who expresses his admiration for Beethoven’s ninth symphony or some other masterpiece of Western civilization immediately bears witness to his tastelessness—true taste is displayed by praising a minor work of Beethoven as being superior to his “greatest hits.”)
Perhaps one should invert the terms of Bertrand Russell’s well-known barber paradox (does the barber who follows the rule of shaving all who do not shave themselves thereby shave himself?), which led him to prohibit the principle of self-inclusion, or inconsistent self-redoubling, as the only way to avoid contradiction. What if, on the contrary, it is the “consistent” adherence to rules which is truly self-contradictory, which turns into its opposite? And what if the only way to truly be reasonable or to truly display taste is to fully engage in self-redoubling, to violate the rule one follows self-reflexively?
It is as if, in today’s permissive society, transgressive violations are permitted only in a “privatized” form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of any public, spectacular or ritualistic dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our weird private practices, but they remain simply private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we should also invert here the standard formula of fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well (that I should obey the rules), but nonetheless . . . (I occasionally violate them, since this too is part of the rules).” In contemporary society, the predominant stance is rather: “I believe (that repeated hedonistic transgressions are what make life worth living), but nonetheless . . . (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but are just artificial coloring serving to re-emphasize the grayness of social reality).”
Legalists Versus Confucians
The philosopher who tried to undermine the very possibility of such unwritten obscene rules was Immanuel Kant. In his essay on “Perpetual Peace,” he grounds what he calls the “transcendental formula of public law” (“All actions relating to the right of other men are unjust if their maxim is not consistent with publicity”) in the obvious fact that a secret law, a law unknown to its subjects, would legitimize the arbitrary despotism of those who exercise it:
A maxim which I cannot divulge without defeating my own purpose must be kept secret if it is to succeed; and, if I cannot publicly avow it without inevitably exciting universal opposition to my project, the necessary and universal opposition which can be foreseen a priori is due only to the injustice with which the maxim threatens everyone.11
Things, however, soon become ambiguous in Kant. As every Kant scholar knows apropos his prohibition of lying, one has always to be very attentive with regard to the exceptions to Kant’s universal maxims. In the Second Supplement to his “Perpetual Peace” essay, Kant asks a naïve question: can the contract between states which obliges them to perpetual peace have a secret clause? Although he admits that a secret article in a contract under public law is objectively a contradiction, he allows for an exception for subjective reasons. This exception is not what one would have expected, namely a clause allowing for the sordid compromises of Realpolitik in order to maintain peace, such as the infamous secret clause in the Soviet–German Treaty of 1939 regarding the partition of Poland and other Eastern European states. It is, rather, something which may appear much more innocent, even ridiculous as the topic of a secret clause: “The opinions of philosophers on the conditions of the possibility of public peace shall be consulted by those states armed for war.” Why should this clause remain secret? If made public, it would appear humiliating to the legislative authority of a state: how can the supreme authority, to whom “we must naturally attribute the utmost wisdom,” seek instruction from its subjects? This may sound absurd, but do we not respect it even today? When Habermas was in England during the period of Blair’s government, did not Tony Blair invite him to a discreet dinner which went unreported in the media? Kant was thus correct: this clause should remain secret, because it does something more terrifying than exposing the dark, cynical underside of legal power (in today’s epoch, a state power can proudly admit to its dark side, advertising the fact that it is discreetly doing dirty things it is better for us not to know about). It underlines the blindness, stupidity and ignorance of power, none of which is personal but is rather institutional: in spite of input from hundreds of highly educated experts, for example, the results of the US invasion of Iraq were catastrophic.
There is, however, a problem with Kant’s thesis: what was unthinkable for Kant was modern “totalitarian ideology,” as opposed to mere authoritarian lust for power: the will to impose on reality a theoretically developed vision of a better world. In totalitarian regimes such as Stalinism, the rulers did indeed listen too much to the advice of philosophers—and was the same not already true of Robespierre, who relied on Rousseau, so much beloved by Kant? And the story continues up to today: Brecht, Sartre, Heidegger . . . Thank God that those in power do not listen to the philosophers’ advice too much! In the 1960s, when China detonated its first atomic bomb, Karl Jaspers advocated a large-scale atomic assault on China to prevent it becoming a threat to world peace. In ancient China itself, the king of Qin—who ruthlessly united the country and, in 221 BCE, proclaimed himself its First Emperor, instituting the ur-model of “totalitarian” rule—also relied so heavily on the advice of the “Legalist” philosophers that one can see this as the first case of a state regime forced on a society by a conscious, well-planned decision to break with past traditions and impose a new order originally conceived in theory:
The king of Qin was not necessarily the brains of the outfit—his advisers, free of the strictures of courtly life, were the ones who had masterminded his rise to power. The plan to install him as the ruler of the world had commenced before he was even born, with the contention of long-dead scholars that the world required an enlightened prince. It had proceeded with . . . an alliance of scholars in search of a patron who might allow them to secure their own political ends. Ying Zheng, the king of Qin, became the First Emperor with the help of great minds.12
These Legalists—first among them Han Fei and the great Li Si—emerged out of the crisis of Confucianism. When, in the fifth to third centuries BCE, China went through the period of the “Warring States,” Confucians saw the ultimate cause of this slow but persistent decay in the betrayal of age-old traditions and customs. Confucius was not so much a philosopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition. Reference was made to an original time when this Tradition still fully reigned (when “a king was really a king, a father really a father,” etc.), in contrast to which the current period appeared as the time of decay, of the disintegration of organic social ties, of the growing gap between things and words, between individuals and their titles or social roles. No wonder Confucius represented his teachings as lessons transmitted from antiquity. And the fact that it is easy to demonstrate how he often did the exact opposite by proposing something quite new—in other words, that the tradition he appealed to was what Eric Hobsbawm has called an “invented tradition”—renders his insistence that he was simply “a transmitter and not a maker” all the more symptomatic: his reference to tradition was a necessary structural illusion.
According to Confucius, people live their lives within parameters firmly established by Heaven (which, more so than a purposeful Supreme Being, designates the higher natural order of things with its fixed cycles and patterns). Men are nonetheless responsible for their actions, especially for their treatment of others: we can do little or nothing to alter our fated span of existence, but we determine what we accomplish and what we are remembered for. Heaven rules the physical universe through ming, or “destiny,” which is beyond human understanding and control, and it rules the moral universe, the universe of human behavior, through T’ien ming, or “The Mandate of Heaven.” This “Mandate of Heaven” is based on the idea that Heaven is primarily concerned with the well-being of humans and human society; in
