Archives for December 2019

Sophocles: Antigone. Peter Ahrensdorf and Thomas L. Pangle translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Sophocles: Antigone. William Blake Tyrrell translation and notes. Posted on-line by Professor Tyrrell.

William Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett: Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.

Seth Benardete: Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999.

Note: Benardete’s characteristically subtle and intricate interpretation of the play resists summary, and no attempt at such will be found here. Rather, I have taken insights from his book to supplement my own (much simpler, and indeed simple-minded) interpretation, indicating them in parenthetical references to the pages on which they are found. “B” refers to Benardete, “TB” to Tyrrell and Bennett.

WM

 

In the city of Thebes, outside the gates of the royal courtyard, seeking secrecy, away from listening ears of rulers and their allies, Antigone meets with her sister, Ismene, in the semi-darkness before sunrise. Antigone appeals to their familial bond, calling her “sister,” but also intends to call her into a plot, a joint action, calling her “partner.” She appeals, too, to shared suffering, to the “evils” which have befallen them both, as a consequence of their father Oedipus’ actions or the wrath of Zeus—”your and my evils.” She is indignant at a public action. “The general,” Creon, has “laid down” an “edict” regarding their brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. After the death of King Oedipus, they had quarreled over the throne. Polyneices had recruited an
Argive army to attack Thebes; during the battle, won by the Thebans, they killed each other. “Evils proper to enemies are coming against loved ones,” Antigone says. Ismene has heard “no word” of the edict, and Antigone has suspected as much: “Outside the gates of the Courtyard, I drew you for this very reason, so that you alone might hear.” Creon has honored Eteocles, defender of Thebes, and dishonored Polyneices, refusing to allow him to be buried. Anyone who attempts to bury him will be executed by “public stoning” by the city. You, Ismene, now knowing this, “will soon show whether you are by nature of good descent or one born wicked from those who are noble.” You will show it by deciding whether or not to join my plot, a private action intended to subvert what she takes to be an unjust public action.

Antigone associates sky-god Zeus with the city, Creon also with the city, the public. The city is said to be ruled by the Olympian gods. Antigone, however, cares not for the city but for the family, for the gods of the household, gods who dwell beneath the earth in the Underworld, which is ruled by Hades, chief ground of the Underworld. She associates nature, too, with the family, with bloodlines or descent. Antigone does not say why Creon has issued his edict. Nor does she mention the war, the fact that Eteocles and Polyneices were rivals for the rule of Thebes, the fact that Polyneices was killed during the war after having attacked Thebes and that Eteocles defended Thebes. She is also silent on the fact that the brothers perished in acts of mutual fratricide. She has no interest in politics or war. Instead she speaks about how Polyneices’ body has been “left for the birds,” food they doubtless will regard as “a sweet treasure,” not as what it is for humans, a putrid corpse (B.3) Although Creon has issued his edict to the city, Antigone insists that he has meant it as a command to you, Ismene, and “to me!” “It is no business of his to keep me from my own!” Antigone loves her own, her own family and especially her own brother. Even before Ismene can say if she will join her plot to give their brother a decent burial, which will enable him to join the royal family in the Underworld, Antigone has claimed the action for herself.

Ismene demurs. Our father, she argues, died “hated and infamous,” a suicide, having killed his father and married his mother, who also committed suicide; our family is not as loveable and noble as you claim. Our brothers killed each other. Then there is the city, and its ruler: “Consider how terribly we will be destroyed, if, in defiance of the law we transgress the decree or power of tyrants.” Ismene knows or perhaps assumes that the law of the city requires obedience to the decrees or edicts of tyrants. Finally, there is a natural limit associated with the city’s threat, countervailing the natural bond of family. “We are by nature women, not combatants against men”; it is a natural fact that “we are ruled by those who are stronger.” Therefore, “Those living in authority I will obey,” hoping for “understanding” from those no longer living, those “under the earth,” no longer on it. “For to do what is beyond the bounds” of family obligation, of decrees, and of the law that she thinks supports those decrees, “is altogether mindless!”

For Ismene, then “nature” means first and foremost the difference in physical strength between the sexes. “Antigone” means anti-woman, anti-generation. Like Lady Macbeth, Anti-gone ‘unsexes’ herself, ignoring her womanliness (B.10). This puts her in a circumstance of unusual tension with the city; she is a woman who thinks and acts against her womanly nature, but at the same time defies the man-ruled city. Her denial enables her to dismiss Ismene’s last argument. “You will be whatever suits your opinion,” she ripostes. Being—meaning here a way of life— is determined by opinion, for Antigone; it is not a ‘given.’ A way of life may be noble or ignoble. For my part, “I will bury him. It is noble for me, doing this, to die. A loved one will I lie, with him, a loved one—having stopped at nothing in doing this pious deed!” Lying-with is the language of incest, one of father King Oedipus’ crimes (B.13). Antigone will perform a pious deed—honoring the gods of the Underworld—for an end that suggests the incestuous, impiousness. But she does make a rational argument, too, saying she prefers to “please” the dead because it is in the Underworld where “I lie forever.” The above-ground world where cities are is only a temporary home for human beings. The gods of the city may punish us here, but it is the gods of the Underworld who will rule us eternally.

Ismene rejoins, “I am by nature incapable of acting in violent defiance of the citizens.” Her nature, fearful or at least respectful of men’s superior bodily strength, inflects her way of life, which in turn is shaped by public opinion—itself the rule of the stronger, of the majority. Further, you, Antigone, “have a warm heart for cold things,” for a corpse, for the dead. “But you know that I am satisfying those whom I must especially please,” Antigone replies—the deathless dead. Your love is misdirected, Ismene insists, as “you are passionately in love with what is impossible”—namely, successful defiance of men’s power in the city; further, such “a hunt for what is impossible is not fitting,” not natural or legal. Antigone, however, intends precisely to defy the limits of what Ismene says is fitting. “I will suffer nothing that is so great that I will not die ignobly.” She chooses not a decent life but a noble death. Ismene calls this “mindless,” while admitting that her sister is “rightly dear to your loved ones.” They depart, separately.

The Chorus, who are the city elders, greet the Sun, a sky-god, not an Underworld god. They credit him for having driven away “the Mortal from Argos,” Capaneus, whom Polyneices had “raised up” against Thebes as an ally in his struggle for the throne. Benardete observes that Antigone is the only suffering heroine in extant Greek tragedy who has no female chorus to console her (B.19). Unlike self-unsexed Antigone, the Chorus side with the city and its gods, especially Zeus, who “detests the boasts of a great tongue,” the boasts of a failed would-be conqueror like Capaneus. Zeus rules the turning points of battles on earth; along with the war-god Ares, he causes victory (B.22). As for the lamentable deaths of the two brothers, “since great-named Victory has come with responsive joy to well-armed Thebes, of these present wars establish forgetfulness.” They would have the city celebrate with wine-god Bacchus (Dionysus), whose mother, Semele, was born in Thebes; Bacchus is well-armed for inducing forgetfulness. The Chorus calls Creon a king, not a tyrant, as Antigone had done. Seeing him, the Chorus wonders, “What plan does he come turning over”?

Creon addresses this “assembly of elders.” “Men,” he announces—appeals to manliness will prove crucial to his claim to rule—”the affairs of the city the gods have safely set right again, after having shaken them with much tossing,” by which he may mean not only the war but the travails of Oedipus and his queen-mother-wife, Jocasta. But now he must establish his own legitimacy, and this will drive his arguments and actions throughout. He knows that the elders “have always revered” the “throne of Laius,” that is, the ruling dynasty to which Oedipus was heir. In this he glosses over Oedipus’ dubious accession to power and his crimes, which may have invalidated his sons’ claims to succeed him in ruling the city (B.24). Like Antigone, then, Creon needs to derive the authority he claims from the Laius family, but like her, the authority he so derives is questionable—parricidal and incestuous, both against the family and familial-too-familial. He therefore points not to the legitimacy of Oedipus’ claim to rule but to the wisdom which made him deserving of it, seen in his solution of the riddle of the Sphinx. Despite all the troubles that followed, you elders “remained still steadfast in mind,” consenting to the rule of the house of Laius.

Now, having witnessed the deaths by fratricide of the inheriting brothers, killed “by their own polluting hands,” you surely must recognize that “it is I who hold all the might and the throne in accordance with closeness of kinship with the dead”; he is the wife of Oedipus’ surviving sister. This means that neither Creon nor the elders contemplate accession to the throne by a woman, whether his wife or either of Oedipus’ daughters. Women remain in the household, protected by the city but not ruling it. As for his wisdom and other virtues—the better claim of Oedipus to rule, and one that Creon needs to address, as well—”it is not feasible to learn, in the case of any man, the soul and mind and judgment, until he would be manifestly tested by offices and laws.” Proverbially, ‘power shows the man’; you can only find out what’s in a man if you give him the authority to rule. As a precaution, however, Creon admits that “to me whoever in directing an entire city fails to grasp the best counsels… seems now, and from of old, most evil”; he promises to share power with the elders, not to rule tyrannically. As if anticipating Antigone’s defiance, or at least defiance of he edict he has issued against the burial of Polyneices, he adds that “whoever conventionally holds a loved one as better than the land of his own fathers, I say this man is nowhere!” Creon associates fathers and brother-citizens with the land; Antigone associates fathers and brothers with their graves, with the family plots in which their remains are interred. Benardete remarks that the city is the regime, but the fatherland “persists through all changes of regime” (B.25). Creon would consolidate his regime not only or even primarily by invoking the royal line to which he is related only by marriage, nor by blood, nor so much to his virtues (which are by his own admission as yet unproven), but by linking his regime to the fatherland, to the Olympian gods who rule that fatherland. He appeals not only to the elders’ loyalty to the royal family, not only to their proffered share in political authority, but to their patriotism. To make this claim, and to assert moreover its priority over the claims of family, he calls family claims merely conventional, whereas his edict is patriotic, calling citizens to a larger brotherhood, to loyalty to the land of their fathers, not to the claims of the fathers and brothers of their own particular families.

His argument is by no means trivial. From his own time to ours, families and clans challenge the authority of political communities, at times threatening to split them apart in civil war, at times appealing to foreign rulers to strengthen their claims to rule—foreign rulers who may decide to rule the community themselves, once admitted into its gates. The defense of political rule against familial self-rule has merit. It remains to be seen whether Creon’s defense of such rule makes sense, whether his way of ruling will prove as virtuous as he promises. And there is one dimension of the circumstance that goes unmentioned by Antigone, who is apolitical and doesn’t care about it, by Creon, who is tyrannical and has no reason to mention it, and indeed by no one, now or later. Polyneices and Eteocles had a pact; they agreed to share the rule of the city, taking turns being king on an annual basis. Eteocles violated his oath and refused to step down when his year was up; in raising the Argive army against Thebes, Polyneices, it could at least be argued, prosecuted a just war—at least in the sense that he fought for a just cause. No person in Sophocles’ play mentions this, but the audience at the play might well have known it that patriotic Eteocles violated an oath witnessed by the city he defended.

Like Antigone, Creon believes that he knows the minds of the gods, and that they know his mind. “For I—may Zeus Who always sees all things know—would not be silent when I saw ruin in place of salvation coming on the townsmen.” I shall never “hold dear a man who was ill disposed to the land,” the fatherland; “for I now that this is what saves, and that when this sails upright, we make loved ones.” The land, the surface of the earth, provides protection and nourishment for those who live on it, in cities; we owe it our prime loyalty for that reason. Antigone associates love, and loveableness, with family; Creon associates it with the fatherland, as those who are loyal to it will love one another. Further, “it is with laws such as these that I make the city grow.” The ‘law’ in this case is his edict to honor Eteocles, “who in fighting on behalf of this city died,” and to dishonor Polyneices, who, while “sharing [Eteocles’] blood,” attempted “to burn down the land of his fathers and the kindred gods,” to “drink common blood and to carry [the Thebans] away as slaves.” The familial blood-tie didn’t stop Polyneices from turning against his brother, and to form the intention to ruin the city he could not rule. [1]

The argument again has merit, but it is shadowed with problems. Creon confuses his edict with the law, indeed, “mistak[ing] the laws of his soul for the laws of his country” (B.28). His edict and his justification of it he calls “my thought”; never by me shall the wicked take precedence in honor over the just, who, “in death and while living, will be honored similarly by me.” Because he cannot simply inherit rule, because he must argue for it, and because he intends a regime of one man, not many or even a few, his speech shades into a self-absorption not unlike that of Antigone. The difference is that he ‘identifies with’ the city—directs his eros towards it—not the family. It is not, as Benardete says, that Cleon fails to see the possibility of conflict between love of one’s own country and love of one’s own family, a failure that “shows how unprepared he is to confront Antigone” (B.27); on the contrary, he sees that possibility quite clearly, and argues against it. Rather, he tries to override that conflict, to defeat it as thoroughly as the Thebans have defeated the Argives in the war. But the civil life of the city may require more balance than the violent life of the battlefield, outside the city. The Chorus, who speak for respectable opinion in the city, put the responsibility for the edict squarely on Creon; they imagine he wants them to guard the corpse. But Creon has guards for that; he only wants the Chorus “not to join the side of those who lack faith in these things” that he has asserted. To this, the Chorus replies, “No man is so foolish as to love being dead!” That is, they fear Cleon’s power more than they consent freely to his rule. What will upend Creon is not them but Antigone, the anti-woman woman, who is indeed so foolish as to love being dead, for reasons she has disclosed to her sister, reasons at present unknown to Creon, the Chorus, or any of the men who are citizens.

Uneasy the head that wears the (somewhat dubious) crown: Creon suspects that hope of gain might overpower fear of death among the men of the city. A guard enters to report, reluctantly, that Polyneices’ corpse has been sprinkled with dust, that “the holy rituals” have been performed on it, contravening Creon’s edict. The guard denies that he did it; he denies any knowledge of who did it; and he denies that any of his fellow guards did it, saying that they had fallen to accusing each other of the deed. This guard was chosen by lot to tell Creon the bad news; he is the scapegoat, ‘chosen’ by Fate. When the pious, elderly Chorus suggest that the gods did it, Creon angrily denies it. The gods of these temples, the gods who accept offerings in those temples, the gods of this land, of these laws, would never honor this corpse. No, his political enemies must have bribed the guards, a theme upon which he is quick to moralize. To humans “there is no conventional thing that has grown up that is so evil as money,” which divides and ruins both cities and families, perverts hitherto “upstanding minds,” destroys morals and sets mortals to “shameful acts,” indeed to “impiety in every action.” He swears by Zeus that if you guards fail to find the criminal and “show him to my eyes, Hades alone won’t suffice for you,” as I will torture you before I kill you. That will teach you; “you shall learn that one ought not to be fond of making gain from everything!” Under his regime, “more are ruined than saved” by such “shameful takings.”

The Guard is surprisingly insouciant in the face of these threats, quite unlike the Chorus, who are already intimidated, without having been threatened. Creon had threatened actions to cut through words—lies and opinions. But the Guard is confident that his innocence will prevail and besides, he will simply not return to Creon’s presence. He had worried that Creon would have him executed merely for reporting bad news, but “having been preserved” from this, “beyond my hope and my judgment,” he “owe[s] to the gods great gratitude.” Having been chose by lot to risk himself, he has now been saved by Fate or by the gods, whichever determined the outcome of the lot. He can now take matters into his own hands by avoiding Creon in the future.

Creon and the Guard exit, leaving the Chorus to reflect upon these events. They too generalize, and moralize, from the events and characters they have seen to observations about the nature of man. “Many are the terrible things, and nothing more terrible than man!” Their immediate example is terrifying Creon, but Creon is human, and his actions are human-all-too human. Man sails the sea, powered by the winter winds; he travels on “the highest” of the gods, Earth, but despite the divinity of sea (Poseidon), wind (Boreus), and Earth, he exploits them all, uses them for his own purposes, netting the fish of the sea, capturing the birds of the air, domesticating the wild beast of the earth and hitching them to plows, ruling them, using horses and bulls as living implements with which he “tirelessly wears away the earth” from which he has seized them. More, his speech, his thought, and “the rage that gives towns laws he has taught himself” bespeak his resourcefulness in exploiting and controlling resources. The city’s laws are man-made, not god-made; the arts generally are self-taught. “Justice is sworn to in the name of the gods,” but not therefore sincerely. In the mind of man, the gods rule only nominally. The gods did not give the arts, including such political arts as rhetoric, to man; nor did man steal them from the gods, as the story of Prometheus maintains. The gods had nothing to do with the man-made arts which man made for himself. The god who limits man is Hades, the god under, not above or on, the earth, the god associated with burial, with Antigone (B.42). And even this limit can be extended by man’s art, by medicine. The Chorus see that man “is high in the city; but without any city is he with whom the ignoble consorts, on account of daring. May he never share my hearth, nor think on an equal level with me, who does these things,” such as burying the corpse of a man self-exiled from his fatherland and city, one who would rally a foreign ruler to conquer that fatherland, that city, on behalf of his own claims to rule. The hearth is the fire, the fourth, final element, the one that Prometheus is said to have stolen from the gods. Antigone reveres Hades, under the earth, who limits man; Creon upholds the city in the name of Zeus, but the city is located on the earth—Earth, whom the Chorus laud as the highest god, “imperishable,” and therefore greater than Zeus. Man is therefore “terrible,” using arts to plough the earth, making use of the highest god, but without such impiety he is ignoble.

Antigone, by contrast, justifies her action in behalf of her brother, her family, and the Underworld god as noble, condemning her sister, obedient to the city and its ruler, as ignoble, fearful of death—as is the Chorus, the Chorus has admitted. As Benardete puts it, “However unaware the Chorus are that the city can only be high at the expense of the highest of the gods, the Chorus do see that the city cannot be, as Creon assumes, unqualifiedly good” (B.41). The city rests on earth, but it establishes and maintains itself by the arts which exploit earth, air, sea, and fire. Antigone, by contrast, “has no arts” (B.52); “her morality undermines the city no less than her immorality (B.49), that is, her daring, which she opposes to manly daring. “With her hot heart for cold things, her love of death, and her antigeneration, Antigone shows thus the union of the divine and the human, which (the Chorus thought) the city harmonized, is essentially monstrous” (B.50). One need not endorse the anti-Christian animus that lurks behind that comment; nor need one endorse its anti-political character. But Benardete is right with respect to Creon‘s single-minded patriotism, the patriotism of a tyrant who will not, in the end, want to share political authority with anyone.

The Guard returns, with Antigone. The Chorus hope she isn’t the guilty one, “you wretched one, of a wretched father, Oedipus.” They ask her, “Are you the one who, in folly,” “lacked faith in the royal laws”? The Guard, not Antigone, answers that she is indeed the one. Creon emerges from the royal courtyard, thinking characteristically of himself: “With what fortune have I arrived in coordination?” The Guard is only too happy to tell him, and at considerable length, caring for his own exoneration and expecting it. To be sure, he had determined never to return to Creon’s presence, but one should never swear to anything, since “the second thoughts falsify the judgment.” Creon doubts him, still convinced that he must be corrupted by the money of his enemies in the city (enemies, it might be noticed, never come forward, and are never identified at any time during the play). The Guard triumphantly describes his own wisdom—that Oedipal and Creonian title to rule—as seen in the way he and his fellows trapped Antigone, who, upon seeing that someone had swept off the dust she had lovingly applied to Polyneices’ body, “shrieked out bitterly, with a sharp bird’s cry”—this, in ironic parallel to the birds who earlier had pecked at the corpse she had wanted to protect and honor.

Creon interrogates Antigone, who bows her head to the ground surely not in shame, Benardete suggests, but in thinking that the sacred dead are in the ground (B.58). Might she be praying to Hades? “I will not deny it,” she says of the accusation against her. “You dared to transgress these laws?” that is, his edict, Creon asks. “Yes, for it was not Zeus,” the god of the city, “Who proclaimed these things to me, nor was it She, Justice, Who dwells with the gods below, who defined these laws for human beings; nor did I think that such strength was in your proclamations, you being mortal, as to be able to prevail over the unwritten and steadfast conventions of the gods!” For the first time she appeals (if only negatively) to the authority of Zeus, her erstwhile enemy—the sky-god of the city, the god by whose authority Creon professes to act. She intends to catch Creon in a contradiction, even if it means seemingly to change her own mind. She clinches her argument by averring that the laws or conventions she obeys are not “something contemporary or of yesterday” but “everlasting,” predating even the rule of the Olympian gods and of the human regimes who make laws in their name. “No one knows from where” the laws I have obeyed “appeared.” What is more, this eternity must be on my side, not yours; more, I will die, anyway, and dying before my time is a gain, living as I do among so many evils. Not the least of which is you and your edicts, Creon, but also the laws of Zeus and the fate of my father, Oedipus, cursed as he was to pollute the ruling dynasty, the House of Laius by killing its reigning father and marrying its reigning mother. To tolerate the refusal to bury him “who is from my mother” would be painful, and as for Creon’s charge of folly, “it is about as if I were charged with folly by a fool!”

Despite her negative appeal to the authority of the city’s god, the Chorus are not persuaded. Antigone’s “savage” birth “from a savage father”—they ignore her reference to her mother—has caused her not to “know how to yield from evils.” Her birth and father are savage, that is, uncivil, incest being the most extreme example “of love of one’s own” (B.63). Civil men such as themselves, civil women such as Ismene, do yield, do respect force at least to the extent that they do not openly defy it. Antigone has no such inhibition. In her own way, she is as terrifying, as unlimited as a man, but unlimited in her defiance of the city, and especially of its ruler, those examples of the fearfulness of man as such. Her limit is not their limit. The one limit of man’s strivings, man’s arts, man’s daring, was death. Hades holds know terrors for her, making her terrifying to those who do find death terrible.

Nor is Creon impressed. “Too-hard thoughts” are like iron, hard on the outside but easily shattered. He expects the girl to break; alternatively, he will ‘break’ her the way a men break spirited horses. He charges her with hubris in transgressing “the established laws” (again, primarily his proclamation) and in boasting of that transgression. Anti-Woman, I will show you who is the real man (anēr): “Indeed, now I am not a real man, but she is rather the real man, if with these acts, she is to dominate with impunity.” He senses that a woman has challenged to a dual of manliness. Who rules, me or this girl? Even if she were my sister, “or still closer than blood,” he would prosecute her; I am the city, I am Thebes. In invoking Zeus against Creon, Antigone referred to another of Zeus’s ruling aspects, to Zeus Herkeios, “Zeus of the Boundary,” that is, to Zeus who protects the boundary of each Greek household and its possessions (TB 74).Creon will defy this Pan-Hellenic Zeus in favor of Zeus the god of his city, the city with which he effectively identifies himself as the regime of that city. And the city’s enemies are numerous. Her very conspiring to commit these acts shows that she’s not mad but a subverter of the city. And a self-righteous one at that: “I do hate it also when someone is caught in evil acts, and then wants to ennoble them!” Nobility sacrifices itself for the city, not for a traitor to the city, brother or no brother. The higher brotherhood remains the fraternity among citizens.

Antigone cuts him short. “So what are you waiting for?” Your words displease me, and my words displease you. My fame will exceed yours because I honored my brother. The Chorus would admit as much, “if fear did not close up the tongue” in the face of your tyranny. Like a man, she issues a dare to her rival. Stop talking and act.

But because Creon’s authority rests unsteadily, he must continue to talk, to justify his rule in the eyes of the elders, the Chorus, who had refrained from full-throated speech in support of his proclamation. He interrogates her, puts her on trial, although the interrogation immediately turns into a dialogue, a debate, a war of logoi. “Was he who died on the other side your own blood too?” She admits it, and it might be added that not only were her two brothers equally her brothers, but her father, who married her mother, was equally her brother, and the brother of her brothers. “How then can you honor with gratitude one who is impious to him”—Polyneices, who killed Eteocles? Because Eteocles would not “bear witness to” this charge. Oh, yes he will, Creon rejoins, “if you honor him on equal terms with the impious one!” Not so, because Eteocles knows “it wasn’t some slave; it was a brother who died!” Yes, but he died “sacking his land,” while Eteocles “stood up on its behalf!” Unqualifiedly, Antigone does not care. It is “all the same”—patriotism or treason—because “He who is Hades longs for these laws.” The god of the Underworld takes no interest in cities or fatherlands, having his own eternal kingdom to rule. “Who knows” if nobility in the eyes of the city is “free from pollution down below,” in the Underworld, in the eyes of Hades, whose laws are not the laws of the city. Creon denies that “one who is an enemy becomes a friend when he dies,” but Antigone maintains that familial love conquers all: “Not to join in hating”—in uniting a city with a shared passion against common enemies—”but to join in loving, is my nature.” (Alternatively, in Tyrrell’s translation, “It is not my nature to side with an enemy but with a philos,” that is, a beloved one. This translation nicely echoes, but in contrast with, Ismene’s earlier declaration of love.) She would not join in the city at all, but join in loving what she understands as the more natural bond, the love of her own family. My nature is to love the truly natural, which is the family, not the city. She understands the natural almost exclusively in terms of its archē, its generative beginning-point, not in terms of its telos, which Aristotle would later describe as the good life, which for citizens means life in but also beyond the family, political life. In this, Anti-Woman is quite womanly, indeed, preferring her own kin to the more extenuated brotherhood of citizenry and sisterhood of all mothers and sisters of citizens. At the same time, as Benardete observes, unlike-a-woman Antigone never weeps (B.69), never throws her arms around the tyrant’s knees to beg him for mercy. She is no suppliant, and in this manly daring, this defiance, she threatens real-man Creon’s rule.

“Go now below and, if they ought to be loved, love them!” he thunders. “But no woman will exercise rule while I am alive!” To be ruled in even one important thing by Oedipus’ daughter: Might that not entail being ruled in all things? Or by his wife, Eurydice, sister of Antigone’s mother, the late Queen Jocasta? Creon, too, will die before submitting to the proclamation of one who contradicts the good of what and who he loves— the city, the Thebans. When Ismene joins them, offering now to share Antigone’s fate, Antigone rejects her offer, telling her to remain among the living, for “my soul long ago died, so as to be a benefit to the dead.” As Benardete remarks, “Creon thought he was exposing Antigone’s unconscious premise when he bid her in death love the dead below,” but she now “answers that she had been doing that all along” (B.73). When the Chorus summarize, lamely, “It has been decided, as it seems, that she is to die,” Creon immediately says, “By you as well as by me.” He intends to exact their support because he needs it. The Antigone is ‘about’ rulers and what legitimate or lawful rule is. Creon bases his rule on legitimacy, on being the sole surviving male member of the ruling dynasty. Not only is this claim tenuous, since he is related to that family by marriage only, but the family itself is awash in illegitimacy, in patricide and incest, even if unintended. Antigone is right about one thing: Creon is indeed a tyrant. He rules the diffident Chorus by fear, and hopes to ‘break’ the two sisters by confronting them with death, cynically assuming that “even the bold fellows flee, when once they see Hades close to their lives!” They too will submit to fear of death, he supposes and hopes, so supposing because he hopes.

Torn between such fear and their reservations about Creon’s proclamation (and therefore about Creon as the ruler), the Chorus deliberate amongst themselves on the question of Zeus, the Olympian god of the city, and “the infernal gods” who rule the dead, and unfailingly seize the living, even living rulers. “Nothing in all cities”—not only Thebes, but universally—”comes to the life of mortals that is without ruin.” Human hopes, and the arts with which they are instantiated, are themselves two-edged. They bring “benefit to many among men, but to many a snare, of lightheaded erotic desires” which come “upon one who does not know, until he burns his foot against a hot fire”—Oedipus, for example, but perhaps Creon, as well. Might Creon not follow Oedipus less in rule than in ruin? The hubris he would pin on Antigone may find its mirror in his own soul.

Creon hopes to pass his rule down to his sole surviving son, Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone. His other son had died to save Thebes from Ares’ wrath (B.81); in this, he resembles Eteocles in his patriotism. What of Haemon? Marriage and wife, or father and country? He begins in obedience: “I am yours. For me no marriage will be worth more than your noble guidance,” a sentiment Creon cannot be applaud, sententiously: “Do not ever, son, cast out prudent thoughts on account of pleasure for the sake of a woman.” For “what could be a greater wound than an evil loved one,” one who can “marry someone in Hades”? “I shall kill her.” What is more, although she may try to stay my hand by appealing to the authority I acknowledge, the authority of Zeus, Zeus presides over not only the city but “over blood kinship,” over the family. To eliminate the threat to the city kinship ties pose (always and everywhere, it should be noticed), the city’s god must also be taken as the families’ god, ruling the sacred lares and not to be defied by them. “For whoever amongst his family is a noble man, will show himself just also in the city,” and whomever “the city sets up” as its ruler, families must obey. This is Creon’s central claim, or set of claims. There shall be no tension between city and family because the city rules the family; the ruler is established by the city (hence his insistence that the Chorus consent to his rule) and, moreover, such a man “would rule nobly, and be willing to be ruled well.” Ruling and being ruled is the distinctly political relationship, Aristotle will later say, not kingship or tyranny. Creon claims kingly legitimacy but also the political status citizen consent affords. Such a man will be “a just and good comrade in arms,” unlike Polyneices. Because “there is no greater evil than anarchy,” this man will not only protect citizens from foreign enemies but from the worst domestic perils. For Creon, the thing that binds the city together, that unifies it, is the same thing that binds the family together. Finally, this isn’t so much practical wisdom, love of city or of fatherland, but obedience

In the Greek, what comes across in the Ahrensdorf and Pangle translation as an unqualified statement of obedience to his father by Haemon is actually qualified in the Tyrrell translation; in the latter, Haemon says, “You would guide me aright if you have good judgment that I will follow”—hinting that he would obey his father if and only if his father exhibited fatherly wisdom. Haemon now recurs to that theme: “Father, the gods make grow for humans prudent thoughts, the highest of all possessions.” While I would not contradict you flatly, “it might be the case, however, that there is another noble view,” one I offer only because “it is natural for me to watch on your behalf whatever someone might say or do or hold in blame.” A son by nature protects his father, and if a tyrant is one’s father, a man “whose eye is terrible to a man of the people,” he may not hear the honest words of praise or blame citizens utter for and against him. But a son might: “For me it is possible to hear, undercover, these things: How the city laments for this child, as the least deserving of all women to perish miserably on account of deeds most glorious,” not allowing “her own brother, fallen amidst slaughter, to lie unburied, or by savage dogs, or by one of the birds, to be destroyed”—allowing the human to be converted into the bestial by its consumption by beasts, as Benardete remarks (B.88). It is the citizens who speak precisely in defense of the family; Antigone is not as savage as the Chorus had claimed, and the threat she poses isn’t so much to the city as to its ruler, its current regime of one-man rule. Your punishment of Antigone, Father, although intended to guard your rule and to uphold the authority of the city over families, works the opposite effect. Haemon goes so far as to suggest that his father’s regime itself is defective. “For whoever supposes that he alone can be prudent, or that he has a tongue, or a soul, such as no one else’s—these when laid open are seen to be empty.” And further, more daringly still, he adds, “For a real man”—the kind of man Creon praises himself as being, the human type who deserves to rule the less manly men—even if he be wise, learning many things and not being too stubborn is not shameful.” In terms of both wise logos and noble thumos, my Father, I ask you to reconsider your decision.

Almost needless to say, the tyrant will have none of this impudence, as he regards it. “By nature” the young man shall not teach the elder; by convention, the city is “held to belong to the one in power.” You, son, ally yourself with a woman. By “going to a court of justice against your father,” addressing him before the Chorus of elders, you commit a sort of parricide, you re-commit the crime of Oedipus. And you defy the gods, by criticizing me for “piously revering my offices.” Your character is therefore “foul, worse than a woman’s!” Haemon protests that his argument is not merely on behalf of the woman but “on your behalf, and on mine, and on behalf of the gods below!”—that is, it should be seen, on behalf of the gods of the family, not of the gods of the city. To Creon, male is to female as the Olympians are to the chthonic gods, the gods of the Underworld. He threatens to drive his claim home (that is, into his own household, into his recalcitrant son) by killing Antigone in front of him. Obedience, the of family and city, rests on fear. Haemon defeats his father’s threat by the simple expedient of running away.

What will you do with Antigone, the elders want to know? Earlier, he had threatened to have the perpetrator of the burial of Polyneices stoned to death. To show his leniency, he will spare Ismene but take Antigone outside the city, give her some food (so as to avoid the city’s pollution), and wait to see if Hades, “Whom alone among the gods she reveres,” will answer her prayers; if Hades does nothing (as he seems confident Hades will do), “she may come to know, even so late, that it is extravagant labor to revere those” in the Underworld. He may have listened to Haemon after all, in one way: getting Antigone out of the city, letting her die there, is less likely to spark a rebellion among a restive citizenry.

To understand what has happened, the Chorus continues to invoke the Olympians, the sky-gods, first of all the love-god, Eros, “invincible in battles” and all-pervasive in the world, maddening and therefore the god who “justif[ies] unjust thoughts.” “It is You who have stirred up this quarrel between men of the same blood,” father and son. “What wins the victory is the shining desire, in the eyes of the beautiful bride-to-be.” Above Eros is Aphrodite, who sets down her own “great binding laws,” but does so playfully, playing all sides (B.97). The Chorus too, elderly though they are, are “carried out of lawful bounds”—pulled away from the proclamations of Creon, even from the laws of the city proper—by the power of love “when I look upon these things, and no longer can I hold back the streams of tears, when I see Antigone here passing to the chamber where all rest.”

Antigone has already proclaimed repeatedly the object of her own love—her family, with whom she will be reunited in the Underworld: “I shall wed Acheron.” Insofar as she recognizes the authority of the Olympians at all, she recognizes Zeus “of the Boundary,” protector of household, Eros and Aphrodite as the love they inspire directs her ‘down’ below the ground, where her family is, not ‘up’ to the city, much less to Olympus. Eros impels her to Hades (B.99) When she compares herself to Niobe, daughter of the god Tantalus, punished by the goddess Leto for boasting that she had more children than Leto, the Chorus in its rather fatherly, or grandfatherly love for her cautions that Niobe was a god and we are not. Your love, having caused you to have “advanced to the extreme of daring,” has caused you to fall heavily “upon the high pedestal of Justice,” and “you are paying for” your father’s sins.

For the first time, the speech of fellow-citizens makes Antigone pause. As a lover of family, and especially of those members of her family now in the Underworld, she cannot dismiss an argument concerning her family, especially her father who now dwells there. “You have touched upon my most painful worries, the threefold pity for our whole fated doom, for the famous Labdacids.” In recalling her “ill-fated mother’s sleeping with her own child,” generating herself, Antigone reminds herself (in Benardete’s words) that “incest is love of one’s own writ large” (B.104). Her brother Polyneices, who married an Argive princess in yet another “ill-fated marriage,” have “slain me while still existing!” And of course Oedipus, her father, is also her brother, so he too has slain her while still existing.

She then begins her third and final apologia or defense before what amounts to the Theban jury of elders. She does not address them directly, however, as she remains preoccupied with family, not city. Instead, she addresses her fallen brother: “Having buried your body, such is what I reap as reward! Yet you I have honored well, in the eyes of those who think prudently”—this, with a glance at the Chorus, whom she has insisted are really on her side. She would never have buried a husband or even children who had died “in violent defiance of the citizens”; husbands and children are replaceable. Her brother is not replaceable. “By such a law indeed have I given you preeminence in honor, while to Creon I seemed to err in these things, and to dare terrible things, oh dear brother!” Therefore, “What justice of the divinities have I transgressed?” If none, then may those here “not suffer greater evils than what they do to me, unjustly?” As for Thebes, it is the “town of my fathers, and of ancestral gods”—significant to her only as the place in which her family has lived. As “the sole woman remaining of the royal line,” she abjures Thebans to see “what kind of things I am suffering, at the hands of what sorts of men, for having revered piety.” She is a threat to Creon’s rule, but he is an unjust man. This is the closest Antigone comes to a political statement, and it is even a potentially revolutionary, regime-changing one.

The fearful Chorus have reached an aporia or impasse impossible to overcome. Creon had claimed that obedience holds families and cities together—obedience, that is, to human rulers, himself in particular. The Chorus are now driven to speak not of Creon, not of Antigone and her family, not even of the gods, but of the “awesomely terrible” Fates, more “terrible” than man, rulers of men and gods alike, whom none escape. The Fates are the real rulers of all. At exactly this moment, when they are most in need of a man who can speak as a prophet, the blind prophet Teiresias appears, the man who had told Oedipus of his fate. Teiresias ‘sees’ beyond the impasse: “I shall teach; and you shall obey the prophet!” You Theban elders have feared a man; I shall remind you to fear the gods more. Once again, he tells them, as in Oedipus’ day, you Thebans balance “on the razor’s edge of Fortune.” The gods are no longer accepting the sacrifices and prayers offered at the temples. While “it is something common to all humans to err,” that only bespeaks their need for counsel. Creon and his city need it, in heart and in mind. In terms of the heart (or, as the Greeks would say, the head, the emotions), they are deficient in courage: “What is the bravery in killing again one who is dead?” In terms of the mind, “to learn from one who speaks well,” such as a blind prophet, “is most pleasing if what he says is profitable.” Like Haemon, Teiresias wants Creon and the elders to learn from him, this time about the gods, not public opinion (B.122). But although Teiresias cannot be dismissed as a presumptuous youth, Creon (perhaps attending to Teiresias’ word, “profitable”) can dismiss him as an avaricious liar in the pay of the ruler’s enemies, just as the guards were, in his mind. It would have been better for him had he recalled the fact that the guard was telling him the truth. What is more, he, Creon, is the superior theologian. Teiresias, you speak of pollution, but “I know well that no one of humans is strong enough to pollute the gods!” Even if Zeus’s eagles were to take “the carrion and take it to the throne of Zeus,” I, the real man, would not by “frightened by this pollution, into allowing that man to be buried!”

To Creon’s tyrannical daring Teiresias opposes his own charge: Creon, you are not thinking; you “are now by nature full of this disease” of mindlessness. After trading accusations of corruption with Creon, Teiresias stops reasoning and starts prophesying, saying that you will “be giving one from your loins, a corpse in exchange for dead ones.” The dead ones “are not your business,” nor even “the business of the gods above,” the Olympians, the Zeus you invoke, the city-gods. The dead ones are the business of “the Furies of Hades and of the gods,” who “lie in wait” for the likes of you. The gods of the city cannot protect you against them. To put it another way, the city is composed of families and it is located neither in the sky, on Mount Olympus, or in the Underworld, but on the ground, on the surface of the earth. The city therefore ‘needs’ not only the gods above it but the gods below it; the regime of the city needs to rule families (if it is to remain a city, a political union) but also needs the consent of families, again if it is to remain a city, and not sunder into warfare of family against family, tribe against tribe. The regime of the city that fails to recognize both of those needs will fail. Creon has made much of Thebes’ victory in the war, but his impious commands can lead to a reversal of the results of that war by the gods of the Underworld, backed by the Fates. Creon is doomed, “learn[ing] too late the difference between a decree and a law” (B.117), a human command and a divine command.

This gives the Chorus yet another thing to fear, and they communicate their fear to Creon. “The man, lord, has left, having prophesied terrible things!” More to the point, “he has never uttered a falsehood to the city!” Finally mindful, Creon admits this is true. “I am unsettled in my thoughts; for to give in is terrible, but in standing fast my spirited anger may be struck with a terrible disaster.” He is now willing to curb his thumos, to “give way,” to “renounce doing what my heart was set upon” since “one must not wage a vain war with necessity,” with the Fates who rule even the gods. In a telling irony, real-man Creon will now play the woman, lamenting the dead (TB.151) For their part, the Chorus prays to Bacchus, the patron god of Thebes, for salvation.

Too late. Too late for the Laertian dynasty, at least. Antigone has hanged herself, anticipating reunion with her beloved family. Haemon has also committed suicide, joining her in the Underworld. “Corpse lies on corpse,” a messenger reports, “like a grim mockery of a sexual embrace” (B.139). Having given Polyneices a proper burial, Creon learns of his son’s death, as does Eurydice, who rushes off to commit suicide as well, cursing Creon “as the killer of [his own] child,” as the messenger tells Creon. Haemon had been partially right in telling his father his rule would end in ruling no one, in ruling a city of one person, namely himself. For if the city is primarily the regime, and Creon has precipitated the self-destruction of the ruling dynasty, Creon (along with Ismene, who is nowhere to be seen, and a woman, one who will not rule), is the last one standing. But it is worse, as Creon no longer has the spiritedness in him to rule even a ‘city’ or regime of one. Broken, as if he were Antigone in the cave, he asks to taken away, having proved his own maxim, power shows the man. For her part, Ismene has feared that her sister’s actions would leave her alone in the world. They have. In the Ahrensdorf/Pangle translation, Sophocles gives the Chorus the last word; it is “prudence.”

This is the seventh of the Chorus’s seven major speeches. In the first they offered thanksgiving to the gods for Thebans’ victory over the Argives; in the second they spoke of the terrifying acts of man, that self-taught, wily being who masters the god, Earth. Does man owe his prosperity to the gods, and especially the gods of his own city, or to his own art? They next offered two speeches of praise of universal, Olympian gods: to Zeus, punisher of the wicked, and to Eros, who never loses a battle. The fifth speech acknowledges the Fates, who are more terrifying than man; the Fates can terrify the terrifying, men or gods. Having persuaded Creon to attempt to right his impious command to leave Polyneices’ corpse unburied, they return to Bacchus, this time not in thanksgiving but in supplication. Their final speech, on prudence, corrects the understanding of self-taught human wisdom. If the ultimate reality is the Fates, and after them the gods, then the highest form of prudence is piety, higher than the practical skills man teaches himself, higher than the technē of man.

Near the beginning of the play, Ismene was indeed prudent to respect strength, mistaken to assume that it was human strength she most needed to respect. Antigone was right to respect the gods of the Underworld, but imprudent in ending her life, as she could have both survived and seen her brother buried by Creon, her enemy. Creon may well have been prudent in suspecting that Polyneices’ alliance with the Argives made him dangerous to Thebes, despite the justice of Polyneices’ claim against his brother. Creon was imprudent, and indeed tyrannical, in assuming that the city’s defense required obedience to himself, even when he offended the gods of the Underworld, who are as universal as the Olympian gods he prefers. The right relation between the universal sky-gods of Olympus and the universal Underground gods—whose rule intersects on the surface of Earth in particular cities, and itself is overawed by the Fates—will be discovered in the souls of men who give honor to each set of gods in their own sphere, men of the right kind of piety or prudence. Fear of the gods is the beginning of wisdom.

 

Note

1. But did Polyneices intend to ruin Thebes, or only to rule it, as his pact with Eteocles entitled him to do? If so, he attacked Thebes justly, with a just and limited intention. However, it is also true that in Argos he married the daughter of the king. A Theban might worry that an Argive victory would end Theban self-government, that Polyneices might rule as his father-in-law’s subaltern.

 

Kai Marchal and Carl K. Y. Shaw, eds.: Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss in the Chinese-Speaking World. Landham: Lexington Books, 2017.

 

An ancient people, the Chinese partake of modern statism under two regimes, one oligarchic (previously an especially vicious tyranny), the other republican. They undertake modern scientific research and technological projects, very much intended to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate, and also intended (under the oligarchic regime) to fortify the ruling body and the highly centralized state it wields. The world has seen the Chinese Communist Party tighten its control on computer-based communications networks, which might otherwise support free discourse leading to challenges to the regime, as seen in Hong Kong. On Taiwan, republican Chinese engage in commercial enterprise; by contrast, on the mainland Chinese Communist oligarchs engage in a form of quasi-capitalism in a political economy dominated by state-owned enterprises.

The Chinese are now ‘moderns.’ Yet their transition to modernity has been more agonizing than other such transitions in Asia, as for example Japan and the Philippines. The Chinese had farther to fall, psychologically; for centuries they had supposed themselves to be, and at times had been, the most powerful and most civilized nation in the world, dominating their neighbors and dismissing Europeans as crude, even barbaric adventurers, hardly worthy of notice. The shock of domination by such riffraff, effected during the nineteenth century, brought on much more than a material or even a political crisis. In his epistolary novel The Temptation of the West, André Malraux gives his Chinese correspondent the name, “Ling,” which means sensibility; Ling’s character stands as the type of the cultivated Chinese person. Despairing, Ling writes to his European counterpart, “How can I express the state of a soul which is breaking apart?” The finest among the Chinese had aspired to become living ideograms. When the symbols—their ‘characters’ in both senses of the word—were confronted with the peoples of the alphabet, peoples of individuality and combinations of individuals, the grammar of their lives shattered.

The tyrant Mao Zedong responded to this crisis by crushing the shards of traditional Chinese identity underfoot, grinding them to powder, then attempting to re-fuse them into a new type, Communist Man. As in Soviet Russia and elsewhere, this radical recasting of human beings, this hyper-modernity, was imperfectly realized. After Mao’s death, his successors in the Chinese Communist Party altered the regime once again—so far with more success. As Marchal and Shaw report in their introduction, “if current trends continue, the shifting of the economic center of gravity from North America and Europe to other parts of the world (especially East Asia) may result in even more radical social and cultural transformations and possibly lead to a new form of modernity, one that is ‘global’ as well as ‘polycentric.'” In that world “non-liberal political regimes and alternative forms of capitalism and social organization” will enjoy greater geopolitical heft. The self-described ‘People’s Republic’ of China will then have achieved its not-entirely-peaceful ‘rise,’ quite likely extending its ambitions beyond a merely regional hegemony.

Hence the interest, among Chinese scholars, in two Western critics of liberal politics, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss. “Some Chinese scholars are explicitly interested in drawing on these two thinkers from Weimar Germany to shape China’s political culture and influence the direction of Chinese politics.” Schmitt and Strauss also went beyond critiques of liberalism to assessments of the modern project itself, the thing from which the peoples of the West themselves had both profited and suffered. Can the undeniably superior power of Western/modern science be assimilated by the Chinese? If so, how?

Or should it be? Marchal and Shaw observe that “Many Chinese intellectuals were—and still are—attracted to the notion that modernity in its Western guise has been nothing but a colossal blunder, and that the political and cultural dominance of the United States and Europe needs to be supplanted by a Pax Sinica in the future.” Those so attracted look to “dissenting European thinkers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault” for alternatives to liberalism. But all of these thinkers are ‘moderns.’ Schmitt and Strauss are ‘Western’ but “nevertheless highly critical of the very core of Western modernity.” Schmitt himself admired Maoist China, hoping that it might become a vehicle for advancing humanity toward what he called the “planetary era.” Strauss, by contrast, simply noted that he could not master Chinese thought, not being able to read Chinese; “were he alive today, Strauss would probably be amused, but also slightly worried, by the fact that Chinese intellectuals are now turning to his ideas.” This being as it may, “the contributors to this volume are in agreement that the reception of Schmitt and Strauss in the Chinese-speaking world (and especially in the People’s Republic of China) not only says much about how Schmitt and Strauss can be read today, but also provides important clues about the deeper contradictions of Western modernity and the dilemmas of non-liberal societies in our increasingly contentious world.” Because care must be taken both in interpreting Schmitt and Strauss ‘on their own terms,’ but also in the possibility that Chinese circumstances may ‘filter’ those terms in ways intended and not intended by intellectuals, the editors emphasize that the essays here exemplify “theoretical engagements” with the political theories of Schmitt and Strauss,” not only historical accounts of their reception by the Chinese.

The first pair of essays provides an overview of the critiques of liberalism advanced by Schmitt and Strauss. Harald Bluhm remarks Schmitt’s well-known “concept of the political,” which, as he says, “operates outside liberalism” by defining politics as fundamentally “the antagonism between friend and foe.” Schmitt denies that there can be any genuine ‘rule of law,’ “as liberal thinkers like to claim.” Law is in no way independent of the overall political system—the regime or “total order” of the state. The weakness of the liberal state, its refusal to think of itself as a total order, derives from its false anthropology, which fails to “understand human beings as evil, their nature prone to conflict.” Contra liberalism, the state can never be a neutral power over society, an umpire. It must take sides because like all other human things it has friends, allies, and foes, enemies. For example, any real state must control the terms of civil discourse, the semantics of society, as seen in the United States in disputes over such terms as ‘Negro’/’black’/’African-American’ or ‘homosexual’/’gay’/’LGBTQ’ (to say nothing of intentionally derogatory terms). Any real state must also control technology, as when the Chinese Communist Party takes control of Internet access available to its subjects.

Bluhm criticizes Schmitt for oversimplifying politics. In South Africa, former enemies reconciled after the Afrikaner regime was replaced by a majority-rule regime. Bluhm rightly notes the attraction of Schmittian ‘conflictualism’ to those on the Left accustomed to the class-conflict theory of Marx and the ideologies of his political disciples, especially Lenin and Mao.

In Strauss Bluhm finds a thinker who concentrates his attention more fully on political philosophy, one who takes few if any ‘policy positions.’ Strauss “wants to identify strategies that will foster self-obliged moral and social responsible conduct in the philosopher, the politician, and the well-educated.” No less than Schmitt does he understand that the regime determines the laws, not the other way around. Strauss’s critique of modernity generally and of modern liberalism in particular has no affinities with a historicist thinker like Marx, however. Strauss’s “unswerving search for truth  in the context of the highest normative framework” leads him beyond ‘the moderns’ to ‘the ancients,’ especially Plato and “the tradition of Jewish thought.” “What Strauss seeks in philosophy is spiritual orientation and prescription for life conduct, not abstract theory”—in a word, political philosophy. In his own, modern circumstance, this quest leads Strauss to a concern with liberal education. “Strauss, the critic of historicism and relativism, responds to liberal political philosophy with a transhistorical understand of liberalism grounded in his concept of philosophy as a steadfast, zetetic discussion of eternal problems.” For Chinese readers, this looks like an invitation to return to their own scholarly tradition, which centered on Confucianism.

Both thinkers, then, “provide insights for both critical and affirmative views on the social order in Mainland China.” Neither would excuse “a merely particularistic claim that advances a position of cultural relativism,” whereby Chinese civilization could be treated as offering one way of life among many, with no responsibility to justify itself before a trans-cultural standard of conduct. Bluhm also contends that both “believed that [liberalism] undercut the power of the political,” that “they understood liberalism primarily in a contained legal sense, divesting [that power] of its political and moral ends.” But this is much more true of Schmitt than it is of Strauss, whose critique of liberalism goes much deeper than that, leading to the philosophic conflict of the moderns, following Machiavelli, with the ancients and to the theological conflict of the moderns, again following Machiavelli, with the Bible and indeed with any revealed religion aside from a ruler-made civil religion.

Karl K. Y. Shaw approaches the critique of liberalism from the other side, from the Chinese side. Chinese interest in Schmitt and Strauss arose with “the rise of Chinese state power and its search for a new mode of legitimacy that diverges from liberal democracy” without necessarily perpetuating Maoist Marxism. The late 1990s saw a  dispute between “Neoliberals,” who advocated privatization of the economy, market reform, and “political reform based on respect for universal human rights and constitutionalism,” and “New Leftists,” who held up “the ideals of socialist equality and mass democracy,” and who condemned Neoliberals as apes of the West. This enabled Wang Hui and other New Leftists to associate socialism with nationalism, and both of these with “the strong state” coupled with “mass democracy.” If this sounds at least as much like fascism as communism, then the interest in the Nazi Schmitt seems quite understandable, although the interest in Strauss needs a very careful explanation, indeed.

Schmitt’s dismissal of humanitarianism and of universal human rights as epiphenomenal cloaks for real politics obviously fits well with New-Left nationalism and statism. Shaw discusses the radical historicism of Xudong Zhang, who aims at a “universalist Chinese cultural politics” which would challenge Western universalism. Paradoxically, Zhang takes his intellectual bearings not from Chinese thinkers but from the modern Germans: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, and Schmitt. But this makes sense when one sees that his “core concept” is “the modernity of the late-comers, which is a shared fate of Germany and China in their competition with earlier bearers of modernity like England, France, and the United States.” As late-comers to modernity, Germany and China faced three tasks: “the unification of the state, the construction of nationhood, and the development of capitalism.” “Like Schmitt, Zhang disdains the claim that liberalism has made since the Enlightenment of being a universal value,” insisting “that Chinese cultural identify could not possibly be developed in space delimited by Western universal values such as science, democracy, and liberty.” Zhang “particularizes” universalism by “disclosing the fact that Western modernity is a historical contingency,” not “a discourse of truth.” Zhang then “universalizes” particularism by “reaffirming Chinese subjectivity as a legitimate mode of universalism which is self-sufficient and not delimited by Western modernity.”

Where, then, does the leftism of the ‘New Left’ come in? Why is it not a form of fascism? Shaw contends that Zhang’s strategy “originates from Marxism,” especially from the “young Marx,” who “highlighted that the bourgeoisie elevates itself as the universal representative of the whole of society”—quite unwarrantedly, of course, since the vast majority of persons living in modern societies were manual workers on farms or (more importantly) in the factories the bourgeoisie owned. “Zhang’s arguments are based on the Marxist dialectics of the universal and particular, though in the postmodernist mode and without the teleology of total redemption.” On that basis, “the Chinese could claim a universality that stands in opposition to Western modernity.” This universality would consist, first, of “the tradition of Chinese history,” its imperialism and highly developed civilization; “the value of mass democracy,” which constitutes “the core content of Chinese modernity”; “the legacy of Marxism,” which Zhang identifies as its “spirit of vitality and fearlessness to assert political autonomy” shared by peoples worldwide; “the Chinese revolutionary tradition and the leadership of the Communist Party,” which “better than any other political forces, represented the interest of the whole nation; and finally “the unitary political will of the nation,” whereby the identity of the national state and the people, the ruler and the ruled, is complete. With Schmitt, he rejects what he takes to be the weaker, liberal institution of representative government or republicanism. The “masses” in “mass democracy” must entirely ‘identify with’ the Communist Party regime and its national state. Shaw calls this “a Marxist appropriation of Schmittian categories”; its main proponent in the West, acknowledged as such by Schmitt himself, was Georg Lukács. Both men understood their debt to Hegelian dialectic, with its valorization of friend-foe conflict in the confrontation of master and slave.

Shaw chooses Liu Xiofeng and Gan Yang as his representative Chinese Straussians. Whereas the attraction of Schmitt to Chinese Communist state-builders stands out clearly, the interest of some Chinese thinkers in Strauss, Shaw suggests, may have both an exoteric and an esoteric dimension. The contemporary Chinese state, as part of its invocation of nationalist sentiments, has authorized study of the Chinese classics. Strauss’s critique of modern social science and his defense of a liberal education in the classics of Western thought fits this intention, at least on the surface. Meanwhile, under the surface, Strauss also discusses the relation of philosophy to politics with respect to the ways in which philosophers may philosophize under the nose, as it were, of even a decidedly illiberal regime.

“Liu argues that all Chinese conceptions of Western learning since the nineteenth century were based on the episteme of Western modernity.” But genuinely Chinese, classical learning predates modernity. The Western counterpart to Chinese learning is Western classical learning. “Since modern Western learning is the product of state-building”—Strauss would say the reverse, but leave that aside for the moment—”reformulating Chinese learning within this modern framework is not adequate.” Liu has expended some of his considerable energies toward publishing Chinese-language translations of Western classical books “to counter the hegemony of Western modernity.” Liu writes, “following Strauss frees us from the habit of evaluating the classical Chinese Dao merely by the Dao of Western modernity”; this in turn can free the Chinese from “the political imaginations of the contemporary Western education system,” with their orientation toward liberal democracy. The obvious question is : Will this also free the Chinese from longer-standing aspects of modern political thought, including statism, nationalism, and historicism—and particularly from “modern tyranny” as seen in Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and (come to think of him) Mao? “Liu is evasive on this crucial issue,” and understandably so, given the character of the PRC regime, but Gan Yang explicitly points his readers to the debate between Strauss and tyranny-defending Alexandre Kojève. Gan sides with Strauss, especially in rejecting Kojève’s praise of the ‘end of history’ as a universal, homogenous state, and in preferring particular, political identities based on the national characteristics of each people.

However, like the Schmittian  Xudong Zhang, Gan recommends a synthesis of contradictory elements—in his case, Confucian tradition, Maoism, and liberal reforms—for modern China. As Shaw tactfully understates the matter, “The crucial issue to be addressed is whether this enterprise is in tune with Strauss’s line of thought in deploying liberal education to regenerate the Western classical idea of ‘perfect gentlemanship’ in contemporary mass society.” Gan’s project “seems to be a Straussian idea of liberal education, but actually falls back on historicism,” with its claim that ‘History’ can reconcile contradictions by means of its extraordinary ‘synthetic’ powers. Shaw observes, “the three orthodoxies” Gan commends “are of an entirely different order.” For starters, Gan is proposing a synthesis of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ systems of thought—exactly the sort of effort Strauss denigrates as incoherent, indeed, “a reversal of Strauss’s thinking.” “How exactly could the Maoist ideas of equality and mass participation and Deng’s market-oriented reform be synthesized with the classical tradition?” Maoism and capitalism alike stem from the modern West, whatever their contemporary advocates in China may tell themselves, and the rest of us.

Shaw concludes, “the Chinese Schmittians and Straussians fail to confront—or perhaps attempt to conceal—the domination of the Marxist-authoritarian state, which, according to Strauss’s depiction, is nothing less than ‘modern tyranny.'” Exactly so.

The following two sections of the collection consist of five essays on Schmitt’s reception in “the Chinese-speaking world” (that is, in the PRC mainland regime and the Republic of China on Taiwan) and of five essays on Strauss’s reception there. Thomas Frölich recalls that Schmitt “rather unexpectedly became interested in Mao Zedong and China” in the early 1960s, as seen in his book Theory of the Partisan. This interest coincided with the interest in Maoism (in a decidedly sanitized version) seen among some members of the Western New Left during the same decade. In this book Schmitt revised his famous definition of politics as the conflict between friend and enemy, leading not to mutual recognition (as in Hegel) but in the annihilation of the enemy (as in Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin). He modified this formulation by redefining politics as partisanship, as partisan conflict in which the victorious side may permit the other to survive. Concurrently, he transferred his attention from conflicts within the West to the conflict between the West and the ‘Third World,’ the non-West, a conflict in which Mao figured prominently. Schmitt envisioned Maoist partisanship, especially in its anti-colonial phase during the Second World War, as resistance to Western hegemony on the basis not so much of class conflict as on that of “defending a particular territory.” “Schmitt took Mao to embody his own view of the partisan who struggled to fully express and authentic apperception of the political that was free from the delusions of a ‘One World’ ideology,” seen in both the Wilsonian/Rooseveltian framework of worldwide leagues to enforce peace and in the Marxist-Leninist framework of universal communism. Schmitt “portrayed Mao’s China as the last stand of human agents’ open resistance against the de-subjectivizing thrust of modernity.” Schmitt’s Mao planted himself firmly on his native soil, and his 1968 “Cultural Revolution” resembled “original revolutionary Christianity” in its struggle against the universalizing Roman Empire. The Chinese people, like the early Christians, engaged in a “permanent revolution” against the (imperialist) world (if not exactly the flesh and the devil).

Liu Xiaofeng hedges his bets more carefully than Schmitt. It isn’t that he does not share Schmitt’s glossing-over of Maoist mass-murder; neither of them mentions that. Rather, “he leaves unanswered the question of whether the contemporary reconstruction of a Chinese nomos would entail territorial claims beyond the current borders of the PRC”—in other words, whether contemporary Chinese rulers themselves aspire to the status of Romans in the modern world. Be this as it may (or rather so obviously is), Liu’s territorial or “telluric” outlook “belongs to a Schmittian, neo-Maoist formulation in debates about China’s political options, its role in the world, and its Maoist legacy,” a formulation that “has clearly left its imprint on current Chinese discourse.”

Mario Wenning, who earned his Ph.D at the New School for Social Research, considers Schmitt from the ‘postmodernist’ orientation that prevails among many members of its Graduate Faculty, as he effectively announces by writing, “deliberate reinterpretations for radically different political and historical agendas dominate the history of political philosophy” (italics added). In addition to Liu Xiaofeng, he adds Gan Yang not as a Straussian but as a Schmittian, an addition that may comport with his own deliberate reinterpretation of these thinkers for his political and historical agenda as a ‘man of the Left.’

“Schmitt’s analysis of liberalism replacement of the political serves to unmask the hypocritical motivation behind a liberal discourse perceived as the latest expression of a colonization of China through Western powers and ideas.” This sentence itself exemplifies a combination of Marxist, ‘postmodern,’ and Schmittian strategies to turn any invocation of principles (in this case, “universal human rights and values”) into a hypocritical cloak for the will to power. “Schmitt offers the critical tools necessary to expose and correct the consequences of a pernicious Western universalism” (italics added), from “the superstition that Western liberalism, itself closely linked to the Enlightenment legacy, ought to be the only or even major reference point of international politics.” Schmitt “approvingly cites Mao’s dream”—evidently deemed neither hypocritical nor superstitious—”to cut up all under heaven into three slices, one for America, one for Europe, and one for China.” This “‘pluralistic image of a new nomos for of the earth’ would result in world peace.” Webber does not explain why this would be so, even on Schmitt’s terms; it sounds rather more like George Orwell’s satirical ‘image’ of a world ‘cut up’ into spheres of influence, engaging in perpetual war.

Wenning deploys Schmitt in a more telling manner when he turns to Schmitt’s critique of the replacement of classical understandings of ‘the good’ with the modern concept of ‘values.’ “The concept of value has increasingly replaced references to human dignity as well as to particular virtues.” Following Schmitt, Wenning prefers to denounce value not so much in terms of their subjective and arbitrary character and the attendant claim that all ‘values’ are ‘relative’ to the societies in which they are upheld, but instead as abstractions or universals distinct from “historically embedded goals.” “When one reads the ancient Western or the Confucian, Daoist, or Buddhist classics, one does not encounter the concept of value”—that is, of ethical principles understood as abstract ideas. Nor does one hear see “a theory of distinct Confucian or Chinese values,” as one does in modern Western thought. One instead sees, for example, “the Confucian concept of li,” which “refers to a specific set of inherited rituals, including the ceremonies surrounding ancestor worship, without, however, juxtaposing them to other traditions.” Quite so: but Wenning characterizes li and similar customs or traditions as “concrete historical realizations,” “specific forms of life”—ways of life, as Aristotle would call this aspect of regimes. But the notion of a concrete historical realization is itself an artifact of Western philosophizing—not, to be sure, Western philosophies of natural right but of modern Western doctrines of historicism. For Aristotle, the elements of any regime, including its way of life, stand at the bar of natural right, not of history. The valorization of the Confucian way of life, under the historicist aegis, can only come from the claim that the course of events, now redefined as ‘History,’ tells us something about what is right. But does it? How so?

Further, why Confucianism? There are several traditions opposed to it within China itself. As Wenning observes, the New Left thinker Wang Hui appropriates Daoism against Confucianism, at least in the sense of ‘Confucian values, but (why not?) against Confucian praxis, as well. Wenning claims that “the alternative to the priority of values and the practices of valorization is an acknowledgment of the irreducible normative complexity of forms of existence,” and acknowledgment that “aim[s] beyond the tyranny of values” and toward “a richer account of possibility and freedom.” Tyranny? Possibility? Freedom? Are these not abstract criteria by which Wenning judges, and invites the rest of us to judge, his own ‘norm-ism’? They do, in any event, prove spurs to partisan warfare, said to be a purely defensive warfare undertaken against invaders, Schmitt’s replacement for the “absolute warfare and its destructive potential” with which Schmitt in old age had become “weary.” This “continuous revolution” proposed as the practice of the weak against the strong, consistent with “the anarchic tradition of Daoist emancipation and resistance movements” stands in contrasts with Mao’s later “repressive and totalitarian turn,” which Wenning, to his great credit, readily acknowledges. It is of course highly unlikely that a more vigorous version of life-by-flash-mob could sustain itself in real politics, Schmittian or Aristotelian. Wenning himself holds out the tantalizing suggestion of “integrating the theory of the partisan within a politics of friendship.” Aristotle discusses friendship in politics, but with no historicist claims.

Charlotte Kroll identifies “two independent features” of “the Sinophone discussion of Schmitt’s work”: the Chinese response to the “failed democratization from below” seen in the Communist Party’s suppression of the 1989 demonstrations in Tianamen Square; and the increased worldwide academic interest in Schmitt in the 21st century. Post-Tianamen, “scholars were engaged in lively debates on how liberalism should be understood, what its role in Chinese politics might be, and how that, in turn, would define China’s relation to ‘the West.'” Such scholars as Xu Ben and Ji Weidong reject Schmitt’s critique of economic and political liberalism; Wang Hui, by contrast, has integrated Schmitt’s arguments into his own case against both free markets and globalization. On the question of liberalism itself, Kroll regards Gao Quanxi as the most substantial writer.

“Gao envisions China’s future as that of a strong modern nation-state based on liberal virtues, constitutional order, and the rule of law.” He sees that this won’t be the work of a day. It will require “the political maturation of Chinese liberalism, including a revision of liberalism’s stance on nationalism, a better understanding of the relationship between politics and law, and the reinterpretation of the current state of China’s constitution.” In response to Schmitt’s challenge to liberalism, he counterposes such thinkers as Hume, Montesquieu, Hegel, and even the American liberal, Bruce Ackerman. It must be said that this is a decidedly mixed bag, on the highest level, but the commonality seems to be an insistence on the importance of political institutions to the founding of a liberal regime. Since the mainland “Chinese do not need Schmitt to teach them about authoritarianism,” having experienced no liberal democracy (whether Weimar-weak or America-strong), they need to read Schmitt to see more clearly the kind of liberal ways and institutions to avoid. They can then design a regime that will avoid the traps into which Western liberal regimes have fallen. “Gao’s ultimate aspiration remains the founding of a nation-state along the lines of what he refers to as ‘the Anglo-American, classical, or republican liberal tradition.'” Like Schmitt (and like the American Founders), he insists on the priority of thinking about regimes prior to thinking about laws. Also like the Americans, he lauds political union. He is less convinced than they that republicanism ought to be commercial, and this distinguishes him not only from them but also from the free-market advocates of 1990s China.

Han Liu takes up a theme familiar to Americans: “the globalization of constitutional law,” which “poses big challenges to the traditional face of a democracy,” which features popular self-government. Today, however, “judges of various national higher courts learn from their foreign colleagues when deciding similar cases,” sometimes even treating majority judicial opinions in foreign cases as authoritative for their countries. This obviously undermines democracy, substituting for it a sort of international aristocracy of judges. Although hardly a democrat, Schmitt would despise this practice, demanding recognition of the (very different) regimes that should produce different sets of laws, not at all easily transferable from one political community to another. Schmitt further rejects social contract theory, countering the liberal intention of taming religious conflict by insisting on the irreconcilability of regimes, which he equates with the irreconcilability of religions. And even a settled constitutional order will require a guardian, a sovereign who can wield emergency powers in crises. “The person in question is either the sovereign or the representative of the sovereign,” empowered to “temporarily suspend the constitution in order to protect the constitution.” Judges who take the role of guardianship typically exploit the political weakness of the country. The fundamental problem, Schmitt thinks, is that “the norm of justice” is “a product of reason,” and thus in principle universal, whereas national identity is “a product of will,” and thus particular. Although judicial reasoning is harmless, indeed good, once the regime has established a constitution for the political community, so long as it stays within the bounds set by that constitution, when it transgresses the nation it purports to serve it resists the nature of political life itself, based as it is, according to Schmitt, on the friend-foe distinction and not on some version of humanitarianism such as (for example) the neo-Kantian universalism of Hans Kelsen, whom Schmitt debated.

Han Liu identifies the United States as an exception in such matters, “quite unique.” Although its regime takes its bearings from natural rights, which are universal, inherent in human beings as such, “its Supreme Court is the most famous court that resists the use of foreign constitutional law in its decisions.” America’s “national debate over foreign law in recent years” “would be unthinkable in many other liberal democracies.” There is even a touch of Schmittian political theology in America: “Nowhere else in the world do the people take their constitution as the sacred text of the nation”; even the Supreme Court considers its “primary work… to maintain an identity of the political unity that is the United States of America.” “Without such an identity, multiculturalism would split the body politic of the United States.” “Just as the death of God leads to the war of gods and demons rather than the age of science, judicial control of the sovereign can lead to a ceaseless struggle among divergent groups rather than the rule of law. The judicialization of politics turns out to be the politicization of the judiciary.” For the Chinese, the American example should be understood not as a template for its own constitution-framing, but as a reason to “pay attention to its own political culture, however defined, to ground a firm constitutional authority.”

Finally, Shu-Perng Hwang considers how Schmitt’s thought might effect the one existing Chinese republican regime, Taiwan, and its constitutional law. So far, it hasn’t effected it much: “Schmitt’s constitutional theory remains foreign and irrelevant to the development of Taiwanese constitutional law.” Indeed, the Taiwanese mistakenly take Schmitt to be an advocate of human rights, an error that demonstrates, if nothing else, the power of regime-formed assumptions in (mis)shaping the interpretations of readers. Professor Hwang disputes this illusion, writing that Schmitt materialistic, anti-pluralist, and anti-liberal thought plainly rejects the concept of human rights. But “many Taiwanese discussions” continue to “interpret Schmitt’s argument based simply on” the “imaginations” of the discussants.

The five essays on Chinese uses and abuses of Strauss begin with the American political philosophy scholar Christopher Nadon’s assessment of the intention of the most prominent Chinese Straussian, Liu Xiaofeng. He reminds readers that Strauss joined Schmitt in rejecting what’s now called liberal internationalism or globalism. He departed from Schmitt’s claim that ‘everything is political,’ that human nature can be understood to be political ‘through and through.’ Considering Sparta as presented by Xenophon, Strauss saw that the Spartans weakened the family to strengthen the polis and encouraged boys to steal to strengthen the desire for acquisition of goods by military action. These customs involved Sparta in a contradiction; Spartans were taught to do both good and harm to human beings. “Unless the city also draws a distinction between how one treats fellow citizens and how one treats foreigners, its own practice calls into question he justice or coherence of the laws upon which it depends.” But even this distinction, central to Schmitt’s understanding of politics as conflict between friends and foes, doesn’t remove the problem. It can as easily lead citizens to view one another with hostility, especially when no foreign war is on. “This insight is fatal to the political community conceived of as the total community inasmuch as it leads citizens to regard each other at best as simply allies, that is, potential enemies, against whom anything is permitted,” a mindset that “necessarily diminishes their devotion” to the polis. Strauss concluded that liberalism may obscure the political, as Schmitt says, but political life itself is “contradictory, irrational, and irredeemably imperfect.” To see the truth about politics, to philosophize about politics, is to put the philosopher at odds with any political community, even if modern liberalism may obscure this fact by attempting to distinguish public from private, thereby giving space for heterodox thoughts and thinkers.

This is the origin of Strauss’s discovery of exoteric writing, and his apprehension of the need for it, “not just as a means of avoiding persecution, but as a permanent duty.” Reason, the philosopher’s means of reaching the truth, “always poses a danger or threat to political life, yet by understanding that danger it will also always moderate itself. If political life is necessarily imperfect, wisdom cannot be separated from moderation.” In attempting to replace the comprehensive political-thought system of liberalism with his own comprehensive system, Schmitt imitates liberals. But “if the classics as Strauss understands them are correct, and the perfect political community is simply impossible, there can be no perfectly consistent system of political thought.” The task of political philosophy then becomes not political theorizing, system-building but the encouragement of practical reasoning, prudence; “common sense, shrewdness, and a certain moral decency are the intellectual requirements of genuine political success,” and this reasoning should “be fortified by political philosophy,” not denigrated by it. “Strauss thought that the greatest danger came from the dreams of modern political theorists who thought the realization of their ideals was necessary,” dreams that led such thinkers “to overestimate the political power of reason to complete a systematic account of politics and therefore to underestimate the dangers to which decency and humanity will always be exposed.”

Liu Xiaofeng understands this, Nadon argues. He doesn’t “think that Strauss is useful for the direct guidance of political reforms, but rather as a resource to help restructure the universities and to inform and encourage he development of liberal arts education in China, although he recognizes these tasks as political but in the broader sense of the word.” He criticizes the Western universities, and “the Western intellectual world” generally, for having succumbed to exactly the utopianism Strauss criticizes. “From Rousseau to Derrida, the ruling passion among intellectuals has been ‘to establish on this earth the empire of wisdom, justice and virtue.'” Indeed, “he finds in the fact of this intellectual homogeneity in the West one reason why Strauss is so vilified there, for Strauss alone subjects the various ‘isms’ to questioning and a radical challenge.” “Strauss actually provides what American and European universities claim to value but in fact abhor: genuine diversity in the form of a perspective that provides an alternative to the Enlightenment tradition and offers the possibility of a critique of Western modernity that does not itself rest upon and therefore advance the principles of modernity.” This includes Strauss’s critique of moral or ‘cultural’ relativism. “The kind of moral advice offered by the philosopher should avoid anything that ‘weakens the moral fibers of men and thus [makes] them unable to bring any sacrifice.” In the modern west, the fact/value distinction and the notion of value-neutral social science confuses the souls of “people who have received higher education (professors in particular),” making them, in Liu’s words, “inferior to ordinary people on the moral plane.”

Liu maintains that it’s not too late for China, that the very interest of Chinese scholars in Strauss’s critique of modern liberalism indicates that ‘we Chinese’ “must take advantage of our situation to promote classical education as quickly as possible.” Moreover, Strauss’s attempt to “understand thinkers as they understood themselves,” rather than trying to plug them into a preconceived thought-system or ‘ism,’ may enable Chinese scholars to recover an understanding of the Chinese classics. “After his encounter with Strauss, Liu sees that philosophy as understood by the classics is the genuine universalism and source of liberation,” a universalism that (crucially) remains zetetic or questioning, and does not aim at rationalism or Enlightenment system-building. Philosophy owes that genuine universalism to the discovery of nature. While philosophy originated in ancient Greece (if it exists, it must have originated somewhere) “its essential core is nevertheless universal and timeless.”

“Liu also claims that there is a profound harmony between Chinese (Confucian and Daoist) and classical Western philosophy in their shared practice of esoteric speech, the discovery of which Strauss thought was crucial to his own recovery of political philosophy in its original sense.” Admittedly, the Chinese classics evidence no discovery of nature. The Chinese classics do, however, cultivate a certain kind of gentlemanliness, if not the same kind as Xenophon intended to cultivate, given the substantial differences between ancient China and ancient Greece. Liu “apparently” sees that philosophy “still needs to be or will be properly introduced” in China. To do this, Liu follows Strauss, as Strauss follows the Western classics, practicing exoteric writing “not only to escape persecution”—no small thing under the PRC regime—”but also to reproduce their distinctive way of life, a way of life which is in conflict not with this or that political regime but with political life in general.” If, as Strauss writes, exoteric writing is necessary to convince “the city” that philosophers “do not desecrate everything sacred to the city,” that “they are not subversives,” then philosophers can philosophize without suffering death (Socrates) or exile (self-imposed, for Aristotle). “For Strauss, true liberalism consists in freedom of the mind”—a way of life, a sort of regime-within-the regime the philosopher happens to live in. “What Strauss thought al-Farabi did for the Islamic world, Maimonides for Judaism, and perhaps Strauss himself for the modern liberal world, Liu might well be undertaking to do for China.”

Co-editor Kai Marchal doubts this. He agrees with Nadon respecting the lack of philosophy in ancient China. For that matter, also unlike the West, China lacked “the idea of a revealed religion.” Nor did Confucian or Daoist sages present themselves as ‘gadflies,’ awakening sleepy cities from their slumber, whether dogmatic or merely habitual. Therefore (and taking a hint from Strauss) we need “to understand the Chinese Straussians in their own terms.”

Thus, by “introduc[ing] to his readers Strauss’s deeper anxieties about modernity and his fierce polemic against the phenomena of ‘nihilism’ and ‘historicism,'” Liu Xiaofeng uses Strauss to induce “Chinese intellectuals to overcome their uncritical, submissive attitude toward the West and Western theories,” to “emancipate themselves from the idea that true ‘Enlightenment’ is only possible by means of Western ideas.” Liu’s “creative reading of Strauss” “affirms the idea that classical Chinese civilization represents a valid horizon and does not need to be critically examined from a modern perspective.” That can in turn impel the Chinese to work at recapturing one major part of that civilization, the Chinese empire: “When read in China,” Strauss’s criticism of “the parochial character of the 19th and 20th century outlook” in the West “encourages readers to reject or, at least, bypass Western modernity and to engage in the building of a united and powerful Chinese state that will again dominate Asia and even the world, as it had done for centuries before its fateful encounter with the imperial powers” of the West. Marchal remarks, dryly, “Strauss likely never anticipated such a reception, namely that his original project, the ‘quarrel between the ancient and the moderns,’ would turn into a veritable gigantomachia in the form of a political and ideological struggle between China and the United States.” He might also wonder how a renewed Chinese imperialism could avoid the methods and mindset of the moderns; for its part, the CCP doesn’t seem to be given to such wondering, a reality Strauss surely would not have found difficult to anticipate, had he lived long enough to see the beginnings of the effort.

Marchal unearths an especially entertaining instance of Liuian legerdemain. If “a contemporary Socrates” were “convicted as a ‘dissident,'” what would he do? Would he flee to the United States or would he stay in the PRC? Why, the Chinese Socrates would stay at home, just as Socrates did, accepting his punishment because “he would not want to live in a country whose ‘gods’ and customs are not his own.” In Liu’s words, “Socrates preferred to sacrifice his life in order to preserve philosophy in Athens rather than to preserve his life in order to introduce philosophy into Crete.” What is more, only under a “despotic regime” like the PRC does such an “existential choice between life and death even arise”; the gods of the liberal-democratic cities have fallen asleep, “citizens can choose rather arbitrarily between all sorts of values” with no criminal consequences, and so “are unable to reach the higher stages of moral being.”

As Marchal notes, this argument pretends that philosophy needs to be introduced into the United States. One might add that it also ignores the example of Aristotle, who did in fact get out of town, lest the Athenians sin twice against philosophy. Or, as Marchal recalls, Strauss himself did get out of Germany, then France, then England, arriving in America—in a way not to introduce, but to reintroduce natural-rights-based philosophy there.

Nadon interprets Liu as writing these things as an exoteric defense of the philosophic way of life in China. Marchal points to Liu’s valorization of the death-defying Socrates as not so much a Straussian but a Schmittian trope, with its frisson at existential risk. For his part, Marchal emphasizes Strauss’s interpretation of Xenophon’s dialogue, the Hiero, as a defense of philosophic daring, to be sure, but simultaneously of ‘politic’ philosophic moderation. By contrast, Liu praises the philosopher Xiong Shili’s “decision not to go into exile after the Chinese Communist Party’s successful revolution in 1949” and his subsequent attempts to convince Mao Zedong “of the need of valuing and preserving traditional scholarship (especially Confucianism) in order to create Chinese culture anew”—actions Liu finds reminiscent of Simonides’ dialogue with Hiero. Liu then argues that Xiong considered “the totalitarian rule of the democratic sage is necessary for the foundation of a truly democratic community,” and that Mao was, or could be, such a “sage.”

Marchal finds “all this” to be “quite perplexing,” in view of the fact that “the ideological foundation of Mao’s communist revolution is of modern origin,” as Liu himself has admitted elsewhere; “the communist notion of equality is a direct result of Westernization, more specifically of the European Enlightenment.” He has also “repeatedly claimed” that Mao’s revolutionary partisanship in the 1930s and 1940s “was very similar” to the sort of thing Schmitt had begun to advocate in the 1920s. Liu’s “attempt to elevate Mao to the status of a ‘beneficent tyrant'” proves “deeply flawed”: Strauss “insists on the eternal tension between the political life and the life devoted to wisdom,” and for that reason such a tyrant will fail; further, there remains “a fundamental difference between the Confucian-Legalist ethos in Imperial China and Mao’s extremely violent and voluntaristic vision of rulership, aiming to push the revolutionary project beyond any limits and restraints,” unifying theory and practice not for the sake of stability but for the sake of permanent revolution. In his dialogue with Kojève on the Hiero, Strauss refuses even to vindicate the rule of Salazar in Portugal, a rule that scarcely approached the tyrannical extremes of Mao.

It “may be possible,” Marchal grants that other Chinese Straussians such as Li Meng and Ding Yun will “aim at a more balanced understanding of the cultural differences between East and West,” preserving philosophy as “a genuinely critical, zetetic force,” and “think about the question of tyranny more soberly.” And it should not be forgotten that Liu has done substantial work in introducing “the Western canon into China.” This “may positively influence many generations of Chinese in the future,” although, one might remark, Strauss and many other commentators were not unmindful of the high level of civilization achieved by the Germans by the beginning of the calamitous twentieth century.

The next two essays feature assessments of Strauss as a philosopher by Chinese scholars. Jianghon Chen describes Strauss as a “negative philosopher.”  By this he means that for Strauss “The quest for the nature of things becomes possible only if one is dissatisfied with the common or vulgar understandings of things. In other words, the quest for the nature of things requires a negation of commonly accepted opinions and customs.” Thus political philosophy will challenge commonly accepted opinions and customs concerning politics. “Two facts” necessitate “the quest for the nature of political things”: first, “political life is enveloped by political opinions and social customs”; second, “political life has never reached the state of perfection and hence is in the state of lacking knowledge of political things.” Philosophy achieves at minimum an awareness of this ignorance. “Philosophy is the negation of any actual politics that claims to have achieved perfection in this world.” It is, as Strauss writes “zetetic.”

These facts being facts, Strauss understands “political philosophy as a politics of philosophy, that is, exotericism.” This practice of exotericism “can be justified in view of the conflict between the quest for knowledge and the satisfaction with opinion,” which satisfaction can lead to lethal dissatisfaction with philosophy and philosophers among the opinionated. Therefore “it is ridiculous to regard Strauss as a conservative thinker,” if ‘conservatism’ means to hold on to one’s received opinions and customs. No genuinely philosophic thinker can be conservative in that way, although he may well appear to be, given his practice of exoteric speech and writing. In prudently rejecting the path of open reform in his public speech, the politics of philosophy may be conservative, but the underlying thought will always be daring. “Political philosophy remains possible in society only if it becomes political philosophy. Strauss is neither a secret Schmittian, a man of the ‘Right,’ nor a follower of Hannah Arendt on the ‘Left.’ Neither is truly politic or truly philosophic in the eyes of Strauss. In the case of Arendt, this may be seen in her refusal to view Plato as an ironist, and her consequent charge that Platonic philosophy, and even philosophy generally, inclines to tyranny. Strauss does not think that Plato’s ‘ideal republic’ is intended as a serious ‘policy proposal,’ as a “blueprint” for human society. The ‘ideal republic’ Socrates and his interlocutors build in the Republic is a city in speech, and only in speech. It will never exist outside of speech; it transcends ordinary, down-to-earth reality, perhaps providing a standard for judging ‘actual’ regimes, but not as a goal to be striven for in action.  Accordingly, Strauss finds philosophy liberal in both senses of the term: a generous giver of noetic insights and an agent of true human freedom from ancient conventions and modern ideologies alike.

Kuan-Min Huang distinguishes the Chinese practice of attempting to “mirror” Western thought and the strategy of viewing that thought as if through a “prism.” He begins, as Malraux had done, by pointing to “the crisis of meaning” contact with the West produced in China, with the consequent search for a Chinese identity, both national (democratic in Taiwan, “authoritarian” on the mainland) and cultural (traditionalism versus modern ‘progressivism’). “All economic development and democratic organization”—attempted solutions to the national crisis—”cannot hide the deeper crisis of meaning,” the cultural crisis, in part because the solutions on offer, by negating Chinese tradition, only intensify that crisis. “For intellectuals during the modern era, the rupture with the Chinese tradition meant nothing less than the collapse of a whole universe of meaning,” as seen in the poignant statement of Malraux’s Ling.

An earlier generation of exiled Chinese intellectuals, including Carson Chang, Xie Youwei, Xu Fuguan, Mou Zongsan, and Tang Junyi, put their hopes “in justifying the possibility of democracy and science in accordance with the Confucian spirit.” “Seen in this context, Leo Strauss’s criticism of modernity could serve as a point of reference in regard to the problem of value.” Professor Huang calls “the method of making use of Straussian arguments to counter Western modernity and to justify the inherent value of the Chinese tradition a form of ‘mirroring.'” In China, this transfers Strauss’s account of the battle of the ancients and the moderns to the Chinese conflict between the Confucian classics and modern Western ideas and ways of life. The problem is that “Strauss precludes any reshaping of tradition.” In Straussian terms, it would be highly unlikely that Confucianism and modernity could mix, any more than Judaism or Platonism could mix with Machiavelli. Politically, too, “if the traditional political regime cannot restore institutional Confucianism (including the traditional family structure and the civil service examination system), appropriating Western values simply will not take China back to the political system of the past; also, it will lead to a political regime rather different from socialist authoritarianism,” itself a product of modern ideas. Neither nationalism nor socialism nor democracy, nor some combination of two or three of those, can comport with Confucianism (or Daoism, or even Legalism, which, of those three, modern thought most nearly resembles).

Huang suggests approaching Strauss in a different way. Strauss’s critique of Western modernity is ‘prismatic’; that is, he shows that there is no one ‘West,’ that it must be analyzed into its components. The principal components are reason and revelation (“Athens” and “Jerusalem”) and “ancient and modern.” Further, modernity itself comprises several elements. “If Chinese culture or other Asian cultures have been caught by the spell of modernity, it is necessary to understand how this modernity is constituted… in order to see at what level the encounter happens and toward what ends the dialogue can lead.” To Huang, Strauss is “Schmittian” in the sense that he emphasizes the conflict of the several elements of the West, not their reconciliation, harmonization, or synthesis.

Huang remarks that, for starters, the conflict between reason and revelation does not resonate in China because Chinese religions are not ‘revealed’ religions. Further, “for a Chinese person who is interested in Strauss, one obvious problem is the difficulty of using the Chinese language to talk about philosophy, given that the latter originated in Greece.” “Can philosophy be other than Greek?” If a Confucian scholar were to consider Western philosophy, he might say that “the source of philosophy is moral conscience.” This is the Chinese equivalent of “human nature” in Western philosophy. A non-Confucian scholar might say no, it ‘universal’ isn’t conscience but the Dao, the “Way” or “Origin” or “Principle.” Still another might say that “nothingness” (in Chinese, sunyata) is the universal principle underlying everything. In considering these matters in light of Strauss’s theologico-political problem, Chinese religion makes the conflict of reason and revelation less severe, making Hegelian historicism—with which Strauss sharply disagrees, precisely on the grounds that reason and revelation cannot be made to cohere—a much more plausible solution to the conflict between Chinese tradition and modernity.

Huang commends the philosopher Tang Junyi, who, Hegel-like, makes the confrontation of Confucianism with modernity into a struggle for recognition. “Tradition is neither an absolute authority nor a divinely revealed source” in Confucianism. “It has great value, but only through rational recognition,” and it “provides a source for human rationality” in the “possibility of self-transcending to affirm the power of adaptation of the Kantian-Hegelian approach to self-consciousness” that Confucianism offers. Thus “the return to tradition does not mean a complete refusal of modernity, as Strauss insists.” Hegelian “immanent transcendence” leaves a place both for religion and reason, with faith “limit[ing] reason’s overestimation of itself” and “offer[ing] a sense of security” to the human soul, and reason, perhaps, limiting religion’s inclination to dogmatism. This Confucian approach to reason and revelation also solves the theologico-political problem because it makes the best regime possible; for Huang, “the best regime is a democratic one complemented by moral cultivation,” centering on (Hegelian) “mutual respect,” which circumscribes “the will to power” by “moral conscience.” And this political solution for China may be extended to international relations, whereby religions can coexist peacefully and build “perpetual peace.” (In China itself, it might be remarked, the often-brutal civil wars have seldom been wars of religion, and the two biggest such wars—the Dungan Revolt (Muslims) and the Taiping Rebellion (Christians) involved adherents to revealed religions. A Chinese intellectual might well associate the immanentism of Chinese religions with relative peace among religionists.) That is, the spectrum revealed by considering Strauss ‘prismatically’ can lead to “a synthesis in the future.” The choice of Hegelian language is of course revealing. Tang Junyi is Kojève with the Schmittism (not to mention the Stalinism) removed.

It must be said that Strauss resists prismatic reading and therefore the synthetic solutions arising from religious or philosophic immanentism. He would raise a zetetic eyebrow at any such grand conciliation of Confucian classics with modernity, replying also that if Chinese tradition is not based on revealed religion, it might well be based on custom or convention, received opinion (albeit refined). Huang does not notice another of Strauss’s distinctions, the one between nature and convention. Strauss might also doubt that Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism can be made to cohere. He might find the Daoists somewhat reminiscent of the apolitical Epicureans, on the one hand, and the cosmos-centered pre-Socratics, on the other; in contrast, Confucianists’ moral and political concerns more nearly resemble Western political philosophers following the ‘Socratic turn.’ And the Legalists look to be closer to Machiavelli and his followers, despising both Daoists and Confucianists as soft, unrealistic, foolish. Strauss might well hasten to note the roughness of these parallels, even as he maintained that neither ‘East’ and ‘West,’ nor the several elements of Chinese tradition itself, much lend themselves to rational synthesis.

The final essay on Schmitt discusses Schmitt in relation to Taiwan. Similarly, the final essay on Strauss discusses Strauss in relation to Taiwan. Chuang-Wei Hu cites Wan Dan, a political activist, and Pai Hsien-yung, a novelist, Taiwanese intellectuals who seek a “cultural renaissance” in their country. Dr. Hu suggests that Strauss’s writings on liberal education might be useful in such a renaissance. As Strauss argues, a “cultured” person may be formed by reading the “great books.” From them, he will learn what human excellence is, and what the best regime is, both for individuals and political communities. Strauss emphasizes “that the meaning of philosophy is to love wisdom but not to have wisdom,” that turning one’s soul “toward the good” does not make the soul perfect, but does make it better and, in some cases, makes it either great—magnanimous—or even (in rare instances) philosophic. The cultured soul may not achieve philosophic status, but ‘intellectuals’ can at least learn to respect philosophers, learn a thing or two from them. In studying philosophers, “the reader cannot expect a set of instructions”; he must try to think along, and finally to judge the merit, of what he’s reading. The philosophers do not “only speak for their own time; they did in fact think about perennial questions.” “Ancient” liberalism means freeing the mind to think rationally about those questions.

Strauss writes, “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.” If ancient democracies expected “all citizens” to “be wise and virtuous,” they at least could be said to aim high. “Modern democracy, in contrast, does not focus on virtues or [what Strauss calls] ‘the contemplation of the eternal,’ but rather pays attention to the political rights of everyone.” The necessity of liberal education in regimes of modern democracy must therefore be seen in the need to maintain at least a core of citizens who continue to see the need for virtue in maintaining their political regime, and the need for virtue in leading a good life within that regime. If modern democracy, as Strauss understands it, isn’t so much the rule of the masses, since modern societies are too large to be ruled directly by the people as a whole, then modern democracy really consists of a “mass culture,” a culture, as Strauss unsparingly puts it, “which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities, without any intellectual and moral effort whatsoever and at a very low monetary price.” The cultural “aristocracy” within this mass culture will consist of those citizens who acquire a liberal education. By becoming teachers they will resist mass culture, possibly elevating not only the culture but the politics of their countries, even if only to a modest degree.

Because they recognize the fact of “natural inequality or social inequality in a democracy more than other thinkers,” Strauss and Straussians “have been denounced” severely by real and pretended democrats (rival elites, in other words) within the democratic regimes. Dr. Hu writes, “I deeply believe that everyone can achieve excellence in one particular area of life,” not necessarily in politics but in “parenting, driving, cooking, etc.” To achieve the excellence appropriate to each soul is to achieve happiness for that soul, and each of us “is worthy of seeking their own happiness.” This is a kind thought, although Strauss would qualify it by noting that one soul’s excellence might be philosophy, another politics, another cooking, and still another pickpocketing. That is, he would insist that there remains a hierarchy of excellences, a hierarchy established by considering what human nature is.

Returning to liberal education in Taiwan, Dr. Hu notices that Strauss leaves open the possibility that great minds and great books may well be found in such countries as China and India. “We do not understand their languages,” Strauss writes, “and we cannot learn all languages.” Dr. Hu confirms that great minds and books to indeed exist in the East, and that “Taiwanese students should read Confucius’ Analects or the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber, because they do know the language.” And Taiwanese students can read the Western ‘greats,’ too, “most of the time with the help of translations.” In Taiwanese mass culture as elsewhere, “people tend to read by their passions, and not by reasonable thinking.” They will need “to choose between the values of Eastern and Western cultures, which often conflict with one another.” “Reading the ‘great books’ can help the Taiwanese people to know themselves better.” In so choosing and coming to know, Dr. Hu draws attention to Strauss’s emphasis on “the importance of political moderation.” As Strauss writes, “Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.” On that, Dr. Hu and Strauss are, as a Chinese thinker might say, in harmony.

Marchal and Shaw have put together a highly instructive collection of essays. The essays demonstrate the possibilities, both promising and dangerous, which the introduction of the writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss have opened for Chinese peoples and their regimes. Judging from these essays, Strauss seems a more beneficial influence than Schmitt, who does not necessarily appeal to the better angels of our nature. It must be observed that the policies of the PRC regime today comport far more with Schmitt’s notions than they do with anything Strauss teaches.