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    Challenges to American Liberalism: Martin Luther King and Malcolm X

    by

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

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

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

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

     

    Martin Luther King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Malcolm X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Concluding Brief Comparison

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

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

     

    Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

     

     

    How Some of Our Contemporaries Aspire to the Philosophic Life

    by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     

    Notes

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

    Montaigne Concludes His Argument: The Essays, Book Three

    by

    Eyeing death, Montaigne negotiates with his reader over the terms of his immortality. He begins by distinguishing the useful from the honorable. The emperor Tiberius said, “The Roman people were accustomed to take vengeance on their enemies by open means, arms in hand, not by fraud or surreptitiously.” But Tiberius was an “imposter.” Montaigne proceeds somewhat differently. He is no Roman, no man of war. He is a peace negotiator. He too claims to proceed unsurreptitously. “I have an open way that easily insinuates itself and gains credit on first acquaintance. Pure naturalness and truth”—he adds, a touch sententiously—”in whatever age, still find their time and their place.” Indeed they do, but not quite in the seeming sense of Montaigne, here.

    Is Montaigne too an imposter? Perish the thought, he exclaims. Those who so suspect “make my subtlety too subtle.” “There is no rule” in any “school” that could do what Montaigne does in his negotiations with the armed prophets of the French civil war. One might even say that great philosophers have been “too enslaved to exhibit reverence for the laws.” One should not “call dishonorable and foul” certain “natural actions that are not only useful but necessary.” A prince should “attribute” the necessity for certain actions to God’s action, “a blow from the divine rod.” After all, “no private utility is worthy of our doing… violence to our conscience.” Yes, but: When it is a matter of “the public utility,” and “when it is very apparent and very important”—well, that is another matter. With Montaigne as for Machiavelli, utility quietly replaces honor as the quintessential public virtue.

    Certain actions, even if supremely useful, might impel a conscientious man to repentance. But as Montaigne looks at himself in old age he can only sigh, resignedly, “Now it is done.” And besides, he says immediately, he is being remade from one minute to the next. Somehow he is both irremediable and perpetually malleable, undeserving of legal chastisement and unable to conform to any rule. As an author he plays no role—grammarian, poet, jurist. He is himself, he is every man. That is, he plays all the roles. He basks in no glory. His immortality is in his universality, not his distinction. “I do not teach”—the people will not call to him, ‘Rabbi, Rabbi’—but he is a prophet without honor in his own country. Unlike the most honored prophet, he will not find honor or reverent obedience in some other country. Seeking honor can get you crucified; reverent obedience is unproductive. Montaigne is rather a sort of Socrates, leading the life of man “in conformity with its natural condition.” With Montaigne, nature replaces God as the source of ‘prophecy.’

    To reach higher is to fail. “Those who in my time have tried to correct the world’s morals by new ideas, reform the superficial vices; the essential ones”—those useful and necessary?—”they leave as them they were, if they do not increase them; and increase is to be feared.” Montaigne says “Pythagoreans” but means Christians in criticizing those who “believe that they feel great regret and remorse within; but of amendment or correction, or interruption, they show us no sign.” There can be no radical conversion, no ‘new man.’ “Repentance does not properly apply to the things that are not in our power.” What Nietzsche says thunderously Montaigne says quietly: Love our own piece of fatum, will the eternal return. “If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived.” that is a spear in the side of Christian renewal.

    As for the philosophical life, like Jesus Socrates arranged his own death, but not out of martyrdom, not to save or transform human beings. Socrates arranged his own death because nature was turning out the lights. A philosopher will adapt to the circumstance, whether it be advancing age or the currently regnant folly that is public opinion. He will know that “the fairest souls are those that have the most variety and adaptability,” and that “life is uneven, irregular, and multiform movement.” The Montaignian Socrates does not point ‘up’ to unchanging forms but ‘around’ to changing ones. That goes for himself, too. “I would rather fashion my mind than furnish it.” Invoking God and Socrates, Montaigne praises useful knowledge.

    Of the three kinds of association—with men, with women, with books—women are pleasant if beautiful and well-bred; men are pleasant and useful if they are of that “rarest type among us” who know how to converse. But books are neither so susceptible to aging as women nor so rare as the rarest men. Montaigne retires to his library, where he can read and pace. (This is no nihilistic Flaubert who thinks sitting down, to be caught by some sharp-eyed wanderer of the future.) But finally in his most private moments Montaigne is alone, unmoveable, enthroned. The admirer of Contr’un is secretly solitary, a monarch, a man alone, like Machiavelli’s prince, and even more like Machiavelli himself—in retirement, teaching the princes (he who denies he teaches), an unmoved mover in a skin that always changes its colors to math its background. Christianity presents the miracle of God in a human body. Montaigne presents the greater miracle of a god in the shape of the most inconspicuous reptile, not even so worrisome as a serpent.

    How can such a weak, lowly chameleon achieve immortality, even rule generations to come more effectively than Jesus? Because Jesus’ followers have a secret weakness. They avert their eyes from death and look to Heaven. They seek vengeance upon atheists who do not aver their eyes; they fix their eyes vengefully upon atheists and other criminals, killing them because to the pious death is a frightening evil. They can be diverted by “the beauty of a contrary picture,” a picture of clemency and kindness winning honor, favor and good will. Political men can always be so diverted. as for the people, they can be diverted by some silly spectacle. Just be sure not to fall in love with your own diversion, as women sometimes do.

    The free spirits can look at death without averting their eyes. For them there is la gaya scienza. La gaya scienza teaches that mind and body are really one. La gaya scienza will prefer health as the real good of human being. La gaya scienza will pursue a discreet policy of sexual liberation., recognizing that love and marriage are a dysfunctional couple. Montaigne here attacks fidelity, perhaps fidelity tout court. The key to many a Montaignian essay is to convert the images to their theological equivalents and then prepare to think unfaithful thoughts. Fidelity is itself a policy of diversion—specifically, of sublimation. But sublimation only rechannels natural passions, making them more powerful, converting them into fanaticism, violence. Montaigne diverts the diverted and perverts the perverted. La gaya scienza is never solemn, because men are such fools. “Our delights and our excrements have been lodged together pell-mell, and… the supreme sensual pleasure is attended, like pain, with faintness and moaning.” What god created such animals? And young M. Foucault, I see what you see, feel what you feel, but are you not altogether too serious, too much in earnest, about all these passions, exquisite limit-pleasures, and bondages? Are you sufficiently gay, mon ami?

    When it comes to God, the judge of men’s follies, Montaigne mounts not the divine chariot but a down-to-earth coach. When tutoring a prince, “it is all too easy to impress liberality on a man who has the means to practice it all he wants at the expense of others.” Liberality in a prince goes as well with tyranny as with royalty. The real royal virtue is justice. Montaigne always tempers his justice not with mercy but with toleration. Central to Book III is chapter seven, “Of the disadvantage of greatness.” The advantage to being a king is that, like a preacher, you address the people, “an inexact judge, easy to dupe, easy to satisfy.” The disadvantage of kingly greatness is that you never really know yourself, know the truth—never can measure exactly your real abilities against those of others. Your real identity is consumed by your royalty. As solitary as a king but, unlike one, obscure, Montaigne knows himself and thereby has the advantage over kings, human and divine. His spirit someday will permeate the world.

    Not that anyone should imitate him. He publishes his imperfections out of caritas, so that others can avoid them. But it is Montaigne’s courage and intelligence in debate that emerge here, not his weakness. Debating “in a small group and for my own sake,” he indulges in “a friendship that delights in the sharpness and rigor of its intercourse, as does love in bites and scratches that draw blood.” This is the advantage of ‘polytheism.’ On the Montaignian throne, there can still be dialogue, if not with rare friends then with good books, if not with good books than with one of the monarch’s many selves. This is Montaigne’s solution to the Machiavellian problem: How can the lone prince know? (Machiavelli’s, too? As when he retired to his chamber to dine on his true food?)

    Turning from theological to philosophic dealings, then, “I am no philosopher.” No philosopher-king, at any rate, seeking to revolutionize the polis. Stay out of it. Leave it alone. Revolution only brings some worse tyranny. I am universal, no political philosopher at all—a cosmopolitan, a world unto myself. I do not cling to my own, including my own life. (Mirabile dictu, I am a survivor, though, am I not? Just lucky, I guess.) Facing death as I am, allow me to offer you my confession. You may notice that I change themes abruptly, use false essay titles, and so forth. But really “my ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance.” The “more casual and accidental” my remarks “seem,” the more beautiful they are. “It is my inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.” I confess, but you are the one to do penance. Go back and read my essays again—the most exquisitely pleasurable penance one could endure.

    You really must learn to husband your will. “I keep myself to myself.” As a result—to my astonishment—I am a political philosopher: “I have been able to take part in public affairs without departing a nail’s breadth from myself, and to give myself to others without taking myself from myself.” Now there is the true divine liberality. This divinity is entirely natural. “The laws of Nature teach us what we rightly need”; those who know them “distinguish subtly between the desires that come from her and those that come from the disorder of my imagination.” To be politic, don’t be partisan. My administration “passed without a mark or a trace.” My “gliding, obscure, and quiet life” rules people without their knowing it.

    How can Montaigne do that? First he philosophizes without claiming knowledge of causes, at least of ultimate causes. What is a miracle? How would you know one if you saw one? Nature is as obscure as God. You can work wonders, quietly and over time, if you win people’s trust rather than insisting on their fidelity, if you confess your ignorance rather than your sins, if you do not try to explain too much. Be the Montaignian Socrates, not soaring to the good but pulling everything down to earth, “his own original and natural level.” Unlike Jesus, Socrates can be known: “He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do for itself,” not, like Jesus, how much God has done for human nature. “I do not think it becomes us well to let ourselves be taught by a pagan”—Plato—”how great an impiety it is to expect no help from God that is simply his own and without our cooperation.” Or, as Algernon Sidney puts it, God helps those who help themselves. Good men have “nothing to fear from the gods,” Montaigne’s Socrates says. “We naturalists” know: To survive and to triumph, put on an open and useful-looking face. That way, everyone will want you to live, perhaps forever, and everyone will take your advice. Benjamin Franklin will read this, considering it carefully.

    “We naturalists” know how to deal with the feverish disease of religious fanaticism. Let nature take its course. Gradually, the fire will burn out. Meanwhile, the prudent man will live, judging naturally, physically, by his own sensations, not by passionate beliefs or overwrought reasonings. (Machiavelli is even more precise: Do not hear, do not look, but touch.) “The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.” Without Jesus or (the Platonic) Socrates.

    Montaigne points back to Machiavelli, ahead to Nietzsche. Like them, he opposes the imaginary republics, religious or philosophic. Like those philosophers, he is alone (except for them, one dead, the other far in the future, and a few others). But he proceeds differently. Unlike Machiavelli, Montaigne finds Christians not weakly self-divided but fanatical, leonine—even if they are at the core cowardly lions. He therefore uses the fox much more than the lion, staying in his den; when he ventures out, he pretends he’s just a lazy dog. Unlike Nietzsche, he doesn’t find Christianity in a state of decadence, ready to collapse after a few strong kicks. This Anti-Christ stays at home, never marching toward Jerusalem. The time is not right.

    But the times may be ripening. Religion can be diverted, philosophy seized, with an image of a new, multiform, various, ever-changing sort of beauty. Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Montesquieu: Where would these gods of the new Olympus be, without Montaigne’s example? Montaigne’s conclusion is practically a beginning.