Abstract
It is our belief that a theoretical reading of Bernard Mandeville’s Work without the consideration of the satirical elements that compose it, is an incomplete and equivocal reading, and may also lead to a distorted view of Mandeville’s social thought. Satirical forms have at their core a peculiar discursive expressiveness that distinguishes them from other narrative genres. It is a double expressiveness because its moral content, almost always supported by the binomium “virtue-vice”, has firstly, as social referent, the character of human beings. The caricature arises therefore inevitable. It is precisely this second aspect that is very current in the satirical purpose of Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees. As a symptom of commercial society, Mandeville realizes the enormous moral incongruity – “hypocrisy”, according to the author – between action and expression, between individual practices and moral defense of collective values. He begins by satirizing man’s hypocritical moralist discourse, since it corresponds to an ethics without empirical content, without any equivalence in terms of man’s individual action in the modern society. Thus, our main goal is to analyze the Mandevillean fundamentals of the relationship between satirical discourse and moral transparency. To a certain extent, it seems that the function of modern satire, as it is assumed by Mandeville, does not imply a corrective purpose, but functions for humans only as therapeutic function.
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Notes
- 1.
For an assessment of the historical background and social implications of Mandeville’s critique of the Reformation of Manners, see, for example, Thomas A. Horne 1978: 1–18.
- 2.
As rightly noted by Malcolm Jack, the Mandevillean narrow conception of vice plays a satirical social function: “Mandeville is not wrong for sometimes associating pleasure with vice; he is wrong in making their connection a necessary one. As [Samuel] Johnson has realized, Mandeville’s rigorism rests on an extremely puritanical premise, deliberately selected to reinforce his satire against the do-gooders, the members of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners” (Jack 2000: 91). The same observation can also be found in Phillip Harth’s satirical interpretation of The Fable of the Bees: “Mandeville’s habit of applying the standard of Self-denial, without which there can be no Virtue is not the psychological quirk of a philosopher who is inconsistent with his own feelings, but the deliberate tactic of a satirist who lays bare the inconsistency of Christians” (Harth 1969: 339).
- 3.
The psychosocial interpretation of vices and virtues leads Mandeville to admit different degrees of complexity of passions. In his opinion, however, the intricate formation of passions have a heterogeneous background, that is, certain particular human feelings, which are often opposites (e.g., love and fear), are articulated as social passions (e.g., jealousy): “The more a Passion is a Compound of many others, the more difficult it is to define it; and the more it is tormenting to those that labour under it, the greater Cruelty it is capable of inspiring them with against others: Therefore nothing is more whimsical or mischievous than Jealousy, which is made up of Love, Hope, Fear, and a great deal of Envy” (Mandeville 1988a: 140–141).
- 4.
“The reduction of spiritual ideals to bodily facts” is, according to Frank Palmeri, one the biggest aims of narrative satire. In this narrow sense, “narrative satire reduces all that might be heroic and noble to a common level of physical experience, which it openly acknowledges, if it does not always joyously celebrate” (Palmeri 1990: 10–12).
- 5.
In An Enquiry Into the Origin of Honour, Mandeville distinguishes between two levels of hypocrisy, more precisely, between Malicious Hypocrites and Fashionable Hypocrites: “By Malicious Hypocrites, I mean such as pretend to a great deal of Religion, when they know their Pretensions to be false; who take pains to appear Pious and Devout, in order to be Villains, and in Hopes that they will be trusted to get an Opportunity of deceiving those, who believe them to be Sincere. Fashionable Hypocrites I call those, who, without any Motive of Religion, or Sense of Duty, go to Church, in Imitation of their Neighbours. (…) The first are, as you say, the worst of Men: but the other are rather beneficial to Society, and can only be injurious to themselves” (Mandeville 1732: 201–202). Through this distinction – and if we also take into account the definition of virtue as “self-denial” –, it is clear that, for Mandeville, human action’s intentionality, unlike social mimetic behavior, always builds the strongest criterion for the moral evaluation of them.
- 6.
This notion of hypocrisy based on lack of knowledge that the human being has of himself can be found, for example, in the connaissance de soi-même of Pierre Nicole: “Comme l’ignorance de soi-même est la source de tous les vices, on peut dire que la connaissance de soi-même est le fondement de toutes les vertus” (Nicole 1999: 331).
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Braga, J. (2015). Simulation and Dissimulation. Mandeville’s Satirical View of Commercial Society. In: Balsemão Pires, E., Braga, J. (eds) Bernard de Mandeville's Tropology of Paradoxes. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19381-6_18
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