What Tocqueville Didn't Tell You About The Americans

I

If any American, man or woman of whatever gender they might believe themselves to be, ever professed love for their country before you while admitting they never had the time to enjoy at least four-hundred pages or so of Democracy in America, the Tocqueville classical masterpiece on the subject— you would be entitled to place question marks around their professed patriotism.

Ideally, so I believe, patriotism should go along with pursuing the highest intellectual pleasure through assimilating as much profundity as attainable about one’s patria. As it just happens, that is precisely what a patriotic man or woman would hardly find or be offered elsewhere. To the extent that anyone does, very few writing on the Americans and their nation come even close to being as illuminating and profound a source of knowledge, as Tocqueville presents his readers with in his masterclass work.

But patriot or not, once one reaches the four-hundred-page mark or so into Democracy in America, one finds the Frenchman focused on putting forward what without a doubt is the first philosophical dissection of the mentality—the intellectual and spiritual inclinations and characteristic traits—of the first half-dozen generations of the American type of humans, the “Homo-Americanus.” To have this cleared up right away, the Homo-Americanus is a type of human unto itself, mainly because, as Tocqueville will keep reminding you, it is a political entity first among modern men to be born democratic. Americans are the embodiment par excellence of the values and beliefs that up to now and practically since it was born have been influencing and defining and ultimately dominating the modern world. Delving the deepest into this matter, Tocqueville’s success has never again been repeated.

Such success is, however, only relative. But that is because the observations by the French political philosopher on the born-democratic Americans hinge on what he considers to be the supposedly “Cartesian method,” which according to him is intrinsic to the mind of, we must infer, the white Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the nation that gives them their name. The arch claim by the Frenchman is that, unbeknown to them and therefore unconsciously, in the motions of their souls, in their everyday approach to life, the Americans he so attentively observed and studied seemed to him to follow the same methodology Descartes came up with in fashioning his epistemology (his philosophic inquiry concerning the foundation and nature of knowledge). As everyone now knows, Descartes arrived at the conclusion that thinking is the bedrock or foundation of Being; we exist only because we are entities capable of thinking, which he formulated in the dictum “Cogito, ergo sum.” I think, therefore I am.

The implication is that, just as Descartes derived his philosophical method from observing himself think and following the motions of his intellect in the acquisition of knowledge about himself, while in the process of thinking up his own existence in relation to his own capability for acquiring truthful and reliable knowledge about the real world—so do the Americans also look only unto themselves and trust only their own experience at the moment of making decisions and obtaining their outlook on life. In political terms, that means that the born-democratic Americans, apart from God who they trust the most in, recognize no other authority over them which has not been democratically constituted. Wherever religious faith is not part of the equation, the American mind claims for itself absolute individual sovereignty.

So far so good. Now, if by happenstance you neither reached nor went beyond the four-hundred-page mark in Tocqueville, if only for clarity’s sake, his insights can be itemized verbatim, as if straight up from the Frenchman’s quill. According to his meticulous observation, the mind of the Anglo-Saxon Americans of his time (1802-1866), but by our own observations, of our time as well, shared a communality in thinking which, in being consistent with one another and each with itself, functioned as though following a method. The clarification is here required that for Tocqueville, as well as for this author, “American” always strictly refers to people of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. So, itemized by yours truly, but always according to the Frech philosopher, the so-called “philosophic method” that is ethnically American, reveals itself to the observer in that,

1.   “[…] to escape from the spirit of system, from the yokes of habits, from family maxims, from class opinions, and up to a point from national prejudices;

2.   to take tradition only as only as information, and current events only as useful study for doing otherwise and better;

3.   to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone;

4.   to strive for a result without letting themselves be chained by the means, and to see through the form to the foundation: those are the principal features that characterize what I shall call the philosophic method of the Americans.”

Thus did Tocqueville praise the “American mind” as he saw it at work during his 1800s nine-month touring and researching of the nation.

II

So, without questioning the validity of such praising, let’s us immediately point out that, as far as the Cartesian method itself goes, its own philosophical and scientific validity endured only until it was taken to task by Nietzsche’s philosophic hammer. Which means that, to the extent that the assessment by Tocqueville of the features of the American mind is correct, its attributed Cartesian virtues, debatable or not, went to die in the second chapter of Beyond Good and Evil, from 1886. But more immediately damaging to Tocqueville’s assessment of the cast of mind of the Anglo-Saxons, is that it is based on a faulty philosophical interpretation of the Cartesian method.

For starters, it is not accurate to posit that the Cartesian philosophy itself successfully manages to escape the “spirit of system.” As Bertrand Russel called attention to, both the Discourse on Method and of The Meditation distinctively reflect the influence of Scholasticism, which Descartes had previously been an adherent to. But then, since the Cartesian Cogito depends on the metaphysics of the “I,” the “I” itself functions as the inescapable system of Cartesian philosophy, on which it supports itself.

And so, as insightfully discovered by Nietzsche, the grammar of all the languages indigenous to Europe, modern as well as ancient, are in fact the Procrustean system from which no philosophy that sustains itself on the “I” proposition can escape. Which is the same as saying that the mind of the “democratic” man par excellence, the American, and the nation he founded, never had a solid foundation—if their attributed Cartesianism holds, and which, if it does, it is nothing deserving of praise, in hindsight. 

Even when it could be true that the mentality of the Anglo-Saxons inclines to escape from the “spirit of system,” and from oppressive habits, family maxims, class opinions or national prejudices, Tocqueville failed to see where such inclination originates; he also failed to see that however much it resembled anything “Cartesian,” it was far from an implicit “mental” method. Namely, Tocqueville did not comprehend that, being the result of a radical break from all the structures above, represented by the successful Revolution of Independence from the British, the mindset of the “born-democratic” man came into the world and developed already outside of, in opposition to, and as the negation of all those basic societal and cultural structures. So, that situation—of radical break with its own past—is what lends to the attitudes and acts of the American mindset the illusion of proceeding from a philosophical method.

Being the product of a radical break from its own origin, the mind of the born-democratic man has no tradition of thought and grew up with no past or history it could look back to, even if it wanted. Consequently, for a long time it developed unmoored and unanchored from any solid historical or even psychological ground. By comparison, at least the Cartesian method attempted to ground itself unto the “I,” metaphysical as such a ground is.

That, in essence, is the reason the American mind values only or more highly the “current facts” it finds at its disposal, regardless the use it might make of them; for it uses facts, not the knowledge of those facts. Which is how Tocqueville can inform us that the American mind seeks the “reasons of things by themselves and in themselves alone.” However, in such an assertion, an Anglo-Saxon incapacity is revealed for discovering the intrinsic, intimate connection between facts of different, and even differing orders. The born-democratic mind, incapable of seeing the historicity of things, is for that reason also unable or uninterested in looking backward and forward at once, and appears to only see things in isolation from one to another: it sees only what is right in front of it. For, the American mind obviates the relatedness naturally existing among historical, political, and social phenomena, for instance. Thus, the cast of the mind of the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity that founded the American nation attains at any given moment only a fragmentary grasp of social reality.

To put the above in a more commonplace language: the born-democratic mind implicitly denies that in the world of facts “one thing leads to another,” or (in the language of philosophy) that in the world of facts and things, everything is connected through the law of cause and effect. Of the cast of mind of the Americans, Nietzsche would have said that it does not aspire to obtain, and therefore does not cultivate, a “vision of totality.”

Well, in relation to that, it is worth noticing that nowhere does Tocqueville observe the Americans concerning themselves with the truth or with the search for the truth. On the contrary, the Frenchman, right at the start of his apologia, is quick to call attention to how the Americans show a collective disinterest for philosophic inquiry in general, and for any of the philosophical schools or trends which, according to him, were back then “dividing” Europe.

III

Although it was far from his intention and purpose, identifying what he proposes to be the characteristics essential to the Anglo-Saxon mind, Tocqueville unwittingly enables us in the present to make some pertinent observations of our own on the topic, and so to move away from his praising of the presumed American “Cartesianism,” without at the same time thoroughly rejecting his thesis. However, we can only move forward with the foreknowledge that, on the one hand, any “Cartesian” attributes of the American mind as observed by Tocqueville are basically analogical, and even metaphorical. And on the other, we must never let go of the fact that, for all the novelty that the philosophy of the Cartesian cogito represented for an emerging modernity, retrospectively, his contribution to philosophic thinking perished long ago. And yet, and not without it ceasing to be ironic, both the Cartesian cogito and the alleged Cartesian “method” of Homos-Americanus both turned out to be similar manifestations of Western nihilism.

From the vantage point of the present, the mind of the democratically-born man is best characterized by its nihilistic tendency. The freedoms sought by the American mind from the “spirit of system,” from the “yoke of habits,” “family maxims,” “class opinions,” and “national prejudices,” and from the very traditions it emerged from, has led to self-reveling its nihilistic attitudes, nihilistic positions, and nihilistic tastes and values.

To realize that, one only has to formulate the question concerning the kind of situation that arises when, as even Tocqueville himself admits, never having it been truly philosophic, the “method,” which is to say, the psychology of such mind becomes politics. Strictly speaking, “politics” here designates the ideologies, public discourses, and the multifarious practices called “democracy” all together, which the democratically-born man regards as his highest achievement. In becoming politics, the pseudo-Cartesian “method,” in true an ethnocentric cast of mind, incarnates into the type of social reality that would have emerged from institutions—the political parties, schools, courts and legal systems, and the universities, news organizations, and above all, from the regional and federal forms of American government. For all that would have been conceived of and informed by the manner of thinking of the people Tocqueville observed at work in his days.   

Since the Anglo-Saxon mind naturally, that is, pragmatically rejects philosophical inquiry, in becoming politics it failed to gain awareness of its own entrenched psychological need to escape from, and therefore to reject, some of the most basic structures of societal life. In its becoming politics, the American mind failed itself by its inability to search the reasons—”in themselves and by themselves”—for there being social structures it needed to methodically escape from.

After all, it is an error of methodology to presuppose that the reason that phenomena or things exist always lie in themselves; or that some things might not be the reason for the coming into existence of phenomena not immediately related. And yet, if anything, that is what the Cartesian Cogito itself demonstrates, counterintuitively and unwittingly as it is. If thinking is in Descartes the causation of his being, then for Descartes Being itself is not the generator of its own reason for being. That is, the “am” of Cartesian philosophy could have only emerged from an act of thinking which, afterward, posits the “I” of itself as its reason, and which at the same time, is itself such an “I.”

Tragically for philosophy, and by extension for the Americans, Descartes never asked himself whether there can be “thinking” in a vacuum. For, we know that “thinking” as such does not exist: thinking is always about something, on the one hand. On the other, there is only “wrong-thinking” or “right-thinking.” And that is the real problem; that is how the “method” of the American mind, just as Cartesianism itself, gives way to nihilism.

We have learned from Nietzsche that nihilism is what eventually takes over whenever something that has been taken at face-value, and which has become unquestioned belief, eventually and finally fails and no longer deserves our trust. Thus, allowing for a scenario where there is “right-thinking” and “wrong-thinking,” as there is in the real world, then there would be a fifty-fifty probability that one could end up with a negative quantity—a negative “am” which would lead to or which posit the self-abolishment of the “I.” And with that, we would arrive to the terra-firma of nihilism. That is when trust and faith in the Cogito, in the I-think, begins to fail. At that point, self-questioning and self-doubting set on in a certain “method’ for dealing with the world of the real—the realia of philosophy.    

Presumably, now we can better understand what the “escaping,” the breaking-free from those basic structures of life which Tocqueville observes the American mind tending toward, amounts to. It is the mistrust and disbelief; it is the loss of faith in those structures (the “spirit of system” and the “yoke of habits,” or, in other words: orderliness, consistency, continuity, self-discipline; “family traditions,” or: continuation, extension, and reproduction of the family and family lore; “class opinions,” or: loyalty and fidelity to their social background and that of their ancestors; “national prejudice” or: country love and national pride).

Thus, ultimately it is mistrust and disbelief which nudges the Anglo-Saxon American mind as it methodically tries to escape forward. Its motions are structured as a permanent attempt at substituting the trust and belief in those structures, for trust and belief in itself only, for relying only on its own capabilities, to the exclusion of everything else, as it at the same time interacts with the things in the world. But it does so on the basis of a similar type of wrong-thinking as the Cartesian “I-think.” And that is what becomes the new source of faith, belief, and trust for the American mind. This is a situation which of course, goes without saying, endlessly repeats itself and is constitutive of the “American mentality” through the generations of the Anglo-Saxon American populations. As pointed out above: that has its origin on the breakage with the British world, and which is the birthplace of what is “American” in such mind.

Thus, the “American mind,” which is to say the peoples who function under or with the “American mentality,” are perpetually ignoring, by-passing, pushing to the sides, moving-away from, and so, leaving-behind things in ways that at bottom are forms of destruction of everything that came before and which was already “there” when they came. That is essential nihilism.

IV

Now, if one is familiar with the anti-nihilistic philosophy of Nietzsche (the paragon philosopher of European, that is, the modern forms of nihilism), then one can readily figure out the two most consequential political phenomena of our time.

It is Nietzsche who over and over again demonstrates that nihilism is born out of the unviability of belief and faith, or rather, out of the collapse of belief in something that has been valued and revalued and without further questioning taken to be worthy of belief, and worthy of depositing one's faith in. That can be God, a major or minor divinity, or the “I-think,” the Cartesian Cogito of the American mind—if we should continue to follow Tocqueville.

At some point in its historical and political development, the mind that counts only on itself to seek the reasons for things “by themselves and in themselves only,” something which, as we saw above, is in itself an error of method, will enter a crisis of self-belief whenever the reality of the world demonstrates to it that it does not understand the world as it really is. It is then warranted to view the democratic order and democratic values generated by the American mind as the manifestations of the philosophical propositions of the Cartesian Cogito, in the sphere of the political.

Consequently, the Americans, and by extension anybody that embraces such an order and such values, deposit their faith and belief in “democracy” to the very extent that they trust the “method” of the Americans.    

Now, about those two most consequential phenomena of our time.
First, a critical reading of Tocqueville on the American democratic system allows us to see that the American mind—the social, cultural, and political reality generated by the American mind, above all its highest political manifestation as a State and federalized government—proceeds from psychological motivations opposite to its Russian counterpart. Second, it allows us to see why and how the political form of the American mind is ostensibly destined to exist in conflict, and to now and again enter into clashes of one type or another, with anything that resolutely defines itself as Russian. That is, with Russia itself. 

And the reason for that, so it must be, is that nihilism is the true “philosophic” system of the Americans. Centrally in contradiction with Russia on this point, nihilism is what gives shape and form to the distinctively Anglo-Saxon mentality of the Americans, and by extension, of the whole Western world over which such mentality rules.

V

It is a given that Tocqueville was not historically well-placed to understand the philosophical implications of the traits he observed in the intellectual and spiritual proclivities of the Americans at the state of societal development in which he first encountered them. That is, he could not have done the adequate psychological and philosophical assessment as to the propensity of the characteristic traits of the Americans to systematically seek an escape from the socio-historical structures we referred to above, and which are all constitutive of the “spirit” of societies, barring none. As pointed out above, the persisting need of Homo-Americanus to methodically “forget,” and to “leave behind,” and to “move forward,” in an attempt to “free” itself, by escaping from any permanent or continued relation with family, traditions, history, and other forms of obligations imposed on it by societal structures—is a patent manifestation of metaphorized nihilism in the character of the ethnically Anglo-Saxon American. Ironically, this feature totally escaped the meticulous attention of the Frenchman.    

Alas, such metaphorized nihilism gets literally translated into and becomes a component of practically everything conceived of by the American mind, as it can be found at the bottom of practically everything done or produced by the Americans. In a previous post this year I attempted to demonstrate that the Americans build with the express purpose of destroying later that which they have built, while their governments leave-behind and move-away from most everything that was conceived and brought into being by the previous government “administrations.”

What the Republicans build, is for the Democrats to nullify and to bring down. And vice versa. Incidental to that, their products are intentionally of low quality because from the first they are not built to last. Nihilism informs the creativity and industriousness of the Americans. In that post I made some remarks about the reason that, for example, their industries operate on the uniquely America notion of “planned obsolescence,” through which the durability of virtually everything is more or less calculated and the life-span of anything “made in the USA” gets measured. To complete the picture, their nihilism is why in their constructions and crafting the Americans prefer cheap materials, to sell the product therefrom at the highest price tag. For, “durability” is not what nihilism builds for, and is therefore not one of the “American values.” Of course, their nihilism also accounts for the permanent dynamism and forward-outlook of American capitalism. Nihilism is a two-edged sword.

Now, if on the economic and industrial fronts their nihilism is wasteful and short-changing of both the parties they do business with and their generalized clientele and costumers, on the political front their nihilism is outrightly dangerous and disastrous, and even more, catastrophic.

That is what is being demonstrated and magnified in Ukraine. Only a nihilistic power that explicitly enjoys itself blowing things up and destroying, and building ostensibly only in order to have something to later destroy, would reject diplomatic negotiations and agreements as have been insistently proposed by Russia to guaranty collective security to all sides that might eventually and predictably find themselves in armed conflict. Instead, the Americans have provoked a war, to be carried through “for as long as it takes,” and “until the last Ukrainian.” Essential nihilism.

That such war is happening illustrates the extent to which the nihilistic mind of the Americans relishes in making things explode, only to see what happens next, as it were. They are highly creative and shrewd in creating the alibis and forging the rationales to over and again consummate their nihilistic drives. So, as corresponds those drives, the Americans effortlessly hit upon the business concept of making wars solely for profit… which is what the power they seek parlays into.   

VI

For the reasons annotated above, none of this could have been told you by Tocqueville. But neither was he historically well situated to realize that the so-called “Cartesian” method of an American mind that still today inclines to systematically attempt to escape from historical and societal structures, was not more than the alibi the Americans resort to in a bid to evermore increase the freedoms required for their complete dedication to industrial enterprise: to the endless undertaking of productive/nihilistic tasks as might be needed in their pursuit of material gains. For, the “happiness” the Americans pursue depends on that—above all else.

If, wanting to catch up with him, you now went to read Tocqueville again, you would in all likelihood notice the most important thing that the Frenchman didn't tell you: their democratism hides their nihilism. The belief in democracy of the Americans, which they were born from, goes only as far as it allows, or better yet, facilitates for them the “pursuit of happiness” as a nation, however that notion might be defined.

But whenever democracy and democratic means are not viable to that end, or not viable any longer at all, crises of belief set in, and nihilism, the profoundest value of the Americans, shows up to the surface, to be held up in all its glory.  That is where we are now.