The Ideologists

The Ideology Disease

2005-12-29T18:54:00.000-08:00

There seems to be something wrong with our Western civilization today, led by the United States of America, the only super power in the world, an empire reminiscent of the Roman Empire. The United States seeks to fashion the world in its own image, with or without the consent of that world, as did the Roman, French, and German empires. The United States wants to make the world safe for its version of democracy whether the world wants it or not, and now its leaders are eager to make pre-emptive strikes and to wage offensive wars far from home to obtain equality under its definition of the law that all liberated peoples should obey. The United States is willing to go it alone and to kill as many people as might be necessary to liberate them from themselves, that all the survivors may become productive members of the New World Order. While the wars to end all wars continue, a few Americans, very few, are becoming increasingly inclined to feel that the arrogant effrontery of the American government, which is enormously popular in the United States, together with the violent action it has taken against the will of the overwhelming majority of the people of the rest of the world, is an inauspicious sign, perhaps of an impending precipitous decline and fall.

We think there must be something wrong with the American ideology, something that is paving the ethical highway to hell. Let us ignore the supposed differences between ideologies, and propose, just for the sake of argument, that ideology itself is the problem. We cannot help but notice that, no matter what sort of ideology a person thinks he adheres to, he is never wrong. No matter what sort of evidence is presented to refute him, he is always right. He is a slippery character armed with bowls of red herrings. What ever the reality might be, he will contrive statistics to suit his ideological prejudice, or he will simply ignore contrary evidence and say, "To hell with the facts, to hell with current circumstances, we must keep the goal in mind, and this is the only way to get there." Yet, in the very next breath, he will speak of adhering to his facts, to his concrete interpretation of reality, and denounce 'utopian' thinking. In fact, his answer to every pressing question is derived from his ideology, not from reality. No experiment or argument will suffice to give him the slightest doubt about his ideological perspective on the world. And he will insist he adheres to it when he acts against it - he cannot see his self-contradiction in the mirror even when his hypocrisy is so blatant that it is obvious to a seven-year old child.

Ideological thinkers seem to be infected with rigid, highly organized illusions. Marx and Engels said ideology is "empty talk about consciousness", that it is "false" and "illusory", as opposed to "real, positive science" and "real knowledge." Engels coined the phrase "false consciousness" as a synonym for "ideology." Americans apparently caught the ideological disease from the French - we understand that Destutt de Tracy invented Ideologie. Napoleon labeled those who practiced ideology, Ideologues, and complained that France had suffered the ideological disease.

"We must lay the blame for the ills that our fair France has suffered on Ideology," said Napoleon, "that shadowy metaphysics which subtly seeks for first causes on which to base the legislation of peoples, rather than making use of laws known to the human heart and of the lessons of history. These errors must inevitably and did in fact lead to the rule of bloodthirsty men." (Moniteur - 21 December 1812)

The disease apparently caused illiterate people to think they could constitute a brotherhood of equals under a free republican government. John Adams, a highly educated Federalist, the world's leading authority on the history of constitutions, wrote to Thomas Jefferson about the absurdity of that proposition in his latter dated July 13, 1813. Apparently Jefferson had caught the deluding mental disease some time before during a visit to France:

"Dear Sir.... The first time that you and I differed in opinion on any material position, was after your arrival from Europe, and that point was the French Revolution. You were well persuaded in your own mind, that the nation would succeed in establishing a free republican government. I was well persuaded in mind, that a project of such a government over five and twenty millions, when four and twenty millions and five hundred thousand of them could neither read nor write, was unnatural, irrational and impracticable as it would be over the elephants, lions, tigers, panthers, wolves and bears in the royal menagerie at Versailles. Napoleon has lately invented a word which perfectly expresses my opinion, at that time and ever since. He calls the project Ideology; and John Randolph, thought he was, fourteen years ago, as wild an enthusiast for equality and fraternity as any of them, appears to be now a regenerated proselyte to Napoleon's opinion and mind, that it was all madness.

"... Inequalities of mind and body are so established by God Almighty, in His constitution of human nature, that no art or policy can ever plane them down to a level. I have never read reasoning more absurd, sophistry more gross, in proof of the Athanasian creed, or Transubstantiation, than the subtle labors of Helvetius and Rousseau, to demonstrate the natural equality of mankind. Jus cuique, the golden rule, do as you would be done by, is all the equality that can be supported or defended by reason, or reconciled to common sense...

"... When the French assembly of notables met, and I say that Turgot's 'government in one centre, and that centre the nation', a sentence as mysterious or as contradictory as the Athanasian creed, we about to take place, and when I saw that Shay's rebellion was about breaking out in Massachusetts, and when I say that even my obscure name was often quoted in France as an advocate for simple democracy, which I say that the sympathies in America had caught the French flame, I was determined to wash my hands as clean as I could of all this foulness...."

Of course Jefferson was not convinced by Adams. In his March, 14, 1820 letter to Adams, Jefferson praised the leading Ideologue, Destutt de Tracy, the man who called his science of ideas, Ideologie, as one of the "ablest metaphysicians living." Jefferson included Tracy's Ideology in an outline of a college curriculum he sent to Peter Carr in 1814. Ideology was included in the curriculum finally established at the University of Virginia in 1824:

I. Latin and Greek, higher grade, Hebrew, Rhetoric, Belles Lettres, Ancient History, Ancient Geography.

II. French, Italian, Spanish, German, English (Anglo-Saxon), Modern History, Modern Geography.

III. Higher Numerical Arithmetic, Algebra, Trigonometry, Plane and Spherical Geometry, Mensuration, Navigation, Conic Sections, Fluxions, or Differentials, Military and Civil Architecture.

IV. Mechanics, Statics, Hydrostatics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Acoustics, Optics, Astronomy, Law and properties of bodies.

V. Chemistry, Mineralogy, Geology, Rural Economy, Botany, Zoology.

VI. Anatomy, Surgery, History of Medicine, Physiology, Pathology, Materia medica, Pharmacy.

VII. Mental Science, Ideology, General Grammar, Logic, Ethics.

VIII. Common and Statute Law, Chancery, Laws Feudal, Civil, Mercatorial, Maritime Law of Nature and Nations, Government, Political Economy.

Notably absent from the curriculum are courses we would find today in the department of religion within many colleges of arts and humanities. We recall here that Jefferson abolished the professorship of divinity at William and Mary in 1799 to make way for law, medicine, chemistry, modern languages; and, in 1814, he omitted theology from all future proposals of subjects to be taught. But never mind. Ideology, even if it be false consciousness or illusory thinking, might be more convenient than theology nowadays; the churches do not seem to provide the attractive, viable alternative to secular life as they once did. Yet even atheists need religion, hence they might turn to ideology. Ideology is political theology. Political theology and religious ideology both worship absolute Power, but politics is more concerned with the material distribution of Power. Ideological religions can be just as intolerant as theological religions - people have used them all to justify mutual mass-murder, often in the name of the same god, who, of course, favors the victor.

Therefore, in order to make the world safe from ideology, it should behoove us to inquire into the etiology of the ideological disease. Of course we presume that the disease is not, as some thinkers insist, actually good for us. We reject the presumption that peace is a sort of malaise indicating the need for profuse bleeding, that it is, in English, a malease precedent to yet another healthy outbreak of war to temporarily decide an ideological difference. But we can hardly discover the cause of the ideological disease unless we have some idea of what ideology is. Since our ideology is allegedly a French export, an invention named Ideologie by a French man, and was spread by its carriers contemptuously called Ideologues by Napoleon Bonaparte, we should turn back the pages of history to the Ideologues for an understanding of ideology.

Regarding John Adams' Letter

The Athanasian Creed deemed absurd by John Adams is the doctrine that god, the father, is of the same substance as his son. The Trinitarian doctrine itself was deemed logically absurd since it violated the fundamental law of static logic, the law of identity, that A = A, from which follows that A cannot be both A and not-A. The forms of these arguments actually preceded Christianity, and were based on the natural observation that father, mother, and child were a unity, of one family, from which were projected triunes of deities. The Christological arguments continued the logic-juggling of pre-Christian games - in Bharata, the loser of these games played by wise men had to submit as a disciple to the man who had mastered him, or else be beheaded. The Christological arguments or dialectics, although seemingly absurd and silly, helped develop not only static logic(s) but our modern dynamic logic as well.

The doctrine of Transubstantiation criticised by John Adams refers to the belief that the bread shared at communion is transformed into and therefore is the actual blood and flesh of Jesus Christ - this practice was identified by some thinkers as a vestige of the early human sacrificial or food-sharing ritual, where, to appease the highest power, the food was offered to him first; what he did not take was shared with the others, first his main troop and the high priests, who were the cooks, then with the rest of the population including the poor - to share with the poor was important for the maintenance of the overall ideal. In some cultures the high power or head man was incorporated for his power when he was killed or otherwise died. The highest power of all was of course invisible or spiritual, to whom was offered the smoke and heat from the sacrificial fire. Aromatic materials or herbs were burned on the food for the enjoyment of the one-god or Sun-god - the fire was associated with the Sun, fire being a gift of god, the Sun. The sacred cooking implements and furniture evolved around the primitive campfire. The tripod (ting in China) was a cooking kettle, a bowl for food, a bowl for gambling to determine the will of god, a medium for sacred symbols, a trophy for winning warriors and atheletes, a chair for the priestess to sit on when delivering oracles, etc. Of course the altar was the table of the Lord - the Church once divided it into two parts: male and female. The sacred power beverage was discovered by the cooks who attended the fires while the others were hunting or making war - they drank the fermented beverage at first, but eventually swore off of it to maintain intellectual control. According to this view, the Pope is God's Head Chef. The garb he wears and his staff are derived from the habit of the ancient cave-man hero of 40,000 years ago, who was called Hercules by many peoples. The habit was continued by the ancient Egyptian priests, the Cynics, and so on.

Ideological Linquistics

2004-07-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

There could be no Ideologie or "science of ideas" without a precise, meaningful language, meaning a scientific language. The French Ideologists were philosophical materialists. That is not to say that all 'Ideologues' , as Napoleon contemptuously called them, were atheists; but for all practical purposes they rejected theological and metaphysical rationalizations justifying arbitrary religious and political authority, and tried to rely instead on the evidence of their senses and careful reflection thereupon. The Ideologists acknowledged Condillac as their founding philosopher. Condillac's philosophy was based on Locke's view, that there are no innate ideas or ideas prior to experience. Locke concluded that knowledge is derived from sensation and reflection. The negative notion that there are no innate ideas is contrary to the gnostic notion of the supreme being, who is purportedly the beginning and end of metaphysics.

In fact Locke, whose influence in America was profound, was called an atheist by more than one Christian, particularly by Christians who believed they were in touch with god. Nonetheless, Locke's doctrine was received well by the Deists and the predominant Protestant sects who rejected papal authority and the divine right of kings. Locke's Reflection left a loophole big enough in which to contrive countless sects. In any event, an agnostic could go about his practical affairs after confessing the existence of god with the proviso that, despite sensational claims to the contrary, god cannot be sensationally apprehended or mentally comprehended.

Condillac dropped Locke's Reflection, and insisted that knowledge is derived from sensation alone. Destutt de Tracy agreed, and dubbed the late-Enlightenment ideology ideologie. Said revolutionary "science of ideas" would analyze the metaphysical nonsense and reduce hazy and confused thinking to its radical elements, to its simple ideas. Since the objects of thought or ideas are expressed by language, Tracy, like Condillac and other Enlightenment thinkers, was inclined to trace language back to its obscure origin, back to its radical, natural roots, some time before its meanings became confused by metaphysical nonsense.

Tracy's approach was therefore reductive or atomistic in that it would reduce language to its elements; and naturalistic, inasmuch as Tracy sought a natural rather than a divine-gift or miraculous explanation for the origin and development of language. The Ideologist of linquistics were duty bound to eliminate vague concepts and dispense with false propositions if not prophets. First of all, the metaphysical "innate" ideas must be exterminated so that language can serve its natural function of satisfying human needs.

Language, averred Tracy, is a system of signs with fixed meanings. Absent language, man is not man: witness the evidence of feral children raised by bears and wolves. Tracy's man is a sensible man, part brute but superior to brutes by virtue of the complex organization of his brain, which enables him to metaphorically 'manipulate' symbols. While animals depend on relatively fixed, innate instinct, man's "instinct" is learned, his instinct is acquired habit.

The better or more useful the language, the better and more useful is the man. The objective of scientific linguistics is to renovate the linguistic system so that it will be true to perceived facts. The earliest signs used by humankind designated sensible objects. Adam Smith had observed that the first words were grunted nouns, denoting or naming objects; adjectives developed as names of qualities including motion (verbs). Tracy opined that the earliest language was a sign language or language of physical action, of gestures complemented by articulated sounds, signifying feelings.

According to this ideological line, general or complex ideas are produced by derivation or abstraction through reflection on the simpler ideas associated with feelings or sensations. The abstractions, however, tend to habitual confusion and imprecision. Therefore the cure: a rigorous chain of ideas must be developed and strengthened by repetition until clear thinking becomes a good habit. Habits are quick judgments. Words habitually sum up previous mental operations for further reflection, analysis and synthesis. Therefore language has a symbolic history, a history of signs relative to previous circumstances. As man develops from animal to man, language develops, just as an egg develops into a chicken.

Now Tracy studied the origin, usage, habit and precision of language at great length. He concluded, for one thing, that alphabetic or phonetic language is far superior to hieroglyphic or pictoral language because phonetic signs are easier to learn, manipulate, combine, and communicate. As for the development of a precise, "ideological" language, Tracy found a fly in his ointment, one that wrecked his radical reformation program: he eventually recognized that verbal language is generally qualitative rather than quantitative like mathematical and algebraic language, hence is inherently imprecise.

The virtue of algebraic language is that its symbols are precise enough for its operations to arrive at definite conclusions. On the other hand, qualitative grammatical operations can never arrive at precise conclusions, but rather describe increasingly vague and complex feelings. Qualities, after all, are universals which are applicable in different ways to a wide variety of particulars - each particular being a unique coincidence of universals - universals, in turn, vary from the ideal form, are shaded, et cetera, so on and so forth ad infinitum.

Despite the flaws in Tracy's ideological system, we should not give up the ancient quest for clear thinking and precise expression of our feelings and thoughts, keeping in mind that all living systems are very complex, and that they are, along with our abstract simplifications, subject to change.

Ideologie of Education - Pierre Cabanis

2004-07-27T12:06:00.000-07:00

Pierre-Jean Cabanis, Ideologie's physiologist, held to the ancient doctrine that nature when left to herself is the best remedy, provided, of course, that she has the occasional assistance of good doctors to cultivate her gifts. Agriculture has served humankind very well for thousands of years, hence we are not surprised to hear doctors of all professions resort to the agricultural metaphor. Dr. Cabanis applied the agricultural metaphor to education, which would "lead human inclinations back to nature." Of course that would lead them away from their superstitious reliance on the vain and absurd metaphysics of kings and priests, that they might read God's natural book and think for themselves.

Dr. Cabanis of course was familiar with the opinions of his dear friend and only patient, the great statesman of the French Revolution, Mirabeau, on the subject of education, as well as the opinions of Adam Smith, whose notions corresponded with those of Mirabeau's tyrannical father, a leading physiocrat. The physiocrats, most of them landlords and real estate speculators, believed that land is the sole source of wealth, and opined that Land and only Land should be regulated, or politically cultivated by taxation. Manufacturing and exchange should be free of regulation; hence unrestrained manufacturing and free exchange of the agricultural and manufactured products. Adam Smith, however, also recognized Labour as a source of value.

As for education, Adam Smith and the young Mirabeau thought that the industry should not be unduly interfered with. Adam Smith believed that competition between educators and teachers (masters) should not be too disturbed, and proposed that students should always pay some portion of tuition so that schools would not be dependent on public or private endowments and teachers on salaries, for that would divert educators from their responsibility to their students and duty to the higher aims of education. Of course some guidance should be provided to curb abuses.

The conservative theory of schooling compromised with radical progressive proposals for compulsive, free public education for all citizens, and provided for some state supervision by means of rewards and punishments, licenses to teach, and so on. It is difficult to apply the tag "liberal" to either the conservative or progressive schools of thought, for both perspective would be liberated from something; the conservatives from the intervention of a dangerous republican (democratic) state, the progressives from repression by the traditional authorities. Suffice it to say that the modern school of education, influenced by the French ideologists, is now referred to as the "liberal school."

Destutt de Tracy, the moral and political ideologist who applied the name ideologie to the French sensationalist philosophy derived from Locke and Condillac, was ambivalent about public education. Although the French Ideologists are credited with favoring universal education, Tracy believed that an education higher than primary school should be limited to the children of a highly educated elite, whose scientific leadership the masses should follow; for Tracy, only the competent, trained legislator could understand the political and moral theory he called ideologie. Tracy would however provide all children with a primary education, first of all, in secular morality in order to free the child of the pernicious influence of irrational authority, and also primary-school courses in reading, writing, and arithmetic. His colleague Dr. Cabanis, also favored primary education, primarily for the purpose of breaking the monopoly on education owned by the wealthy. Of course a course in Ideologie, such as Tracy's course in political and moral science, would be indispensable to that end; furthermore, such a course, which would include logic or analytical thinking, was necessary to protect people from ignorance public officials of all types and for the development of technical proficiency.

In other words, all people should be subject to a common education, for that would force the same instruction on rich and poor. For him, no cost was too great to prevent a "nation deprived of enlightenment, from falling under the aristocracy of the rich, the most odious of all subjection." As for Smith's British liberal approach, which was more conservative, Dr. Cabanis wrote, "The ideas of Smith were... mine for some time... but I consider them not very solid in general... and... in no way applicable to the circumstances of the French nation."

Against publicly funded education, the extremists of the "classical" liberal school maintained their "laissez faire" stance to protect themselves against taxation and "dissolute morality." They argued for the morality of feeling and authority, not the reign of Reason, god of the Enlightenment. They feared that state surveillance and regulation of education would turn republicans (democrats) into a "ferocious sect" and teachers into political parrots rather than libertarian cultivators.

Napoleon of course was a traditional or 'Burkean' conservative, who shared Burke's repugnance for radical Jacobin ideas. He was not opposed to scientific education provided that the science was employed for military and administrative ends. Of course "political science", if there could be such a monstrous thing, was anathema to Napoleon, once he crowned himself with the Pope's blessing and became France's supreme power. The traditional secular power by arbitrary divine right is not a subject to be studied but one to be obeyed. And that was the end of popular secular education for awhile.

Ideologie of Education - Destutt de Tracy

2004-07-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

Napoleon contemptuously referred to France's foremost ideologist, Destutt de Tracy, as an ideologue once the Ideologists were of no further use to him. They had presumed to preach political science from their chairs at the Institute of Political and Moral Sciences. Napoleon, who had an honorary chair there, did an about face and called the Institute of "miserable metaphysicians" a "college of atheists."

The notions of the founders of ideologie (the science of ideas) posed a threat to Napoleon's conservative authoritarian regime, but the Ideologists were by no means radical republicans (democrats) or Jacobins: they were intellectual elitists. Tracy wanted to provide a high education to the elite, those who had sufficient leisure to receive it because of their social status. He had little confidence in popular public education except as a device to inculcate republican principles in the lower classes. By "republican principles," in this case we mean bourgeois representative republicanism versus Crown and Church, and, of course, an educated elite versus the irrational masses. Needless to say, the Ideologists had their aristocratic prejudices: Tracy was one of the largest landed proprietors and absentee landlords in France, one who believed in economic determinism and who complained, when his rational agenda was opposed by the irrational self-interest of members of his own class, that it was of no avail to tell the idle rich that they were good for nothings.

On February 22,1799, Tracy joined a council convened to establish public policy on education - the Council on Public Instruction - and proceeded to describe his ideological education program. Tracy divided humankind into "two species of man" - manual and intellectual workers. Children born into the manually laboring class would get a primary education, while those born into the educated class would get an intellectual or higher education, via the ecoles central. As far as Tracy was concerned, it was better to get no education at all than a bad education - in useless Latin and metaphysics. Therefore in France a master course in Ideologie was to take precedence over all other courses. An education in this improved course of moral (mental) and political science - ala the sensationalists Locke and Condillac - would be a prerequisite to obtaining public employment.

Students of Ideologie would learn from previous analysts how to analyze ideas, boil off metaphysical vapors, reduce nebulous notions to elementary ideas. This course would of course enable them to think for themselves instead of relying on traditional authority. Ideologie, we should note again, was the tail end of the Enlightenment, and as such was suffering the Romantic reaction to Reason. Tracy had his own doubts about the utility of his ideologie, yet he hoped it would help wipe priests and kings - who had waged war on genuine knowledge (science) since the time of Pythagoras - from the face of the Earth.

Tracy was too late, or he was ahead of his time. Napoleon's public, fearing further "excesses" of the Revolution, was generally hostile to his "anti-religious" imposition of an enlightened or reasonable curriculum for the education of the sons of France. The Romantic reaction naturally opposed heretical, anti-authoritarian ideas, especially those ideas included in revolutionary arguments which made too much common sense.

"I see the fury of destroying everything," complained Tracy in his 1801 Project d' elements d' ideology a l'usage ecoles centrales de le Republique francois, "has been replaced by the mania of allowing nothing to be established and that, under the pretext of hating the Revolution, a war has been declared on everything it has produced. This is the fashion...."

Not all Frenchmen, however, found Tracy's ideological course reprehensible. Teachers, on the whole, liked the imposed course in Ideologie, even though they had little academic freedom to vary from the course - only the Rhenish departments favored the German idealists over Locke and Condillac. A number of parents also approved of the enlightened education of their children. Tracy valiantly defended the ideological program of education on the basis of the real improvements already made in the field, but Napoleon Bonaparte and the press were fulminating against it. The Council of Public Instruction was suppressed, then dissolved by Lucien Bonaparte in 1800.

"Why should anyone want to silence the organs of the political and moral sciences," an angry parent asked, "when every citizen who knows and respects his dignity cries out with the Constituent Assembly that ignorance, forgetfulness, or the disdain of the rights of man are the sole causes of public calamities and the corruption of government?"

The purge of the Ideologists (now called "vermin") from their seats in the Tribunate and Legislature began in 1802. The Concordat with the Church was passed - even the atheists were in favor of it since they believed Catholicism would keep order among the ingorant public. The romantically inclined Chateaubriand, an old friend of the Ideologists, published the greatest apology for Christianity ever, Genie du chirstianisme. The preface eulogizes Napoleon.

"All metaphysics," declared Chateaubriand, "which is separate from theology is futile because it lacks purpose."

Ideologie, particularly the courses in political and moral science, was purged from France's school system and replaced by military courses and training. Political economics, however, was retained. On the other hand, in the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson, a son of the French Enlightment, deleted Theology from his curriculum and inserted Ideology.

Ideological Property

2004-07-12T10:51:00.000-07:00

Sociologists of knowledge interested in the relationship of human knowledge to material circumstances now believe that the study of "ideology," or political creeds expressing a group's socio-economic interests, is central to the historical and social understanding of groups. Marx and Engels, neglecting the fact that their own creed was ideological, called ideology "empty talk about consciousness." Engels identified ideology with "false consciousness." Ideologie was, or so many communists believed, nothing but a vain vindication of bourgeois laissez-faire economic theory.

Napoleon Bonaparte, a "Burkean" conservative albeit Burke's arch enemy, contemptuously dubbed the original Ideologists Ideologues after they served his purpose then abandoned him because of his tyranical methods. He dismissed their ideologie as "idealistic trash" and blamed them for everything that went wrong with his France including the Russian disaster. Therefore the foremost Ideologists, Destutt de Tracy and Pierre Cabanis, looked to the new United States of America as the proper crib for ideologie. Thomas Jefferson, an American son of the French Enlightenment, translated French ideologie into English ideology and had it published. Furthermore, he dropped theology from the curriculum at his university in favor of ideology.

The phrase, "the pursuit of happiness," drafted by Thomas Jefferson into the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was certainly a more sophisticated statement than would have been "the pursuit of property." But the French utilitarians were gauche enough to broach the term 'property' instead of 'happiness' in their own liberal declaration, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man - perhaps they deemed 'happiness' to be an inutile metaphysical term:

"The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression."

After all, property is the basis of all physical and spiritual wealth, is it not? The feeling of natural properties, from which the willful human derives the notion of personal property, is the origin of self-development. The necessarily individual, privately owned sensation of nature, an ownership depending on the human will, is the natural source of human personality and other derived or 'artificial' institutions including the institution of private property.

We might even hold that the 'person' is a property of the individual will in its unique relation to objective social circumstances, which it introjects and ejects to suit itself. The 'self' might be construed more broadly than 'person', but a discussion of the difference would lead us astray here - the ideologists failed to realize their prime objective: dispense with vague definitions and metaphysical terms by resort to more precise signs.

Tracy proposed that willing is a way of feeling: "The faculty of willing is but a mode of the faculty of feeling," he stated. For him, the 'self' is the sensibility of personal organization which is felt to possess that sensibility. We interpret this to mean that the self splits and feels itself - other-feeling is at the same time self-feeling. Tracy's self, he says, is the moral person, something that might be construed to be either an abstract existence, called 'sensibility,' or a little subtle body. Again, to feel something is self-feeling. Separated from objects, such self-feeling is infinite, unbounded, hence differs from ordinary concepts of knowledge. The self is not something in opposition to something, but simply constitutes our existence:

"I feel because I exist." My existence and my sensibility are one and the same thing. Willing is part of feeling, the ability to react to pain and pleasure felt.

"The self," declared Destutt de Tracy, "of every one of us is for him his own sensibility. Thus sensibility alone gives to a certain point, the idea of personality. But the mode of sensibility, called the will or willing faculty, can alone render this idea of personality complete; it is only then that it can produce the idea of property as we have it. The idea of property arises solely from the faculty of will; and moreover it arises necessarily from it, for we cannot have an idea of self without having that of the property in the faculties of self and their effects. If it was not this, if there was not amongst us a natural and necessary property, there never would have been a conventional or artificial property. This truth is the foundation of all economy, and of all morality; which are in their principles but one and the same science."

Now the idea of property arises from inevitable individuality, from the individual will (cause) for property (effect). That is, the willing individual always has some property, for individuality in itself is the inalienable and inevitable property of sensible being. But the individual must want something:

"We should not have the property of any of our goods whatsoever," claimed Tracy, "if we had not that of our wants, which is nothing but that of our sentiments; and all these properties are inevitably derived from the sentiment of personality, from the consciousness of our self."

"If it were not in nature," further translated Jefferson, "that every solid body sustained above our heads necessarily sheltered us we would never have had houses made for shelter. In the same manner, if there never had been natural and inevitable property there never would have been any artificial or conventional."

Tracy dismissed thinkers who held that property was merely a human invention, perhaps an excuse for the theft of man's common-wealth or natural treasury in the earth, an invention that could or should be disposed with:

"It seems were we to listen to certain philosophers and legislators that at a precise instant people have taken into their heads spontaneously, and without cause, to say thine and mine, and that they could and even should have dispensed with it. But the thine and the mine were never invented."

The feeling of property, Tracy reiterated at length, arises from the recognition of other willing, resisting beings, to which a personality has to be accorded. Personalities are, of course, personal properties of the individuals concerned.

"There is a property," quoth Tracy, "fundamental, anterior and superior to every institution, from which will arise all the sentiments and dis-sentiments which are derived from all the others; for there is property, if not every where there is an individual sentiment, at least every where that there is an individual willing and acting in consequence of his will."

Of course we must work for our property, including the self with which properties are associated:

"The same intellectual acts emanating from our faculty of will, which cause us to acquire a distinct and complete idea of self, and of exclusive property in all its modes, are also those which render us susceptible of wants, and are the source of all our means of providing those wants.... Labour, the employment of our force, constitutes our only treasure and our only power.... It is the faculty of will which renders us proprietors of wants and means, of passion and action, of pain and power. Thence arise the ideas of justice and deprivation."

Mind you that, at least as far as the original ideology goes, that whatever satisfies wants is good. To have goods, says Tracy, is to be rich. We get rich by exercising our sole power, by working. Good have two values: their cost, and their benefit. Hence labor has the same values. Cost is "natural and necessary," said Tracy, and benefit is "eventual and variable."

Now the primary good of all goods is our liberty. What is liberty?

"Liberty is the power of executing our will. It is our first good. It includes them all.... All constraint is sufferance; all liberty is enjoyment.... Our sole duty is to augment our liberty and its value. The object of society is solely the fulfillment of this duty."

Are we perfectly clear now about the nature of Ideological Property? Have we learned anything useful, or have we been spinning the wheels and begging the questions?

Napoleon's Ideologues

2004-06-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

We have taken up the study Pierre-Jean Cabanis (1757-1808) on the recommendation of Thomas Jefferson, founding father of French Ideologie in the United States, because we want to know more about our French heritage. Dr. Cabanis was trained as a medical doctor. Jefferson, an avowed materialist, was most impressed by Dr. Cabanis' physiological ideology extrapolated in twelve memoirs and published as Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme in 1802. Of course the philosophical rapport between body and mind was monistic; i.e. material. Following the lead of the French Enlightenment's scientism, Dr. Cabanis propounded a materialist physiology, rejecting metaphysical speculation and the presumption of an Author of final causes.

Physiology of course is the study of the functions of living organisms in relation to their anatomical structure. It is an ancient dissecting or analytical science, a science improved in modern times by the development of deductive methodology. Since the body as an object is better known than the illusive, subjective mind, Dr. Cabanis presented physiology as the foundational study of what he called the 'Science of Man': "Physiology, the analysis of ideas, and morale," he explained, "are but three branches of one and the same science, which can be rightly called the science of man." Jefferson translated Dr. Cabanis' Rapports into English and urged that it be studied prior to tacking up the more abstract philosophy of another leading French Ideologist, Destutt de Tracy, whose courses in Ideologie Jefferson also translated - he eventually the courses into the curriculum of his beloved university as 'ideology.'

'Scientific' writers had exerted an extraordinary influence over the educated French mind during the Enlightenment, helping to release it from the shackles of spiritual and moral dogma. As for illiterate people, the theater played the influential role. The group of thinkers Napoleon contemptuously called Ideologues stood at the end of the Enlightenment, on the verge of the Romantic reaction introduced into France, with great thanks to Madame de Stael's love of German literature.

French doctors were still bleeding their patients to death in those days. The science of medicine as well as the art of quackery was a popular topic. France had the "doctor's disease." Its leading medical doctors took the spotlight and were now loquacious gentlemen of the world with excellent bedside and salon manners. Besides the usual ravaging diseases they were confronted with, they had to attend at length to noble women suffering from the vapours and rebellious pulses.

Dr. Pierre-Jean Cabanis was certainly a gentleman; he was taken in as a protégé by Madame d'Helvetius, thereby rubbing shoulders at her Auteuil salon with the leading lights of the latter-day Enlightenment; company included American notables such Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. However, with one famous exception, Dr. Cabanis did not actually practice medicine: he wrote about it. And like other Ideologists whose science was the Science of Ideas, he was deeply involved in politics. His ideas were 'radical' in the British sense of the term; for instance, he was devoted to the radical reform of the pathetic hospital system. Yet, generally speaking, his politics were what we might characterize as liberal conservative. We note that, like other gentle members of Madame d'Helvetius' salon, he withdrew from the public scene during the Reign of Terror. And he played a significant part in Napoleon's rise to power.

To say the very least, the ten years since 1789 had been stormy. Since 1795, a Directory of five relatively moderate directors governed France. These executives led by Paul Barras, together with the members of the bicameral legislature of the Councils of Ancients and Five Hundred, were so desperately preoccupied with staying on the public horse that they were unable to regulate its zigzagging course. For one thing, they had no funds and were reduced to selling national artworks to raise a little hard cash. Crime and disorder were running rampant, and little or nothing could be done to put down rebellions. In its very first year, Barras had to call on his young protégé, Napoleon Bonaparte, to drive away unruly crowds with "The Whiff of Grapeshot." As conditions worsened, intellectuals grew exceedingly anxious. The political body suffered from a malaise that worried doctors interpreted as a leading indicator of another violent anarchic eruption. A remedy was dearly wanted.

By 1799, more than seventy newspapers in Paris alone ran wild with suggestions. The political cacophony of the regular journals was supplemented by a pamphlet press so slanderous in nature that they were called libelles. Madame de Stael, a free-thinker devoted to the Christian moral code, had enjoyed the company of Bonaparte at her famous salon - she admired men with strong wills like her own. She championed a constitutional monarchy along English lines - she would be delighted of course to provide strong guidance therefor. Napoleon demurred. He admired her, but she was a bit too pushy for his taste. She was eventually exiled - in depressing exile she wrote among other things an interesting paper on the subject of suicide: No - suicide is against sound Christian principles.

Now monarchists were promoting all sorts of monarchy including absolutism, but royalty was scarcely in vogue. The Ideologists at the Institut de France were the most influential force in the literary community - they also had enjoyed Napoleon's company - at their sanctum sanctorum: Madame l'Helvetius' salon in Auteuil. They were so pleased with his praise of the letters and sciences that they made him an honorary member of the Institut de France. As far as the Ideologists were concerned, Napoleon was the right general authority to restore dysfunctional France; not to monarchy, of course, but to a healthy dynamic equilibrium; then he would make certain that eufunctional natural law and order was maintained. Of course the Ideologists, including L'Abbe Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes - the group's most powerful politician, best known for his statement that the Third Estate is "everything" - did not want a monarchy or a dictator. However, since ordinary people were apparently not ready for freedom, bold intervention was required: a regimen would have to be prescribed and executed from the top down for the good of the patient.

Wherefore a formula was concocted to cure the fledgling nation of its ill-tempered democratic Republic - The Directory (1795-1799) - and to regenerate a healthy "Republic" - The Consulate (1799-1804), which was really a dictatorship. That would require ridding France of its dystructural document: the Revolutionary Constitution of the year III. Since the reader may already know how that was accomplished by the historic Coup d'Etat of the Eighteenth of Brumaire (9 November 1799), we shall provide scant reminders simply to jog his or her memory.

Napoleon had been greeted by enthusiastic crowds when he returned from Egypt in 1799 - surely he was the savior everyone had hoped for, the general who could do for France what General Monk had done for England in 1660 at the end of Cromwell's revolutionary disaster. While Napoleon had been away on his military adventures, he had maintained contact with the Ideologists through his brothers. Now, on his return, he conversed with Dr. Cabanis, who was a leader of the Council of Five Hundred, Abbe Sieyes, and other Ideologists. Abbe Sieyes said to Napoleon, "We have no constitution, at least not the one we need. It is for your genius to give us one." Napoleon's brother, Lucien Bonaparte, was president of the Five Hundred. In order to accomplish the coup, it was decided to remove the Councils of Ancients and Five Hundred, from Paris to a palace in secluded St. Cloud, in order to avoid a Jacobin plot - to be alleged by the conspirators. Dr. Cabanis strongly supported this plan, knowing well that it would deprive the present government of local support. Let us turn to Napoleon's Memoirs for a good brief account of what transpired:

"At seven o'clock in the evening I held a council at the Tuileries. Abbe Sieyes proposed that the forty principle leaders of the opposite parties should be arrested. The recommendation was a wise one; but I believed I was too strong to need any such precautions. 'I swore in the evening,' said I, 'to protect the national representation; I will not this evening violate my oath: I fear no such weak enemies.' Everybody agreed in opinion with Abbe Sieyes, but nothing could overcome this delicacy on my part. It will soon appear that I was in the wrong."

Napoleon writes that there was an unfortunate delay of a few hours getting the orangerie hall of Saint Cloud palace ready for the Five Hundred - he and his staff had the Emperor's Cabinet, while the Ancients met in the Saloon of Princes. The deputies became exasperated by the delay and demanded of the Ancients to know why they had been called. Was it to change the Directory? Fine, then, put Napoleon and a couple of other citizens in there. At that point the conspirators in the know suggested the plan previously concocted: dispose with Constitution III; adjourn the Councils of Ancients and Five Hundred for three months; establish Three Provisional Consuls, and regenerate the state. These hints before the meeting went over like a lead balloon. When the Five Hundred finally managed to be seated in the hall, Napoleon reports that, "The furious rushing forth of winds inclosed in the caverns of Aeolus never raised a more raging storm. The speaker was violently hurled to the bottom of the tribune. The ferment became excessive." The members were urged to renew Constitution III by swearing to it. The feeling in favor of doing so was so fervent and overbearing that even Lucien was compelled to swear.

Meanwhile Napoleon was drumming up support in the Ancients. We shall never forget his famous speech, which another famous corporal, his admiring student, Adolph Hitler, no doubt studied well: "You stand upon a volcano; the Republic no longer possess a government; the Directory is dissolved; factions are at work; the hour of decision is come. You have called in my arms and the arms of my comrades, to the support of your wisdom.... I know that Caesar,and Cromwell, are talked of - as if this day could be conquered with past times. No, I desire nothing but the safety of the Republic.... And you, grenadiers, whose caps I perceive at the doors of this hall - speak - have I ever deceived you?" And so on.

A member by the name of Lingley arose to astonish the assembly into silence with a remarkable question: "General, we applaud what you say; swear then, with us, obedience to the Constitution of the year III which can alone save the Republic."

After Napoleon recovered his composure, he pointed out that the said Constitution had been violated so many times that it no longer was in effect: "There must be a new compact, new guarantees." Three-quarters of the Ancients rose in approval. An member of the opposition denounced Napoleon as a conspirator against public liberty, but he retorted in turn that he knew the secrets of every party; to with: the existing Constitution was despised by all.

At this point Napoleon got wind that, over in the assembly of Five Hundred, his brother Lucien was being forced to declare him an outlaw, hence he rushed to the orangery, where he was greeted by two or three hundred members shouting, "Death to the tyrant! down with the tyrant!" Two grenadiers saved him from the mob - one was wounded by a dagger and another had his clothes cut through. Napoleon drummed up his soldiers outside and complained that he had come to save the Republic but was attacked with daggers by deputies inside who were doing the bidding of foreign kings. "Soldiers," may I rely on you?" But of course he could, hence he ordered a captain with ten men to enter the chamber of Five Hundred and liberate his brother. When they arrive, Lucien had just thrown off his official robes of office and was calling the Five Hundred, "Wretches!" And more. The deputies thought for a moment that the soldiers had come to express loyalty to the legislative Council - they were soon disabused of the notion. The soldiers shouted, "Down with the assassins!" Lucien was saved from the legislative mob and taken outside where he mounted a horse and addressed Napoleon: "General - and you, soldiers - the President of the Council of Five Hundred proclaims to you that factious men, with drawn daggers, have interrupted the deliberations of that assembly. He calls upon you to employ force against these disturbers. The Council of Five Hundred is dissolved."

Napoleon informs us of his reply: "It shall be done." Of course he did not want one drop of blood spilled, and advised his soldiers accordingly. They charged into the chamber with bayonets - the deputies took to the windows and fled to Paris. That was the end of the "Constitution of the year III."

Dr. Cabanis had apparently avoided the clamor at Saint Cloud and was at his residence in Auteuil when he heard of the coup's success, then rushed to Saint Cloud and wrote the manifesto delivered to the nation by the new regime. The proclamation was read by torchlight to joyful Parisians. It was Napoleon's account of the day's events. Daggers had been drawn in the assembly. France had been saved from the incompetent and corrupt Directory. "Wholesome resolutions for the public safety" were about to become "the new and provisional law of the Republic. The principles of preservation, protection, and liberality, are restored to their due preponderance by the dispersion of those factious men who tyrannized over the Councils, and who, thought they have been prevented from becoming the most hateful of mankind, are the most wretched."

Dr. Cabanis insisted to his dying day that he sincerely believed in the proclamation when he wrote it. Napoleon made him a senator. But he as well as the other Ideologists soon fell out with Napoleon because of his dictatorial methods - Destutt de Tracy, to his credit, never trusted Napoleon. In the United States, Jefferson eventually leaned Napoleon's way. John Adams liked him outright and loved his derogatory term, Ideologues, for his erstwhile supporters - Adams really got into the spirit some time later and called the science of ideas 'Idiotology.'

Surely Dr. Cabanis, since he was somewhat liberally disposed, must have become suspicious of Napoleon's reactionary conservatism at the very first meeting of the Provisional Consuls. We certainly hope so, for we like Dr. Cabanis and we cannot help but recall Hitler's remark on the subject, that Napoleon had wisely surrounded himself with "insignificant" men prior to becoming Consul. However that may be, Napoleon, as usual, relates the story of the first meeting of the Consuls well enough to directly quote it in part:

"The first sitting of the Consuls lasted several hours. Sieyes had hoped that I would interfere only in military matters, and would leave the regulation of civil affairs to him; but he was much surprised when he observed that I had formed settled opinions on policy, finance, and justice: even on jurisprudence also; and, in a word, on all branches of administration; that I supported my ideas with arguments at once forceable and concise, and that I was no convinced. In the evening, on the return home, Sieyes said in the presence of Chazal, Talleyrand, Boulay, Roederer, Cabanis, etc.: 'Gentlemen, you have a master: Napoleon will do all, and can do all. In our deplorable situation, it is better to submit, than to excite dissensions which would draw down certain ruin.'"

Now that we know where Dr. Cabanis stood in respect to the constitutional disease of Revolutionary France, we shall examine the particular themes of his political ideology. We shall also consider his welfare programs - I think we might be favorably impressed by them. Finally, we shall consider his medical practice, which was virtually limited to the treatment of a single patient: his dying friend, the Revolutionary statesman, Mirabeau.

Enlightenment Ideology

2004-06-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

Napoleon preferred the pealing of church bells!

Christianity! Have not the philosophers wished to prove it a system of astronomy? When they can do that, do you think they will persuade me that Christianity is a small thing? If Christianity is an allegory of the movement of the spheres, a geometry of the stars, the free-thinkers can do what they will, they will still leave grandeur enough to the thing they stigmatize. - Napoleon to Chateaubriand

The American Revolution changed the guard and modified the British form of government. Within the American Revolution we find an ideological revolution transplanted from European soil, a sort of social disease or plague which struggles to degrade the old order no matter where a regime might set its foot down and plant its flag. The liberating revolution continues to this very day in the progress of the natural rights of human beings against the blind impedance of pseudo-conservative traditionalists, who must, when the apparent fallacies of their arguments are exposed, ultimately depend on some mysterious and divine power higher than reason to justify the elevation of a powerful few over the many. Liberty too evenly spread is social suicide as far as they are concerned. The liberal end of history cannot be the secular socialism or spiritual communism radical liberals dream of, nor can it be some combination of liberty and order in a kingdom of god on Earth, but could only, or so the illiberal pseudo-conservatives say, amount to the death of civilization in chaotic anarchy. Therefore the world must be liberated of divisive ideology by all possible means in order for the traditional liberty of the few to reign.

The ideological plague arrived in America in the holds of ships - the minds of certain passengers had been infected in Europe. The term Ideologie is a French appellation, but ideology did not spring up spontaneously on French soil; it had its antecedents in other parts of the world: we find ancient records of its symptoms in Aristotle work. Strictly speaking, Ideologie was the "science of ideas" of latter-day philosophes - the leading wits of the French ray of the Enlightenment. The names of two Ideologues loom large: Destutt de Tracy and Pierre-Jean Cabanis. They had exchanged brain secretions at Madame Helvetius' salon with the likes of Condillac, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Franklin, Jefferson. Although the Ideologues begged to differ with Condillac's passive ideological statue - the concrete blank slate Condillac used to illustrate his famous first principle, sensation - the Ideologues still claimed Condillac as their founder, hence they were referred to as "Condillac's coat-tails." Condillac's master was Locke, who attributed knowledge to two factors, sensation, and reflection thereupon; Condillac differed with Locke on the obscure but seemingly independent nature of reflection, boiling it down to sensation alone.

Now Englishmen cannot lay claim to inventing Ideology, yet its source, the Enlightenment, is believed by English authorities to have originated in English minds amply illuminated by Reason, although not all of them embraced its rationalism. Newton gets a great deal of credit, as the hero of scientific thinking who shed light on that first principle called gravity - enlightened men were also excited about its mental or moral attractions said to be equivalent to ancient "love." Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), expounder of the egotistical war of all against all and the availability of wisdom to all reasonable men without priestly interpretation, is sometimes offered up as the first philosopher of the Enlightenment, instead of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who knew that scientific knowledge is power - the Renaissance also claims Bacon. We might consider the Frenchman, Rene Descartes (1596-1650), founding father of modern criticism and certainty of self: "I think therefore I am." But Descarte with his innate ideas is too idealistic for enlightened sensationalists.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 is sometimes given as the historical ground for the Enlightenment. Of course we presume that epochs or ages are arbitrary conceptions and history is continuous. As for the Enlightenment, we find brilliant minds in many lands, including but not limited to Great Britain, North America, Holland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and South America. For those interested in the development of the philosophy of rights, I personally recommend the fascinating writings of Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-1694), a German thinker who combined the social rights of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutchman, with the selfish rights of Hobbes. And do not forget to read Pierre Bayle's (1647-1706) Dictionary - Bayle compared reason to acid, claiming that reason eats through all of the foundations it lays, yet he did not fear the void beneath. And we can't forget Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) reasonable criticism of reason, setting the Enlightenment's rationalism at naught, whether we are enlightened by him or not; but never mind, for in the final analysis, the Enlightenment is rather hard to pin down.

The Enlightenment erupted in the French Revolution and was dealt with by Napoleon. Sparks also flew in America - Napoleon considered relocating to the States. Ideology then entailed the scientific method of thinking, which was antipathetic to traditional spiritual and temporal authority because reason was available to every mature individual of sound mind who cared to study nature - god's natural book - hopefully but not necessarily in conjunction with the Bible. That is, the exercise of reason sufficed to know the natural law. And since god's creation was perfect, nature proceeds very well without divine intervention.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967) characterizes the Enlightenment as a form of Iluminism:

"(The Enlightenment) enthroned reason and empowered it infallibly to judge, condemn, and banish all the nonreason of the past. Culture, religion, and government of the past was claimed to be unworthy of enlightened man and therefore had to be changed or abolished. Such illuminism could neither exist, nor can it be understood, apart from the philosophical rationalism, empiricism, and mechanism that preceded it, nor isolated from the social or political evils of the latter 17th and 18th centuries, from the progress of science, nor from the spirit of independence and rebellion against tradition and authority characteristic of Europeans since the 16th century. Philosophically it was an amalgam of empiricism, deism, rationalism, hedonism, utilitarianism, relativism, antihistoricism, egoistic humanism, optimism, and a veneration of science - all spring from nature and converging toward naturalism, with its emphasis on natural rights, natural society, and natural religion."

The Illuminati made a religion out of illumined human reason, borrowing rituals from Freemasonry. Jesuit-educated Adam Weishaupt founded the enthusiastic Bavarian group on May 1, 1776; he envisioned a free and happy world to be obtained by all available means under the auspices of the secret Order of Illuminati.

Returning to Ideologie, the tail end of the Enlightenment at the inception of the 'Romantic' reaction, we note that Napoleon coined the word Ideologues for the practitioners of ideology. Although he allied himself with the Ideologues during his climb to power, there was no room for their "science of ideas," which smacked of political science, at the top. He scorned the "shadowy metaphysics" of those "miserable Ideologues," those "dreamers" and "windbags" who sought "first principles" in their sensational relation to nature, whose scandalous ideas were responsible for so many revolutionary evils. "You Ideologues destroy all illusions," he complained, "and the age of illusions is for individuals as for people the age of happiness." He blamed the hated Ideologues for everything gone wrong, including his disastrous misadventure in Russia. "It is to the doctrine of the Ideologues - to this diffuse metaphysics, which in a continual manner seeks to find the primary counsels and on this foundation would erect the legislation of peoples, instead of adapting the laws to a knowledge of the human heart and of the lessons of history - to which one must attribute all the misfortunes which have befallen our beloved France," he declared. Napoleon the mathematics enthusiast summed up his complaints in an angry speech to the Council of State on February 2, 1801:

"I am not a king and I do not wish to be insulted like a king.... They treat me like a straw king. Me a straw king. I am a soldier who rose from the people and I raised myself up. Can I be compared to a Louis XVI? I listen to everyone, to the truth, but my head is my only counsel.... There is a class of men who for ten years, through the system of distrust which dominates it, has done more harm to France than the worst revolutionaries. This class is composed of windbags and revolutionaries. They have always fought the existing authority. After having overthrown the authority of 1791, after having prated for several months, although numerous and eloquent themselves, they were overthrown in their turn. They reappeared and they prated some more. Always distrusting authority, even when it was in their hands, they always refused to give it the indispensable force needed to resist revolutions; hazy and miguided minds, they would be worth a little more if they had taken some lessons in geometry...."

Long before Karl Marx assiduously defined the Ideologues as upside-down thinkers, or idealists like all the other idealists, including the German idealists whose Reality was Ideal, the Ideologues enjoyed a considerable reputation for repudiating metaphysics altogether, or simply ignoring it for all practical intents and purposes. But thanks to Napoleon and others, the inadequately defined neologism ideologie took on a pejorative hue shortly after it was cast by Destutt de Tracy: Degerando, in a footnote to his Des Signes, observed:

"A contemptible play on words has cast some ridicule on the expression 'ideology,' adopted by different writers; as if ideas were not something very real, as if they were not even what is most real for us, since our knowledge is only our ideas. All science is truly an 'ideology' or a reasoning on our ideas, and if this expression has any defect, it is its universality, which renders it too vague. Far from being subject to the criticism that (ideology) is unreal, it can perhaps be accused of having too extensive a meaning."

As for "first principles," whatever that means, the Ideologues preferred them to metaphysical musings about final causes presumably intended by an unknown or divine author. They were particularly fond of a single first principle: sensation of nature, not divine revelation, is the source of knowledge.

Incidentally, Napoleon did have a final cause: POWER. His age-old strategy was rather simple: Keep people fairly happy by supplying them with as much as you can of what they want, while taking from them all you can get. As for liberty, liberty is just a word, or, at most, a legal code for protecting property, and property is what people really want - they will gladly sacrifice "liberty" and "equality" for it. Make sure people believe in "equality of opportunity." Provide them at least with the hope that they can rise to the top, and they will go along. Napoleon's "A career open to all talents" was in fact severely limited - one's best chance was in the military.

The Ideologues were wary of Napoleon when he showed up at their salons some time before he held absolute sway over much of Europe, but they supported him because they thought he would restore order and save France and their ideologie from anarchy and religion. Of course they abandoned him because they hated his tyrannical methods - they wanted a sort of republic governed scientifically by a highly educated elite. Napoleon, however, was a traditionalist, a conservative whose conservative sentiments were that of his arch-enemy in England, Burke. For one thing, Napoleon loved the pealing of the church bells of the Church, although he was wary of the secret cabals of monarchist priests and of the superstitious poor people who believed in the divine right of kings to rule them. The absurd mummery of the worship of the goddess Reason and the banal materialism of the Ideologues did not suit the marriage of convenience or concord he had arranged with the Pope. For him, man at large or the common man was not man enough to be an atheist or an agnostic yet: he needed a spiritual or mental master as well as a temporal or physical master - a spiritual master who would obediently report to the emperor. Thus in Napoleon we have the epitome of the so-called "romantic reaction" to the Enlightenment, was we mentioned above.

Fortunately for the revolution within the American revolution, Thomas Jefferson translated ideologie into English and planted it in the budding United States. Thomas Jefferson had befriended one of the leading Ideologues, a physiologist, Doctor Pierre-Jean Cabainis, at Madame Helvetius' salon while Jefferson was in France. Doctor Cabanis had conceived of and elaborated an hypothetical concord, a rapport between mind and matter, which he published in 1820 as Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme - 'moral' in those days referred to man's mental faculty. He sent a copy of it to Jefferson, who in turn acknowledged receipt of the book in his December 12, 1803 letter to Cabanis:

"Dear Sir - I have lately received your friendly letter of 28 Vendem. an. 11, with the two volumes on the relations between the physical and moral faculties of man. This has ever been the subject of great interest to the inquisitive mind, and it could not have got into better hands for discussion than yours. That thought may be a faculty for our material organization, has been believed in the gross; and thought the 'opus operandi' of nature, in this, as in most other cases, can never be developed and demonstrated to beings limited as we are, yet I feel confident that you have conducted us as far on the road as we can go, and have lodged us within reconnoitering distance of the citadel itself. While here. I have time to read nothing. But our annual recess of the months of August and September is now approaching, during which time I shall be at the Montrials, where I anticipate great satisfaction in the presence of these volumes. It is with great satisfaction, too, I recollected the agreeable hours I have passed with yourself and M.de La Roche, at the house of our late excellent friend, Madame Helvetius, and elsewhere; and I am happy to learn you continue residence there. Antevil always appeared to me a delicious village, and Madame Helvetius' the most delicious spot in it. I those days how sanguine we were! and how soon were the virtuous hopes and confidence of every good man blasted! and how many excellent friends have we lost in your efforts towards self-government, et cui bono? But let us draw a veil over the dead, and hope best for the living, if the hero who has saved you from a combination of enemies, shall also be the means of giving you as great a portion of liberty as the opinions, habits and character of the nation are prepared for, progressive preparation may fit you for progressive portions of that first of blessings, and you may in time attain what we erred in supposing could be hastily seized and maintained, in the present state of political information among the citizens at large. In this way all may end well.

"You are again at war, I find. But we, I hope, shall be permitted to run the race of peace. Your government has wisely removed what certainly endangered collision between us. I now see nothing which need every interrupt the friendship between France and this country. Twenty years of peace, and the prosperity so visibly flowing from it, have but strengthened our attachment to it, and the blessings it brings, and we do not despair of being always a peaceable nation. We think that peaceable means may be devised of keeping nations in the path of justice towards us, by making justice their interest, and injuries to react on themselves. Our distance enables us to pursue a course which the crowded situation of Europe renders perhaps impracticable there.

"Be so good as to accept for yourself and M. de La Roche, my friendly salutations, and assurances of great consideration and respect."

Jefferson translated and published a number of works written by the Ideologues - he eventually included Destutt de Tracy's 'Ideology' in the curricula of his beloved University of Virginia. In a letter to Thomas Cooper dated July 10, 1812, Jefferson recommended that Cabanis' work be perused before studying Ideology, therefore we should pause here and follow his recommendation.

Physiological Ideology

2004-06-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

Dr. Cabanis and the materialist foundation of American ideology.

Pierre-Jean Georges Cabanis (1757-1808), Ideology's physiologist, comes to us highly recommended by Thomas Jefferson as the philosophical physician and legislator whose work we should study before taking up the texts of Ideology's rationalist, Destutt de Tracy, the philosopher and accomplished dancer who coined the term, Ideologie. Jefferson believed theological squabbles were a waste of time; he told his intimates that he was a "materialist" and a "hedonist," and that he believed, along with with other enlightened persons such as John Locke, that God was omnipotent enough to make matter think - Locke had actually said that it is conceivable that God added thought to matter, but it is likely that he created a separate thinking substance. Whether or not god and soul is independent of world and body is a sensitive matter for those who are dying to outlive their bodies.

In any case, knowledge of the natural person takes precedence to speculation about the supernatural person where practical affairs are concerned. Tracy also believed in putting first things first, the sensation of matter before the abstract reflections of mind. Since Ideology's general subject or object of scientific study was man, Ideology was applicable to all human sciences. Tracy called his own ideological specialty - the study of grammar, logic, and politics - "rational ideology." But thought was, or so the Ideologists felt, a function of man's physical organism in relation to its environment, hence the origin of thought is not something to be elucidated by "rational ideology" but is rather something to be treated of by "physiological ideology."

Physiology is a branch of biology, the general science of life. Physiologists want to know how living things work: physiology is the science of the functions of living or organic matter. Physiology may be formally distinguished from the actual practice of medicine, the art and science of restoring and maintaining health. A few of the greatest clinicians in Dr. Cabanis' time were pragmatic therapists who believed that the theoretical studies of the body and its functions were useless conjectures, and in many instances they were correct. Furthermore, religious scruples dictated against human vivisection, a practice necessary to physiology since the functions of the body are dependent upon and can only be understood in relation to its anatomy. A pertinent modern definition of physiology's scientific domain is given in Robert M. Dowben's text, general physiology, a molecular approach (1969):

"Physiology is a branch of biology concerned with the mechanism of functional operation and the coordination of function of living organisms in both the plant and animal kingdoms. Implicit in physiology is the idea that the collective results of studies of partial phenomena dissected apart in living organisms will lead to an understanding of life processes. It is like the astronomer who proposes to understand that universe by patient observation of the motions of the stars. Physiology emphasizes the integrative aspect of organ function and cellular function and, in this sense, is one side of the coin, the other side being embryology, which emphasizes differentiation. The function of organs and cells depends upon processes; the analysis of these process is the domain of physiology."

Of course the analysis is a mental or conscious process, a process religious needs may associate with an independent immortal soul. Modern scientists are still struggling to understand how the mind's incomprehensible qualities, such as perception, memory, voluntary movement and the like, spring from living tissue and electrical impulses: a researcher recently stated, "Souls and synapses are hard to reconcile." As far as Dr. Cabanis and many other French Ideologues of the eighteenth century were concerned, body and mind are a unity, hence the physiological and ideological functions are governed by the same laws. Jefferson advised us to study the physiology of Cabanis before the ideology of Destutt de Tracy because the body can be observed and its mental functions arise from that body. The analytical method of Ideology, the "new" science of ideas most systematically exposed by the abstractions of Tracy was difficult to understand standing alone without physical examples. John Adams, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated 16 December 1816, exclaimed:

"Three vols. of Ideology!' Pray explain to me this Neological title! What does it mean? When Bonaparte used it [disparagingly], I was delighted with it, upon the common principle of delight in everything we cannot understand. Does it mean Idiotism? The science of non compos mentuism? The science of Lunacy? The theory of delirium? or does it mean the science of self-love? Of amour propre? or the elements of vanity? Were I in France at this time, could profess blindness and infirmity, and prove it too. I suppose he does not avow the analysis, as Hume did not avow his essay on human nature. That analysis, however, does not show a man of excessive mediocrity. Had I known of these things two years ago, I would have written him a letter."

The analytic method of Ideology was not really new: it relied heavily on Francis Bacon's famous universal method for sorting things out and examining them for basic principles. Whatever stood out was often the principle sought. Descartes was onto such striking ideas or principles of things. Furthermore, Newton's combination of experience with reasoning was world-shaking. The logical process involved the inductive method of empirical science the Arabs and Jews had developed from Greek metaphysics, and had introduced into Europe during the Renaissance. Ideology's "schoolmaster", Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac, picked up the method and spoke of decomposing confused pictures, then composing what had been induced from the decomposition into deductions or successive transformations of the salient fact in order to get the right picture of reality. After doing just that, he had to modify his English master's philosophy: he boiled Locke's sensation and reflections thereupon down to one source - sensation. Tracy carried the work even further and made Ideologie out of it - we shall examine his contributions elsewhere.

Of course thoughts are a farthing per dozen and are readily available for dissection. However, for over a thousand years cadavers were not that easy for physiologists to get ahold for analysis. The ancient physiologists enjoyed dissecting them, but Scholasticism eventually gripped the minds of dialecticians - professors became more interested in faithful rhetoric than in physical reality. When dissection was first taken up by Renaissance doctors, corpses were hard to come by. Cemeteries were not neatly kept up, so the skeletal and other organ systems could be scavenged and analyzed. The bodies of executed criminals put up for public display could be stolen, or analyzed as the birds picked them clean. Given the lack of material to experiment with for so many years, it is hardly surprising that as late as the eighteenth century esteemed doctors, regardless of their faith or lack of it, thought physiological theories were useless if not silly. Although dissection was being practiced by the medical community, the public did not cotton to it: there were riots around dissections in the United States; for instance, one young man looked into a window and saw his mother being analyzed, and all hell broke loose shortly thereafter. Nevertheless, enlightened thinkers including physicians believed physiology was as indispensable to medicine as ideology was to thinking. Some of them were particularly interested in the mysterious vital principle of living matter, a principle they identified with physical sensitivity. Some of the vitalist doctrines impeded the progress of physiological science because certain doctors believed that what they did not know about life, the unknown x-factor, was a sacred mystery for the elaboration of dogma, not in the sense of what seems to be true for rational experimental purposes but dogma in the sense of irrefutable intuited doctrine. However, as Sensibility grew popular in the moral sphere, the intuitions were revelations of feeling rather than of reasoning - a transcendental process whose god was Reason. Jefferson replaced Descartes' "I think therefore I am" with "I feel therefore I am." Cabanis said, "From the moment that we feel, we exist."

Of course the liberal appreciation of feeling in lieu of the abstruse reasoning was in accord with the popular view, that free people have an innate moral sense, somewhat similar to the good-old protestant conscience, a felt virtue which a person of good taste, a graceful gentleman or lady, can follow in order to achieve the happiness pursued in those days. Hume, one of the nicest philosophers who ever lived, said that the perceived viciousness of murder is "the object of feeling, not of reason. So that when you pronounce any action of character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it." Adam Smith referred to the "demigod within the breast, judge and arbiter of conduct," but he conceived it as founded on sympathy for what other people think of us: if we would only look into the mirror of other people's opinions, we would reform ourselves and be quite nice - he neglected to mention that each self-interested person gazing in the mirror tends to think more of himself than he thinks of others. Rousseau, considered by moralists to be one of the most immoral men who ever lived, was intoxicated with "Conscience! divine instinct... judge infallible of good and evil, which makes man like unto God!" Madame de Stael explained virtue: "Virtue thus becomes a spontaneous impulsion, a motive which passes into the blood, and which carries you along irresistibly like the most imperious passions." And on to Schiller: "I prejudge nothing good... He is much more estimable who abandons himself with a certain security inclination, without having to fear being led astray by her." And on to Nietzsche. But we have passed beyond physiological ideology's scientific recognition of the fundamental importance of the living body into the mystification of materialism after being caught up by Romantic movement, which reverted in part to spiritual authority for the restoration moral order.

Traditional spiritual authority was obviously being repudiated during the Revolutionary era; society was seasick with revolt; bold physicians intervened to help restore the natural balance of the physical constitution that had been overstimulated by its radical root. The origin had been obscured by metaphysics: it was the duty of doctors to observe the body, analyze the conditions, dispense with irrelevant illusions, come up with sound solutions. The social body had been unnaturally oppressed by the Old Regime. The Revolution erupted; society was bled; politically active physicians recommended a natural regimen instead of the Old Regime artificially supported by doctors of divinity more interested in the spiritual instruction of the vulgar population than in its education. Of course a physician's first concern is not the political constitution of a people but is the constitution of the sensitive organism, particularly the natural constitution of individual human beings. Busy medical practitioners today may have little interest in politics other than upholding certain laissez faire principles of classical liberalism over bureaucratic socialism, particularly where insurance schemes are concerned. But doctors were more politically active during the Revolutionary period when the health of the society was in grave peril. That body was however was constituted by its constituent organisms, therefore observation of the human body rather than speculation on the supernatural aspects of the transcendental supreme person suited Ideology fine, that final phase of the Enlightenment just prior to the Romantic reaction and the restoration of dictatorial divine order.

Since sensations produce thought, said Dr. Cabanis, medical science alone can expose the nature of consciousness; in fact it was the only science actually exploring the nature and functions of sensibility in its environment. Physiological medicine and not metaphysics was the true queen of the sciences of man. Tracy called his science Ideology, meaning the "science of ideas", whereas Cabanis called Ideology the "science of man", a science naturally led by physicians, fore the body was already familiar while the mind was still awfully mysterious - so first things first. Tracy was glad the French National Institute had included a physiologist, Dr. Cabanis, in its section on Ideology - the Class of Moral and Political Sciences. By doing so, Tracy said the Institute had followed the Delphic injunction, "Know thyself." And Cabanis was glad to be there, for he saw in the new republic a golden opportunity to deliver the gospel of the human sciences to Europe and to the future generations of the world.

It is meet to refer to Dr. Cabanis' infamous analogy, to the effect that the brain secretes thoughts like the stomach secretes bile, while keeping in mind that it is just that, an analogy - it certainly gave a number of pious people heart burn and a bad case of indigestion followed by severe headaches. The analogy appears in the text admired and translated by Jefferson, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, that is, Relations between the Physical and Mental in Man. We might prefer to use the English equivalent, rapport, since 'rapport' better expresses the formality of the harmony of mind and body presented by Cabanis. That harmony was a formal dualism for convenience's sake: according to his monistic materialism, mind and body were actually a unity. Not that dualism may not work to throw off real spiritual authority: the gods or God can be deported to a transcendental sphere accessible by private prayers and individual revelation only, leaving people free to conduct business on Earth in name only of their respective deities, even to the point of making war on each other while invoking the universal god of love.

A rapport might take the form of a concord. We recall that Napoleon worked out a Concordat (1802) with the Pope: of course Napoleon was the conductor of that harmonious relationship between spirit and matter. Napoleon despised Dr. Cabanis and the other Ideologists, whom he scornfully dubbed Ideologues; they had called on him to save France, then abandoned him because they did not like the regimen he imposed on the political body; hence Dr. Cabanis sent his seminal Rapports (1802) along to the third president of the United States.

Dr. Cabanis' amiable friend, Baron von Holbach, influenced his rapport with nature with his opinion of the law of body and mind. The rich baron, naturalized into French life along with his intimate friend Grimm, had already written his scandalous masterpiece, Systeme de la Nature, ou les Lois du Monde physique et du Monde moral (1770). Readers could not believe that Holbach, modest maitre d'hotel to enlightened philosophers could have written the troublesome book. Chapter VIII is entitled 'The Intellectual Faculties derived from the Faculty of Feeling' - The second paragraph begins: "The first faculty we behold in the living man, and that from which all his others flow, is feeling: however inexplicable this faculty may appear, on a first view, if it be examined closely, it will be found to be a consequence of the essence, or a result of the properties of organized beings: the same as gravity, magnetism, elasticity, electricity, &c. result from the essence or nature of some others." For Holbach empirical investigation is the only legitimate method of obtaining knowledge, and it ultimately reveals only matter in motion: matter and motion explains all phenomena. He goes on to say that "feeling is a particular manner of being moved - a mode of receiving an impulse peculiar to certain organs of animated bodies, which is occasioned by the presence of a material object that acts upon these organs, and transmit the impulse or shock to the brain. Man only feels by the aid of nerves dispersed through his body: which is itself, to speak correctly, nothing more than a great nerve; or may be said to resemble a large tree, of which the branches experience the action of the root, communicated through the trunk." Voltaire was left aghast by the the baron's book; especially appalling was its ethical relativism, and the proposition that there is no such thing in the natural universe as order and disorder besides our wishful thinking that there is.

A much earlier book set the stage for the bold materialism: Julien Offroy de La Mettrie's scandalous L'Homme Machine (1747). Dr. La Mettrie obtained his medical degree at Reims, then served France as an army physician. An illness convinced him that organic changes cause psychic phenomena. The publication of those views caused him to be run out of Paris - his book on the natural history of the soul was burned by the hangman. Dr. La Mettrie was the black sheep of the philosophes. Nonetheless, L'Homme Machine undoubtedly influenced Dr. Cabanis and Holbach as well, therefore I quote therefrom:

I propose... to interpret supernatural things, incomprehensible in themselves, by the light each of us has received from nature. We should be guided here by experience alone. They abound in the annals of physicians who were philosophers, but not in those of philosophers who were not physicians. Physician-philosophers probe and illuminate the labyrinth that is man. They alone have revealed man's springs hidden under coverings that obscure so many other marvels.... What have others to tell us, above all, theologians? Is it not ridiculous to hear them pronouncing shamelessly on something they are incapable of understanding, from which, on the contrary, they have been completely turned away by obscure studies that have led them to a thousand prejudices, in a word, to fanaticism, which adds further to their ignorance of the mechanism of bodies?

"Man is a machine so complicated that it is impossible at first to form a clear idea of it, and, consequently, to describe it. This is why all the investigations the greatest philosophers have made a priori, that is, by wanting to take flight with the wings of the mind, have been in vain. Only a posteriori, by unraveling the soul as one pulls out the guts of the body, can one, I do not say discover with clarity what the nature of man is,butt rather attain the highest degree of probability possible on the subject. Take up, therefore, the staff of experience, and leave behind the history of all the vain opinions of philosophers. To be blind and yet believe that you can do without the staff, is blindness at its darkest."

Of course Descartes had already said, in Man, that animals are like machines - he was familiar with the automata of his day, the mechanical analogues of animals and men, particularly the articulated figures that produced the illusion of self-moving creatures in gardens. Descartes endeavored to untangle the rational soul from previous theories and divorce it, the unique property of man, from the body; he explicitly championed the "soulless physiology" of his day, which envisioned the cosmos as a machine or clock. In other words, man is unlike other animals, said Descartes, because God joined a rational soul to the human animal: "He will place its chief seat in the brain (pineal glad) and will make its nature such that, according to the different in which the entrances of the pores in the internal surface of the brain are opened through the intervention of the nerves, the soul will have different feelings." But Dr. La Mettrie did not need Descartes' metaphysical dualism; he did not buy its unknown soul a la carte: "Descartes and all the Cartesians...made the same mistake. They said man consists of two distinct substances, as though they had seen and counted them."

Dr. La Mettrie, in L'Homme Machine, took advantage of the principle of irritability - the inherent tendency of muscle to contract when touched - uncovered by the Swiss physiologist, Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) - much to Dr. Haller's outrage, the book was dedicated to him. Dr. Haller had also isolated the principle of sensitivity, that nerves do not apparently change shape when touched but transmit impulses that cause muscles to contract - he believed sensitivity was a property of the unified central nervous system and consciousness. Now Dr. La Mettrie focused on irritability when building his machine-man model, hypothesizing that each little fibre, independent of the nerves, had an "innate force" that the nervous system transmitted to the brain. This principal spring of the entire machine, referred to by Hippocrates as the enormon or soul, a pervasive essence in creation presiding over the elements it generates and constitutes, was really "only a principle of motion, or a sensitive material part of the brain." Consciousness is not an independent soul but is a property of matter. Apes and humans are not two kinds of creatures but differ only in degree - man has language. Every thing is a portion of a single uniform substance, or matter, subject to inherent natural law. Material man, if not deformed or depraved, has pleasure in moral conduct. Hence living matter is not merely mechanical, but possesses a sensitive motive force.

Dr. La Mettrie had satirized the medical profession from time to time, and he, in turn, was called insane and frenetic. insolent, a glutton and a hedonist - he was fond of Epicurus. The Machine Man with his lawfully operating spring was a rather nice device compared to the irreverent models its author had constructed elsewhere. The doctor had opined that nature is simply an unplanned, amoral, fortuitous motion of matter. Vulgar man, incapable of fundamental moral improvement, is by nature a "wicked" or antisocial machine. He is an animal who requires legal coercion in order to get along with his kind. He does not need the arbitrary religious standards of conscience, the relative ideas of good and evil that make him feel unnaturally guilty and remorseful. Crime makes some people happy, hence criminals should be externally restrained. Psychological restraints, inculcated guilt and remorse, do more harm than good since they are mostly felt after the commission of crimes. External coercion actually leaves the individual much freer, more in accord with human nature. Of course, enlightened philosophers like the Epicureans, in contrast to ordinary people, who are brutes, will retire to a conservative retreat - Epicurus retreated to his garden and deported the gods - who could care less about humans - into an undisclosed remote location.

Despite his pessimism, Dr. La Mettrie was obviously an activist who deliberately exaggerated his case and flouted conventional thinking in order to open the glazed eyes of his fellow man. The rhetoric runs all the way back to the master himself, Hippocrates, who was not beyond castigating metaphysicians posing as physicians, thus exposing the nonsense of his day. He came up with some foolish ideas of his own, but the general principles he expounded were sound. Dr. Cabanis, one of his countless disciples over the centuries certainly thought so. The disciple of Hippocrates who works with nature will reject supernatural explanations and carefully observe the matter at hand, the organism and its environment, in order to isolate factors that cause disease and health, that he may preserve man's natural state and restore it when deranged. The physician will observe and not interfere with nature's own recuperative power. Hippocrates states, in the sixth chapter of Epidemics:

"(Nature medicatrice). La nature est le medecin des maladies. La nature trouve pour elle-meme les voies et moyens, non par intelligence; tels sont le enlignement, les offices que la langue accomplit, et les autres actions de ce genre; la nature sans instruction et sans savoir, fait ce qui convient." [Nature is the healer of disease. Nature finds her own ways and means, not by intelligence; such are the alignment, the offices achieved by the tongue, and other actions of that kind; nature without instruction and without thinking, does what is appropriate....] (par E. Littre's Oevres completes D'Hippocrates, V, 314).

The physician strives to do good, or at least to do no harm. Of course Hippocrates recognized that there are times when the physician must boldly intervene in nature's business with surgery, drastic laxatives, bleeding and the like. He also posited the four internal "humors" of temperament and expounded on such subjects as diet, climate, epidemic, head injuries, fractures, joint problems, ulcers, leprosy, fistula, and reproduction - including numerous texts on gynecology. The equilibrium or balance of powers of the organic constitution is of prime importance to Hippocrates and his followers, including physicians of the body politic who would adhere to his injunction to do good, or at least do no harm, and observe the Physiocratic laissez faire. Hippocrates' constitutional equilibrium was given a modern voice by Claude Bernard (1813-1878). He called it the milieu interior - the relatively constant internal environment that bathes the cells of complex animals, enabling the organism to survive in an adverse environment. The American physiologist, Walter Cannon, expanded the concept in the 1920s with elaborate experiments. He dubbed the balance "homeostasis", the "wisdom of the body"; that is, the body's ability to maintain dynamic albeit relatively stable internal conditions although the environment is changing. This is accomplished via control mechanisms, feedback from the endocrine and nervous systems.

Lest we lose Dr. Cabanis in an extended, convoluted history of medicine, we might wonder whether or not he made a unique contribution to medicine or to physiological ideology, something analogous to the contribution of the brothers who assembled an airplane and flew it for a few hundred feet. Unlike Galen, Dr. Cabanis did not produce a coherent theory of temperament based on the classical four humours. Nor did he write the first textbook on physiology - Aristotle had already done that many centuries prior. He did not reveal that life processes are fundamentally chemical, as did the alchemist Paracelsus. Nor did he realize the function of pulmonary system; for that the credit goes to Michael Servetus, whom Calvin had burned at the stake along with the heretical book in which the description appeared, Restitution of Christianity. And it was William Harvey who provided us with the conclusion that "the blood in the animal body moves around in a circle continuously, and that the action or function of the heart is to accomplish this by pumping. This is the reason for the motion and beat of the heart." Dr. Cabanis did try to generate life from both organic and inorganic matter, but he failed, whereas in 1748 Needham presented his memoir describing the spontaneous generation of living 'animacules' from sealed, heated beef broth - Needham ascribed the generation of life to a "vegetative force" that "vivifies organized bodies" and "furnishes the soul material for thought."

Nor did Dr. Cabanis' physiological ideology arise spontaneously from a vacuum, or from beef broth, or abiogenically from a hot 'chicken' soup of prebiologic compounds subjected to volcanic pressure or to, say, a high voltage discharge. He did emphasize and elaborate certain concepts derived from his predecessors and contemporaries. To begin with, he stressed the fundamental importance of medical science and its independence from collateral sciences: "Physiology, the analysis of ideas, and morale are but three branches of one and the same science, which can rightly be called the science of man," he stated, but physiology must take precedence. The study of moral and physical behavior is a single science, a zoological study of the natural history of man. Simplistic mechanistic explanations are untenable - there must be strictures on the applying the doctrines of sciences collateral to the "animal economy." Since moral science has a physiological basis, the medical expert should replace the moralist. He is prudent and cautious. He did not deny the special status of life nor is he pessimistic about its future.

Furthermore, Dr. Cabanis emphasized the ancient notion of man as an organic constitution in temperamental equilibrium. The organism seems to be designed, to be a finality; however, it is the result of natural laws, and it is imprudent for the scientist to infer the existence of an author from its design. Temperament was anciently conceived to be the mix or composition of four humours derived from the elements, but that notion was giving way to the idea of the total force or potential energy of the vital pricniple observed in the weakness or strength of sensations, appetite, convulsions, et cetera. Dr. Cabanis attributed individual differences in temperament to causes external and internal - climate, diet, gender, lifestyle or modes of living, health, unconscious thoughts and desires, instincts, and so on. He admitted that innate instincts have a purpose or final cause, but he refused to speculate on their "author." As for the self, it is pre-formed by instinct and dispositions, building for itself an external world with those elements that interest it. There are several egos, but we refer to the egoistic feeling as the center for sensation. Happiness is simple "the free exercise of the faculties, in the feeling of force and ease with which one puts them into action." The "faculties" of man are generalized statements of organic operations. Moreover, for Dr. Cabanis the human constitution was not a blank state or passive statue upon which external stimuli alone makes an impression, pushing the machine around. Man had his internal, vital operations, and they were for the most part instinctive. That is, not only is the body impressed from without but it expresses itself from within. Indeed, his views on this very subject influenced Maine de Biran, the French philosopher who developed a vitalistic theory of will, a theoretical turning point in French philosophy that eventually led to the Victor Cousin's popularization of eclecticism and synthetic Spiritualism. Cousin was influenced, like the Ideologists, by Locke and Condillac, but he also liked Kant; to both he applied so much Hegel that Hegel said his friend Cousin had stolen his soup. In America, New England Transcendentalists found what they liked best in Cousin's soup, and, ignoring Kant's warning about transcendental illusions, ran hog wild with it.

Given the outspoken atheism and anti-clerical passion of his time, Dr. Cabanis was unusually quiet on transcendental subjects except to state unequivocally that it was not his intention to replace spiritual metaphysics with material metaphysics. In fact he is not propounding first causes but is replacing metaphysical speculations with methodic analysis of phenomena, the "essence" of which is the collection of appearances to be scientifically treated; all else is faith. The appearance of the mental aspects of the physical organism is due to the observer's perspective. We do not find him preaching extreme materialism or atheism. We get the impression that, as a philosophical physician, the doctor wished to restrict his professional observations to the matter at hand; namely, to the human body and its functions. As for spiritualism, in about 1806 Dr. Cabanis wrote a letter a young author, Claude Fauriel, wherein he indited the probable existence of a universal intelligence or First Cause, the source of all forces, and perhaps the ground of an immortal soul. A Montepelier physician found the letter in 1824 and published it. This gave due cause for critics to grind their axes and to argue that Dr. Cabanis had been converted to spiritualism or was at least backsliding from materialism as such. After all, he had heretofore painted man as a sensitive machine in an indifferent universe, and he had not bothered to use the term 'soul' in his seminal treatise, Rapports. Mind you, in 1798 he allegedly made an atheistic retort to an engineer at the Institute: the engineer, Sainte-Pierre, had reportedly praised the wisdom of God, to which Dr. Cabanis supposedly exclaimed, "I wish that the name of God never be pronounced within these walls!" If Dr. Cabanis did so exclaim, we must consider the scientific context within the walls as well as the Christian doctrine on matching duties to offices. Still, almost everyone concluded, especially after reading his statement that thoughts are brain secretions, that Dr. Cabanis was an atheist and an extreme materialist, and for those who wanted to outlive their bodies that was a terrible thing indeed.

"We see... impressions arriving at the brain, by the intermediary of the nerves; at this point they are isolated and without coherence. The viscera enters into action; it acts on them and soon it renders them back metamorphosed into ideas that are expressed in the language of physiognomy and gesture, or the signs of speech an writing. We conclude... that the brain in some way digests impressions, that it produces organically the secretion of thought."
- Rapports

Yet again we must ask, What does Dr. Cabanis get special credit for? He wrote a book about the rapport between mind and body, a book representative of the physiological ideology of his day; his ideological approach to medicine was the most systematic available at the time - that is why Jefferson recommended it to Americans. Dr. Cabanis's unique contribution was a coincidence of universal concepts handed down by a long line of doctors of body and soul, and we must leave it university professors to unravel his peculiar contribution to science and expose it to laymen who are apt to be confused about such complex matters simply because their jobs keep them from inquiring very deeply into them. Then as now the physiology and medical texts read about the same on matters most obvious to anyone who has the time to study them. Of course there were metaphysical differences between schools of thought; for instance the ongoing controversy between animism, with its spiritual being or sovereign soul; mechanism, with its inexplicable force; and vitalism, with its vital, purposive principle. Mechanism and vitalism shoved animism aside and merged, so to speak. But what real difference can we really make between the terms, 'spirit', 'force', 'principle'? Dr. Cabanis's mentor, Voltaire, had this to say in his famous Dictionary:

"We call soul is that which animates. Since our intelligence is limited, we know hardly anything about the subject.... Poor pedant, you see a plant that vegetates, and you say vegetation, or even vegetative soul. You notice that bodies have and produce motion, and you say force: you see your hunting dog learn his craft from you, and you claim instinct, sensitive soul; you have complex ideas, and you say spirit. But, please, what do you understand by these words? ... The opinion we should adopt is that the soul is an immaterial being; but you can't imagine what that immaterial being is. 'No', the scholars reply, 'but we know that its nature is to think.' And how do you know that? 'We know because it thinks.' Oh, scholars! I'm afraid that you are ignorant as Epicurus: the nature of the stone is to fall, because it falls, but I ask you what makes it fall. 'We know,' they go on, 'that a stone has no soul.' Granted, I believe that too. 'We know that a negation and an affirmation are not divisible, are not parts of matters.' I am of our opinion. But matter, too, otherwise unknown to us, possesses qualities which are not material, which are not divisible; it has gravitation toward a center, which God has given it. No this gravitation has no parts; it is not divisible. The moving force of bodies is not a being composed of parts. Nor is the vegetation of organized bodies, their life, their instincts. These are not beings apart, divisible beings; you can no more cut in two the vegetation of a rose, the life of a horse, the instinct of a dog, than you can cut in two a sensation, a negation, an affirmation. Therefore your fine argument, drawn from the indivisibility of thought, proves nothing at all."

"O man! God has given you understanding to conduct yourself well, and not to penetrate into the essence of the things he has created. This is what Locke thought, and before Locke, Gassendi, and before Gassendi, a multitude of sages; but we have bachelors of arts who know everything those great men didn't know. Cruel enemies of reason have dared to rise up against these truths acknowledged by all the sages. They have carried bad faith and impudence so far a s to charge the authors of this Dictionary with affirming that the soul is matter. You know perfectly well that at the bottom of page 64, there are these very words against Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius: 'My friend, how does an atom think? Acknowledge that you know nothing about it.' Obviously, then, you are slanderers. No one knows the nature of that being called spirit, to which even you give this material name of spirit, which signifies wind.

Again and again the student of Dr. Cabanis is confronted not only with slanderers but with monism, monistic materialism, or the view that only matter exists, whatever it is. At bottom was matter in motion, sensitive matter as far as physiology was concerned. As have seen, the essential nature of matter was the subject of metaphysical speculation, at the bottom of which the investigator might be left clutching thin air if not absolute space - early metaphysicians of modern science were astonished to discover that the definition of absolute space was virtually identical to the theological definition of God. Matter has mass and occupies space, however mass and space might be defined. In any case, the final word on 'matter' is that it is a word grown from a Sanskrit root, ma, meaning "measured out" (extension); it is the root of such words as 'man' and 'mother.' The form of the symbol is arbitrary, but it means something, stands for something we experience, something empirical or real - matter alone is not the sole thing experienced, thus some idealists call themselves realists!

Dr. Cabanis's eighteenth-century France is notorious for its atheistic materialism. Yet the mystification of materialism does not require much imagination: matter can be conceived as living and thinking - this is our experience. Notwithstanding the question of God's existence, materialism was a convenient political position. Ironically, the extreme materialists - the most most radical opponents of spiritual authority and divine right of kings to tyranny - elevated matter over mind after ostensibly identifying the two as a single material substance. They were quite willing to scientifically master the world without pope or king; albeit most of them, craving more liberty for themselves and needing some support for their claims, were quite generous with liberty and recommended that more latitude be given to all individuals to do as they would do. After all, as Hippocrates had made plain, that freedom would purportedly correspond to the underlying natural constitution of all human beings. What does it matter if matter is constituted as long as it is constituted? Does not everyone want to exist? Certain empowered spiritualists objected to materialists for their own underlying political reasons: religion worships Power, politics distributes it. Monistic spiritualists wanted spirit alone; they would not admit matter as a real substance, or even worse, as the only real substance. If nothing comes from nothing and if God is eternal, matter must also be eternal if God is to have a substance to create with. But let us not get caught up here in absurd squabbles. Suffice it to quote Voltaire's Dictionary again:

"You will be pushed by the theologian who will tell you: 'If you believe in eternal matter, you then recognized two principles, God and matter; you fall into the error of Zoroaster, of the Manicheans.' ... But we might say to the theologian: 'In what am I a Manichean? Here are stones an architect has not made; he has raised an immense building with them; I don't accept two architects, brute stones obeyed power and genius.' Happily, whatever system we adopt, none does harm to morality; for what difference does it make whether matter is created or ordered? In both cases God is our absolute master. In both cases, whether it's a chaos unraveled or a chaos created out of nothing, we must be virtuous; almost none of these metaphysical questions have any influence on the conduct of life: these disputes are like fruitless discussions at table: everybody forgets after dinner what he has said, and goes where his interest and taste call him."

Well, then, let us retire to the living room, where we shall continue our discussion with a brief biography of the practical aspects of the life of Dr. Cabanis. Although he had his medical certificate, he did not make a practice of medicine, with one glowing exception: he was attending physician to his dying friend, the revolutionary statesman, Mirabeau. Therefore we shall conclude the biography with an account of that agonizing end to life as we know it.