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    Leftist Lit-Crit, Revised

    by

    Patrick Colm Hogan: The Politics of Interpretation: Ideology, Professionalism, and the Study of Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

    Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 15, Number 2, October 1991.

     

    Don Quixote ‘proves’ the existence of his chivalric heroes by imagining their faces. Academia today provides safe haven for many such knights of woeful countenance, unhappy warriors whose political battle-cry, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it!’ echoes harmlessly from distant, unmoved windmills.

    Patrick Colm Hogan seeks a literary criticism guided by political principles “closer to the political concerns of real human life” (viii). He aims not at the ‘deconstruction’ or the ‘construction’ of political-literary ‘theories.’ Poorly disguised assertions of arbitrary will and politically correct attitudinizing fail to impress him. As a man of the ‘Left,’ he sees that the political victory and moral legitimacy of the ‘Left’ require the congruence of its doctrines and insights with the real world. To change the world, one must understand it.

    In Hogan’s view, political criticism should combine evaluation of ideological aims, beliefs, and actions, the examination of how literary works foster these, and an answer to the perennial question, Cui bono?—the examination of what interests or “power relations” the inculcation of a given ideology “might serve” (30). Deconstructionism and some forms of feminist criticism impede these activities by condemning “logical inference and empirical investigation” as “patriarchal and repressive” (31). “A denial of the Principle of Non-Contradiction makes all of one’s claims into dogma, brooking no dispute” (35), ending with the substitution of “intimidation for dialectic” (49). This kind of criticism is political in the worst sense: partisan in tone and substance, coercive in spirit—in a word, tyrannical.

    Against Derrida, Hogan observes that definition need not entail oppressive hierarchies, that “logocentrism” has no necessary historical connection to “phallocentricism.” “Clearly, the ordinary guarded and skeptical methods of rational enquiry—so disparaged by deconstructionists—are far more germane to forging an anti-Leninist and anti-Stalinist left, especially if these are combined with a Kantian ethics which grants to individuals their rights as ends in themselves” (86).

    Against certain varieties of feminism, Hogan questions the attempt to make womanhood prior to a woman’s individuality, as when “women are encouraged not to develop their own capacities, but the putative capacities of their gender-essence” (98). Even as Voltaire twitted earlier philosophers for defining a tree by its ‘treeness,’ Hogan rejects claims that, say, Simone de Beauvoir could be adequately defined or explained by ‘femaleness.’ No empirical or logical evidence sustains such claims, which are little more than the photographic negatives of long-existing stereotypes, valorized to serve the interests or, more accurately to caress the vanity of new photographers.

    To subvert ideologies of domination ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ Hogan urges empirical and dialectical criticism along with action to “dismantle all those structures which establish or reinforce” ideology, including such institutions as religion, the state, and capitalism (171). In academia this would require “a massive anarchist or libertarian restructuring of the university” (193), including the abolition of such “feudal, guild structures” as academic departments (176). Tenure, tuition, and the exploitation of teaching assistants and part-time instructors would also need to go. He offers amusing remarks about the influence of the commercial ethos on literary scholars, each generation of whom makes work for itself, “creates a demand,” by seizing upon new theories of interpretation. “It all has to be done over!” I heard one literary feminist exult; just so.

    Hogan is a sane man. It is helpful to have his leftist and feminist critique of certain surreal elements of the lit-crit ‘Left.’ I admire his common sense, lucidity, and civic courage. He himself, however, departs from realism from time to time. From the book’s dedication to the Nicaraguan revolutionaries (all too many of whom turned out to be self-serving farceurs) to the concluding pipe dreams about an “Anarchist University,” there is here more than a touch of what Marxists rightly deride as utopian socialism. David Hume’s sound remark on other-worldly men of his day speaks even more pointedly to this-worldly activist-utopians of our own: “A delicate sense of morals, especially when attended with a splenetic temper, is apt to give a man a disgust of the world, and to make him consider the common course of human affairs with too much indignation.”

    Churchill on Empire

    by

    Kirk Emmert: Winston S. Churchill on Empire. Durham: Carolina Academic Press and the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, 1989.

     

    Winston Churchill claimed, “There is no halfway house for Britain between greatness and ruin” (3). In fact there is; its current proprietor is Margaret Thatcher. Britain has lost and gained: markets replaced colonies; Englishness replaced ‘civilization’; corporations replaced viceroys. If household management or economics has not quite replaced politics, the mold that shaped Churchill has broken. There is no halfway house for a Churchill between greatness and ruin.

    Americans think of Churchill as a wartime ally against rightist tyranny and a peacetime ally against leftist tyranny—as a courageous prophet of liberty honored, finally, in his native land. Churchill’s defense of the British Empire strikes Americans as contradictory to this spirit, something to be deplored or at best apologized for. Professor Emmert’s study has the merit of recognizing that Churchill’s “commitment to empire was central” to his political career (xi). Emmert shows that Churchill commitment arose not from mere traditionalism or even from ambition, simply, but from an “aristocratic or Aristotelian” understanding of the demands and responsibilities of political life (xvi).

    “True” imperialism develops both “manhood” and commerce in the imperial nation (1)—two qualities not easy to combine. By renouncing its Continental ambitions and building the strongest navy in the world, Britain increased its own security and encouraged limited government in England while freeing the army for overseas conquests. Continental nations expended substantial public revenues on self-defense; the British navy defended the island nation inexpensively, leaving money available for private investment and international commerce. The navy protected British shipping and forcibly opened new markets. Military ‘necessity’ refocused, from national defense to imperial defense. Imperial defense requires expansion, as increased territory increases the scope of security needs. “[W]ar and change, not peace and permanence, are the constant companions of empire” (8). A moderate, civilized empire must “pursue a policy which is difficult to distinguish from that of an aggressive, intentionally expansive nation.” Even a civilized empire “must act in much the same manner as a tyrant” (9). Nor did Churchill try to hide under the cloak of ‘necessity’; he freely observed that the natural desire “to be predominant” fans imperialist ambitions. Civilization “restrains and rechannels these instincts into more pacific activities, but it cannot eliminate or fully control them” (10).

    Churchill parted from Machiavelli in upholding an “eternal standard of right and wrong independent of and superior to climate, custom, and caprice” (11), a standard beckoning citizens to honor. Honor is a mean between “narrow self-interest and moralistic excess” (12). “Churchill proposed civilizing empire as the cure to the disease of tyrannizing empire” (13), of which he saw three kinds during his career: the “scientific barbarism” of the Kaiser’s Germany; the “animal form of barbarism” of Bolshevik Russia; and the racist barbarism of Nazi Germany (15). Barbarism begins with human life itself. A pre-political war of “all against all” reflects mankind’s “strong aboriginal propensity to kill” (16). Primitive peoples lack shame and moral indignation, engage in treachery and violence, and cannot reason. They emerge from the most primitive barbarism when, tiring of perpetual insecurity, they establish tyrannies In their credulity, primitive men also give way to “religious fanaticism grounded in a claim of prophetic revelation” (17); this religion impedes civilization’s development by encouraging “degraded sensualism” and by retarding the mental faculties (17). As civilization develops, however, intelligence usually outruns morality, leading once again to barbarism.

    Churchill considers courage to be the foundation of civilized or fully human life. Courage is “the first of all human qualities” because it “guarantees all the others” (19). The courage of barbarians is reckless or “wild courage”—passionate, unruly, rash (20). Civilized courage is calm, a sign of self-mastery and endurance. “In the civilized man, Churchill suggests, reason rules the bodily desires and man’s spiritedness. Thus, under stress, the civilized man is persevering, serene, deliberate, self-controlled and proudly self-sufficient” (22). Habituation forms civilized courage; the force of discipline and of circumstances supplement habit. Habit should be reinforced by vanity, the desire to establish a good reputation, but this must not be overemphasized, as it will promote timidity in the face of public disapproval. The sentiment of nobility, whereby “vanity is transformed into justifiable pride” (25), best anchors habitual courage. The moral importance of habituation figures largely in Aristotle, as does the definition of virtue as the mean between two extremes, two vices; and of course the distinction between civilization and barbarism runs through ancient Greece generally.

    Churchill recognized that the increasing egalitarianism of modern civilization threatened these Aristotelian virtues. He therefore “stressed increasingly in his speeches and more popular writings the kinship of civilization and freedom or self-government” (25). Attempting to preserve as much of the older moral order as possible, he traced British rights, liberties, and constitutional safeguards to “ancient Greece and Rome” (26); he represented the Roman Empire in Britain as “a golden age for Britain” (9), a time when the British themselves benefited morally and politically from rule by civilized imperialists. The virtues of justice, prudence, moderation or self-government, and goodwill or toleration, along with civilized courage, make individual and political freedom possible; most of these are classical virtues. Christianity too has its place, because “philosophy”—these are Churchill’s words—”cannot convince the bullet” (129, n. 81). Praying and belief in providence may not convince the bullet, either, but they serve as helps to steady the man facing the bullet. “Churchill understood that the morality that guided the [British] Empire and the rest of the civilized West had both classical and Christian roots” (29); although the statesman will conduct himself according to the classical standard of gentlemanly honor, he will also nourish Christianity as “the most politically salutary religion available to modern civilized statesmen” (30). Modern science also needs cultivation; even more it needs restraint. “The first civilization that has indissolvably married human excellence and physical power rather than leaving them to come together occasionally and by chance” (31) must take care that scientific or intellectual development does not overwhelm moral virtues, destroying the conditions of its own existence.”

    Emmert discusses Churchill’s view of civilizing empire’s effect on rulers and the ruled. “[A]ll human  beings have an obligation to improve themselves which takes precedence over any rights they might claim to liberty or self-government” (33); primitive contentment is no more fully human than is primitive strife, and both prevent or retard the development of civilization. “The precariousness of [the] natural way to civilization, its long duration, and the likelihood it might miscarry led Churchill to reject it in principle as an alternative to imperial rule” (34). Empire as it were assists nature by “rapidly increasing capital wealth and by expanding human desires” (36), first by encouraging small entrepreneurs, then larger scale commercial projects. At the same time modern civilization’s technology goes beyond assistance to the subjugation of nature for use by man. Capital investment should be limited to avoid exploitation; Churchill preferred a limited state socialism, limited because an excessively powerful local government would overawe the native population and demand independence from the Empire—break the civilizational bonds that alone justify empire. Christian missionaries posed an especially difficult problem; Churchill applauded them only in such places as Uganda, where they cooperated fully with the imperial government.

    Altruism and philanthropy should not move imperial rulers. Nor should selfishness. “At its best, empire is not a burden to be endured,” or a tyranny to be exploited, “but an opportunity for individual and national self-improvement” (53). Barbarians have no intrinsic rights; rather, civilized nations owe it to themselves to treat barbarians justly. In this, Churchill found himself opposed by the democrats and state socialists who gained power after the First World War. Democrats reduced politics to economics, “denied that man was a political animal” (55). Socialists sought to politicize the private. Churchill defined politics in two distinct, complementary ways: as a means of collective action to satisfy the individual’s need for security and well-being; as an effort to realize the distinctively human potential for reasoning and reasoned speech. Imperialism satisfied man’s political nature in both senses, immediately for the rulers and ruled with respect to ‘low’ politics, and immediately for rulers, eventually for the ruled with respect to ‘high’ politics. Empire “calls forth certain virtues, and ths a specific type of human being” (63). Its ordinary citizens strengthen their self-respect; its extraordinary citizens fulfill their magnanimity, their great-souledness in the Aristotelian sense. Empire counterbalanced the leveling effects of mass democracy. “[S]ince the maintenance [of Empire] necessitated a considerably greater degree of moral and political virtue from the nation’s foremost citizens, in looking up to these leaders the British citizenry was taught to admire the considerable virtue they embodied” (64). For the foremost citizens themselves, “ruling imperially” afforded the chance to achieve the fullest humanity by engaging in “the fully civilizing activity” (64).

    “By the late 1920s, Churchill had concluded that the coming of mass democracy had transformed and degraded British politics” (70). Majoritarianism replaced deliberation and consent, and “the advent of political equality undermined [the] conventional acknowledgements of political authority which in the best cases were indications of natural preeminence and in most cases made mediocrity more serviceable” (71). As technology purveyed mass tastes, politics itself became more ‘technical’ or technocrat; middle and lower classes improved their standard of living but declined in the exercise of civic liberty, prudence, and initiative. In Churchill’s metaphor, the British political system liquefied. Institutions, hierarchy, structure weakened against the ebb and flow of public passions. Churchill attempted to use imperialism as a bulwark against this tide, but as the spirit of party triumphed over the spirit of Parliament, the Empire itself became a bone of political contention. A politics of individual rights and self-interest overcame the politics of honor and “noble self-regard” (81). “[I]t was not possible for long to rule according to ‘new principles’ at home but ‘old principles’ abroad” (85). Churchill gradually came to hope for a British Empire of self-governing dominions, a “voluntary association of like-minded nations” or “English-speaking peoples” (99)—less a political than a cultural empire modeled on Demosthenes’ pan-Hellenism.

    The tension in Churchill’s thought between “his acceptance of human equality” and “his admiration for excellence and for the accomplishments of the unequal few” would have disappeared had he “fully embraced on principle or the other.” “This Churchill would not do, probably because he thought that neither in itself reflected the full truth about human nature” (107). The limitations of imperial rule reflect the contradictions of politics itself, limitations and contradiction of politics itself, limitations and contradictions suggesting that political life is not the human life, at least not simply or comprehensively. For Churchill this truth led to an appreciation of the powers of observation and memory called for by painting. Churchill also “noted a certain similarity between a philosopher and the uncivilized” man (37)—both of whom enjoy their leisure and want few things. He called the uncivilized man an “unconscious philosopher” (37). Philosophers might well be grateful to Churchill, and in their own way return his admiration. In opposing tyrannies masquerading as final knowledge about human things, Churchill protected philosophy from lapsing into a state of unconsciousness, that is to say barbarism, perhaps even from a death that would have killed the soul instead of liberating it from the body. And there may be more. Professor Harry V. Jaffa, who contributes an illuminating Foreword to this volume, has spoken of the way the example of Churchill’s statesmanship could inspirit a philosopher’s soul in dark times, leading the philosopher to reconsider the classical philosophers who distinguish political from philosophic life without segregating them. Professor Emmert’s thoughtful scholarship, so profoundly at odds with current academic passions and prejudices, brings Churchill’s example to view, not vividly and partially as his own writings did, but wholly or essentially, delivered from the partisan distortions of his time and ours.

    Natural Right and the American Academic

    by

    Catherine H. Zuckert: Natural Right and the American Imagination. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990.

     

    The title Natural Right and the American Imagination recalls Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History. It is risky to invite comparison to a formidable book. In this instance, the risk was worth taking. Although there might be a numbskull or two led to imagine that Professor Zuckert is attempting to rival Strauss—the vainest personalities unfailingly impute vanity to others—she is right to draw attention to Strauss’s book and to invite, not a comparison, but a parallel consideration of her book and his.

    By writing of natural right and history, Strauss intends to question the conventional opinion of our time: that we have a ‘time,’ that all of life, including human life and thought, is ‘historical’—that is, relative to whatever ‘epoch’ it occurs in. Strauss not only refers his readers to the older teaching of natural right transcending times and places. He further tells readers that if they want truly to ‘think historically,’ to be faithful to the historical record, they must read the books of the past without presuming to pigeonhole them into readymade categories: the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the Dark Ages, the rosy dawn of Enlightenment, and so on. A genuine historian wants to know what the author of any book was trying to do. The only way to discover that is to put first things first, to pay attention to the details of the arrangement of the words in front of your nose. There is no ‘method,’ no royal road of reading, only a patient familiarizing with the boulevards and back alleys of the city in which you’ve chosen to take up intellectual residence, for a time.

    This seemingly modest argument brought down on Strauss a farrago of fear and loathing, when it did not simply cause him to be ignored or dismissed as a crank. Strauss paid much attention to the dangers of the philosophic life precisely because he anticipated and then experienced them—if, in his later years, only in those mild forms seen in commercial republics.

    By contrast, Professor Zuckert’s book has won considerable praise. She reads very much the way Strauss read, directing her intellectual energies to the books at hand. Yet there are no reviewer-denunciations of her, no charges that she is some sort of Professor Moriarity of philosophic crime. The book has earned wide respect.

    The solution to this mystery may be found in reflecting not upon the way Professor Zuckert reads, but upon the way she writes. In her preface she asserts that the American novelists she will examine concurred in seeing the “need for a peculiarly democratic kind of literary political thinker” (ix). Professor Zuckert appears to be a peculiarly democratic, peculiarly American kind of literary-political critic; she appears so by writing as if she is one. Strauss does not write that way. No American democrat, he does not mention America, or the imagination, in any book-title of his. Strauss is ineluctably foreign. Zuckert comes across as one of us.

    Americans recur perhaps too quickly to fundamentals, having the example of the Declaration of Independence always before them. A “recurrent theme” of the American novel, Zuckert writes, is “the hero who withdraws from civil society to live in nature” (1). As did the American Founders, these re-founders “almost immediately establish new kinds of social relations” on “the grounds on which a just community might be founded” (1). Because recurrence to the foundations of America in some sense constitutes thoughtful Americans, “one can become an American” (6, emphasis added): learn a civic catechism, convert. And a citizen can become a statesman in his own right, conceive an architectonic project, even if the intent is fidelity not rebellion. In “trying to reshape” American ways, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner engaged in a “form of political leadership” (7). Zuckert chooses the word “leadership,” not statesmanship–a measure of her rhetorical skill. Her audience consists of feminist and historicist literary academics. ‘Statesmanship’ says ‘male,’ stasis, permanent things. “Leadership” says ‘progressive,’ ‘historical,’ with equal opportunity for all.

    The details of Zuckert’s argument may best be understood by following her example and studying her book alongside not only Strauss but also the books she discusses. (For an excellent summary, see Diana Schaub’s review in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume XIX, Number 1, 105-110.) Consider, for the moment, a simple list. Zuckert begins her overview of these novelists with a Rousseauan (Cooper), followed by an anti-Rousseauan careful not to fall back into Calvinism (Hawthorne), a democratic tragedian who stands closer to Shakespeare than to any philosopher (Melville), a satirist who writes like a  Benjamin Franklin reared in the South (Twain), an American ‘Heideggerian’ (Hemingway), and a Bergsonian historicist (Faulkner). That is, Zuckert begins with a novelist influenced by a proto-historicist and ends with two historicists, one a scourge of tradition and the second a tender of it. At least three of her novelists reject the founding principles of the American republic. Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain are, each in his own way, more nearly compatible with ‘American’ principles than are Cooper, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Zuckert thus forces her thoughtful reader to consider political principles that cannot be ‘synthesized’ or made into a unified ‘tradition.’ Natural right and history, indeed.

    In her ninth and final chapter, Zuckert argues as follows: The founders instituted a government in order to secure the unalienable, God-endowed “natural rights” of the American people (242). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness number among these rights, which are self-evident. However, the worth of human life itself, and therefore the worth of the right to it, are not self-evident, even if our possession of that right is. “[T]he things that make human life worthwhile are not externally visible” (242). “If the goodness of human life is not externally visible, American political institutions ultimately must be founded in an appreciation of the inner beauty of an ordinary person” (242)—that is, one who has been “created equal” with respect to his unalienable rights, as the Declaration styles it, but may be lacking in any obvious beauties. However, the beauty of such a one “cannot be described historically or analyzed theoretically”; “it can only be revealed through the work of a literary artist” (242). “Because such revelations are explicitly fictional, their political and philosophical import has generally been ignored. Should contemporary readers become more aware of the ontological and epistemological limitations not merely of ‘science’ but of discursive reason more generally, however, they might—as Martin Heidegger has argued—come to see the way in which poetic ‘fiction’ not only can but also does shape communal human existence.” (242)  Accordingly, some of the American novelists have had recourse to European philosophers in attempting to correct alleged flaws in the American regime.

    Zuckert takes this last fact as an invitation not to literary criticism or even literary theory, but as an invitation to political philosophy. That this is not an obvious, or shall we say self-evident, step may be seen in the fact that so many scholars who devote themselves to the study of American novelists do not take it. Yet many of these same scholars admire Zuckert’s book.

    How can this be?

    Contemporary American literary academics might best be characterized as Heideggerians of egalitarianism. Gone are the traces of Nietzsche’s steep, rigorous order of rank. Retained are the historicizing and the poeticizing, the radical critique of reason and (it must be said) the severely intolerant politicizing. By the grace of egalitarianism or unself-conscious democratism, this is a politicizing from the ‘Left.’

    Zuckert charms this nest of vipers. To make goodness desirable one must reveal it as beautiful, because beauty isn’t skin-deep. To discover beauty in human goodness may require a making-visible, a poesis, as both Plato and Aristotle teach. But Zuckert does not point to them. She points to Heidegger, whose notions of poeticizing differ radically from those of Plato and Aristotle. Between those philosophers and Heidegger arises the popularization of the concept of creation. This is a concept the Declaration declares, but the Founders declare nothing about human creation, only divine creation.

    The worth of human life—its inner truth and greatness, to appropriate a fine phrase infamously used by Heidegger—is not ocularly self-evident, externally visible. This leaves open the possibility that it may be self-evident noetically, to the mind’s eye. Poetry as understood and ‘corrected’ by Plato and Aristotle depends upon some such perception. Poesis depends upon noesis. This is why it is so intelligent to make the central chapter of a book on American novelists the chapter on the Shakespearean, Melville.

    These facts, presented to a candid world, will guide Zuckert’s thoughtful readers toward political philosophy and toward a more serious understanding of literature. Just as Strauss shows that a genuine historical understanding will find certain thinkers to have transcended ‘history’ as conceived as a pattern of events or a ‘time,’ so Zuckert shows that an understanding of natural right as a philosophically discoverable idea is required to reach a genuine literary understanding of certain novelists. The genuine literary understanding will see the novelists as they saw themselves, entailing, among other things, a clear understanding of their poesis. To understand the American imagination (and its popular cousin, the American dream), you need to understand natural right. Without naming names, Zuckert gently but firmly guides her readers toward the most ‘poetic’ of the political philosophers—Plato, Aristotle (in the Poetics), Lucretius, Boethius, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzsche—and the most philosophic of poets—Dante, Shakespeare—all the while sounding as if she might be a neo-Heideggerian, ‘one of us’ literary-critical types. She is of course well aware that noesis or intellectual intuition sets a strict limit on historicism, preventing it from becoming radical or Heideggerian. At the same time, she agrees with Heidegger that analytical and discursive reasoning are inadequate for the task of perceiving or understanding either the beautiful or the good. Hence the value of appreciating poesis, even if it is quite dangerous to appreciate it too much. She knows that in order to understand natural right, you don’t need to understand, or even to have heard of, the American imagination. Still, to arrive at such an understanding of natural right, the American imagination is an excellent place to start.

    Zuckert also knows that a large portion of the audience she addresses is none too candid, none too thoughtful. She will not arouse those who slumber dogmatically, those who elevate their narcolepsy to the level of ‘principle’ and from that dubious vantage point proclaim themselves self-conscious. She may awaken others from their dogmatic slumber, those others who dreamily see that there is no reconciling all her novelists, or all the philosophers she invites her readers to read. Let those alert to the principle of non-contradiction follow its lead to new perceptions.