Self in the World

Connecting Life's Extremes

Keith Hart

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781800734210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

Eminent anthropologist Keith Hart draws on the humanities, popular culture and his own experiences to help readers explore their own place in history.

We each embark on two life journeys – one out into the world, the other inward to the self. With these journeys in mind, anthropologist, amateur economist and globetrotter Keith Hart reflects on a life of learning, sharing and remembering to offer readers the means of connecting life's extremes – individual and society, local and global, personal and impersonal dimensions of existence and explores what it is that makes us fully human.

"This is a work of great originality. Keith Hart has had an unorthodox academic career and it has liberated him in many ways from academic pieties. His background in African ethnography gives him a fascinating angle on all sorts of things, not least the possibility of a more African-influenced global future. The book is full of surprises and mind-shifting observations. I actually couldn't put it down."—Sherry B. Ortner, UCLA

From the introduction:
People have many sides, but I will focus here on two. Each of us is a biological organism with a historical personality that together make us a unique individual. But we cannot live outside society which shapes us in unfathomable ways. Human beings must learn to be self-reliant (not self-interested) in small and large ways: no-one will brush your teeth for you or save you from being run over while crossing the street. We each must also learn to belong to others, merging personal identity in a plethora of social relations and categories. Modern ideology insists that being individual and mutual is problematic. The culture of capitalist societies anticipates a conflict between them. Yet they are inseparable aspects of human nature.

Part I

ANCESTORS

Chapter 1

WRITING THE SELF

A Genealogy

Michel de Montaigne’s Self-Portrait

Montaigne and Shakespeare have often been identified as the first modern writers. All literature since them has explored their basic theme, the sense of being unsure of who you are.¹ Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) was a nobleman who lived in south-west France and sometimes held public office. He had the idea of writing about himself as ‘a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity’. He became the first modern writer. Montaigne wrote 107 essays of varying length, each on a named topic. These addressed big questions – his was a time of religious war. His book depicts an individual character, himself, his everyday life and deepest personal questions. Most writers, like me, are concerned with mental questions, but not Montaigne. We learn in detail about his bodily functions. After all, everyone has a body. The essays are a treatise on universal human nature told through disconnected fragments. In form they are not a treatise at all. Montaigne’s Essays are not an autobiography, but a self-portrait.² There is no overall narrative or retrospective view of his career as a whole, just parts. We learn nothing of his sixteen years as a jurist or of his four years as Bordeaux’s mayor.

What I chiefly portray is my cogitations, a shapeless subject that does not lend itself to expression in actions. . . My actions would tell more about fortune than about me. They bear witness to their own part, not to mine, unless it be by conjecture and without certainty.³

Philippe Desan believes that Montaigne’s persona as someone who has retreated into domestic life is misleading.⁴ He shows him as a politician finely attuned to the conflicts of his day, arguing that in the Essays he concealed his real intentions behind the façade of a humanist litterateur. I disagree. Montaigne was sometimes a politician and they often lack a private life. That is a good reason for him to explore his private life. In any case, this is the most personal book of philosophy ever written.

Montaigne claimed that his ‘was the only book of its kind in the world. Authors communicate with the people by some special extrinsic mark; I am the first to do so by my entire being, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian or a poet or a jurist’.⁵ As Craig Brush puts it, ‘His book raises the paean to the self, and suggests that becoming an essayist is the surest way to fulfil the potentiality innate in each self’.⁶

Montaigne always placed himself in the foreground and the Essays do reflect a coherent view of his self. But the man and his book are not the same. Each chapter has two levels: its ostensible topic and the author. The reader is a third party. Montaigne knew that once he let go of his book, readers would do with it whatever they liked. He embraced that possibility in his style and organization. Montaigne often addresses readers by the familiar tu. His tone is friendly and he is not a name dropper. Most of the public personages he mentions are anonymous.

Montaigne, apparently a modest humanist philosopher, set his personal observations and reflections against his reading of classical authors such as Plutarch. He relies heavily on anecdotes taken from ancient Greece and Rome. We read about great figures like Caesar and Pompey, but with no hint of hero worship. Montaigne treats them as equals, his familiars. This too reduces the gap between author and reader and encourages us to treat his book as a personal resource. He banks on us accepting his honesty and good faith. Rousseau thought the Essays were pioneering, but he ‘laughed at the false naivety of Montaigne who, while pretending to confess his faults, is very careful to give himself only loveable ones’. Brush takes Rousseau’s side here: ‘He does admit again and again to having been foolish, but his book is so far from being foolish that we find it somewhat hard to believe.’⁷ Rousseau’s reactionary opponents, starting with Voltaire, often focus on his faults. Montaigne seems to have escaped scot-free.

The Essays were long banned on the Continent, but the English were enthusiastic. Shakespeare was a contemporary who knew their first translator into English, Florio. Many have looked for Montaigne’s influence in his plays, the favourite being Hamlet. Shakespeare’s plays could allocate his contradictions to different characters and set them in action on the stage. The poet Alexander Pope noted of the Essays in his copy:

This is (in my Opinion) the very best Book for Information of Manners that has been writ; This Author says nothing but what everyone feels at the Heart.⁸

William Hazlitt based his own approach to writing essays on Montaigne. He and his sons made sure that the Victorians had access to him:

[Essayists], says Hazlitt, capture things as they really are rather than as they should be. Montaigne allowed everything to be what it was, including himself, and he knew how to look at things. An ideal essay. . . plays the whole game of human life over before us, and enables us to become agents [who] have to perform a part.⁹

Nietzsche based his Gay Science on Montaigne’s approach.¹⁰ The Essays’ fans include Diderot, Voltaire, Gibbon, Sand, Emerson and many others.

The affinity between the Essays and ethnography is obvious. But today’s anthropologists lack Montaigne’s vision of humanity. I side with Montaigne more than Rousseau and Brush on self-revelation. I prefer to teach students what pleases me. But I have included unflattering episodes here. My core ideas and practices have one source in a life that always involves reading a lot. My method is more historical than ethnographic. This book, I hope, is honestly written in good faith with my readers.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Two Exercises in Autobiography

Rousseau (1712–78)¹¹ had a purple patch in the early 1760s when he published books on politics, sexuality and education. All hell broke loose with the publication of the last one, Emile: On Education. Rousseau took refuge in Neuchatel, Switzerland. Its governor, George Keith, with David Hume’s help, found him a safe house in England. He wrote most of The Confessions there. It was published after his death.

I have entered upon a performance that is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself. . . I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues.¹²

We each have a big voice and a little voice. The first tells us that we are a hero, star, genius; the second says, you’re a fraud and they will soon find you out. This second voice keeps us sane, but without the first we would never attempt great things. Rousseau lacked a little voice here and was borderline mad. The English sojourn ended badly. He blamed Hume for a satirical letter published in France and England and signed by the ‘King of Prussia’. Horace Walpole later admitted to having been its author. The English demonized Rousseau as the author of the French Revolution.

He was allowed back to Paris if he never wrote about politics or religion. He made a poor living there from copying music scores. He was the first object of celebrity tourism and wrote one more beautiful book, Reveries of The Solitary Walker.¹³ This collection of ten essays has little of the strident egotism of The Confessions. They reveal deep self-knowledge, acute observation and even irony. The sixth walk deserves a place in the pantheon of discourse on the gift. On a regular weekend stroll, a crippled little boy addresses Rousseau by name and, touched, he gives him a sweet. The same thing happens next time and again. . . The spontaneous gift is by now expected and a burden. Jean-Jacques changes his favourite walk to avoid the boy. The seventh walk takes him to an Alpine wilderness:

I compared myself to those great explorers who discover a desert island, and said complacently to myself: ‘Doubtless I am the first mortal to set foot in this place.’. . . While I was preening myself on this notion, I heard not far off a certain clicking noise which sounded familiar. . . Surprised and intrigued, I got up, pushed through a thicket of undergrowth in the direction of the noise, and in a hollow twenty yards from the very place where I had thought to be the first person to tread, I saw a stocking mill.¹⁴

The little voice (and sanity) returns here. Emile reveals its author and has much more to teach us than The Confessions.¹⁵ The Reveries is a delightful book, a low-key memoir in essay form. It belongs with Montaigne’s Essays in style, content and humanity.¹⁶ But Rousseau shows his quirky side, as Montaigne does not.

Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography

Benjamin Franklin (1706–90)¹⁷ was celebrated as ‘the greatest man in the world’ during his lifetime. He was the youngest son of a Boston soap and candle maker with almost no formal education. He taught himself to read and write very well. At 17 he ran away to Philadelphia. There he became a successful tradesman, printer and journalist. He retired at 42 with a fortune large enough to support ‘Leisure during the rest of my life for Philosophical Studies and Amusements’.¹⁸ He entered public service and co-wrote the Declaration of Independence. He was lionized in Paris as American minister to France and took part in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Franklin unusually attributed his business success to his love of reading and writing.¹⁹ He was a prolific inventor. He synthesized electricity out of the fragments available then. He wrote on ‘agriculture, chess, military strategy, literary style, silkworms, pickled sturgeon, ice boats, mastodon teeth, garters and the balance of trade’.²⁰ To call him a polymath doesn’t capture it. He was noted for his wit. Franklin travelled a lot as the revolution’s foreign spokesman.

The Autobiography was written in instalments at home and abroad: the first section in England when he was 65, the second in France thirteen y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Part I. Ancestors
• Part II. Self
• Part III. World
• Part IV. Lifelong Learning
• Afterword
• Appendix. Hart Papers Online (By Year)
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index