#i cannot get into hegel bc itll become obvious how little i understand hegel

[centrifuge-politics]

Brick Club 5.4.1

Late late late! I would say something about this compelling illustration but it feels in bad taste. This maybe goes without saying, but TW for suicide and suicidal thoughts. I don’t talk in detail about that aspect, but it very much is the lens this chapter is presented through.

To start off with a mild observation, I don’t particularly picture the Seine as a rapidly flowing river, so I’m wondering what the geography of this area must have been like to create deadly rapids in the Seine.

“There had been a new thing, a revolution, a catastrophe in the depths of his being.” I just watched Hello Future Me’s very good video on redemption arcs and Javert is absolutely primed for the start of a redemption arc that we are tragically deprived of. (The video also just provides really good frameworks for thinking about contextual character growth from any starting point). In the video, Future Me identifies three interconnected aspects of a character’s being that, when altered, create the tension that drives a character to change. These are stakes, views of self, and views of the world. For Javert, these have been in harmony thus far; he must maintain order, he is irreproachable in his duty, and people will always act according to their roles, respectively. But one of these points changes when Valjean spares him; his view of the world is challenged. As a result, his view of himself is no longer compatible with how he sees the world. If this had happened halfway through the book we would possibly see all of these aspects change one after the other as Javert struggled with the new tension between these factors and subsequently changed as a character. But, alas.

Javert has blown past rigid morals and entered into complete prescriptive essentialism. “One thing had astonished him, that Jean Valjean had spared him,” not even because Valjean is ‘bad’ and therefore does ‘bad’ actions, but that taking revenge against Javert would have been justified and even right in Javert’s eyes. It’s a startling view into Javert’s thought process, that every person is so inherently defined by their social positions that they their actions should be 100% predictable at all times, like rational choice theory on steroids.

However, there’s also a really interesting individual element that complicates things. Javert has a personal sense of honor that he has seemingly developed entirely based on his assumptions about society which dictates his response to this situation. It’s like he’s a computer program that hasn’t coded for any exceptions and assumes that every other person is the very same. It has such a twisted Hegelian flair, “the rational alone is real.”

“One of his causes of anxiety was, that he was compelled to think.” Honestly, it’s likely Javert would have never been able to comprehend that he even had an individual sense of honor had it not, at this moment, diverged from the one straight line he’s been following his whole life. There’s suddenly a divide between societal regulations and individual morals that he didn’t even know existed. Of course, the purely rational course of action is to turn Valjean in; a good act doesn’t absolve you of past crimes (legally speaking, because only state sanctioned penalty can exonerate a violation against state law). But Javert has made the mistake of making this personal, he’s no longer objective! Or he never was and is only just now realizing it. Instead, he’s suddenly developing subject/object awareness. Mmm, yes, Hegel. “He had, he, Javert, thought good to decide, against all the regulations of the police, against the whole social and judicial organisation, against the entire code, in favour of a release; that had pleased him; he had substituted his own affairs for the public affairs; could this be characterised?” Yes, sometimes we aren’t mindless cogs in the machine. Imagine if the world were actually imperfect and imprecise. “Terrible situation! to be moved…to be obliged to acknowledge this: infallibility is not infallible.”

The most surprising thing about this crisis is that it took this long for Javert to have it. I would have thought his continual dealings with corrupt individuals with the police would have triggered this crossroads ages ago. In the musical, this maybe works better because Valjean is Javert’s personal obsession. In the book, he’s really just a particular felon that Javert happens to run into every decade or so. He’s not hunting Valjean, he’s not even overly fixated on him until the moment when Valjean does him, personally, an unexpected good turn by not killing Javert as expected. Ignoring the fact that, by everything Javert knows, Valjean has never ever been a violent criminal and his worst crime is breaking parole, this is merely the ‘good’ reversal of the corrupt cop.

Below the cut, more discussion about Javert and rationality.

It’s also notable that this is not a moral awakening, it’s entirely a dilemma of moral logic. “Javert’s ideal was not to be humane, not to be great, not to be sublime; it was to be irreproachable.” And also, something not identical but similar to this has happened to him before! “But how manage to send in his resignation to God?” What a fascinating way of thinking about this. Javert’s mindset truly exemplifies the concept of anomic suicide—which I’ve often linked Marius to as well—which, to review, is characterized by an intense disillusionment and disappointment due to an abrupt shift in circumstances. In Javert’s case, the norms and values he has predicated his entire life on have been violently contested. He no longer feels able to fit into the societal niche he filled, he can’t be a police officer, he can’t be an agent of order, he can’t be a just man. Unlike Marius, Javert’s dilemma has very little to do with emotion and interpersonal conflict and everything to do with established rules and logic.

Javert is an interesting study of how macro structures perpetuate in micro cases, because it’s clear that he’s internalized the strictures of society into a personal ethic, but without any of the context that those strictures were created within. Society says ‘justice’ but what they actually mean is ‘rule of law.’ If Javert simply followed the letter of the law, he could turn Valjean in without reservation, but Javert genuinely believes in the spirit of the law and, well, the two are simply inherently incompatible in a corrupt system. Not to say Javert is a secret advocate of social justice, he definitely still has some screwed up ideas about the worth of poor people and oppressed ethnic groups and, I’m sure, women that definitely influence his idea of what is punishable. But his priorities show in what is functionally his last will and testament. He doesn’t show anything that could be called compassion or empathy for the prisoners he mentions—remember, he isn’t humane—but many of his observations would be a benefit to the prison population and restrictive for the guards. He’s a creature motivated by impartial reason and just exchange built on a questionable moral foundation.

So much of the imagery on the last page is adapted really beautifully in ‘Javert’s Suicide’ and this scene recalls Valjean’s initial epiphany years ago in Digne just as Javert’s melody is reprised from ‘Valjean’s Soliloquy,’ “Immensity seemed open there. What was beneath was not water, it was chasm. The wall of the quai, abrupt, confused, mingled with vapour, suddenly lost to sight, seemed like an escarpment of the infinite…the swollen river guessed at rather than perceived, the tragical whispering of the flood, the dismal vastness of the arches of the bridge, the imaginable fall into that gloomy void, all that shadow full of horror.” Javert, in the end, chose the unknown of death over the unknown of life which, in my opinion, if the core tragedy of his character.