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Maxims

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The famous Indian classic, Kautilya's 'Arthasastra,' a treatise which deals with the attainment of worldly ends, distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom - Straight and Crooked. To the former belong (to use Western examples) such works as 'The Imitation of Christ' by Thomas a Kempis, a work which teaches how, ideally, the virtuous should live, while overlooking the fact that often it would be extremely impractical and socially disastrous to live in such a way.

The second class of books, those which teach the art of 'Crooked Wisdom,' is exemplified in the East by Kautilya's 'Arthasastra' itself, and in the West by such works as Balthasar Gracian's 'The Art of Worldly Wisdom,' Francesco Guicciardini's 'Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman' (Ricordi), and by the present collection of Maxims by La Rochefoucauld.

These books are both highly realistic and extremely practical, for they depict, not man as he is supposed to be, but man as he is with all his selfishness, stupidity, ambition, arrogance, malice, laziness and other imperfections, and they teach the art of how, not merely to survive, but even to thrive in the midst of our far from perfect fellow men and women. And, certainly in the case of La Rochefoucauld, this teaching is done with great precision and wit.

'Crooked Wisdom,' then, should not be understood as the product of a crooked mind, but as the clear-sighted wisdom one needs to survive in a world teeming with such minds, a world, as Tancock says, involved in a "sordid struggle of self-interests, a scramble for power, position, and influence in which the foulest motives and methods [are] decked with labels such as duty, honor, patriotism, and glory."

La Rochefoucauld seems to provoke two very different kinds of reaction. Fully paid up members of the rose-tinted spectacles club, are shocked and horrified by his portrait of man and society, and they tend to dislike both the man and his book.

The more realistically inclined, however, will savor his bite and wit and will readily acknowledge the self-evident truth of much if not all of what he says. The man was undoubtedly brilliant, not only in terms of the many profound insights he gave us - particularly those having to do with 'amour propre' or self-love - but also in terms of the skill with which he translated those insights into pithy and memorable maxims.

Tancock defines the maxim as the expression of "some thought about human motives or behavior in a form containing the maximum of clarity and TRUTH with the minimum of words arranged in the most striking and memorable order" (my caps). La Rochefoucauld's aim, in short, was simply to tell the truth, and to tell it for our benefit.

The maxim as a literary genre was cultivated in his milieu, and La Rochefoucauld's were polished to a high state of perfection, for they had to satisfy a critical and sophisticated audience. Seven years were devoted to refining them, during which the circle of his aristocratic friends and fellow habitues of Mmme de Sable's salon repeatedly offered advice and criticism.

The 'Maxims,' then, although the product of an individual sensibility, also become in a sense the product a collective effort, having emerged from a serious and civilized salon whose interests were psychological, literary, and linguistic. Anyone who feels inclined to dismiss them might keep this in mind.

I discovered La Rochefoucauld many years ago, and have always been a great admirer of his Maxims. Once read, they are never forgotten. They have a way of burrowing deeply into the mind, and the fact that they tend to recur in those moments when we are reflecting on life and mulling over our experiences seems to me a kind of proof of their veracity.

One that has always struck me as particularly significant is Maxim 22 : "Philosophy easily triumphs over past ills and ills to come, but present ills triumph over philosophy." Or, in the words of the Red Queen : "Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but no jam today." If such truths are not exactly cheering, this in no way detracts from their being true.

There is an enormous amount to be learned by the honest and open-minded reader from La Rochefoucauld's 'Maxims,' especially if they also have a sense of humor. But the 'Happy Days! Happy Sky!' school, whose main requirement of a writer would seem to be that he should confirm them in their beautiful illusions, would be wiser to look elsewhere for edification. La Rochefoucauld is not a writer for the faint of heart, nor for those without a sense of humor.

Be warned! La Rochefoucauld is not a very edifying writer. He doesn't believe in making people better. Instead he says: "Virtue wouldn't go very far if it were not for vanity keeping it company." The Maxims offer one of the most disillusioned views of human nature in world literature. What really recommends them, however, is their clarity and elegance. Again and again they have been compared to diamonds.

La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) is the most famous of the French moralists who dissected human behaviour in razor-sharp aphorisms. Get this volume to discover a tradition of thinking which is largely alien to English literature, with the notable exception of Oscar Wilde. "Most young people feel they are just being natural when they are nothing but gross."

These maxims, though brief, speak volumes about their author and the human condition. Francois duc do La Rouchefoucauld was cursed with a double nature which led him in his career as a courtier to, as Leonard Tanner puts it in his introduction "romantic self-dedication followed by bitter disillusion." After the fighting in Paris of 1652 he retired to a quiet life of contemplation and the society of such friends as Mme de Sevigne, who's letters give us such a vibrant window upon that age. It was during the many meetings he had with these friends that the first maxims evolved, and which he would continue to compose and perfect until his death in 1680. Nothing quite like them had ever existed before in European literature, and their precision and bleak though biting wit would shape the style of French letters for centuries to come. Essential reading for the student of the school of hard knocks.

La Rochefoucauld isn't for everyone. Let's excuse those who are going to be offended right away. Do you insist your movies be in color and have a happy endings? You're excused. Do you believe man is perfectable through his institutions? You're excused. Do you believe that love remains bright, eternal and unchanging? You're excused. Do you believe you know yourself completely and thoroughly? Then I'll see you around. Have a nice day.

Now, for the rest of us, realists rather than idealists, La Rochefoucauld is a Godsend. A nobleman from the highest levels of the French aristrocracy pulls up a chair and starts talking to us, telling us deep and profound things, giving us insights so quickly and so accurately that we erupt over and over again with deep, raucous laughter. He tells us the essential, conceptual problems with love. He tells us that the sexes are not the same and cannot act identically, and says this profoundly and without dismissing or mocking either men or women.

He warns us about vanity, resentment, envy and jealousy. Most especially, he convinces us that these qualities are dominent in human affairs. He tells us why a dismissive attitude about death is not genuine. He warns us of the great dangers brought about through laziness.

The art of using the minimum words to convey a subtle truth was in its highest form in Paris at this time. The Maxims were shared and honed in a salon. La Rochefoucauld's life of warfare and court intrigue and betrayal and unrequited love allowed him to bring deep wisdom into the emotions and moods he describes. Particularly, his rivalry with a self-aggrandizing courtier informs his writing. Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, was a pompous and annoying hypocrite who was extremely successful in some aspects of his life. Retz once received eight votes for election to the Papacy. Yet La Rochefoucauld both saw through him and came to understand why so many others did not pierce the veil of the cardinal's reputation.

The salon and rivalry with Retz are an important introduction Tancock gives us to the Maxims. That material should be read thoroughly and introspectively, especially the cardinal's written description of La Rochefoucauld and the duke's written description of the cardinal.

In the actual body of the Maxims and Reflections, La Rochefoucauld tells us of the dominent human characteristic, an impulse for self-preservation so strong that affection for oneself, pride, and vanity about one's reputation become included in it. It's called "amour-propre," for which self-love is only a glib translation. The essay on self-love, the longest and most stunning of the writings, is more than a maxim. It resists being broken down into pithy sayings. Sturdily written, it was so shocking to the French aristocracy that it was excluded from later editions of the Maxims.

But La Rochefoucauld's description of amour-propre is a masterpiece, a work of genius and modern psychology, three hundred years ahead of its time. Personally, it is the most important essay I ever read. Here is a partial quote from Tancock's translation of the maxim on self-love (number 563):

"....From this enveloping darkness come the ludicrous ideas it has about its own nature -- the errors, ignorances, obtusenesses, and sillinesses where itself is concerned -- believing, for instance, that its emotions are dead when they are merely dormant, that it has given up wanting to run just because it is resting, or that it has lost the tastes it has satiated. But this thick darkness that hides it from itself does not prevent its seeing with perfect clarity things outside itself, just as our eyes can perceive everything else and are only blind when it comes to seeing themselves. Indeed, where its main interests and really important affairs are concerned, and the violence of its desires takes up the whole of its attention, self-love sees, feels, hears, imagines, suspects, penetrates, and guesses everything, and one is tempted to believe that its every passion has magical properties of its own..."

Tancock here, and throughout the book, performs a meticulous translation for us. His friend, W. G. Moore, wrote about this particular passage in his book "La Rochefoucauld, His Mind and Art" and said:

"Surely this is writing of a high order. Lucid in form, short unremarkable phrases, few images, most of the stress on the single verb -- these features are not usually combined with the description of something that no human eye has seen or brain registered. Apparently the only way of describing the quality called amour-propre is to make it personal. The phrases are understandable as applied to a human being; perhaps even more to an animal, in a lair, taking precautions against surprise, running, resting, feeding, hiding, finding no rest,. We are not, as we thought, in the domain of critical assessment, still less in the domain of phrase-making, we are reading about magic, a picture is conjured up before our eyes; we watch the imagination at work. What it shows is a monster, something unnatural. The mood of scorn, discernible in many epigrams, is absent. The attitude is one of respect, almost awe, before something ubiquitous and mysterious. Yet we know what is being described: the power and plight of fallen man is here more imposing and impressive than in a Bossuet sermon. This is an Augustinian passage."

Let this nobleman, Francois, the sixth duke of La Rochefoucauld, stun you, amuse you, and lead you to greater wisdom.

These maxims- aphorisms are a Western classic .In one way they look with a cynical eye at this vain self - aggrandizing creature the human being and do their best to debunk his illusions. On the other they are written with such grace , point and wit that they amuse and give the reader pleasure.

If there is one criticism it is that on the whole Rouchefoucaud has a very limited view of mankind and human nature. We may not all be as wonderful as we think, but humanity is far better and good in many ways than is seen in these aphorisms.

This book is a classic of cynicism. It is an exercise in discovering the true motivations of people of La Rouchefoucauld's time. Whether you agree or disagree with the maxims, I think you will gain much by reading them and thinking about them.

La Rouchefoucauld flashes his deadly epigrammatic knife-blade and, with ruthless precision, he sets about stripping the flesh off all that reasonable and upstanding people respect -- virtue, moderation, compassion, love and reason itself. With poise, elegance and control, he deploys the literary form of the aphorism, though despite the balance, the brevity and the stylistic grace, one cannot mistake his intention: the destruction of moral prejudices and received opinions. Some of his axioms are timeless: -- "There are some bad qualities which make great talents." -- "If we judge love by the generality of its effects, it resembles hatred rather than friendship." -- "Interest speaks all sorts of languages, and plays all sorts of parts, even that of disinterestedness." With his icy, seemingly dispassionate precepts, he deliberately glories in paradox and presents a mordant picture of human nature. Stylistically as well as substantively, he was a forerunner of the aristocratic anarchist Nietzsche.

Rich with aphorisms that ring true today. A treasure.

For example, "212. Folly pursues us throughout our lives, and the man whom we call wise is he whose follies are proportionate to his age and to his fortune."

This Kindle version is not perfect, but the text at least is properly typed. Having this in electronic format is great for quick reads and for highlighting favorites, which Kindle also conveniently allows you to post to FB.

For anyone who has questioned the motives of others or of himself or for the person who wishes to deal truly with his own passions, this is a great read. Written in small snippets of knowledge, La Rochefoucauld systematically redefines all virtues in terms of the vices behind them or simply in terms of self interest. How true this all rings!

Very nice hard-cover edition of a classic of pithy observations on the nature of man. La Rochefoucald's Maxims force us to take an often disquieting look at ourselves and at the immutability of human nature.