José Pablo Feinmann on Mariano Moreno and the Revolución de Mayo of Argentina

This is Chapter 2 of the third season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T3 CAP 2. El Plan de Operaciones," Encuentro n/d YouTube 02/07/2013, which continues with his discussion of the Revolucion de Mayo of 1810 and its chief leader Mariano Moreno.

The Plan of Operations (Plan revolucionario de operaciones) was a document by Moreno, laying out a plan for constructing an indepedent Argentina, heavily influenced by French Jacobin theorists Robespierre and Saint-Just.

Feinmann argues that Moreno's Plan didn't have a people, a public, that was large enough and so constituted that it could act as a genuine revolutionary subject in the sense that the French Revolution had experienced.

Not to put to fine a point on it, Buenos Aires, where Moreno and his fellow revolutionary leaders Cornelio de Saavedra and Manuel Belgrano, was a small city in a backwater section of the Spanish Empire.

What we now know as Argentina was the largest part of the Virreinato [Viceroyalty] del Río de la Plata, established by Spain in 1776. This graphic from Wikimedia Commons shows the territory it included:

The Revolución de Mayo ended the rule of the last Viceroy of Spain, Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros, though Francisco Javier de Elío formerly held the title 1810-12, though he had no effective control in most of his nominal territory. The Revolución de Mayo established the independence of Buenos Aires.

The Virreinato del Río de la Plata was formerly abolished in the Congress of Tucumán of 1816, which declared the independence of the Provincias Unidas [United Provinces] del Río de la Plata

Feinmann here groups participants in a revolution into three groups: enthusiasts, enemies and spectators and discusses Moreno's approach to each.

José Pablo Feinmann on the Enlightenment and the Argentinian Revolution of Independence

This is Chapter 1 of the third season of Argentine philosopher José Pablo Feinmann's public TV series Filosofía aquí y ahora, "T3 CAP 1. Iluminismo y Revolucion de Mayo"; Encuentro n/d YouTube 02/07/2013

href="http://www.encuentro.gov.ar/sitios/encuentro/programas/ver?rec_id=50216">Encuentro n/d Filosofía y Praxis YouTube 02/05/2013:

French Revolution made by the masses led by the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class. Liberty, eqaulity, fraternity.

As Feinmann explains, the Revolucion de Mayo was not made by the masses in anything like the same sense. Not a "popular revolution". It was a revolution made by a small group who took advantage of the strange situation presented by the unusual conditions of the French control of Spain under Napoleon.

He stresses the extent to which Enlightenment thought shaped that of Mariano Moreno. Moreno was a Jacobin in his philosophical orientation, but without the sanguinary implications that label carries in its French context.

Andrew Jackson, Indian removal and the Enlightenment

I've been reading up a bit on the history of the Enlightenment with a particular view to the contradictory nature of its heritage.

The German journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft.Zeitschrift für Historische Sozialwissenschaft did a special issue in 2010 on the topic Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung (The Enlightenment and Its Effects in the World). One of the essays is by Volker Depkat, "Angewandte Autklärung? Die Weltwirkung der Autklärung im kolonialen Britisch Nordamerika und den USA."

Andrew Jackson, too Enlightened for the good of American Indians?

Depkat uses the worst act of my man Andrew Jackson to illustrate the dark side of the Enlightenment. Specifically, Jackson's 1830 message to Congress justifying the Indian Removal Act. See Transcript of President Andrew Jackson's Message to Congress 'On Indian Removal' (1830).

Depkat says the arguments in that speech "came out of a intellectual world whose essential elements and figures of thinking were bound to the Enlightenment" ("einer Vorstellungswelt entsprang, deren wesentliche Elemente und Denkfiguren der Aufklärung verpflichtet waren").

I think Jackson actually believed what he said in that speech, not that it was any excuse for the policy. The opponents of the Act argued that the Indians could be more effectively Christianized if they stayed put, and also that some of these Indians were slaveholders who upheld the Peculiar Institution.The white Enlightenment meant disaster for the Indians either way.

Jackson's speech got it tragically right on that point, too, when he argued that the relocation of the tribes "will retard the progress of decay, which is lessening their numbers, and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community." No Happy Ending for the tribes subject to this civilizing tutelage.

The rest of the paragraph of which that passage is the conclusion is:

It puts an end to all possible danger of collision between the authorities of the General and State Governments on account of the Indians. It will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters. By opening the whole territory between Tennessee on the north and Louisiana on the south to the settlement of the whites it will incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier and render the adjacent States strong enough to repel future invasions without remote aid. It will relieve the whole State of Mississippi and the western part of Alabama of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of whites; free them from the power of the States; enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions ...

As Depkat points out, here was the Enlightenment notion of continual historical progress and the civilizing effects of knowledge and Christian - white European Christian - civilization. There was the Enlightenment notion that white Christian civilization had the deeply moral and ethical duty to raise the lesser peoples, the "savages," to a higher (European) level of life.

This was a confusion of ideas, not lacking in cynicism and hypocrisy. But they were also ideas that grew out of concrete conditions in Europe, where the civilized Christians had mutually butchered each others in the Wars of Religion of the 16th century, followed by the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648, then the largest slaughter in the history of humanity. Christian Europe would not exceed that record until the 20th century, when they far exceeded it twice.

Jackson was right in his calculations. And the opponents of the Indian Removal Act were right in theirs. Both were working from a concept of civilization that excluded the Indians from any concept of participating in American civilization as a distinct culture, as practitioners of their aboriginal religions. There were two types of "Indian lovers" among American whites in those times. There were urban idealists who were justifiably critical of the treatment of the native tribes but who had limited knowledge of real existing Indians. And there were those who were actively interacting with the Indians, like fur traders. The author Herman Melville, who actually lived among native tribes in the South Seas, was one such contemporary. The historian Francis Parkman took the time to become personally acquainted with native tribes and their languages, making his histories of enduring relevance for historians and anthropologists to this day.

Jackson's German contemporary Hegel painted a famously grim picture of what he saw as the inexorable but amoral progress of Reason in history (Philosophy of History III.2 §24; paragraph breaks added here for ease of reading; my emphasis in bold):

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole springs of action — the efficient agents in this scene of activity. Among these may, perhaps, be found aims of a liberal or universal kind — benevolence it may be, or noble patriotism; but such virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the World and its doings.

We may perhaps see the Ideal of Reason actualised in those who adopt such aims, and within the sphere of their influence; but they bear only a trifling proportion to the mass of the human race; and the extent of that influence is limited accordingly. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are on the other hand, most effective springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restraint, law and morality.

When we look at this display of passions, and the consequences of their violence; the Unreason which is associated not ... only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims; when we see the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can scarce avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption: and, since this decay is not the work of mere Nature, but of the Human Will — a moral embitterment — a revolt of the Good Spirit (if it have a place within us) may well be the result of our reflections.

Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, — forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counter-balanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life — the Present formed by our private aims and interests.

In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoy in safety the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.” But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered. From this point the investigation usually proceeds to that which we have made the general commencement of our enquiry.

Starting from this we pointed out those phenomena which made up a picture so suggestive of gloomy emotions and thoughtful reflections — as the very field which we, for our part, regard as exhibiting only the means for realising what we assert to be the essential destiny — the absolute aim, or — which comes to the same thing — the true result of the World's History. We have all along purposely eschewed “moral reflections” as a method of rising from the scene of historical specialties to the general principles which they embody. Besides, it is not the interest of such sentimentalities, really to rise above those depressing emotions; and to solve the enigmas of Providence which the considerations that occasioned them, present.

It is essential to their character to find a gloomy satisfaction in the empty and fruitless sublimities of that negative result. We return then to the point of view which we have adopted; observing that the successive steps (Momente) of the analysis to which it will lead us, will also evolve the conditions requisite for answering the enquiries suggested by the panorama of sin and suffering that history unfolds.

Depkat also points to this passage from Jackson's speech as exhibiting the Enlightenment view of the duty of humanity to master Nature:

What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?

Depkat writes:

Sein Argument gründet somit in einem scharfen Kontrast zwischen der vorzivilisierten Wildnis und der durch Städte und Farmen bestimmten U.S.-amerikanischen „Fortschrittslandschaft". Letztere steht für Kontrolle über die Natur, für die rationale Nutzung der natürlichen Ressourcen, für soziale, ökonomische und kulturelle Komplexität sowie für eine fortlaufende, alle Bereiche des Alltags erfassende Verbesserung der Lebenssituation („improvements"). Damit verbunden wird ein ästhetischer Aspekt, denn die sichtbaren Manifestationen des Fortschritts werden als Verschönerung („embellishment") einer zuvor wilden und deshalb häßlichen Landschaft gesehen. Ferner bemerkenswert ist, dass die Verwandlung der Landschaft als Ergebnis der unablässigen Arbeit und des ausdauernden Fleißes („industry"), des Wissens und der Fertigkeiten („art") freier Individuen gesehen wird. Jackson entwirft damit einen kausalen Zusammenhang von Freiheit und Fortschritt, durch den die Fortschrittlichkeit des Geschichtsprozesses selbst befordert wird.

[His argument is thereby grounded in a sharp contrast between the pre-civilized wilderness and American "progressive landscape" defined by cities and farms. The latter stands for control over Nature, for the rational use of natural resources, for social, economic and cultural complexity as well as for a continuous bettering of the life situation ("improvements") encompassing all spheres of everyday life. Bound up with that is an aesthetic aspect, because the visible manifestations of progress are seen as beautification ("embellishment") of the landscape that was previously wild and ugly. Further noteworthy is that the transformation of the landscape is seen as the result of unrelenting labor and of sustained industriousness ("industry"), of knowledge of the skill ("art") of free individuals. Jackson thereby project a causal connection between freedom and progress, through which the progressive nature of the historical process itself is advanced.]

Also important to Depkat's argument is that groups including women, native peoples, labor, slaves and free African-Americans used Enlightenment arguments, especially as embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the 1787 US Constitution, to argue against the limits that earlier Enlightenment thought and political institutions based in Enlightenment concepts had imposed on them.

And uses as examples arguments for women's rights from Abigail Adams and the 1790 essay from Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), On the Equality of the Sexes.

Enlightenment philosophy - as in Age of Enlightenment, not the California New Agey kind

William Blake's artistic interpretation of Isaac Newton

I just read a little book called The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) by historian Carl Becker. The book is devoted to discussing some of Becker's key idea about the philosophy of the European Enlightenment, which had such a great influence on the leaders of the American Revolution and shaped the Founders' conception of the world.

Enlightenment thinkers on whom he touches in this 168-page book include: John Locke (1632-1704); Isaac Newton (1643-1727); Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826); Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790); David Hume (1711-1776); Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755); Francis Bacon (1561-1626); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1825); Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803); Voltaire (1694-1778); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); Denis Diderot (1713-1784); Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771); Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716); and, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781).

It goes without saying that so short a book can't convey a lot about the philosophy of every one of those people. (Dead white guys all!)

But his focus is fairly specific. He argues that the Enlightenment thinkers continued much of the religious habit of thought of medieval thinkers, despite their general anticlerical leanings. They laid great store by Reason. But he argues that they also substituted concepts like history or posterity for the role played by God in the European Christian thought of earlier centuries.

Being innocent of any detailed knowledge of the philosophies of these gentlemen - Thomas Jefferson and Goethe excepted - Becker's argument on that point sounds sensible enough to me. At least if I take it to mean that this is how they conceptualized the world of science while establishing a continuity with the Christian philosophical thought on which much of their intellectual tradition was based.

I'm not sure it would hold up that well to close scrutiny, though. Jefferson certainly knew the difference between God and deified Reason, for instance. Isaac Newton was a conservative Protestant who expected to be remembered more for his voluminous writing on theology rather than for his revolutionary scientific work.

His continuation of the argument into the 19th-century, post-Enlightenment period is much less convincing. In fact, he recites from fairly conventional judgments that the political fanaticism of the French Revolution and its successors, which basically includes all the European democratic revolutions (successful and otherwise) as well as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, essentially substituted their political faith for God, making their political ideologies into religions.

I understand the argument. But I think it carries so much baggage from the assumptions of secular historians of the 19th century who tended to discount or dismiss the role of religion in historical events, that it's not particularly useful as a way of understanding the events in question. People can be fanatical about many things, from religion to politics to sports to cars and lots of other things. But it doesn't mean that soccer games can be equated to cars, despite the emotional similarities in the fanaticism. Trying to define charismatic or fanatical political phenomenon as religion obscures at least as much as it explains.

But along the way, he makes some intriguing observations which sheds some light on some concepts and ways of understanding the world that help make sense of some of the Founders' ideas to people today.

He emphasizes how important it is to understand the prevailing understandings of the world that surrounded the Enlightenment thinkers, the "climate of opinion" of the time. In defining his own time in 1932, Becker manages to sound something like a stock market booster from the 1990s:

It is well known that the result of pursuing this restricted aim (the scientific method reduced to its lowest terms) has been astounding. It is needless to say that we live in a machine age, that the art of inventing is the greatest of our inventions, or that within a brief space of fifty years the outward conditions of life have been transformed. It is less well understood that this bewildering experience has given a new slant to our minds. Fresh discoveries and new inventions are no longer the result of fortunate accidents which we are expected to note with awe. They are all a part of the day's work, anticipated, deliberately intended, and brought to pass according to schedule. Novelty has ceased to excite wonder because it has ceased to be novelty; on the contrary, the strange, so habituated have we become to it, is of the very essence of the customary. There is nothing new in heaven or earth not dreamt of in our laboratories; and we should be amazed indeed if tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow failed to offer us something new to challenge our capacity for readjustment. Science has taught us the futility of troubling to understand the "underlying agency" of the things we use. We have found that we can drive an automobile without knowing how the carburetor works, and listen to a radio without mastering the secret of radiation. We really haven't time to stand amazed, either at the starry firmament above or the Freudian complexes within us. The multiplicity of things to manipulate and make use of so fully engages our attention that we have neither the leisure nor the inclination to seek a rational explanation of the force that makes them function so efficiently. (my emphasis)

This is by way of making his point that the more common 20th-century view of the world is oriented toward facts, where the Enlightenment worldview emphasized the role of Reason. But he also argues that these thinkers were far more influenced by Christian theology and philosophy than present-day readers tend to realize. As he puts it:

In spite of the rationalism and their humane sympathies, in spite of their aversion to hocus-pocus and enthusiasm and dim perspectives, in spite of their eager skepticism, their engaging cynicism, their brave youthful blasphemies and talk of hanging the last king in the entrails of the last priest - in spite of all of it, there is more of Christian philosophy in the writings of the Philosophes than has yet been dreamt of in our histories.

Natural law was a key concept of the Enlightenment. It made their way into the Declaration of Independence as the "laws of nature and of nature's God". The notion of natural law was that the world was governed by regular laws that could be observed and understood in nature, in the material world, though the ultimate source of these natural laws was God.

Not that the concept of natural law was unique or new to the Enlightenment. Becker argues that the Enlightenment brought what we might call a reversal of direction in understanding it. Instead of assuming that the world and nature were rational because an intelligent divine Creator made them, they assumed that because nature functioned according to laws that can be derived and understood by observing the outward world, God must be an intelligent Creator. This view integrated the findings of contemporary science into their world outlook along with the God of Christianity. Though the Christianity part wasn't universal among them. Goethe, for instance, was Christian only in the vaguest sense, holding a Romantic, semi-mystical, quasi-pagan worldview and some Enlightenment philosophers were atheists.

Becker illustrates with the example of Newton:

Newton did not doubt that the heavens declare the glory of God; but he was concerned to find out, by looking through a telescope and doing a sum in mathematics, precisely how they managed it. He discovered that every particle of matter, whether in the heavens or elsewhere, behaved as if it attracted every other particle with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance. This was a new kind of "law of nature." Formerly, as the editor of the second edition of the Principia tells us, philosophers were "employed in giving names to things, and not in searching into things themselves." Newton himself noted the difference by saying: "These Principles I consider not as occult [hidden] Qualities, supposed to result from the specific Forms of Things, but as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form'd." This was the new way to knowledge opened up by "natural philosophy": to "search into Things themselves," and then to formulate the "general Laws of Nature by which the Things themselves are form'd." (my emphasis)

But for all their rationalism and genuine attachment to science - still called "natural philosophy" in the 18th century - Becker finds the Enlightenment philosophers to be eager to make constructive changes in the world, not just to study and understand it:

We need not be deceived. In spite of their persiflage and wit, in spite of their correct manner and restrained prose, we can still hear, in the very accents of the saints, the despairing cry, "How long, O Lord, how long!"

That description certainly fits the American revolutionaries Jefferson and Franklin.

The Enlightenment philosophers considered history to be extremely important. Becker detects a tendency to look for a previous Golden Age that humanity needed to regain, a Golden Age not unlike Christian conceptions of the Garden of Eden or of the special event in the past when Jesus carried out his earthly ministry.

One twist for us now in understanding their perspective on history is that the Enlightenment emphasized that their time was a break with the past, a discontinuity in the flow of history. This, says Becker, is because:

... the eighteenth-century Philosphers were not primarily interested in stabilizing society, but in changing it. They did not ask how society had come to be what it was, but how it could be made better than it was. There is no more apt illustration of this slant of mind than the famous opening sentences of Rousseau's Social Contract. "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains. ..."

Their successors in the 19th century, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the continuities of history, seeing history as a continuous flow of events and processes rather than one subject to "breaks in history" as the Enlightenment understood them.

This Enlightenment understand of history led people to look to history for moral lessons, a habit which has changed today in terms of our formal understanding of what history is, but is still awfully hard to break.

Becker's discussion of how the Enlightenment thinkers understood posterity casts some helpful light on how Americans of the early Republic saw their duties to subsequent generations. In his interpretation, the concept of posterity was a vision of a perfectible future, an appealing dream that functioned for the Enlightenment secularists much as the promise of Heaven in medieval times. It was a more congenial vision for that time's "climate of opinion" than the Christian notion which has been mocked by anticlerical reformers as "pie in the sky when you die." (Not necessarily the best way to mock it, since that actually sounds pretty appealing. But that's another story.)

With the emerging modern idea of progress, posterity would be the recipients and the realization of the Heavenly City here on earth:

No "return," no "rebirth" of classical philosophy, however idealized and humanized, no worship of ancestors long since dead, or pale imitations of Greek pessimism would suffice for a society that had been so long and so well taught to look forward to another and better world to come. Without a new heaven to replace the old, a new way of salvation, of attaining perfection, the religion of humanity [i.e., Enlightenment philosophy] would appeal in vain to the common run of men.

He uses a quotation from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder that ties together the grand Enlightenment view of history with its aspirations for the future, for posterity:

Manifold is the problem of humanity, and everywhere the result of human striving this: "Upon reason and integrity depends the essence of our race, its end and its fate." No nobler use has history than this: it leads us as it were into the council of fate and teaches us to conform to the eternal laws of nature. While it shows us the defects and consequences of all unreason, it teaches us our place in that great organism in which reason and goodness struggle with chaotic forces, always however according to their nature creating order, and pressing forward on the path of victory.

That's a view of history that may be difficult for people today to appreciate, much less to adopt as our own.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

But it does give us a window into understanding one aspect of martyrdom, a phenomenon that more often takes a political form now rather than a religious one, though the latter is certainly not exclusively a thing of the past. Nor is it always so easy to cleanly separate political from religious martyrdom. The concept of being vindicated by posterity, though, is an important aspect of both. Writing of Denis Diderot, Becker says:

Whatever Diderot's intellect might say, the good heart of the man assured him that virtue was the most certain of realities; and since it was a reality there must be compensation for the practice of it. The only compensation Diderot could ever find was the hope of living forever in the memory of posterity. "Do you not see," he exclaims, "that the judgment of posterity anticipated is the sole encouragement, the sole support, the sole consolation ... of men in a thousand unhappy circumstances?" "If our predecessors have done nothing for us, and if we do nothing for our descendants, it is almost in vain that nature wills that man should be perfectible." "All these philosophers, these men of integrity who have been the victims of stupid people, of atrocious priests, of enraged tyrants, what consolation remains to them in the hour of death? This: that prejudice passes, and that posterity will transfer to their enemies the ignominy which they have suffered." It is significant that throughout this discussion Diderot employs the phrases "sentiment of immortality" and "respect for posterity." The "sentiment of immortality and respect for posterity move the heart and elevate the soul; they are two germs of great things, two promises as substantial as any others." The ideas, the phrases, are essentially religious, essentially Christian: for the worship of God, Diderot has substituted respect for posterity; for the hope of immortality in heaven, the hope of living in the memory of future generations. (my emphasis)

Tags: carl becker, diderot, enlightenment philosophy, isaac newton