Comparisons, it was
anciently thought, were among the royal tools of thought, along with logic. One
of the interesting thing about comparisons is how, buried beneath them, we find
coincidences, intersections on the plane of concept or image. And the comparison
is all the more powerful in that, like a coincidence, it produces a cognitive
shock, a crossroads surprise. The shock, if the comparison goes off well, will
be transmitted to the object we began with. It will seem not only as if we have
given an explanation, but we have given a surplus of explanation.
It is here that
comparison runs into trouble, for, like coincidence, it seems tangled in
superstition. Enlightenment begins, perhaps, with a suspicion of the surplus of
explanatory value. Ancient enlightenment – the sceptics and epicurians
who came after Aristotle – recognized that comparison did too much work. It is
as if an occult power, a dark force, planned that meeting of concepts or images
or situations. The enlightenment state of mind is always allergic to occult
forces. These are, after all, the things that plunge us perhaps all innocently
and without taking notice into a magical view of history. And yet, if the
Enlightenment wants to have a history of itself in which it too figures against
the forces of unreason and superstition, if it works towards “progress”, it is
always itself subject to a self-subverting contradiction, the projection of
some force that makes for history as a progress, a force that is not a force,
when logically analyzed, leaving us a history without a motion, which
frustrates our idea of what history should be. Which is just to say that enlightenment itself
often does not resist the temptation to seek out destinies and fates, and
tarries with an image of history as a sort of white magic.
This is one side of
comparison. Another side is its absorption, over time, into the literal, the
long march from connotation to denotation. Coincidence, here, is routinized, or
overlooked so often as to seem no coincidence at all.
There is a haunting comparison
in Montaigne’s essay, “On the useful and the honorable” – which Florio
translates as the Profitable and the Honest – which speaks to comparison itself
within the public sphere. This essay begins the third book, which was published
four years before Montaigne’s death, in 1592. The third book has a certain
retrospective splendour, rather in the manner of Shakespeare’s The Tempest –
one feels that Montaigne, like Prospero, is about to break his rod and drown
his books, as the last voyage approaches. On the useful and the honorable (de
l’utile et l’honnête) mingles memories or summings up from Montaigne’s public
career with a reflection on the division between what it is useful to do for
the state – what profits the prince, or one’s ambitions - and what it is
honest, moral, honorable to do from the perspective of the private individual.
The image and
comparison I have in mind arises in the context of a characteristic moment of
self-accounting, with its to-and-fro motion:
“What was required by
my position, I furnished, but in the most private way possible. As a child I
was plunged into it up to my ears. And I succeeded well enough, but I have
often, in good time, disengaged myself from it. I have since avoided meddling
in public affairs, rarely accepting to do so and never requesting it. Holding
my back turned to ambition. If not like rowers who advance, thus, backwards.
Nevertheless, being embarked, I find myself less obliged to my resolution than
to my good fortune. There are, indeed, paths less inimicable to my taste, and
more adapted to my temperament, by which, if my fortune had called me in the
past to public service and advancement in the opinion of the world, I know I
would have bypassed all the arguments of my reason and followed it.”
The to and fro is held
together here, I think, by that discrete glimpse of rowers advancing with their
back turned. It is an image of progress that surely has a double root in
Montaigne’s own experience and in the classical authors.
For a man who saw the
world as constantly dissolving one hard element into another, Montaigne was
very phobic about water, much prefering solid land, and even the bumpiness of
coaches, to the waves. Nevertheless, he did travel, sometimes, by water. In
a gabare, a flat bottomed boat that was poled or rowed. There was one that
went from Bordeaux to Blaye, a village on the Garonne that was a point of
contention in the guerilla war between the Catholics and the Protestants when
Montaigne was mayor of Bordeaux. Indeed, advance has an emphatic military
meaning as well as one that indicates a certain directed movement. The
symbolism of the rower who, facing backwards, advances the boat must have
suggested itself to Montaigne hundreds of times. But perhaps he was also
inspired by an essay of Plutarch’s which was thematically akin to this essay:
If it is true that we should live a hidden life.
“The oarsmen, turned
towards the stern, chase after the catch by the action that they impress on the
oars in a sense contrary to the direction of the vessel. Something similar
happens to those who give us such precepts: they hurry after fame in pretending
to turn their back on it.”
I have been revolving
this image in my head, and it grows more interesting the more I think about it.
Here fate, fame, progress, and a strange reversal of how we think of human
progress all come together. I think there is a long European history of this
image, which to my mind, more than the invisible hand, says something
interesting about the upper class view of what eventually becomes capitalism.
Aren’t we, vagabonds outside of the gated community, those backwards rowers?