FIVE
The Individual and the Agent
The reader has doubtless been disappointed by the little place that I have accorded in the preceding chapters to arguments that might be said to be properly or specifically philosophical, and the reader may be surprised by the importance that the question of the state has taken on in my discussion. I hope to have provided some solid reasons to justify my approach. I would like in any case to summarize them here. On the one hand, the modern state is inconceivable without the philosophical elaboration that accompanied and guided its construction; it is inseparable from it. As I have said, modern political philosophy is mainly or, rather, essentially a philosophy of the state. We often fail to derive the consequences, or to appreciate the implications, of this widely shared or sharable observation. On the other hand, the political, moral, and social history of European humanity has been profoundly informed by the deployment of the state. The state has changed our condition—according to the most favorable and most widely received interpretation, it has improved our condition—by changing the conditions of action. This expression indicates the enormity of the transformation undertaken. Since the human being in its most specific definition is the acting animal, the most decisive changes that may affect this being concern the conditions of action. It would certainly be a simplification, but I think an illuminating simplification, to say: Western humanity—that is, humanity understood as having entered into a history—has known two great changes, two revolutions, affecting the conditions of action. The first consisted in the crystallization of the city in Greece, the second in the construction of the modern state. These are the two revolutions that have most deeply affected the human being, that have most deeply transformed it. Between these two, the Christian religious revolution must surely be given its place. This revolution, for the first and only time in human history, proposed principles of action independent of all previously existing political association and capable by themselves of producing a human community of an unprecedented kind, that is, the church.
Whatever may be the case on this last point, the revolution of the state had for its objective and its effect the indefinite augmentation of the level or the degree of human activity by two inseparable approaches, or by a double approach that might be summarized thus: on the one hand, the equalization of the conditions of action; on the other, the limitation or circumscription of the amplitude or the range of action. These are therefore the three determining parameters of modern life under the revolution of the state: the augmentation or intensification of activity (which of course, and precisely, must not be confused with action), the equalization of the conditions of action, and the shrinking of its perimeter or of its ambition. It is difficult to rank these parameters or to attribute a leading role to one or another. We see clearly enough, moreover, how, among the different political or social movements, the different opinions that lead modern society on, certain ones are associated by predilection with the acceleration of the movement of human beings and of things, others with equality of conditions, and others still with the limitation of the actions of human beings on one another. In any case it is the coming together of these three vectors under the pressure and the direction of the state that gives the modern revolution its prodigious power to transform human life. The definition of man as the being with rights has plausibility only on the condition of an indefinite or “deregulated” human activity, or a human activity with no other rule than the equality of conditions at the start, or, as we now say, equality of opportunity, an equality which for its part demands that human beings avoid deploying capacities or competencies that might give some a superiority of legitimate command over others, not a simply functional superiority but an intrinsic and, as it were, “natural” superiority. In any case, this triple determination places the experience of modern life, and the idea we make of it, under a regime of constraints whose rigor we are prevented from feeling by a long habituation. These constraints weigh most particularly on the notion in which the moderns have placed their joy and their pride, that is, freedom.
It is stating a commonplace to say that for the moderns, the notion of natural law is indefensible and finally devoid of meaning, since it is incompatible with and even directly contrary to the definition of humanity as freedom, a definition that is of a piece with our self-consciousness as “subjects,” or as “individuals,” or precisely as “self-consciousness.” Law can have meaning for human beings, at least for human beings who have attained this self-consciousness, only if it is a product or an expression of their freedom. How it is that the rational animal posits a law independent of and superior to any natural determination either of the individual or of the species is a question that opens an immense range of propositions and speculations. The prestige of these speculations, in which the specific audacity and profundity of modern philosophy are deployed, must not blind us to the fact that modern freedom, understood as a concrete proposition of the radical recomposition of our way of life by the methodical and complete transformation of the conditions of human action, came about along more prosaic paths and that, moreover, when these speculations were taking off, the decisions had already been made and the foundations already laid, decisions and foundations that were not to be reconsidered. It is important, in effect, not to forget that modern freedom was born as a fast friend of this nature that it would later come to treat or pretend to treat from such a position of superiority; it was born as an extension and need of this nature. More precisely, modern freedom was born as nature liberated, as nature unbound: freedom, for the moderns, is first of all the removal of impediments to nature.
That was true at the beginning, and it remains true at the end of the movement. What is sexual freedom, a freedom that is so central to the contemporary understanding of freedom that it tends to constitute the representative expression of that freedom and something like its critical experience—what is this freedom if not the suppression of all material, legal, and moral obstacles to the satisfaction of sexual desires? But these liberated or authorized desires cannot be characterized otherwise than as natural determinations of the living-individual, as we see in the insistence already noted on the fact that sexual orientation never or in any degree results from a person’s choice. As enthusiastically as we generally invoke it, freedom here is in the service of natural necessities or tendencies, or in the service of a desiring nature that violently rejects any suggestion of a possible opening to freedom as reflective choice. Hence the glowing attention and the merit we see invested in the “coming out” that I evoked in the preceding chapter: to come out is the first and the last choice, it is the only choice, the only free act that is open to a person once he conceives himself as the living-individual subject to the necessity of his desire.
Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passez
Although the movement of nature’s liberation (for this is how the vector of modern freedom ought to be designated) takes ever-new forms, thus ever-surprising and even shocking forms, for contemporaries, the activating principles of this liberation are not only present and active but even explicit and even thematic from the time of its initial engagement. I have recalled from the outset the importance of the notion of conatus, which distills the original and principal modern determination of human nature. It is time to add that it is inseparably an essential ingredient of the modern idea of freedom. This effort to persevere in being, this beginning of movement, this desire for power, this desiring machine—the point is to liberate it, to remove the obstacles that oppose or hinder its deployment. In brief, laissez-faire, laissez-passer—this is the simple but prodigiously seductive formula of modern freedom, whether it is a question of the circulation of wheat, of workers, of ideas, or of drives.1 There is always a part of society, a sector of activity, an aspect of human nature, or a domain of being that is still trammeled. There is always a new freedom and there are always some new rights to promulgate in order to remove restraints, to free up and liberate the natural necessity that was already there and making its pressure felt. This natural necessity reigns not only over our material and passionate nature; our very ideas are subject to it. One of the favorite arguments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for rejecting the government of opinions by law can be summed up something like this: How can law, whether political or religious, legitimately command our opinions, when we do not have power over our own thoughts, the ability to think one thing rather than another, to believe or not to believe, for example and especially the power to believe that God does or does not exist? These commands and this censorship are illegitimate and unjust for the same reason that they are essentially powerless: they claim to do what it is impossible to do, to oblige us to choose what we think or believe. Modern freedom consists in liberating our natural necessity by dismissing the illusion of freedom—the illusion of free will, the illusion of free choice—that hides this necessity from us and justifies commands that are as oppressive as they are ineffective.
The argument that I have just recalled can be found in Hobbes as well as in Spinoza or Bayle. In fact, the most important or most influential philosophers in the elaboration of the liberal project are practically all resolute and explicit critics of the Greek conception of reflective choice as well as the Christian conception of free will and conscience. While it is certain that they want to liberate humanity from the shackles that hold them back and constrain them, it may be doubted that the human beings they want to liberate are agents capable of the complete practical operation that the Greeks thus called reflective choice and that the Christians called free action. For the fathers of liberalism, the decision that determines action is the last step in a process that is finally mechanical, a competitive process that gives the advantage to the strongest “preference,” a process of which the individual is the site and the witness, but in which he does not intervene as a truly free agent.
To be sure, minds so well advised knew what they were doing. If they deprived human beings of their free will in order to liberate them, this is because the former action was the condition of the latter. “Freedom” could not be offered as the ultimate or main goal to a human being endowed with free will, an agent capable of reflective choice. However inconvenient, painful, and even humiliating may be obstacles external to his body or his soul, the free agent aims mainly at what his free will allows him, or rather commands him, to aim at, that is, right action, whose declensions are courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—in brief, action that takes on its form and color according to the catalogue of virtues. As I have already emphasized a number of times, action is at its core or at its summit commanding action, the command of action, the commandment of right action, and this command, far from injuring action, gives it its rule and its meaning.
It is true that reflective choice may consist in the removal of obstacles to the spontaneous deployment of our nature—including our nature in its necessary movement—in introducing institutions proper to modern freedom, in giving the force of law in certain circumstances to the maxim laissez-faire, laissez-passer. In a word, it is true that ancient prudence can consist in introducing or extending modern freedom. But in this case the agent will have concluded that the suppression of obstacles, the emancipation of certain tendencies of human nature was, in these circumstances and in this domain of economic or social life, favorable to the improvement of the practical capacities of members of society or of citizens, to their education for reflective choice. In such cases, the always difficult discernment of which belongs to the prudence of the agents and first of all of the legislator, the living-and-desiring-individual is not left to himself, abandoned to the freedom of necessity as if this were always and everywhere essentially advisable: thus untrammeled and liberated, he does not cease to obey the reflective choice of the civic body. In any case, in order to sum up the contrast between reflective choice and the freedom of necessity, a contrast that reveals the deepest stratum of the opposition between the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns, I would say something like the following: the free agent is concerned more with the intrinsic quality of his action than with the external obstacles to it, while the free individual is concerned more with the external obstacles to his action than with its intrinsic quality.
The Obstacle of Death
Since, in the perspective of modern freedom, life consists mainly in removing obstacles to life’s movement, to its material and necessary movement, the free individual encounters death as the obstacle par excellence. This is in effect the singular posture of the living-individual engaged in modern freedom regarding death, not that he finds death undesirable or repugnant—this affect belongs to human beings as such—but that he considers it as an obstacle to avert, doubtless more imperatively than the others, but not at all differently. This obstacle is surely more intimidating, troubling, and fearful than other obstacles, but it belongs nonetheless to the same category of obstacles that modern life and freedom are determined to avert. Seen in this perspective, the death of the body does not open up a new domain, an unprecedented experience; it introduces no essential or urgent interrogation into the substance or the intimate texture of life. It is simply the greatest material obstacle with the potential of interrupting the material and necessary movement of life.
If the fear of death is thus the greatest fear of the acting-and-free-individual, since death is the greatest obstacle that opposes its movement, this fear takes on a very particular character: rather than surveying the horizon of life, rather than calling up thoughts worthy of its formidable magnitude, rather than inviting the imagination to evoke the splendors or the misfortunes that may await us beyond the tomb, this liberal and modern death comes to be mixed up and confused with all the material accidents that may be encountered in life, even the slightest, which now appear as bearing or indicating a risk of death. The security of the body, the preservation, comfort, and health of the body, become the most obsessive concern, even a more and more exclusive concern, of the living-and-free-individual.
A free agent does not relate to death in this way. To be sure, as I have said, and as is plain to see, he is a human being; he is naturally afraid of death and spontaneously seeks to avoid it. Yet it is not the standpoint from which he views his life: though he wishes to avoid death, he does not take it as his main task to avoid death; this is not the way he sees things. It is not that he is “more courageous,” as the admirers of the “old virtues” imagine; even less is it the case that he is “mad” to the point of thoughtlessly risking his life as Nietzsche’s “last man” believes and as we are led to think as individuals engaged in modern life and freedom. If the agent, the acting human being, despite his fear, his great fear of death, does not, unlike the free individual, spend every effort to avoid or avert death, this is precisely because he is an agent, an acting human being, and as such obeys his nature and the logic of action. What does this mean? Well, as we know, even if he is not the most virtuous of men, even if he often departs from the right way, as an agent he is in search of the right action, which has its rules and priorities and thus may include and even command acting in a way that implies mortal risk. It is not that he looks at death without blinking; it is that in acting he looks first at the rule of action, and death or the fear of death cannot be the main thing on his mind. One might say: the individual who sees in life a series of obstacles to avert ends up seeing in life only the threat of death, whereas the agent, finding in life a plurality of motives and rules of actions that it is important to combine rightly, sees before himself a very rich field of practice, which death, however much it may be feared, cannot come to occupy all by itself, nor even in general to dominate.
This orientation of modern freedom profoundly modifies the character of death. Now an external obstacle to avert or keep at a distance rather than an intrinsic factor in determining human life, a factor that must be given a place and a meaning, death tends to become an extrinsic accident that demands from us no effort other than the tireless and incessant effort required to make it more and more rare and to make it come later and later. This perspective is not incompatible, in certain circumstances, with anticipating a natural death that would have come later and bringing on a fatal accident, not in order to give death some meaning within life, but on the contrary to preserve its character as an extrinsic accident. In fact the modern state tends almost irresistibly to institutionalize euthanasia in one form or another. By taking the initiative to administer death before death imposes its own law, the state takes away death’s power and its sting as much as it can; it withdraws its right to demand the attention and, as it were, the obedience of human beings. By administering death when it chooses and not at death’s own time, the state follows to its end the mission confided to it by modern freedom, that is, to avert obstacles to the movement of life—which, in the last stage of life, leads it to want to prevent the suffering or dependency that hinder and, as it were, humiliate this movement: we suppose that putting an end to life deliberately preserves life’s integrity more than letting it go to its natural end.
This very troubling intervention of the state is oriented by an idea of nature, or of life in conformity with nature, or of the nature of this life, and it is justified by this idea. This idea is nevertheless incapable of providing even a minimally rigorous rule or a criterion for the state’s approach. To be sure, the intention is to preserve the continuity and the integrity of the feeling of immanent life, of the feeling of existence, in the most pleasant and least difficult and painful form possible. But how is this subjective feeling, which is so difficult to communicate as well as to penetrate, to be included in a practical approach? How can it be made the foundation of a public measure as serious as ending a human life? Neither the patient nor the intervening medical professional can derive a rule from subjective immanence with any confidence, first because such a rule would be essentially variable, like the subjective sentiment. Besides, and more fundamentally, since the point is to correspond to or to “match” a subjective feeling, it is impossible to conceive the approach that on this basis would put the medical professional in a position to judge and then to decide according to a passably objective and sharable criterion. There is no way to arrive at such a position on the basis of even the widest and most delicate subjective sympathy. Whatever a person’s scruples and qualities, we are here outside the domain of a public rule or of law however these might be understood.
Thus the modern state, which has renounced the infliction of the death penalty for crimes determined by the law, tends more and more to grant authorization to administer death to sick people held to be at the end of life, according to a “law” that claims to determine what it is not possible to determine—that is, a certain “subjective state” of the person that would by itself justify and, as it were, require ending the life of this person. A “law” claiming to regulate the way the most universal and rigorous commandment—“Thou shalt not kill”—is infringed is the opposite of a law. However praiseworthy one may wish to consider the intentions of the legislator, we are forced to observe that the state now judges itself to have the right to authorize—that is, in practice, to encourage—the administration of death to innocent persons in a fundamentally arbitrary manner. This is the ultimate consequence, and by no means an accidental one, of the perspective of modern freedom, which defines death as an accident extrinsic to life.
The State and the Government
Let us return to the principle laissez-faire, laissez-passer, to the freedom of enterprise and the freedom of movement that define modern freedom, the freedom of the living-individual. This principle of freedom gives rise to or encourages the formation of a kind of active tissue, without command or obedience properly so called, that we now call civil society, a society peopled and animated by individuals who assert their rights and seek their interests. Civil society is conditioned by the state in the strong sense, by the state that commands no particular action but determines the conditions of all actions. As we have emphasized, as central and as decisive as the state is in shaping the life of modern societies, it neither governs nor commands in the proper sense. Moreover, beginning with the irruption of the democratic movement at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been thought, in diverse sectors of opinion, liberal as well as socialist, that modern societies could do without government as long as the state, by establishing and guaranteeing a framework of equality, allowed all members of society to produce among themselves an order that no longer depended on political commands, a spontaneous order. Curiously, these hopes were entertained under the banner of the minimal state or even the withering away of the state. This confuses the state and the government, an excusable and understandable confusion, given how difficult it is to discern the status of the modern state. Still, although the state and the government mix their efforts and often confuse their offices in the framing of modern societies, it is of the first importance to know how to distinguish them. Let us try.
Let us begin with an observation that is not often made even though it is plain to see. By establishing and guaranteeing the framework of equality, the modern state renders all government impossible in principle. Not only does it in effect delegitimize or eviscerate social commands, but it removes from all political government, all government in the proper sense, its condition of possibility. How can the state that is responsible for guaranteeing equality allow the deployment of the immense distance, the essential inequality, that separates one who governs from one who is governed in any political regime? In fact, I repeat, many believed that under the regime of modern freedom we would do without government. We know that this was a vain dream, a sterile speculation; modern societies or peoples demand and need to be governed as much as others. Yes, but how—since, once again, the state, by imposing the framework of equality, seems indeed to exclude the possibility as well as the legitimacy of a government? My riddle is quite innocent; I have no surprise waiting, since we all know the answer to the question of government under the conditions of the modern state; we all know how impossible government became possible: it became possible and legitimate by becoming representative.
Representative government is the great invention of modern politics. On the one hand, we owe to it the greatest successes of modern politics; or, rather, representative government has itself been the greatest success of modern politics. On the other hand, the equivocations of the notion have allowed or rather encouraged what is most perverse in specifically modern tyrannies. This is not the place to get into the question of the relations between democracy and totalitarianism.2 I would just like to make a few remarks on the way the representative form of government affects and is affected by the question of action.
First remark: Applied to a political community, to a political body taken as a whole, the notion of representation is singularly confused, or at least very indeterminate. What is it that the government is supposed to represent; what does it in fact represent, and what in any case is the meaning of “representation” here? Is it to represent the members of the collective in their unanimity, or only a majority of them? Does it represent them according to their arithmetic sum or according to an internal articulation of the whole in its social, regional, or otherwise defined groups? Does it represent the interests or the opinions of these different groupings? And in each hypothesis what is the meaning of “represent”? We sense that these questions are infinite and that no response will be truly conclusive or entirely satisfying. This is because the notion of representation applied to a political whole invites us to consider all aspects of this political society from a perspective that is more theoretical than practical. We find ourselves before a problem of projective mathematics: given an indefinite set of sets to “represent,” which should be chosen in order that the representation of the whole be as faithful or judicious as possible, and how are these sets to be projected in the most precise manner on the plane in which their representation will become visible? Practically all answers to such questions are to a degree plausible or defensible, since the questioning is not conducted under the constraint of a practical perspective or approach, but with all the latitude of a theoretical way of seeing, one that searches out the multiple aspects of a phenomenon. It is, moreover, this feature that has made the representative idea vulnerable to the ideological perversions I recalled above.
Second remark: While the idea of representation is dangerously theoretical, the idea that has guaranteed the prestige and the ascendency of the representative form of government and has attracted the favor of citizens in most of the countries of the world seems, on the contrary, eminently practical, that is, the idea of consent. This is an idea of enviable simplicity. It can be formulated thus: since no government is legitimate but one to which citizens have consented in advance by themselves or their representatives, only representative government is legitimate under the conditions of modern societies, in which citizens are too numerous to give opinions by themselves. Thus, the necessity of organizing consent provides the practical objectives that make it necessary to resolve the difficulties raised or left in place by the theoretical uncertainty of the notion of representation and to arrange things such that citizens recognize themselves in the consent thus produced—which means in practice that consent must result from universal suffrage, for any other method proves “indefensible” in practice. Still, we are not at the end of our troubles.
Third and last remark: The principle of consent provides, to be sure, a simple and radical solution to the problem of obedience. We owe obedience, we have an obligation to obey, only those who command or who govern to whom we have previously and explicitly consented. At the same time, this response leaves hanging the question of governing or commanding. One might as well say that it assumes the question has been resolved. It assumes that members of society or citizens will only obey a good government, or that a government obliged to obtain the consent of the governed will necessarily be good, or at least the best possible under the circumstances. This argument has a certain plausibility, but it does not get us very far, since it is perfectly circular. In any case, it neglects the qualitative dissymmetry that exists between commanding and obeying, the dissymmetry that I have emphasized with regard to action in general. The one who commands and the one who obeys have distinct points of view on each question; they relate to each by mobilizing different capacities and virtues. We think spontaneously that the governed, as “consumers” of government, are better judges than its “producers,” but is this so clear? The principle of consent may take in all political legitimacy, but it tends to exclude from consideration, or rather to treat superficially, a major question of practical life, that of the virtues proper to one who governs or commands.
We can also clarify the oblivion of the practical question in the representative regime in the following way. Representative government presents itself as the government of society by itself. Those who govern willingly maintain this advantageous idea, and even if citizens have their doubts, they would much like things to be that way. If society governs itself by means of the device of representation, or if such a formula at least provides an approximately correct idea of what is happening, then the question of government is, as it were, magically resolved, or never even reaches awareness, since society cannot wish to be badly governed, and since the idea of government of the self by the self brings those who are governed and those who govern so close as to confuse them, such that the specific question of government cannot reach the light of day. The practical and political question (Who governs? How, according to what principles, and for what ends?) has been replaced by a theoretical and, as it were, optical framework in which government in a way reflects society and society recognizes itself in government, in a reciprocal transparency that can only be imaginary or ideological, so that the properly practical and political question cannot appear in its own form and greatness.
Now, once a statesman in a representative regime begins and commands an action on a certain scale, he modifies more or less significantly the society whose members consent to his government. Moreover, by modifying the constitution, or by establishing a new constitution, he has the means to modify the conditions of consent itself. In other words, as important as the “consensual” character of representative government may be, this character tells us little concerning the nature and the merits of governmental action. This action emanates from a starting point, some “high ground” that it consolidates and even exalts, or, alternatively, abases and degrades, according to its intrinsic quality, that is, independently of the popular consent, which, in a representative regime, is always in principle present. Consent does not create power or the site of power. Although power and the site of power surely vary according to the character of the regime, they are always already there, a given, since human beings cannot be without government. If a new government appears, it never springs up, as it were, from a simple absence of government, or from a state of nature; it follows upon or takes the place of a previous government. It follows, I repeat, contrary to what we like to believe, that governments are not, properly speaking, our own work or the product of our consent. We always intervene in an already governed world. The primary phenomenon in the human world lies neither in obedience nor in consent, but in the commands of those who govern. In truth, when we say that “we want to govern ourselves,” we mean at the same time that “we want to be well governed, by a good government,” that is, a government that has the intrinsic qualities of a good government, independently of the representative character conferred upon it by our consent. The device of representation has profoundly modified but has not abolished the archic3 character of the political order, that is, of the human order.
Thus the living-individual who asserts his rights and pursues his interests, engaged in the laissez-faire, laissez-passer of modern freedom, is at the same time a citizen who wants to be well governed. As living-individual engaged in modern freedom, he willingly imagines, in various forms, a life without government. Since he must despite everything obey a government, he insists that this government “represent” him, a notion that can for him take on quite diverse meanings and modalities. Yet this is not sufficient. He still wants to be well governed, and he wants his country to be well governed. He wants the government’s action above all to be just, or again perhaps prudent, or courageous, or even moderate—it must above all avoid too much debt!—the preference for one or another criterion bringing together citizens who share the same orientation, the same “sensibility,” as we now say.
However considerable may be the innovations proper to modern politics, with, on the one hand, the state as guarantor of the equality of rights and, on the other, representative government—innovations that place the individual as citizen in a framework that is less practical than reflexive, a framework that obscures or even hides the question of action or of the intrinsic rule of action—political life, even under modern conditions, culminates and is actualized in the actions of those who govern. Although one who governs is always for us a “representative,” “our” representative, this trait is, as it were, a recessive characteristic, for one who governs is essentially an agent, in action, whose being is wholly in the action that he is carrying out and who can only be judged appropriately and justly according to the criteria or rules of action. Since the natural law must be capable of guiding and judging action, its power to illuminate and its jurisdiction must extend to action par excellence, that is, political action. The natural law must be capable of grasping action not in the empirical regularities that action may present and that are of interest to less refined disciplines, but in the springs of its practice, in its motives and in its capacity to enhance and to improve the human operation. Natural law is not a rule foreign to human action, as would be a physical or metaphysical criterion elaborated by theoretical reason; it is a friend of action, motivating for action. It can judge the acting human being only because it knows how to guide and encourage him. We will consider natural law from this angle in our next and last chapter.