be interpreted as if purposive with organisms judged under the concept of natural purpose. Kant does not write that the sympathy may be regulatively judged under the idea of a moral predisposition, he writes that it can have “no other cause.” The sign doctrine contains determinative inferential components even if its overall framing is reflective, and these components are what gives the sign its evidential force.13 Third, the structure of Achtung invoked above is constitutive of moral feeling and not contingent; Achtung is not a feeling that happens to have a cognitive object but rather is a unique kind of feeling whose intentional content is the moral law as recognized by reason, and whose cognitive content is therefore directly constitutive for its identity rather than arbitrary. Once Kant describes the spectator enthusiasm as structurally similar to Achtung and identifies its object as the right of constitutional self-determination, he is theoretically committed on his own analysis of moral feeling to that object being a genuine moral feature, because a feeling of this structural type cannot, by his analysis, take an illusory object without ceasing to be the specific kind of feeling it is. To the extent that Kant’s conception of enthusiasm mirrors his conception of non-pathological moral feeling such as Achtung, one cannot assume he means to suggest enthusiasm arises from anything but objective moral content. The Ripsteinian retreat, that we may interpret the enthusiasm under a regulative idea without committing to its object’s moral reality, seemingly falters when considering the constitutive and intentional structure of moral feeling itself, alongside all the conclusions one can infer from that structure.

The reflective/determinative distinction therefore cannot by itself salvage the position. Kant in the Conflict makes no determinative juridical claim contradicting the Doctrine of Right. The reflective interpretation is moral interpretation, and the moral interpretation commits him to attributing moral reality to the feature of the event that the juridical theory denies any reality as right. The two registers communicate because moral and juridical evaluation are not, for Kant, independently variable. Right and ethics are distinct but both are forms of evaluation grounded in pure practical reason, and a moral disposition correctly responsive to a moral feature of an event commits Kant to recognizing that feature as morally real. Yirmiyahu Yovel notes that the Conflict threatens to undercut the juridical conservatism of the other writings, but does not seek to remedy that by devaluing either the juridical or historical perspective, noting that Kant leaves both independently true in a state of tension. In a footnote, he writes,

Compare, for instance, the concluding chapter of TP to Par. 6 in The Contest [or Conflict] of Faculties. In the former he states that revolution is absolutely forbidden and that any resistance to the supreme legislator or incitation to rebellion is the worst offense in a political community and the most deserving of punishment, since it undermines its foundation. In the second work he says the French Revolution not only calls for sympathy and enthusiasm, but also that it suggests that the human race has an inclination toward the good and reasonable evidence of moral progress in history. Kant’s final position is that one cannot justify any revolution a priori, but that there are revolutions that are beneficial a posteriori, that is, once they have occurred. He consequently leaves the matter in the hands of “Providence” (Rel., VI:122/112-113).14

Korsgaard’s reconciliation handles the difficulty by firstly distinguishing two senses of the “right of revolution.” A juridical right would be a right codifiable within an existing legal order, a public law authorizing resistance against the sovereign under specified conditions. Kant, of course, denies that any such right of this kind exists. But Korsgaard argues this denial is compatible with a moral justification of revolution in extreme cases where institutions meant to realize rights are used to violate them, noting that, “the virtue of justice will be turned against itself,” and that the virtuous person may have “nowhere else to turn” except to paradoxically take rights under their own protection due to their commitment to universal justice.15 In such cases revolution can be morally “permissible” (with all the responsibility and possibility of consequent punishment the action entails) without being juridically authorized. The Doctrine of Right denies revolution can be juridically right, and the Conflict affirms only that the spectator enthusiasm reveals a moral disposition responsive to a moral right, so the two are consistent. Korsgaard essentially takes the explicit moral consequence of the sign doctrine at face value while preserving the Doctrine of Right’s juridical conclusion.

Flikschuh converges with my thesis by a different route. She asserts that Korsgaard’s reading, by locating revolutionary legitimacy in a non-juridical ethical domain that exempts the “good person” from the ethical duty not to revolt, “squanders the conceptual gains she achieves through her procedural reading of Kant’s juridical non-revolution argument.”16 The gain is the connection between procedural Kantian justice and Kant’s emphasis on publicly reasoned reform. The textual basis is the passage in “On the Common Saying” where freedom of the pen is named “the sole palladium of the people’s rights” (8:304), to be exercised within the limits of esteem and love for the constitution rather than as a coercive weapon against the sovereign.17 Korsgaard, according to Flikschuh, “nowhere thematises freedom of the pen as the people’s ‘palladium’ against the government’s coercive authority over them; in effect, her transcendental contractualism deprives the people of its capacity to judge the difference between just and unjust lawmaking.”18 For Flikschuh, the proper Kantian figure of resistance, rather than the pseudo-Nietzschean hero of justice which Korsgaard describes, is the dissident who acknowledges the basic legitimacy of the regime while criticizing the injustice of its laws through publicly reasoned argument.

But Flikschuh’s textual evidence does not exhaust the issue. The spectators are certainly enthusiastic about more than the right to publicly criticize the existing constitution within the limits of esteem and love. They are enthusiastic, Kant says, about “the right of every people to give itself a civil constitution of the kind that it sees fit” (7:85). This exceeds the right of publicly reasoned reform; it is expressing the controversial right to constitute oneself politically against the existing sovereign. The deeper objection to Korsgaard is that her reconciliation is relocating the contradiction inward to a place even the freedom-of-the-pen reform critique cannot reach. If there is a moral right of constitutional self-determination with no possible juridical expression, including no expression through publicly reasoned reform, then Kant’s practical philosophy contains a moral right that cannot be made effective within the system of public right. The Doctrine of Right is not a separate domain sealed off from moral right; it is grounded in the principle of right, itself a principle of pure practical reason, tasked with specifying how moral right is to be realized among persons in external relations. The system is therefore theoretically incomplete by its own standards.

Korsgaard might respond that this is the right conclusion to draw, that revolution is the extreme case where moral right exceeds the capacity of juridical right to formalize it, and that this fact in itself is not an issue because the jurisdiction between the two is distinct. Korsgaard treats this asymmetry as an exception which leaves the juridical theory’s foundations intact, but I treat it, sharpened by Flikschuh’s textual evidence about the freedom of the pen, as a place where the juridical theory’s claim to specify how moral right is made effective shows its limits. The decision depends on how much weight one places on the systematic ambition of Kantian juridical theory. If one holds, as I think one should, that the Doctrine of Right is meant to be the explicit systematic specification of how moral right is made effective in dealing with external relations, then a moral right with no juridical expression is not an exception that can fall from our attention, but an oversight or contradiction where the system is experiencing such severe strain that it could threaten to unravel the whole project.

One might suspect that Kant simply changed his mind between 1797 and 1798, since the texts are separated by little more than a year. But the sign doctrine of the Conflict is continuous with the teleological framework Kant had been developing since “Idea for a Universal History” (1784) through Perpetual Peace (1795), and as a result it seemingly is not the sudden product of a late reversal. Nor does Kant anywhere acknowledge that the Conflict revises the Doctrine of Right; the two arguments are presented as answering different questions, and the absence of any retractive gesture by Kant suggests against a simple developmental reading. What we see instead is a single late position holding two independent claims that upon inspection possess a serious conflict. The conflict involves more than just autonomy versus sovereign command; the moral capacity which grounds the authority of public right (the autonomous rational agent’s recognition of the principle of right as itself a principle of pure practical reason) also generates moral judgments that the system of right cannot incorporate. The Doctrine of Right is meant to be the systematic specification of how moral right is made effective in external relations among persons, but the same moral capacity that legitimates that specification yields, in the case Kant identifies in the Conflict, a moral recognition of the people’s right to constitute itself politically against the existing sovereign, which the system of right has declared juridically impossible.

This is where the Hegelian perspective Beck gestures toward, and the structurally analogous move Korsgaard makes, show their downsides. The cunning of reason converts the revolutionary’s crime into human progress and Korsgaard treats revolution as a moral permission in extremis that cannot be juridically codified. Both solutions are philosophically coherent, but they reconcile the situation by externalizing the contradiction rather than properly dissolving it within Kantian systemic bounds. The Hegelian solution concedes the principle Kant’s juridical theory was intended to resist, specifically that moral right exceeds juridical right in certain cases, with the excess having to be justified in some post-hoc way (through Providence, world-historical individuals, the exceptional “good person” who takes rights under their own protection, etc). Accepting the Hegelian solution would mean abandoning a good portion of the Doctrine of Right’s systematic ambition. Korsgaard’s framing is more moderate but inherits the same cost: if a moral right of constitutional self-determination has no possible juridical expression, as my argument against her, drawing on Flikschuh, suggests, then Kant’s practical philosophy contains a moral right that cannot be made effective within the very system tasked with making moral right effective, and the exception remains a thorn that hasn’t been dealt with.

The contradiction between the Doctrine of Right and the Conflict of the Faculties is productive in a specific sense. It reveals where the attempt to give a fully self-contained juridical theory, grounded entirely in the principle of right with no moral exception, can be broken by the moral capacity from which that principle derives. Kant cannot maintain that public right is the systematic specification of how moral right is realized externally and at the same time hold that the moral recognitions the sign of history demonstrates have no juridical justification. The productive content of the tension is the recognition that any attempt at a closed normative systematization of right will face this structural pressure: the moral grounds of legitimacy generate moral judgments that a system of legitimacy seemingly cannot fully accommodate. I believe this is not a failure of Kantian ethics to deal with conflicting duties, as Beck supposed, but rather the place where the ambitious architecture of right and ethics in Kant’s late project refuses to merge cleanly. The contradiction makes visible the limit of any attempt to mesh moral right and historical progress entirely with a universal system of public right.

Bibliography

Beck, Lewis White. “Kant and the Right of Revolution.” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 3 (1971): 411–22.

Flikschuh, Katrin. “Sidestepping Morality: Korsgaard on Kant’s No-Right to Revolution.” Jahrbuch Für Recht Und Ethik / Annual Review of Law and Ethics 16 (2008): 127–45.

Kant, Immanuel. Kants gesammelte Schriften. Edited by the Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Reimer/De Gruyter, 1900–.

———. The Conflict of the Faculties. Translated by Mary J. Gregor and Robert E. Anchor. In Religion and Rational Theology, edited by Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by Mary Gregor. In Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. In Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim.” Translated by Allen W. Wood. In Anthropology, History, and Education, edited by Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

———. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. In Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice.” Translated by Mary Gregor. In Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

———. “Toward Perpetual Peace.” Translated by Mary Gregor. In Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Korsgaard, Christine M. “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Kant on the Right to Revolution.” In Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, edited by Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M. Korsgaard, 297–328. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Ripstein, Arthur. Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Seebohm, Thomas. “Kant’s Theory of Revolution.” Social Research 48, no. 3 (1981): 557–87.

Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

338:

“The more I read, the more I realize I know nothing.” Voltaire’s.

Aphorisms and maxims remain alien to me. I cannot easily puff my chest out and declare anything about reality beyond how I experience it. I am ever-conscious of my role as interpreter, of my fallible senses, of an organization of manifolds that will come tumbling down with the approaching crack of gunpowder. This is my union of object and subject: the lingering feeling of decay, the coming instant when matter declares that I am dead.

The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.

I am trying, standing in the door,

To discover in the distant echoes

What the coming years may hold in store.

The nocturnal darkness with a thousand

Binoculars is focused onto me.

Take away this cup, O Abba Father,

Everything is possible to Thee.

I am fond of this Thy stubborn project,

And to play my part I am content.

But another drama is in progress,

And, this once, O let me be exempt.

But the plan of action is determined,

And the end irrevocably sealed.

I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:

Life is not a walk across a field.1

470:

Unlike Camus, Pushkin, or de Vigny, I can shed few tears for the fate of the traitor Chénier, despite all of his lovely little limp-wristed scribblings. There is a case to be made still that I am a political rather than artistic creature, that my concerns lie with the objective mechanisms of society’s base rather than any subjective fruits, that I am so far dissociated from my own “genius”; this is why I produce nothing as artist, I am too busy dreaming of days when genius is no longer a privilege, when Prometheus is truly unbound and as natural of an impulse as that to fulfill any other satiation. I can love nothing until everything is perfect, proper, just. I am a martyr. Hailing the old Romantic genius produced recidivistic reactionary sentiments. We have seen such a superstructural Reich rear its head already. That’s the society of Sturm und Drang, the swelling, briny tide of masses clad in medieval gallantry and the neuroses of a people who genuinely believed themselves besieged. The lightning of the poets shattering shackles with their dreams led them to cast their own all the way to the gates of Moscow.

To know is to know the essential, to engage in it by sight and not by analysis or speech. This garrulous, brawling, blustering animal who exults in racket (noise is the direct consequence of Original Sin) must be silenced, for he will never approach life's inviolate sources if he still has dealings with words. And so long as he is not delivered from metaphysically superficial knowledge, he will persevere in that counterfeit existence in which he lacks any standing, where everything in him is beside the point. Dilapidating his being, he employs his will beyond his means; he wills with despair, with rage, and when he has exhausted the semblance of reality he possesses, he wills more passionately still-to the point of annihilation or absurdity. Inept at living, he fakes life; that is why, his cult of the imminent verging on ecstasy, he swoons in the presence of the unknown he pursues and dreads, the moment he anticipates, in which he hopes to exist and in which he will exist as little as in the moment before. There is no future for those who live in the idolatry of tomorrow. Having despoiled the present of its eternal dimension, all they have left is Will, their great recourse-and their great punishment.2

There is a serious case to be made for quietism.

267:

Force and “beauty” (and the subversion of these) are the two things that can really stir the instincts of the masses like blood in the water... The philosopher may be ugly because he deals in truths, the shaker of the world must be beautiful to appeal to the inner organs of mirage. All sorts of newspapers and treatises are impotent for all purposes but to mobilize the few who will lead with the body, the only thing that really grants authority in the eyes of the fascistic assembly of drifters we have today.

226:

The localized and reactive quality of the thought as compared to the dream. The thought, though it can dance with such vivid colors and shapes, morphs at a whim to suit whatever strange connections (via genesis or reaction) the waking mind makes at any point, and thus remains to some extent at a fraction of its true power, projected as an object outside of the experience, since we already exist within the frames of existence through “wakefulness”. It is very difficult to imagine something which utilizes all the space of the mind’s stage. There is always an aspect of localized phenomena of imagery, as opposed to the dream, which becomes so easily the full body sensation and the empathetic experience of putting oneself for a moment in the shoes of the infinite terror and mutable amalgamations of the mind’s eye. One is always some sort of victim in dreams. The imagination rules over you, whether in the waking moment, when it refuses to allow itself to be fully realized, or in the dream in which you are its prey. Someone serious will have to write a phenomenology of dreams.

"How difficult it is . . . to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with the word" (Theory of Color, §754). Here it is useful to recall that the word symbol is related to the Greek verb symballein, which means to draw together, to unite. It is the scientist's task to find such symbols, for he is dealing with isolated events in living nature which yield their secrets only when properly arranged and presented. Goethe was extremely careful to avoid abstract diagrams, theoretical conclusions, and mathematical formulations. Instead, he viewed his work as similar to a playwright's, relying on a setting and the presence of actors to make it come alive.3

143:

The natural metaphor works as a qualitative exchange of divinity, as all of God's energies are equidistant from the tongue and equal in His regard. One hierophany for another; mulberries plunge from trees and stain the ground in purple ichor, wine-dark seas, and so forth.

"But Man's world is mutable, seas become mulberry fields"...4

"Every phenomenon of nature was a word, — the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.”5

How does this fit into the picture theory of meaning, exactly?

396:

Fear is the direct child of self-regard and self-preservation, and hence inseparable from man, but most of all manifest in and proper to primitive man, children, and those who are closest to the natural state; it’s a passion that man holds most intimately in common with every animal species and a general characteristic of living creatures; as a passion it is the most selfish there is. A fearful man withdraws into perfect isolation, cuts himself off from his nearest and dearest and hardly thinks twice about sacrificing them, etc., to save himself (on the contrary, it’s as if he’s disposed to do so by natural necessity). And when he’s afraid a man doesn’t cut himself off just from others, or from everything that in some way belongs to others, but from his own belongings as well, the things closest, most precious, and most necessary to him, like the sailor who dumps the fruits of years of hard work into the sea, of his entire life even, the very means of his subsistence.

Hence we can say that fear is the perfection and the purest quintessence of egoism, because it reduces man not only to taking care only of his own things, but to letting even those go so as to take care exclusively of his own pure and naked self, the barest existence of his own individual life, cut off from every other possible existence. Man will even sacrifice parts of himself when he fears for his life, all his care and passion being reduced, cowed by fear, to concentrating on survival and exclusively on what is absolutely necessary for survival at any given moment. One might say that his very self shrinks and contracts the better to survive, allowing him to jettison any part of himself not strictly necessary, to save only what is inseparable from his being, only what makes it up, the essential part in which it necessarily and substantially consists.6

What is it that necessarily and substantially constitutes my person? When all of the jewelry is cast off? A disembodied reason, like a spirit? Only someone like me could be taken in by Descartes. No, man a machine, a machine of traumas, molested by the world. . . “but who here will envy whom the highest place exposes formost to stand against the thunderers aim your bulwark, and condemns to greatest share of endless pain?”7

40:

It is possible to imagine kinds of world very different from the world as we know it. It is possible to describe types of experience very different from the experience we actually have. But not any purported and grammatically permissible description of a possible kind of experience would be a truly intelligible description. There are limits to what we can conceive of, or make intelligible to ourselves, as a possible general structure of experience. The investigation of these limits, the investigation of the set of ideas which forms the limiting framework of all our thought about the world and experience of the world, is, evidently, an important and interesting philosophical undertaking. No philosopher has made a more strenuous attempt on it than Kant.8

But is even this description not “more intelligible” to the individual that possesses the more acute faculties of imagination? Is there not a biconditional experiment being performed in the precise language of the author of such a description (who must be given more credit than the interpreter under most assumptions, unless we must “know the author better than he know himself” [Herder, Schleiermacher?9] and the skilled verbal comprehension of the interpreter? That is to say, proper fiction relies on a kind of imposition of the a priori onto the word? How much of language is just calculation and the accuracy of such calculations? Is the poet the same kind of genius as the mathematician? Surely not?

18:

A great deal of developments require the supersession of some other, more entrenched, even potentially more “reasonable” position. The law gives way to the great men, the ethical is suspended by the teleological, et cetera. All striving is heteropathic, all revolutions are noble. Let heaven’s bright clarion ring with a single eternal truth—It is right to rebel!

Terror is the path to lucidity. “In his commentary on Genesis, the medieval commentator Rabbi Levi writes: ‘if (one) desirest the world to endure, there can be no absolutely strict judgment, while if (one) desirest absolutely strict judgment, the world cannot endure.’”10 Can a single man reform the world? No. But he can jostle it with a precise stab or come crashing down like the executioner's blade; natural law will do the rest. If only we could calculate the exact direction the crowd would scurry.

Hemsterhuis has a wonderful passage on spirit and letter in philosophy. According to him the letter is merely a help for philosophical communication—the true essence of which consists in after-thinking [nachdenken]. The speaker merely leads the direction of thought in the hearer—and thereby it becomes after-thinking. He thinks and the other thinks after him. Words are an untrustworthy medium of fore-thinking [vordenken]. The genuine truth must, according to its nature, show the way. Therefore, the only thing that matters is sending someone onto the right road, or better, giving him a certain direction towards the truth. He will then get there automatically, if only he is active, desiring, to get to the truth. The exposition [Darstellung] of philosophy consists, therefore, merely in themes, first sentences—certain sentences that push [Stoßsätze]—the exposition exists only for active lovers of the truth. The analytical elaboration of the theme is for slow or unskilled ones, those whom the mother first needs to teach how to fly, and how to maintain a certain direction.11

Most revolutionaries began as lawyers. They interpreted reality and fought within its bounds. But eventually there will come a revolutionary from the linguist’s trade, and he will possess the authority to make reality again from the beginning. He will be the closest to God a man can be.

486:

Some thoughts on Rousseau, Kant, et al., reflections on essays from Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls

For Leibniz, as indeed for any rationalist, the goodness of God and the comprehensibility of the laws by which He structured Creation stand or fall together. God must not, he tells us, be compared to a ruler like Caligula, “who has his edicts written in so small a hand and has them placarded in so high a place that it is not possible to read them.”12

While reading Newton's philosophical writings, I came across the notion that the 18th century earnestly desired to identify the philosophical equivalent of Newton who would finally calculate the social mechanics of man. Surprisingly, Kant declared it was Rousseau. I had found this particularly interesting, since, as mentioned in the essay by Neiman, his theodicy seemed to me rather impotent in the face of Voltaire's brilliant assault on God following the 1755 Lisbon earthquake;

Say ye, o'er that yet quivering mass of flesh:

"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?

What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived

That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother's breast?

Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice

Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?13

Rather disappointingly (though for reasons we will come to understand), Rousseau's response in correspondence was that mankind truly was at fault for this evil. The earthquake was brought on by the folly and sin of the residents of Lisbon. How, then, could this be the man Kant called the Newton of the social laws?

Moral sense demands from philosophy more acknowledgment than Job received from his friends. God cannot, Kant has Job tell us, be defended with injustice. This means that sheer rejection of theodicy, in the form of a claim that "God in His infinite wisdom has reasons which our weak and feeble minds cannot hope to comprehend" is no solution at all. Though something like this might seem to follow from Kant's general account of metaphysics, he views this claim itself to be a form of theodicy, and one of the worst. Indeed, he calls it an apology that requires no refutation but the abhorrence of anyone with the least feeling for morality. This passage relies on Kant's view of the infinite worth of practical reason: in questions of justice, God has no more insight than we do. Thus we cannot vindicate God by appealing to His superior wisdom, against which the judgment of our own practical reason has no claim. When a man of perfect integrity questions the justice of Creation, he speaks on equal footing with God. But if God Himself deemed Job's questions to be worthy of an answer, philosophy cannot simply deny them.14

Yes, we and God must be on equal footing in an ethical sense, else His moral law would be incommunicable altogether (at its core, mystic nonsense, indistinguishable from any other religion’s justification), a fundamentally incomprehensible command from an authority rather than the personable God who convinces our reason as any other skilled rhetorician does. For what else moves us to willingly devote ourselves to a great truth than the belief that it is made up of atomic truths? Pascal’s night of fire, maybe? What good is that for those of us who never become one of those terrified elect? The necessity of a leap of faith or suspension of the ethical may satisfy Kierkegaard, but I cannot see how a God which ordains us with reason would not make Himself known in a comprehensible and rational manner. I should easily be convinced by reason; the omniscient God knows this, yet God does not employ reason. God, in fact, watches me slip away from the position of theism as I further employ my reason and He refuses to even engage in dialogue. He must not value me as the rest of the lost sheep! How does dear Rousseau salvage this, if he can?

The fruitful novelty in this anthropology of Rousseau’s is that mankind has alienated himself from his goodness and reason over the development of history, as opposed to losing it in some fell swoop of mythic proportion. At some point humanity externalized its needs to value the esteem of others, pursuing validation through sexual competition, private property, the satiation of basal needs, et cetera. The species continues to do this to its own detriment, compounding the evil, and God cannot intervene lest He interfere with the path that man is carving for himself.

False needs engender, and are in turn reinforced by, the relations of domination and submission that constitute inequality and are the basis of evil. They create a double slavery, subjecting us to people as well as to things. Not only does each new thing soon become a need rather than a source of pleasure; it forces us into permanent conflict with the rest of our species. For (assuming conditions of even moderate scarcity) ownership of anything requires denying others' claims to it. For the rich, this leads to isolation, uncertainty, fear, and misery; for those less clever or violent, the consequences are the same, with the addition of poverty as well. Misery, then, is the result from any standpoint, soon leading to the Hobbesian state of war which all will seek to escape at any cost.15

Rousseau has managed to declare evil unnatural. His position does not really differ, in a cosmological sense, from the typical appeal to free will, and Rousseau does not assert any particular way to overcome the problem of evil. Despite this, I believe the recognition of the synthetic nature of evil and the constructed needs which compel of the aforementioned behaviors is hugely important, since it shifts humanity from the status of a condemned victim to master of its own cultivation. What is to be done? Let us discard the question of God and assume a purely humanistic orientation. In fact, the question of God hardly matters now, since we have situated man and his needs as the agentic master of historical development. There must be some way to reform (in the literal sense of reconstitution) society, which has become so riddled with those external calls to evil that the master, compounding his forces, is blind to all appeals to goodness. The slave, to Kant, must obey the authority of the sovereign, since the sovereign’s end should be justice and the representation of the popular will, by definition. But this is not the case! The slave will definitionally be an outlaw and subject to the most severe punishment of the law if he rebels with use of coercive force, and he cannot be said to have any right to rebel. It is the punishable nature of the revolutionary that Kant often focuses on. But no revolutionary has ever deluded himself with the thought that he is anything but a criminal to the state, and Eugen Leviné is right to say, “We communists are all dead men on leave.”

Just as Kant addressed in An Old Question Raised Again that the revolutionaries of his day fought for the republican form of governance, the only form of governance men in his time believed could foster true virtue, I argue that our modern understanding of class interest (that is to say we Marxists recognize now, in a way Kant could not, that all class society has the natural impulse of consolidation and exploitation even at the cost of our dear convention of “virtue”) compels us to take the moral law into our own hands and suspend it, with all the responsibility that entails, that which Kant recognized as a paternalistic disregard for autonomy. This paternalism is born from the intention to rectify and the pursuit of the highest end of love for humanity. It goes without saying that staunch Marxists have no opposition to revolution. It is the scrupulous and conscientious character which I mean to appeal to here. The virtues which erupt from the autonomous person may only do so once the individual is subject only to voluntary duties he assumes as a member of the polity, and not to the coercive existence of indebtedness to that architectonic slavedriver he experiences in class society. We will, in all likelihood, have to form a mass party of “Old Jacobins”; then, rather than fearing the consequences of the failure of a small, disorganized revolution and the condemnation that would arise, we will sweep the Earth like a thundering wave of liberty and be unquestionably victorious, completely assured that we are moving one step closer to the society which will produce a sublime morality entirely alien to us in these cruel days.

Enlightenment, the condition in which people think for themselves, leads to morality, the condition in which people live by the laws of their own autonomy. Thus enthusiasm for the revolution can be understood as enthusiasm for the future of morality itself.16

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“Thereby he offended against the world’s law, and his destiny became one of atonement for pride, for an overweening yet glorious self-exaltation. The world’s law demands admixture, and will tolerate no exemption from the universal circulation of substance. One who refuses to bathe in the warm current of life is left stranded on the shore; the non-participant is foredoomed to solitude. Hölderlin’s claim that he should be allowed to serve art and not actual existence, the gods and not his fellow men, constitutes (let me repeat—in a sublime and transcendental sense), like that of his Empedocles, an intolerable presumption. None but the gods are privileged to live thus apart, in unchallenged purity. What can we expect but that life should take vengeance upon those who disdain it by subjecting them to its meanest forces, by exposing them to the torture of crude starvation, by enforcing the basest servitude upon those who refuse any and every form of service? Because Hölderlin refused to share his goods, all his possessions were reft from him; because he would not allow his spirit to be bound, his whole existence passed into thraldom. Hölderlin’s beauty is the very thing he has to suffer for.”1

I am a poet. Nature has endowed me with such a perspicacity that. . .

It disgusts me too much to dare continue with this train of thought. Why, though, does it disgust me? Would Dante have not given me a fierce shove (or worse), condemning my false modesty as nothing but the craven urge to remain concealed and free of judgment? He knew the sting of that exact paralyzing malaise yet pushed forth, for the great matters he recorded demanded all his attention and he must proceed.2 Lest I should some day be found guilty of the charge of the buried talent,3 I must severely investigate the reasons for my inhibition. The fact of the matter is that, by virtue of my very constitution, I can recognize I am not wholly like the “rest of man”; I also continue to act in the world with that basic fact in immediate recollection, as part of my most fundamental perspective. How could I not? Can anyone honestly force himself to think outside the logic which he is compelled to by those faculties that arrange the conscious experience in the first place? Why, then, does every impulse of actual and declared difference fill me with such fervent abhorrence?

Since youth I have been lauded for my intellect. Anecdotal evidence from and psychometric testing in my early years suggest I am a bona fide “genius” (let us be clear in hopes of easing the bitter taste lingering in my mouth, I scored +4σ on the WISC and was inclined towards complicated astronomical texts when learning to read, et cetera), and understandably included with such a label was the ominous weight of familial and societal expectations. I do not come from a wealthy or stable background, so for some of the older members of the family I am told there is a faint hope that now one of us can redeem the name. But for all of the homeschooling, university at fifteen, international collegiate awards, proficiency in languages, four thousand X4 followers (!?). . . where has it gotten me? I am twenty-two and have produced nothing of real note. I live alone and further still by choice in “splendid” isolation, never really venturing out save for when I am obligated to by my courses or place of employment. Something has to give, because there’s real potential here being squandered.

The inky blot that has smudged itself all over my conscience is the fear of undue praise. I concede ground every day to those willing to mobilize themselves, and little more can be said about this complex of mine than that it is merely the unholy child of perfectionism and pusillanimity. It has to end. Too many years have been stolen on time’s wing that were spent in ignoble and irate sloth.

[. . .]

You ought to give me small or large sums of money, so I can quit my job, become a wholly intellectual creature; it will do much good for the species. I will write very much.

I have surely proven my worth over the years!

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[Surliminal messaging.]

I walk a dangerous tightrope. I am a conceited creature who boils over in slavish conditions. A quote of Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair5 has lingered in my mind for years—

“Bring every man to the agony of life’s last moments by whip, fire, or injections, and through terrible torture he will undergo the great purification afforded by a vision of death. Then free him and let him run in a fright until he falls exhausted. I warrant you that the effect is incomparably greater than any obtained through normal means. If I could, I would drive the entire world to agony to achieve a radical purification of life; I would set a fire burning insidiously at the roots of life, not to destroy them but to give them a new and different sap, a new heat. The fire I would set to the world would not bring ruin but cosmic transfiguration. In this way life would adjust to higher temperatures and would cease to be an environment propitious to mediocrity. And maybe in this dream, death too would cease to be immanent in life. (These lines written today, April 8, 1933, when I turn twenty- two. It is strange to think that I am already a specialist in the question of death.)”

I hate the mediocrity of the world! How I would subject everything with a solely commercial end to firing squad! I am forced to sell myself in one way or another, and I have a duty to this enterprise as a means of survival. I will parrot Wittgenstein here, and all the other philosophers and authors and scientists and statesmen, who now hide from my view but may be unknowingly of use to my particular point at this particular moment, “There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest man—but he has a particular kind of lens to concentrate this light into a burning point.”6 Beyond the binds of mere subsistence, I am bound by a certain duty deep in my marrow to burn and burn and burn in hopes that one of my pithy remarks can light the world for a moment. But as it stands, all I can produce are those poetical reflections, as I have no time for anything else. Can my bright streak shine through obfuscating mist, the dark smoke of this mode of production? Can I bolster the momentum behind me enough or rally a crowd to free me from economic shackles, replacing them with another, more sublime obligation? Won’t you all declare me your daimonic prince?7

from the 16th century The Book of Comets

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7

Life requires a strict balance between amnesia and anamnesis. The body ensures memory is lost so that it may be gained again; the broken love fades that you might find another mate in the pool. Sentiments are cyclical and resurrected from the deepest, wanting parts of the psyche. The love for another will always resemble to some extent the infant’s desire for its mother because it is a repetition of the first unfolding of the sentiment of interpersonal need. In this way, man lives out his creation myth daily and his youthful traumas grip his psyche long into adulthood. Thus all the rituals of connaissance prove grating for the mind as they invoke in their act of renascence all prior instances of the associated sentiment and dynamic. With age and dreaded experience, love becomes something that can be navigated more efficiently and with a more dull temperance thanks to the vividly identified failures of previous attempts. But the mind can only be submerged into itself so many times without a stale and exasperated feeling. Even the average utilization of memory proves to be a debilitating, numbing disorder in its own right.

A formidable memory resembles amnesia in practice. This is the hyperreality of the self. Abundant reverie becomes fatal, as time clamps down with its massive jaws and leaves a man paralyzed by terrors of the night and day alike. The horrific magic of memory is that the dreamlike monstrosities that it crafts and boils the blood with can possess even more weight than the initial tragedy, because it has all the wisdom of being mediated through the self and is laced with the quiet insecurities that only dance in the depths. The subject of the plague of this kind of memory becomes nothing but the passive victim of chronology, the tortured god of past and future. He loses himself in the Lethe, which must be imagined, rather than as a void, as a torrent of broken promises and the first feelings of butterflies in the stomach. Dante, conscious of the balance, invented the parallel river of Eunoë which would extol the virtues of man. The idea of simple forgetfulness was terrifying to him, too. Why else would anyone praise anything than for the hope of bestowing a little taste of eternity? Yet, if all is eternal of a man, he is conscious predominantly of his failures first. And he is conscious of himself as a man even less.

It is impossible to live with such an acute sense of higher memory, but it happens to be biologically ordained in certain cases that a person’s memory should prove too active. The only real solution is a blissful forgetfulness, and it can never properly come. The amnesiac grapples with the angels for even the slightest relinquishment of personhood from their grasp. As quickly as the moment comes, it is lost again. None of us have exactly as much forgetfulness and being as is necessary to be happy in this fleeting mirage of pain. Is it that we can properly say that memory is cruel, or is memory simply the rope that we hang ourselves with? It is no wonder that anyone should wish to drown themselves to the depths of oblivion with alcohol and substances.

Cycles, again and again. Nothing is new under the sun, but the imagination learns new ways to terrorize and craft facsimiles that hurt more than the original. Reason watches and wonders if death might be better than helplessness.

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Most notably, the perception of the Forms is corrupted. Qualitative factors, especially syncategorematic ones, are highlighted to the ends of the earth. The most important aims of the system (if we are to ascribe it any sort of consciousness) lie in the divorce of an object from its immediacy. The categorical intellect sees these objects in the social form, but not necessarily the ideal Form. The lower phenomenon of buzzing streetlights removes any sort of magic about the immediate, investigative curiosity of the intuition, of what constitutes a streetlight, what might drive its sodium lamps to deterioration, and so forth. All of this is to say that the frayed nerves of the mind have grown accustomed to that which is not anomalous, because it is categorical. There is a latent expectation of the perception when dealing with objects in general that makes us alien to their object; we could have had knowledge of them existing and hardly had any reason to have perceived them with the senses at all. It would make no difference to the unconscious. Social identities take on a similar color; they are marred with what is not or what is only seen among certain populaces, concepts that allow us to lie dormant and moribund awaiting our realization as individual specimens. It is a sort of predicative fallacy in the perception of the self that the identity relies so terribly on the discernment of the adjective-ridden Other that we either avoid or embrace. People do not want to exist as individuals that we merely know exist, they want to be representative of some other banner or category. Perhaps it is the fault of the division of labour or the great wealth of information that we are bombarded with, but we are constantly awaiting our assimilation into the ideal, because we are alienated from our own immanence.

The infinite deferral of the self is remedied by our divorce from all projective and categorical obsessions. We must straighten our backs from the scoliotic reign of routine pressures. Every frame of man’s transient and unconscious experience must bear his internal devotion as the technique of the hand betrays the name of the artist. The sublime vision comes in a wealth of differing means, but they are all bound by the simple rebellion of spontaneity. Religious ecstasy is something of a hierophant’s dérive, breaking with the causal chain to experience the lucidity of contact with the divine in the frame. We do not speak of the pathology of God, of being diagnosed with Him one day, but rather His unfolding and immanence from the latent thread that had already been running through our lives. His definition demands that sort of conception. It is the same with all manifestations of the sublime and spontaneous; the unconscious is an a priori substance. Drawing from that well of impulse and language requires little more than a push in the right direction, which is to imply we must consciously orient towards the unconscious that we might see where a more dreamlike world may lead us.

We must reclaim the aura of things and deny the anesthetized existence. The order of the day is quantitative and causal existence, but it must become the qualitative durée. Little nonsensical revolts and volitive constructed situations rouse states of nonroutine existence where the thoughts change to suit the unique, unreproducible ritual. Allow the gift of the hour to come to you in its blessed manifestation. Expeditious walks and reveries in nature, riding the bus longer than one ought to, the impulses of unorthodoxy are our means of reclaiming life from a systemic intellect. We must burn ourselves and view the world in the viridescent lenses of the coming spring. Our personal élan vital and willful clicking of neurons will allow us to hold infinity in the palm of our hand and eternity in an hour. We must stop and investigate with utmost fervor all the things that have creeped into our life and surroundings. I plead you to remember how strange this all is; treat it with that same bizarre reverence it bestows unto you.

“Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!”

All of these are fine little truths to turn about in the head. We are looking, however, for the synthesized truth to be gleaned from our quoting anamnesis. It is of course in the immortal words of Goethe that we operate here, “All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.”

The Greek στόμα is easily translated as “mouth”, whether the mouth of man or mouth of a stream, fissure, etc. There is also another sense to it, however. It is used in primarily two ways in the Bible; the στόμα is a resting place for man’s soul, the river by which all his expression is socialized, but it is also the cutting edge of a sword, the closing jaws of the lion.

The poet casts drops of light into murky waters. His profession is completely the revelation of his own soul through the word. He has the most divine and sinful task, the hubris of enlightening exhibitionism. His vowels give him air for the great, heaving bellows of his lungs, the consonants choke him in their density. His very existence is marked by the act of his production, a well he falls into sometime in his youth. His mission is to put the reins on the castes language engenders and coax the fruits from it. He is σημειωτῐκός, the one who recognizes and manipulates the signs, who calls forth the connecting innate knowledge. “I recognize”, “this reminds me of…” are some of the most important humanistic statements, and yet authors are always liars. The artistic soul is a demanding, ostentatious, impossible one.

It is this tension that I want to touch upon, with what little authority I have. Language is the chief hierarchizing force of man. It is a faux-pas to speak of anything in an unpleasant manner, regardless of the theses of the words themselves. The unfolding of the musical lungs and their poesy is tantamount to the artistic expression; the very ego of the prose man reveals itself in dazzling colors. Rallying cries are dressed in the scarlet, bloody future. The sharp and grating consonants kill long before any hands do. Barthes says that language is fascism. Psychometric batteries often cite vocabulary as a metric of crystalized intelligence, often being the item most correlative to the g-factor. The primary way we distinguish the worth of a man is his speech and writing; the way he dresses his words and lets his thoughts rush forth and the degree to which he tempers and moderates them is our most immediate insight to his soul, and perhaps our only. Articulation is laced with latent conceptions of competency to the point that Baudelaire has the gall to muse that “[handling] a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.” As language is this hierarchizing function in man, a real unitive love must be something silent. In the beginning was the Word, something projected so far above us. He was only equal in that He could die and lie mute. Silence is the cross we must crucify our ego on.

If pride is to die and love to bloom, man must cease to speak. All the thoughts of the soul must swirl around in the mouth like intoxicating, jagged spikes and never be released. All writing and striving will die. Grotesque images are born from consonants and vowels. In the beginning was the Word.