Human Rights as a Way of Life

Human Rights as a Way of Life Alexandre Lefebvre Department of Government and International Relations School of Social and Political Sciences Room 443, Merewether Building The University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia Alexandre.Lefebvre@sydney.edu.au Abstract: It seems self evident that the purpose of human rights is to care for other people. They are designed to protect others, criticize power, and realize global social justice. In this seminar, however, I propose to look at human rights the other way around: as a form of selfcare. I will consider whether their central purpose is to bring about a transformation of the self, or, more pointedly, a transformation of oneself. Understood in this way, human rights would be a medium through which we relate to, improve upon, and care for ourselves. Note that this is the first part of the first chapter of my book in progress on Bergson, titled Human Rights as a Way of Life: on Bergson s Political Philosophy. In these pages, I try to lay out the bad view of human rights: i.e., what Bergson is trying to overcome. In my presentation I ll sketch out some of the positive ways in which Bergson hopes human rights can turn us away from this view. So: this paper concerns the bad stuff we have to get away from and the presentation will push off from this and talk about the good stuff. In both cases, I have/will do my best to extract the problem of human rights as a way of life from the technicalities of Bergson s philosophy. Paper for the Contemporary Challenges of Politics Research Workshop, October 31 st 2011, Crowne Plaza Hotel Coogee Beach, Coogee, NSW 2034 1

CHAPTER 1 THREE POINTS OF REFERENCE The essence of classicism is precision. Those writers who became classical are those who said what they wanted, nothing less, but certainly nothing more. Henri Bergson, Letter to Jacques Chevalier, November 19 th 1934 Two Sources is a difficult text to exposit. On the one hand, it is in Bergson s characteristically accessible and lucid style. Written without jargon, composed with great economy, and punctuated by frequent appeals to experience and commonsense, it meets the standard Bergson expects of philosophy. 1 At the same time, however, this style poses unique challenges. Frédéric Worms puts it well: This is the book of Bergson s that reads in the most simple manner: a book without introduction and without almost any transitions, a garment without any apparent seams, it without a doubt most closely approximates Bergson s definition of philosophy as a simple act. 2 In eschewing the kind of apparatus that makes a book of philosophy look like a battleship of the Dreadnaught class (CM 92/1351), Two Sources provides few of the usual aids to orient oneself in a text. It contains no explicit discussion of method and only the barest of references. I have included a chapter at the beginning of each of the two parts of this book to help fill in these blanks. This is especially necessary given our focus on human rights. As I said in the Preface, although human rights are at the center of Bergson s political philosophy, the explicit textual attention he devotes to them is extraordinarily compressed. In Chapter 4 we will look at the method Bergson uses to conceive of human rights as a way of life. This chapter, on the other hand, sets out three key points of reference to grasp the meaning and stakes of Bergson s critique of human rights. They are: 1. The conception of morality Bergson criticizes in Two Sources ( the picture of morality ); 2. The theory behind it ( veneer theory ); and 3. Its chief expositor (Durkheim). Our aim is to understand all three on their own terms in order to prepare Bergson s critique in Chapters 2 and 3. Reference Point #1: The Picture of Morality Two Sources is divided into four long chapters. Each chapter is in its own way indispensable to construct a Bergsonian concept of human rights. But with respect to the critique of human rights, Chapter One ( Moral Obligation ) stands out. There, Bergson outlines a conception (or better yet, a preconception) of morality that has become a subconscious orthodoxy in human rights discourse, both in his time and in our own. I call this conception the picture of morality. The purpose of Part One of this book is to show how this widespread picture undermines the purpose and efficacy of human rights. The first step toward this goal is to lay out the picture of morality in its own terms. What, according to Bergson, is its major feature? It is that moral obligation can extend itself to include larger and larger groups of people, all the way to the whole of humanity. The belief that 1 There is no philosophical idea, no matter how profound or subtle it may be, that can and must not be expressed in everyday language [la langue de tout le monde] (M 1514). 2 Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie, 267 8. See also, Waterlot, L ellipse. 2

moral obligation can be indefinitely expanded is the core of the picture of morality. This is how Bergson voices it: We are fond of saying [on se plaît à dire] that the apprenticeship to civic virtue is served in the family, and that in the same way, from holding our country dear, we learn to love mankind [le genre humain]. Our sympathies are supposed to broaden out [s élargirait] in an unbroken progression, to expand while remaining identical, and to end by embracing all humanity. [ ] We observe that the three groups to which we can attach ourselves comprise an increasing number of people, and we conclude that a progressive expansion [dilatation] of feeling simply corresponds with the increasing size of the object we love (TS 32/1001, emphasis added). No doubt, this picture of morality must seem natural; perhaps it even appears to be unobjectionable. After all, if morality is able to include all of humanity and, as we shall see, Bergson doesn't doubt it then how else can it proceed except by expanding the circle of specific attachments? It seems obvious that morality must extend itself step by step, from smaller to bigger groups, if it is to embrace all of mankind. And yet, it is precisely this image of morality that Bergson will reject. I have been using the term picture, and now image, to refer to this conception of morality. By that, I mean the way of thinking about morality Bergson expresses in the above passage is so deeply ingrained in us that it risks being taken for granted. To cite two very different philosophers on this score, we could say with Wittgenstein, A picture [or image Bild] held us captive. And we couldn t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeated it to us inexorably ; or, with Deleuze, We live with a particular image of thought, that is to say, before we begin to think, we have a vague idea of what it means to think, its means and ends. 3 As with these two other thinkers, Bergson also believes that an implicit cast of mind a picture or an image orients our thinking (in this case, our reflections on morality and morality itself, i.e., meta ethics and ethics) and that it is difficult to become aware of it because it constitutes the very framework or medium of our thought. 4 A central ambition of his, therefore, is to explicitly identify those pictures and images that orient us, and, by that very act, make us aware of and responsible for them. To this end, let us spell out the features of this picture of morality. A diagram is helpful, in large part because Bergson s passage is full of spatial language. Figure 1: the Circle Diagram 3 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115; Deleuze, On Nietzsche, 139. Deleuze s major statement on the image of thought is in Difference and Repetition, 129 167. It is significant that all three thinkers use phrases of temptation and desire to characterize the picture or image. For example, the standard locution Wittgenstein uses to introduce a particular picture in Philosophical Investigations, is one would like to say [möchte man sagen] ; Bergson, for his part, repeatedly gives voice to the picture of morality with the phrase, We are fond of saying [on se plaît à dire] as if it were a source of comfort. 4 See Deleuze s Bergsonism, 20 21. For my discussion of the image of thought with respect to law (and adjudication in particular), see The Image of Law, 1 3, 53 87. 3

Love and duty to humankind Love and duty to nation Love and duty to family Bergson s passage, along with this diagram, will be the central points of reference in Part One. Although different theories of human rights adapt the picture of morality in different ways, they nevertheless share a common core. This core can be summarized in four points. Taken together, they constitute the major postulates of the picture of morality. 1. Object attachment. Duty and love are directed toward specific objects: family, nation, and humanity. 2. Compatible attachments. Duty and love for family, nation, and humanity are compatible. Each has its own quality, but there is no necessary antagonism between them. 3. Quantitative growth. Duty and love can extend to larger and larger groups of people, all the way to the whole of humanity. 4. Progressive development. Progress in morality both at the level of the individual and of the species is made by advancing to higher stages, from family, to nation, to humanity. This is a snapshot, as it were, of the picture of morality that Bergson criticizes in Two Sources. But it is crucial to anticipate the thrust of his critique. Bergson does not deny that morality changes and evolves, nor does he deny morality can become universally inclusive. Far from it. Rather, he objects to the way this picture represents the evolution of morality. In particular, he objects to the idea that the moral obligations characteristic of our attachment to exclusive groups, such as the family and nation, can be safely expanded to include all of humanity. He is skeptical, in other words, that a morality inclusive of all human beings has grown out of our attachment to exclusive groups. Reference Point #2: Veneer Theory With the picture of morality in sight, we can begin to introduce the substantive criticism Bergson makes of it. Our purpose here is not to develop the criticism itself (this is the objective of Chapters 2 and 3) but to identify its target. That way, once again, we can lay it (i.e., the target) out on its own terms. 4

A good place to begin is with the famous closing words of Chapter One. Here, Bergson drives home the central point of the book: The source of morality is biology. Everything is obscure if we confine ourselves to mere manifestations, whether they are all called indiscriminately social, or whether one examines, in social man, more particularly the feature of intelligence. All becomes clear, on the contrary, if we go and search, beyond these manifestations, for life itself. Let us then give to the word biology the very wide meaning it should have [le sens très compréhensif qu il devrait avoir], and will perhaps have one day, and let us say in conclusion that all morality, be it pressure or aspiration, is in essence biological (TS 100 101/1061, emphasis added). Many terms in this passage such as intelligence, pressure, aspiration, and most of all, life and biology will have to be defined and elucidated. But for now, we can take Bergson s main argument to be that an adequate understanding of morality, society and social life, must start from the fact that they are biological phenomena. As Frédéric Worms puts it, the main philosophical thesis of Bergson in [Two Sources] is indeed the following: what grounds morality, as well as religion, in their closed as well as their open form, is not reason, nor society [ ] but life. 5 And so, if fifty years later E.O. Wilson would call for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized, it clearly was not Bergson he was complaining about. 6 Two Sources is a pioneering work in sociobiology, one that consistently places social, political, moral, and even religious life within an evolutionary perspective. 7 It is clarifying to contrast Bergson s thesis with its opposite, which, following Frans de Waal, a contemporary primatologist, I call veneer theory. In his 2004 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, de Waal defines veneer theory as the prevalent (and for him, pernicious) belief that morality is a thin, artificial veneer that overlays a natural, selfish, amoral core. Veneer theory, he argues, assumes that deep down we are not truly moral. It views morality as a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature. 8 The guiding ideas behind veneer theory are, first, that human morality is unique and irreducible to natural or evolutionary processes, and second, that its function is to oppose nature. In the words of Thomas Henry Huxley, the original veneer theorist, the ethical process of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it. 9 In a nutshell, because natural selection is a cruel, pitiless process, veneer theory assumes that it could only have produced cruel, pitiless beings that become moral only by opposing [their] own nature. 10 Obviously, Bergson never uses the term veneer theory. But it is nevertheless a useful shorthand to name the main object of his criticism: the view that morality is not biological in origin or essence. Veneer theory is also a useful term to uncover the extreme coherence of Bergson s engagements in Two Sources. Everywhere we look in that book and nowhere more so than in 5 Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie, 269. 6 E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: the New Synthesis, 562. 7 See Ansell Pearson and Mullarkey, Introduction, 37 38. 8 De Waal, Morally Evolved, 6. 9 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, 83. Among contemporary veneer theorists, Waal names Richard Dawkins and Robert Wight, Morally Evolved, 9, 11. See Dawkins, An interview of Richard Dawkins, What I am saying, along with many other people, among them T.H. Huxley, is that in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say that we don t want to live in a Darwinian world (3). 10 De Waal, Morally Evolved, 7. 5

its first two chapters on Moral Obligation and Static Religion Bergson is busy fighting on multiple fronts against contemporaries who argue that this or that domain is irreducible to biology, such as Émile Durkheim (society is sui generis), T. H. Huxley (morality is set against evolution), Herbert Spencer (civilization is the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics), and Lucien Lévy Bruhl (the civilized mindset is different in kind from the primitive mindset ). All of these thinkers write from within the evolutionary turn they are in this key respect Bergson s contemporaries and, crucially, they all reaffirm the basic break from biology that is the core of veneer theory. Indeed, without too much exaggeration, we could say that veneer theory is the criterion of selection for Bergson s major interlocutors in Two Sources. But why? What could possibly account for this preponderance? Why is it so important for Bergson to attack all of these different exponents of veneer theory? The answer to this question brings us to the relation between the picture of morality and veneer theory. In Part One I will argue that veneer theory acquires its importance for Bergson because it sustains the picture of morality. In particular, my claim is that it is only by denying the biological nature of morality that we can continue to inhabit the picture of morality. Or, positively put, it is only through an effective critique of veneer theory that we will become free of the picture of morality. Seen in this way, the critique of veneer theory acquires not only theoretical importance but also practical urgency. For if Bergson believes that key institutions such as human rights are made ineffective by being based on an inadequate picture of morality, then criticism of the theoretical perspective that upholds it becomes a practical necessity. [ ] 6