16/02/2017
16/02/2017 With Tzvetan Todorov another notable humanist of our time disappears. He was a grand European, a perfect keeper of that European Republic of Letters which had his moment of glory during the 18th century, especially in France. He was born in Bulgaria, even though he found his new homeland in France. It was the country which inspired his youth and maturity years, in which he took the decisive step from linguistic specialization to a sort of historic-cultural essay in which the human being played a primary role. Nevertheless, vindicating the importance of reason in the postmodern age, in which the wind is favorable to exacerbated individualism and a certain irrationalism, had to lead Todorov to incomprehension and the exercise of a dissent he did not experiment in communist Bulgaria.
When an author writes a biography, he usually does it, barring the typical defamatory exceptions encouraged by the ideological clichés, to identify, to a greater o lesser extent, with the biography subject. That’s why the fact that Todorov wrote a book drew my attention, more of an essay than a classic biography, about the liberal thinker Benjamin Constant (1767 – 1830), with the subtitle La passion démocratique. Constant was one of the last Enlightenment thinkers, a man of shy and reflexive nature, but also a persuasive speaker in the House of Peers, one of the few streams for the freedom of speech in France during the Bourbon Restoration after the fall of the Empire. Like Todorov, he was exiled and could never play an influential role in public life under Napoleon nor the Bourbons. They only left him the channel of his writings, many of which weren’t published until well into the 20th century, even though some of his great intuitions, immortalized in speeches such as The Liberty of Ancient Compared with that of Moderns, soon came forward.
Constant was an advocate of constitutional principles and a punisher of any kind of tyrannies. He also emphasized the opposition between the liberty of Ancients, in which individuals were subordinated to the power of political assemblies, and the liberty of Moderns, marked by an individualism which can be an overwhelming burden to society. He had experienced the first conception of liberty in times of Robespierre, when politics were depicted as new religion to the rhythm of Rousseau’s theory of the general will, but he also knew a modern freedom, much more prosaic and focused on the individual, after the disenchantment of wars and revolutions. Didn’t the same happen to Todorov, witness of a suffocating communist bureaucracy and later critic of a society, to the East and West of Europe, which turned to understand human rights as an expression of the isolated individual, distant from familiar and social relations? Certainly, Todorov was always aware that behind political rhetoric, communist in the case of Bulgaria, exacerbated individualism was hidden. Society was sacrificed to the State in the name of a radiant future, but while the advent of the Golden Age was expected, the representatives of the power personally anticipated the ‘glorious dawns’ with the common practice of corruption and nepotism. Unfortunately, we had the chance to prove that such behaviors aren’t privative of any political regime.
Benjamin Constant and Tzvetan Todorov agreed in opposing messianisms. The first did not only criticize the reign of Terror of the French revolution but also the autoritarism of Napoleon, whom he qualified as man of the embodied calculation, able to see others not as human being but as objects. In the Napoleonic wars, some saw a propagation of the revolutionary ideals, even though Constant perceived only an example of the conquest and usurpation spirit, adjectives which served to title one of his best works, faded into oblivion and discovered by some French intellectuals after the occupation of his country by Hitler’s Germany in 1940. On his behalf, Todorov mistrusted those who want to impose the Good by force. Colonialism, fascism and communism had done so because they were convinced of the superiority of their doctrines, expression of an alleged higher level of civilization. But the disappeared essayist also wanted to highlight that, in his view, in the years after the Cold War and under the deceitful mirage of the theory of the end of History, the western countries would have make similar mistakes in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya.
Todorov also studied the psychology of Constant and stressed his capacity for compassion, even though he highlightedat the same time that this might be an inoperative feeling for some people. Mercy made Constant take the other into consideration even thought this involved the risk of paralyzing him in his social and effective relations. In fact, his sentimental and familiar life was quite troubled and somewhat disappointing. Todorov opposed the feelings of the individual to the brightness of the writer and theorist. It isn’t stranded that he transcribes this quote by Constant, faithful expression of a nostalgia of affection: ‘A word, a look, a handshake have in my view always seemed preferable to all reason and all the thrones on earth.’ In any case, it is not a quote picked at random. Maybe Todorov wanted to tell us that we should rather worry about the welfare of the particular individuals than elaborate complex theories about good in general, which sometimes only serve to spill blood.