Alexis de Tocqueville and "Democracy in America"

 

Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville
by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856)

In 1831 and 1832, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As employees of the French Interior Ministry, their trip was intended as a "fact-finding" mission on conditions in the American penal system. De Tocqueville and de Beaumont landed in Newport, Rhode Island.  They traveled through the states of New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, made a foray into Québec, then into Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and D.C. before sailing back to France from New York City.

De Tocqueville was a scholar of history and politics with a great interest in the affairs of his own country. France in his time had been embroiled in a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions. His visit to America took place during the second half of the first administration of President Andrew Jackson. When he returned to France, he set to writing De la démocratie en Amérique or Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840.

Democracy in America is a deep meditation on our political system, and we Americans have ever since been looking into de Tocqueville's mirror to understand ourselves better.

 

Elements of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," by Walt Whitman

 

A steel engraving of
Walt Whitman (1803-1892)
from the 1855 edition of Leaves
of Grass

Our selection this month is "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," by Walt Whitman, from a section of his Leaves of Grass entitled "Sea Drift."  It has 183 lines, 69 of which are italicized and understood to be the song of a male mocking-bird who loses his mate.

The "characters" of the poem are:

The male bird

His mate

The boy ("when the fifth-month grass was growing")

The man ("out of the Ninth-month midnight")

The lost mate of the male bird

An "old crone"

The sea

The four "light-green" eggs!

One approach to making sense of the poem is to examine the interplay of these elements.

"Self Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Epigrams are short, pointed, memorable statements and form the heart of Emerson's rhetorical style.  Here is a sampling of Emerson's epigrammatic assertions in our selection on Monday night, "Self-Reliance," possibly his most famous essay (page citations are from Great Conversations 1):

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men--that is genius.

(page 169).

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. (page 170)

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. (page 170)

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. (page 171)

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. (page 172)

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by statesmen and philosophers and divines. (page 174)

To be great is to be misunderstood. (page 174)

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. (page 180)

Discontent is the want of self-reliance: it is infirmity of will. (page 180)

For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian? (page 186)

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. (page 187)

With thanks to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations 15th edition.

"Pensées" of Pascal

When Blaise Pascal died at the age of 39 in 1662, he left behind fragments of an work intended to be entitled "Apology for the  Christian Religion."  Two copies of these fragments were transcribed, and different arrangements of them have come down to us as his Pensées (or "Thoughts"). The Pensées were first published in France in 1670, and were classified under headings.  The selection we take up this Monday night in Great Conversations 1, according the the introduction, was developed to include the most well-known passages among the hundreds of paragraphs Pascal wrote.  A caveat to the reader: not all of them are related to the overarching design of an apology (or "defense") of Christianity.

I offer here a "concordance" of these 18 passages and the classifications Pascal gave to them, in order to help us see how they fit into Pascal's overriding themes.

136: "Diversion"

44: "Order"

978 (Self-love): A separately sourced fragment

512: Difference between the mathematical and intuitive mind (a translator's title)

198, 199, 200: Transition from knowledge of man to knowledge of God (according to a note by our translator, A.J. Krailsheimer, these three Pensées form a "dossier on Man"

429, 430: "Against Indifference" (a translator's title)

678: Human nature. Style. Jesuits, etc. (a translator's title)

12: "Order"

427, 428: Also "Against indifference"

148: "The Sovereign Good"

110 "Greatness"

423, 424, 418 "The Wager" (translator's title)

"Of Friendship," by Michel de Montaigne

 

Wine label given to me by
onetime group member Alice Link,
who just turned 100!

At the outset of his Essay “On Friendship,” Montaigne states his intention to imitate the method of a painter in his employ.  The painter starts with “the best spot, the middle of each wall” and there paints a beautiful picture “labored over with all his skill.”  He fills in the empty spaces around it with “grotesques.”  Montaigne compares his Essays to these paintings.  He says his Essays are also “monstrous bodies,” without any “definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental.”

He doubts his own ability to create a “rich polished picture.” He states his admiration for a work of his deceased friend, Étienne de la Boétie, entitled La Servitude Volontaire, which espouses liberty over tyrants. Montaigne laments that despite having been bequeathed La Boétie’s library and papers, he has not been able to publish more than one small volume of his friend’s work.

Nevertheless, Montaigne is grateful that La Servitude Volontaire is what brought them together as friends, and their friendship was so “entire and so perfect that certainly you will hardly read of the like, and among men of today you see no trace of it in practice.”

Montaigne’s admiration for his friend launches him into his discussion of different types of friendship.  He talks about familial friendships, e.g., of a father for a son, between brothers, affection of men and women, (including marriage), and “licentious Greek love,” (a code term for homosexual love). In each case Montaigne argues these kinds of love fall short.  He returns to his description of a “more equitable and equable kind of friendship” as embodied in his relationship with La Boétie.

In his closing paragraph, Montaigne defends his friend’s reputation and his patriotism.  He states that he has decided to refrain from reprinting La Servitude Volontaire, and instead will substitute his sonnets (which in fact, didn’t make it into the last edition of Montaigne’s book, published in 1588).

No doubt the editors of Great Conversations 1 also selected Montaigne's Essay "On Solitude" as a companion piece to "Of Friendship."  On Monday night we'll talk about whether the solitude of which Montaigne speaks can really be considered as parallel to his idea of friendship.

"Prometheus Bound," by Aeschylus

 Sculpture of Prometheus by Paul Manship at the Rockefeller Center Skating Rink in Manhattan

 (photo by Troy David Johnson)

On Monday night we discuss the play "Prometheus Bound," by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, about Zeus's punishment of the Titan Prometheus for giving humankind the useful arts. Classicist John  Hetherington writes in his book on Aeschylus (Aeschylus, Yale University Press, 1986) that we who have been brought up in Jewish or Christian traditions, in which truth is based on scripture, may find it difficult to comprehend ancient Greek religion, based as it is on "a bewildering multitude of traditional beliefs and local cult-practices".  We may tend to conflate Zeus, the first among the gods, with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Aeschylus's view of  Zeus, however, was quite different, as we'll talk about tomorrow night.

As a "study aid," I offer this outline of the play.  As you can see, a considerable portion of the play is devoted to Io.  Io is the only human character in the play, though as punishment for Zeus's attraction to her, she is turned into a cow.  I think the common bond she and Prometheus share as victims of Zeus puts them at the center of the drama. 

Pages 63-66: Dialogue of Might (Kratos) and Hephaestus

Pages 67-73: Prometheus and Chorus

Pages 73-76: Oceanos and Chrous

Pages 76-77: Chorus

Pages 78-80: Chorus and Prometheus

Pages 80-81: Chorus

Pages 81-91: Io, Prometheus, and Chorus

Pages 92-96: Chorus and Prometheus

Pages 94-96: Prometheus and Hermes

Pages 97-99: Chorus, Prometheus, and Hermes

Great Books in the Pandemic Year of 2020

If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this however, was too late. The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.

--Frederick Douglass, "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave"

To recap our doings in this covid-19 pandemic year of 2020, I offer the following list of our readings:

In January we celebrated our fifteenth anniversary with "The Devil Baby of Hull House," by Jane Addams, in which she recounts the rumors that swirled around the immigrant communities of the south side of Chicago.

February our selection "The Man Who Could Perform Miracles" by H.G. Wells was a "thought experiment" of what would happen if a man had the power to make the world stop turning.

In March, alas, we had to cancel our meeting because of the covid-19 shutdown.  We took up the selection, Thomas Mann's eerie story of a family's sojourn at an Italian seaside resort, "Mario and the Magician" in May.

We held a special meeting in April in which we looked at Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, a masterpiece of plague literature.  Fittingly, as a twenty-first-century response to a pandemic, it was our very first Zoom meeting.

April's regular selection was "Daughters of the Late Colonel," by Katherine Mansfield, on two sisters living in their father's shadow.

June's reading was the amazing play "R.U.R." by Karel Čapek, in which robots revolt against their human makers.

In July we looked at Mary McCarthy's memoir "My Confession" in which she recounts her involvement with the Communist Party in the 1930s.

August's selection was the impressionistic "Holy Week," by Deborah Eisenberg.

In September we took up "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," a book which strongly influenced the anti-slavery movement in the United States. In October  the selection was "The Epic of Gilgamesh," with our Head of Adult Services Thérèse Nielsen filling in for me.  Thank you Thérèse!

In 2021 we continue our reading and discussion of great literature and philosophy, a fulfilling and lifelong pursuit.