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    Strauss on Reason and Revelation

    by

    Susan Orr: Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 24, Number 2, Winter 1997. Republished with permission.

     

    For many students, the political philosophizing of Leo Strauss first comes to sight in the opposition between natural right and historicism, or perhaps in the opposition between ancient and modern. But for Strauss himself, according to his account in the Preface to the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, political philosophy came to sight when, as “a young Jew born and raised in Germany,” he “found himself in the grip of the theological-political predicament” (New York: Schocken Books, 1965, 1). Understood in light of the high rather than the low, this predicament resolves into the opposition or apparent opposition between revelation and reason. Strauss very nearly begins his account of the results of his investigation by admitting that unassisted human reason—thought unaided by divine revelation and governed by the principle of non-contradiction—cannot refute the testimony of the Bible. Aware of the political dangers of this admission, which becomes even more acute when Biblical motifs are ‘secularized,’ Strauss, famously turns to an investigation of premodern political philosophy, wandering far from Jerusalem, but without ever forgetting what Jerusalem stands for.

    Susan Orr has written a commentary on “Jerusalem and Athens,” an essay that is in some sense central to Strauss’s Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Concerned that some of Strauss’s students have wandered altogether too far from what Jerusalem, Orr seeks to remind them, and all students of Strauss, of what Jerusalem stands for in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. At the end of her introduction she frames the question this way: Leo Strauss, “cautious nihilist” or “reluctant believer” (18)? Thus, in good Straussian fashion, she compels us to ask if Strauss might have been a reluctant nihilist or a cautious believer, or perhaps neither a nihilist nor a believer, but something else (for example, a Platonic political philosopher).

    Orr’s introduction is the first of seven chapters. In Chapter 2, “Preliminary Reflections,” she observes that Athens and Jerusalem represent “the two great traditions of philosophy and faith” (22), of human guidance, freedom, contemplation, and progress as distinguished from divine guidance, obedience, and return. She thereby compels us to consider whether philosophy and faith are equally traditions, or if both are traditions. She goes on to present an elegant and accurate outline of Strauss’s essay, commenting that the central section is devoted to “Greek counterparts” of the Biblical account of genesis, of God’s creation, and that the central paragraph of the essay “deals with the curse of Canaan, the excellence of Nimrod, and the Tower of Babel—a paragraph which, “according to Strauss, contains the biblical understanding of the beginning of man as a political animal” (32). This observation compels us to consider that the phrase “political animal” most immediately calls to mind the political thought of Aristotle, a student of Plato.

    Chapter 3 contains an ingenious argument concerning one aspect of the theme of beginning or genesis. Strauss observes that for “Jerusalem” the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, whereas for “Athens” the beginning of wisdom is wonder. Orr asks, Is not Biblical awe akin to Greek wonder? (She thus draws our attention to Strauss’s own denial, in another place, that awe is akin to wonder.) Orr continues: By emphasizing fear, not awe, Strauss artfully conceals “the compelling rationality of Jerusalem”; he does this because he is “lulling the atheists to sleep” (49). Why would sing this lullaby of Broadway? Because in his time and place the reigning opinion was atheistic. To be a man of faith in the modern world is to blaspheme against a militant and powerful atheism, an atheism that will confine the scholar of religious faith to some academic ghetto.

    In singing this song, Strauss partakes of an art common to Jerusalem and Athens, Orr argues. Strauss prepares dogmatic atheists to awaken to what will be for them a new, reasoned consideration of “Jerusalem” (56). In the essay itself, of course, Strauss contrasts ‘scientific’ Biblical criticism not with the Bible itself but with natural theology. Strauss remarks that he will begin on the surface of the Bible, where both orthodox believers and ‘scientific’ historians begin.

    In her central chapter, Orr writes that Strauss describes Jewish and Islamic revelation as perfect law, not dogma, as rational systems, even if revealed through a mere human being, a prophet. She is artfully silent on Strauss’s description of the “loyal philosophers” or falasifa as non-orthodox. Orr observes that Strauss’s emphasis on the coherence, rather than the divine inspiration of the Biblical account of genesis once again softens the dogmatism of atheists, who will now admire that coherence without bristling prematurely at the question of its source. Neither Strauss, nor Orr following Strauss, shirks the question of the Bible’s source. Orr writes that Strauss “says that man shares with God” not so much reason as an “ability to change his ways” (69). If God is “unpredictable,” then philosophy, governed by the principle of non-contradiction, “cannot touch” Him (69). It might be added that philosophy, then, cannot touch man either, that political philosophy is impossible, and that Heidegger is right. If the “seeming contradictions” of God in the Bible demonstrate the ability of God to change His ways, this does admit “the possibility that the Bible is inspired” (73), but it leaves open whether the Bible was inspired by God or by (equally changeable) men. In pointing to “the fundamental inscrutability of God” (86), one might suspect that Strauss invites us to wonder rather than to fear. But if one wonders rather than fears, one need not engage in either early-Heideggerian assertiveness or late-Heideggerian passivity.

    According to the Bible, human life is not originally political. God intended man to be an apolitical being of childlike innocence governed by God. Man was not intended to know the good, morally or intellectually. “The difference between the Bible’s first discussion of politics and, for instance, Aristotle’s assertion that man is political by nature is astonishing” (83), Orr rightly comments. Strauss’s central paragraph describes “political life… as we know it now” (90): The human, Nimrodian attempt to united mankind by force fails when God destroys the Tower of Babel and confuses the tongues of the inhabitants, scattering human beings to the ends of the earth. This prevents “a worldwide kingdom” (90). One might add to Orr’s account that in this paragraph Strauss sides with the Biblical teaching against not only Nimrod but Hegel, (most immediately) Kojève, and all who would commit the sin against the Holy Spirit by replacing the Holy Spirit with the Absolute Spirit. By doing so, Strauss does not necessarily commit himself fully to Biblical conviction, but rather challenges us to see why ‘universalizing’ reason does not commit us to universal or worldwide government.

    Perhaps these wonderings about God, including his wonderings about God’s justice in the story of Abraham and Isaac, lead Strauss to shift his attention from Genesis to Exodus, specifically, to the teaching on God’s name. Here Strauss says “I believe,” not “I know,” and translates the Tetragrammaton not as “I am that I am” but “I shall be what I shall be.” This reemphasizes the changeability of God, even as it emphasizes the covenants, the promises of God. Covenants require predictability, one might note. Following Strauss, Orr argues that “I am that I am” is too metaphysical to fit Biblical thought, too Being-oriented. “[O]ne can even go further” and “say that it is difficult even to speak abstractly in Hebrew” (93). God ‘is,’ so to speak, pure willing, not pure thought thinking itself; God is a person, not an ‘it.’ This tends to make the God of the Bible very close to Allah of the Koran—possibly too close. If God is pure willing, pure, arbitrary, “I shall be what I shall be,” then why does He exhibit such remarkable consistency throughout the Hebrew Scriptures? It is true that He ‘changes His mind’ from time to time, but only in response to the words and actions of men, themselves created with the capacity for free will.

    In her fifth chapter, Orr discusses Strauss’s account of the “Greek counterparts” of Genesis, centrally, the account handed down by Hesiod. Now that he has atheists thinking rather than merely disbelieving, Strauss here admits that the Torah is not a coherent whole, but a compilation. Strauss uncompromisingly prefers the Biblical God, who is wise, and whose jealousy of man’s love stems “not out of need, but out of concern for us” (103), to Hesiod’s Zeus, who is jealous of Metis because Metis has wisdom Zeus lacks. Aristotle reflects “Greek” presuppositions in asking “whether it is prudent to call a man happy until after he is dead so as not to provoke the envy of the gods” (103). (Elsewhere, we know, Strauss in effect questions the piety of Aristotle, by noticing that the classical political philosophers, including Aristotle, exhibit the ancient city more as a natural not as a holy city [The City and Man, 240-241]. This may mean that the Philosopher feared human envy more than divine.) At any rate, the gods of Greece are ruled by fate, by a force; the ultimate power in the Greek universe is impersonal, ‘beyond good and evil.’ Aristotle’s god, not to be confused with fate, is pure thought thinking itself. Pure thought thinking itself transcends justice and injustice, although it does not transcend goodness. Be that as it may, Aristotle’s god is not a jealous god, any more than the God of the Bible is an envious one. To reflect upon the differences and similarities between envious, jealous, and neither envious nor jealous gods is to reflect upon the theme of ‘Jerusalem and Athens’—though not, to be sure, to exhaust it. Plato’s god is closer to the Biblical God than Aristotle’s. Orr notes that Plato’s theology, with its talk of providence, is both the closest “Greek” thing to the Biblical account of God and likely to be a noble lie (114).

    In the sixth chapter, Orr turns to the second, much shorter, part of Strauss’s essay. In “On Socrates and the Prophets,” Strauss shows how not to bring the Bible and Plato together. He sets up a contrast between himself and the Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. The diverge on the issue of historicism. “By combining the social ideals of Plato and the prophets, [Cohen] envisioned a world of the future in which there would be no suffering, and no distinctions among men” (128). Orr thereby points us to the reflection that historicism is that part of philosophic thought that most closely imitates Biblical providence. Has philosophy corrupted religion, or vice-versa? (Or has each corrupted the other?) Perhaps this is the reason why Strauss distinguishes reason from revelation, even when he takes pains to defend revelation from charges of irrationality.

    The problem of historicism, and of the politics historicism spawns, raises the problem of false prophets. In one of her most insightful passages, Orr remarks that Strauss does not “make the traditional arguments for distinguishing false from true prophets”; that false prophets are those who contradict Mosaic law; that true prophets “demonstrate the veracity of their calling through miracles” (136). Rather, in Strauss’s words, “false prophets trust in flesh, even if that flesh is the temple in Jerusalem, the promised land, nay, the chosen people itself, nay, God’s promise to the chosen people if that promise is taken to be an unconditional promise and not part of a Covenant” (136). This attack on materialism is indeed a kind of Platonism and stands in opposition to all prophecy-of-the-flesh, whether it be dialectical materialism or the dialectical immaterialism of the Absolute Spirit. This stance comports with Strauss’s opinion that Socrates is “by Strauss’s definition, a pious man” (140), one “who investigates the human things and leaves divine things alone” (141). Moreover, “[f]rom Socrates and therefore philosophy’s perspective, the prophets have a beneficial purpose” (143); philosophy “lacks teeth” (144), but prophets, as orators, do not, and (one might add) philosophers might influence the thought of prophets. That it is not a good thing for prophets’ impulses to rule philosophers may be seen in the history of historicism.

    In her concluding chapter, Orr accurately asserts that Socrates, unlike Nietzsche, does not hold it possible to unite Jerusalem and Athens, to synthesize reason and revelation. Strauss thereby establishes himself as “the new guide”—a better guide than Nietzsche—for perplexed moderns.

    A gentle but firm guide to the perplexed reader of Strauss, Orr proceeds with careful judgment, slowing down impatient souls who want to the philosopher to ‘get to the point.’ She knows that a philosopher wants his student to be the one who gets to the point, and none too hastily. The impulse to get to the point too hastily yields an undue agitation for eschatological relief.

    Challenges to American Liberalism: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

    by

    For more than a century, what’s called ‘liberalism’ in the United States consists of an overlay of ‘German’ or historicist ideas on a natural-rights constitutionalism. Contemporary American liberalism is a theoretical and rhetorical justification of the regime of commercial republicanism, with a substantial, Bismarck-style ‘welfare state’ added. In theory usually and in practice almost always, this liberalism combines two elements. First, there is a respect for such core principles as the equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which, in the original formulation, are held to be principles held to be universally valid, independent of political or social conventions. Second, there is a congruent set of political and social conventions (“inventions of prudence”), designed to secure the enjoyment of those principles in practice. These conventional agreements typically include the rule of law, culminating in a written constitution; a political economy regulated but not dictated by the national government; and a federal government characterized by the separation and balance of powers. American liberalism esteems self-government—government by consent understood as reasoned assent. The institutions this liberalism favors recognizes the sovereignty of the people, not the sovereignty of government.

    More pertinently for present purposes, American liberalism asserts in its fundamental law certain civil rights intended to parallel and secure natural rights. The civil rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, ranging from freedom of religion to federalism, give practicable legal form to universally valid but perpetually vulnerable natural rights.

    American liberalism has been complicated if not rendered incoherent by an overlay of ‘German’ thought. The Hegelian concept of a ‘recognition’-driven historical dialectic—whether based upon class, race, or some other ‘identity’—exists in tension with natural right. German idealism goes beyond the prudential securing of natural rights, conceiving of political ideas as objects of achievement and construction. This constructivism lends itself to social activities defined as movements and to an ‘activist’ and bureaucratic government. In politics ‘from below’ and politics ‘from above,’ self-determination replaces self-government, very often replacing such moral and civic virtues as prudence and moderation with individual and group self-assertion. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, ‘class analysis’ forms of socialism, and nationalism number among these auto-determinist ideologies. All of them have influenced contemporary liberalism in complex ways.

    This later form of liberalism may sharpen the tensions between ruler and ruled. American bureaucracy or ‘corporate liberalism’ has an ambivalent effect on citizens and liberal institutions. Statism or quasi-statism in a liberal setting very often secures rights but does so at the expense of the vigorous citizen participation genuine self-government requires. Statism threatens to make popular sovereignty very attenuated in practice, as acknowledged by many prominent historians and social scientists, including Daniel Rodgers, Robert H. Wiebe, David Plotke, Stephen Skowronek, and Samuel Huntington.   Hegelianized liberalism runs up against the Hobbesian paradox: really to secure equality, do we not need one ruler—or perhaps a well-trained few—to make the rest of us civilly and economically equal, and to keep us that way? If so, how secure are we against that one, or those few rulers? Can the Crolyean promise be kept? Can (faux-)Hamiltonian/ ‘monarchist’/neo-Hegelian means really secure ‘Jeffersonian’/popular/democratic/’Whiggish’ ends? And how will such ends transform commercial republicanism, if rights are reconceived as founded upon ‘History’ instead of nature?

     

    Martin Luther King

    King avails himself of many of he principles and practices of American liberalism. However, his thought changes its emphasis during the course of his career, in part responding to changing circumstances. In the 1950s he spoke and acted as if he expected his movement to bring the South to racial justice ‘Whiggishly,’ by bringing local citizens to solve local problems. By the early 1960s, he turned to the federal government and the nation at large (through skilled use of the news media) in order to force reforms upon white Southerners. (In this, he recapitulates the movement of American politics generally from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.) By the end of the decade, King sounded much more like a radical than a liberal, although it is fair to say that he never sounds illiberal, dictatorial.

    Several of King’s major initiatives in the South had a distinctly liberal, even Whiggish, flavor. He demanded voting rights for blacks in order to get rid of the need for statist protection (TOH 198). After winning those rights, he spearheaded a voter registration drive (Garrow, 303). The Southern Christian Leadership Conference-sponsored citizenship schools (Garrow, 309) featured not only the political equivalent of ‘assertiveness training’ but self-criticism by blacks of habits unconducive to freedom (STF 173); self-criticism, insofar as it isn’t the phony, ultimately statist sort practiced in Maoist China, goes well beyond ‘German’ autodeterminism to the original idea of self-government. King engaged in forthright partisanship in defense of civil rights (TOH 303) and in coalition-building with other interest groups (e.g., “If the Negro Wins, Labor Wins,” TOH). His critique of the Vietnam War as a statist act of violence (TOH 233) belongs to the Whig tradition, as inflected by King’s own combination of Christian and Gandhian pacifism.

    King repeatedly cites the Declaration of Independence (although he mistakenly supposed that Jefferson mean ‘all white men are created equal’ (WDWGFH 77). Not to be judged by the color one’s skin but by the content of one’s character is of course an excellent restatement of the core Jeffersonian thought. Against race prejudice, King cites Jefferson (and, behind Jefferson, Algernon Sidney) in declaring eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man: This means that prejudice interferes not only with the self-government of blacks but that of whites, as well (STL 11; TMOM 35).

    In his much-neglected “An Appeal to the President of the United States for National Rededication to the Principles of the Emancipation Proclamation and for an Executive Order Prohibiting Segregation in the United States of America” (May 17, 1962), King cites the American liberal principle of equality before the law, connecting the current civil rights struggle to the principles of the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration, now to be more fully brought into practice—”a democratic heritage so painfully won” (MLKT 294). “Enforced segregation is but a new form of slavery—an enslavement of the human spirit and dignity rather than of the body”(MLKT 296). By the mid-1960s, however, King’s understanding of the Constitution is decidedly not Jeffersonian but Crolyean; he advocates use of the supreme law of the land and due process clauses to break state laws on segregation. In this document also holds up the example of Woodrow Wilson—a Crolyesque move, to be sure—as an example of presidential leadership (MLKT. 311-312).

    This notwithstanding, King does not directly endorse ‘German’ liberalism in principle. Famously, in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” King presents an old-fashioned American liberal account of the distinction between conventional and natural law. Conventional law is unjust if “not rooted in eternal law and natural law” (WWCW 82). Nonviolent resistance against an unjust conventional al asserts the Thomistic and Lockean right to revolution; King may very well have known that some writers link Whiggism to Thomism. Also in the Letter, King cities the liberal principle of toleration: “Unity has never meant uniformity. If it had, it would not have been possible for such dedicated democrats as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, a radical such as Thomas Paine and an autocrat such as Alexander Hamilton to lead a unified American Revolution”(WWCW 133). that is, in his most famous call for a kind of revolutionary and civil war on behalf of American liberal principles, King eschews political sectarianism and vanguardism, and ignores the historicism or ‘progressivism’ of ‘German’ liberalism.

    It is in the means King advocates for fighting this war that he adds something new—although not necessarily something contradictory to—the American political repertoire. Nonviolent coercion is “a weapon unique in history”; “a sword that heals” (WWCW 26). This is in part the theme of Christian warfare—bringing not peace but the sword (STF 32, 67). But he adapts it for specific political purposes as well as spiritual ones. Nonviolent coercion requires a tough mind and a tender heart—the wisdom of serpents and the innocence of doves (STL 1). It is a politically savvy expression of agapic love, the love of redemptive goodwill that is neither erotic nor philiac/affectionate. The significance of nonviolent coercion in America is twofold. It is a means of asserting the right to revolution without the anachronistic means of an armed militia movement, or the self-destructive means of rioting, ‘urban guerrilla’ action, and so on. It is also, perhaps more importantly, potentially a way of solving the core problem of rights-based government, a problem no ethnic group has as much reason to see clearly as African-Americans. How to reconcile the protection of rights with the need for consent” If ‘consent’ means reasonable assent, there is no problem, in theory. But what if the majority of the people are unreasonable, prejudiced? Or what if they are reasonable, but do not assent to the protection of minority rights because they reasonably calculate that such assent might tear the society apart? This problem has been with us since the Founding. Nonviolent coercion depends upon mass support but not majority support. A program of nonviolent coercion can be well designed to swing majority support in its direction. Can nonviolent coercion be the practicable ‘missing link’ between secure enjoyment of rights and the need for majority consent?

    King’s political Christianity is decisively influenced by the thought of Gandhi. Although much ink has been expended in showing the influence of Christianity (specifically, Quakerism) on Gandhi’s thought, such exercises are ethnocentric; Gandhi has had far more influence on Christianity than Christianity had on Gandhi. King’s theme of “soul force” overpowering physical force, thanks to “the ultimate morality of the universe” which, in the end, rewards righteous action (TOH 257), comes right out of Gandhian Hinduism.

    This is where things get interesting. The theme of the progressive ‘ensoulment’ of the world is of course not only a Gandhian theme but a theme of German philosophy, of idealism, as mentioned above. The bigoted Alabama sheriff “Bull” Connor “didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that didn’t relate to the transphyics that we knew about” (TOH 281). This is Gandhian. It is also transcendentalist, and thus a theme of American ‘Germanism’ starting at its source, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is likely that King came to German philosophy at Boston University, where he studied the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch, qualified it with the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr (both profoundly influenced by German thought) and also encountered Hegel—whose dialectic is explained in precisely the terms that would galvanize King’s attention: the master-slave relationship—as well as Marxism and ‘personalism’ or Christian Kantianism (Garrow 64).

    Thus, indirectly King does indeed strike many characteristic chords of ‘Germanism.’ He does so more insistently or at least more openly in his later career. The call for a “revolution in values,” rejecting orientation in terms of things and embracing orientation in terms of persons (TOH 241) is a Kantian motif. The emphasis on “psychological freedom” or noumenalism goes with that call, while the demand that “the Negro must rise up with an affirmation f his Olympian manhood” (TOH 246) more nearly resembles such later philosophers in the German tradition as Marx and Nietzsche. (But was Nietzsche an advocate of nonviolence? Consider Nietzsche’s Aphorism 284 in Human, All too Human, “The Wanderer and His Shadow”: “And perhaps there will come a great day on which a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development of military discipline and thinking, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices on behalf of these things, will cry of its own free will: ‘we shall shatter the sword’—and demolish its entire military machine down to its last foundations.”) King’s worries about technology—that our ends means have outrun our ends, that industrialism and automation are threats (TOH 211), are standard themes of German Romanticism, repackaged in King’s century by Heidegger. They are also quite Gandhian. In fact, the interplay between German philosophy and Hinduism dates at least to Schopenhauer’s The Fourfold Root and may be seen in Nietzsche, as well.

    King consistently thinks in the ‘German’ terms of constructivist dialectic (as distinguished form the analytical dialectic of the Greeks). Nonviolent coercion for “social revolution” (Garrow 418) or “social transformation” (TOH 225), for “a change as far-reaching as the American revolution” in opposition to America’s “inner core of despotism” (TOC 17) seen in its persistent racism, depends upon a dialectic in action, a dialectic that exploits the ‘antithetic’ stupidity of a Bull Connor to achieve a desired ‘synthetic’ end. Further, the end itself will be a synthesis of capitalism and communism, the individual and society (TOH 251). This Hegelian constructivism parallels Gandhian/Hindu syncretism (as seen, for example, in King’s relaxed attitude toward Marxist allies, very much in accordance with Gandhi’s example).

    Capitalism is materialistic and in King’s opinion tends toward atheism or the worship of the self (STF 25, STL 93). Communism is equally materialistic and atheistic, as well as relativist and tyrannical (STF 73-74). Their synthesis, seen in the social democracies of Scandinavia (Garrow 364), “a modified form of socialism” (STF. 382) enforcing “economic justice” (STF 367), is really a German-idealist ensoulment or progressivist spiritualization that subordinates material means for spiritual ends.

    King thereby breaks with the older American liberalism, with its emphasis (seen in the tenth Federalist, in Jefferson’s writings, and elsewhere) on the broad definition of property advanced by Locke: property not only as external possessions but natural faculties. This is the core of self-government in Locke, and King is right to suspect it of materialism; Locke’s emphasis on human property clearly undermines tradition, theistic ideas of the world and indeed of the human mind itself, as rightfully the property of the Creator-God.

    King’s revolution would both fulfill American liberalism, the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation, but ‘synthesize’ them into what he conceives as a much grander vision. Pacifism, for example, goes beyond the principles of the Declaration, as King says (STF 18). The only just war is nonviolent coercion. This war must be America’s firstly genuinely civil war, fought within civil society with ‘civil’ or nonviolent methods. It is, however, to be supplemented by the genuinely civil methods of public argument and political organizing. King opposed Jim Bevel’s unrealistic ambition of using nonviolent coercion to overthrow Alabama Governor George C. Wallace (Garrow Ch. 6). “Direct action is not a substitute for work in the courts and the halls of government” (WWBW 42). Nonviolent coercion is indeed coercive, and can too easily comport with decidedly uncivil discourse. Dr. King was an eminently prudent man. He made errors, but never descended to crankishness. Although theoretically problematic, King’s appropriations of disparate and even contradictory ideas were often fruitful in practice. He is easily the most politically successful American pacifist, and one of the most successful American social activists.

    At the end of his career, King was increasingly radical, and quite isolated from the Progressive/New Deal type of liberalism seen in the Johnson Administration. Had he been granted a full lifespan, it is impossible to say where he would have taken his thought and his movement. It is reasonable to think that the American Left has missed him—a real link to a genuinely heroic past, and a real link to American religiosity.

     

    Malcolm X

    Malcolm X’s political thought is a moving target. An autodidact, but much smarter than most, his thought was still maturing when he was murdered. His father was a Garveyite, and Garveyism has a somewhat attenuated but still discernible connection to American liberalism; with its doctrines of self-help and race-consciousness, it might be described as an African-American Whiggism. The Whig theme of anti-statism sounds early in the Autobiography: “If ever a state social agency destroyed a family, it destroyed ours…. [T]hey looked at us as numbers and not as human beings.” (A 22)  This succinctly expresses opposition to a neo-Hobbesian strategy of equality through atomization, and might easily be quoted in a polemic by some latter-day Jeffersonian ‘conservative.’ The Garveyite advocacy of business ownership by blacks, for blacks, echoes the Whig esteem for the self-sufficient farmer (A 275). Malcolm X’s advice to foreign countries sounds much like some of Jefferson’s strictures on the menace posed by British international bankers: “Don’t escape from European colonialism only to become even more enslaved by deceitful, ‘friendly’ American dollarism” (MXS 77).

    Malcolm X also has a strong notion of self-government, not merely self-determination. His account of the Nation of Islam’s way of curing men of heroin addiction well exemplifies this (A 260-261). An Islamic man must engage in “no lying or stealing, and no insubordination to civil authority, except on the grounds of religious obligation” (A 221); this is, if anything, more ‘conservative’ than Whiggism. Strict moral self-government translates into political self-government: “Whenever any group can vote in a bloc, and decide the outcome of elections, and it fails to do this, then that group is politically sick” (A 314)—no conflict with liberalism there. His advocacy, at some points, of black separation, as distinguished from the dominance-game of segregation and the hypocrisy of integration, mirrors Jeffersonianism exactly (a 246).

    Overall, however, Malcolm X is a firmly anti-liberal thinker. M. S. Handler, author of the introduction to the Autobiography, calls him “a born aristocrat” (A ix), and truer words were never written. If there ever was a man of thumos in American public life, it was Malcolm X. He hadn’t a democratic bone in his body, and this traits remains constant throughout the course of many changes in his life. “I love too much to do battle,” he admits, rightly (A 205). And in a humorous moment: “I do believe that I might have made a good lawyer” (A 205)—lawyers being an aristocratic exception to American democracy, in Tocqueville’s just aperçu. Only a fool would deny that Malcolm X would have made a very good lawyer, indeed.

    “More wives would keep their husbands if they realized their greatest urge is to be men” (A 92). “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak; they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength” (A 93). Islam endorses, but does not bring him, this thumotic and masculine insight (A 226).

    On the streets, “Red” followed a kind of aristocrat’s code. “For a hustler, in our sidewalk jungle, ‘face’ and ‘honor’ were important” (A 127). He lived and thought “like a predatory animal” (A 134)—more lion than fox, but not devoid of the fox. “Deep down, I actually believed that after living as humanly as possible, one should die violently” (A 138)—precisely the choice of the warrior-aristocrat, Achilles. (And, given Malcolm X’s wide reading, I should not be surprised if he knew that.) In prison, where he read Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—critics of ‘Lockean liberalism,’ all—his nickname was “Satan,” a being of pure thumoerotic ‘negativity.’

    His conversion to the Nation of Islam simply reversed the direction of these passions. Instead of demonizing himself, he demonized whites (A 163). Satan means ‘enemy’: “Our enemy is the white man” (A 257). At this stage he proposed a sort of revolutionary Mackinderism, or race-based Marxism: Whites are a minority, worldwide, and the Nation of Islam minority within the U. S. minority community could ignite a worldwide revolution (MXS 46; see also A 275). In describing Nation of Islam’s ‘Prophet’ Elijah Muhammad’s hypocrisy, he writes, “I could conceive death. I couldn’t conceive betrayal.” (A 305) Loyalty is the eroticism of the man of thumos.

    The turn to a more traditional Islam seen in his trip to Mecca rechanneled his thumos yet again, although this time it also moderated it. Islam is the most thumotic of the Bible-based religions, exalting the warrior simply, and not only the ‘warrior of the spirit.’ “All honoring the same God Allah, all in turn giving equal honor to each other” (A 323, emphasis added). This is a step toward democracy, but it is a democracy couched in ‘aristocratic’ terms—pure ‘recognition,’ with no admixture of ‘bourgeois’ easygoingness. If racism is “psychological castration,” Islam re-masculinizes the world, bringing absolute loyalty and fraternity. It is therefore “the one religion that erases fromits society the race problem” (A 340). This re-masculinizing of the world opposes something fundamental in liberalism, the Lockean strand of which nearly begins with a critique of Filmer’s patriarchalism and, by implication, the patriarchy of the Biblical God. “Human rights!” he exclaims indignantly. “Respect as human beings! That’s what America’s black masses want.” (A 272). Could this dismissal of human rights, coupled with a pure ‘politics of recognition,’ ever be genuinely democratic? Is traditional Islam, with its sha’ria, likely to be democratized, commercialized, or republicanized?

    After the widening and deepening of his Islamic faith diluted his racism, Malcolm X “was no less angry than I had been, but at the same time the true brotherhood I had seen in the Holy World had influenced me to recognize that anger can blind human vision” (A 375). I can make no confident guess about the possible fate of this extraordinary man, had he lived. I am willing to bet he would not be chairing Americans for Democratic Actions, People for the American Way, or some other progressive-liberal body. He surely would have attempted to channel the anger of young black men away from crime, drugs, and other means of self-destruction, aspects of life he knew firsthand far better than King did.

     

    Concluding Brief Comparison

    For most of his career, King publicly stayed within the confines of American liberalism, as it existed in his time. He harbored—perhaps since his graduate student days, perhaps later—radical misgivings about that liberalism, particularly with respect to its commercial character. As long as he did not put his misgivings front-and-center, his movement made remarkable progress, although it is not certain that it could have gone much farther. Would he have been able to think of a way out of the tension between statist liberalism and Whiggish (and Gandhian) localism and self-government generally? It is more likely that he would have become a revered elder statesman of the Left, unable to find a practical counter to the increasingly ‘Rightward’ tendency of the American population at large during the two decades after his murder. He would not have endorsed the violence of the Black Power movement, and in fact condemned it as late as 1967: “The weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man” (WDWGFH 52). Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is no substitute for the Bible; “violence will not work” for American blacks (WDWGFH 56).

    For much of his career, Malcolm X claimed that violence could work for American blacks, if in conjunction with a worldwide revolution of peoples of color. This strikes me as even less likely than King’s democratic socialism. Unlike King, Malcolm X could point to no concrete achievements other than the strengthening of the Nation of Islam and, at the end, the founding of his own breakaway sect. With maturing judgment, he might have been able to build a new organization, linking it with Islamic groups in other countries. The future of Islam in the United States will be fascinating to watch: How will it interact with commercial republicanism? Malcolm X might have played a major role in that collision.

     

    Works Cited

    Garrow, David J.: Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986.

    A: Malcolm X (with Alex Haley): The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

    MLKT: Cain, Alfred E., ed.: A Martin Luther King Treasury. Yonkers: Educational Heritage, Inc., 1964.

    MXS: George Breitman, ed.: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1966.

    STF: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Stride Toward Freedom. New York: Ballantine Books, 1961 [1958].

    STL: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Strength to Love. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

    TMOM: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Measure of Man. Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1968.

    TOC: King, Jr., Martin Luther: The Trumpet of Conscience. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

    TOH: Washington, James Melvin, ed.: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing of Martin Luther King. San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1986.

    WDWGFH: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Where Do We Go From Here? New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

    WWCW: King, Jr., Martin Luther: Why We Can’t Wait. New York: New American Library, 1964.

     

     

     

    How Some of Our Contemporaries Aspire to the Philosophic Life

    by

    It makes sense to suppose that philosophy requires a way of life. Any ‘ruling passion’ must orient the actions of the one ruled by it. There might well be a characteristic life-pattern, a regime of sorts, of those ruled by the love of wisdom, philo-sophia. The pattern might be indistinct, susceptible to enormous variations, even as the love of money might animate an athlete, a financier, or a killer for hire. Still, the difference between a wisdom-love and a money-lover (assuming that wisdom does not culminate in the love of money) must play out inactions as well as states of soul insofar as he loves money, a man will converse about no general topics, unless conversing about general topic brings in money. And even then, the money-loving talker will likely tailor his speech to attract a large, paying audience; he will prefer to tell them of that wisdom they will desire and accept as wisdom. There would then be no distinction between the life of the philosopher and the life of the sophist.

    What Richard Schusterman describes as “professional philosophy” must then be no philosophy at all, or some extraordinarily fortunate philosophy. [1] In its good fortune, it may not be fully aware of the condition of its flourishing: some political regime that encourages (or at least does not seriously discourage) citizens to pay to listen to philosophers. Insofar as philosophers are unaware of the conditions of their own existence, they are at risk. Insofar as they are unaware, they are also unphilosophical. Perhaps fortunately, it has become increasingly difficult for even “professional philosophy” to remain unphilosophical in this way, given the radical and disruptive challenges to the very conditions of academic ‘professionalism’ seen in the past several decades. Unfortunately, these challenges also tempt or intimidate the professional profs into capitulation.

    Schusterman would meet this challenge with a particular form of philosophy, pragmatism, especially as conceived by the first-generation American pragmatist, John Dewey. Dewey blends theoria and technē while avoiding the ‘aristocratic’/’vanguard’ consequences of both Hegelian/Marxist thought on one side and l’art pour l’art estheticism on the other. Dewey wants a democratic, meliorist fusion of theory and practice; “philosophy for everyone” may not be Socratic, as Schusterman claims, but it is a characteristic motif of American pragmatism.

    It is not clear that philosophy as conceived by pragmatists can finally distinguish itself from any other practical activity. Fuse theory and practice, and what is the wisdom a philosopher loves? How does philosophy differ from pounding a nail, making a layup, sawing on a fiddle (assuming that Rome isn’t burning)? How does a pragmatic philosopher distinguish himself from a pragmatic politician, a successful commodities trader, a happy hooker? Pragmatism in philosophy may bring for a dark night in the city of pigs where all sows are black. At one point, Dewey tries to distinguish a good man in his ‘growth’ from a criminal in his professional growth, with embarrassing implausibility. [2]  It isn’t clear that Schusterman can do any better.

    Martha C. Nussbaum ‘feminizes’ pragmatism. [3] Philosophy is to be not only “practical” but “compassionate.” Unlike Dewey, she looks not to Francis Bacon and his modern project, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, but to the Hellenistic philosophers. The Hellenistic “combination of logic with compassion” attracts her, as long as it can be supplemented with Aristotle’s political sense.

    But will not an ambition to formulate a politics of compassion not land the philosopher somewhere in the orbit whose apogee is Rousseau and whose perigee is Marx, with all the concomitant secular-religiosities that that orbit traces? To put it another way: Dewey’s Baconianism has a thumoerotic Machiavellian core, of which Dewey himself may or may not be aware. (Bacon was.) Machiaville and Baconsburg (more grandly, the New Atlantis) are fundamentally towns without pity, although the latter can make quite a show of pity. To be effective in the real world, pity needs power; absent an omnipotent and providential God, it needs self-empower and thumoerotic Man. Rousseauian compassion, replacing Christian charity, has recourse neither to prayer nor to technological power; the Hegelian and Marxist attempts to find a secular replacement for the all-powerful God who has disappeared—the eschatology of ‘historical’ dialectic—have simply failed. Why would recourse to the philosophers of antiquity, who were not especially compassionate or ‘constructive’ in the modern sense, rescue the mission?

    Michel Foucault traces what appears at first to be the progressive moralization of philosophy, but turns out to be philosophy’s progressive accommodation to despotism. [4] Socratic philosophy is already ‘moralizing’ and ‘politicizing,’ at least in contrast with the natural philosophy that preceded it. Politics means ruling oneself and others and being ruled by others. The Stoics under the Roman Empire and the Christians, also under an empire, shift the emphasis to ‘being ruled.’

    ‘Being ruled’ means writing more, talking less. Laws are written. Bureaucratic regulations are written. The vast bureaucratic empire of Rome evidently produced a philosophy of rules and regulations. Ruling ‘by the rules’ must attend to the body, inasmuch as the body is more easily ‘accessible’ to rule by rules than is the soul. But this does not prevent attempts to rule the soul by rules, to make the soul assay itself in accordance with a network of rules laid down by a pedagogue-king to respectfully silent students, their souls treated as if they were passive bodies waiting to be pierced and tattooed.

    Rule-bound philosophy risks losing the ascent from the cave, perhaps the most distinctive feature of Socratic philosophizing. In Foucault’s words, “Alēthia becomes ethos.” But if truth simply becomes ethos, one has a sort of pre-modern version of Enlightenment, a triumph of the sophists, of soi-disant knowers over philosophers.

    Thus Foucault’s Stoics are distinguished from Christians primarily because their rules come from nature and not from a personal God. The personal God, not unlike the worldly king, requires self-revelation and submission. The personal God kindly requires submission for the sake of human salvation, whereas the worldly king, if he is a tyrant, will have no such charity at heart. In the monastery, “obedience is complete control of behavior by the master, not a final autonomous state,” ultimately because in a created world there is no autonomous state. “The self must constitute itself through obedience” because it does not finally constitute itself at all; God constitutes the human soul, which, to survive, must return in fear and trembling to its Maker.

    Foucault additionally claims that the emphasis on ‘being ruled’ reflects a shift from caring for oneself to knowing oneself. this implies that Plato’s Socrates, that first of all self-knowers, was more despotic than anyone, a claim that goes badly with his dialogic disposition. “In Greco-Roman culture,” Foucault writes, “knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes that fundamental principle.” Yes, but only in the sense that knowledge, including self-knowledge, is conceived as power—a Baconian not a Platonic notion. Foucault here is Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean.

    Thus, in his commentary on Alcibiades I, Foucault remarks that “the intersection of political ambition and philosophical love is ‘the care of the self,'” but fails to remark that this intersection fails, that Alcibiades careens to political disaster and Socrates must flee or drink hemlock. Theory and practice, self-knowledge and politics, do not so easily unite, and Plato’s dialogues tell us that in a rich variety of ways. Theory and practice are related, but their unity is not more easy to effect than a polis ruled by philosopher-kings. Foucault’s own attempt to united theory and practice non-rationally, ‘experientially,’ in the “limit experience”—a pragmatism for anti-Enlighteners—replaces the Nietzschean “yes to life” with “yes to death,” and thereby cancels itself.

    Unlike the pragmatists and Foucault, Pierre Hadot claims neither philosophic nor ‘anti-philosophic’ status for himself. [5]  He present himself as a scholar. Perhaps because he doesn’t try to make something of the philosophers he reads, he recovers the character of the old philosophers intact. Philosophers are “strange,” foreigners in their native countries; Socrates is “unclassifiable” to the men of this world, the political men (when they do not mistake him for a sophist). This means conflict, not meliorism, and the philosopher had better watch his step. Hadot sees that the Hellenistic rules exist not for themselves but for the instrumental purpose of getting the philosopher through the day, a day full of numerous unphilosophic dangers. The zeteticism of Ulysses needs the prudence of Ulysses. But the arête of Ulysses is not “inner freedom”—here Hadot Rousseauizes—but the alliance of prudence and courage symbolized by Athena. (Unless the alliance of prudence and courage is what Hadot means by “inner freedom.”) Better is his Georges Friedmann citation from that year of bad events, 1942, exhorting us to strive to become worthy of the revolution rather than to revolutionize too directly. To become worthy of the revolution might bring forth a real revolution. (Or, as someone observed, the real American Revolution took place in the minds and hearts of Americans.) A real revolution might or might not turn out to be a political revolution. Why else found a city in speech?

     

    Notes

    1. Richard Schusterman: Practical Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophic Life. New York: Routledge, 1997.
    2. John Dewey: Democracy and Education. New York: The Free Press, 1968 [1916].
    3. Martha C. Nussbaum: Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
    4. Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. Alan Sheridan translation. New York: Vintage Books, 1977 [1975].
    5. Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercise from Socrates to Foucault.  Michael Chase translation. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1995.