Finding a Form (34 page)

Narratives like the story of Gyges and his ring imperceptibly
seduce their listeners, because they always solicit our participation: not for a naive or complacent identification with the protagonists necessarily (where each of us is Gyges, Eve or Adam, maybe God), or even with the rich raciness of their roles (where each of us takes the queen’s place in bed, or the serpent’s in the tree), but by an implication that extends to the idea of man in general; so even if I say to myself: “I wouldn’t go down in that gorge—no way—or sneak that ring from that dead man’s finger—not me—and I’m too good a guy, basically, to be bought by a little loose change, free flesh, or a position of power,” nevertheless (and this is Glaucon’s expectation), I can believe everybody else would; so when Glaucon suggests we place one such ring on the finger of a plainly unjust man, who has already flouted society’s conventions without its aid, and then another on the finger of a man who has always behaved like a good worker bee, a diligent drone, my mind moves easily along the track which has been greased for it to the right rhetorical conclusion: beneath clothes, cosmetics, and conventions, where we confront the naked soul, there is no difference to be discerned between the sinner and the saint, both souls are so stained and opaque, except that the saint, in addition to his other vices, is a successful hypocrite.

The story of that state of nature, like narratives in general, prefers to take us from our present place and time to another, earlier, indeed original, condition, and it plays continually upon the differences. In a way, we always stand at the story’s end. It moves toward us as Adam’s does, explaining our life as it recounts his, justifying our miseries with his mistakes. Gyges is the dishonest heart in Everyman. Beneath his simple shepherd’s garb and sunburned grizzle is a monster, pitiless and greedy, which only the shine of the public’s gaze, the weight of their opinions, the force of their arms, keeps immobile, cold as the corpse that got hid in the horse that was buried in a chasm which had stayed a secret even to the earth.

The most eloquent description of the state of nature, as well as the most plausible, I think, is that of Thomas Hobbes. His, however, is not given to us in narrative, but in a description. Locke and Rousseau have their own versions, both palpably implausible, but the first thing to note, before admiring Hobbes’s version, is that all of these arguments, as arguments, are the same. They are the same because they have the same form. For a structuralist, at least, that is sufficient to establish an identity.

To understand what it means to “have the same form,” let us examine a pair of children’s board games, Winnie-the-Pooh and Treasure Island. Both are played on pasteboard fields designed to resemble their respective regions of the world: Pooh’s has a stream and a bridge, woods, a house, a few fields, while the pirate realm is represented by seas and lagoons, an island, palm trees, ravines, lookout points, some jungle, a stretch of castaway beach, and so on. Through these landscapes, like a road which resembles a relaxed, even tangled, dressmaker’s tape, runs a bright, clearly segmented path. Upon this path, counters of various colors and kinds are placed (a button will do if a counter is lost). These pieces stand for the characters that have been taken from their respective stories: Eeyore, Tigger, and Pooh in one set; Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, and Ben Gunn in the other. There will be some point, probably a circle, marked
START
, and another, containing a honey pot or a chest of treasure, marked
END
. The players select their pieces (perhaps identifying with the characters and their roles in the original story). We are ready. Who shall go first? who shall roll the dice or spin the first spin?

The word “counter” is correctly chosen, because that’s what we do when we play these games: we roll dice and add the number that turns up to the sum we have already amassed. This sum is dramatically displayed by the distance a piece has gone on the trail to the treasure; perhaps it has reached Coffin Cave just ahead of
Long John Silver, who, after all, has a wooden leg and ought to be lagging behind. A little subtraction (dare I say?) adds a bit of spice to the contest, or a player may be made to lose a turn when his piece falls into the Huffalump pit or is captured by cannibals. Embellishments or descriptive alterations do not make the slightest difference to the form: imagine, instead, a racetrack with six noble steeds ready to run as fast as the spinner will point them, neck and neck along competing columns of numbers—how exciting—six plus three plus two plus four plus five, galloping as fast as your favorite cliché, their manes streaming, their jockeys digging in their heels and using the whip, a fortune bet on the outcome, maybe the mortgages on several properties from the Monopoly board. I can keep a record of losses and victories—wins, places, shows—fast track or slow—rider names, weights, and numbers—farms and owners—dams and sires—positions in the starting gate. I can call the race in an excited voice. I can toast the victor and drop around his neck a horseshoe cut from colored paper. Still, a sum of only seven will lose to eleven every time, no matter what the horse is called, or the color of the jockey’s silks. As far as the form goes, we might as well sit at a bar and roll dice for drinks. Even an ancient and much more complex game like pachisi, played with cowrie shells, states its nature in its name, which represents the game’s highest throw: the number twenty-five.

Aristotle was the first to perceive clearly how statements became logically woven together in an argument. Nothing is more linear than the syllogism, or more like narrative in its nature. Aristotle saw how assertions (in his Greek) could be reduced to four subject/predicate forms (all, none, some, and not), and how, with the help of a shrewdly placed and chosen middle term, such shapes could be validly linked to a conclusion. The discovery (one of the more momentous in the history of mankind’s mind) required us to discard content and concentrate on structure, to remember, in short, that Winnie-the-Pooh and Treasure Island are the same game. Nevertheless, even students of logic are regularly seduced by arguments in striking costumes and propositions wearing beguiling perfume. The syllogism that runs “Movie stars lead glamorous lives,
but glamorous lives don’t last, so stars tend to twinkle once and die twice, the glamour going dead before they do,” is more fascinating to most people than a simple old wheeze like “All men are mortal, some movie stars are men, so some movie stars are mortal”—an argument whose only interest is its caution.

Aristotle called the middle term the “cause” of the conclusion, and it was natural enough to identify the relation of premises to conclusion in an argument with the relation of cause to effect in physics. Thus the syllogism borrowed the idea of causality from the material world while the material world drew upon logic for the concept of necessary connection. The regress of events that threatened to be infinite, and therefore had to be terminated in a Prime Mover, Big Bang, or lightninglike
logos
called God, was the same sort of regress that endangered the syllogism with indeterminacy if every premise had in turn to have been the conclusion of some prior argument, and if there were no first principles or axioms or ultimate ideas.

The story of the state of nature, like any argument, pays off in the coins which have been fed into it. Its central process is one of pretended purification. Like a ship’s hull, history must be scraped clean of encrustation—culturation—before its real shape can be appreciated. Since one cannot do this in fact, one must do it in one’s head, in exemplary tales like that of Adam and Eve, or Gyges and his ring.

For John Locke the state of nature was essentially a state of peace; it was a fragile but genuine paradise. However, conflicts would inevitably arise, even between people of good will when their points of view sincerely contradicted and their interests genuinely clashed. If there were no just way of mediating these conflicts, a condition of peace would soon enough become a condition of war. Political structures are like blocks beneath the wheels of a truck parked on a steep slope. On the other hand, the snake in Rousseau’s garden was society itself. The devil destroys the truth by organizing it. These organizations then multiply desires, create social classes, and foment disappointment, resentment, and strife.

Hobbes placed a different value on the natural condition, and
belongs, with Freud, securely in Gyges’s camp. The phrase “every man against every man” tolls through his text like a dirge.

Hobbes carries the dot-matrix theory of society back to its atomistic source. The leviathan he calls the State is built up like a photographic image. Each man is a dot, a body in motion. Each man is driven, willy-nilly, by desires, and everywhere seeks their satisfaction. The power over available means, which men need to
dampen those drives, will be given up only when they realize the futility of going it alone. Civilization is therefore based upon the mutual surrender of rights, the ceding of individual sovereignty. Freud would say that it depends upon the sublimation of instincts.

So we begin our story in a state of war, where every man has a right to everything, and nothing is unjust because nothing is just, and we end it by establishing a power which is absolutely sovereign, and therefore in a state of peace. Narrative beginnings are necessarily unstable, whereas the endings of most every narrative are calm, resolved, steady.

The historical reality of the state of nature has always been a problem, and even a rationalist like Hobbes is tempted, now and then, by the idea of an actual and absolute starting point, just as others are seduced by utopian dreams—the narrative’s ultimate, and triumphant, ending.

When beginnings are described in absolute and complete terms, it becomes difficult to find a fatal flaw or, amid the war of all, the small reign of reason, which can move matters off the mark. When Aristophanes said that we were once round and therefore that we
thought
we were perfect, he avoided the problem, since, clearly, we were not what we thought, and obviously full of false pride, and consequently in the wrong, and justly punished by our division; but we ought to have no such misapprehensions about any paradise that is truly a peaceable kingdom. Is a garden perfect if it may be improved by cutting down one tree? Paradise is a theological puzzle the way the Big Bang is a theoretical one. Why fall at all? Just in
order to have a story? What made the Big Bang go boom? Do we begin with an instability raised to its highest power and end with a tranquillity so smoothly even everywhere energy cannot pilot-light a stove? If square one is impure, why call it square one? Are there going to be handicaps imposed before the race is run? Adam obeyed his wife, not God, but this result could scarcely have been a surprise. On the other hand, if square one is without blemish, why budge? Hobbes tries to have his cake remain as whole and untasted as when first baked, while eating it bit by bite from frost to crumb, but such a desire cannot be satisfied inside consistency.

What experience confirms (by counting our locks, our looks, our fears) is that society is at war with itself, as Rousseau suggested, not that nature necessarily is. But if nature is as warlike as Hobbes insists, we shall be as unable to release ourselves from its grip as we shall be powerless to prevent peace should we ever reach our absolute sovereign’s final society.