In Defense of Louis XVI

Miguel Tamen

Common Knowledge, Volume 19, Issue 2, Spring 2013, pp. 205-210 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ckn/summary/v019/19.2.tamen.html

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CoLuMNS

IN DEFENSE OF LOUIS XVI

Miguel Tamen

Hapless Fabrice del Dongo, the hero of Stendhals La Chartreuse de Parme, wanders around the elds of Waterloo in his desire to ght alongside Napoleon, gets lost, half- sees Marshall Ney, misses the emperor, is rescued by an innkeeper, falls asleep, sees some action, and is wounded. Is this a real battle? he asks a sergeant. A little, the sergeant replies. Perhaps the reason why we half- smile at Fabrices misfortunes is that we are certain we would have never had any such doubts. Those who have doubts about where they are or what is going on around them we dismiss as examples of historical stupidity. A perennial favorite is Louis XVI, king of France, whose reputation attained a quasi- Stendhalian condition of unintended misery. Take his journal entry for July 14, 1789: Rien, Nothing. Among many others, Leon Trotsky complained of the depressing spiritual emptiness of Louiss journals. The king kept an uninterrupted record of engagements from the age of eleven, and the events of July 14 were not royal engagements, but no one seems to care. It would take immense stupidity and even callousness, we assume, for someone not to have been aware of a historical event of such consequence, which moreover was taking place in his immediate vicinity. Again, most people seem certain that, were they to have had the misfortune of having been Louis, they would have relinquished power promptly (to Trotsky, were he around) and in the process substituted a complete analysis of the French Revolution, perhaps even a cultural analysis of the French Revolution, for the royal entry, Rien.
Common Knowledge 19:2 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2073197 2013 by Duke University Press

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There is no need to argue that Louiss comment on the meaning of July 14 has proved to be a prescient anticipation of all the consequences of the events in question. There are two other points that need making instead. First, one that comes easily and goes down smoothly: being at the place of an event does not guarantee that one understands what is going on. One has only to say a few words about cultural diversity and perspectivism for this point to be immediately granted, though there may be disagreements about whether being there is a necessary condition or an optional feature of knowing anything about it, or indeed whether someone who has never been there may know more about it than someone who has been there often. The second point I wish to make is less familiar and consensual and involves the claim that something having happened to me, or with me, does not guarantee that I understand what happened. Concessions to diversity and perspectivism do not seem to apply here. It does not occur to most people that being the person who is reporting on his or her own feelings might not constitute assurance enough for those kinds of reports to be true. There seems to be a connection between my two points, having to do with the understanding of I asin the words of Elizabeth Anscombethis- thing- here. It is the funny word here that makes the connection, though it also introduces a number of difculties. The main one is that, although my two points seem related, they are really different in kind. Trotsky might have excused Louis XVI more easily for not having understood what was going on in Paris in July 1789 than for not having realized what was happening to himself personally. The kings lack of experience with revolutions and insufcient knowledge of the laws of history were shortcomings that, in Trotskys book, could be remedied by reeducation. Not being present to oneself, on the other hand, appears to be without remedy. How could there be a remedy for this- t hing- here being insufciently somewhere? The reason why claiming that people are not particularly well qualied to describe their own thoughts and intentions sounds counterintuitive and preposterous is that we tend to imagine there is a scale of assuredness to be derived from our relation to the object that is to be known. We would wish for such a relation to be measurable, perhaps in inches or in years, and we feel tempted to derive from the trivial experience of nearsightedness a whole theory of skepticism. What suggests that we cannot perceive distant objects also appears to suggest that we can trust our instincts. After all, the latter are by denition closer to us than the former. Or are they? Part of the difculty comes from imagining that, if intentions and self- awareness in general exist, they must occupy a place in space and timethey must be located somewhere. The rest of the difculty comes from imagining that there is an organic parallel to introspection and thus that what I know about myself is known through perception. Yet our perceptual devices have

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a limited scope. It would be as silly to deny that we all know many true things about ourselves as to deny that we can be wrong about ourselves sometimes. Our belief that there are forms of rst- person authority is, in Donald Davidsons words, an unavoidable presumption. What can be denied is that the claim to know the causes of the peristaltic movements of your own consciousness can be granted simply because it is a claim about your own consciousness. Talk of peristaltic movements is, if taken literally, a good example. We often resort to asking other people whether there is anything wrong with us. The rejoinder that we feel there is something wrong with us before we ask other people is unpersuasive. The reason why we recur to other people is that we are not sure of what is wrong with us or not sure about the cause of what we think is wrong. Granted, our interlocutor might say, but, since we are sure that something is wrong with us, our rst impression is still to a great extent the best impression. Not necessarily, though: very often the people to whom we recur tell us that there is nothing wrong with us, and thats that. Needless to say, they too can be wrong. Only time will tell. We generally hope that, given enough time, someone will be right about us eventually. A different line of defense would be to say that all analogy between peristaltic movements and states of consciousness is misleading. But it is misleading to the extent to which the soul is not an organ and so is of no great consolation to that line of defense. Indeed, the argument goes, for things like stomach aches we often are not in a position to know what, if anything, is wrong with us. In the case of feelings, wishes, and intentions, we are in such a position. Position, however, is an unfortunate word. Like acquaintance, used by Bertrand Russell in a related context, position cannot be given any clear meaning. It cannot, for instance, mean position to see, or perceive, since very often we see things about our bodies that we do not understand, and understand many things about ourselves that we cannot perceive. The word also does not mean bodily position. To deliberately move oneself into a bodily position conducive to an adequate examination of ones mental states would be a form of optional gymnastics rather than a condition for self-k nowledge. William James once remarked that our so- called states of consciousness are always analyzable in terms of bodily organs and bodily impressionshe called them bodily factsrather than known by direct introspective acquaintance. Being sad or in love, feeling suspicious, are translated as having this- impression- here. Jamess insight is an important one and can be found preserved in otherwise discredited ancient theories of bodily humors. But it is simply not true that we look for help only in cases similar to that of stomach pain. Good knowledge of the kinds of help available would preserve the connection between a bodily impression and a helpful person: if the pipes are clogged, call the plumber, not the philosopher. The problem is that we often do not know whether a pain in the

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stomach is better dealt with by a gastrologer or an astrologer. My having this- feeling- here does not entail that I can produce a true description of its cause, let alone of its putative consequences. Gastrologers (though perhaps not astrologers) routinely refer their patients to other specialists or simply send them home; that is, gastrologers routinely tell their patients that they were wrong about the cause and estimation of their own bodily impressions. In short, patients are told they have produced false descriptions of something very close to them. This- t hing- here is sometimes not the most reliable source for descriptions of what is happening to this-thing-here. These points are well known. They have been discussed by technical philosophers, even by nontechnical philosophers, and I would not presume to add much to the discussion. There is, however, a less- traveled aspect of the problem that will perhaps help me to connect in a more robust way the two points with which I began. Put it this way: one can have a sense of having been deprived of ones natural authority over descriptions of things close to oneself. In a famous passage in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed that his understanding of the Platonic notion of idea was better than Platos. Were it not for the contingency that this disagreement was between giants, we would long ago have become sensitive to the difculty. Prima facie, Kants claim seems to be on a par with any claim by a professed or unaware non giant about having understood Kant better than Kant himself. Philosophers, literary critics, and civilians have used the argument many times, usually when they want to suggest that authors cannot fully control the implications, the meaning, or simply the posthumous use of their works. Very often, authors feel offended by certain interpretations of their work and, more importantly, feel powerless to reassert what they believe is a true description of their intentions. The rest of us only pay attention to their arguments because authors, for many contingent reasons, are thought to suffer from a special form of immunity to self- deception. The situation becomes interesting when someone, an author or not, acknowledges that someone else has produced a description of his mental states, complete with ascriptions of feelings and intentions, better than any he himself would have been capable of making. This situation would be analogous to one in which Plato says to Kant, All things considered, you know me better than I know myself. Not being Plato, we usually resent being in that sort of situation, even if we half- acknowledge the plausibility or truth of what we have been told. We can resent a diagnosis by our gastrologer or indeed by anyone on the grounds that we believe it to be false, or libelous, or humiliating, or incomplete. It would not occur to most of us, though, to resent a correct diagnosis by our gastrologer; we would not, that is, want to claim that the diagnosis is both true and insulting. No particular feelings of invasiveness are attached to statements about our entrails, provided the statement is made by the right kind of person and is true. The prob-

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lem is that there appears to be no right kind of professional equipped to tell the truth about our mental states. So the contrast we need to make is not between gastrologers and astrologers, but rather between gastrologers and astrologers, on the one hand, and civilians, on the otherbetween specialists and presumed know-nothings. Given, however, the sort of thing this- t hing- here is, no one in principle, and therefore not the owner of this- thing- here, could presume to know anything about it in any special sense. Thus the difculty, again in principle, is that an unknown, unequipped amateur can know things about our mental viscera as well as anyone can. We would like to assert that since we have mental viscera, they must be our own. Astute verdicts by people unknown to ourselves are resented as a form of smug trespassingthough, perhaps, not every astute verdict: only astute verdicts that had previously not occurred to us. There is also a more pleasant version of the phenomenon, namely, the attering effect of hearing, often overhearing, total strangers saying pleasant things about us. Their words come out as fragments of a truth for which, we believe, they are not equipped, since of course we have not abandoned the notion that we are the supreme authority on the knowledge of our own mental states. A strange conjunction of chance and necessity gives these pronouncements an oracular hue. Look, we say to ourselves, that sphinx is talking about me, except that generally he or she proffers no riddles to solve. Then there is the intermediate case of a friend disagreeing with us about ourselves or even saying things about ourselves whose truth had hitherto been unapparent to us. Those whom we call friends tend to be one- t hird sphinx, one- t hird know- nothings, and one- t hird experts, so their insights can variously excite anger or glee, and denote incomprehension or intrusiveness. Few people will acknowledge that someone else is the best authority on himself or herself, just as few natives of a country will recognize that the best description of their neck of the woods has been produced by foreigners. Contrary to individuals, however, countries tend to elicit multiple descriptions, which is ideal for those who like to compare, refute, and defend descriptions. Natives of the American South, Serbia, Portugal, and Estonia have occasionally felt chagrined by H. L. Menckens having put the contribution of each to world literature in the status of awe- inspiring blank. Since Mencken loved his native Baltimore with a passion unknown in Tallinn, we might surmise that, had he hailed from Estonia, his evaluation would have been different. That likelihood, however, does not exclude the possibility that his evaluation of Serbian, Portuguese, Estonian, and antebellum literature was right. I say so, and the amazing thing is that I know next to nothing about Portugal. Brazilians might resent that the best description of the threatening landscape of Rio de Janeiro was provided by a young Belgian anthropologist who

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many years ago compared it to a toothless mouth. Were the metaphor more widely known, it could be invoked by all who feel that native descriptions of Rio are edulcorated or self- serving. One can understand the impulse behind the state agencies and ministries called, variously, of culture, of tourism, of propagandathe hopeless impulse to set the record straight and assert or limit the right of access to certain goods (in this case, truth) to specially protected individuals. The notion that the truth about me is to be known from me is the product of a similar impulse. Epimenides, who was from Crete, had well- founded and well- k nown misgivings about what to expect from Cretans in general when talking about themselves, but he remains an exception and his opinions on the issue are still thought to be paradoxical. A conation of psychology and politics appears to be responsible for this state of affairs. Such is the confusion of self- description with self- determination that surrendering ones right to the former feels like surrendering a civil right. Self- description, however, is barely a right, if at all; it is, rather, a matter of being good, true, accurate, and successful at describing this- t hing- here. Some people are naturally good at it, some learn how to become good at it, some forget how good they once were, and some are hopelessly inept. None should be deprived of their civil rights because they failed the introspection exam, just as no one should be granted any additional right because he or she happened to be at the right time in the right place. As the case of Louis XVI shows, being in the right place is as elusive a condition as having a thing- here. Nothing need follow from either, just as nothing need follow from my occasional recourse to gastrologers, philosophers, and political representatives. According authority to someone else is not necessarily to open doors to reprehensible foreign domination. Affairs- of- state metaphors applied to personal interactions are as dubious as conjugal metaphors applied to international law. Relying on others for the news about oneself is a noble act, rare and worthy of performance, even at the risk of nding oneself in the company of Louis XVI.

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