The Labor of the Mind. Anthony J. La Vopa

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СКАЧАТЬ the natural and social world”: the polarity between labor (travail) and aisance, or effortlessness. In his Conversations, Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, an elder statesmen of the salons, observed that the surest sign of failure to master the art of conversation was “a constrained manner, where one senses much work (travail).”³² Méré’s essays remind us again and again that in the ideal of honnêteté “free” (libre) and “natural” were virtually synonymous qualities. We must be careful not to read back into this language the eighteenth-century critique of aristocratic society and culture, and more broadly of le monde, that would find its most impassioned articulation in Rousseau’s texts. In the discourse of honnêteté, appeals to the “natural” were not meant to censure the artificiality of polite sociability by invidious comparison with the more natural life of common people. Quite the contrary; the apparently natural aisance of the honnête femme and the honnête homme was precisely what marked their superiority over everyone outside their clearly delimited space. To be able to act naturally—to engage in the spontaneous play of the social aesthetic—meant to be free of the “determinisms” that labor to satisfy basic needs imposed on the great mass. Most obviously it marked the fact that one used one’s time as one wished, rather than as material needs demanded. Ultimately this conception of natural freedom drew a line between the choices open to a uniquely human nature and the imprisonment of the human animal in material necessities. It stigmatized labor as the mark of subjection to material need. The ideological irony lay in the fact that a universal ideal—the freedom of the human being as such—justified the exclusion of most human beings from its practice. This self-image obviously put the honnêtes at a vast social distance from people engaged in any kind of manual labor. More to the point, it made the life of the leisured mind—the pleasure of esprit—qualitatively different from the rule-governed intellectual labor of the “learned” or “liberal” professions. Their eloquentia—their distinctly male forms of verbal authority—was laborious. We miss the point, then, if we think of the discourse as perching honnêtes gens at the pinnacle of an occupational hierarchy; its imagined world hovered above the entire social organization of labor.³³

      If men who practiced professions and occupied offices—university professors, magistrates in the parlements, military officers, clergymen—did not want to be branded bores, they had to leave their professional concerns behind them when they entered the salons. Even when Méré and others wrote for publication, they took pains to seem to be merely recording the “caprice” of their thoughts, without any planned order of presentation, as in the free play of conversation.³⁴ The social aesthetic would not allow any intrusion from the occupation world. At a deeper level, it would not allow conversational play to sully itself by taking on any appearance of labor in its practice, or indeed any hint that an investment of labor had been required to prepare for it. If we define intellectual labor as concentrated and sustained mental effort, that was precisely what the aesthetic excluded. To apply rules would be to degrade conversational play into something laborious and hence boring. Dwelling on one subject had the same effect; the orchestra could remain “diverting” only if it changed melodies constantly, like a meandering stream. The great gift of women—the “free” and “natural” air men had to acquire from them—was to leave the impression that everything they said was said spontaneously and effortlessly, or with “ease” (aisance). As Scudéry put it: “Although judgment is absolutely necessary so as to never say anything inappropriate, the conversation must appear so free that it seems that one rejects none of his thoughts, and that one says everything that comes to one’s fancy (fantaisie).”³⁵

      As the aesthetic emphasis on appearance suggests, there was something illusory, perhaps even self-deluding, about this taboo on labor. In fact the play of honnêteté—the exclusive concern with giving pleasure, the care to avoid shocking or wounding others, the repression of any instinct to dominate—required a relentless exercise of self-discipline.³⁶ “How much art,” La Bruyère observed in his Characters, “to return to nature! How much time, rules, attention and work to dance with the same liberty and the grace as one knows how to walk, to sing as one speaks, to speak and express oneself as one thinks.”³⁷ The art might be considered an antirhetorical rhetoric—one that could not be learned in “the schools,” but nonetheless had to be mastered. However noble his birth, the individual had to acquire the requisite self-discipline through long practice. It is striking, however, that the interpreters of honnêteté—Scudéry, Méré, and many others—insisted that the art of conversation could not be mastered by reading books. However important reading was in supplying a point of departure for conversation, and in providing the language of “judgment,” it had to remain a “diversion.” Otherwise one’s speech would betray, in Méré’s phrase, “the smell of study.”³⁸ One could learn the art only as an apprentice to one of its masters, within the permeable but self-sufficient space of polite conversation. The social aesthetic needed nothing—not even print—that could be acquired in the world of labor outside it.

      At its deepest level, the honnête performance of intelligence can be understood as the social exhibition of a dimension of selfhood. In his study of western European thinking about “the self” since the seventeenth century, Jerrold Seigel has identified a “relational” dimension in which the self “arises from social and cultural interaction, the common connections and involvements that give us collective identities and shared orientations and values, making us people able to use a specific language or idiom and marking us with its particular styles of description, categorization, and expression.”³⁹ The worldly sociability prescribed in the discourse of honnêteté might be described as hyperrelational. In his L’honneste femme, first published from 1632 to 1636, the Franciscan priest Jacques du Bosc, in the tradition of Francis de Sales, sought to keep anchored in Christian ethics women’s obligation to devote themselves to pleasing others, and to diverting themselves, in leisured sociability. Contrary to conventional wisdom that only men could be honnête, he argued that women could be paragons of honnêteté. Du Bosc assured women that a measured worldliness, with no taint of libertinism, was entirely compatible with being a devout Christian. The virtue enabled by God’s grace provides “an interior joy” that does not make one “too melancholy” for “conversation.” Quite the contrary; it is the Christian virtue of charity that “gives us the qualities that render a person amiable in conversation.” “It is necessary, first,” Du Bosc wrote, “to put virtue in the will; after that, knowledge (la science) in the mind (esprit); and finally, gentleness in the countenance.”⁴⁰ But in the ensuing articulation of the code of politeness little serious attention was given to Du Bosc’s effort to fuse a devoutness infused with divine grace and worldly self-fashioning. In the worldly ethos of constant “diversion,” there was little room for the meditative tradition of solitary prayer, much less for the asceticism, of Jansenist women at Port-Royal and the followers of Mme Guyon’s mysticism of utter abandonment of the self in surrender to the divine will.⁴¹

      Nor was there anything of modern authenticity about the social aesthetic; any impulse to make transparent the depths of one’s inner self had to give way to what Simmel called “freedom in bondage.” More to the point here, honnêteté rejected what Seigel calls the “reflective” dimension of selfhood, which makes inwardness—introspective self-examination—the route to one’s consciousness of one’s self as “an active agent of its own realization,” often in opposition to social expectations.⁴² Honnêteté was openly hostile to the most rigorous tradition of intellectual labor inherited from the ancients: the Stoic tradition of askesis, the struggle for self-command at the rational core of human nature, the inner self, in the solitude of intense and repeated meditation. Since the late sixteenth century there had been a neo-Stoic strain in French philosophy, but it was obviously at odds with the feminizing of worldly culture, and particularly with its ideal of aisance. Neo-Stoicism kept virtue manly, as a labor of rational self-control, contrasted with the enslaving imagination that the term “effeminacy” evoked.⁴³ Honnêteté preferred the joys of sociability; to enter solitude by choice, and to try to plumb СКАЧАТЬ