Historicism

11. Strauss, Natural Right and History (19 June 2022)

by kurto

The search for natural right, or the best way for man to live – the aim of political philosophy – has since Machiavelli been corrupted by abandoning nature as the source of right and by ‘political hedonism’, the ennoblement of benevolence.

All knowledge presupposes a horizon in which knowledge is possible, an articulated whole. All social visions of the whole, no matter how different, are the same in that reconciliation leads to knowledge and natural right. We are obliged to seek a standard of judging our ideas, as well as others, and also the competing needs within society. We cannot give a good account of human ends if they are merely desires or impulses. Natural right is the pursuit of understanding what man ought to do.
The quest to know first things is an endeavor to distinguish to naturally be (to be in truth) and to be by convention. Pre-philosophic thought considered the good life the ancestral. Nature was discovered when man understood the distribution of man-made and naturally occurring first things as observable. The discovery of nature established humanity’s capacity to determine its ends – its successes and failures – across history, society, morals, religion. It was a necessary condition for natural right.

But philosophy does not recognize nature as the standard, because philosophy answers to reason not to authority, whether natural (law of nature) or made by man.

To reject natural right is to say virtue, that which is praiseworthy, is positive or man made. Argument against natural right assumes all knowledge is inherent, that no moral effort is needed, only scientific effort. Separately, historicism attacks natural right because justice is seen as mutable. For historicism to be tenable, it must be made evident that there is no continuity in man’s nature, that there is no persistence in metaphysics. But history often concerns the same fundamental themes or problems. Historicism tries to exempt itself from its own critique – to judge of periods without itself being judged – and showing exceptions in a culture or in practice does not disprove historic norms.

Weber thought there could not be genuine knowledge of the ought (values), only the is (fact). The rejection of value judgements undermines objectivity: the historian cannot interpret the past on its own terms whenever past societies thought value judgements were possible. He contended only science or faith were legitimate grounds but left out human reason: philosophy was downgraded. His views abjured the stateman’s golden mean and encouraged political extremism: his approach to social. The secularization of understanding Providence culminates in the view that man’s ways are scrutable to sufficiently enlightened men, that they should be guided by the actual not what ought to be.

(Weber traced capitalism to a late or ‘corrupt’ Calvinism which had made peace with the world, which means Puritanism did not cause capitalism. This was to overestimate religion’s break with ancient theology [i.e., Roman-era Christianity], and underestimate the break with classical rationalism [Puritanism carrying modern views of Machiavelli, Bacon, etc.].)

Socrates’ turning to the study of human things was no rejection of the divine or the natural but a new way to understand all things, and especially human things, as not reducible to the divine or the natural. To discover the whole was no longer the study of roots but of constituent parts of sciences. Philosophy was to ascend from opinion to truth, via dialectic.

In Crito, Plato suggested duty to the city stems from a tacit social contract (which idea comes from Lucretius); but in the Republic, which addresses the best city, the philosopher is obliged to follow the city simply because the city is perfect. Government is not the same as community. The political problem consists of reconciling the requirement for wisdom with the requirement for consent. For egalitarians, consent trumps wisdom, for natural right, wisdom tops consent. The city has to reconcile wisdom with consent, which implies potential for unwisdom.

In retrospect, the historian is to settle extreme actions which were just and those that were unjust or ill-judged. This points up the Aristotelian view of natural right drawn from everyday justice and the Machiavellian view premised on extreme cases of necessity. These may be described as idealism versus cynicism; whereas Thomist natural law is free of ambiguities implied in the spectrum between Aristotle (higher purpose) and Machiavelli (higher urgency), collapsed into a simpler view of the Decalogue. Modern natural law attempts to separate the moral principles from Thomist (Christian) theology, a return to the classics. For example, Montesquieu wanted latitude for statesmanship.

Hobbes was neither public spirited nor concerned with statesmanship: his view of natural law was scientific, accelerating Machiavelli’s turn to modernity. For the classics, the state of nature was life in a healthy civil society, for Hobbes, life antedating society. Death replaced telos, the state did not promote the virtuous life but safeguarded the individual’s natural right. Where Aristotle saw magnanimity and justice as paramount – serving others – Descartes simplified moral philosophy to morality, and Hobbes to justice, rules to be obeyed in order to create peace or at least self-preservation. Justice became fulfillment of the social contract, no longer standards independent of human will; the Decalogue was no longer intrinsically valid. Virtue is but peaceability; vice is vanity of an aggressive soul not a wicked one; the severe virtues of self-restraint lose standing. The privileging of benevolence is political hedonism. Reason of state – peace – replaces the search for the best regime. Later Nietzsche, declaring will to power to be reality, replaced the study of ends with the study of power. The right institutions guarantee social order and much else.

Locke thought that private consciences are private opinions. The desire for happiness is natural right, but no duty is entailed. Then, all social or government power commences with individual right. Hobbes emphasizes right to resist society or government more strongly than Locke. Property right is most characteristic of the latter: property is natural law, natural law defines limits of the state. The poor are enriched when others acquire property, generating benevolence. Madison followed Locke in expressing the first role of government as protecting different or unequal faculties in acquiring property. From this point, nature furnishes only materials, not the results – there are no natural forms or essences. Society was to be built on low but solid ground, taking its bearings from how man lives, not how he should live.
Rousseau, the forerunner of the second wave, returned to the classics but discarded reason in favor of passion, leading to Nietzsche. The Frenchman sought to defend both the city and its virtue and nature; there is a tension. Science is cosmopolitan and the fount of universal philosophy; theoretical science must control civic virtue. As Hobbes put natural right at the service of passion, Rousseau criticized him for locating the law of nature (prescribing duties) as subservient to reason. His duties are instead directly subject to passion: man is by nature good, his passions valid, he is perfectible and so malleable. Further freedom is ‘self legislation’, replacing virtue (restraint). Not virtue makes freedom but freedom makes virtue. By result, modern society must obfuscate the telos of political philosophy. Modern man claims privileged treatment based on sensitivity not wisdom, on compassion not virtue.

Burke: the practical consequence of siding with the ancients in the milieu of modern political events explains the Anglo-Irishman using modern language of natural right, albeit within a classical or Thomist framework. The demos’ claim to political is not a right – the right is good government, and good government not guaranteed by democracy. His remarks on the juncture of theory and practice, surpassing Aristotle, are his most important original contribution; he left no corpus of theory. In both the American and French revolutions, treating the right of sovereignty and the right of man, he questioned the wisdom of exercising legally valid but politically dubious claims. Burke thought history a habit not a precept; analogies are often misleading. In Sublime, he his disagrees with the classics that beauty is perfection of proportion, virtue, order. It is not intellectual but sensual or circumstantial. Likewise, constitutions are not made by a master legislator but must grow. He derides Rousseau’s historicism.

NB: In the Ethics, Aristotle wrote the only serious part of philosophy is political philosophy.
Socrates: universal doubt leads not to truth but into a void.

22. Ellmers, Narrow Passage (23 November 2023)

by kurto

The 1980’s ‘culture wars’, abating at Cold War’s end, resurfaced in the late 2010s, latterly the more bitter for the revelation of a Hegelian-Nietzschean split between leftists favoring technocracy (progressives) and latter-day Existentialism (postmoderns). Both strands of thought had already been identified as dead ends by Heidegger and Strauss, whose call for a return to classical rationalism is the main topic. Political thought is not academic but practical, and modern society is rational. When Western academics and government officials lose faith in reason, society is in crisis.

The Philosophes had sought to make reason universal; but the unbridled pursuit of philosophy in government damages the city’s ends (its latter-day myths and gods). What has been lost, as per Strauss’ ‘three waves of modernity’, is the conception of nature and man’s place in it. Inability to test authority by use of reason portends loss of agency, freedom. When social scientists speak of angst, unknowingly they refer to essentially political emptiness, reduced either to soulless technocracy or nihilism. (Foucault, who plays an unlikely role herein, observed power never disappears but takes on new forms, ever-changing because it is not bounded by reason.)

History, properly the imaginative reconstruction of places and events, was often seen by 19th-century intellectuals as a mechanistic process. Historicism failed (and continues to fail) because history is neither rational nor ending; but the view assigns man an uncontrollable place in an inexorable sweep, while isolating him within time. Science, which came on scene with Bacon and Descartes, promises mastery of nature but separates facts from values, and so can’t produce a view of the good. Only the pursuit of political thought free of philosophy of history and historicist determination can liberate the 21st century from nihilism and technocracy (the latter seeming the larger task).

Strauss’ unique contribution is an awareness of the moral-political equilibrium (tension) of philosophy. To become political, to establish conditions for virtuous life, human matters must be elevated to reason; otherwise, all is but a contest of will to power.

Plato’s importance to Strauss is evident. The ancient thought the whole consists of heterogeneous parts which cannot be understood as constitutive; but knowledge of the whole is impossible. His famous analogy of the shadowy cave – an argument for transparent use of reason in government – is reified in Foucault’s portrayal of unaccountable, amorphous sociopolitical elites exercising power (the insight giving rise to an otherwise misleading title). Yet it’s not clear why Plato among Strauss’ many influences is here singled out, just as it’s unclear what ‘narrow passage’ refers to. A bibliography is wonted.

21. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (24 Nov 2015)

by kurto

Fulminates against the American university’s abandonment of liberal arts education in favor of the postmodern left’s historicism and nihilism. The opening section blasts the contemporary student, circa 1985, and is forgettable. The meat of the book more usefully traces the passage from Weber and Nietzsche to Heidegger and thence, severely corrupted, to the postwar American faculty. The author contrasts classical understandings of the self, truth, and suchlike concepts with the studiously value-free conceptions of the moderns and postmoderns. The final section demonstrates how the Enlightenment university, established to safeguard academic freedom, has been transformed into a radically totalitarian institution. Erudite and interesting, if occasionally shrill.

21. Banner, Ever-changing Past (15 October 2022)

by kurto

The discipline of history depends on evidence, which element is protean, and seeks for relevance, which changes with passing generations. Therefore conclusions are in the long run unstable. So runs the main tenet of Banner’s argument for historicism. ‘Only by writing for their own times and in response to questions of their day can historians make the past comprehensible to those who wish to learn of it. … What to one person and one age is orthodoxy to another is revision, and vice versa’ (p. 269). Banner commences with the contrast between Herodotus, who valued informal culture and mindsets, and Thucydides, who preferred tangible deeds and recorded public affairs. Put another way, whether the discipline’s purpose is to advance moral understanding or be objective (Ranke’s as it actually happened) is an important source of competing perspective. Revisions may also stem from method, which prompt different queries. After a tour of such revisionists – really pioneering practitioners – as the 4th-century theologian Eusebius and Marx, the author establishes himself as a postmodern fellow traveler. The premise of deconstruction is admitted; objectivity is ‘masculine’; historical propositions usually cannot be falsified; the would-be neutrality (positivism) of psychology is smuggled into historical practice to demonstrate the impossibility of conclusion. Yet Banner is pleased to defend the mandarinate’s expertise: ‘Whatever modern and postmodern doubts about the objectivity ideal have arisen since the nineteenth century, it is impossible to imagine that the inborn human thirst for dependable historical understanding will suffer significantly among professional historians and members of the general public because of these uncertainties’ (p. 262)! And: ‘Such prudent relativism in historical thought has never come close to being so unhinged and radical as to threaten historians’ commitment to truth and accuracy’ (p.265). The usual (circa 2021) progressive platitudes are frequently aired. Lacking any boundary between ‘revisionism’ and nihilism, Banner tacitly encourages postmodern attacks on the heritage of Western society. The matter of historicism is treated by recognizing it is not the answers but the great recurring questions that establish transcendence.