Introduction
and Commentary
José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917)
was an Uruguayan philosopher and politician; unlike the authors I typically
translate here, he was not Catholic.
Instead, he proudly declared himself a “freethinker,” though that in no
way made him abhor religion: “Believe that nothing inspires more respect in me
than religious sincerity, wherever it manifests itself, whatever be the dogmas
to which it lives united…Free-thinking, as I conceive and profess it, is, in its
most ultimate essence, tolerance; and fruitful tolerance has to be, not merely passive,
but active as well; it has to be, not merely an apathetic attitude, disdainful
consent, frigid leniency, but rather an exchange of stimuli and teachings, a relation
of love, a power of sympathy that penetrates into the abysses of another’s
conscience, of which an indifferent heart will never be capable. And, more than any others, religious
questions are those which require this high kind of tolerance, because they are
the [questions] in which, in the greatest way, one enters into the unconscious
and ineffable foundation of every spirit” (“The Religious Sentiment and the
Critic,” in Obras completas, 289, 290-291).
He had no qualms about
drawing from religions if he found truth therein. Thus, in the passage translated below, he strives
to unite the idea of the equality of each person—drawn from Christianity—with the
idea of “natural aristocracy.” The basis
of this idea is the simple recognition that different people have different
skills, and that some have greater skill or aptitude, in a certain field, than others
do. Some are physically stronger than
others; some are better jumpers; some are better at mathematics; some are
better at persuading others via charisma, etc.
Going further, concepts of “natural aristocracy” try to build a society
that takes these different skills into account, a society that, necessarily,
becomes hierarchical, since those better skilled in any one field become
leaders of the less-skilled. (Proponents
of “natural aristocracy” typically go further and say that even the political
sphere should become a hierarchy based on general skillfulness: the truly best
(aristoi) should rule.) Yet
it is easy for such a hierarchy to become a denigration and oppression of those
with lesser skills, a caste system with a swath of “Untouchables.” That is why Rodó tries to counteract this tendency
by drawing on the Christian idea of equality and the universal dignity of every
person, and even go so far as to declare—inspired by the image of the Cross—that
“hierarchical superiority in an order ought to be nothing else but a superior
capacity for love.” It is this focus on
love and on how hierarchy leads to the uplifting of all, that separates his
view of “natural aristocracy” from a brutal, Darwinist dictatorship of the
powerful.
Rodó the freethinker was not
the only one to have such ideas; the ornery Colombian Catholic aphoristic philosopher
Nicolás Gómez-Dávila (1913-1994) emphasized similar thoughts in his own pithy
way. Thus, he argues, hierarchy is not
antithetical to freethinking, but necessary: “He who repudiates dogmatism has
to choose between indifferentism and hierarchy” (Escolios a un texto
implícito, 319). Likewise, instead
of suppressing the weak and unskilled, it supports them: “The hierarchical
order is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses…In societies where
everyone believes themselves equal, the inevitable superiority of some few
makes the rest feel like failures. Inversely,
in societies where inequality is the norm, each one installs himself in his own
difference, without feeling the urgency, nor conceiving the possibility, of
comparing himself. Only a hierarchical
structure is compassionate towards the mediocre and the humble” (Escolios,
94, 424). The very principle of
hierarchy—as opposed to a pure dictatorship of the powerful—protects those on below. It is also, he adds, blindly obvious: “Even
among fanatical egalitarians, the briefest encounter re-establishes human inequalities…There
exists no individual who, measuring himself unpreparedly, does not discover
himself inferior to many, superior to few, equal to none” (Escolios, 204,
478). This hierarchical principle,
Gómez-Dávila argues, is basic to all of life, even in the understanding of
Catholicism itself, for “Catholicism is the hierarchical structuring of the
history of religions”—that is, it takes the elements and truths buried in all
other religions (“it integrates magical rite as well as mystical contemplation,
ethical behavior as well as theological reasoning”) and hierarchically structures
them into the full, absolute truth (Escolios, 496).
It is because
of the development of this idea—the integration of hierarchy and universal
human dignity—in writers like Gómez-Dávila that I decided to translate the following
passage from a “freethinker” like Rodó.
This passage comes from Chapter IV of Rodó’s famous essay Ariel,
a rallying cry for Latin-American modernism, which argues for embracing the truths
of (continental) American democracy, without being subsumed by nordomanía,
“Yankee mania,” the uncritical embrace of all the over-the-top, materialistic
trends in U.S. society. Oddly, the essay
is written as an address to (continental) American youth by Ariel, the spirit
from Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Rodó makes Caliban, from the same play,
into a principle of evil, and he also wrote a separate essay collection
entitled Prospero’s Viewpoint—evidently, the play struck a cord with
him.
The
Aristocratic Element in Democracy
José Enrique
Rodó
(from Ariel,
Ch. IV; Obras completas 223-226)
No distinction is more
easily confused and negated in the spirit of the people than that which teaches
that democratic equality can signify an ideal possibility, but never an
ideal reality, of influence and prestige among the members of an
organized society. In all of them, there
is an identical right to aspire to the moral superiorities which ought to be
the reason for and foundation of effective superiorities, but only to those who
have really taken possession of the former ought the prize of the latter to be conceded. The truthful, the worthy concept of equality
rests upon the thought that all rational beings are endowed, by nature, with
faculties capable of a noble development.
The duty of the State consists in arranging all the members of the society
in the indistinct conditions which tend towards their perfecting. The duty of the State consists in
predisposing the proper means for uniformly provoking the revelation of human
superiorities, wherever they exist. In a
like manner, but far from this initial equality, every inequality will be
justified, because it will be the sanction of the mysterious elections of
Nature or of the meritorious force of the will.—When conceived in this way,
democratic equality, far from opposing the selection of customs and of ideas,
is the most efficacious instrument for spiritual selection, is the providential
atmosphere of culture. All that
favors the predominance of intelligent energy will favor it. In just the same way, I can agree with de
Tocqueville that poetry, eloquence, graces of the spirit, splendors of the
imagination, profundity of thought, “all those gifts of the soul, scattered
haphazardly by heaven,” were collaborators in the work of democracy and served
it, even when they were found on the side of its adversaries, because they all
converged in putting into relief the natural, the non-inherited greatness, of
which our spirit is capable.—Emulation, which is the most powerful stimulus
among those which can overexcite vivacity of thought as well as the other human
activities, needs, at times, equality as a starting-point, in order to be
produced, and inequality, which gives the advantage to the most apt and the
best, as final object. Only a democratic
regime can reconcile, in its bosom, those two conditions of emulation, when it
does not degenerate into a flattening egalitarianism and limit itself to
considering a future equivalence of men through their ascension to the same
grade of culture as a beautiful idea of perfectibility.
Rationally conceived,
democracy always admits an imprescriptible aristocratic element, which consists
in establishing the superiority of the best, assuring it with the free consent
of those associated. Like aristocracies,
it consecrates the distinction of quality, but it resolves it in favor of truly
superior qualities—those of virtue, character, spirit—and, without pretending
to immobilize them in classes constituted apart from others, which maintain, in
their own favor, the execrable privilege of caste, it ceaselessly renews its ruling
aristocracy in the living fonts of the people, and it makes them accept it
through justice and love. In a like
manner, recognizing, in the selection and predominance of the greatest
endowments, a necessity of all progress, it excludes from that universal law of
life—in order to sanction it in the order of society—the effect of humiliation
and suffering that lies in the concurrences of nature and in those of the other
social organizations, the hard lot of the conquered. “The great law of natural selection”—Fouillée[1]
has luminously said—“will continue to be realized in the bosom of human
societies only when it is realized more and more by way of liberty.”—The odious
character of traditional aristocracies originated from their being unjust in
their foundation and oppressive, inasmuch as their authority was an
imposition. Today we know that there
exists no other legitimate limit for human equality than that which consists in
the dominion of intelligence and virtue, consented to by the liberty of
all. But we also know that it is
necessary that this limit exist in reality.—On the other hand, our Christian
conception of life teaches us that moral superiorities, which are a motive for
rights, are principally a motive for duties, and that every superior spirit has
duties towards the rest in equal proportion to how it exceeds them in the
capacity for realizing the good.
Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarianism—which causes so deep a furrow in what we
might call our modern literature of ideas—brought to its powerful
revindication of the rights that he considers implicit in human superiorities
an abominable, a reactionary spirit: seeing that, negating all brotherhood, all
piety, it places in the heart of the superman whom it deifies a satanic
belittling of the disinherited and the weak; and, with logical resolution, it,
in the end, comes to affirm that “society does not exist for itself, but rather
for its elect.”—It is not, certainly, this monstruous conception which could be
opposed, like a standard, to the false egalitarianism that aspires to the
flattening of all through a common vulgarity. Fortunately, as long as there
exists in the world the possibility of arranging two pieces of wood in the form
of a cross—that is to say, always—humanity will continue believing that love is
the foundation of every stable order and that hierarchical superiority in an
order ought to be nothing else but a superior capacity for love!
A fountain of inexhaustible
moral inspirations, a new science suggests to us, in order to clarify the laws
of life, how the democratic principle can be reconciled, in the organization of
human collectivities, with an aristarchy[2]
of morality and culture.—On the one hand—as Henri Bérenger once noted in a
sympathetic book[3]—the
affirmations of science contribute to sanctioning and fortifying the spirit of
democracy in society, revealing how great is the natural value of the
collective force; how great the greatness of the work of the small; how immense
the part of action reserved for the anonymous and obscure collaborator in any
manifestation of universal development.
It raises, no less than revelation, the dignity of the humble, this new
revelation, which attributes, in nature, to the work of the infinitely small,
to the labor of the nummulite and bryozoan[4] in
the obscure depth of the abyss, the construction of geological foundations; which
causes all the ascendent impulse of organic forms from the vibration of the
unformed and primitive cell; which manifests the powerful role that, in our psychical
life, it is necessary to attribute to the more unapparent and vaguer phenomena,
even to the fleeting perceptions of which we have no consciousness; and which,
arriving at sociology and history, restores to heroism, often denounced by the
crowds, the part that silence forbid it in the glory of the individual hero,
and it makes clear the slow accumulation of the investigations which, across
the centuries, in the shadow, in the workshop, or in the laboratory of
forgotten workers, prepare the deeds of genius.
But, at the same time that
it thus manifests the immortal efficacy of the collective force and dignifies
the participation of the unknown collaborators in the universal work, science
shows how, in the immense society of things and beings, hierarchical order is a
necessary condition of all progress; how the relations of dependence and of
subordination between the individual components of that society and between the
elements of the organization of the individual are a principle of life; and,
finally, how there is necessarily inherent in the universal law of imitation,
if it is set in relation to the perfecting of human societies, the presence, in
them, of living and influential models, which raise them up through the
progressive generalization of their superiority.
In order to show, now, how
both universal teachings of science can be translated into acts, being
reconciled in the organization and in the spirit of society, it is enough to
insist upon the conception of a noble, just democracy; of a democracy ruled by
the notion and sentiment of true human superiorities; of a democracy in which
supremacy of intelligence and virtue—the only limits for the meritorious
equivalence of men—receives its authority and its prestige from liberty and
descends upon the multitudes in a beneficial effusion of love.
At the same time that it
reconciles those two great results of the observation of the natural order, it
will realize, within a similar society—according to what Bérenger observes in
the same book of which I spoke to you—the harmony of the two historical
impulses that have communicated their essential characters to our civilization,
the ruling principles of its life.—From the spirit of Christianity is born,
effectively, the sentiment of equality, corrupted by a certain ascetic
belittling of spiritual selection and culture.
From the inheritance of the classical civilizations is born the feeling
of order, of hierarchy, and the religious respect for genius, corrupted by a
certain aristocratic disdain for the humble and the weak. The future will synthesize both suggestions
from the past into an immortal formula.
Democracy, meanwhile, will have definitively triumphed. And it, which, when it threatens with the
ignobility of the flattening razor, justifies the irate protests and the bitter
melancholy of those who believed that, through its triumph, every intellectual
distinction, every dream of art, every delicacy of life was sacrificed, will
have, even more than the old aristocracies, inviolable security for the cultivation
of the flowers of the soul, would wilt and perish in the atmosphere of
vulgarity and amid the impieties of mayhem!
Sources: José Enrique Rodó, Obras completas, ed. Emir Rodríguez
Monegal (Madrid: Águilar, 1957).
Nicolás Gómez-Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito (Girona: Atalanta, 2021).
(Confusingly, the name Scholia
to an Implicit Text is given both to Gómez-Dávila’s collected works and to
his first two-volume book; this volume contains all of Gómez-Dávila’s
aphoristic works, though all the passages I quoted are from that first two-volume
work. )
[1] Alfred
Jules Émile Fouillée (1838-1912), a French philosopher who strove to reconcile
metaphysical idealism and positivistic science.
[2]
Rodó is trying to distinguish aristocracy from aristarchy. Both are related to rule by the best (aristos),
but the second half of the names come from different Greek terms, kratos
and arche. Both can mean “rule,”
but the former has a greater sense of ruling by force, by “might” or “power”
(other translations of kratos), while the latter has more of a
connotation of exercising authority or jurisdiction or leadership.
[3]
Henri Bérenger (1867-1952) was a French senator for over thirty years
(1912-1945), as well as, briefly (1926-1927), the French ambassador to the
United States. He was also a prolific
author; Rodó is most likely referencing Bérenger’s 1895 book Intellectual
Aristocracy.
[4] The nummulite is a single-celled protozoan famous for its tiny, coiled shells, which the ancient Egyptians used for currency (hence the name nummulite comes from the Latin nummulus, “little coin”). A bryozoan is member of a phylum of aquatic, invertebrate animals. Rodó is using both as examples of tiny, ancient, simple organisms whose cumulative acts caused large effects.
Translation ©2023 Brandon P. Otto. Licensed via CC BY-NC. Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.
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