There are certain fools endowed with genius whose every sentence vibrates, almost unwittingly, with a fateful metaphysical resonance. They are delegated by a whole civilization with the task of making certain crucial and authoritative pronouncements that no one else wishes to express in such blunt terms. For us, such a man was Jeremy Bentham, a true hero of Ahnungslosigkeit, a man with no perception of the Powers:
“Directly or indirectly, well-being, in one shape or other, or in several shapes, or all shapes taken together, is the subject of every thought, and the object of every action, on the part of every known Being, who is, at the same time, a sensitive and thinking Being.”
“Money is the instrument of measuring the quantity of pain or pleasure. Those who are not satisfied with the accuracy of this instrument must find out some other that shall be more accurate or bid adieu to politics and morals.
“Let no man therefore be either surprised or scandalized if he find me in the course of his work valuing everything in money. ’Tis in this way only can we get aliquot parts to measure by. If we must not say of a pain or a pleasure that it is worth so much money, it is in vain, in point of quantity, to say anything at all about it, there is neither proportion nor disproportion between Punishments and Crimes.”
“The only common measure the nature of things affords is money.”
“I beg a truce here of our man of sentiment and feeling while from necessity, and it is only from necessity, I speak and prompt mankind to speak a mercenary language.”
“Now then, money being the current instrument of pleasure, it is clear by uncontroverted experience, that the quantity of actual pleasure follows in every instance in some proportion or other the quantity of money.” This proportionality between money and pleasure is declared, only for it to be explained immediately after that it cannot be precisely determined:
“In large sums the ratio of pleasure to pleasure is in this way less than a ratio of money to money. There is no limit beyond which the quantity of money cannot go: but there are limits, and those comparatively narrow, beyond which pleasure cannot go.”
We are therefore faced with the paradox of a unit of measure expressed with complete certainty, but which cannot in fact be applied each time, since the variation of circumstances also continually varies the proportion between the two series (money and pleasure). And if a law can be established in such a correspondence, it will be that which states a different ratio in the progression between the two series.
The crucial steps:
a) to establish the need for a unit of measure;
b) to express it in money;
c) to trace the limited back to the unlimited.
Bentham destroys the correspondence, observing the different ratio between the two series, but reaffirming it immediately after: with this device he excludes all areas where the problem of limit arises (the great pleasures and the great sums) in order to suggest that the normal, regular, and legal range is precisely that where the proportion is still respected, hence the range of small pleasures and small sums: “For all of this, it is true enough for practice with respect to such proportions [variant: small quantities] as ordinarily occur, that ceteris paribus the proportion between pleasure and pleasure is the same as between sum and sum.” For society to be well ordered, it will have to regard great pleasures as hostile and troublesome in relation to the whole. But not because they conceal the power of the unlimited. On the contrary: because they would compel us to recognize that the power of the unlimited is concealed in money itself.
John Stuart Mill, who was the first guinea pig of a strictly Benthamite education, entirely regulated by the calculation of utility, did not react with lavish delirium, as would happen in a similar situation to Judge Schreber. On the contrary, he managed to write a magnanimous essay on Bentham. His words are guided by a display of respect, along with lucidity, but they inadvertently reveal more than they claim. Meanwhile he offers us the most appropriate definition of the Master, presenting him as “the great subversive” and, in particular, “the chief subversive thinker of an age which has long lost all that they could subvert.” Bentham was the first living tabula rasa, an obtuse, insolent child who could harbor no doubts since he had no experience (nor would he acquire any). “He had neither internal experience, nor external; the quiet, even tenor of his life, and his healthiness of mind, conspired to exclude him from both. He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety: he never had even the experiences which sickness gives; he lived from childhood to the age of eighty-five in boyish health. He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He never felt life a sore and a weary burthen. He was a boy to the last. Self-consciousness, that daemon of the men of genius of our time, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand, and to which this age owes so much both of its cheerful and its mournful wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never been made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow-creatures.” With Bentham, the antiromantic child, a genuine new man was born: one who knows nothing, calculates everything, and in the end resolves everything.
Bentham is the happy autodidact. The calculation of pleasures erases the incalculable past, with its pack of ghosts that disrupt the sums and subtractions. But watertight cases like his are unusual. More frequently the autodidact is afflicted by a sinister awe, like that of Auguste Blanqui imprisoned at the Fort du Taureau, who projects the cosmos into his mind, sees that “the forms are countless, the elements are the same” and the cosmos is therefore a jumble of duplicates.
Where there is no initiation, there is the autodidact. Anyone for whom knowledge is not wisdom transmitted through experience is enrolled in a university that is a correspondence course.
E***: Our fate is governed by two mummies: that of Lenin in his mausoleum and that of Bentham at University College, London.