Leo Strauss

10. Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs (15 April 2024)

by kurto

Essays spanning literary criticism and political thought, insistently making the point that only recovering the origins of one’s ideas, so as to see the real arguments before they calcified, makes one a thoughtful analyst. Some of the things we hold true are so, some are not.

Modern science seeks to explain man by what is not man, not by the soul. It broke with the classics, Swift first noted in Gulliver’s Travels, when it could no longer reason but only slavishly follow process: humanity was sidelined for Cartesian rationalism. But a man is most what he is by result of what he does, by the character of his activity. Schiller thought modernity was characterized by abstract science and also unrefined passions, whereas a good man and conscientious citizen seeks for harmony. But the ‘accidents of life’ force men into customs which cause them to forget the whole. Harmony is not daily but transcendent.

Since Rousseau, overcoming society’s bourgeois has been seen as very nearly the whole problem of realizing true democracy and simultaneously achieving genuine ‘personality’. Rousseau studied the passions to balance them, not to govern them. Yet he sought to reproduce Platonic egalitarianism based on morality, not post-Machiavellian self-interest. He introduced sublimation of the will as a source of higher expression (e.g., the arts); Nietzsche coined the erm; Freud popularized it. In Emile, lessons are separated into layers where philosophy seeks for the whole. Only in the end, in winning Sophia, does the protagonist distinguish between inclination and will; morality is the struggle between these since nature is primary and authority comes from within. Thus balanced can man be free and moral.

The bourgeois as Rousseau popularized them stand between the naturally good and the moral public. Rousseau follows Montesquieu in seeing virtue as a passion (as against the ancients), in believing passion the real power of the soul, in seeing only passion as able to control passion. But Enlightenment sought to connect selfish passions to the rational, dependable civic ones, while Rousseau defended morality versus reason and denied the otherwise desired transition. Consequently while the ancients saw the freedom of the small community as the means to virtue, he made freedom the end. Willing the general will was a new kind of inclination: obedience is freedom! Rousseau looked to aristocratic Sparta and Geneva as models.

To summarize

    Natural Right and History

(pp. 241-242): Strauss thought Nietzsche wrong to assert rationalism was a line of inquiry unbroken from the ancients to contemporary science. The succession of philosophical developments obscures the core questions and their alternatives. To reject historicism is to seek to understand people as they themselves did, not to assert one can know more than the principals themselves.

On Aron: the Cold War was the political issue of the 20th century. The greatest sign of liberal decay was the savaging of the university by people who called themselves liberals. The tyrannies see bourgeois society as the enemy; communism says reason can’t be free, and must be replaced by theory; fascism wants to be replace reason with passion. Both undercut rationalism.

Kojeve saw Hegel as primarily concerned with self-knowledge, the ability for the philosopher to explain his doings. Hegel fulfilled the Platonic-Aristotelian goal of absolute wisdom – without such possibility, all knowledge, science, and philosophy itself is impossible. Thus the end of history, for only at the end can all be known. But if we lack final wisdom, then the matter is to understand alternatives.

Modern state-of-nature theorists (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) agreed with Plato and Aristotle that nature is the permanent standard, but disagreed on what is natural. John Rawls is an updated utilitarian. Simplifying Hobbes and Locke, uninfluenced by Rousseau or Kant, focused on the satisfaction of desire but not morality let alone virtue, he thought pursuing contradictory social ends presented no problems, but evidenced freedom. Thus he was to intuit equality, dispensing with the question of whether equality is just.

Socrates saw the contest between philosophy and poetry stemming from religion, and more specifically the latter’s connection to fanaticism – a connection present in all artistic ‘cultures’. Culture implies opposition to commercial society (i.e., pursuits based on reason). It stems from the Platonic cave. During the Enlightenment art and religion became subservient to more amorphous culture. Bloom holds up Goethe as able to see the real problem of coming to terms with what is, not first reforming the world to one’s vision.

The

    Republic

attempts to find a regime in which philosophers are not ruled by hypocrites. Paraphrasing Aristotle, we begin with the things which are first to us, in order to reach what is first to nature. Aristotle saw the essence of happiness as virtue; life, liberty, and property are merely conditions favored by the moderns. In politics, teachings (i.e., consensus) reflect what is more powerful in the regime and in turn magnify the regime’s most dangerous tendencies. Yet there’s no reason to compromise public views which are conducive to the general good to accommodate the freedom of fanatical minorities.

The sociology of knowledge is a premise which accepts that which is to be investigated as established, that which is to be proven (by exegesis) as a given. A corollary: in what appears similar, we should look for distinctions.

Most university scientists are sub-theoretical technicians, and most research for commercial purposes. Only the money stops conflict from being apparent. More broadly, the modern university’s divided pursuits is the decisive intellectual phenomenon of the late 20th century (and counting?). The left sees the university as the means to addressing contemporary politics (or even forcing the issue). To assert students have the right to judge their teachers is to convert the school to a marketplace.

25. Frohnen, Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism (17 December 2023)

by kurto

Burke and Tocqueville laid down a set of principles, based on Christian natural law and finding virtue in the husbanding of tradition and community, which together constitute a proper philosophy. Its challenge is finding goodness in an imperfect, materialist society.
In Aristotle, virtue ensures rightness of ends; prudence, or practical wisdom in given circumstances, rightness of means. In Augustine, understanding is the reward of faith. In Aquinas, society’s checking base appetites enables development of virtue. Natural law holds society promotes character: conservatives defend regimes which respect customs as promoting individual virtue. The true conservative mistrusts individual reason, finding in prejudice proofs over time which are applicable to current circumstance, finding in custom God’s purpose as well as the nature of man.
Burke and Tocqueville, whose views are elaborately explicated, could oppose common practice while supporting society as it was, defending that which exists without sacrificing commitment to virtue. Burke’s opposition to the abstract really targeted idealization, which not only omits true qualities but also inserts falsehoods, for not only simplifying human nature but also supposing hoped-for but unreal qualities. Idealization equally undermines existing authority posits false ends, the enforcement of which is tyranny. Government is not the teacher of virtue but its guardian, the keeper of tradition, manners, prejudice.
For Tocqueville, individual character and well-ordered liberty could not be imposed but were habitual; he commenced with the individual himself, one step earlier than Aristotle’s family. Liberty depends on social institutions not political character, for laws are the children of custom, which grow upward from the local. In America, local practice prevailed; in England, the laws were good because they were old. Localism and legalism interceded between the individual and the state. Whereas in France, centralization enervated custom. By doing for citizens what they ought to do for themselves, the state enfeebled its residents. Conversely, public service demonstrates independence – what, when how – from egalitarian diktat. Tocqueville sought to recall French rulers to the pursuit of virtue. Tyranny of the majority restricts worthy contributors to social and political life. Such societies will have little true diversity, few great writers and statesmen. The conservative may consider his own society superior, even if others are virtuous.
The conservative affection for the particularistic, up through the nation-state, is not the same as the republican’s requisite service to the state, for public service can take many forms. But Strauss thought Burke’s identifying tradition with wisdom was conflating the good with the existing. Strauss rejected God in arrangements: natural law and philosophy does not require a deity.
Oakeshott saw man’s ability to act properly outside norms as highly limited. Rules are an abstraction of the essential activity, which resists the cataloging of all possible experience. The less to be discussed, the sounder the social basis. Social achievement is taking next steps consistent with what’s already been done. The search for social perfection results in chaos of conflicting ideas which society can’t survive (i.e., the analogy of Babel). But custom itself is rightful, not the container of higher truth. Oakeshott called a artists and philosophers to promote Platonic lies, unrealistically in Frohnen’s view. He could not reconcile himself to the practical role of religion in rightful conduct. Kristol could not identify a pole other than compromised materialism; Kirk was so concerned with the nature of beliefs that he overlooked the sense of good character.
Best as comparative study, though having raised Strauss’ dispute with Burke, Frohnen ought to have studied the paradox of why the contemporary right looks to both Burke and Strauss.
Burke: ‘Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas in hot reformations … the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested, mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice, so contrary to the whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very people who are most eager for it are among the first to grow disgusted at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their own quality, but by the unapt and violent natures of the remedies.’ Speech of Economical reform
Tocqueville: ‘… It is not the mechanism of laws that produces great events, gentlemen, but the inner spirit of the government. Keep the laws as they are, if you wish. I think you would be very wrong to do so; but keep then. Keep the men, too, if it gives you any pleasure. I raise no objection so far as I am concerned. But, in God’s name, change the spirit of the government; for, I repeat, that spirit will lead you to the abyss. Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848

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.

15. Strauss and Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy (14 August 2021)

by kurto

An anthology of essays on the most influential of political philosophers, shaped by the characteristic views of Leo Strauss. The discovery of nature divided physics (i.e., the natural) and nomos (law, convention). Then followed the question whether political things are natural or conventional: the Socratic ‘what is?’.

Thucydides:
• Human nature will always overthrow the restraints of law and justice when given the chance, as demonstrated by the depravity of the Peloponnesian War
• Carrying strength of observation through to a full understanding demonstrates Thucydides’ tenacity, which enabled him to portray the course of the war, its horrors, and its humanity in ways that indeed lessons for the modern era

Plato:
• Justice is dedication to the city-state’s common good; taken to the extreme it’s communism
• The

    Republic

does not aim at the best regime but the nature of the city. The

    Laws

looks at the practice application of government
• The ‘art of justice’ reflects the view of knowledge as virtue. Citizenship in the just city is craftsmanship of some kind – men are different by nature, and so there is accommodation to actual circumstance. Justice is therefore moderate
• The city and its elite are attached to the noble lie, whereas the philosopher replaces opinion with knowledge
• The contemplation of ideas is the work of the philosopher; the artisan imitates the process in his work; Nietzsche thought poets, searching for virtue, are imitating the ‘work of ideas’ and therefore valets of derivative morality

Xenophon:
• Accepts Socratic pursuit of the best way of life if not that philosophy is the answer. Agrees justice if the primary problem of political thought
• Also follows Socrates in accepting the radical limits of knowledge
• In seeking honor from friends and retiring from Cyrus and public life, he sought deeper pursuit of knowledge. In seeking to rehabilitate Socrates, he veered from knowledge is virtue to discipling one’s self to the task at hand

Aristotle:
• The philosophic life is best for those capable, but it doesn’t follow it’s the best political outcome or that all must participate in politics. Just as war is for the sake of peace and occupation for leisure, so politics is for well-ordered life in the city. Thus the best regime makes possible lines of pursuit for many virtues
• The regime is not only institutional arrangements but also intent – a view similar to Marx or modern sociology
• Equity is not grounded in natural law but prudence; friends have no need of justice but only concord to achieve fairness
• Aristotle’s pioneering use of the mixed regime is to blunt conflict between rich and poor

Cicero:
• Philosophic inquiry increases the probability of knowledge but skepticism, taken to the extreme, is disastrous. The statemen who discover the best measures for promoting virtue are superior to the wisest philosopher
• Cicero praises respect for convention and custom, to a point, but thinks one or several men could be prescient; the statemen’s task is not dispelling myth but refracting practical truth into chosen policy. Burke’s later veneration differed in observing that the best ways were not always the product of known reason.
• The mixed regime captures both talent and popular opinion.
• Holds to natural law – justice is not entirely dependent on continent circumstance. Both reason and justice must make accommodation for practical politics

Augustine:
• Chiefly opposed classical thought’s failure to deliver a just society, not classical thought itself: temporal law requires higher, divine law
• His attack on pagan virtue set the path for the fallen view of Rome during medieval ages
• His treatment of Donatists set the stage for medieval persecution of heretics
• Augustine’s solutions to religious and civil society were unsatisfactory in that imprecision led to real harm. Classical philosophy limited itself to classical elites; Christianity, which as a faith (not a divine law such Judaism or Islam), addresses all and therefore ought to solve for society

Al Farabi:
• First Muslim to address classical political thought, relaying Aristotle and also Plato’s Republic to the Western tradition, but also for possibility of conjoining rationality and revealed law – which al-Farabi would later reject
• Aristocracy is the most virtuous regime: its citizenry is concerned with divine law as well as properly harmonized natural (rational) knowledge. There are two powers of intellect for understanding God: by imagination and by rational faculty
• At the summit is the philosopher-king, who engages in rightly guided prophesy; who also defends laws established by ‘true princes’ and conducts artful jurisprudence
• Man is peaceful. Because war is violent, only defensive war is justified

Maimonides:
• Law should be absolute, universal in its prescription even though it doesn’t (can’t) address all possible cases
• Like Islam, in Judaism prophesy plays the important function of elucidating divine law. Kings are below prophets

Thomas Aquinas:
• Christians favored Aristotle’s Politics, Jews and Muslims Plato’s Republic and Laws, by dint of sociocultural tradition. Consequently the former are more amendable to political thought shaping the city; the latter seek to square laws with revelation
• The best (by knowledge and virtue) should rule; the city defines the regime
• The choice of progressing from means to ends is derived from common sense (i.e., prudence); but the end itself of man as a moral being is assigned by nature and is predetermined
• The main issue between Aristotle and Aquinas is whether moral principles change. Aristotle says natural right varies, Aquinas seeks categorization so as to fix some elements consistent with Christian theology. The most general principles (i.e., the Decalogue) are not relative to society

Marsilius:
• An Aristotelian who opposed the papacy, Marsilius favored the many over the few or the one, which are guarded by religious institutions
• The ‘sect’ is constituted by divine law, escaping philosophy as philosophy, a concept also found in al Farabi. It points to the priesthood as society’s teachers of afterlife, rather than rulers or judges of the here and now
• Pointed the way to Machiavelli: when anticlericalism advances to questioning supremacy of philosophy (i.e., contemplation of knowledge), then political thought breaks with the classical tradition

Machiavelli:
• Lowered the goal of best regime from virtue to the practical
• A ruler who seeks to be loved depends on other, but who aims at fear is self-sufficient. Recovery of ancient (i.e., Roman) virtue lies in reimposing fear that once made men good. To be effective, the prince must have the public sphere to himself. Religion, an alternate public authority, must be completely supplanted by the prince
• Machiavelli’s innovations, like many modern discoveries, were well known to the ancients but appear fresh by his narrowing of scope

Luther & Calvin:
• Luther held reason is insufficiently aware of man’s fallen nature; the recourse is scripture, which sets limits to the guidance of history, traditional, rationality. For Calvin, scripture is a source of action, making him the more radical
• The ‘dual citizenship’ of every man creates a frontier in each man. Reason is incapable for valid teleology. For Luther, the formal frontier is circumstantial, for Calvin the church must conform to scripture
• Opposing Anabaptism, each held for the necessity of civic government; opposing the papacy, each for the autonomy of the state under God; against princes, the autonomy of God within the church
• Luther believed depraved man was best ruled by the monarch; whereas Calvin thought monarchs too were men and should be checked, but injustice or tyranny was no cause for civil disobedience
• The law of the state is for maintenance of ‘outward’ morality. It is related to divine / natural law but not deducible from it because of circumstance

Hooker:
• English Puritans, Knox, and French Huguenots departed from Calvin’s acceptance of reason in ways which undermined their philosophic consistency. Hooker attacked these ‘degraded’ works for their resort (i.e., refuge) to scripture
• Eternal law is not arbitrary but reason, since rationality stems from God

Bacon:
• Men love fame or wisdom: the former is achieved by the later. The highest wisdom comes from teleological progress
• Bacon’s scientific method of progress is meant to pertain to all fields including political thought
• Bacon denied the best political order could be known prior to progress in conquering nature. Yet philosophers are superior to experts, who are superior to the public

Grotius:
• Exemplifies the work of a jurist (i.e., positive law) applied to the political sphere, rather than philosophic origin
• Man is rational and social: men act justly (pace Cicero, Seneca) when in conformity with attraction to society
• There is no right to revolution: peace is always better for society
• Whoever metes punishment must have been injured or have responsibility for one who’s been attacked

Hobbes:
• Following Machiavelli, separated natural law from the ideal of man’s perfection
• Man’s thoughts (rationality) are subordinate to his passions
• There are three causes of conflict among men – competition, distrust, glory – which drive the natural state of war. Reason acts to intensify fear of death, seeks comfort
• Aristotle’s view of some men being more fit to lead is false. Men enter society only as equals; justice must be equally extended
• Leviathan is the all-powerful state which all must enter for government to succeed. The decisive questions regard technical administration. Statute law is supreme, supersedes canon law

Descartes:
• Perhaps the founder of modern philosophy but not modern political thought, he followed Bacon in favoring useful knowledge over knowledge for its own sake
• In the contest between virtue and passion, the latter prevails. The science which leads to happiness does not end in the good of the soul (or theology) but the good of the body: the good of man is material
• No teaching relevant to natural law or rights. Reason services the passions, a la Hobbes. Descartes seconded Machiavelli’s critique of natural reason, which led to the need for method and thence mastery of nature via science

Milton:
• The free commonwealth depends on an aristocracy of the middle class, men trained in civic virtue by public-spirited education
• Christianity, like the aristocracy, is to be preferred on its tradition not current merit, for liberty of religion or politics is the goal of public life (even if not universally sought). But liberty is to be virtuous not licentious
• The free commonwealth honors pursuit of knowledge, educates citizens to pursue it and to exercise Christian liberty. It depends not only on institutions but men who can rule themselves

Spinoza:
• Politics is scientific not Socratic. Man is defined by the base, the end is mastery of power
• All sciences are built on the mathematical model: teleology is banished. Thus comprehending political events differs from political action based on consensual understanding
• Power equals rights. Spinoza emphasizes freedom of institutions not of individuals; institutions check the irrationality of the multitude (i.e., the heterogeneity of the state of nature). But he deviates from Hobbes in a more nuanced view of self-preservation, and monarchy is replaced by conservative democracy (i.e., aristocracy) which supports freedom of philosophy
• Religious freedom is action only: it bears no claim to truth. Indeed since the best regime expresses morality, religious piety is obedience to the political order
• Evidences that freedom is imperiled when love of speculation is absent or repressed

Locke:
• Government is by consent of the governed because all are born free. The basis of the law of nature is the strongest desire within humankind: thence to life, liberty, property
• Money changes the basis of human interaction, promoting greater protection of property. The central theme is the effect of increase within society. Property is the catalyst for need of common judgment: property explains the transition to civil society
• Contra Hobbes, under tyranny, man has not left the state of nature. The good prince and the tyrant are difficult to distinguish: both go beyond the law; the answer is not theoretical but the people’s practical judgment, which implies the right of resistance. Political life is an unending struggle from backsliding into the state of nature
• There is no freedom from arbitrary power without laws, the business of channeling basic desires. Government is powerless to change human nature – those that try must end in terrorism
• The ancients thought passions were tyrannical of individuals and reason alone could subdue them. Locke upended this view, seeking to use passions to promote civic freedom

Montesquieu:
• Statesmanship requires treatment of particulars, which are intelligible only in light of historical understanding, both proximate and ultimate (i.e., philosophic)
• Every government has a nature and a principle which is the foundation of its laws
• Aristotle and Montesquieu differently distributed government powers: the former’s deliberative (executive) prescription was narrower than the latter. More important, extensive liberty is less important to Aristotle than to Locke or Montesquieu
• In England the liberty of impassioned merchants guarantees that of the thoughtful few – the postponing of social breakdown in a way that doesn’t require virtue. Indeed the revival of commerce encouraged the renaissance of philosophy in Europe: commerce and knowledge ended the Middle Ages
• The ancients thought the good man and the good citizen rarely coincided. Montesquieu thought vice underpinned good civic order, a view taken from Machiavelli

Hume:
• Ideas are derived from impressions. One cannot think what one hasn’t seen; we cannot have certain knowledge of fact, only the relations of ideas. We are obliged to doubt whatever cannot be affirmed
• Moral cognition is not separable from action (or aversion to it). The virtuous is what one is compelled to pursue. Virtue and vice constitute sentiment. Moral judgments are not reasoned from passion, they are passions
• Toleration reduces fervor, promotes civil society; but when authority is challenged, it should be preferred for the sake of order. Government is founded on custom (not ‘contract’). Time will naturally strengthen political institutions

Rousseau:
• Admired Sparta for its simplicity – only the simple republic can thrive. The development of arts and sciences is inherently corrupting to mankind’s morals
• Man is not directed to an end, he needs ‘history’ to point the way, and history shows he is plastic (not primarily political or social). There is no natural law
• Man’s freedom opposes / is independent of moral rule but paradoxically is the source of morality. Virtue is not the end but the means to freedom. Manners are more important than formal institutions, because they give practical force
• Education and punishment are instruments of ‘forcing one to be free’, of enforcing the general will
• In large societies, delegation is required; delegates are to effect the general will (no Burkean representation). But this diminishes freedom by curtailing participation
• Government is the source of inequalities of rank (rather than the capstone of communal cooperation). When the state withers and equality of persons is established, inequality of property becomes suspect
• Did not hold to a philosophy of history nor neglected the importance of politics. Rousseau completes the Machiavellian-Hobbesian break with antiquity; and anticipates Hegel and Nietzsche; but his grasp of humanity was more subtle than this 19th- and 20th-century successors on the left

Kant:
• Political thought reduces to republican government and international organization. The pivot is the tension between deterministic Newtonian science and Rousseau’s moral conscientiousness – phenomena and noumena (reason attaining freedom from conditions). Deeply indebted to Rousseau, he favored the practical over the theoretical, moral over intellectual, common folk over scientists; but Kant fills in structural support for liberalism and democracy missing from Hobbes, Locke, even Rousseau
• Science of nature is a priori understanding, versus the receptivity of the senses. Experience supplies rules. But morality is ‘ought’ not ‘is’. Good will tends to be identical with justice. Yet legal duties take precedence: first rights, then happiness
• Philosophy of history surmounts disjunction of morality and politics (i.e., justice). Kant believes in moral progress (the ratchet of history). Moral reason liberates man from theoretic or scientific reason – fellow men are ends not means – but in turn society is continually progressing, so there is no discord between virtue and happiness, morality and nature, or politics, duty and interest.
• More optimistic than Rousseau about the effects of tension between individual and society – history reconciles with morality
• Philosophy of history entails reconciling amoral politics (a la Machiavelli) and supermorality not of this world. Politics does not admit of perfect solutions: man needs a master, but his master is himself. The highest problem of philosophy of history is to grasp moral bearing of progress in culture, society, and law and channel into education of the individual
• Good constitutions derive not from people’s morality but instead moral education from the constitution. Laws lose force as government gains in extent – soulless despotism decays into anarchy
• Morality, nature, and history take turns in progressing toward Kant’s eternal peace.
• Civilization (lawfulness) precedes morality; the decision to act on morals (the ‘moral step’) cannot be effected by appeal to egoism; it is duty to the categorical imperative. Philosophy of history mediates but cannot erases gaps between evil, good, and ego-morality

Blackstone:
• Chiefly concerned, despite appearances, with natural law versus conventional (common) law of England, though not a political thinker per se
• Where there is tyranny, mankind will not be reasoned out of humanity or liberty
• The origin of duty (convention) ultimately lies in the preservation of equality and rights. But convention bears only so much scrutiny – one defaults to natural law

Smith:
• To understand a market-oriented society, one must understand how Smith revised Locke. Smith’s moral philosophy is Humean: virtue stems from approbation (not innate qualities); sympathy from imagination. This view demonstrates a changed outlook of commercial gain, from property to service for others. The recognition of private and common good on a voluntary basis was novel
• Nature’s end is advanced by sentiment more than reason, but where the classics allowed for relaxing morals to serve the higher good, Smith was ambivalent because the higher good’s exceeding moral virtue (praiseworthy acts) was questionable. Smith mitigated Hobbesian ferocity and completed the Lockean view by turning to economics. But in reducing man to his affections, he implied duties (e.g., social contact) as well as rights (self preservation). Hence the best order of society was free, prosperous, tolerant – but imperfect because of the nature of individuals
• The Marxist critique understandably exploited these tensions, but relied on philosophy for resolution, which is alien to individuality

Federalist:
• Exhibits a very high degree of conjoining practical and theoretic matters, specifically the best functioning of republican government, and argues for restrictions on pure democracy (i.e., government by country in a representative body) without resort to monarchical, aristocratic, or mixed forms
• The dangers are usurpation by elected representatives, tyranny of the majority, and/or the populace acting foolishly. The distance between the people and representatives is intended to promote dispassionate government (progressivism in the extreme or best form)

Paine:
• Though he felt government’s role was limited to the ‘few cases’ in which society was not ‘conveniently competent’, he is important for foreshadowing the welfare state

Burke:
• Theorists of the French Revolution wrongly based their work on extreme cases – generalizing from the outlier leads to wanton destruction, since at the edge natural affections are abandoned. Humanitarianism is trimmed by ruthlessness, hardening hearts even while claiming to be freedom
• But for attacking Rousseau’s usage by Revolutionary leaders, he avoids theory and instead contends on grounds of practical action. He is therefore more theoretical than statesmen-politicians, and more practical than political thinkers
• Prudence in the statesman is superior to morality but needs imprimatur. Aristotle viewed statesmanship as the comprehensive legislative art; Burke saw lower and higher orders. The British constitution guarantees both ‘sovereignty’ and morality by giving prudence superior claim over a theory of virtue. Smith also favored prudence but didn’t so exalt the constitution; Montesquieu was somewhere in the middle
• The ruling principle of Burke’s political thought is avoiding the clash of theory and practice: he shunned the making of constitutions from whole cloth, favoring adjustment. The founding was unimportant compared with timely reform. The constitution embodies the mechanism for growth and progress
• Neither Thomist (the soul’s natural inclinations are fulfilled in politics) nor Aristotelian (man is a political animal) Burke thought man was a religious animal
• Prescription is Burke’s special contribution to political thought, defined as long accustomed usage, formerly reserved to property, transformed into part of man’s natural rights. Prescription mellows the inevitability of change into acceptance
• Though siding with Cicero (against Hobbes) that man cannot make any law which he pleases, and having spent little energy establishing the substance of original justice, Burke’s prescription makes it a guide for applying natural law. It is more the means than the ends
• Prejudice is allied with reason: untaught wisdom. His thinking is aligned with Aristotle: organic society is not rational
• Manliness is courage and prudence combined so as to be open to public inspection, but is not subservient to public opinion
• He sought to fortify the rule of the few, resulting in the 19th century in the philosophic immobility of conservatives and trusting liberals with a poor grasp of the mechanics of reform – ironic evidence of political imperfection

Bentham:
• Asserted the greatest good for the greatest number; legislators who can succeed in one country can succeed in any; historic circumstance cannot veto ‘scientific’ progress.
• Progress versus custom is the essential characteristic of political debate. Bentham argued for immanent social improvement via judgement (i.e., best guesses) at consequences. That is, a collective self-interest trumps public regardingness, the Socratic ruler’s seeking for orienting the soul toward the divine
• Law inhibits freedom, but overall happiness is enhanced by collective observance. Bentham brought a modern understanding of government to the fore
• Opposed Socratic humility which concedes that philosophy must acknowledge political circumstance and decision making, thereby (adversely) demonstrating the difference between a philosopher and a philosophe

Hegel:
• The state is the primary political actor. The concern is the state as it ought to be understood, not ought to be
• The Greeks lived for the polis – there was no further conscience, no right of subjective freedom. The French Revolution was a breakthrough for putting reason at the heart of the state, for prioritizing liberty as an individual goal – but overdrawn individualism crowds out the role of government
• Hegel sought to resolve / to fuse classical and Christian-Kantian morality (duty), the politics of Plato (virtue, reason), and politics of modernity (the emancipation of passion). The decisive characteristic of the Protestant mind is free thinking. The philosophy of history is the means of synthesis
• The modern state requires rational laws, government, morals (public sentiment). Society leads to the state at the center. War shows the primary of the state, superseding lower goals of security of person and property. War also cleanses the national soul of putrid Kantian ideal of perpetual peace. The state resolves conflict of morality, politics – war is the final arbiter.
• Hegel’s state of civil servants, though seeking ancient-modern fusion, must ultimately settle on the latter

Tocqueville:
• In democratic societies, equality trumps liberty. Therefore resolving popular sovereignty requires finding a place for individual excellence, public virtue, greatness. The New England settlers had reconciled liberty and religion
• Equality of conditions is compatible with tyranny as well as freedom. The majority assaults the few, a new phenomenon in history. Further the majority, fearing to lose influence, turns to government for support. The antidote is plurality of associations
• Tocqueville rejects the classic concern with justice as the foremost goal – justice demands natural rights, which derive from equality

Mill:
• In political thought, the purpose is not only to know what should be done in the present, but also to reach the next phase of history. Mill accepted Tocqueville’s view that the move to democracy indicates necessary progress, and also that equality carried too far undermines justice, individual excellence. Rule by experts, chosen by the people’s representatives, is two stages removed – experts govern but are to be controlled by the elected officials
• Most things are done better by individuals than government since individual action promotes individual education while government threatens liberty

Marx:
• Marxist practice is fundamentally opposed to Western rule of law – it is not simply rhetoric
• Marx denied political economy as the science of allocating scarce resources. He denied timeless essences – only historical events (and becoming) which demonstrate power
• Materialism (i.e., state of need) means mankind must be alienated from political society. It supersedes self-interest, ending in a social prescription (from each, to each…) grounded in nothing
• Dialectical materialism is premised on material conditions of production being primary; the most important conflict is the dialectic stemming from irresolvable conflict of class. The view contrasts with the idealist dialectic, Hegelian dependence on reason
• Property is to classical political economy as constitutional government to political theory
• The labor theory of value is assumed to be self-evident. Marx thought surplus value was unfairly captured
• Rousseau questioned the goodness of both civil society and property; Marx followed on by asserting they were not good and not final. The withering away of the state is naught but Rousseau’s resolution
• Philosophy, the reason of man which is unequally distributed, is to be replaced by philosophy of history, or historic reason. This engine requires the perfectibility of human nature. Then mankind will be ready for politics and religion to be replaced by society and economics

Nietzsche:
• The death of god encompasses the death of Platonic forms. Nietzsche hated the banal last man, teaches acceptance of nihilism as the alternate
• To transvalue partisan politics is to equate morals with politics. The will to power subsumes morality; man is no longer rational; will to power asserts (via the doctrine of eternal return) controlling the future is effectively reshaping the past and making man himself his own creator (ubermensch)
• Historicism asserts the overwhelming importance of temporality – man cannot escape his life and thoughts being shaped by his era. Nietzsche initially agreed with Hegel, before breaking away
• Modern education produces specialists but not thoughtful individuals, which corrupts the state
• His is an implicit critique of Marxism: Marxist freedom from want is Nietzsche’s degraded last man
• Re Nazism: a man who counsels living dangerously must be credited with dangerous outcomes

Dewey:
• Sought for a popular understanding of ethics, education, logic, etc. – aiming at pragmatic description of social progress
• Marxism is valuable for establishing economic determinism as fact. Scientific method is applicable to society: a consensus of objectives means measurement is possible
• Growth is the end of philosophic and social development – but an ill-defined goal. In pluralist politics, growth runs against teleology, so the state is judge in its own cause
• Contra fixed, substantive goals for the community, growth is not political (as commonly determined) but instead psychologic and economic. Democracy is not government but a way of life (i.e., the general will)

Husserl:
• The founder of phenomenology, Husserl sought for the ultimate grounds of rationality, so as to foreclose positivist, historicism skepticism. Reason is autonomous (i.e., normative). Reason’s presuppositions must be identified
• Weber and Nietzsche questioned the value (facticity) of reason and knowledge. Husserl showed their doubts stemmed from the basis of their inquires. Reason is indeed the ultimate good; man needs a telos
• Lack of telos is the West’s crisis of confidence – failures of reason are post-Cartesian errors. Husserl opposes nihilism
• Human nature is reason’s relation to the surrounding world. Phenomenology is more thoroughly rationalist than the ancients (i.e., Platonic forms)
• Contrary to scientific reduction to experience (observation, measurement), appearances have immanent logos (i.e., a reason for appearing as they do). When reason is undermined, it’s a disaster for society since human life is based on rational norms. Whereas free scientific inquiry makes science a source of its own decay, as evidenced by positivism and historicism

Heidegger:
• If nothing is fundamentally true, everything is permitted. Metaphysical nihilism is moral nihilism. This misunderstanding of being starts with Plato. It’s necessary to understand being in light of time as we’re understood since becoming conscious of history
• Technology cannot secure freedom because it subdues human nature. Modern conflict results from attempts to refine supremacy of technology, from Cartesian self-consciousness to Nietzschean will
• History makes possible an understanding of place in eternity (i.e., the forms) but as technology undermines nature, leading to nihilism, history falls prey to historicism
• The Greeks’ mistake was to try to answer the incomprehension of being, rather than consider being itself. It is the decisive turn in Western history. Christianity, post-Cartesians diminish the mystery, the wonder of being
• Man cannot surmount nihilism, the genie loosed, but can prepare for the next revelation
• Re Nazism, paraphrasing from Plato’s Last Days of Socrates ‘everything great stands in the storm – stands by virtue of its resistance, difference, persistent victory over oneself’ (Book V: He is like one who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the driving wind hurries along, retires under the shelter of a wall; and seeing the rest of mankind full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can live his own life and be pure from evil or unrighteousness, and depart in peace and goodwill, with bright hopes.)

Strauss
• The crisis of modern political thought (i.e., fact-value disjunction, relativism, historicism) requires a return to the ancients. Understanding modernity requires historicity – we cannot solve matters by accepting presuppositions
• Better to understand the low in light of the high than vice versa
• Assess the author’s own intent, not the post facto understandings of scholars
• Though Machiavelli opposed Christianity, it was his transforming the mode and role of philosophy into a vehicle for controlling (lowering) the path of human thought that marked the turn – natural ends of man (telos) were to be rejected for scientific goals (as later articulated by Bacon, Descartes, etc.)
• Modern natural right was initiated by Rousseau, shifting basis from nature to history; the second wave was inaugurated by Nietzschean nihilism, which asserted history offers no standards
• Ancient and medieval thought was willing to engage dialectically, even with alternative outlooks. Socratic-Platonic though was aware of its ignorance. Socratic dialectical seeks not for universal code (i.e., natural law) but a hierarchy of goals revealed in the exercise of philosophy
• The Socratic voice is lonely, logical opposition identifying the regime’s shortcomings
• Strauss distinguished between what is highest and most urgent: the most urgent need of the democratic state but is not improvement (e.g., Dewey), but rather defense against tyranny of the masses
• Marxism offers a real critique but its positive vision is tantamount to Nietzsche’s last man; further, it undermines lawful freedom, liberalism’s checks on abuse of power. Marxism fails by its own standards to block despotism

12. Zuckerts, Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy (17 May 2015)

by kurto

The challenge of political philosophy is to understand the best way to govern society. Leo Strauss’s reading of ancient and modern philosophers produced a master narrative, a history of ideas, featuring a ‘Socratic turn’ (when philosophy discarded the gods and began to focus on human nature and affairs) and a ‘Machiavellian turn’ (when the pursuit of virtue was lowered to accommodate how humans are commonly seen to behave). Positivism, which distinguishes between scientific fact and all other ‘values’, and historicism, which asserts ideas and events are chained to contemporary interpretation (and is now intertwined with postmodernism), threaten the tenets of this narrative because they tend to nihilism. The book features Strauss’s readings of leading figures and treats his practice of esotericism, which controversially asserts that many philosophers did not write what they really thought, but only left clues, due to threat of political persecution. A final section considers his practical politics and school of disciples. To be re-read.

4. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss (27 Jan 2018)

by kurto

Surveys the German-American political philosopher’s primary teachings:

On political philosophy
• Political philosophy, which aims to replace opinion with knowledge, paradoxically pits the organic wisdom against rational inquiry
• The terrible truth of philosophy is there’s no objective need for it – the only critical necessity is intrinsic to its practice
• One of Strauss’ most enduring themes is Athens vs Jerusalem: Each is obligated to open itself to the other’s challenge. The two sides agree the need for morality, which is core to justice (and thus law). Athens is steadfastly moral; Jerusalem is alive to the possibility of revelation
• Jewish political thought evidences the particular rather than the universal. The Jewish state is modified exile. Strauss showed outward fidelity to Israel, inward commitment to philosophy, in order to combat atheism while preserving truth in knowledge
• Political thought is the first of the social sciences because human experience is practical, borne of action for a purpose (i.e., to preserve or to change). Political opinion presupposes a structured way of life, codified by law, underpinned by a theory of governance
• Justice is a mixture of freedom and coercion, or virtue and persuasion
• Straussian ‘esoteric reading’ is not a doctrine but a process. The emphasis on close reading, which may reveal hidden ideas and emphases, was taken from Heidegger. Politics is implicit in every text because texts are sure to be read in their social context
• Strauss avoided ontology, the nature of being. Not everything is permissible – thus political philosophy, not ontology, is the bedrock of humanity
• It’s safer to understand the low in light of the high (i.e., the ideal), in order to appreciate the best of man’s political traditions
• The experience of history and daily affairs cannot override evidence of simple right and wrong, which is the bottom of natural right. The problem of justice in every context persists
• The distinction between philosophy and ideology is the regard for permanent conditions of human nature – which makes some things insoluble
• Statesmanship is the highest non-philosophical pursuit: the pursuit of freedom and justice through prudence transcends lawyers, technicians, visionaries, and opportunists
• The cultivation of friendship (with one’s opposites) is imperative to practicing the craft

On the history of ideas:
• Like Burke, Strauss sided with the ancients because political thought is closest to the political community
• Classic political thought derives directly from the experience of newly conscious political society. Subsequent political philosophy was tempered by the traditions borne of the political context (i.e., the choices society made)
• According to the classics, honor is secondary to virtue and wisdom. Initiated by Machiavelli, the concern with virtu is shared by Strauss and also the ancients; but Machiavelli omitted the concern with moderation
• Plato’s Laws, Machiavelli’s Discourses, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws put issues of ‘political education’ front and center, in an ‘institutional’ or regime-based approach
• Machiavelli broke with the ancients in 1) abandoning the concern for morality in society and justice in government, 2) elevating politics’ concern for security and consumption over ideals, and 3) positing nature (i.e., the environment) as something to be exploited by technology
• Machiavelli’s view that the means justify the ends eliminated morality and paved the way for tyranny. The modern American concern for freedom runs counter to Machiavelli
• Property unbounded from classic, medieval limits to acquisition is at the core of modern capitalism. Initiated by Locke, this was a big change in natural law: the central value of labor shifted the moral center of property from nature to creativity
• There are three waves of modernity: 1) Hobbes and Locke grounded politics in passion and self-preservation; 2) Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx shifted to historical processes, which are fixed (in contrast to malleable passions; 3) Nietzsche and Heidegger introduced radical historicism so as to reintroduce theology into politics. But the ‘accidental advantage’ of the ‘dead god’ enables the recovery of idealism
• The elasticity of Heidegger’s thought accommodates very bad political philosophy, ideology such as Nazism. Concern for being, versus for humanity, lead to indifference to tyranny. Thus Heidegger had dismissed ethics from the center of philosophy
• Strauss returns to the primacy of politics as a basis for criticizing Heidegger. Both held the West to be in crisis, Heidegger for its loss of culture – the spiritual decay facing Germany – Strauss because Western liberalism was being undermined by relativism and historicism
• Strauss recovered Plato as a source of modern liberalism, by showing Plato denied the possibility of a completely just city and by showing the dialogue as a vehicle of authorial intent – it’s the content that counts
• Natural Right and History seeks to restore natural right, in response to the inroads made by Heidegger’s relativism, to shore up liberalism’s defenses against tyranny. Natural right itself points toward admiring the excellence of the human soul for its intrinsic value, without regard for material conditions
• Strauss has been criticized for his focus on the end of a just society, which implies hierarchy (i.e., political inequality)

On liberalism and tyranny:
• The regime is core to classical political philosophy, both in a factual and a normative sense
• The completely open society will exist on a lower level than a closed society aiming at perfection
• Moral behavior arises from obligations to others, felt needs and strong attachments, not arbitrary commitments
• The Counter Enlightenment was an effort to save morality from determinism of reason. Divesting religion of its public character was a victory for the Enlightenment
• Liberal education is a ladder from mass democracy to ‘democracy of everybody’, but it is elitist and not egalitarian
• Liberalism entails a public-private divide. To abolish the liberal framework would be to pave the way to tyranny
• The contrast between core defense of personal liberty and agnosticism of personal liberty is symptomatic of the crisis of the West. The root problem is attenuated understanding of liberalism, triggered by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and refracted by Berlin
• From Carl Schmitt, Strauss learned to see politics defined as ‘friend or enemy’. A world without conflict would be conformist. When man abandons what is (seen to be) right in favor of comfort, he forsakes human nature
• Evil is ever present. Ideals require moral fervor but also political prudence. The revolutionary’s goal, post-Enlightenment, is to fix it now. The crisis of the West can be treated by prudence, by recourse to liberalism
• Social scientists haven’t recognized fascism and communism as modern tyranny
• The so-called fact-value distinction is at root of nihilism. Social science which can’t distinguish tyranny has no value
• Not only ideology but also science and technology (the conquest of nature) are instruments of social control. The path was blazed by Machiavelli, who sought to connect ‘virtu’ with the ancients albeit without moderation

5. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (21 Feb 2018)

by kurto

In a series of lectures / essays addressing the history of Western ideas, as well as the interplay of philosophy and religion, Strauss makes the case for the primacy of political thought as a bulwark against tyranny and argues the main threat is liberalism’s crisis of confidence. Strauss also recurs to the practice of political philosophy itself.

On practice of philosophy:
• Philosophy begins when the quest for origins is to understood in light of nature, not myth. The gods are the engine by which man believes he can control chance. By contrast, Christian religion prompts one to search inside oneself
• Philosophy is the highest end of political life, for it seeks to answer the question of what is virtue? and to supply practical references; however, the philosopher has to understand things as they are understood in the political community. It has no independent justification
• The poet imitates the legislator in seeking justice, but acts the valet, according to Nietzsche. Plato, to the contrary, says the poet possesses genuine knowledge of the soul. In this sense philosophy is psychology; however, modern psychology and sociology (which do not seek to distinguish between the noble and the base) cannot articulate a higher purpose for life. Thus philosophy, which works by logic, and poetry, which acts by demonstration, are more similar, seeking a solution to the problem of happiness. But philosophy is concerned with all things (the whole); poetry (especially as tragedy) prepares men for the philosophic life
• Aristocracy is the form of government in which the virtuous don’t have to compromise with democratic predilections for common behaviors
• Socrates is the philosophic model, the ‘loving skeptic’. The Socratic dialogue is the main vehicle for classical ideals of civic virtue and justice, the Socratic model is the highest possibility of liberalism
• Dialectic is skill in conversation: Socrates used ‘what if?’ when contradicted, proceeded to general opinions when unchallenged, each in pursuit of consensual agreement (if not truth)
• Rational philosophy is guided by the distinction between objective (true) and subjective. Existentialism says what was objective is superficial and problematic (debatable), and what was subjective is profound but not demonstrable. It rejects a return to metaphysics
• There may be many ways to understand an author, but only one way to understand him as he understood himself

On the sequence of political thinking:
• The ancients were not addressing intelligent men but decent men, and sought to settle controversy in a kind way for the good citizen. No intellectual effort is required to grasp ordinary morality, which consists of doing, whereas the highest morality – virtue – is knowledge
• After Socrates, history exemplifies the precepts of political philosophy. And history remains political history because statesmanship and legislation are the one thing needful. Politics is not the highest but is first (i.e., most urgent), because human things are close to the nature of all things
• By understanding the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides presents the highest ascent of Greek civilization (i.e., politics) and the fragile character of ancient Greek justice, as against barbarians. The Thucydidean speeches are meant to enlarge the character of the speech, to fill the space between the talk (essence) and deeds (wisdom) of the actors. By understanding Periclean Athens we understand the wisdom of moderation: wisdom cannot be said, only practiced. In the act of pursuing wisdom, Plato qua philosopher emphasizes individual choice (i.e., nature) while Thucydides qua political historian points up fate (i.e., events are too big)
• But contrary to Plato, Thucydides sees virtue as a means. He sees unrest, barbarism, war as the norm, where Plato seeks rest, Greek civilization, peace. Thucydides’ highest is unknown, Plato’s highest is nature’s highest. Thucydides’ cause of Periclean Athens is Periclean Athens, Plato’s Periclean Athens is a condition not the cause. For Thucydides, the highest is fragile, for Plato it is the strongest.
• Plato suggested three parts to the soul: reason, spiritedness, desire. Spirit is deferential to reason whereas desire revolts. Strauss says spiritedness thus links the highest level of man to the lowest, but spirit arises from desire’s being rechanneled
• The Middle Ages was the first era to foster the dialogue between philosophy and religion
• Philosophy is more precarious in Islamic and Jewish society than the Christian West. In these cultures religion is law, and does not admit of science; philosophy is highly private, as it was among the ancient Greeks. This explains the collapse of philosophy in Islam after the Middle Ages
• Aristotle says the paramount requirement of society is stability. The classic of the Christian world was Aristotle’s Politics, in the Jewish world Plato’s Laws and Republic, featuring the prophetic philosopher-king. Nor is there Roman thinking or the natural law is the Islamic and Jewish traditions
• Hume viewed man as the reference to unchanging nature. Logical positivism followed the ‘discovery of history’, which emerged from Kant’s distinction between validity and genesis
• Classical political philosophy did not need to demonstrate the essence of courage, justice, kindness, virtue: it knew these were good. Hegel rejected the ancients for lack of demonstrability
• Heidegger defined ‘to be’ as to exist as man, whereas the ancients saw it as perpetual existence. His sein (‘being’ or ‘essence’) replaces knowledge as the goal of the virtuous life
• There is no universal hermeneutics, no semiotics; all dialogue is localized to context, and rhetoric is further individualized
• Sophistry is related to classical political philosophy as the French Revolution to German idealism, as exemplified by Hegel (?)
• Modernity sees philosophy not in service of truth and good but of society and its ethics. Modernity is unusually quick to dismiss the clams to truth of previous eras
• Modern science is more powerful than ancient science but incapable of suggesting how to use this power because of its aversion to values. It can’t speak of progress but only of change. It no longer aspires to perfection
• Rational conduct means to choose the right means for the right ends. Relativism, because it requires unequivocal causality, is actually a flight from reason. Thus the modern flight from scientific reason is a consequence of science’s flight from reason
• Political science is concerned with the normative, while political philosophy regards the best. The former obsesses over method, the latter umpires competing claims to good and justice. Legislation is the architectural skill of the latter
• The problem with social sciences is not abstraction per se but abstraction from the essential things of human society. Social science is concerned with regular behavior, whereas classical politics is concerned with good government
• Political history supposes freedom and empire as manifestations of power, as mankind’s great objective, but history is now seen to be broader. Philosophy can be seen as mankind’s effort to free himself of the binding premises of civilization or culture, so history now threatens philosophy; historical sequences teach us nothing about values
• The acceptance of the past (the return to historical thinking) is different from unquestioned continuing on the current path – the so-called discovery or engine of history (p233)

On the decline of the West
• Existentialism is historicism rooted in Nietzschean relativism: life-giving truth is subjective; it cannot be the same for all men, all ages. Existentialism is the attempt to break free of Nietzsche’s solution to relativism – ‘relapsing’ to metaphysics or recourse to nature. Existentialism belongs to declining Europe, for it is unsure of its absolutes
• Modern philosophy is anthropocentric, as compared with Biblical theology or Greek cosmography, and tends to regard the human mind. In the 17th century, virtue itself came to be seen as a passion; freedom then took the place of virtue. The good life does not correspond to universal truth but consists of creating an original pattern.
• The rediscovery of classical times points up that Athens and Jerusalem have never been harmonized; but the commonality remains justice-morality-divine or natural law. The spring of Western vitality is the irresolvable tension between philosophy and religion, Athens and Jerusalem
• To combine exactness and comprehensiveness, start at the strategic points
• The well-being of the city depends on law and its observance. Justice is primarily a political goal. The wise rule indirectly through the law; the rule of wisdom is diluted by consent
• The difference between progress, which is a moral claim, and change, which makes no claim to improvement, is a major compromise of the modern West. Good and evil were replaced by progressive and reactionary in the 19th century. This substitution failed once it became obvious there is no motor of history; facts don’t teach anything about values; social sciences can only rationalize; the values of barbarism are as defensible as those of civilization
• The impossibility of Irving Berlin’s grounding the case for liberal freedom (‘inviolable boundaries’) indicates the crisis of liberalism as it moves from an absolutist claim to relativism
• The counter to Heidegger’s nightmarish world society is the individuated, the noble, and the great, which are cultural (i.e., explicit to the nation-state)

16. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (24 August 2021)

by kurto

A series of essays and reviews elucidating characteristic elements of Leo Strauss’ political thought. Political thought considers humanity’s greatest objectives, freedom and government, those matters which lift men above their normal, daily concerns. It complements actual practice but stands above the here-and-now because philosophy is a neutral manner of consideration, firstly interested in the best regime and only then in contemporary circumstance.

The pursuit of truth entails value judgements, honestly derived. Contemporary political science, sociology, etc., seek to proscribe subjective criteria but admit judgments via assumptions or conceptual frameworks. Better to acknowledge we must first address what is or should be political, a question that is dialectic or pre-scientific, that is common sense. Philosophy rejects the ‘charms of competence’ (e.g., math) or ‘humble awe’ (meditation on the human soul and its experience): it is a matter of intellectual courage and moderation. Whereas positivism inevitably becomes historicism, which rejects the question of the best society and contends the fundamental questions cannot be answered once for all.

Whereas most philosophers have considered the combination of what is best with what is possible in given circumstance, the historicist insists that circumstance entails a determinative ‘historical conditioning’. But the necessity of all doctrine being related to a particular setting does not preclude the doctrine’s truth or utility. Political thought does not become obsolete because times have changed. Historicism believes in continuous progress, however, that we are necessarily ever closer to the truth. The nature of contemporary politics is superseded by trends, the question not of what is just but what should forthcome.

In political thought, the fatherland is the substance, the regime the form, the latter higher because it is compared to the best form. Virtue emerges through education in the form. Universal education requires technology free of moral or political control, something the ancients would not have countenanced. Moderns are not entitled to say they were wrong that such control would lead to dehumanization.
Machiavelli commenced the shift from government forming character to trust in institutions that deliver justice, implying belief that man is plastic. But the new prince may easily be a bad man disguised by public ambitions. Machiavelli lowered standards to increase the probability of the ‘success’ of the social order. Locke substituted acquisition for virtue as the individual’s goal. Montesquieu, contrasting the Roman republic with English political liberty, seconded the effect, substituting trade and finance for virtue. Rousseau represented the second wave of Machiavelli, wherein the criterion of justice is the general will. Democracy is government by the ill-educated; Rousseau taught that sufficient knowledge stems from conscience, the preserve of simple souls, that man is already equipped for the good life. German idealism sought to restore classicism but replaced virtue with freedom, which required an engine of history, an actualization of the right order which occurs from selfish behavior. Nietzsche commenced the third wave of modernity, characterized by individual will to power, the conquering of nature and chance, the renouncing of ideals and eternity – evidencing radical historicism.

Also:
• High ambition – hard problems – plus the question for wisdom defines philosophy. Ethics is the study of virtues, politics the study of man’s temporal ends. The philosopher ceases to be when he adopts subjective certainty of a solution that surpasses recognizing the problems / challenges to the solution. Similarly, detachment from human concerns regarding the eternal questions degenerates into provincialism
• The classic political philosopher is not a mediator but a neutral. Political science is transferable from one community to another, a teacher of legislators. It is concerned not with the purpose of the nation-state or foreign policy, for these are givens, but with the best political order
• Compared with classical political thought, all subsequent treatments are derivative, estranged from these primary issues. There is an important distinction between independently acquired knowledge and inherited knowledge. Special effort is required to discern what is true of the latter. Lessons must always be relearned if their vitality is to persist
• The law of nature is based on the distinction between the nature of being and the perfection of being
• Classic political thinkers sought the best way; Hegel demanded neutrality; thus thought became theory
• For Hobbes, justice does not exist outside of human institutions. Yet there is no basis but natural law for following the sovereign, so he resorts to disqualifying civil disobedience, but is nonetheless upended by the nature of charity and thus justice
• Locke denies knowledge of natural law by nature, says understanding must come from god. But: proof of the first mover does not prove natural law
• Both Hobbes and Hegel view human society as based on a humanity which lacks awareness of sacred restraints, and is guided by nothing other than thymos (i.e., desire for recognition).
• Spinoza championed pantheism and liberal democracy, running against his era, but was rehabilitated by the philosophes; yet he was surpassed in the 20th century by Hobbes (atheism, Leviathan) due to the work of Hegel and Nietzsche
• The historian is unlikely to know the philosopher’s intention better than the original, no matter the benefit of hindsight. By invading one’s privacy, the historian does not know the subject better but ceases to see the subject as an individual
• Originality or invention of system does not equal depth or true perception, understanding

Locke and Strauss

by kurto

How do these passages reconcile? In the latter essay, there is no suggestion one of Jaffa broke with his teacher

While both schools of Strauss’s followers extol John Locke as America’s political-moral inspiration, Jaffa and his followers regard this English philosopher as a Christian thinker. Locke’s defense of individual rights is an integral part of Jaffa’s understanding of the Tradition and belongs to his picture of the founding.

Jaffa first published in 1952 a book that began as a dissertation under Strauss at the New School for Social Research, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics. It was, as philosopher Alasdair McIntyre observed, a luminous exercise in intellectual history. Much of his subsequent work seems driven by his commitment to his view of the American founding and Lincoln’s redemptive role in purifying this process.

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/the-soul-of-the-claremont-school/

Strauss, famous for distinguishing between the explicit and supposedly hidden meaning of historical texts, persuaded a generation of political theorists that Locke was a closet Hobbesian who used biblical language to cloak a radically individualist, anti-religious agenda.

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/10/the-appropriation-of-locke