How unhappiness comes to serve happiness in the best of all possible worlds

When Nemesis perched on the city walls, the signs were evident, and the causes were clear. The monarch had offended the gods with his pride, the people had offended with their neglect of the sacrifices and usages. They had defied the rules concerning food, for instance. They had indulged in forbidden luxuries. The balance between the divine and the human had been broken, or somehow violated.

In Rouen, in the 1690s, Nemesis was evidently sitting on the city walls. One had merely to look to the countryside. One had merely to tally up the decline in trade with the Berbers, or the British. But this time, the prophet who descried the shadow of Nemesis had a different interpretation of the balances in question – an interpretation that eventually became the hermeneutic through which the scholars and officials both interpreted and implemented the Great Transformation. In this hermeneutic, the categories of sacrifice and of luxury were up-ended. Yes, the monarch offends the balance with his pride, but in the new dispensation, the monarch is – logically, sotto voce – reduced to a form, an enforcer of the order of contract, at best the commandatore’s statue. And the natural balance – or as it was called by the prophet of Rouen, the “equilibrium” – was inherent in the economy itself. The economy – like nature – naturally gravitated towards a self-regulating balance, and anything that got in the way of this natural process was to be condemned.
Nemesis was divested of her ancient attributes, and put on a strictly mathematical footing. L’esprit geometrique was let loose upon the face of the globe for real.
The prophet was a magistrate named Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert. As LI pointed out in our series of posts on Fontenelle, the nest of gentlefolk in Rouen who, in the period between 1680-1730, figured on the modern side in the battle between the ancients and the moderns is extremely impressive – and especially considering their ties to one another. As it happens, a Le Pesant married a Corneille, and as the Corneille family was related to Fontenelle, so too was Boisguilbert. A descendent of that family was Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Marat.
In the Critique of the Political Economy, Marx attributed much to the founders of the English and French schools of classical economy – as he saw it – William Petty and Boisguilbert. Marx writes: The analysis of commodities as labor in a double form, of use value derived from real labor of purposeful productive activity, and of exchange value derived from labor time or equal to social labor, is the critical end product of more than a half a century’s classical political economic research that begins in England with William Petty and in France with Boisguilbert, and ends in England with Ricardo and in France with Sismondi.”
There is an anecdote about him, told in Sainte-Simon’s memoirs.
“He [Vauban] was well advanced when there appeared diverse small books by sieur de Boisguillebert, lieutenant general at the seat of Rouen, a man of much intellect, detail and industry, brother of a counselor to the parlement of Normandy who, after much preparation, touched with the same views as Vauban, worked on them for a long time. He had already made some progress before the chancellor left the financial office. He came expressly to find him, and, as his lively spirit had something singular in it, he demanded of him to listen with patience; and though, as he said, he would take him at first for a fool, afterwards, he would see that he merited attention, and that at the end, he would be happy with his system. Pontchartrain, disgusted by so many givers of advise who had passed through his hands, and who was all saltpeter, began to laugh, brusquely responded that he took him for the first thing, and turned his back on him. Boisguillebert, returned to Rouen, was not at all put off by the bad outcome of his trip. He only worked the more indefatigably on his project, which was pretty close to that of Vauban’s, without either knowing the other. From this labor was born a book, one that was wise and profound on the matter, of which the system went to an exact dividing up of aid to the people, with all the expenses that they supported and the many tarrifs, which were direct expropriations into the king’s purse, and consequently ruinous to the existence of tradesmen, to the power of intendants, to the sovereign domain of ministers of finance. Thus, he displeased all the former as much as he was applauded by all those who did not share the former’s interests. Chamillart, who had succeeded Pontchartrain, examined the book. He conceived a liking for it; he requested the presence of Boiguillebert two or three times at l’Etang, and worked there with him on many occasions, as a minister whose probity only tried to do good.”

Berkeley's floating world

Berkeley was a pre-classical economist – not that he knew it. Our captions exist outside of our frames, scribbled in by who knows who, the hand that writes and having writ - continues mindlessly to write endlessly more. But of those of his commentors who have taken the trouble to reflect on Berkeley’s political economy, especially as it is presented – or undermined – in that oddest of Irish bulls, The Querist – it is certain that, as Patrick Kelly puts it in his essay for the Cambridge companion to Berkeley, “Given the absence of any conception of the achievement of equilibrium through hidden harmony or the design of nature, a pivotal responsibility was accorded to the state in bringing about the necessary conditions to promote what Berkeley asserted to be the public objective of full employment.” One might think that ‘equilibrium’ – that frame upon which economics has woven its mythology since it got its science pants on – was, alas, not articulated in Berkeley’s time – but this is not exactly true, as B. Tieben, in his exhaustive study of the history of equilibrium as an economic concept has shown: Sir Dudley North and Pierre de Boisguilbert had already employed the concept, ‘treating the economy as a relatively self-regulating system…”

Berkeley, in the Querist, violates several principles of that self-regulating model. He expresses the horrifying idea in a work published four years before the great famine of 1741 wiped out about 200-400 thousand Irishmen that perhaps Ireland’s unstinting export of foodstuffs like beef and mutton to England, in return for which a certain class of landowner received the means to by English luxury goods, was not such a good deal for Ireland. This kind of thinking pops up around famine time, and is always soundly trounced by economists, who deal with aggregates and have well and truly summed up, in their accounting books, the pleasures of these luxury goods against the piddling souls of the barely employed and are extremely satisfied that the self-regulating system is the best of all worlds.

“142. Whether it be not certain that from the single town of Cork were exported, in one year, no less than one hundred and seven thousand one hundred and sixty-one barrels of beef; seven
thousand three hundred and seventy-nine barrels of pork; thirteen thousand four hundred and sixty-one casks, and eighty-five thousand seven hundred and twenty-seven firkins of butter? And what hands were employed in this manufacture?
143 Whether a foreigner could imagine that one half of the people were starving, in a country which sent out such plenty of provisions?
144 Whether an Irish lady, set out with French silks and Flanders lace, may not be said to consume more beef and butter than a hundred of our labouring peasants?
145 Whether nine-tenths of our foreign trade be not carried on singly to support the article of vanity?”

And in fact, taking and transforming an image from Locke, Berkeley imagines the following:

“134. Whether, if there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom, our natives might not nevertheless live cleanly and comfortably, till the land, and reap the fruits of
it?
135 What should hinder us from exerting ourselves, using our hands and brains, doing something or other, man, woman, and child, like the other inhabitants of God's earth?
136 Be the restraining our trade well or ill advised in our neighbours, with respect to their own interest, yet whether it be not plainly ours to accommodate ourselves to it?
137 Whether it be not vain to think of persuading other people to see their interest, while we continue blind to our own? “

Yet, for all this, Berkeley was not a mere throwback to a hard money autochthonous economics. Oddly, he mixed a doubt about the unmitigated benefits of foreign trade with another doubt that put him on the very lines of the avant garde for his time: his doubt that gold or silver has any intrinsic value. Indeed, the Querist quietly pursues a purpose quite different from that of Swift, in the Drapier Letters, who propounded a theory of money that was classically metallic. Berkeley views money quite as he views vision – as a great system of signs. Under the signs, one finds the tangible value – industry, or labor.

“5. Whether money be not only so far useful, as it stirreth up industry, enabling men mutually to participate the fruits of each other's labour?”

and: “23 Whether money is to be considered as having an intrinsic value, or as being a commodity, a standard, a measure, or a pledge, as is variously suggested by writers? And whether the true idea of money, as such, be not altogether that of a ticket or counter?”

In this sense, Berkeley’s proposals aren’t that far from John Law’s, especially as he suggests a national, government run bank to issue these ‘tickets’. It is the stirring up of industry that Berkeley has in mind – and his mind darts immediately to what one might call the paradox of disequilibrium – that the system of industry requires the production of want: “20 Whether the creating of wants be not the likeliest way to produce industry in a people? And whether, if our peasants were accustomed to eat beef and wear shoes, they would not be more industrious?
21 Whether other things being given, as climate, soil, etc., the wealth be not proportioned to the industry, and this to the circulation of credit, be the credit circulated or transferred by what marks or tokens soever?”

This part of Berkeley’s work has served as a point of controversy between those who, like T.W. Hutchinson, glommed onto such statements as evidence that Berkeley had a pre-Keynesian sense that the state should be in the business of managing aggregate demand, and those who, like Ian Ward, emphasized Berkeley’s concern with the categories of voluntary and involuntary employment – which led Berkeley, in some of his Queries, to endorse slavery or servitude for the voluntary beggar. Hutchinson, in responding to Ward, makes the invaluable point that the voluntary vs. involuntary employment categories make no sense in the early modern economy, where the continuity of employment was not the recognized and legally hedged around social process that it is in the twentieth century.

Constantine George Caffentzis has noted that Berkeley’s solution to economic problems is very much aligned with the surface skepticism of a philosophy that has its deepest roots in the tangible, the real wisdom and common sense of all mankind. In other words, Berkeley does not view the economy as a puzzle to be solved, but as a puzzle that continually generates puzzles – and this is reflected in the very form of his suggestions, which press upon us with the utmost passivity of the question form. Just as a thing is really the to be perceived, in the heart of the proposition is the to be asked.

“The Querist’s Bank was not a machine, it was not a self-regulatiing homeostatic device, nor was it a storehouse of values, consequently when the Querist came to the solution of his problematic – a new definition of money and the project of a National Bank – there was no declarative sentence. The Bank was a questionable as its money. In fact, it was the very recognition of its questionability that made it a reasonable institution.”

Man lives in a floating world, and his institutions must either notice this fact or be crushed.

carlo ginzburg

Yesterday, I saw a fascinating talk with Carlo Ginzburg. The format was that his translator, Martin Rueff, would ask him questions. Actually, Rueff read a small essay on his work, and occasionally intervened to let Ginzburg riff about what he wanted to.

Because this session was connected with the publication of a new book of Ginzburg’s essays, le fil et les traces, the discussion tended to sound some old controversies, including that between Ginzburg and the ‘postmodern’ skeptics, notably Hayden White. Which is how one of the ‘threads” in this conversation was about proofs and the truth. Another thread, though, was about Ginzburg’s relationship with the documents he used to trace his histories – notably, the records of Inquisitorial interrogation. And there Ginzburg brought up the anthropological distinction between etic and emic, which, he modestly said, has really only been utilized by one historian – himself.

These themes fascinated me, and I was tempted to try the temper of the salle with my French as I asked a question that seems obvious from this triangle of themes or obsessions.

I would have liked to ask a question something like this. The idea that there is a rigid separation between the etic view, that of the observer, and the emic view, that of the observed, seems to be to ignore the arrow of desire that brings those two together – in situations such as that of the Inquisition. But it is a good starting place.

But isn’t there a movement, here?
And isn’t the movement, as you have shown in the Night Battles, not towards truth, but towards an agreement as to what the truth should be?

Rhetorical questions – the type a bad questioner asks. So I didn’t ask. But the question of the movement that mobilizes the inquisition is, nevertheless, on my mind. I think that the idea of narrative induction, proposed by an ethnographer, Charlotte Linde, defined “as the process by which people come to take on an existing set of stories as their own story…”

Linde’s field work was done in an insurance company, not a tribe. The idea that there is a process of taking on an existing set of stories seems to work in a number of institutional situations, although the variables of the process – its actual implementation – isn’t fixed in one mode or another. Still, a common mode is just the question and response format. One of the great liberal myths is that the question is always a power for liberation. But this is to elevate a romantic idea of questions over its pragmatics. In fact, one of the remarkable things about the Night Battles is the way that the Benedetti take on an existing story about themselves from the Inquisition. Their story begins, Ginzburg shows, with a story in which they are on the side of God, battling against witches. But this is not the story the Inquisition (an institution that is actually named – at least in popular history - for a grammatical feature of Western languages – as though there could be an institution called the Statement or the Exclamation) the Inquisition could accept. And so, through an intervention that depended on the question and response format, the Benedetti were gradually induced into identifying with another story – the story that they were actually on the side of the devil.

Linde, I think, was thinking of other forms of narrative induction – such as pep talks and inter-office communications that made insurance adjusters identify with a narrative we, that of the insurance company and its ‘point of view’. But a narrative induction does not have to be positive in that sense – it can also be the narrative that a given institutional power wants the people it regulates, or even outlaws, to identify with. I identify myself as mad or neurotic with the psychologist, or as delinquent with the police officer, etc. We are not the stories we tell ourselves – we are a compound of the stories we accept about ourselves.

And this, of course, is the source of the anxiety that gives rise to postmodernism. It is the anxiety proper to the post-colonial epoch. The imperial narrative, which succeeded for hundreds of years, was challenged. Challenged synchronically, it cast into doubt the diachronic narratives that helped establish the places assigned to, among others, the savage, the barbarian, the civilized.

Or at least that is a sympathetic reading of the moment – I find the word postmodern rather repulsive, and think of it as a sort of conceptual dust collector.

the tactile privilege

Riddle me this:

Berkeley returns to Great Britain from Italy in 1721, and publishes a pamphlet, An Essay towards preventing the ruin of Great Britain, which aims to moralize the collapse of the South Sea Bubble. Berkeley is not simply distressed by the economic collapse of the speculation, one of those annexes to John Law’s system, but is incensed at what he takes to be the symptoms of irreligion and moral decay:

“Industry is the natural sure way to wealth. This is so true that it is impossible an industrious free people should want the necessaries and comforts of life, or an idle enjoy them under any form of government. Money is so far useful to the public as it promoteth industry, and credit
having the same effect is of the same value with money ; but money or credit circulating through a nation from hand to hand, without producing labour and industry in
the inhabitants, is direct gaming.

It is not impossible for cunning men to make such plausible schemes as may draw those who are less skilful into their own and the public ruin. But surely there is no man of sense and honesty but must see and own, whether he understands the game or not, that it is an
evident folly for any people, instead of prosecuting the old honest methods of industry and frugality, to sit down to a public gaming-table, and play off their money one
to another.

The more methods there are in a state for acquiring riches without industry or merit, the less there will be of either in that state…”

Yet here is the puzzle. In some ways, one would have thought, speculation , which frees money from some supposed natural value, corresponds to Berkeley’s own idealism. Just as the value of money is no longer the value of a metal, but a social value, so, too, matter is no longer outside of the mind, as its support, but inside the mind, as its ‘game’. Why, then, does Berkeley denouce speculation in these traditional moralistic terms?

However, a careful reading of the pamphlet shows Berkeley is not denouncing any Laws-ian system per se. Rather, it is the opportunity for unearned wealth, available to all, that is Berkeley’s target. Speculation as conditioned by a lack of socially useful industry – the foundation of wealth – and a tilt towards luxury – social splendor – is, for Berkeley, much like one of those language games that metaphysicians engage in to create fictional entities, like matter, than it is a true comparison of ideas.

Later, Berkeley considers money more seriously in one of his avant garde texts, the Querist. Which I will go to next – but I want to revisit an argument in my last post. As I’ve implied, Berkeley’s notion of the equivalence between reality and the to-be-perceived gives us, or can be conceived to give us, a deeply human world. If the perceivers are, supremely, human, and if we don’t think that there are perceivers swarming in the world – rather like monads – but that there are specific perceivers, who are human like, then the world is deeply human – we really are the species designated, in Genesis, as the guardians of the world.

But of course, we are ourselves, on the deepest level, perceived – and the whole of the system depends on one great perceiver, God. And this God, as Berkeley mentions in the Principles of Human Understanding (quoting his Theory of Vision), privileges touch. We should resist the automatic way we link up of perception and sight – sight being the Occidental sense of choice. This assumption leads us in the wrong direction not only with Berkeley, but with a whole line of Enlightenment philosophers who similarly assume that touch is the deepest sense. In an odd way, Berkeley participates in this materialism. It is touch, God’s touch, which we find everywhere in Berkeley’s vision of the world. Vision is on the side of the sign, and touch on the side of the real.

Of course, the tactile privilege that runs through 18th century sensualism and materialism is not just derived from Berkeley or Newton – although many of the vibrational ontologies of the time explicitly reference Newton. This is, as well, a folk metaphysic.

More on Berkeley and money later.

what kind of idealism is this? Berkeley and modernity

Last night, after reading my post about Berkeley and the spider, A. asked me about the point I was trying to make. I had to respond that honestly, I’m not sure. In one sense, it simply fascinates me that three philosophers who each took a stance against l’esprit geometrique are found in Southern Italy in the early eighteenth century. Vico turns to the ingenium, and Shaftesbury to common sense, as the intellectual force that resists the mechanization of the spirit - Berkeley, by contrast, traces the path of the skeptic and radicalizes l’esprit geometrique, in a way heralded by Pascal and Bayle – who also applied skepticism in the service of faith – but that goes far beyond them in its ontological conclusions. Yet, Berkeley’s response to Locke’s milktoast metaphysics contains an ambiguity, a pull between the ancients and the moderns, a re-constitution of the terms in which l’esprit geometrique is understood, that can be read as according, in the absence of the divine DJ, everything to the moderns.

Or to start again: metaphysics – I think I am trying to say – is anchored in life. When , in the 1790s, Cuoco criticizes the revolutionaries of Naples for favoring abstraction over the concrete interests of the people, he is in a sense echoing a theme we find in Berkeley’s A treatise concerning Human Knowledge, which contrasts abstraction – that fantastic product of the schools – to the mental processes of the great mass of men:

“To be plain, I own my self able to abstract in one Sense, as when I consider some particular Parts or Qualities separated from others, with which though they are united in some Object, yet, it is possible they may really Exist without them. But I deny that I can abstract one from another, or conceive separately, those Qualities which it is impossible should Exist so separated; or that I can frame a General Notion by abstracting from Particulars in the manner aforesaid. Which two last are the proper Acceptations of Abstraction. And there are Grounds to think most Men will acknowledge themselves to be in my Case. The Generality of Men which are Simple and Illiterate never pretend to abstract Notions. It is said they are difficult and not to be attained without Pains and Study. We may therefore reasonably conclude that, if such there be, they are confined only to the Learned.”

Plain speech, and plain people. This is the Berkeley who could share a dish of beans with a group of squatting peasants in a field. He is unafraid of popular contact – and that is one of the fundamental living impulses of democracy.

Berkeley’s preliminary work in countering the absurdities thrust upon us by abstraction – which is a process that never really occurs in any mind whatsoever, has no root in our biological life (ie is never found to occur among children who are acquiring language skills) is meant to prepare us for his self-evident truth:

“Some Truths there are so near and obvious to the Mind, that a Man need only open
his Eyes to see them. Such I take this Important one to be, to wit, that all the Choir of Heaven and Furniture of the Earth, in a word all those Bodies which compose the mighty Frame of the World, have not any Subsistence without a Mind, that their Being is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my Mind or that of any other created Spirit, they must either have no Existence at all, or else subsist in the Mind of some eternal Spirit: It being perfectly unintelligible and involving all the Absurdity of Abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an Existence independent of a Spirit. To be convinced of which, the Reader need only reflect and try to separate in his own Thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived.”

This is a tightly reasoned paragraph, and yet within it the innocent reader feels that somehow, what is happening here is a feint, or an out of bounds punch. A first reading – and one that became common in the 18th century – was that this was a plea for pure solipsism. Diderot, in the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, remarks: “The bishop of Cloyne said: if I ascend to the heights of the mountains, or descend into the valleys, it is never anything but me that I apperceive: thus, it is possible that these don’t exist without me. And Berkeley still awaits an answer.” Diderot is a shrewd reader, but we – who can ascend to the heights of Berkeley commentators, or perhaps descend into the valley of their obsessions – have learned to read this paragraph differently, with an emphasis not on the moi – an emphasis that Diderot takes, unconsciously, from the whole French moraliste position – but rather on the tricky passive construction, “that their Being is to be perceived or known,” which leads us not to the imperial subject but to a fact about the choir of heaven that can only be expressed in the passive tense in English: that their very being is not ever to be separated from their being knowable or perceivable. Far from being accidents to which sovereign being submits – as a sort of royal sacrifice – being is essentially knowable or perceivable – the sovereign power is essentially a matter of election and, ultimately, of pressure. Berkeley’s is a world of pressures ultimately emanating, literally, from the hand of God. The combination of pressure and passivity finds its political correlate, perhaps, in the passive obedience Berkeley promoted in an early political pamphlet.

Still, Berkeley goes a long way to divest reality of any magic. The tarantula, its bite, the belief in the tarantalla, the doubts of the country doctor, are all real. “I do not argue against the Existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by Sense or Reflexion. That the things I see with mine Eyes and touch with my Hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least Question. The only thing whose Existence we deny, is that which Philosophers call Matter or corporeal Substance. And in doing of this, there is no Damage done to the rest of Mankind, who, I dare say, will never miss it.” Again, one wonders whether this is a feint or an argument – for, with the most beneficient of smiles, here Berkeley slips matter, so much metaphysical waste, into the trashcan. This is not something mankind will miss – it is not part of our common property.

What is the end result of this logic? “But, say you, it sounds very harsh to say we eat and drink Ideas, and are clothed with Ideas. I acknowledge it does so, the word Idea not being used in common Discourse to signify the several Combinations of sensible Qualities, which are called Things: and it is certain that any Expression which varies from the familiar Use of Language, will seem harsh and ridiculous. But this doth not concern the Truth of the Proposition, which in other Words is no more than to say, we are fed and clothed with those Things which we perceive immediately by our Senses. The Hardness or Softness, the Colour, Taste, Warmth, Figure, and such like Qualities, which combined together constitute the several sorts of Victuals and
Apparel, have been shewn to exist only in the Mind that perceives them; and this is all that is meant by calling them Ideas.”

In this way, Berkeley’s thought radically humanizes the world – which is the distinct twist of the emergence of Western, vs. Eastern, idealism. For ideas don’t lead us to illusions – illusions, rather, are easily comprehended within the schema of ideas. The world that Berkeley, at trifling expense (we hardly miss the old terms), reconstitutes is literally the one handed to us – in keeping with the privilege accorded to touch in his system. ”The Ideas of Sight and Touch make two Species, intirely distinct and heterogeneous. The former are Marks and Prognostics of the latter. That the proper Objects of Sight neither exist without the Mind, nor are the Images of external Things, was shewn even in that Treatise. Though throughout the same, the contrary be supposed true of tangible Objects: Not that to suppose that vulgar Error, was necessary for establishing the Notion therein laid down; but because it was beside my Purpose to examine and refute it in a Discourse concerning Vision. So that in strict Truth the Ideas of Sight, when we apprehend by them Distance and Things placed at a Distance, do not suggest or mark out to us Things actually existing
at a Distance, but only admonish us what Ideas of Touch will be imprinted in our Minds at such and such distances of Time, and in consequence of such or such Actions. It is, I say, evident from what has been said in the foregoing Parts of this Treatise, and in Sect. 147, and elsewhere of the Essay concerning Vision, that visible Ideas are the Language whereby the governing Spirit, on whom we depend, informs us what tangible Ideas he is about to imprint upon us, in case we excite this or that Motion in our own Bodies.”

It is this sense in which Berkeley’s idealism, which seems to move us to Diderot’s misrepresentation of it, actually situates us under the new dispensation of the moderns. It does so even while seeming to take the idealistic path of a wholly non-European tradition. Vico and Shaftesbury’s humanism, on the other hand, opens a front that challenges the totality of modernity – a totality that modernity, that epoch of universal-making, can’t do without.

Berkeley and a spider

It is interesting to contemplate the fact that in the period between 1712-1717, Vico, Shaftesbury and Berkeley were all either living in or visiting Naples. Schaftesbury, who was raised, in a manner of speaking, by Locke, and rejected his tutor unequivocally – Berkeley, who grew to detest Shaftesbury’s philosophy as the very antithesis of religion and a much more poisonous skepticism than that he was accused of promoting; and Vico, whose sense of doing battle with the moderns has much in common with Shaftesbury’s sense that raillery and wit were marks of true intellectual freedom, and conversation the method of wisdom – which is another aspect of Vico’s defense of topoi against mere logic. All, in turn, knew Paolo Doria, into whose salon each man, at various times, ventured.

I wonder if Berkeley spoke to Doria of the tarantella. I wonder if there is any meaning in the fact that this idealist metaphysician – to label him in the classroom way – was so fascinated with both the tarantula and the stories of the effect of its bite. Surely as a clergyman, Berkeley was enrolled, forcibly, in the struggle against popular superstition. But Berkeley did not have Shaftesbury’s Tory contempt for the people - his Italian journal is full of incidents that show Berkeley as something more like an anthropologist than judge, recording the dirtiness of cleanliness of towns, the agricultural prospects of the countryside, the speech of the peasants with a certain tone of equanimity and fairness that surely was his tone, and one of the reasons he could get on with Swift.

But to the theme of this post: the future bishop and the spider.

The first mention of the tarantella in the journal is about a doctor who is met with on the road as Berkeley is going into Calabria. The doctor has cheerful contempt fo the peasant superstition of the tarantella, and attributes it to the peasants almost sexual love for drama. seems fascinate
After this, Berkeley records what a certain “Consul” in Tarentum told him about it:

“Tarantato that we saw dance here, no lookingglass or sword ; stamped, screeched, seemed to smile sometimes; danced in a circle like the others. The Consul,
&c. inform us that all spiders except the long-legged ones bite, causing the usual symptoms, though not so violent as the large ones in the country. He tells me the
tarantula causes pain and blackness to a great space round the bite; thinks there can be no deceit, the dancing is so laborious ; tells me they are feverish mad, and sometimes after dancing throw themselves into the sea, and would drown if not prevented ; that in case the tarantula be killed on biting, the patient dances but one year ; otherwise to the death of the tarantula.”

The next day, passing through a small Italian town, Berkeley talks with an Albanian priest about the spider: “The priest told us the arm, e. g. being bitten by the tarantula swelled, confirmed, as indeed everybody, that common notion of the tarantula's death curing the bite. His house very neat. Everywhere great respect for a knowledge of the English, owing to our commerce, fleets, and armies.” In a stop at Gavina, evidently to his enquiries, Berkeley learns this: “Tarantula not in this country ; he hath seen several bitten with a black swoln mark as large as half-a-crown ; they knew not they were bitten till dancing ; tarantula bites only in the hot months ; a peasant at Canosa laughed at their biting, and said he had often taken them in his hands.” In Ascola, or in the environs of the town, Berkeley and his companion eat beans with some peasants in a field: “They boast of a saint's finger kept in a church of a convent on a hill overlooking the town, which, so far as the church is visible, prevents the bite of the tarantula.” Approaching Vesuvius, Berkeley notes: “Taurasi and La Torella. Fricento belongs to the Principe della Torella ; 25,000 souls [2500. M.J ; July and J August without fires. An image on Monte Virgine protects the country about as far as visible from tarantulas, which, say they, are here likewise.Two bears slain last year in a neighbouring wood.” Berkeley wrote a letter about Vesuvius to John Arbuthnot – one of Berkeley’s set, along with Pope and Swift- in which he recounts its eruption and the horrible noise it makes – a letter that makes one wonder if Swift slyly poked at it in Gulliver’s Travels. He would have known of it not only because letters were passed around in the set, but also because the letter was published by the Royal Society. It was one of the odder gothic habits of 18th century intellectuals – like Wincklemann, in the 1760s – to climb Vesuvius and marvel at the lava flows. Wincklemann and his companions, the rather louche Baron d’Hancarville, tossed down a few bottles of wine on the summit. Berkeley doesn’t mention drinking anything.

After arriving at Naples, Berkeley seems to lose interest in the tarantula, and takes up another custom: the nasty habit of murder that has sprung up among the inhabitants of Southern Italy. In a letter to Pope about the island of Ischia, he writes: “and were they but as much strangers to revenge as they are to avarice and ambition, they
might in fact answer the poetical notions of the golden age. But they have got, as an alloy to their happiness, an ill habit of murdering one another on slight offences. We had an instance of this the second night after our arrival, a youth of eighteen being shot dead by our door : and yet by the sole secret of minding our own business, we found a means of living securely among those dangerous people.”

So: what is one to make of the practices of these people, their mental, or physical, reaction to the bite of the certainly real tarantula? In other words, what is the meaning of the appearance of a certain mentalist imperialism during a period when England is undergoing the tremors of the Great Transformation?

sage-imposter vs. fool-imposter

“But to imagine a plan for a republican constitution and to found a republic are two very different things. In a government where the public will, or the law, has not and ought not to have any other support, other guarantee, other ministry than the particular will, one cannot establish liberty but in making free men. Before elevating the edifice of liberty in Naples, there was in the ancient constitutions, in the customs, in the inveterate prejudices of the people, and in the interests of the moment, a thousand obstacles that it was urgent to know and indispensable to remove.”

Thus Cuoco, pointing to the republican dilemma when a foreign army, the French, took the city and most of the kingdom.

A story.

Four Corsicans are caught in Apulia when the French army took Naples. One is a former servant, Cesare, and one is a former artillery officer and deserter, Boccheciampe. Their other two companions are, by all accounts, unemployed vagabonds. According to Cuoco, the four were fleeing to Brindisi when the came to Monteasi, a small village, and took lodgings with an old woman, to whom they told the story that they were actually fleeing nobles – Boccheciampe was the brother of the king, and Cesare (this is not in the Cuoco account, but in Pietro Colleta’s History) for the duke of Saxony. Actually, the old woman was related to the royal intendant in the village, one Girunda. According to Colleta, Girunda was taken into the secret – according to Cuoco, Girunda went to the old woman’s house, knelt before Boccheciampe, and swore his allegiance. When the four got to Brindisi, they began to issue orders and raised an army of insurgents – Boccheciampe invested the province of Leuca, and Cesare marched on Barri. The men under their command, according to Cuoco, were ‘baron’s men’, criminals, and miscreants who had escaped from one prison or another. According to Colletta, the four Corsicans were soon busy firing and hiring magistrates and emptying the treasuries of various towns and villages, while imposing fines on the “rebels” to the King.

Not only did the people rejoice in this pillage of the “patriots” – they were encouraged by the clergy, who, knowing the men were imposters, nevertheless seized the chance to proclaim them legitimate in order to set going a countryside insurgency. Even the Bourbon nobility, well aware that the King’s brother was not a rude artilleryman with a Corse accent, played along with the imposters.

And so the revolt in the countryside begins not in support of the patriots who have overthrown the barbaric remnants of feudalism in Naples, when the Republic was proclaimed, but is conducted by the people for the feudal regime, under the banner of four imposters, against Republicanism, as it is understood, itself.

…

Since Naples was the home of Vico and Bruno, there is much here for the Gnostic historian, avid for intersignes, to contemplate, especially as the glosses are supplied by an intelligence like Cuoco’s, whose form of enlightenment materialism (for instance, he attributes the heterogeneity of customs and tempers in the Kingdom of Naples to the heterogeneity of the property arrangements instituted by feodalism: “… and the feudal system, which, in the centuries which followed barbarism and preceded civilization, always varied according to places and circumstances, rendering property diverse throughout; and that diversity necessarily passed into the moeurs, which are always analogous to the nature of property and the means of subsistence”) is lit up, as well, by the darker torches held aloft by Machiavelli and Vico.

The problem of “removing” these impediments to create a new connection between the state and the people – that organic connection of happiness – seems, in the chaos of 1799, to have reached a moment of dream tension in which parts of the fabric of legitimacy – as if will later be called – peel off to reveal the form of the variable that takes the sovereign position. I want to intervene in this dream to recall a typology I explored years ago, at the beginning of the Human Limit project: that of the sage and the fool.

For underneath Cuoco’s distinction between a revolution from above – a revolution for abstractions, imposed upon the public, which receives it passively – and a revolution from below – a revolution of the people, struggling to achieve their interests, actively – is something like the trace of the odd necessity that yoked the fool and the sage together.

Oh that counter-enlightenment crewe! From Vico onward – and actually, from the witch onward, from the tales in the forest onward – there is a program, or at least a programmatic stance, even if there is no system, or even if the systems are crackpot, deviant, ad hoc – which consists in the rejection of the power of the will to truth. One finds (inevitably?) that the opposition between sage and philosopher that structures Francois Jullien’s argument in A Sage is Without Ideas eventually crystalizes about this matter, our matter, the will to truth. The sage, in Jullien’s account, does not develop a neurosis about the truth – and thus a whole intellectual culture slips the bonds and knots of a certain mastering cognitive passion, orienting itself instead with relation to the road, or way.

Jullien does not ask if the Dao is the path of pins or the path of needles – little red riding hood does not figure in his story. More curiously, neither does the fool. Unless – and here one feels Jullien’s grasp of the theme loosen a bit – that role is taken by the Daoist.

I have emphasized the role of the adventurer in the Great Transformation – and surely it is in the wake of the adventurer that the fool and the sage, a couple we saw come apart in Le Neveau de Rameau, recommence their adventures.

The question I am posing here is this: how does the sage-imposter differ from the fool-imposter?