Hiding the tree in a forest
When, in G.K. Chesterton’s “The Sign of the Broken Sword” (a story from The Innocence of Father Brown),1 Father Brown explains the mystery to his companion Flambeau, he begins with “what everyone knows”:
Arthur St. Clare was a great and successful English general. [Everyone] knows that after splendid yet careful campaigns both in India and Africa he was in command against Brazil when the great Brazilian patriot Olivier issued his ultimatum. [Everyone] knows that on that occasion St. Clare with a very small force attacked Olivier with a very large one, and was captured after heroic resistance. And [everyone] knows that after his capture, and to the abhorrence of the civilised world, St. Clare was hanged on the nearest tree. He was found swinging there after the Brazilians had retired, with his broken sword hung round his neck.
However, Father Brown notices that something does not fit in this story that everybody knows: St. Clare, who was always a prudent commander, characterized more by a sense of duty than by dashing, made a foolish attack which ended in disaster; Olivier, who was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry and always set free prisoners, cruelly killed St. Clare. To account for this mystery, Father Brown evokes a metaphor:
“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in,” said the priest in an obscure voice. “A fearful sin. [. . .] And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead bodies to hide it in.”
The denouement relies on the hypothesis of the dark corrupted side of the English hero: Sir Arthur St. Clare
was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier.[. . .] Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted—lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?
In the Brazilian jungle, just before the fatal battle, the general encountered an unexpected problem: his accompanying younger officer, Major Murray, had somehow guessed the hideous truth; and as they walked slowly through the jungle, he killed Murray with his sabre. But what could he do now with this body he would have to account for? “He could make the corpse less unaccountable. He could create a hill of corpses to cover this one. In twenty minutes eight hundred English soldiers were marching down to their death.” Here, however, things went wrong for the general: the surviving English soldiers somehow guessed what he had done—it was they who killed the general, not Olivier. Olivier (to whom the survivors surrendered) generously set them free and withdrew his troops; the surviving soldiers then tried St. Clare and hanged him, and then, in order to save the glory of the English army, covered up their act by the story that Olivier had had him killed.
The story ends in the spirit of John Ford’s westerns which prefer heroic legend to truth (recall John Wayne’s final speech to the journalists about the ruthless general played by Henry Fonda, from Fort Apache): “Millions who never knew him shall love him like a father—this man whom the last few that knew him dealt with like dung. He shall be a saint; and the truth shall never be told of him, because I have made up my mind at last.”
What, then, is the Hegelian lesson of this story? Is it that the simple cynical-denunciatory reading should be rejected? Is it that the gaze which reduces the general’s corruption to the truth of his personality is itself mean and base? Hegel described long ago this trap as that of the Beautiful Soul whose gaze reduces all great heroic deeds to the private base motives of their perpetrators:
No hero is a hero to his valet, not, however, because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is—the valet, with whom the hero has to do, not as a hero, but as a man who eats, drinks, and dresses, who, in short, appears as a private individual with certain personal wants and ideas of his own. In the same way, there is no act in which that process of judgment cannot oppose the personal aspect of the individuality to the universal aspect of the act, and play the part of the “moral” valet towards the agent.2
Is, then, Father Brown, if not this kind of “moral valet” to the general, then, at least, a cynic who knows that the unpleasant truth has to be covered up for the sake of the public good? Chesterton’s theological finesse is discernible in the way he allocates the responsibility for the general’s gradual downfall: it is not the general’s betrayal of the Christian faith through his moral corruption due to the predominance of base materialist motives. Chesterton is wise enough to depict the cause of the general’s moral downfall as inherent to Christianity: the general “was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him.” It was the particular—in this case, Protestant—reading that is held responsible. And can one not say the same about Heidegger’s attempt (and also that of Adorno and Horkheimer, and even of Agamben) to lay the blame for the ethico-political catastrophes of the twentieth century on the shoulders of the entire tradition of “Western metaphysics” with its instrumental Reason, and so on and so forth, leading in linear fashion “from Plato to Nato” (or, rather, the gulag)? Sloterdijk has written the following about the leftist global problematization of “Western civilization”:
Through the boundless forms of cultural criticism—say, the reduction of Auschwitz back to Luther and Plato, or the criminalization of Western civilization in its entirety—one tries to blur the traces which betray how close to a class-genocidical system we ourselves were standing.3
The only thing one should add here is that the same applies to Heidegger and other former fascists: they too hid their Nazi corpse in the mountain of corpses called Western metaphysics . . . And should one not reject in the same way, as an over-hasty generalization, the liberal popular wisdom according to which philosophers who meddle in politics will always lead to disaster? According to this view, starting with Plato, they either miserably fail or succeed . . . in supporting tyrants. The reason, so the story goes on, is that philosophers try to impose their Notions on reality, violating it—no wonder that, from Plato to Heidegger, they are resolutely anti-democratic (with the exception of a few empiricists and pragmatists), dismissing the “people” as the victim of sophists, at the mercy of a contingent plurality . . . So when those who hold to this commonsensical wisdom hear of Marxists who defend Marx, claiming that his ideas were not faithfully realized by Stalinism, they reply: “Thank God! It would have been even worse had they been fully realized!” Heidegger at least was willing to draw the consequences of his catastrophic experience and concede that those who think ontologically have to err ontically, that the gap is irreducible, that there is no “philosophical politics” proper. It thus seems that G.K. Chesterton was fully justified in his ironic proposal to install a “special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers”:
It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. [. . .] The work of the philosophical policeman [. . .] is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.4
Would not thinkers as different as Popper, Adorno, and Levinas also subscribe to a slightly amended version of this idea, where the political crime is called “totalitarianism” and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of “totality”? A straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism,
