Mark Blitz: Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021.

 

This review first appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 49, Number 1, Fall 2022. Reprinted with permission.

 

Our contemporaries incline to reduce politics to subpolitical categories—race, class, gender, power. Mark Blitz resists this parade of idols, reclaiming the indispensable link between the human capacity to reason in speech and the human capacity to join with others in the task of self-government. He clearly sees the impediments which have been erected to hinder this effort; while his subtitle mentions nature, the criterion for political judgment among ‘the ancients,’ it equally mentions phenomena, a distinctly ‘modern’ locution, often used to blur or to deny the distinction between nature and convention. On the contrary, he argues, the ‘phenomena’ of political life have a nature, and “to explore the nature of political phenomena is equivalent to exploring what is reasonable about them” since the term ‘nature,’ for human beings at very least, “is the correlative of reason.” Correlation means not only relating our thoughts about things to the things themselves but relating our actions to those thoughts. Each of Blitz’s chapter titles begins with the phrase “The Nature of”: the nature of practical action, freedom and rights, power and property, virtue, what is common, and goods. In each instance, he intends to connect politics to nature by means of reason, itself the distinctive characteristic of human nature.

By the “nature” of a thing, Blitz means “what in it we do not produce, what is common or pervasive in it, and what is essential to it.” In identifying the nature or essence of a thing we identify “what is always there that is important, not trivial, and that forms the thing’s other characteristics,” what distinguishes it from other things. What is natural is “unmade, general, and essential”; this is “what reason qua reason seeks to know,” going beyond sense impressions of particular physical things and classifying them into kinds.

But does politics have a nature? Is political life not conventional, man-made? Not simply, or even at its core: “political life serves an understanding of what can be good, pursued by actions that are more or less just.” If “what is good and just are natural and reason can know them, politics need not and, indeed, cannot be irredeemably conventional.” This is not to say, on the other extreme, that politics is or can be entirely aligned with goodness and justice, given the stubborn persistence of “what is particular and impure” in all human life, and in all humans. Rather, “my goal is to bring out what is rational in what is contingent, or not simply rational, in us.” This goal does not encompass all of politics, given the complexity of our particularities and impurities, which vary from time to time, from place to place, interacting with other times (past and future) and other places (near and far). This is another way of saying that political life cannot achieve mathematical certainty and precision; it leaves room for “disputability in judgment and choice.” Attempts to remove disputability in judgment and choice from political life do not end well, even if firm judgments and choices must be made in every political community. Nonetheless, the inadequacy of mathematical or apodictic reasoning in approaching politics does not consign politics to the sphere of irrationality.” “The central political phenomena are speech- or opinion-laden and are thus open to becoming conceptually understood.”

Who cares? What makes “political phenomena” worth our attention, indeed worth philosophic attention? Because our lives are diminished when we do not pay sufficient attention, as seen in opposing but complementary syndromes of the antipolitical ‘politics’ we suffer now: a passive moral relativism or lassitude on one hand and self-righteous, self-interested, impassioned self-assertion on the other. And failure to attend to human nature as manifested prevents us from intelligently addressing the potential of technology, and therefore of technologists, to alter human nature, “to reduce everything human to the molecular and mathematical, perhaps, indeed, to make us over.” Before doing that, might it not be better to understand the human nature we seek to alter in the terms in which we present that nature to one another—as social and political beings?

Hence we need clarity of thought about political things. To achieve clarity, we need to find some sort of “initial intelligibility.” The very notion of intelligibility has attracted considerable philosophic dispute. The good news here is that the dispute is indeed considerable, thinkable. To begin this inquiry, the quest for some “indubitable or certain beginning”—Cartesian, Lockean, or some other kind—may “not be the correct starting point.” “It is not evident that certainty is the appropriate goal for truly understanding the matters we are studying.” Here, such recent thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Leo Strauss, and Jacob Klein prove helpful in their insistence in recognizing “the importance or inevitability of beginning not from supposedly timeless yet in fact inherited concepts but, rather, from one’s own immersion in one’s own world.” Given the very sharp disagreements on the cognitive status of one’s own world seen in the writings of those thinkers, such a beginning “does not presume that thought must remain relative to one’s time and place.” Still, “the need to begin from things as we deal with them, our reliance on ordinary practical intelligibility, shows the importance of grounding all our concepts in ordinary contexts and ultimately, I will argue, in political ways of life.”

Ways of life: this is one of the four dimensions of what Aristotle calls a politeia or regime, along with the purpose, the rulers, and the ruling “forms” or offices of the political community. Of these, Blitz has chosen the one most “near to hand,” as Heidegger would say, consisting of the “particular activities and contexts” informed by an “understanding of justice or righteousness” that gives those activities and contexts their direction. “Justice, moreover, embodies and serves an understanding of happiness, excellence, what is god, and what is appropriate.” This in turn suggests that any particular regime or way of life, “however close knit,” “cannot encapsulate experience fully,” as human beings “can observe moderation and courage” and other virtues, to say nothing of vices, “apart from the orders within which we practice them.” “This dialectic or spiral of the closedness of a way of life and openness to what is independent from it indicates the complexity of human experience, and the possibility of exploring matters theoretically.” And this in turn raises the question, and the questionability, of the opinions that prevail in a given political community, questions arising from within it, within a framework of “law and culture, or in divine writings and priestly control,” even as they point beyond it, beyond the city, the res publica, the public thing (in modernity, usually the state), and the regime that rules it, profoundly influencing the minds and hearts of its residents.”

In order either to defend or to attack a given regime, one must take action. Therefore, “my first effort is to investigate practical activity and the place of context in understanding it,” especially “the power of opinion,” our inclination to “live our lives primarily within what we take for granted and do not explore,” our “common sense.”

Practial actions are those taken for reasons other than knowledge, simply; they aim at knowledge “embedded in the activity itself,” requiring not only thought but experience. Practical actions are contextual, involving “the interrelations among the things to which one is attending, which are largely ordered in terms of their purpose.” “Common sense” is constituted to a great extent in naming things, thereby bringing out the relevance of things and fixing their meaning in terms of the actions for which we intend to use them. Thus “truth about much in practical affairs is not ‘certainty’ in the Cartesian, mathematical, or scientific sense.” “Meaning” itself has “two fundamental elements” intelligibility or description and evidence. With regard to intelligibility, we thereby see that the child is kicking the ball and why he is kicking it. In this sense, “a meaning is an explicable or rational fit that allows it to be intelligible,” free of self-contradiction. With regard to guidance, meaning “tells us what is important” about an action, how it affects, compels, or engages us, why we devote ourselves to it. Clearly, meaning understood as “guiding, orienting, intelligibility” connects us with opinions about “justice and goodness.” And we will want to know meaningful activities, understood as just or unjust, good or bad, interrelate in an overall regime. Because our understanding of activities and regimes seldom if ever achieves apodictic certainty, it mounts to knowledge of probabilities, of likelihoods. It might be added that what we now call ‘conspiracy theories’ or master plots amount to attempts to make the uncertain certain We would all like to be ‘in the know, for sure.’ It is part of the beginning of political wisdom not to indulge this desire too far.

The relations among these probabilities include personal relationship. Common sense in a particular context, very much including a political regime, involves “the general sense one has of others’ trustworthiness and reliability, the character and ordinary practices one implicitly expects on which one depends in business, politics, and elsewhere.” Is this street safe for me to walk down? Can I confide in you and trust your promises? This kind of common sense constitutes the social bonds that unify the political community. frayed or severed, they cause faction, even civil war They can be reinforced or weakened by prior regime or way, especially “the religious and traditional ways…that precede civic regimes.” These habits of mind and heart, a Tocqueville calls them, provide “an implicit understanding or meaning…composed from sense of goodness and justice,” which forms the ineluctable starting point of philosophizing.”

Mind and heart are not identical, so “a good moral education may differ from a good intellectual one.” The cultivation of the moral sense derives from our “embedded expectations” about our regime, derived from that regime, as “expressed here and now in our particular affairs” In the American regime, opinion about equality and liberty, to say nothing of the pursuit of happiness, “govern what we can say respectably”; those who intend to change the regime will attempt to re-channel what we can say respectably about those opinions. Indeed, “public discussion is increasingly governed by a presumption in favor of the identical respectability and availability of all modes of living that do not question this equal propriety,” making “proper distinctions difficult to state and defend publicly,” as such distinctions are now “seen only as assertions of power.” Even the realms of art and of intellect have been classified as “cultural ‘products,'” and thus expression of the will to power, in a sort of democratized or egalitarian deformation of Nietzsche’s thought. “This is the chief problem of our culture” now.

The fact that the American regime has changed since the time of the American founders adds to the evidence that it, like all regimes, does not perpetuate itself. As noted, every regime retains a degree of openness to thoughts not consistent with the thoughts it commends. This is why political founding is possible in the first place. “Founding institutes a form and an end that derive from what is general,” not specific to the existing regime, “even if not simply understood.” A common source of political founds is the tension between or among various social groups, “rich and poor, above all,” which “keeps this basic awareness” of possibilities beyond the regime “alive” in the minds of citizens. Another source of such innovation is war; another is “the press of desire” for things not offered within the existing regime; still another is statesmanship, which discerns possibilities not realized with the regime. “Plato likens statesmanship to weaving, medicine, gymnastic training, piloting, architecture, and other arts,” a ruling art that weaves “the virtues of several” of the arts together, defending the existing regime but also altering it, making it more durable.” 

Statecraft takes a ‘modern’ turn when statesmen, or would-be statesmen, turn not so much to religion or to natural right as the source of moral and political authority but to an account of the course of events, that is, to ‘history,’ as that source. Recourse to history may look to scientific discovery, novel religious revelation, or “new drives and passions,” sometimes thought to follow an orderly, rationally discernible pattern (as in Hege and Marx), sometimes following no pattern at all, arbitrary. Blitz suggests that even this might actually be understandable in terms of the ‘ancient’ understanding; for example, “perhaps we can explain the source of religion sufficiently naturally,” a point to which he will return in his later discussion of reverence. At any rate, “it is not evident that we need to account for what seems to be new in historicist terms.”

Another form of historicism, devised by the aforementioned Heidegger, locates human historicity not in a set of laws of historical development but in “factic” life, our immersion in our “particular existence” here and now. From the fact that “we always already exist in a word of meaningful things,” as Blitz readily admits, Heidegger goes on to claim that “my possibilities are always transmitted in historically limited fashion,” one so limited by the “world” or “context” as to make us blind to anything else. (Hence, perhaps, Heidegger’s insistence that one can properly philosophize only in one of two languages Greek and—conveniently enough—German.) to this, Blitz replies that our contexts or regimes “also carry their grounds before me in a manner that detaches me from here and now (myself and us) at the same time that I am immersed in them,” that this “movement is not only horizontal or historical but vertical, too,” and always incomplete,” beckoning us “beyond finite heritage.” To be sure, “every regime limits certain possibilities,” but “it cannot do this simply; what may be good or just more generally announces itself,” over the din of the loudspeakers. This goes for individuals and also for political communities. “Heidegger’s connecting all our possibilities to a particular people rather than also to what is more cosmopolitan than (and may conflict with) my people is an important intellectual ground of his support for the Nazis. In contrast to Heidegger’s view, the ‘temporal’ properly includes the aspiration to perfection and completeness it includes what I will examine in what follows as the erotic as well as the spirited.”

In sum, practical activity has a certain nature. It entails “the purposes and orders that form and direct what we expect”; it entails “the purposes and orders that form and direct what we expect” it extends to “the way of life in which we live” and “the character, virtues, or pious ways” the regime “promotes”; this way of life is formed by “the approach of what allows things to be good” and “the justice that seeks to achieve goods,” thereby enabling us to rank the elements of our way of life. and this way of life is never “strictly rigid,” inasmuch as “we can attempt to examine its elements and activities on their own,” that is, beyond the intellectual and moral limits of the regime.

But is our practical activity determined by chance or some form of necessity? If not determined, by what criteria should we act? Blitz moves to a discussion of the nature of freedom and rights.

One meaning of freedom is to be unbound, either in a good way—poised for choice and action—or in a bad way—lost, wanting direction but having none. Another meaning of freedom is to be self-directed, self-ruling. This suggests that “freedom’s openness and self-direction occur in relation to activity and thought and the intelligibility that makes these possible.” We want to know where we are freely going, and why, and to be able to sustain our freely chosen action, “not to be battered from side to side” by forces not our own. Freedom “involves self-binding,” the capacity to stay the course we have set for ourselves or to “leave the path” if and when we so choose. Isaiah Berlin’s well-known distinction between “positive” and “negative” freedom, between freedom to do something and freedom from something, must be supplemented with a teleological point: that we want our freedom to choose the actions and goods toward which we direct ourselves or are hindered in directing ourselves.

“Another central experience of freedom is its necessity,” by which Blitz means that we cannot avoid choosing because we are human. “To be free is a necessary or essential component of what we are,” a point succinctly expressed some decades ago by Henry Kissinger, who titled one of his books the Necessity for Choice.

In view of these observations, full exercise of our freedom may require us to submit to unfreedom. That is, in order to achieve what we freely intend to accomplish, we may well need prior restraint: if I freely choose to cross the street, please grab me if am about to step out in front of an oncoming truck, lest I never get to where I want to go; if I freely choose to learn Latin, please put me under the authority of someone who knows how to teach me. “The goods one feels, experiences, and joys are linked to the soul that masters them,” and that soul mut be ordered in a certain way, often by taking on a set of habits, in order to obtain the ends it chooses.

Stated formally, “freedom is our movement and direction toward and unhindered immersion in accessible things, together with our movement toward and unhindered immersion in their initial and continuing intelligibility and guidance, that is, their meaning.” Politically, this means that “we must…consider goods and the common good more fully in order to grasp toward what the soul’s full movement, its direction, unencumbered readiness, and attentive binding are oriented” in terms of our public life, our regime, which after all sets many of the conditions of action.” The regime of liberal democracy, with its “free political institutions,” serves “the free and equal self-directed attempt to satisfy desire.” Hence its “liberal” or free character, featuring a government that limits itself, or rather is limited by the sovereign, self-governing people, “employing and enhancing the character I need to execute and secure my freedom, and by advancing self-government.” Freedom of religion, of speech, and of self-government generally will require a degree of unfreedom, of “excellence of speech or reason,” including some degree of the rule of reason over desire the rule of speech over force This freedom “is not limited to liberal political freedom” but also “points to liberal education.” All of this suggests that freedom rightly and comprehensively defined necessitates a way of life or regime—not necessarily a modern liberal democracy, but surely not a tyranny, ‘ancient’ or ‘modern.’

How one understands or defines the basis of freedom will vary, and Blitz stipulates a capacious range of definitions. For the classical political philosophers, freedom means, primarily, a rightly ordered soul participating in civic rule; for the moderns, freedom means primarily freedom of thought and action, certain rights exercised in civil society within the framework of a centralized state. But freedom might also concern “not only the classic soul or the one who holds rights but also the transcendental will in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, and Heidegger’s Dasein.” Whereas “for the classics…the abilities of soul have full or proper natural uses and objects,” the abilities of the transcendental will “are linked to what they productively shape or to that in which they are freely immersed as material to shape.” For Kant, this means “the self-effected moral ought or Idea”; for Nietzsche, creating and overcoming, for Heidegger, “fated being,” but for all of them freedom is still “poised and self-moving immersion in what is (for these thinkers) most open or available.”

Against freedom, some thinkers claim doctrines of determinism. These may be material, historical, divine, psychological, sociobiological, or economic. One often hears such doctrines asserted regarding matters involving “criminal blame”; Tom Dooley may well hang down his head and cry, not out of guilt but out of having been buffeted by circumstances he could not have controlled. To these claims, Blitz opposes the ineluctable fact that almost always one’s actions present themselves as choices. For example, “One cannot (or cannot yet) even fully describe what happens in thought, in virtuous action, or complex emotion at the molecular level, let alone show how it determines the other.” Our judgments may be determined in some way, but “making the statement and expressing the judgment” cannot account for the meaning of the judgment, tell us whether they are right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. “The virtuous act qua virtuous act has meaning apart from and no meaning strictly in terms of the material, which is at best a condition of but not equivalent to the motive or ground of what we must describe and approach in some other way.” David Hume’s celebrated distinction between “Is” and “Ought,” predicated on the claim that nature is only purposeless matter in motion, does not require us to convince ourselves that our manifest sense of being able to make choices has not reality. There is no sufficient reason to permit ourselves to be talked out of it.

“Arguments to this effect are made with special force by Heidegger,” quite apart from his malign political opinions. We understand ourselves as open to being, an openness that “belongs to our temporality or finitude, the fact that we are not eternal or outside of time but always project a future, bring forward a past in doing so, and are immersed in a related present.” Our resoluteness, or decisiveness, in this moment bespeaks our freedom to take responsibility for ourselves and for our understanding of the “entities” behind, around, and before us. Heidegger “means to show that freedom from, freedom for, self-determination, self-legislation, and standing within and freely choosing good and evil are grounded in the free openness of being as he understands it.” Being itself opens itself to our choosing. In Heidegger’s words, “Determinism denies freedom, and yet by denying it, already must presuppose a certain idea of freedom,” namely, the freedom to deny freedom. “Therefore,” he continues, determinism “remains outside of freedom from the start.” Blitz concurs to some extent, writing that “because of the irrelevance for choice of believing all outcomes to be determined, current and future arguments about determinism should not affect one’s practice.” For example, when Aristotle defines distributive justice as “equal to equals and unequal to unequals,” it is “hard to see how the meaning and fact of this just distribution are caused by the power of what the material can effect or condition rather than limiting and in that sense directing the material.”

“The fullest expression of freedom would involve recognition of and unhindered immersion, explicit directedness, and lingering movement within the fullest context, the fullest ends and intelligibility.” Such freedom can be seen in the philosophic life, in greatness of soul, and in the full (Madisonian) responsibility of the liberal statesman citizens generally exercise it in thought, in speech, and in a certain kind of learning, liberal education.

Freedom implies motion. Motion concerns not only “physical matters” but politics, soul, and thought, all of them meaningful, purposeful. “The free movement of the soul,” for example, “is oriented to things in their meaning—what is good about them (their goodness) and our expectations about their availability, that is, how one can move or proceed toward them, how they can be distributed, and their possible independence.” To elaborate this point, Blitz turns not to Heidegger but to Plato—specifically, to Socrates’ account of erōs and thumos. Love is needy, aiming union with the beloved, but it can also be observant; that is, it may not wish “to incorporate, use, or join with “the beloved “as if it has no independence but, rather, to be together with it as the very thing it is,” to admire, to “liv[e] up to the perfection one admires and wishes to be with,” transporting the lover and uplifting him without the desire to “merely combine.” And when a lover does want to combine with the beloved, he “distinguishes the one loved from all others,” intending that a loving pair will form, in turn distinguishing themselves from all others. In this love moves from “something that seems complete to what is more complete”—a couple, a family, eventually a political community.

For its part, “spiritedness is also a movement,” not of combining or admiring but of “separating, identifying, protecting, and, even, withdrawing”—movements regarding lovers and those persons, ideas, or things they love. We associate spiritedness with anger, pride, self-defense, “and hence with rights,” since “rights are grounded in reverence for what is inviolable in oneself.” Politically, spiritedness “defend[s] courageously what it separates if it is just and good” and attacks or defends against what seems to threaten one’s independence. If aiming at the unjust and evil, however, spiritedness may seek “dominance of oneself alone, one’s name, what one does not share.” 

When it supports the understanding reason seeks, love “tends to see things in their wholeness,” seeing distinct things in right combination, now or in the future. When it supports understanding, spiritedness “tends to see things as recalcitrant, unyielding, perplexing single units and necessities,” inclining toward attempts “to absorb or agglomerate them into a more expansive unit or one,” as in mathematics and “the modern conquest of nature” or other forms of manipulation “When the dialectic of the movement of eros and spiritedness accompanies thought, it seeks eventually to bring them together,” with the virtue of eros being moderation, the virtue of spiritedness being courage. both are connected, or at least should be connected, to freedom, although in their vicious form they tyrannize the souls in their grip.

Returning to the regime that justifies itself in terms of freedom, Blitz addresses the familiar notion of rights, which “we often call…our freedoms.” “A right is a deserved authority, mastery, freedom, or choice,” an “authority, ownership, mastery or freedom to dispose of or to direct.” “My right is my authority,” my deserved claim freely to direct, master, lead, or guide myself, and therefore seen in what the Declaration of Independence calls the consent of the governed. In terms of the Declaration, certain individual rights are authorities by nature primarily, rightly instantiated in human custom and in law but ordained by the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. The “democracy” part of liberal democracy means that rights so conceived shall be equal, under law. Such rights most especially turn out to be right concerning desires everyone shares, what Locke identifies as pleasure or “the relief from unease,” that low but solid ground upon which all of us stand, even philosophers.

Other forms of authority include parental authority, natural at least until the child reaches maturity and also an important conduit of traditional authorities including religion, class, and occupation. The ground of parental authority is “care, attention, love of one’s own, and, for a while, greater knowledge and experience.” Beyond that, the natural right/authority of consent or rational assent should prevail. A difficulty has arisen, however, with the institution of a ruling class of professional administrators, the asserted rule of the few based on “expert knowledge of ways and means” to accomplish public actions; nevertheless, under liberal democracy the many retain the authority to set the purposes administrative experts undertake to fulfill. “Indeed, the ordinary grasp of these goals may be superior to the experts’ opinions.” Still another form of authority is legitimacy, which focuses not on means or ends but on origin, whether it be monarchic or aristocratic birthright, election, or appointment.

Natural rights imply equality of some sort, inasmuch as we see that other human beings have by nature the same power of self-direction that we enjoy. We see this most clearly when it comes to “satisfying desires,” as “such goods are most clearly equal” and “most visibly separable from the mass spirituality and otherworldliness against which modern thinkers rebelled.” But not all desires are created equal. “Securing equal individual rights as the heart of justice is coordinate with understanding goodness as what relieves unease.” Thus, “in the American world of John Locke,” “rights are not found in a mysterious world of freedom separated from ordinary human motives and facts,” as they are in the Kantian realm of noumena. But neither are they found in “mere calculation,” as argued by the early Utilitarians. rights are found in “the truth of human self-direction and inviolability.” To see that is to involve the spiritedness described by ‘the ancients’ along with desire and security—that low-but-solid preoccupation of the ‘moderns.’

The sense that our rights are unalienable or inviolable derives from our sense of, and love for, ‘our own,’ “the experience of one’s separateness and unity.” My own includes my body, but it also includes my thoughts and emotions; even when I am “lost in thought” this “is still my being lost in thought” (emphasis added). “My own is first or primarily the experience of the movement of separation that freely directs the things and powers one masters or controls,” an “experienced movement of pushing away from or enclosing and absorbing.” Blitz identifies spiritedness as “the ground of this understanding” in nature while remarking that the development of it in individuals “differs in different regimes.” Regimes founded on natural and civic equality will incline both to emphasize the development of a strong sense of individual rights while at the same time centering citizens’ attention on the “average, universal, or equal way” of interpreting those rights, not on the noble way of interpreting them seen in man monarchies and aristocracies. This liberal but perhaps especially democratic interpretation of spiritedness “connects the self to goods, and pleasures that it is difficult to doubt.”

Human nature being more than bodily and material, however, even in liberal democracies, “individual rights also speak to reverence for the individual” as part of the ground of equal authority. “Such reverence is the experience of attention to what is high in oneself, what gives one pause in dealing with oneself, in relation to good and what is high in them.” This in turn “speaks to the role of reason in directing our powers,” reason being both a distinctively human characteristic, and therefore ‘high,’ while also being universal in human beings as such, and therefore universal. “Rights interpret this reverence in a certain way—in an egalitarian way with egalitarian goods.” Even our passions are intellectual “in the sense that we experience them together with reason, with combining, separating, and directing.” This makes opinion “important in experiencing justice, goodness, and virtue,” and in comparing one way or set of ways to another and questioning our own ways. “Reverence belongs to the noetic passions,” that is, to the higher passions, those more likely to find guidance in reason. Rights generally “belong to the experience of honoring oneself, one’s separateness in deserving honor,” thus in spiritedness, that part of the soul that craves honor, respect. Rights “combine one’s spirited separateness as the one who asserts, wills, and chooses with the erotic movement toward excellence or perfection.”

Excellence might aim at the sublime or the beautiful, or both. The sublime sublimates all else to the holy. In admiring someone or something holy, we mix admiration with awe and fear. By admiring the beautiful, especially in philo-sophia—the wondering love of, the eros for beautiful wisdom—the soul “lacks fear.” “The ‘holy’ is what one protects in its beauty, purity, separateness, nobility and wonder rather than simply possessing it, and this protection is then also compatible with knowing and admiring it, which is erotic.” Rights combine these two understandings of excellence, as when we become indignant over being ‘used’ and we insist on being recognized for our efforts “One sees this in Locke’s understanding of value as coming almost exclusively from human effort, not from nature, and in Hegel’s understanding of property.” There is spiritedness concealed in ‘the bourgeois,’ which may account both for his willingness to fight for his rights and his enemy’s surprise when he does so.

Blitz identifies three “elements in instituting and securing rights.” The first is to seek the source of “one’s own authoritative self-direction and assertion” in “what deserves to be revered rather than bowing down to priest as the only guardians of the pure.” This evidently links the modern sense of rights to Protestant religion rather than to Catholicism. The second, as mentioned, is to connect rights to “meeting ordinary desires and producing ordinary pleasures,” the relief of “unease.” The third is virtue, “in particular responsibility” (As James Madison so clearly sees), responsibility “understood as protecting rights.”

“Virtue specifies the character one needs—the human type one needs—fully to enjoy justice and goodness in a regime.” Responsibility is the liberal-democratic virtue equivalent to, but not identical with, the magnanimity, the greatness of soul, upheld by Aristotle and exemplified by so many of the heroes of antiquity. Magnanimity “is higher than responsibility but less equal,” more aristocratic, “and the good with which it deals is not a momentary resting but a kind of burgeoning and expansiveness.” Responsibility comports with liberal democracy because citizens in that regime readily expect their elected representative to ‘respond’ to their rightful demands, and typically insist that all of their fellow citizens ‘take responsibility’ for their own actions under the rule of law, whereby everyone is to be equally protected.

Self-government, then, to be sure, but how shall one understand the responsibilities of the ‘self’? By what standards shall one judge it? Rights, yes, but with a sense of not only what an individual self is, by nature, but also of what it can become, the extent to which it can be brought to embody the most distinctively human dimensions of that nature—the end(s), the purposes(s) of that nature. Further, “this judgment involves understanding the full use of the powers” seen in the individual, “oriented to one’s way of life and, ultimately, to the true whole that any way of life, any order of justice,” any regime, “imitates” Finally, our standard of judgment involves “seeing what most fully allows the other element in one’s regime—the virtues and other ends of individuals—their natural independence.” Even in liberal democracies, founded upon natural rights which inhere in individuals, we discover the ineluctably political character of human beings.

Blitz will continue his consideration of virtue. Before that, however, he addresses an element of politics which enables the virtuous and the unvirtuous to take actions in accordance with the standards they wish to enforce: power, something “central to any political discussion.” Power, he observes, means not only coercive force but also ability, as when we say of someone that he has outstanding intellectual powers. Such powers or abilities provide those favored by the possession of them to acquire property, thereby widening the range of their natural powers. The unequal distribution of natural powers results in unequal distribution of property. This, notoriously, leads to disputes over whether the existing distribution of property within a political community is just.

First and often foremost, power is strength. It “involves speed and force—movement—that tends to destroy or break up (separate)” but also may “hold fast against destruction and may then reassemble or put together.” Considered as strength, power might be concentrated, as when we describe an odor as powerful; it may also be expansive, as when a river floods.

Second, as mentioned, power is ability—for example, a hummingbird’s power of hovering. “How full the gathering of something’s ability is, moreover, is a central measure of its excellence, although not its only one.” This means that power is not necessarily a morally neutral phenomenon, since excellence in human beings obviously betokens goodness of one sort or another. And although goodness at, say, swinging a baseball bat and hitting a ball has no intrinsic moral significance, the purpose of that activity implicates us in the question of whether playing baseball is a good activity for human beings to undertake. (I once read about a recently arrived European immigrant to the United States who, upon witnessing a baseball game, warned the young men in his congregation against becoming “a crazy American runner.”)

A distinctively human power is speech or reason. This suggests that “our powers…are not efficient causes but, rather, the defining elements in what we do, especially one we see this in the light of our perfections.” Speaking and reasoning are as central to political life, and are as much powers, as is coercive force. Both involve considerations of justice, as “proper power is a measured concentration on proper tasks or movements that allows one and others to follow their natural inclinations and, consequently, sometimes to improve their immediate inclinations,” whereas “improper force is destroying something’s form or independence, controlling and misdirecting not only its own abilities and inclination, but its unity itself.”

Political philosophers have had a thing or two to say on this. For Hobbes and Locke, “a power is a means to what helps relieve unease or satisfy desires,” a quest that “ceaseth only in death,” as Hobbes famously contends (Leviathan, chapter 11). This move by modern political philosophers splits power “from specific abilities connected to specific forms, areas, and completions—that is, it is in line with the rejection of the idea that human nature has a telos or purpose distinct from other animal species. These philosophers advocate “moving things away from their natural inclinations and separating and putting them together as one chooses,” manipulating the control “of any motion or of things in motion as one sees fit.” The conquest of nature in an act of the human soul reconceived as a “free self,” a “calculating self” intent on self-motion and autonomy “from all claims that are not authoritatively chosen” by other human beings in contractual association with one another.

In this, modern liberal democracy resembles “classical democracy” in being based on liberty and equality. It differs from classical democracy in its “greater denigration of pride, honor and nobility, the reduction of full virtue, the justification of the utility and not only beauty of scientific knowledge the abolition of slavery, the civic equality of women, the favoring of economic expansion the narrowing and equalizing of pleasure, the permitting of toleration, the (relative) separation of the private from the public, the existence of [political] representation, and, starting with Locke’s separation of powers, the utility of internal clash or dissent within government.” An extensive list, one deriving from the initial move, namely, the substitution of the self, which aims at its own commodious preservation, for the soul, which aims at that, but even more at honor among men and even honor before God—salvation, not mere self-preservation. What satisfies the self “is only what is for myself and my security with no independent excellence in things.” “What common ground could there be” between that and “classical nobility”? Hence Nietzsche’s rebellion against earlier modern, one that remains, however, within the framework of power, now understood as creativity, “not as making new products, but as ordering and reordering, for “treating as one’s creation what has been fated for one historically.”

To all the moderns, Blitz rejoins that power has limits. It aims at some result, whether proper or improper. That goes both for power as strength and power as ability. This fact compels one to return to the question of telos. And thus back to virtue.

“The question now is whether this orientation to proper use is also true of our other distinctive powers.” Each of the twelve virtues enumerated in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics “deals with the passion or good in question in a measured way: one seeks, enjoys, or deals with it in the right way, at the right time, for the right reason, with the right people, a measured by practical reason.” “Our virtuous choices and actions involve measured thought and, therefore, point to properly measured thought.” Measured though means rational thought; “human experience is inseparable from reason,” the human power which enables us to make distinctions, to consider both our ends and the means by which we intend to secure those ends. Power as strength finds its limit in (for example) exhaustion; power as ability finds its limit in nature, as when a boy figures out that he will never play first base in the majors. Both also find a limit in ends, which are rationally discernible and rationally open to question, to discernment, to making distinctions.

Regimes set purposes and ways of life, bringing out some virtues (if bad, some vices) and pushing others into the background. The virtues fostered by ancient regimes often conduced to “noble action,” to “beautiful purposes and satisfactions.” “These satisfactions and purposes differ from the restlessness of modern desire” highlighted by Tocqueville, “fostered by the ways of life in modern regimes.” Blitz does not judge modern regimes lacking in virtue altogether. They do not admire greatness of soul, but they do admire responsibility, its equivalent “in liberal democracy.” More widely, “the liberal democratic virtues of industriousness, tolerance, and civility differ in their generality from political and military effort, piety, and aristocratic friendliness or noblesse oblige.”

Many of the modern virtues center on property—so much so, that James Madison argues that even as we have a right in our property, we have a property in our rights. Material property “is especially interesting” to Blitz “because it is a visible place where we humanize ordinary material (most clearly the land and what grows on it), where we transform it or take it up into what is human, where we limit, rearrange, and even to some degree bring out and develop it element and give them added meaning.” Further, in order to protect property, we must engage in political life, raising questions about justice, rightful ownership.

For the ‘ancients,’ just ownership means fitting property to nature, assigning the bigger coat to the bigger boy, the smaller coat to the smaller boy. This standard may also be seen in Locke, particularly when he addresses human relations outside of civil society, as when he argues that a people which uses more land than it needs is rightly pushed off that land by another people whose land is overpopulated, or even that one can use the land more efficiently, in a more civilized manner. “But who in practice is to judge this?” Blitz asks. Plato’s Socrates recommends the rule of the wise, but does so ironically, knowing that “the wise are not simply wise” but wise primarily in their knowledge of their own ignorance “and, consequently, would not wish to spend time distributing property (or other goods and opportunities), which they would do inadequately in any event.” The same problem arises with the rule of the virtuous, as seen in “the actual aristocracies or semi-aristocracies that have existed in fact in Great Britain and Europe.”

A more down-to-earth justification of property roots possession in “being oneself, being one’s own”—that Madisonian property in one’s rights—or “in what one needs to be one’s own rather than in better or best use.” Everyone “wants good things for oneself, not only for the one who uses them best.” That is the kind of property right more readily secured in practice. It does so in large measure because, in defending what is my own, I quickly recognize that I must grant a reciprocal right of self-defense to others, lest they gang up on me and strip me of my possession. Liberal democracy is the modern regime that encourages that way of life, tying property to equality and establishing laws that prevent property from being seized by force. This sets reasonable limits on both property ownership and property use.

What about the properties of bodies? “The body is not a mere physical appendage or tool, for ‘I’ feel, use, own, and occupy. This is why violations of the body are violations of the person.” The body is “soul-diffused.” As body, it requires property to “meet necessity”; as the locus of a soul, it needs to use property well, “to use virtuously.” “The experience of things that brings out their powers and properties depends on what allows these activities to occur or to be developed. This is primarily a country’s way of life, its law or justice and the understanding of what can be good to which it is directed. This is one reason why political-philosophical matters are so central.” 

Having discussed virtues as they relate to political life, Blitz turns to “the nature of virtue” itself. “Virtue of character is an important purpose or element of political life because it is a vital way we deal with and control goods,” along with law and technical skill. What we regard as virtue or good character is inflected by our regime as a way of life embodying as it does “a view of the right way to act and behave.” The several schools of ethics today—’deontological,’ ‘consequentialist,’ and so one—emphasize a section of this more comprehensive understanding of virtues and of ethics. At the same time, no regime “can fully control the experience of its members and citizens,” much as the rulers may try. Opinions about what virtue is are susceptible of reasoned scrutiny, in and across regimes.

Blitz divides his own effort at such scrutiny into three topics: virtue in relation to goods; virtue in relation to various regimes; and virtue in relation to morality generally “The basic experience of virtue” occurs as we live our live with other people, noticing that they, and we, are better or worse at the tasks they undertake. Children quickly form judgment of their parents’ parenting; they ‘talk back.’

Virtues, taken together, constitute virtue, or character. Character “concerns the way one deals with goods and passions.” Aristotle argues that ethical virtue, good character, in action “constituted happiness” because virtue “enjoys and deals with what is good.” For him, “the most complete or beautiful use of our powers to enjoy the basic goods” is what happiness consists of. For moderns, and especially modern Americans, Aristotelian virtue might well be supplemented by religious virtue—faith, hope, and charity being quite different from, if not contradictory to, courage, moderation, wisdom, and justice—and by the virtues of liberal democracy, responsibility and industriousness among them. However broadly or narrowly conceived, virtue nonetheless “depends on the truth and breadth of our experience and understanding of human powers and their orientation to what exercises and engages them fully.” Children do indeed talk back, but it will take time and though and habituation to bring them to the point of consistently talking back intelligently. “Acquiring virtue and using the mind take time and are not automatic.” Parents retain their say in such matters.

Political regimes also have their own say, in speech (persuasion) and in action (punishment). “The nature of all virtues, some more clearly than other, is that they require a political community” (emphasis added). That is because acquiring virtue and using the mind do indeed take time are not automatic, and therefore will need the support of the regime within which such cultivation takes place. Further, all of the virtues have implications for the survival and prosperity of the regime: courage “has a natural, spirited, basis” but the battlefield courage needed to defend a regime and the country it rules requires training and public support. The same goes for moderation and other virtues. A given regime will point the intellectual and affective attention of its citizens to particular kinds of virtue by directing them to and along a particular way of life. During the Cold War, the American citizen was not Soviet man; the constellation of virtues that made up the regime’s conception of virtue or character inclined the citizens of the one regime in one way, the subjects of the other regime in another, forming very different character ‘types’ within the respective populations. “Virtues are connected to different regimes for three central reasons: the understanding of justice that constitutes the regime, the basic experience of good that is involved with the regime and its virtues, and the nature of the ‘I’ and freedom coordinate with the regime.”

With respect to morality, Blitz distinguishes it from ethical character or virtue, although it is of course related to that. Morality consists not so much in the enjoyment of goods as in “restricting one’s actions in order to benefit others but not necessarily oneself.” In this way, morality “is close to law as a command followed by punishment for disobeying the command.” Morality and law are in turn related to the virtue of justice, which concerns both the distribution of goods within the community (which may or may not coincide with my full enjoyment of them), and punishment, which may or may not be ‘for my own good.’

One moral system influential in liberal democracies for more than a century is Kant’s. Kant grounds moral law “on the freedom of equal individuals as those who have rightful individual authority, those who deserve equal respect.” Blitz criticizes Kant, doubting that our fundamental moral convictions are self-evident and denying Kant’s claim that freedom means “the universal legislating that Kant has in mind, since any number of contradictory things could be universally legislated” (for example, prohibiting or commending theft, as Hegel remarks). Kant also tends to define pleasure “in the narrow or utilitarian sense” brought forth by his philosophic rivals in his own time. Arriving at the right moral conclusion becomes a matter of applying of a rule-based procedure as the guarantee of moral behavior. As a consequence, in political life Kantian morality tends to separate law-abidingness and legal administration “from its purpose—advancing the common good—and increasingly [towards] strict proceduralism.” Such an ethos in turn inclines toward administrative statism, a form of aristocracy or perhaps oligarchy, not toward the political rule liberal democracy attempts to cultivate in modern states. “On the whole, liberal democracy, its ground in natural right, its characteristic virtues, and its predating the absolute moral law of Kant and his successors, is a superior and less fantastic combination of proper choice, satisfaction, and each person’s inviolability.”

Moral proceduralism thus obscures “the major question to which the virtues point,” namely, the “degree and status of their truth.” If virtues vary from one regime to another, how can we decide which, if any, really do fit the nature of things, including human nature? “What are the beautiful things or true honors, or the true fears and satisfaction?” Enter the Platonic dialogues, wherein such questions animate the interlocutors, not always leading to apodictic conclusions. “The discussions bring out the important fact that what is virtuous and what the virtuous objects are become more visible once we consider the imprecision and unclarity of any opinion we have of virtue, or our experience of it.” Aristotle does not overlook this, although moderns, perhaps intent on rivaling the certainties of religious conviction, attempt to overcome it. In failing, they frequently call morality and virtue themselves into question.

As a result, the finest eroticism declines. In accepting uncertainty in moral judgment, the ancients leave the soul open to yearning, to striving for a perfection we cannot reach. “One cannot always merge with the beautiful, the good, and the whole of things”; “always incomplete,” we feel the presence of “greater beckoning wholes.” Even in the mild and egalitarian air of liberal democracies, “one cannot be fully responsible,” fully virtuous as we sand on the low but solid ground. A degree of acquaintance with the older philosophers may alert one to that. Otherwise, self-satisfied souls without longing will prevail, entranced with their own technical proficiencies but merely blinking at the stars. “The virtues are initially and for the most part connected to political regimes, or ways of life,” and insofar as the liberal democracies foreclose the experience of greatness of soul or the experience of humility under “divine authority” along a pious way of life, they diminish the persons they intend to protect from those they describe a overbearing aristocrats and fanatic priests.

This leads Blitz to move from the nature of virtue to the nature of “what is common”—the res publica. To be a member of a polis, empire, feudal society, or modern state means first to be presented with certain things held to be good by the political community, second to find “equal and unequal distribution of tasks, opportunities and goods and their fit or working together, what is proper to be done, by whom.” Both of these features of political communities require “virtue and law.” “Together, the fit of tasks and opportunities to achieve certain goods constitutes what we hold in common in a way of life,” a regime which characterizes but is not the same as the political community, which could have any regime and indeed may undergo regime changes, over time. Among the “commonalities” seen in “the public thing” are organizations, endeavors, “goods that we can produce only in common” such as victory in war or in soccer or in orchestral music, public honors and, depending upon the regime, ruling offices. Commonalities shape the character of those who partake in them, making “understand[ing] virtue and why it is good” the “core issue” in Aristotelian political science.

The regime of liberal democracy in the characteristic modern ‘public thing’ separates the state from civil society; in that regime, “economic, intellectual, artistic, and religious life is primarily private and the state regulates or tries to ensure equal opportunity but does not direct it.” This separation originates with the philosophic founder of lo stato, Machiavelli, and is elaborated by Hobbes and Locke. They replace “the classical city or political community” with exactly this “difference between state and society, and ‘states’ need not be governments; governments are not politics’ only or primary venue.” This tends to liberate the desires from moral control by governmental authorities, a move intended to unfetter the human capacity to master fortune and nature and to unfetter governments from priestly control. What binds modern states together, aside from force (which can and often does defeat the purpose of liberalism by crushing individual and civil-social enterprise), is patriotism.

Patriotism is not the same as the public good. “My own, our own, our good, and my good differ.” As “the political love of, the political attachment to, one’s own, patriotism may well attach itself to the existing regime, but then it may not. The American revolutionaries considered themselves patriots. More, the patriot will attach himself, remain loyal to, “practices, conventions, and the current and accumulated opinions about what the justice and goodness of our way of life actually mean.” And it almost always attaches itself to the land, to our own country experienced as home. Patriotism should also be distinguished from nationalism, which in modernity typically refers to ethnic and linguistic commonalities. Blitz again points to Heidegger as the preeminent philosophic theorist of nationalism, who “thinks of authentic politics primarily in terms of the people, the political analogue to the authentic individual.” At the same time, Heidegger is an atypical nationalist, one who held “race and space” to be “significant not as physical or biological causes but as factors made meaningful when they are taken up into people’s pursuit of possibilities.”

This obviously differs from the Americans’ understanding of “We the People” as a “self-chosen and gathered” assemblage ruling themselves by a self-designed supreme law of the land, itself under the authority of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. As Americans, “we are embedded in a particular country, but this embeddedness exists in a circle that opens up and out to questions of truer justice and excellence.” In this, Americans replicate by design the natural tendency of human beings to form families, which Aristotle identifies as the first form of association in which political relations occur. “Our first loving aspiration is to elevate ourselves to another, or to be together with them and then to be attached to what is joint, the child…. This first openness and loyalty, this first combining of man, woman, and child, is crucial as the ground for other kinds of openness, however much the development of the I, the separateness of the couple, or the direction of further excellence depends on one’s overall way of life.” The contemporary plans and experiments to alter the nature of human beings will “not [be] possible without goods being given up, restricted, or distorted—love, loyalty, family, and freedom in various venues—that we also need for what is higher and more complete.” That is, once the modern attempt to conquer nature extends in some systematic and effective way to individual human bodies, the material foundation of the family, bound together initially in bodily desire, likely will destroy more than it gains. “What will be restricted in our aspirations, freedom, and pride by the attempt to completely master and reform the body?”

As his last topic, Blitz addresses the nature of goods. ‘What is good’ guides actions because it choice worthy, worth being guided by; what is more, “by their nature, goods provide a measure for actions, requiring us to consider what actions are likely to conduce to our securing them. In so acting, we develop other goods, namely, the capacities needed to secure the goods we lack. In acquiring those goods, we move toward perfecting ourselves and the conditions in which we live.”

What about real goods acquired by bad means? Can there be a “perfect crime,” a good way of doing evil? Not really. “The perfect crime does not use our full powers, it harms others’ goods excessively, and it is unlikely to achieve the full pleasure that is one of its goals, let alone satisfy still other ends.” In contrast, “when Plato and Aristotle claim that the philosophical life is best, they mean that it uses all our human powers most completely, is oriented directly to the unchanging whole without detracting from others, and is pleasant.” And although “statesmanship is not directed to the whole simply, as philosophers seek to understand it,” a “statesman’s life or a life of ethical virtue is excellent or best” in that it is “a full if not altogether complete and pleasant use of our powers that also aids others’ excellence in a common enterprise”—as Charles de Gaulle was wont to say, a grand design.

Why then, is the good disputed? Blitz identifies seven ways in which we interfere with our perception of it. First, ‘we moderns’ exhibit an egalitarian distaste for ranking goods and the pleasures associated with their pursuit and possession. Second, “the complexity of pleasure,” which may range from philosophic inquiry to drug-induced euphoria, “makes choice, especially common choice, difficult.” It has finally become easy to legalize and commercialize once-illegal drugs and gambling, activities inducing stupidity and indebtedness—that is to say, dependency instead of self-government—in a citizenry rendered increasingly incapable of citizenship because lacking in the virtues that make citizenship a possible way of life. “If there is no public justification for excellent or exceptional powers fully used,” if egalitarian lassitude pervades the minds and hearts of citizens, “it can be difficult for these [powers] to flourish.”

Third, freedom and individuality are as complex and potentially confusing as pleasure. “Because we are free, we are free to ignore, reject, and make mistakes”—to misuse our reason by, among other things, failing to engage it in the task of “forming desire, spiritedness, and our passions.” “Attempts to live a life that ignores reason—drugs, alcohol, sloth—ignore our powers and fall short of satisfying them.” This makes it difficult for individuals freely “to acknowledge what is better, to and for themselves,” especially since what is good for me is never the good simply but must be adjusted to my own capacities and interests, as well as to the resources available to me, which may be scarce—a fourth source of confusing, raising as it does difficult questions of distributive justice.

Fifth, reason entails speech, and speech can be deceptive. Speech “often allows fraud to triumph.” “The history of religious obsession and political terror makes this clear.” Opinion and sentiment are manipulable by clever persons who hold out hope, inspire fear, or demand obedience to themselves by invoking long-standing customs, Sixth, and in opposition to long-standing custom, is doubt and rebellion, which may be raised by speech but also by the “compatibility [which] exists among several activities that use our abilities and are pleasurable,” contradicting our existing way of life. As religiously minded persons have long understood, certain kind of music lead to certain kinds of dancing.

Finally, and notoriously, notions of goodness vary from regime to regime. “In each case, our human choice begins within a form of justice, a presentation of what can be good, and our correlated characteristics.” Regimes set that framework of choice. And even within these limits, one still needs to address the problem of the imprecision of measuring and judging what good is, and what is good. “The most basic criterion is the fullest use of our powers, primarily speech or reason, but also the reasoned experience of passions and ordinary goods”; understanding the good and what is good is a “noetic and discursive” exercise performed within “a just whole,” not a matter of mere calculation at the service of passion. However, the natural standard discoverable by our reason and speech “is both advanced and complicated by one’s pride in self-direction, by spirited self-defense and protecting some level of individual inviolability and fair treatment.” As a college professor, Blitz holds out education as “the central element that makes proper choice more likely,” although it may also be likely that he does not assume that the college classroom is necessarily the best or the only place for such education.

Such a liberal education requires leisure. We Americans “have a good degree of that,” Blitz remarks, drily. What we lack today, thanks to the egalitarianism fostered by civil-social democracy, is a sense of excellence, except when it comes to activities which give us immediate pleasure, such as watching athletes or listening to musicians. At the same time, Blitz cannot recommend “communities that are or claim to be aristocratic (or religiously aristocratic),” as these are either fraudulent or present other dangers, including habits of subservience. He offers a threefold approach to the issue: “first, individually, the fullest or most virtuous use of our powers and the education that allows and develops this; second, basing this use and education on the natural meaning of trust, love, family, friendship, and limits in resources; and, third, doing this in a community grounded on equal individual choice and pride, on trust whose expectations rest on these virtues and meaning and on understanding our powers and their truly excellent use.” In effect, he would embed the ‘ancient’ or ‘classical’ virtues in civil society, especially through educational institutions, broadly conceived. The existence of a civil society in the modern state, one that is most vigorous in modern states with liberal democratic regimes that protect civil society from overbearing governmental supervision, might serve as a means of resistance to the more dangerous features of modernity, including the radical conquest of human nature proposed by ‘transhumanists.’

 

 

Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Chapter Three: “The Will to Power and the Politics of Greatness” and Chapter Four: “The Distant Command of the Greeks: Heidegger and the Community of Destiny.”

 

Might a ‘philosophy of freedom’ eventuate in an attempt to free human beings from reason—that is, from the constraints of logic, indeed from human nature itself? Whereas Hegel esteems the Greeks of the classical age, Plato above all, “Nietzsche extolled the tragic age of Homeric heroism along with the pre-Socratics and Sophists”—aristocratic Callicles over vulgar Socrates, who smelled of the rabble.  Although he shares Hegel’s conception of Being as self-originating, “like Marx,” he “believed that Hegel’s ‘absolute science’ of Spirit had robbed man of his creative powers and chained him in an iron cage of determinism,” the dialectical laws of ‘History’ leading inevitably to the telos, the ‘End of History’ understood as a constitutional monarchy buttressed by an administrative state; unlike Marx, he has no use for a ‘labor theory of value’ undergirding yet another rationalist-historical determinism, this one culminating in social, economic, and political equality. As Newell calmly understates the matter, with Nietzsche, “we are now in a very different atmosphere from that of Marx’s earnest activism.” Although, like Marx, Nietzsche is a communitarian, he is a ‘Right’ communitarian, lauding a community of ruling hierarchies, aristocratic rank, far from Marx’s egalitarianism. For Nietzsche, socialism “is every bit as much a symptom of base materialism and spiritual degradation as liberalism.” Unlike Marx, Nietzsche (in this, like Hegel) cares about liberal education, which differentiates and ranks students. But he despises the telos of Hegelian and Marxist ‘History’ alike as productive of the Last Man, that human nullity who mistakes his mediocrity for wise moderation.

What does Nietzsche’s historicism look like? History (and therefore the right kind of education) consists of the “symbiotic relationship” between the Apollonian or rational and the Dionysian or irrational. Homer exemplifies this relationship, his metrical verse being “the triumph of Apollonian form over the wordless ecstasy and violence of Dionysus,” yet “enlivened by the terrible passions it sublimates.” This removes Nietzsche not only from rationalist historicism, which seeks to dominate the passions altogether, but also from Rousseau, who dreams of natural harmony, not the “stupendous struggle” of the Homeric gods, heroes and the poetry evoking them. “There is no higher Platonic synthesis of mind and the affects,” only strife. In Greek tragedy, “Oedipus’ fury and lust are both blind,” taking him “down into the depths, not up toward the eternal good.” “By blinding himself, Oedipus symbolically finally achieves the wisdom of blind Tiresias, whose maxim was: Best not to know the truth. Blindness as a metaphor for wisdom is directly antithetical to Socrates’ likening of the intellect to the eye of the soul—it is impossible to know too much.” When Aristotle interprets the tragedies as conflicts about moral intention and responsibility, when Plato’s Socrates argues that such a thing as moral responsibility is possible or desirable, they overlook “the passions that express themselves through” this supposed “capacity for moral choice.” “If one assumes that the cosmos is rationally ordered, including the supremacy of the mind over the passions, you might judge Oedipus as responsible for murdering Laius in a fit of rage. but if life is at bottom hostile and dooms us through our passions, then we may be fated to carry out such crimes.” The world consists not of a rationally ordered cosmos or a rationally ordered course of events but of the will to power. 

Nietzsche does not want merely to reestablish a balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian but to tear the Dionysian away from Apollonian ascetic rationality “in order to enable a new birth, the Overman.” In replacing the Absolute Spirit with the will to power, and as “perhaps the greatest philosophical critic of liberal democracy and modernity,” Nietzsche despises Hegel’s “benevolent flourishing of the modern nation-state as it finds a new sense of religious purpose through mutual forgiveness”; he is the John the Baptist not for a secularized and collectivized Christ but for “the new messianism of Zarathustra.” Zarathustra embraces the world of the will to power, a world “apparently devoid of permanent meaning.” Nietzsche is the philosopher not of rationalism classical or modern, but of “life,” by which he means “the passionate commitment humans experience when they are creating something altogether new in history.” To fail in this is to allow the triumph not of the Absolute Spirit or the long-oppressed proletariat but of the Last Man, the bourgeois man, absorbed in his own “survival and comfort.”

But how “can you worship a god which you know to be a human creation like all other past gods and values?” Do you not see that the knowledge that all gods are idols, human makings, leaves you as a spiritless, ignoble Last Man, incapable of creating any new gods? The historicism of ‘progressives’ “paralyzes our commitment to anything new, bold and dangerous.” This is the abuse of history, leading to the ruin of man, drowning in his attempt to ‘be objective,’ which is only “a retreat from deciding what we prefer, a disguise for indifference”—in reality not objective at all but the expression of “petty subjectivity,” making culture, which after all means cultivation, subject to our “pedestrian whims.” The dilemma is that “modern man has discovered the dread truth that values are indeed relative”; if he is to become a creator again, he must “do so in the knowledge that it is a value, rather than an absolute truth.” No less than the Christians, and no less than Descartes who in this respect imitates the Christians while doubting the existence of God, Nietzsche seeks certainty: but now, “the only way of being sure we are overcoming the present is through the depth, passion and intensity of our commitment.” Do not abandon history and the knowledge it provides; “reform it as the servant of commitment,” using it as a spur to enhance human beings “through a radical futurism.”

How? First, narrow your horizons. The moral relativism ‘objective’ history supports can only yield utilitarian drabness. “Man needs narrow horizons in order to beautify life and make it more bearable through reverence before a higher authority and the striving for nobility.” Also, appreciate what Plato and Christianity did accomplish by claiming that the world we experience sensually isn’t the real world at all, that there exists “a higher, eternal, and invisible realm of higher truth.” This was “the greatest expression in history of the will to power,” the greatest beckoning to self-overcoming ever conceived by men for Man. It has now played itself out, devolving into the egalitarian lowlands of liberal democracy, because Socrates and Jesus both contended that men are “fundamentally equal,” each one “possess[ing] a soul linking us to the immortal truth. Although it ended in the wretched egalitarianism of today, this effort nonetheless shows that self-overcoming is possible. To resent such an achievement at its radical origin is to remain within the wide but low horizon of democracy, with its egalitarian resentment of all great achievements. At the same time, do recognize that Plato’s Idea of the Good and Christianity’s God, in “bring[ing] the rest of existence” under their rule, must eventually destroy what his ‘high’ in it, the Idea of the Good, the Christian God, because they impose equality on human beings. By Nietzsche’s time, the crisis of egalitarianism had become so acute that even the Biblical God, a person “capable of love, jealousy, and vengeance,” had been abandoned—’killed,’ replaced by “modern rationalism and science” aiming at happiness as conceived by the likes of a race so low as the English flat heads, tepid utilitarian pursuers of happiness now conceived as bodily satisfaction and mental peace. Thankfully, “a new supreme being, the Overman, will take God’s place as the horizon for mankind’s future reverence and self-overcoming”—the Overman, who offers us not peace but a renewal of noble striving. 

Hitherto, philosophers have sought truth without wondering what truth is and why they seek it. Philosophers have failed to reflect upon their own motivation. Nietzsche calls this “the metaphysical prejudice,” and charges that “the principle of identity and contradiction” itself—logic, the core of reason—only registers this prejudice, produced by an unadmitted passion. Whatever philosophy will now become, it must become “aware that the value of truth is the enhancement of life,” that the fact of its passionate character alone makes it worth something to living human beings. Logic serves human life because it narrows human horizons. For example, Stoics hardly live according to nature, as they claim, since nature is chaotic—wasteful, purposeless, unmerciful, unjust. Rather, “Stoicism tyrannizes over the chaos of nature by imposing reason on it in order to make life bearable.” Hegel has done the same thing, only in accordance with an equally rationalized, hence equally false but initially vital, narrowing of human horizons. Hegel even improved upon “classical cosmology,” which posited “rational and benevolent orderliness” in nature, whereas Hegel did understand the importance of movement, dynamism. Nietzsche radicalizes this historicism, “arguing that what masquerades as objective reality is entirely created on impulse by the human will.” This, he maintains, “unlike all previous truths,” is no prejudice but “a genuine account of all existence.” And if what we know is willed, “psychology must replace philosophy.” 

To prepare the way for the Overman, such psychologists as Nietzsche and his potential followers, the “Free Spirits,” reject “reification,” the “erection of…expressions [of the will to power] as final and unalterable truths” as against creativity, which is a “process” not a permanent condition. The will to power is “Nietzsche’s name for the whole, the matrix of self-origination out of which issue all of our individual acts of will, our instincts, even the organic processes of procreation and nourishment (non-human as well as human),” the source of “all force univocally,” as Nietzsche put it. “You yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing else!” he exclaims. The will to power replaces Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, the last philosophically interesting vestige of rationalism before English utilitarians and Marxian communists plunged reason into the mud of egalitarianism. The dead end of both the morality of consequences seen in classical Greece and the morality of intention inaugurated by Christians can only be escaped by going beyond good and evil as so conceived, to psychology, to the Overman’s combination the Roman Caesar, that consequentialist par excellence, and the soul of Christ, the God who judges men according to the inclinations of their souls, clearly visible to Himself alone. The Free Spirits who precede the Overman reject the supine softness of democracy; they are the hard men of “a coming new aristocracy.”

When Nietzsche says hard, he means it. He “envisions a process that could take place both inwardly and psychologically and simultaneously involve literally tyrannical, evil and terrible historical transformation involving entire peoples or even the entire world,” as indeed “every great historical transformation” has brought “enormous force and bloodshed.” “Deeply interested in politics and warfare as well as culture,” Nietzsche evidently shares Hegel’s sense of history as a slaughter-bench. 

What new forms will get hacked into their shape on the slaughter-bench, refined in the souls of the Free Spirits and then beyond them, by the Overman? Having established that it is religion, not philosophy, which practices the “primordial phenomenon of sacrifice in which…morality is grounded,” Nietzsche wills a return to the primordial, now in “a new land” in which we must not sacrifice human beings in reverence to God but “to sacrifice God himself, to purge him of any remaining capacity for pity, consolation or love toward us,” enabling “the Overman to take the place of God.” While the Christian saint’s willingness to sacrifice his life to an invisible God has deepened human souls, his compassion for the weak has spawned the Last Man, the weak man. But “if modernity has shown that man is nothing but a system of matter in motion bent on self-preservation, and not uniquely loved by God, why does man deserve compassion?” To get rid of soul-slackening compassion, to deepen the human soul without the Christian God, Nietzsche’s new “philosopher” must merge “the philosopher as traditionally conceived”—that unwitting embodiment of the self-overcoming will to power—with “the legislator, the prophet, and the ‘breeder.'” This new philosopher will no longer pursue wisdom but constitute a new “master class,” a new aristocracy reminiscent of, but surpassing, the old Homeric heroes or Hindu Brahmins, the rulers of lesser rulers who obey their commands by commanding the ordinary men. The religion of the latter will make them content with their humble lot, as peasants were under the regime of Christian feudalism. Indeed, “Christianity’s particular concern with comforting the wretched masses might be an important means of ruling to supplement the Vedic or ‘Asiatic’ code of the higher castes.” 

For now, the battle between the new nobility and the herd-men is on. In yet another reversal of his predecessor, Nietzsche inverts Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. This time, there will be no synthesis; “on the contrary, the tension between the master morality and the herd morality is escalating toward an unprecedented conflagration.” It is the role of the Free Spirits to educate this new ruling caste. But unlike the philosopher-kings of Plato’s ideal regime, “these educators are not shaping the souls of the future citizenry so as to wean them away from the temptation to tyranny, but on the contrary to hone and refine their tyrannical instincts for domination over both themselves and their subjects.” Dangerous? But of course. Yet the danger of the great effort is the only antidote to the torpor of the way of life of the Last Man. Will the Last Man be the final, low and boring, human type, or will he be the last man, the last human-all-too-human predecessor to the Overman? Nietzsche urges his noblest readers to take the risk, “rather than to submit to the unspeakably worse cataclysm of herd morality triumphing entirely and swallowing up any chance for renewed greatness on earth,” the death not only of God but of philosophy itself—of every thing and every one once exalted as above the herd. The twentieth century will bring “the fight for the domination of the earth.” Ready yourselves for it.

In calling the “genuine philosophers” of the future “commanders and legislators, not classifiers” of supposedly natural species, Nietzsche calls the new philosophers’ knowledge itself a willed creating, their creating legislation, their will to truth the will to power. Newell observes, “at this moment Nietzsche reveals how essentially and at bottom he is a modern,” equating knowing with creating as Machiavelli did when he called for the conquest of Fortuna in order to create ‘new modes and orders,’ a project refined as Bacon’s and Hobbes’s maxim that to know something is to be able to make it, thereby improving the human lot. This project was in turn “further radicalized as the Fichtean reading of Kant, whereby reason is entirely assimilated to our will to master and reshape nature, and Schiller’s and Hegel’s identification of modern reason with Verstand, the Baconian power to tear nature apart through analysis in order to improve upon it.” But unlike all of these political philosophers, Nietzsche abominates the modern nation-state as the coldest of all cold monsters, a bureaucratic monstrosity of ‘administrative science’ foisted upon Germany by the “bourgeois-imperialist nationalism associated with Bismarck” and perfected by the English flat-heads of womanish Victorianism. Instead of underwriting this project of a deformed and deforming mediocrity, “politics must vault over the nation-state altogether, even in its comparatively more authentic underlying Volkisch sediment”—perhaps Volkitsch would be the apter term?—and “seek the rebirth of the will to power on a global level” in “a new order that will span the planet,” ruled by a global aristocracy that shares Marx’s internationalism but at the service of anything but social democracy. This “new ruling caste will usher in mankind’s new supreme being, the Overman.” Only then can mankind recover the ennobling instincts of loyalty, honor, reverence, courage, rank. Religion will now return, no longer at the service of metaphysics, whether Platonic, Christian (“Platonism for the people”), or Hegelian, but as the perpetually self-originating, self-renewing will to power of the Overman. The current-day democratization of Europe serves one and only one useful purpose: it “goads into existence a new master class that will reign over the herd men, who in this sense are their own gravediggers,” even as Marx’s feudal lords and bourgeois masters have dug, are digging, their graves. 

For Aristotle, magnanimity or greatness of soul is the pinnacle of moral virtue, while philosophy is the highest way of life. Nietzsche eschews this separation of theory and practice. In this, he again shows himself as a historicist, if not a Hegelian or Marxist historicist. For Nietzsche, “what matters ultimately is not wisdom…but rank.” “After the collapse of Platonism and all traditional philosophy through its exposure as a prejudice and as having culminated in nihilism” the only “remaining and enduring peaks of human greatness” are “faith and nobility.” Only these remain as possible “footholds in the abyss enabling us not to be overwhelmed and swept away by the chaos at the heart of all existence.” Only these might provide the “strength of soul” needed for that, to say nothing of the strength of soul needed to slog through the egalitarian mud. 

“Nietzsche’s Zarathustra calls for salvation through a new order premised on the destruction of human equality” and the surpassing of the categories ‘good and evil’ posited by the original, Manichean, Zarathustra. He represents not the historicist teleology of Hegel but “an apocalyptic revolutionary break aimed at an as yet unspecifiable new order that will bear virtually no resemblance to the current epoch of ‘herd morality.'” “No final resolution of history’s contradictions” will result; even if this were possible, it would stagnate human being. “The world is a field of forces that radiate through human creativity and issue forth as great faiths, philosophies and civilizations,” but once established, these ossify or ‘reify’ into some “hardened distinction between the real and apparent world.” “What the Overman fully will be cannot as yet be known”; we cannot know the full meaning of the past until the overman comes and, even then, renewal will be possible, ad infinitum. For human creativity to endure it must now consciously found itself upon “the underlying ontological principle of the will to power,” now freed “as a process,” not as “a completed doctrine or dogma sub specie aeternitatis.” The will to power “expresses itself through the passions and the affects, resulting in a self and in individual action as the last stage of its emergence,” action resulting in a new regime, “an inegalitarian collectivism.” “The greatest creators fashion horizons for entire civilizations, uniting the individual with the community.” 

Newell asks, “how can man experience reverence bowing to a god which he knows himself to have created?” This would be a decisive objection, if the will to power were only a creation of Nietzsche’s.

Newell well and brilliantly insists that the will to power alone won’t produce this revolution, however. It must be supplemented by the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. By this, Nietzsche does not mean a form of fatalism, which would be “paralyzing.” “The eternal recurrence is not an iron cage of determinism” but “an open circle,” in which actions and events occur unpredictably. The will to power alone would only destroy, like an anarchist’s bomb; it would be vengeful, a passion of ressentiment aimed at all that has happened, all that has been thought and felt hitherto. Life’s “colorful and invigorating chaos does not prompt tragic moaning about the loss of certainty, but laughter over its evanescence.” The cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships, and moralities that Nietzsche derides in The Use and Abuse of History becomes a source of merriment and creativity, once one understands that nothing can or should last forever. “The eternal recurrence will dissipate the spirit of gravity in an eros for all that can be”; “we have no need for permanence, which is the outcome of the spirit of gravity in its desire to put an end to new willing.” (On this ground, one might even take Isaac Newton to have been the author of a physics of English flat-headism.) Newell considers this “Nietzsche’s most profound truth, more profound even than the revelation of the Overman that it makes possible.” Abandoning “the Platonic eros through which beauty draws us on up toward the eternal truth,” Nietzschean eros loves “the unquenchable richness and variability of existence,” the “Pandora’s box of sheer becoming, possibility and spontaneity,” enabling “the mystery and wonder of life [to] flood back” into the turgid backwater modernity has become.  

In terms of politics, to combine the will to power with the Eternal Recurrence issues in a Trotskyism of the ‘Right’ to complement Nietzsche’s ‘Right’ or hierarchical communitarianism. That is, Nietzsche anticipates Trotsky’s notion of the permanent revolution. Although Newell doesn’t mention Trotsky, he sees the principle clearly, writing that Nietzsche envisions the result of the masters’ victory over the slaves “not [as] a political state at all but more akin to an ongoing revolutionary transformation.” This is why Nietzsche proposes no ‘best regime’ or ‘political science.’ The outcome of the revolution cannot be predicted because it will be an act of freedom, of creativity. And it might fail. “Herd morality may triumph once and for all.” All Nietzsche knows is that if the Free Spirits do succeed in educating the “eventual master caste,” and if the master caste triumphs over the herd, and “once man has been ‘redeemed from revenge’ by the eternal recurrence, all we can glimpse is ‘the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms'”—a new Rainbow Covenant, this one for atheists. “No one can know what will happen when we cross that bridge.” Newell characterizes Nietzsche’s attitude: “Let’s roll the dice and see what comes of it.”

Looking back at Nietzsche’s immediate philosophic predecessors, “it is not the Hegelian or Marxist belief in the rational outcome of the struggle for historical progress in which we should invest our hopes, but the liberating creative and violent forces of that underlying strife itself.” Do not pity the victims of the coming mass slaughter. Pity instead “the inner toll this mission will take on the psyche of those who carry it out.” Newell remarks that Nietzsche is to the Nazis what Rousseau is to the French Revolution: his thoughts were distorted and vulgarized, but they were indeed his thoughts. “The heart of the matter is that Nietzsche rejects all forms of transhistorical ethics, from Aristotelian to Kantian, that would equip us to stand outside of events and make a moral judgment about such movements ahead of time.” Newell concurs with the judgment of Walter J. Dannhauser, who wrote, “A man who counsels men to live dangerously must expect to have dangerous men like Mussolini heed his counsel; a man who teaches that a good war justifies any cause must expect to have this teaching, which is presented half in jest but only half in jest to be abused.” [1] Newell simply suggests that Nietzsche would not have minded finding out.

In some respects, Martin Heidegger radicalizes Nietzsche. And there is no doubt that Heidegger did endorse Nazism, unrepentantly. “How did the arguably greatest thinker of the twentieth century find himself serving one of history’s most murderous regimes?” Heidegger follows Nietzsche in attacking Hegelian-Marxist teleological historicism. He also shares Nietzsche’s preference for the archaic Greeks against classical civilization. But he faults all of his predecessors, not only by “rejecting any conception of the rational progress of history,” but by rejecting genealogy of any kind. No historical phase since the archaic origins of civilizations has any real merit; on the contrary, all that has occurred subsequently has amounted to a departure from Being, not an unfolding or deepening of it. “Heidegger goes farther than any of them in summoning forth the originating matrix of history as an ‘overpowering power’ as pure unmediated strife,” a matrix that issues what he calls its “distant command” to modern Germans, and only to modern Germans, to tap into the reordering authority of that fertile chaos. 

Like all historicists, Heidegger conceives of Being as a self-originating, self-transforming force. But unlike Hegel and Marx (or the non-historicist Aristotle), he rejects the idea that the end, the purpose of Being, whether historical or natural, is its summit. The tree should not be defined by its mature state but by its roots, its hidden origin. Whereas classical metaphysics takes the telos as an ideal, the realest reality of any thing, considering any feature short of that as a flaw to be remedied, Heidegger deprecates this as “the yoke of the Idea”—a burden, dully unfree, an invitation not to understand Being but to subjugate it in a radically misguided attempt to perfect it. Not realization or culmination but the moment of origin, when a thing or indeed Being itself begins as sheer possibility—that is the true being of a thing or the being of Being. In Heidegger’s words, “possibility stands higher than actuality.” Because Man, is open to doubt about his own purpose, he is closer to Being than any other being. Like Being, Man is open to possibilities in a way other beings are not. “Dasein, the distinctively human mode of Being, is the ‘there’ (Da) of Being (Sein), the place where the question of Being unfolds” in all its historicity, its impermanence, especially when we recognize our transitoriness, recognize that we will die. “The openness to change and doubt which constitutes man’s existence is directly conditioned by the mutability and impermanence of Being as such,” the human “awareness of death,” unique to human beings. We can understand the archaic, “sheer possibility” of Being by this observation. It, and not wonder or love of wisdom, initiate the philosophic quest.

Given this historicity, given the centrality of originating possibility, questions of ‘how’ take priority over the questions of ‘what’ that characterize classical philosophy. ‘What is’ questions take priority if you think you are looking at nature, at something that is stable, something that can be contemplated, as distinct from ever-shifting conventions and opinions. Socratic or political philosophy proceeds by interrogating one’s human interlocutors, asking them to define things and then showing that their opinions are self-contradictory, inadequate for understanding nature, including their own nature as human and their own natures as human ‘types.’ For Heidegger, not dialogue but observation (of mortality) opens the window to serious thought, leading to historical consciousness or awareness not to nature, which strictly speaking does not exist due to Being’s historicity or impermanence. That is, death should remind us of impermanence, of our own historicity. The everyday opinions of everyday life do not constitute a path to this consciousness; the attempt to transcend them, to ascend from them into a realm of Ideas (as in Plato), or a transcendent God (as in the Bible), or even to an understanding of the more concrete nature Aristotle investigates causes an “alienation” from Being. It is an attempt to impose an order, a stability, upon Being that Being does not in reality have. “Truth can in no way transcend ordinary experience but must somehow reside in it organically.” This isn’t Rousseau’s state of nature, for example, nor is it “a universal ideal yet to be achieved” like Kant’s Categorical Imperative,” nor Hegel’s “end of history.” Instead, there are only “the unique and independent worlds that have grown out of local encounters with Being,” which has been embodied in ever-changing customs that are rooted in the origins of those worlds. Thus, “Man has no pure freedom beyond the particular world to which he is committed, and his commitment takes place nowhere except in the midst of this world, its people and their heritage.” This makes ‘Man’ not a ‘what,’ a being with a nature, but a ‘who,’ a being with an origin, a history. This also makes Man a communal being, not an individual subject, “a complex of forces that is intersubjective and collective at the deepest level,” un-Cartesian and un-Rousseauian. As Newell well writes, Heidegger “reject[s] entirely the progressive notion of history without abandoning an entirely historical definition of man.” One might say that Heidegger offers a radicalized Burkeanism.

“When Being touches us through our finitude, making us aware of the primordial possibilities that the everyday world, in its anxious search for security and control, tries to ‘dim down’ and paper over, it acts as the spur to authenticity.” But a resolve “to recommit ourselves to the authenticity of the origins can fail“; “Dasein can ‘cut itself off from its ontic roots'” in an illusory attempt to recover its authenticity. That is what all previous philosophers and prophets have done when they try to find some comforting permanence, some intellectual or spiritual security in a realm imagined to transcend flux—what Heidegger calls “reification.” These efforts alienate us from ourselves and from others, since we are at core not permanent. We substitute for our true selves what Heidegger calls the “they-self,” the “public authority which orders our lives as fearful conformists or efficient managers of the surrounding environment.” This is pretense. There can be no “horizontal universality,” no “science of history or a genealogy of morals” of a human “type.” “We encounter only the vertical universality of irreducibly unique collectivist monads, of ‘peoples.'” There is “no exit from one’s world, its people and heritage.” We live authentically only in “seizing upon” the vital origins of that world, the struggle or strife “out of which the everyday world has issued, and reenacting those origins afresh.” “Confronting the finitude, arbitrariness and particularity of our world dispels the complacency of everyday life, enabling us to see ourselves for what we really are.”

And so, Germans must heed “the distant command” of the archaic Greeks if they are to recur to their own origins, dismantle the inauthentic world that men, including Germans, have constructed in their fearful retreat from the originating strife of primordial Being. “Being is Nothing”—that is, no-thing, no particular realized thing. As pure possibility, it beckons us to regenerate the world that has long since lapsed into inauthenticity. “Resolving upon its ‘finite freedom’ enables a people to shatter the dictatorship reared out of their own alienation,” to “give themselves over to their historical destiny,” to enable them “to vault into the future rooted in a past so primordial as to bear little if any relationship to the reified present.” The heroes of such a people will “rear up out of the deepest roots of the past, where they were trapped by the they-self’s official history of the past.” Newell calls this true radicalism, “both backward and forward-looking,” “atavistic futurism.” In returning to the radix, the root of human life, the moment of supreme freedom, it rejects “all existing political social, cultural and moral bonds in the name of a contentless communitarianism” of pure possibility, pure originalism, unique and arbitrary. To state the obvious, this cannot occur without “power, struggle, resolve, violence”—a “tremendous negative energy purging everyday life in the longing to reexperience what Heidegger calls the ‘ecstatic moment of vision’ when the community’s world sprang into being.” Such a (re)experience can “offer no guidance about concrete goals,” as befits an anti-teleological teaching. Heidegger altogether disdains “any compromise with the conditions of ordinary political dispute and party politics,” indeed of politics as Aristotle defines it of ruling and being ruled. This fits with his rejection of regard for the Socratic dialogue, with political philosophy. Heidegger resembles the pre-Socratic nature-philosophers Socrates criticized, except that he conceives of Being as historical, not natural-sempiternal. And of course, he rejects the theory of justice behind modern ‘social contracts,’ along with the throne-and-altar ‘conservatism’ social contract theory replaced. “Freedom is the return to a protean, indeterminate nothingness that overthrows all existing conditions without either developing them”—as per the early moderns—or “being developed by them”—as per all previous historicists—altogether “dispensing with precedent and prescription along with moderation”—now, in a very sharp departure from Burke.

It is easy to see why Heidegger would have been attracted to Nazism. Simultaneously atavistic and futuristic, gripped by the cult of the hero, rejecting liberalism, conservativism, and ‘Left’ or egalitarian communitarianism, Nazism addressed, or at least could be supposed to address, the acute danger of modern alienation in all its forms, whether ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian.’ “In order to recover its destiny, Germany must rethink [its] hidden history,” the “indeterminacy of Being” seen in the archaic Greeks but subsequently buried by the classical Greeks, the Romans, the feudalists, the early ‘natural-right’ moderns and late historical-progressive moderns. If Germany can do this, then act upon it, it can redeem itself and the West. It must therefore repudiate Hegel, the German philosopher par excellence, that teleologist of history, recognizing his Panglossian dialectic not as a force for progress but as “a steady, regressive development away from freedom,” an instrument of alienation. At the same time, without this “extremity of the alienation from Being” Hegelianism has imposed, Germans would continue to roll along, without self-knowledge, without consciousness of what they, and mankind generally, have lost. 

This new consciousness must reject not only Hegel’s logic of history but logic itself, reason, as the defining characteristic of Man. It is the consciousness of his finitude, his mortality, that distinguishes Man from all other beings, not the capacity to reason. “The limitation of logic is that it cannot deal with the Nothing, with nonbeing, meaning origination.” Logic or the principle of non-contradiction can only operate when and where there is something, whether natural, divine, or historical. Since Being does produce beings, reason has a proper role, but only if thoroughly embedded within history, not as a ladder to any realm claiming to transcend history. But “Being understood as origination” is no-thing, perceived not by reason but by revelation alone. “Poetry and revelation may rank higher than science because they reveal Being more richly and primordially than analytical rationality.” [2] Germans should harken to “the surest historical precedent for understanding an authentic relation to Being,” the relation seen in “the great pre-Platonic poets, thinkers, and statesmen” of Greece. Today, Germans find themselves caught between two “pincers,” the modern-scientific, technological giants of Russia and America, regimes Heidegger classifies as “metaphysically the same,” despite their “superficially different ideologies.” What Heidegger calls the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism inheres in its opposition to those pincers. The Soviet Russians and the liberal Americans would conquer Being. What Heidegger wants Germans under Nazism to do is to act as “a conduit for Being’s revelation through assuming the role of ‘resolve'” against the care, the existential anxiety, that Being too often has induced Man to oppose because it imposes death, finitude, upon him. That is, against the resolve of the men who have met Being with “subjective willfulness,” Heidegger would have them willfully surrender to Being, let Being run through them, become open “to the overpowering power of Being,” a surrender “that empowers our choosing to recommit ourselves to the community’s destiny”—whatever that destiny may turn out to be, in terms of particular events and conditions. The genuine political founder, like the true artist, brings about the rule of Being, in his case “by interpreting it for his people as their norms—their laws and mores.” What Heidegger calls “the greatness” of a founding occurs only at its beginning, its free, originative act, just as Being as a whole reaches its greatness in its “creative origins”, the initial act of its history. All else is decline, a falling away from Being. “From Heidegger’s perspective, Homer was a legislator,” someone like T. S. Eliot “merely a diversion for the cultured,” the inauthentic ones. In his intention “to open the underlying Pandora’s box of creative chaos, dismantling the metaphysical edifice of Hegel’s Absolute Science of Spirit,” Heidegger looked to the Nazi revolution of 1933 as “the spark” to ignite the explosion, Germany’s answer to “the distant summons of the polis” for recovering “our destiny as a people,” freeing “logos from the chains of logic.” 

This can be accomplished by recourse not to reason but to etymology. (In this, Heidegger is an anti-rationalist Vico.) That is, unlike the Socratic use of words to uncover the rational meaning of nature concealed by the verbiage of conventional opinion, etymology digs into the archaic origin of the words themselves to find their true meaning in their history. For example, when Aristotle defines Man as a zoon echon logon, that means literally an “animal having reason,” not an animal rationale, as Latinists would have it. Heidegger claims that the word “having” suggests temporality, historicity, “a fluid historical process,” whereas “rational animal” suggests confinement within a defined, permanent, ahistorical essence. The latter is reification, and Aristotle himself actually prefers it, especially when he speaks in his Metaphysics of Being as a substance instead of a process, as the Being—more noun than verb. But “when Aristotle tries to wrestle Greek into conveying this monistic entity, it wriggles and undulates at every turn to evade such exactitude,” being the language of Homer, of archaic Greece. Aristotle “would have preferred to express his metaphysics in Latin had it existed for him, because [Latin] lent itself readily to the kind of contraction of the meaning of Being to the one moment of metaphysical essence he and Plato were aiming for.” Heidegger links this feature of Greek to the German language. German is the only modern language that resembles Greek in its resistance to stasis, to reification. It is the only modern language in which one can truly philosophize, think in tune with Being. In this, Heidegger departs from the biological or ‘racist’ nationalism of Nazism, finding Germany’s true roots in its language. All too optimistically, he supposed that “the German people might, through National Socialism, pose the Question of Being on an active level, resolving upon their collective destiny, returning to the underlying potency of their historical possibilities so as to throw off the shackles of global technology pressing in on them in the shape of the two metaphysical superpowers.” He “saw in the Nazis a great national revival that rejected the selfish values of liberalism, bourgeois materialism and the Enlightenment for the sake of patriotism, courage, passion and daring.”

In his Rectoral Address of 1933, Heidegger therefore identified three “bonds” of Germany and its universities: labor service, armed service, and knowledge service. “Everyone…must serve the People,” not by bubbling together in an egalitarian stew, liberal or communist, but in accordance with these ranks, ranks obviously derived from the three classes Socrates enumerates in the Republic—the laborers, the guardians, and the philosopher-kings. Plato’s regime, established on a properly historical instead of a rational-natural basis, has or can become the reality of the Nazi regime. In addition, the myth of “the autochthony of the best regime” Socrates upholds in that dialogue now becomes the reality of Germany for Heidegger—the rootedness of Germans in their soil, their territory. What Socrates presents with irony and playfulness become German-all-too-German indeed—literally and humorlessly actual. “In Platonic terms, Heidegger employs philosophy to liberate thumotic boldness, aggression and zealotry from any boundaries whatever.” Having deprecated reason, Heidegger leaves “knowledge service” as a mere instrument of armed, self-exalting manliness and abandoning gentlemanliness. “By identifying the meaning of rationality with modern instrumental utilitarianism, and even tracing this back to classical metaphysics as its inevitable working out, Heidegger cuts himself off from the Platonic conception of manliness as an ordered harmony of reason over the passions sublimated as virtues like courage and honor-seeking.” This is no aristocracy, Newell remarks, “but something more akin to the Red Guards” of Maoist China. For Plato, all great things are precarious; for Heidegger, all great things partake of Being’s primordial storm, issuing in the rule of Storm Troopers. Being isn’t eidos but polemos, war. [3] This again recalls Heraclitus, but a Heraclitus who has seen the stultifying hazards of Being’s centuries-long reification.

And so, despite his rejection of racist nationalism for a linguistic nationalism, despite conceiving of Germans as a language group rooted in a specific “soil” or territory, Heidegger would never express any regret for his collaboration with Nazism. His claim of Nazism’s “inner truth and greatness,” as supposed by himself, overrode all qualms about such enormities as the Holocaust and the World War. He did see, eventually, what is obvious to almost any other person who looks at the Nazis: they were as much enamored of modern science and technology as their enemies in Russia and America. Accordingly, he predicted that the world headed for an even more momentous cataclysm than the Nazis had wrought. His German contemporaries, having failed to live up to that inner truth and greatness, “have as yet no inkling of the catastrophe that has engulfed them,” he lamented, after the German surrender. 

In his 1947 Letter on Humanism, Heidegger looks back on the German politics of the past two decades. He now distinguishes between “nationalism” and “homeland.” Nationalism is the twin of the modern state, aiming at the same thing: “domination of external reality.” The modern state is part of the modern project of scientistic reification, in this case the reification of a people’s “longing for a homeland,” a place where a people can live according to the particular being their founder derived from Being. The internationalism of such postwar entities as the United Nations merely yokes together “otherwise unrelated national subjects under a cosmopolitan veneer aiming for an ever more dreary, alienating and oppressive world-state”—Hegelianism triumphant. Given the Nazi catastrophe, Heidegger “turns away from any further explicitly political commitment” without rejecting his previous claim that Nazism’ “inner truth and greatness” justified Hitler’s founding. 

In modernity, the technologist has triumphed over the craftsman. Technology has nearly completed its task of treating all reality external to Man as a “standing reserve” for human exploitation. Even human beings themselves “become part of the standing reserve” in the latest permutation of Being. Whereas technology seeks to dominate all things external to man, and even those things internal to him, “the craftsman does not so much produce things ex nihilo as he ‘lets be.'” He is open to Being, allowing it to run through him and into the things he makes. The things he makes themselves let Being run through them like the wind that causes the windmill to turn. Nonetheless, even in its triumph, technology does not really escape the Being it seeks to control. By turning Man against himself, by turning men themselves into part of its standing reserve, technology makes the crisis more and more acute. In this sense, “technology is the history of Being,” having “been the destiny of Being from the outset.” In its sheer oppressiveness, technology “might itself spark the return to Being” by intensifying Man’s anxiety; a “hitherto unprecedented degree of alienation and despair establishes the possibility of an unprecedented degree of freedom and fulfillment.” By “dissolving all fixity so that everything is converted into the energy of standing reserve, technology itself at length makes us challenge” the false metaphysics that has afflicted Man for millennia, finally “provid[ing] a liberating insight” into the impermanence of the everyday.” Newell suggests that this is why Heidegger refused to regret the Holocaust (“any more than the fire-bombing of Dresden, the Battle of Stalingrad and Hiroshima”). Such enormities must happen, if Man is to come to his senses and draw back from technology. “There are no enduring transtemporal standards by which to judge good and bad conduct.”

In this way, Heidegger on technology resembles Marx on capitalism; the worse it gets, the better, the more human consciousness may be raised. May: technology may defeat Man, reduce him “to pure energy for the endless transformation of existence.” But if humanity finally sees the full horror of technological oppression, we may pull back from our ambition to become “Lords of the Earth” (“a Nazi slogan taken from Nietzsche”), understand the full horror of technological oppression, open our eyes to the tyranny of the metaphysical dualism that threatens to reduce us to the condition of standing reserve.  Man might then instead become the “Shepherd of Being”—tending to all beings, caring for them, letting them be themselves. If we do become shepherds, that will be “a millenarian deliverance in which nothing will be the same as before.” While this hope may resemble Hegel’s end of history, Marx’s communism, and Nietzsche’s Third Metamorphosis, “Heidegger goes much further than any of them in his repudiation of the present.” Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche all subsumed the history of being into the ends they envisioned; not so, Heidegger, who regarded all human history since the archaic age to have been an alienation from Being, a fall from Being’s true character as originator of all beings. His Third Age does not synthesize all that has come before, as in Hegel and Marx, nor does it esteem the successive deepening of “the type, Man” as Nietzsche does, the coming of the all-redeeming Overman. The Man of Heidegger’s Third Age, if it comes, will be “the Shepherd of Being, rejecting all of human history except its origin and letting things be instead of attempting to dominate and reshape them.” [4] “For Heidegger, reason’s insufficiency for explaining human existence can never be exposed by reason itself, but only by its dismantling and silencing, the ‘end of philosophy’ and its replacement by ‘thinking’ as ‘thanking,’ a silent act of piety for the ‘furrows’ of Being that cross into us.” In the famous dictum Heidegger offered near the end of his life, “Only a god can now save us.”

Newell criticizes Heidegger’s claim that technology lurks in the recesses of classical metaphysics. Aristotle’s elaboration of the four causes of beings doesn’t ‘privilege’ the efficient cause; the ‘final’ cause, the purpose of a being, “solicits and elicits” the other causes. There is no suggestion that nature can or should be conquered by technē. “Efficient cause is the least significant of the causes because it is merely the means by which reason brings about its purpose. The elevation of efficient cause over the other causes takes place only through the assimilation of efficient cause to the creative power of God over nature as chief artificer effected by Christian theology, later transferred…by Machiavelli and Hobbes to the secular human agency of the Prince or Sovereign.” Similarly, in his four-volume study of Nietzsche, Heidegger abstracts from the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, concentrating his attention solely on the Will to Power. As Newell has already shown, “Nietzsche did not conceive of willing to be its own ground, but understood it to be grounded in an interplay between man and Being in which Life solicits man to will her interpretation in order that Life can come to presence as the manifold values exhibited throughout history.” Newell doubts that Heidegger finally cares whether he has ‘gotten it right’ in his exegeses of his philosophic predecessors. If you are intent on allowing Being to speak through you, exegetical correctness is rather beside the point.

Who or what, then, is this god Heidegger hopes will save us? And if the Shepherd of Being is a “quietistic” being, one must still “wonder what transitional means this god…might have to employ in order to bring about” what Heidegger calls the “astounding” transformation he will effect. The Shepherd will (or won’t) reveal himself. God is “radically apart,” approached through “a mystical experience” not rational prediction. No theology, whether Thomistic or Hegelian, can anticipate such a return of Being. 

Very well then, can Heidegger’s “ontology of Being” be questioned within the field of its own assumptions? This is what Leo Strauss did, asking (in Newell’s paraphrase), “What justifies Heidegger in the first place in identifying anxiety as the fundamental human relationship to the whole? Why could it not at least as justifiably be love, whether of God or of wisdom,” Platonic eros or Christian agape? (Indeed, the Old Testament itself maintains that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom but not its culmination.) We should ask ourselves, “what moves us more profoundly: Anxiety or Love?” It may be recalled that one of Strauss’s earliest books was a study of Hobbes, who makes much of the fear of violent death; Strauss is known for his critique of ‘the moderns’ on this and many other points.

Heidegger shares with his historicist predecessors the claim that Being is immanent in the course of events. Within a century of its inception, however, Hegelian historicist rationalism “had been displaced in the academic world” Hegel himself inhabited and animated for several generations by “the comeback of modern dualism and its separation of rationality from experience,” as seen in neo-Kantianism, “which located reason in a contentless ethical and analytical formalism standing outside of history,” and in the form of Weber’s distinction between facts and values (itself a reprise of Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’), leading to the moral relativism of ‘social science.’ What Hegel had sought to synthesize his academic successors sought to separate. “Heidegger aimed to salvage the traditional role of reason in the West as guiding our choices by completely historicizing it” or, as “a critic might argue, by destroying it altogether.” He folded reason into history, making it “entirely historical, temporal and immanent.” This does not descend into relativism because “not every historical setting or people was suitable for posing the question of being.” Archaic Greeks and modern Germans were the suitable ones, thanks not to their biological race but to their language, which opened their consciousness to the flow of Being.

“Heidegger is the last of the group who, like Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, offered a complete and absolutely comprehensive teaching providing a unified account of life on every level—individual, communal, political, psychological, moral and aesthetic—within an overarching ontological framework claiming to possess the absolute truth about the whole (Spirit, scientific socialism, the Will to Power, the ontology of Being).” Because the politics issuing from all of these comprehensive historicisms issued in political ‘totalitarianism’ or modern tyranny, and because the doctrines themselves have seemed finally too ambitious, too sweeping, too riddled with dubious assumptions and claims, later historicists have pulled back from them. “No one aims for this kind of comprehensiveness again.” Newell turns to a consideration of Habermas’s critical theory (which leans toward Hegelianism), Foucault’s postmodernism (which leans toward Nietzsche), and Gadamer’s hermeneutics (positioned between Hegel and Nietzsche)—all fragments of the Philosophy of Freedom. 

Newell offers some cogent summary remarks on the Philosophy of Freedom. “Rousseau initiated the great countermovement against bourgeois materialism and the smallness and venality of modern political life, but because he did not reject the modern account of nature and reason, these aggressive passions could only be defended because they were irrational.” Only the passions seemed ‘free.’ That is, he associated reason precisely with bourgeois materialism and modernity’s political pettiness and so could not elevate calculation to the level of prudence. “After Rousseau’s bifurcation between freedom and reason the only hope for moderating these aggressive passions lay in a belief in the rationality of the progress of history,” whereby the mediation of the Spirit’s dialectic replaced moderation, the classical virtue reason made possible. That is, reason animated by what Hegelians eventually called ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis’ dialectic, held to be immanent in the course of events, replaced natural, prudential reason or statesmanship. “But the underlying historicist ontology of existence as spontaneous ‘self-origination,’ of (to cite Heidegger) existence as Heraclitean strife or war, upon which the Hegelian dialectic had been erected, eventually blew up and swept away the simulacrum of moderation that Hegel believed was provided by the teleological progress of history, a belief systematically dismantled by the critiques of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that culminated in philosophy standing aside and letting youthful passion roar out of its box. The central liability of historicism as regards the progress of history, is that in order to rescue honor-seeking from the psychological reductionism of liberal materialism, it could not avoid defending it as irrational.” Although the Philosophy of Freedom stands as a reminder of what merely utilitarian rationalism costs the human soul, the dilemma it causes in its way of redressing that cost remains with us today, albeit in less philosophically interesting but perhaps as morally and politically injurious forms seen in critical theory and postmodernism.

 

Notes

1. Werner J. Dannhauser: “Friedrich Nietzsche.” In Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, eds.: History of Political Philosophy, Third edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
2. In his post-World War II book, Origin of Artwork, Heidegger “attempts to render a poetic, noncausal account of art—that is, an account of art showing that making, poesis, comes at least as close to conveying the self-origination of Being as metaphysics. Plato’s Socrates argues that a poem or other work of art is imitative, something twice removed from the real thing. A drawing of a boot imitates the real boot, which imitates the idea of the boot in the mind of the bootmaker. Heidegger demurs, contending that Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant boots reveals more than a display of actual boots or even a photograph of them, “connect[ing] us” as it does “to the peasant’s enveloping environment of soil, wind and labor.” The painting brings us what Heidegger calls the “presence” of the boots; “the painting is as close as can be to their source in being as origination, closer than the actual boots themselves.”
3. This is very reminiscent of Heraclitus. But Heidegger suggests that even “the Pre-Socratics themselves…may have already harbored the seed of metaphysics” in “their evanescent distinctions between being, becoming and appearance, and in any event, they were not strong enough to resist” the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle.
4. The poet Ezra Pound, who had much the same experience with Italian Fascism as Heidegger had with Nazism, concluded his Cantos by writing, “I have tried to write Paradise. Let the wind speak. That is Paradise.” In popular culture, looking at things from the egalitarian Left, John Lennon famously sang, “Let it be.”