Mark Twain wrote this in 1898, locked it in a drawer, and did not publish it until 1906, and even then only privately, anonymously, in a limited edition he did not put his name on.
The man who made the world laugh for fifty years was afraid of this book. Not because it was badly written, it is extraordinarily well written, but because it contained what he actually thought, and what he actually thought was this: that human beings are machines, that every action a person takes is the product of outside influences acting on interior temperament, that free will is a comfortable fiction, that altruism does not exist, that the most selfless act ever performed was performed for the actor’s own internal satisfaction, and that the difference between a good person and a bad person is training and circumstance rather than moral character.
He knew what this would do to his reputation. He published it anyway, without his name, which is either the most cowardly brave thing he ever did or the most brave cowardly thing, and the ambiguity is itself a small argument against the book’s thesis.
The book is structured as a dialogue between an Old Man and a Young Man, the Old Man delivering Twain’s deterministic philosophy and the Young Man asking the questions that allow the Old Man to elaborate, challenge, and ultimately dismantle every defense of human moral agency the Young Man can produce.
The form is Platonic and the irony is deliberate, Twain borrowing the structure Plato used to vindicate the soul and using it to deny the soul any meaningful independence whatsoever.
The Old Man wins every exchange. He is designed to win every exchange. This is either a philosophical flaw, the rigging of a debate that should be honest, or a formal acknowledgment that Twain had been living with these ideas long enough to have pre-answered every objection, that the Young Man’s challenges are not straw men but the actual best arguments Twain could mount against himself, already defeated by the time he put pen to paper.
The central argument is that every human action is performed for the actor’s own spiritual comfort, that what looks like selflessness is actually the satisfaction of an internal need, that the man who jumps into a river to save a drowning stranger is not sacrificing himself but obeying the compulsion of a temperament that would feel worse watching the stranger drown than risking the river.
This is the argument that most offended Twain’s contemporaries and that most interests philosophers today, because it is not obviously wrong. The Old Man does not say this makes the river-jumper less admirable. He says it makes the river-jumper human, subject to the same mechanisms as everyone else, the hero and the coward both products of training acting on temperament, neither choosing their nature and neither therefore deserving the moral credit or the moral blame that society distributes so confidently.
The argument lands because it is internally consistent, which is not the same as true but is considerably more than most arguments manage.
What makes the book more than a philosophical exercise is that you can hear Twain behind the Old Man, not performing a position but confessing one, a man in his sixties who has watched his daughter die and his wife die and his fortune collapse and his fame become a kind of prison, who has looked at human history with the eyes of someone who spent fifty years making people laugh at it and has arrived at the conclusion that the laughing was a way of not saying what he actually thought.
The famous humor is not here. The famous warmth is not here, or not exactly. What is here is the mind that produced the humor, stripped of the performance the humor required, saying the thing that the humor was always approaching and never quite reaching, that human beings are doing the best they can with what they were given and what they were given was never entirely their choice.
This is either the most compassionate possible conclusion to a determinist argument or the most devastating, and Twain seems genuinely unsure which, which is the most human thing about a book arguing that humans are machines.
The chapter on the Master Passion, the argument that every person’s actions are governed by their need for their own approval, for the internal peace of having satisfied their own conscience however that conscience has been trained, is the book’s philosophical summit and the place where Twain is most original.
He is not saying people are selfish in the conventional sense of pursuing material advantage. He is saying something stranger, that the currency of human motivation is internal and that the internal economy is as rigidly governed as any external one, that the saint and the sinner are both serving their Master Passion with equal dedication, that the only difference between them is what their particular training has made their Master Passion demand.
This observation, made in 1898 by a humorist who had never taken a philosophy class, anticipates arguments that academic psychology and philosophy are still having, which is the kind of thing that happens when a person thinks for themselves long enough and honestly enough that they arrive somewhere the professional thinkers are still on their way to.
What Is Man? is not a book that makes you feel better about being human, which is presumably why Twain hid it for eight years and published it without his name. It is a book that makes you think more precisely about what being human actually involves, which is a different and more demanding gift.
The Old Man’s determinism is too clean, too complete, too perfectly sealed against counterargument to be the final word, because final words on this subject do not exist and Twain was too honest not to know it. But the discomfort the book produces is the productive kind, the kind that remains after the cover is closed and follows you into the next conversation you have with someone who is certain they chose to be the person they are, and makes you wonder, not with despair but with the specific curiosity that Twain could never quite kill in himself no matter how bleak the philosophy got.
Whether the certainty is itself the training, whether the freedom feels real because the mechanism requires that it feel real, and whether that changes anything, and whether it changes everything, and whether the difference between those two conclusions is itself something we chose or something that was chosen for us before we arrived to have an opinion about it.—
Preacher was a-talkin'
There's a sermon he gave,
He said every man's conscience
Is vile and depraved.
You cannot depend on it
To be your guide
'Cause it's you who must
Keep it satisfied.
(Bob Dylan, "Man in the Long Black Coat")
