I recently finished Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2013). It was a great read!  Maybe that’s just me in recoil from all the consciousness stuff I’ve been reading—glad to be back in more familiar territory: political philosophy.  Not just that, however.  It is just enthralling to read a closely reasoned, carefully constructed, argument.  There just are too few well-written and well-thought (if I can coin that adjective) books. 

Interestingly, when I think through what Lefebvre has to say in order to offer up the gist in this post, it’s not all that startling.  It is the care with which he makes his case that is exhilarating, not the substance (although it is hardly shabby. Just not all that startling either.)

So here’s the summary.

Bergson is a follower of Darwin. His reliance on evolutionary explanations for human phenomenon (like religion and morality) is quirky because he is a vitalist.  He believes in a fundamental “life force” that drives evolution, so is prone to 1) ascribe intention to evolution and 2) to think evolution has a single, dominating force (instead of resulting from a multitude of random—and unrelated—genetic mutations.)

In addition, Bergson is a dualist.  He believes that there exist spiritual entities that are distinct from material ones—and that the failure to give the spiritual its due is disastrous for human beings.  Bergson quite cheerfully declares himself a “mystic” and asserts that the spiritual is ineffable even as humans have various intimations of its existence (and importance!).

How do these basic commitments on Bergson’s part play into an account of human rights?  It all stems from the paradoxes built into morality.  For Bergson, human morality is a product of evolution.  “The evolutionary function of moral obligation is to hold society together. Its function is to ‘ensure the cohesion of the group.’” (page 25; quoted passage is from Bergson).  Unlike other theorists of morals, Bergson is adamant that morality is “natural,” is produced by evolution, as opposed to something that humans add on top of evolution.  Morality is not a human contrivance that tries to counteract natural impulses; instead, morality itself is a natural impulse.  Humans are social animals, utterly dependent on social relations to stay alive and to reproduce (the Darwinian imperatives).  Morality, insofar as it make sociality possible, is thus produced by evolution as are other human capacities essential to survival and reproduction.

The paradox comes from the fact that morality is exclusive.  Societies are “closed,” non-infinite, groupings.  One of the things essential to a society’s and its members’ survival and flourishing is protection from external threats.  Morality performs its service to life in part by distinguishing between friend (insider, fellow member) and enemy (outside, threat, non-member). 

“Closure is essential to moral obligation because its evolutionary purpose is to ensure the cohesion of the group in the face of an adversary.  It is this feature of exclusivity that Bergson brings to the fore with the concept of the closed society.  The purpose of this concept is not to claim that this or that society is closed.  Instead, it designates a tendency toward closure on the part of all societies” (25).

For this reason, war seems inevitable—and certainly human history appears to demonstrate that war is ineradicable.  Morality is good for the survival of particular societies—but is not conducive to the survival of human beings as a whole (especially once technology has given humans the means to mass annihilation) or to the survival of individuals (even the “winning side” in a war has many of its members killed in the contest).  To put it most bluntly: human morality generates not only cooperation and fellow-feeling with insiders, but also aggression toward outsiders.  For all the sophistication of his argument, Lefebvre ends up in a very familiar place: the claim that exclusion justifies doing harm to those designated as “other,” as beyond the pale.

Human rights, then, are an attempt to counteract the tendency of morality to sanction violence.  “Human rights are . . . an effort . . . that seeks to counteract our evolved moral nature. . . . Bergson [offers] a vision not just of what human rights must protect us from (i.e., morality) but also why (i.e., because of its [morality’s] biological origins” (54, 57). 

The standard way to address this paradox—that we need morality and that we also need something to counteract morality—depends on two planks.  The first recognizes that morality (the closed society) at least in the so-called Western world post 1700 functions most powerfully in the form of the nation-state.  Wars take place between nation-states—and the brutalities inflicted upon “enemies” have only increased since that time.  (The bombing of cities, the murder of refugees.)  Even in times of peace between nation-states, a particular state can identify certain people who live within its boundaries as “enemies within” and treat them differently and harshly in distinction from fully admitted members (citizens).

In response, there have been repeated efforts to create supra-national institutions that could rein in the aggressions of nation-states.  Such institutions have proved mostly ineffective.  When it comes to actually wielding power—and in securing the affective consent of people—the nation-state stands supreme, only minimally beholden to efforts to establish (and enforce) international law.  The institutionalization of human rights has mostly been a failure. Human rights are most fully protected when and where the state’s power has been used to uphold them.  But that’s useless in cases where it is the state itself that is abusing the human rights of some peoples living in its territory, not to mention its abuse of human rights on enemies during wartime.

The second plank is to widen morality in such a way that it is no longer exclusive.  The relevant “in group” would be all human beings—or, as proponents of animal rights desire—all animals.  Lefebvre demonstrates convincingly that the idea of “widening the circle” to be more inclusive is a prevalent call in much of contemporary political and moral philosophy.  Human rights are meant to apply “universally” and thus stand in direct opposition to any and all distinctions that would justify treating some people (or some groups) differently from others. 

Philosophers calling for expanding the circle offer different accounts of how that might be achieved.  Basically, the Humeans call for extending sympathy outwards.  Fellow feeling for those who can suffer—humans and animals—will underwrite our extending our consideration to them.  Kantians rely on reason to bring us to the recognition that only universalism keeps us from self-contradiction.  Utilitarians ask us to admit that suffering is a wrong—and then to avoid all actions that would increase the amount of suffering in the world. 

Levebvre’s most original contribution to such debates is to deny (forcefully) that expanding the circle is possible or adequate.  Morality, he insists, must be exclusive.  That is its whole modus operandi.  It only performs its natural function by being exclusive.  So it’s simply wrong to think it can be transformed into something non-exclusive. 

Human rights, therefore, must be something utterly different from morality, not an extension of it.  Lefebvre expresses this point by contrasting a distinction in quantity from one in quality.  We run into Bergson’s dualism here (although I doubt whether we have to embrace that dualism in order to adopt the distinction between a difference in quantity from a difference in quality.)  In any case, Bergson thinks “intelligence” deals in quantities and that we need another faculty (intuition or insight) to handle qualities.  Here’s Lefebvre’s account of Bergson’s view:

“[I]ntelligence does some things very well but not others.  It has a natural affinity with space and quantity and a natural aversion to time and quality.  More to the point, given its aptitude for quantity and number, intelligence views all forms of change in terms of (quantitative) differences of degree rather than (qualitative) differences in kind.  This includes moral change, of course.  It is no accident or simple error, therefore, which leads us to consider the evolution of morality in terms of expansion, growth, and continuous progress. . . . Intelligence is by its nature driven to picture the evolution of morality as the extension of a selfsame core (i.e., moral obligation) to more and more people” (49-50).

Bergson, then, wants to introduce an entirely different principle, one not based on moral obligation, as the underpinning of a human rights regime. Bergson wants to provide the basis for an “open society” that contrasts with closed societies that standard morality creates.  He strives to point his readers toward “a qualitatively different kind of morality, irreducible to obligation.  It [intelligence] struggles to conceive of a moral tendency that is not object attached.  And it struggles, as Bergson will come to say, to imagine a way to love that does not grow out of exclusive attachments” (50).

Before getting to a description of this “different kind of morality,” a morality of love, one other preliminary point must be made.  Bergson doubts the motivational power of reason.  He does not think that practical reason of the Kantian sort can move people to action.  Instead, he thinks morality must be a matter of habitus, of practice. 

“It is helpful to observe what Bergson has in common with an important strand of practical philosophy—call it antirationalism.  As Carl Power puts it, ‘Bergson might be said to join a counter-tradition that begins with Aristotle and includes more recent names such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Taylor.  What these disparate figures share is a propensity to see the human agent . . . as a being who is immediately engaged in the world and whose understanding of self and other is first and foremost expressed in practice.’ Broadly speaking, for these thinkers moral life is not primarily a matter of concepts and principles but of concrete durable practices that integrate moral obligations into the texture of everyday life. On that view, morality is not primarily a matter of weighing the purity of one’s intentions or assessing the partiality of one’s judgments.  Certainly these can be part of moral life; but they are not its backbone.  Instead, most of the time the performance of our moral obligations is prereflexive and embedded in the habits and activities of day-today life” (57-8).

It is precisely this emphasis on “practice” that explains Lefebvre’s title: human rights as a way of life.  Only through practice, through the embedding of human rights into the fabric of daily existence, can they take up a place in our world.  The “love” that Bergson advocates must be habitual for humans, must, in a concrete way, become routine.  It’s worth quoting Lefebvre a bit more on what a reliance of “habit” means.

“With his focus on habit, Bergson . . . wants to shift the attention of moral philosophy away from its preoccupation with the rational self-present agent.  Only on rare occasions does the performance of duty involve a conscious or deliberative process.  By and large, it is automatic, second nature, and unconscious. As he says, we ordinarily ‘conform to our obligations rather than think of them.’ Hence the importance of habits, which for Bergson are the true fabric of moral life.  In fact, moral or social life . . . is nothing other than an interlocking web of habits that connect the individual to a variety of groups.  But they don’t merely join the individual to different groups, as if he or she were pre-formed.  Rather, habits constitute the very stuff of our personalities.  They are what make us into parents, professionals, citizens, and the like” (58-9).

We are in recognizably Aristotelean territory here.  Character (personality, selfhood) is created through what we do—and our doings quickly become habits.  Humans are creatures, mostly, of regularity.  Which is not entirely a good thing.  “Habit seems to favor not only passivity and acquiescence but also conformity and laziness” (59).

The would-be moral reformer, the preacher, must lead the audience to become aware of their habits and to consider whether they are desirable or not.  Bergson “repeatedly characterizes love and openness as an ‘effort.’ Love [of the kind he advocated] does not extend moral obligation and it does not follow the habits of everyday life.  It defies them” (60).

So, Bergson wants to enlist the power of habit by making this open love habitual, but he must first break through the habits that make standard closed morality the default mode for most people.

OK!  Finally, what is this open love?  How to describe it, how to experience it, how to incorporate into one’s way of being in the world, how to make it “a way of life”?

Lefebvre cannot—and does not aim to—offer definitive answers to these questions.  The very idea (better: the very experience) of open love grows out of Bergson’s self-proclaimed “mysticism.”  Intelligence has nothing of use to say on this topic.  What Lefebvre wants to show is that “Human rights are works of love that initiate us into love” (89).  We can only proceed by way of examples—and of practices.  Examples “disclose love; they bring it into the world” (88).

As mostly practiced in contemporary society (the human rights practices and discourse most familiar to us), human rights attempts to regulate our world of closed societies, aiming to prevent or (at least mitigate) the abuses to which closed societies are prone.  Normal human rights strive to protect us from hate.

Open human rights aim not to protect, but to convert.  “Human rights are the best-placed institution for the open tendency to gain traction in the world” (89).  They offer a pathway toward a conversion to love, to taking up love as our way of life.

Lefebvre offers four examples of this way of life.  I don’t think they are meant to convince as much as meant to appeal. The first example is the person who says “yes” to the world and to existence, someone who radically affirms that this life is good and a source of joy. “In this sense, love is a disposition or a mood.  It is a way of being in the world, rather than a direct attachment to any particular thing in it” (93).

The second example is a radical indifference (i.e. making no distinctions, and hence an “open” justice), “according no preference to any of the beings in our path, in giving everyone our entire presence, and responding with precise faithfulness to the call they utter to us. . . . Yet this glance is the opposite of an insensitive glance; it is a loving glance which distinguishes, within each individual being, precisely what he or she needs: the words that touch him, and the treatment he deserves” (94 in Lefebvre; he is quoting Louis Lavelle). 

The third example comes from Deleuze’s description of the moment in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend when the on-looking crowd is deeply invested in Rogue Riderhood’s recovery from an apparent drowning.  That crowd is rooting for the life in Riderhood, not attuned to his specific person, personality, or history.  They extend those good wishes to everything that has life, but attuned to life’s manifestation in this singular instance which provides the specific occasion for this affirmation of life.

Finally, Lefebvre considers Elizabeth Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of that name.  Elizabeth refuses the “insensibility to the pain of outsiders”(97) that, for her, must accompany the complicity with the slaughter of animals that all eating of meat entails.  She opens herself up to that pain—and in the process offends any number of human beings, to the extent that she doesn’t quite feel herself part of the human race any longer. 

In summary, Lefebvre tells us that “all four portraits are preoccupied with the care of others.  Or more precisely, each presents a mode of care made possible only once love ceases to be dedicated to a specific object. [With the first example] it is radiant joy and welcome; with Lavelle it is the responsiveness of indifference; with Deleuze it is attentiveness to singularity; and with Coetzee is it empathy not bound with the group” (100).

Obviously, just how moving these examples will prove to different readers will vary.  Lefebvre is offering, in a different key admittedly, his version of the argument between where to place one’s political efforts: in reforming laws and institutions or in reforming hearts and minds.  To his credit, he refuses to make this an either/or.  We need to do both; he resists the temptation (familiar in various leftist critiques) to see the discourse and institutions of human rights as corrupt and/or positively harmful. 

But, clearly, his focus is on conversion, on change at the individual level.  He struggles (in my view) to connect his perspective to Foucault’s (and the ancients) idea of “care for the self.”  I find this the least convincing move in his book—and I don’t think he really nails the connection he is trying to establish.  For me, even if I buy the idea of human rights as a “way of life,” that way of life had much more to do with my relation to others than it does to my relation to my self.  The “care” that Lefebvre focuses on in the passage quoted in the previous paragraph is not “care for the self” but “care of others.”  Both morality and love are about relations to what is beyond the self.  So I think it a mistake to try to bring them into the purview of the self.

I have undertaken to write a review of Lefebvre’s follow-up book, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024).  I haven’t started reading it yet, but am eager to get into it since I enjoyed reading this human rights book so much.  More on Lefebvre once I do finish the new book.

• Darwin
• moral philosophy
• philosophy
• political theory
• rights