Carlo Ginzburg Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance

The tension between natural law and history—the theme of this series of
lectures1—has come down to us, as so many other ideas, from the ancient
Greeks. In a most famous passage of his Rhetoric (1373b) Aristotle put it in
this way:
Justice and injustice have been defined in reference to laws and
persons in two ways. Now there are two kinds of laws, particular
and general. By particular laws I mean those established by each
people in reference to themselves, which again are divided into
written and unwritten; by general laws I mean those based upon
nature ( ` ). In fact, there is a general idea of just and unjust
in accordance with nature, as all men in a manner divine, even if
there is neither communication nor agreement between them. This
is what Antigone in Sophocles evidently means, when she declares
that it is just, though forbidden, to bury Polynices, as being
naturally just: ‘For neither today nor yesterday, but from all
eternity, these statutes live and no man knoweth whence they
came.’2
Let us briefly recall the context of these words. Aristotle is analysing the
different parts of rhetoric: deliberative, forensic, epideictic (that is,
oratory which deals with praise or blame). The opposition between
written particular law, on the one hand, and unwritten general law, on the
other, takes place within the section on forensic rhetoric. Aristotle does
‘Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’ will be
published in Olwen Hufton, ed., Historical Change and Human Rights: The Oxford
Amnesty Lectures 1994, Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers Inc.,
December 1994. It is reprinted by arrangement with the publisher.
1 I am very grateful to Jean-Christophe Curelop, who polished my English; to
Pier Cesare Bori, Alberto Gajano, Samuel R. Gilbert, Stefano Levi della Torre,
Francesco Orlando, Adriano Prosperi, who helped my research; to Perry
Anderson for his comments.
2 Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, Loeb Classical Library, p. 139ff. The various
perceptions of Antigone, from Aristotle to our contemporaries, have been
analysed by G. Steiner, Antigones, Oxford 1986.
107
not bother to demonstrate the existence of unwritten general law: he takes
it as natural, and therefore self-evident.3
Aristotle seems to suggest that what is ‘based upon nature ( ` )’ is
unrelated to specific times and places. But some passages of the second
book of Rhetoric suggest a different view. Aristotle is examining in detail
the different emotions used by the orator to convince his audience. Pity,
for intance (1386a):
The persons men pity are those whom they know, provided they
are not too closely connected with them; for if they are, they feel the
same as if they themselves were likely to suffer. (. . .) The terrible is
different from the pitiable (
` `



 
 ), for it
drives out pity, and often serves to produce the opposing feeling.
Further, the nearness of the terrible makes men pity. Men also pity
those who resemble them in age, character, habits, position, or
family; for all such relations make a man more likely to think that
their misfortune may befall him as well. For, in general, here also we
may conclude that all that men fear in regard to themselves excites
their pity when others are the victims. And since sufferings are
pitiable when they appear close at hand, while those that are past ten
thousand years backwards or forwards, either do not excite pity at
all or only in a less degree, because men neither expect the one nor
remember the other, it follows that those who contribute to the
effect by gestures, voices, dress, and dramatic action generally, are
more pitiable; for they make the evil appear close at hand, setting it
before our eyes as either future or past. And disasters that have just
happened or are soon about to happen excite more pity for the same
reason.
We come across the same argument in the section about envy. People
‘envy those who are near them in time, place, age, and reputation, whence
it was said “Kinship knows how to envy also”; and those with whom they
are in rivalry, who are those just spoken of; for no man tries to rival those
who lived ten thousand years ago, or are about to be born, or are already
dead; nor those who live near the Pillars of Hercules; nor those who, in his
own opinion or in that of others, are either far inferior or superior to
him . . .’4
In Aristotle’s view the emotions analysed in the second book of Rhetoric
are undoubtedly based upon nature ( ` ). But he submitted them,
,
3 As a footnote I would like to point out that the 1926 translation from the Loeb
Classical Library I just quoted—‘As all men in a manner divine . . . no man
knoweth’—has today a sexist nuance which is absent in the Greek original texts.
This is not a minor detail, in so far as both Sophocles and Aristotle use neuter
terms (
’
, nob0dy; ´ , all) in passages ascribed, respectively, to a feminine
character, Antigone, or meant to introduce the same feminine character as a
prominent example. Natural law, as those neuter terms emphasize, embraces both
men and women. Antigone, therefore, speaks the voice of generality; on the
contrary, the written (and, we may add, masculine) law in the name of which
Creontes forbids the burial of Polynices, is, in Aristotle’s words, a ‘particular law’
(
´
`
` ` ´

).
4 Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, p. 227ff.
108
as we would say today, to specific historical and geographical limitations.
In Plato’s mythical account the kingdom of Atlantis had flourished nine
thousand years before Solon. Aristotle uses an even larger figure—‘ten
thousand years’ (

)—in order to suggest a time, either past or
future, so remote as to prevent us from identifying, either in a positive or
in a negative way, with the emotions of other human beings. The allusion
to the Pillars of Hercules conveys similar implications: the lands and seas
beyond the border of the Mediterranean were supposed to be inhabited by
savages or monsters, according to legendary traditions which later on
were projected unto the disciple of Aristotle, Alexander the Great.5
But Aristotle’s remarks on the chronological and geographical limits of
pity and envy cannot be referred to an opposition between reality and
myth. Mythical characters could also trigger powerful emotions,
especially on stage. In his Poetics Aristotle remarks that tragedy focuses on
‘incidents arousing fear and pity’ (
^ ^ . . .
) (1452b). He specifies them in these terms: ‘Such must
necessarily be the actions of friends to each other or of enemies or of
people that are neither. Now if an enemy does it to an enemy, there is
nothing pitiable either in the deed or the intention, except so far as the
actual calamity goes. Nor would there be if they were neither friends nor
enemies. But when these calamities happen among friends, when for
instance brother kills brother, or son father, or mother son, or son
mother—either kills or intends to kill, or does something of the kind, that
is what we must look for (1453b).6
Fratelli, coltelli; Lontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuore. These two Italian
proverbs (meaning, respectively: ‘Brothers, knives’; ‘Out of sight, out of
mind’) graphically convey the contradictory implications stressed by
Aristotle both in his Poetics and in his Rhetoric. If extreme distance leads to
indifference, extreme closeness can lead either to pity or to destructive
rivalry. This ambivalence, which found a powerful expression on the
Greek stage, was part of everyday experience in the face-to-face society in
which Aristotle lived.
The Morality of the Blind
I will examine now a very different text, written two thousand years later
by Diderot: Entretien d’un père avec ses enfants, ou du danger de se mettre audessus
des lois (‘Conversation of a Father with His Children, or the Danger
of Putting Oneself above the Laws’) first published in 1773.7
In a broken, abrupt style inspired by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy Diderot
describes a conversation which took place in his father’s house, during a
peaceful winter evening. People come and go, telling anecdotes and
memories which revolve around a single issue, the relationship between
written law and moral principles: that is, the ‘particular’ and the ‘general’
law, as Aristotle would have said, embodied by Diderot the father and
,
5 See P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘L’Atlantide et les nations’, in La Démocratie grecque vue
d’ailleurs, Paris 1990, p. 139ff.
6 Aristotle, The Poetics. . . . , Loeb Classical Library, London 1965, pp. 45, 51.
7 D. Diderot, Oeuvres, ed. A. Billy, Paris 1951, pp. 759–81.
109
Diderot the son respectively.8 Are we entitled to violate the written law in
order to protect the general principles of morality? Is a doctor allowed to
refuse to heal a wounded criminal? Is it morally legitimate to destroy an
unjust will which would disinherit a group of poor people for the
exclusive benefit of a selfish rich man? In reworking the text of the
Entretien which had appeared in 1773, Diderot added a rather ill-woven
digression. A hatter comes to tell his story. He had taken care of his sick
wife for eighteen years; after her death, having no money left, he had
taken his wife’s dowry, which according to the law should have gone
instead to her relatives; was he right or wrong? A debate follows. Diderot
the father insists that the hatter should give back the money he had illicitly
taken for himself.
The hatter replied brusquely:
‘No, Monsieur, I shall go away, I shall go to Geneva.’
‘And you expect to leave your remorse behind?’
‘I don’t know; but I shall go to Geneva.’
‘Go wherever you choose, conscience will infallibly follow you.’
‘We agreed,’ Diderot writes, ‘that perhaps distance in space or time
weakened all feelings and all sorts of guilty conscience, even of crime. The
assassin, removed to the shores of China, can no longer see the corpse
which he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine. Remorse springs perhaps
less from horror of oneself than from fear of others; less from shame at
what one has done than from the blame and punishment it would bring if
it were found out. . .’9
In his Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage Diderot will argue that sexuality,
being a natural activity, should be exempt from any sort of moral or
juridical constraint. In the Conversation of a Father with His Children he
seems to suggest the same about the act of killing another human being.
The starting point of Diderot’s shocking remark that ‘the distance in
space and time weaken[s] all feelings’ looks like a literal echo of the
passage from Aristotle’s Rhetoric I quoted before; but it is Aristotle
pushed to an extreme. This should not surprise us. ‘Aristotle,’ Diderot
wrote in an earlier piece of his, the Discourse on Dramatic Poetry (1758), ‘is a
philosopher who proceeds in an orderly way, by etablishing some general
principles and leaving to others the task of drawing their consequences
and applications.’10 Among these consequences I would include the
8 See W.E. Edmiston, Diderot and the Family. A Conflict of Nature and Law,
Saratoga, Calif. 1985, p. 75ff.
9 D. Diderot, ‘Conversation of a Father with His Children’, This is not a Story and
Other Writings, Columbia, Missouri 1991, p. 143; Oeuvres, p. 772: ‘Le chapelier
partit; sa réponse bizarre devint le sujet de l’entretien. On convint que peut-être la
distance des lieux et du temps affaiblissait plus ou moins tous les sentiments, toutes
les sortes de conscience, même celle du crime. L’assassin, transporté sur le rivage
de la Chine, est trop loin pour apercevoir le cadavre qu’il a laissé sanglant sur les
bords de la Seine. Le remords naît peut-être moins de l’horreur de soi que de la
crainte des autres; moins de la honte de l’action que du blâme et du chatiment qui
la suivraient s’il arrivait qu’on la decouvrit . . .’
10 D. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, ed. P. Vernière, Paris 1988, p. 206: ‘Aristote est
un philosophe qui marche avec ordre, qui établit des principes généraux, et qui en
laisse les conséquences à tirer, et les applications à faire.’
110
phosis of Aristotle’s lack of pity, due to the ‘distance in space and time’,
into the presumable lack of remorse of Diderot’s murderer, due to the
same reasons. Distant, non-communicating human beings turn into a
split self: the theme which inspired two among Diderot’s most powerful
pieces, Rameau’s Nephew and The Paradox of Acting.
This inward shift is projected into a geographical scene—from France to
China—which is immensely larger than Aristotle’s Mediterranean world.
But why China? The mention of China in the framework of a fictitious
moral case has suggested the possibility that Diderot took his example
from a Jesuit treatise on casuistry.11 This hypothesis, although undemonstrated
so far, is intriguing. Whatever the source of the story may be,
Diderot took it as a starting point for a moral experiment comparable to
the one he had made twenty years before in his Lettre sur les aveugles, à
l’usage de ceux qui voient (‘Letter on the Blind, for the Use of Those Who
See’):
Since the blind are affected by none of the external demonstrations
that awaken pity and ideas of grief in ourselves, with the sole
exception of vocal complaints, I suspect them of being, in general,
unfeeling toward their fellow men. What difference is there to a
blind person between a man urinating and a man bleeding to death
without speaking? Do we ourselves not cease to feel compassion
when distance or the smallness of the object produces the same
effect on us as lack of sight does on the blind? Thus do all our virtues
depend on the way of apprehending things and on the degree to
which external objects affect us! I feel quite sure that were it not for
fear of punishment, many people would have fewer qualms at
killing a man who was far enough away to appear no larger than a
swallow than in butchering a steer with their own hands. And if we
feel compassion for a horse in pain though we can crush an ant
without a second thought, are these actions not governed by the
same principle?12
There is clearly an analogy between the geographical distance of France
and China, on the one hand, and the sensorial deprivation of the blind, on
the other.13 The lack of humanity and compassion which, in Diderot’s
11 However, Diderot’s reference to a ‘text’ (‘ce texte épuisé’, p. 742) does not
necessarily refer to a written text: see p. 817 (‘Lettre sur les aveugles’).
12 Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed. L.G. Crocker, trans. D. Coltman, London 1966,
p. 17; D. Diderot, ‘Lettre sur les aveugles’, Oeuvres. p. 820: ‘Comme de toutes les
démonstrations extérieures qui reveillent en nous la commisération et les idées de
la douleur, les aveugles ne sont affectés que par la plainte, je les soupçonne, en
général, d’inhumanité. Quelle différence y a-t-il pour un aveugle, entre un homme
qui urine et un homme, qui, sans se plaindre, verse son sang? Nous-mêmes, ne
cessons-nous pas de compatir lorsque la distance ou la petitesse des objets produit
le même effet sur nous que la privation de la vue sur les aveugles? tant nos vertus
dépendent de notre manière de sentir et du degré auquel les chose extérieures nous
affectent! Aussi je ne doute point que, sans la crainte du châtiment, bien de gens
n’eussent moins de peine à tuer un homme à une distance où il ne le verraient gros
que comme un hirondelle, qu’à égorger un boeuf de leurs mains. Si nous avons de
la compassion pour un cheval qui souffre, et si nous écrasons une fourmi sans
aucune scrupule, n’est-ce pas le même principe qui nous détermine?’
13 See the insightful remarks of F. Venturi, Jeunesse de Diderot, Paris 1939, pp. 142–
67, especially 163–6.
111
view, is the outcome of both situations, refutes the alleged eternal
character of morality. ‘Ah, madame! How different is the morality of the
blind from ours!’14 says Diderot to Madame de Puisieux, the addressee of
the Letter on the Blind. According to Diderot, morality is a result of specific
circumstances and constraints, physical as well as historical. The same
crucial words, crainte and châtiment, ‘fear’ and ‘punishment’, surface again,
after twenty years, to explain the lack of remorse of both the hypothetical
murderer leaving Paris for China and the person who would kill a man
from a distance, when he would look no larger than a swallow. But this
analogy, through a sudden twist, typical of Diderot’s way of reasoning,
leads to a new theme, implying a different kind of displacement: our
attitude towards animals, Diderot says, is also affected by our perception
of size and distance. He does not spell out the consequences of this
seemingly innocent principle. They are of course ambiguous. Should we
extend to ants the compassion we feel for a suffering horse? Or should we,
on the contrary, extend to horses and human beings the lack of
compassion that we, human beings, have for ants?
The former conclusion was certainly much more consistent with
Diderot’s emphasis on passions and sensibility—‘that disposition,’ he
wrote in an obvious autobiographical mood, ‘which accompanies organic
weakness, which follows on easy affection of the diaphragm, on vivacity
of imagination, on delicacy of nerves, which inclines one to being
compassionate, to being horrified, to admiration, to fear, to being upset,
to tears’ and so on and so forth.15 But the alternative, implying the
projection on a cosmic scale of our disregard for insects’ sufferings, was
made explicit by one eighteenth-century reader. As Franco Venturi, the
great historian of the European Enlightenment, perceptively noticed in
his book Jeunesse de Diderot, the arguments against religion displayed in the
Letter on the Blind had a remarkable impact on Sade.16 In fact, I would
suggest that the latter’s philosophy would have been inconceivable
without Diderot’s Letter on the Blind.17 Here is the Marquis de Sade,
arguing the legitimacy of murder in his Philosophy in the Bedroom:
What is a man? and what difference is there between him and other
plants, between him and all the other animals of the world? None,
obviously. Fortuitously placed, like them, upon this globe, he is
born like them; like them, he reproduces, rises and falls; like them
he arrives at old age and sinks like them into nothingness at the
close of the life span Nature assigns each species of animal, in
accordance with his organic construction. Since the parallels are so
14 D. Diderot, Oeuvres, p. 820: ‘Ah, madame! que la morale des aveugles est
differente de la nôtre!’
15 D. Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. W.H. Pollock, New York 1963, p. 43;
Diderot, ‘Paradoxe sur le comedien’, Oeuvres, p. 1032: ‘La sensibilité, cette
disposition compagne de la faiblesse des organes, suite de la mobilité du diaphragme,
de la vivacité de l’imagination, de la delicatesse des nerfs, qui incline a
compatir, à frissonner, à admirer, à craindre, à se troubler, à pleurer’ etc.
16 F. Venturi, Jeunesse de Diderot. pp. 159–60.
17 In commenting Diderot’s remark that in a blind man’s perception a urinating
and a bleeding man are alike, Venturi mentions ‘the characteristic cruelty which is
often associated to the eighteenth-century vision of Nature’ (Jeunesse de Diderot,
p. 165).
112
exact that the inquiring eye of philosophy is absolutely unable to
perceive any grounds for discrimination, there is then just as much
evil in killing animals as men, or just as little, and whatever be the
distinctions we make, they will be found to stem from our pride’s
prejudice, than which, unhappily, nothing is more absurd. (. . .) If
Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is
one of her laws. (. . .) Little animals are formed immediately a large
animal expires and these little animals’ lives are simply one of the
necessary effects determined by the large animals’ temporary sleep.
Given this, will you dare suggest that one pleases Nature more than
another?18
The Sentimental Conscience
Sade has sometimes been considered as the extreme but logical outcome
of the Enlightenment—an argument which had been already suggested in
a polemical article by Charles de Pougens, the reactionary writer,
published in 1801.19 But for the intellectual and political champions of the
Restoration Diderot was a much more obvious target than Sade. In The
Genius of Christianity, Alphonse de Chateaubriand’s European bestseller,
the story about the murderer who had left Europe for China re-emerged
again, taking a new shape. ‘The distance of space and time weaken[s] all
feelings and all sorts of guilty conscience, even crime’—something which
does not exist, Diderot had written, if there is no fear of punishment.
These very words triggered Chateaubriand’s virtuous indignation:
Conscience! is it possible that thou cannot be but a phantom of the
imagination, or the fear of the punishment of men? I ask my own
heart, I put to myself this question: ‘If thou couldst by a mere wish
kill a fellow-creature in China, and inherit his fortune in Europe,
with the supernatural conviction that the fact would never be
known, wouldst thou consent to form such a wish?’ In vain do I
exaggerate my indigence; in vain do I attempt to extenuate the
murder, by supposing that through the effect of my wish the
Chinese expires instantaneouly and without pain; that, had he even
died of a natural death, his property, from the situation of his
affairs, would have been lost to the state; in vain do I figure to
myself this stranger overwhelmed with disease and affliction; in
vain do I urge that to him death is a blessing, that he himself desires
it, that he has but a moment longer to live; in spite of all my useless
subterfuges, I hear a voice in the recesses of my soul, protesting so
loudly against the mere idea of such supposition, that I cannot for
one moment doubt the reality of conscience.20
18 The Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and other Writings, New
York 1965, pp. 329–31.
19 See the passage quoted by M. Delon in his introduction to Sade, Oeuvres, Paris
1990, p. 24.
20 A. de Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, English transl. Baltimore 1857,
pp. 187–8; F.A. de Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme, ou beautés de la religion
chrétienne, Lyon 1809, vol. I, pp. 272–3: ‘O conscience! ne serais-tu qu’un fantôme
113
Chateaubriand is obviously reacting against Diderot’s texts about the
murderer fleeing to China and those who would easily kill a human being
from a distance. By mixing them, Chateaubriand created a new story: the
victim is a Chinese; the murderer, a European; a reason for the murder—
financial gain—is mentioned. In this new version the story became
famous, albeit under a false attribution to Rousseau. The mistake goes
back to Balzac.21 In Le Père Goriot Rastignac spends a night in considering
the possibility of making a rich marriage which would involve him, at
least indirectly, in a murder. Then he meets his friend Bianchon at the
Luxembourg Gardens.
‘I’m being tortured by evil thoughts.’ [Rastignac says, adding:]
‘Have you read Rousseau?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what
he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese
mandarin, without leaving Paris, just by an act of will?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then?’
‘Oh, I’m on my thirty-third mandarin.’
‘Don’t joke about it. Come, if it were proved to you that the thing
was possible and that all you’d need to do would be nod your head,
would you do it?’
‘Is your mandarin very old? Oh, well, young or old, healthy or
paralytic, good Lord . . . Oh, the devil! Well, no.’22
de l’imagination, ou la peur des châtimens des hommes? Je m’interroge; je me fais
cette question. “Si tu pouvais, par un seul désir, tuer un homme â la Chine, et
hériter de sa fortune en Europe, avec la conviction surnaturelle qu’on n’en saurait
jamais rien, consentirais-tu à former ce désir?” J’ai beau m’exagerer mon
indigence; j’ai beau vouloir atténuer cet homicide, en supposant que, par mon
souhait, le Chinois meurt tout-à-coup sans douleur, qu’il n’a point d’héritier, que
même à sa mort, ses biens seront perdus pour l’état; j’ai beau me figurer cet
étranger comme accablé de maladies et de chagrins, j’ai beau me dire que la mort
est un bien pour lui, qu’il l’appelle lui-même, qu’il n’a plus qu’un instant à vivre;
malgré mes vains subterfuges, j’entends au fond de mon coeur une voix qui crie si
fortement contre la seule pensée d’une telle supposition, que je ne puis douter un
instant de la réalité de la conscience.’
21 The connection between Balzac and Chateaubriand was first pointed out by P.
Rönai, ‘Tuer le mandarin, Revue de littérature comparée, vol. 10 (1930), pp. 520–3.
Notwithstanding its subtitle, the essay by L.W. Keates, ‘Mysterious Miraculous
Mandarin. Origins, Literary Paternity, Implications in Ethics’, Revue de littérature
comparée, vol. 40 (1966), pp. 497–525, does not deal with the eighteenth-century
precedents. The relevance of the two Diderot passages for the later developments
of the theme is rejected by A. Coimbra Martins, ‘O Mandarim assassinado’,
Ensaios Queirosianos, Lisbon 1967, pp. 11–266, 381–3, 387–95, explicitly on pp. 27–
8. See also R. Trousson, Balzac disciple et juge de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Geneva 1983,
p. 243 and n. 11.
22 H. de Balzac, Père Goriot, trans. E.K. Brown, New York 1950, p. 139. Le Père
Goriot, Paris 1963, pp. 154–5: ‘Je suis tourmenté par des mauvaises idées.’ (. . .)
‘As-tu lu Rousseau?’ ‘Oui.’ ‘Te souviens-tu de ce passage où il demande à son
lecteur ce qu’il ferait au cas où il pourrait s’enrichir en tuant à la Chine par sa seule
volonté un vieux mandarin, sans bouger de Paris?’ ‘Qui.’ ‘Eh bien?’ ‘Bah! Je suis à
mon trente-troisième mandarin.’ ‘Ne plaisante pas. Allons, s’il était prouvé que la
chose est possible et qu’il te suffit d’un signe de tête, le ferais-tu?’ ‘Est-il bien vieux,
114
Indifference and Complicity
The mandarin parable anticipates the development of Rastignac’s
character. Balzac wants to show that in bourgeois society it is difficult to
observe moral obligations, including the most basic ones. The chain of
relations in which we are all involved can make us at least indirectly
responsible for a crime. Some years later, in Modeste Mignon, Balzac again
used a mandarin to make a similar point: ‘If at this moment,’ the poet
Canalis says, ‘the most important mandarin in China is closing his eyes
and putting the Empire into mourning, does that grieve you deeply? In
India the English are killing thousands of men as good as we are; and at
this moment, as I speak, the most charming woman is there being burnt—
but you have had coffee for breakfast all the same?’23 In a world dominated
by the cruelties of backwardness and the cruelties of imperialism, moral
indifference already implies a form of complicity.
On the contrary, the resistance of Rastignac’s friend to the idea of killing
an unknown Chinese mandarin can be considered as an implicit
endorsement of the existence of ‘a general idea of just and unjust in
accordance with nature’—as Aristotle put it. But the emergence of a
worldwide economic system had already turned the possibility of a
financial gain, involving much longer distances than Aristotle had
imagined even in his wildest flight of fantasy, into a reality. The
possibility of such a connection was perceived a long time ago. ‘A West-
India merchant will tell you, that he is not without concern about what
passes in Jamaica,’ David Hume remarked in a section of his Treatise of
Human Nature placed under the title ‘Of Contiguity and Distance in Space
and Time’.24 As we will see, Hume’s subtle remarks on this topic ignored
the moral and juridical implications of it. This silence is not easily missed
today. We should have become aware that somebody’s financial gains can
be related, more or less directly, to the distress of distant human beings,
thrown into poverty, starvation, and even death. But the economy is only
one of the possibilities of affecting other people’s lives from a distance
which progress has given us. In the most widespread version of the story
the Chinese mandarin can be killed simply by pressing a button: a detail
which is more consistent with modern warfare than with the traditional
attribution of the story to Rousseau.25 Airplanes and missiles have proved
le mandarin? Mais, bah! jeune ou vieux, paralytique ou bien portant, ma foi . . .
Diantre! Eh bien, non.’ (See also p. 174.) On the erroneous attribution to
Rousseau see A. Coimbra Martins, ‘O Mandarim assassinado’.
23 H. de Balzac, Modeste Mignon and Other Stories. trans. C. Bell, Philadelphia 1898,
p. 144; Modeste Mignon. La Comédie humaine vol. I, Paris 1976, p. 593: ‘En ce
moment, le mandarin le plus utile à la Chine tourne l’oeil en dedans et met l’empire
en deuil, cela vous fait-il beaucoup de chagrin? Les Anglais tuent dans l’Inde des
milliers de gens qui nous valent, et l’on y brûle, à la minute où je vous parle, la
femme la plus ravissante; mais vous n’en avez pas moins déjeuné d’une tasse de
café?’ The passage has been noticed by P. Rönai (see A. Coimbra Martins, ‘O
Mandarim assassinado’, pp. 38–40).
24 D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, part 3, sections 7 and 8 (The Philosophical
Works, ed. T.H. Green and T.H. Grose, vol. 2, London 1886, reprint Darmstadt
1992, pp. 205–14, especially p. 207).
25 The false text by Rousseau is still reproduced in D. Diderot, Oeuvres, ed. A.
Billy, p. 1418, n. 7, allegedly from Émile (but no exact quotation is provided). This
provenance is immediately disproved by a quick glance at E. Brunet, Index-
Concordance d ’ Émile ou de l’éducation, Geneva 1980.
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the truth of Diderot’s conjecture that it would be much easier to kill a
human being if he or she would look no larger than a swallow.
Bureaucratic progress went in the same direction, creating the possibility
of dealing with large groups of human beings as if they were mere
numbers—also a most effective way of distancing them.
Dropping a bomb which kills hundreds of thousands of people can
sometimes generate remorse, as the case of Claude Eatherly, the
Hiroshima pilot, suggests. But it does not require training ordinary
people to perform the grim details of human butchery. Even when such a
training is fully successful (and this is often the case) some frictions may
occur, as Christopher Browning has shown in his book Ordinary Men: a
thoughtful, deeply disturbing research on a German reserve police
battalion which was involved in the extermination of Jews in Poland.26
Normal German citizens who were turned into mass murderers were
slightly disturbed by the perspective of performing their usual job when
they came by chance across Jews they had already known in the past. To
project the stereotypes provided by Nazi propaganda onto tens or
thousands of unknown Jews was apparently easier for them.
The sharp distinction between us and them which was at the core of the
Nazi racist legislation was related, on a theoretical level, to an explicit
rejection of the idea of natural law. In this sense, the formulation of the
juridical notion of ‘crimes againt humanity’ which emerged at the end of
the Second World War can be regarded as a belated victory for Antigone.
‘It is just, though forbidden, to bury Polynices, as being naturally just’:
these words, in Aristotle’s view, implied the supremacy of general laws
over particular laws, of allegiance towards the human kind over
allegiance towards a particular community, of distance over closeness.
But as Aristotle himself remarked, both distance and closeness are
ambivalent concepts; moreover, they are submitted to temporal and
spatial constraints. As we have seen, distance, if pushed to an extreme, can
generate a total lack of compassion for our fellow humans. How, we may
ask, can we trace the boundary between distance and extreme distance?
Or, to put it another way: what are the historical limits of an alleged
natural passion such as human compassion?
Reason and Tradition
This is a very big question, which I will not try to answer directly. But it
might be worthwhile to clarify at least some of its implications.
The mandarin’s story was concerned only with distance in space. In his
Treatise Hume explored a much larger topic—‘Contiguity and Distance in
Space and Time’—which as we have seen had been already touched on by
Aristotle. Hume, who did not mention him, approached the issue from a
very different angle:
We find in common life that men are principally concern’d about
those objects, which are not much remov’d either in space or time,
26 C. Browning, Ordinary Men. Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland, New York 1992.
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enjoying the present, and leaving what is afar off to the care of
chance and fortune. Talk to a man of his condition thirty years
hence, and he will not regard you. Speak of what is to happen
tomorrow, and he will lend you attention. The breaking of a mirror
gives us more concern when at home, than the burning of a house,
when abroad, and some hundred leagues distant.
Hume’s rather paradoxical argument is conducted from a general, but
strictly self-centred perspective: the house which is burning is ours, when
we are abroad—not somebody else’s. No Chinese mandarin is involved
here. Hume does not even mention sympathy, which in his mind was
closely connected to morality. Then a qualification follows:
Tho’ distance both in space and time has a considerable effect on the
imagination, and by that means on the will and passions, yet the
consequences of a removal in space are much inferior to those of a
removal in time. Twenty years are certainly but a small distance of
time in comparison of what history and even the memory of some
may inform them of, and yet I doubt if a thousand leagues, or even
the greatest distance of place this globe can admit of, will so
remarkably weaken our ideas, and diminish our passions.
Hume supports his statement with the already mentioned example of the
West Indian merchant who is concerned by what goes on in Jamaica,
whereas ‘few extend their views so far into futurity, as to dread very
remote accidents’. This asymmetry between space and time leads him to
the discussion of a further difference concerning time: ‘the superior effects
of the same distance in the past above that in futurity’27—superior, in
terms of weakening more both our will and our passions.
As far as the will is concerned, Hume says this is ‘easily accounted for. As
none of our actions can alter the past, ’tis not strange it shou’d never
determine the will.’ Passions deserve on the contrary a much longer
discussion, which ends up this way:
We conceive the future as flowing every moment nearer us, and the
past as retiring. An equal distance, therefore, in the past and the
future, has not the same effect on the imagination; and that because
we consider the one as continually encreasing, and the other as
continually diminishing. The fancy anticipates the course of things,
and surveys the object in that condition, to which it tends, as well as
in that, which is regarded as the present.
Through a detailed analysis Hume has been able to account, in his own
words, ‘for three phenomena, which seem pretty remarkable. Why
distance weakens the conception and passion: Why distance in time has a
greater effect than that in space: And why distance in past time has still a
greater effect than that in future. We must now consider,’ he goes on,
27 The edition I consulted (D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, The Philosophical
Works, p. 207) reads: ‘the superior effects of the same distance in futurity above
that in the past’. I corrected the text according to the logical requirements of the
argument.
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‘three phenomena, which seem to be, in a manner, the reverse of these:
Why a very great distance encreases our esteem and admiration for an
object: Why a very great distance encreases it more that that in space: And
a distance in past time more than that in future.’
These two sets of conflicting arguments point, if I am not mistaken, to a
factual (not logical) contradiction which Hume, and even the Enlightenment
at large, could not easily cope with. On the one hand, a tendency to
dismiss the power and prestige of tradition as a purely irrational
argument; on the other, a recognition of that same power and prestige as
an undeniable force. Some cutting remarks on the effects of distance in
time compared with those of distance in space show Hume the
philosopher engaged in a productive dialogue with Hume the historian:
Antient busts and inscriptions are more valu’d than Japan tables:
And not to mention the Greeks and Romans, ’tis certain we regard
with more veneration the old Chaldeans and Egyptians, than the
modern Chinese and Persians, and bestow more fruitless pains to
clear up the history and chronology of the former, than it wou’d
cost us to make a voyage, and be certainly inform’d of the character,
learning and government of the latter.28
The ways in which Hume tried to solve the already mentioned
contradictions are disappointing in so far as they are drawn from
individual psychology only. The connections between distance and
difficulty, between difficulty and the pleasure in overcoming obstacles,
stressed by Hume cannot explain the value ascribed by our civilization to
distance, to the past, and to a distant past. This is a specific historical
phenomenon, related to specific historical circumstances. These utterly
changed during the twentieth century. Hume could still confidently write
that ‘None of our actions can alter the past.’ Today we would add that this
is certainly true, but that human actions can deeply affect the memory of the
past by distorting its traces, by putting them into oblivion, by utterly
destroying them.
Redeeming the Past
The impulse to rescue the past from an incumbent menace has never been
so poignantly articulated as in the Theses on the Philosophy of History written
by Walter Benjamin in the early months of 1940, in the aftermath of the
Stalin–Hitler pact. ‘Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he
wins,’ Benjamin wrote, just a few months before his own tragic death.29
At the beginning of his second thesis Benjamin quoted a sentence by
Hermann Lotze, the nineteenth-century German philosopher. ‘One of
the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,’ Lotze wrote, ‘is,
alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy
which the present displays toward the future.’
In these words we can hear the distinct echo of the passage of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric on the ambivalent relationship between passions (more specifi-
28 Ibid., pp. 206–10.
29 W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, New York
1968, p. 257.
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cally, envy) and distance in space and time. The lack of envy towards
posterity was considered by Lotze as a ‘wonderful phenomenon’ which
‘may well tend to confirm our belief that there is some unity of history,
transcending that of which we are conscious, a unity in which we cannot
merely say of the past that it is not.’ ‘The presentiment that we shall not be
lost to the future,’ he went on, ‘that those who were before us though they
have passed away from the sphere of earthly reality have not passed away
from reality altogether, and that in some mysterious way the progress of
history affects them too—this conviction it is that first entitles us to speak
as we do of humanity and its history.’30
The Passagen-Werk, Benjamin’s great unfinished work on Paris in the
nineteenth century, includes several quotations from Lotze’s Mikrokosmus:
a book which was very popular in the late nineteenth century and is
now forgotten. Lotze played an important, and so far nearly unnoticed
role in Benjamin’s thought.31 One of the central themes of Benjamin’s
Theses on the Philosophy of History, the urge to ‘brush history against the
grain’, developed Lotze’s remarks on the redemption of the past within
the framework of both Judaism and historical materialism. ‘Like every
generation which preceded us,’ Benjamin wrote ‘we have been endowed
with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim’.32
These words were written in 1940. In the light of what happened since
then one is tempted to say that the last two generations have been
endowed, on the contrary, with a powerful, albeit negative, messianic
power. The end of history—not in the metaphorical sense which became
fashionable recently, but in a most literal sense—has been for the last half
century a technical possibility. The potential self-destrution of the human
kind, in itself a turning point in history, has affected and will affect the life
and the fragmented memories, respectively, of all future and past
generations—including those ‘that are past ten thousand years backwards
or forwards’ as Aristotle wrote. The realm of what Aristotle called
‘general law’ seems to have expanded accordingly. But to express
compassion for those distant fellow humans would be, I suspect, an act of
mere rhetoric. Our power to pollute and destroy the present, the past and
the future is incomparably greater than our feeble moral imagination.
30 H. Lotze, Microcosmus. An Essay Concerning Man and His Relation to the World,
New York 1886, vol. 2, pp. 171–4.
31 To my knowledge, Benjamin’s intellectual debt to Lotze has been mentioned
only by Stephane Moses: see his L’Ange de l’histoire. Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem,
Paris 1992, p. 166.
32 W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, pp. 259, 256.
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