Bruno Quélennec: Retour dans la caverne: Philosophie, politique et religion chez le jeune Leo Strauss. Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2018.

 

Admired and decried in his adopted American home, Leo Strauss has enjoyed a more favorable reception in France, thanks in large measure to the kind and perspicacious Pierre Manent, who shares Strauss’ intention of defending natural right against its enemies, ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern.’ Bruno Quélennec enters the fray as a critic of Strauss from the ‘Left,’ but does so much more intelligently than North American Leftists have done, attempting to understand Strauss’s though in its own terms before condemning it in the name of egalitarianism and democracy.

As Quélennec explains, in the past several decades Strauss has been (mis)understood as the progenitor of ‘neo-conservativism,’ despite his near-total avoidance of American political debates; illiberal, authoritarian-to-fascistic, and (most wildly) ‘La Rouchite,’ the Strauss depicted by the American Left was a very bad sort, indeed, somehow responsible for enormities ranging from Goldwaterism to the Second Gulf War. Central to this argument is a 1933 letter Strauss wrote to a friend in which he called for a sort of Unpopular Front consisting of the several right-wing Continental European regimes, including Mussolini’s Italy, to array itself against Nazi Germany. Having despaired of liberal democracy—already ruined in Germany, tottering in France—and shrinking from the Leninist-Stalinist regime in Russia, which he had rightly identified as malevolent the moment it appeared, Strauss shared with Winston Churchill the soon-to-be-disappointed hope that the ‘old’ Right might stand up and contain its radical challenger. From the Stalinists of the 1930s to the resolutely egalitarian ‘postmodernists’ of today, the Left is not amused.

Quélennec examines Strauss’s writings before and after the Nazi revolution, focusing particularly on his critique of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, “modern liberalism.” In the decade before 1933, Strauss saw the liberalism of Germany’s Weimar Republic in crisis, challenged both philosophically by critics of the Enlightenment thought upon which it was based and practically by the ideological Jew-hatred which set itself against the “liberal model of German-Jewish emancipation.” to do this, Quélennec begins with an incisive account of that model and of the Enlightenment thought behind it, as understood by prominent Jewish intellectuals of the time criticized by Strauss, particularly Julius Guttmann, Herman Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. Quélennec rightly understands Strauss not as an ideologist bending philosophy to political ends but rather as a thinker engaged first of all in the thought of his times in order to study its philosophic underpinnings, and only then to “return to the Cave” (Plato’s familiar image of life in the political community”) in order to defend the possibility of the philosophic way of life in that constrained, dimly-lit circumstance. Quélennec provides “a sort of map” of the German-Jewish regions within that cave, first of all in the pre-republican German regimes between 1780 and 1918. In the early decades of that period, German Jews were excluded or ‘ghettoized’ economically, socially, and politically; emancipation was intended to make “morally corrupt” (allegedly usurious and religiously prejudiced) Jews better, that is, more like German Christians. Jews were expected to ‘assimilate’ with Germans, free themselves from Jewishness.

Many Germans were having none of this. Modern anti-Semitism arose, often led by ‘Left’ Hegelians (eventually including Karl Marx, no Aryan), who associated Jews with capitalism, but more usually by nationalists, who especially detested Jews from eastern Europe who had fled pogroms in Russia and Ukraine. Whereas the old Jew-hatred bespoke religious bigotry, the new Jew-hatred registered racial prejudice (animated by ‘race science’) and a sort of democracy (resentment of Jewish ‘elites’ in finance and commerce). The more assimilation progressed, the more virulent anti-Semitism became, leading to controversy among German Jewish intellectuals in the years prior to the First World War. One response, political Zionism, judged European anti-Semitism “incurable”; in his 1882 book, Autoemancipation, Leon Pinsker maintained that “liberalism could not fulfill its promises of liberty and equality,” that Jewish must establish their own national state on some other continent. Political Zionism’s leading thinkers, Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, argued respectively for a “statist Zionism” (secular, nationalist, anti-socialist) and a “muscular Zionism” (anti-liberal, anti-progressive, anti-bourgeois). Another response, cultural Zionism, founded by Ahad Hasam and propound famously by Martin Buber, regarded political Zionism as unrealistic and rejected nationalism in favor of “a universalist and pacifist ethic.”

Neither political nor cultural Zionism could stop Jew-hatred, which increased during the war and found an early, murderous expression in the 1922 assassination of Walter Rathenau, the German-Jewish Foreign Affairs minister of the Weimar Republic. At the same time, Weimar saw a “Jewish Renaissance,” a “return to the Jewish religion” led by Cohen and Rosenzweig. Both men attempted to resolve the ‘Jewish problem’ with grand philosophic syntheses. The neo-Kantian Cohen combined the “prophetic ethic” of the Bible with Enlightenment themes, all to be safeguarded by democratic socialism within the Jewish community (he was a firm anti-statist). Rosenzweig, also a neo-Kantian, came down on the “liberal-imperialist” side of modern politics, although his ‘imperialism’ was entirely pacifistic and anti-statist, consisting of a belief in the evolution of all European nations toward peace and equality, an evolution to be spurred by the unification of Germans throughout Europe, who would thereby establish a benign hegemony over the Continent. He saw the Great War rather a Woodrow Wilson did: the harbinger of the Kantian version of the end of History, resulting in a League of Nations (to be dominated by Germans, not Anglo-Americans) whose members would make war against one another no more. With the German defeat, the undaunted Rosenzweig formulated a “new synthesis,” this one combining the high-enlightenment rationalism of Kantian and Hegelian ‘idealism’ with a ‘subjectivist’ or ‘perspectivist’ theology: “They complement one another, Rosenzweig averred. This time, not Germany but the Jewish nation would serve as the catalyst for change, as its longtime statelessness provided a model for the world’s peaceful future. In sum, both Cohen and Rosenzweig affirmed Jewish “self-emancipation, but [in] a religious, not Zionist form.

At these new forms of messianic utopianism the young Strauss raised a skeptical eyebrow above a cold, clear eye. In what would become characteristic of his thought throughout his life, Straus spurned attempts at combining opposites in grand syntheses; he ‘divided the house’ between national/secular Jews and universalist/religious Jews, between “radical atheism” and “religious orthodoxy.” He sided with Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism, a political realist with no patience for utopianism who advocated Jewish national unity, corporatism, military discipline, the rapid colonization of Palestine, and a sharp rejection of Orthodox Judaism as quietist, subservient to the despots of eastern Europe. Resolutely tough-minded when thinking of practical politics, Strauss praised Theodor Herzl for his clear-eyed geopolitical realism and did not hesitate to propose an alliance of Zionism with neither Orthodox Jewry nor Italian fascism but with German liberals, who equally rejected submission to the divine Law while advancing religious freedom.

This notwithstanding, Strauss interested himself much less in the practical side of Zionism as in Zionism as an instance of the “theologico-political problem”—that is, in Zionism’s theoretical implications. He expressed this problem in a paradox: there could be no Jewish nationalism without the (atheist) Enlightenment which—in its non-universalist form—valorized nationalism over the universalism of the revealed religions; however, without religion, there can be no Jewish people, ‘Semitism’ (and therefore anti-Semitism) being an excrescence of pseudo-science. Therefore, one must choose, and Strauss chose political Zionism, calling for “a strictly atheist and Zionist appropriation of the biblical text.” The liberalism, humanitarianism, and assimilationism of Enlightenment emancipation—that is, the universalist form of Enlightenment—had proved a weak reed, as had the German state which was supposed to guarantee it. Jews must face facts, abandon their utopian-socialist illusions whether purely secularist or ‘synthetic,’ understanding that they are not now and never will be Germans; in this, the anti-Semites are right, even if their malevolence i wrong; political societies are by nature exclusive, limited to the like-minded. Jews and Germans are not like-minded; absent thorough assimilation, they must separate. Quélennec objects, arguing that given the pogroms of 1922-24, any call upon German Jews to abandon their historical rights to German citizenship was “absurd.” But of course Strauss wasn’t calling upon Jews to abandon their rights; he called upon them to go someplace where they could secure them.

Be this as it may, one cannot read Straus’s writings of the 1920s without recognizing how Zionism spurs his mind to thought much more than to action. “The central opposition which haunts the texts of the young Strauss is that between ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief.'” Indeed, Strauss concurred with Goethe’s judgment, that the “struggle between unbelief and belief” constitutes “the eternal and sole theme of the entire history of the world and man.” Against “unconditional submission to Jewish law,” affirmation of certain “fundamental dogmas” creation, miracles, providence) Strauss opposed what looks to Quélennec very much like the Nietzschean claim (itself borrowed from the Protestant Bible scholar Julius Wellhausen) of Judaism as originally a form of nature-worship, and thus potentially a pathway to the rational study of nature, to philosophy. On this basis Strauss could claim that Zionism, aiming at the founding of a state based on natural principles, could be reconciled with Judaism in its original form, a nature-religion opposed and buried by priests. This would overcome the impasse of Jewish nationalism. It would require the formation o a Zionist elite who would hold up Judaism as a civic religion for the Jewish ‘masses,’ obviating the need for “a democratic politics,” which was proving itself impotent against proponents of tyranny ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in 1920s Germany.

By the 1920s Strauss thus had established himself as an astringent critic of the ethics and politics of sentimentalism. It would be too much to call him a philosopher, yet, but his no-nonsense refusal to tolerate slovenly thought, sentimental moralism, and the wishful thinking resulting from them impelled him to an ascent from the ‘cave’ of the Weimar regime generally, and from its Jewish (and, as he saw it, insufficiently Judaic) milieu in particular. In the second half of the decade he began to turn away from “the political struggles of his time,” beyond the nationalist-Enlightenment critique of Orthodoxy as revised and radicalized by Nietzsche and toward a critique of the Enlightenment itself. For that, he turned to the study of Spinoza. Cohen had criticized Spinoza for his “aristocratic” concept of philosophy, for his naturalistic ethics founded not on divine law but on “the right of the stronger,” for his irreligious denial of prophetic inspiration, and for his use of revealed religion for merely civic purposes. “For Cohen, Spinoza totally lacked the universalistic dimension of Judaism, which was illustrated by the rabbinical doctrine of the Noachide [commandments], the source of modern natural right,” as Cohen thought. Strauss defended Spinoza for attempting “to deliver philosophy from the tutelage of the Church and for reinforcing the republic” in Holland, which was under attack by Calvinists who justified absolute monarchy by citing the Old Testament. Cohen failed to look at Spinoza in his political context, that is, as a ‘politic’ as well as political philosopher. Further, Cohen ignored the contradiction between Judaism and his own neo-Kantianism, itself an Enlightenment-based philosophy decisively inflected by Spinozist thought.

As he concentrated more carefully on Spinoza’s philosophy itself, however, Strauss began to think of “the modern critique of religion” not so much in historical terms but as a “philosophic problem.” Spinoza took aim at three adversaries: Orthodox Jews, who suspected philosophy as such of heresy; Maimonides, whose defense of philosophy before the bar of Orthodoxy remained mired in ancient Greek thought; and Calvinists, as hostile to philosophy as the Orthodox but anti-republican as well. Strauss rejects Spinoza’s critique of Orthodoxy because his critique of miracles presupposes that we have comprehensive knowledge of natural law; further, and in step with the Enlightenment generally, Spinoza sought to disprove Scripture by ‘crowding out’ divine providence with what Strauss would later recognize as the Machiavellian notion of progress—the use of reason to master fortune. This obviously leads to an infinite regress (how does one know that the scientific discoverer wasn’t aided by God’s grace?). Moreover, as Strauss puts it in a 1925 essay, science “knows nothing, and can now nothing, of all these things since it does not permit itself to believe.” This goes especially for modern “Bible science” which, like all modern science, is atheistic in principle. These weaknesses in Enlightenment arguments induced Enlighteners to supplement their critique with ridicule, replacing piety and prayer with irreverent jeering. Strauss found such antics unimpressive, writing, in his 1928 essay on Sigmund Freud, “If God’s thoughts are not the thoughts of men, and men’s ways are not the ways of God, then God’s thoughts and ways are not experimentally controllable; moreover, every attempt to justify directly by scientific means the denial of the existence of God is fundamentally deficient.” That goes for satire as well as science.

By contrast, in Spinoza’s estimation Maimonides is a fellow philosopher. But Maimonides concedes too much to biblical revelation, and his science consists of a now-discredited Aristotelianism. He has the wrong theological-political doctrine and the wrong philosophic doctrine. As Strauss observes, Spinoza sees that the new Cartesian science pays no respect to tradition, looking instead to the present and the future, regarding human thought alone to suffice for “the perfection of theory.” Contra Maimonides, no harmonization or even coordination of Scripture and philosophic theory need be attempted.

Much more firmly anti-rationalist than Orthodoxy (let alone Maimonides), Calvinism regards the Holy Spirit as the sole “necessary guide for the conduct of life,” as reason merely evinces human pride. Enlightenment science simply cannot address such a claim, much less refute it.”

Strauss finds Enlightenment philosophy as Spinoza and other neo-epicurean philosophers conceive it too ‘soft’ on religion, which is too ‘hard,’ stern and demanding, for epicureans of any stripe to withstand. “Biblical morality, as Strauss represents it, hardens the individual who has faith,” as seen in the example of Father Abraham, ready to sacrifice his own sons to his stern God. If atheism is to match faith, and overcome it, it must make itself equally stern. This is the dimension of Judaism Nietzsche praises. The young Strauss therefore joins Nietzsche in “valoriz[ing] all that which, in theism or atheism, favors the ‘hardening’ of man” against the mushy humanitarianism of Cohen and his predecessors. Strauss praises Hobbes as Nietzsche’s tough-minded forebear, deviser of “an authentically rationalist, atheist morality founded on fear” of death—that is to say, acknowledgement of grim reality far removed from ‘idealist’ illusions. But even Hobbes’s Leviathan, king of the proud, and Nietzsche’s new dawn of the Superman will not suffice: “the deification of mankind is no genuine atheism,” Strauss would eventually observe.

Quélennec tips his hand at this point, finding all of this “meager and superficial” compared to the thought of the young Marx, who bases his critique of philosophic idealism on the claim that class struggle underlies human ideas and the thought that produces them. But even the young Strauss had a refutation of Marxism well in hand, having shown that scientific materialism at the service of the human mastery of nature and fortune—the promise of all ‘modern’ philosophic doctrines including Marxism—can only ‘speak past’ claims of divine revelation, and never refute it on rational grounds. To his credit, despite his own neo-Marxism, Quélennec usually engages Strauss’s thought on its own terms, even while occasionally assuring his readers of his Leftist bona fides. In this he follows the young Strauss after all, who wrote, “Every author is measured first of all by the standard that he expressly acknowledges in his own work. The best way to dispose of an author is therefore to prove that he fails to achieve what he strives for.”

Having raised serious questions about the various contemporary attempts to ‘synthesize’ Judaism and Enlightenment philosophy and finding much of the latter inclined to soften human souls in a world that treats softness unkindly, Strauss turned away from Nietzsche and toward the philosopher many regard as the arch-idealist, Plato. What accounts for this turn?

Against such Straussian thinkers as Heinrich Meier and Michael and Catherine Zuckert, and indeed against Strauss’s own testimony, Quélennec regards the “turn” as “less a rupture with his engagement of the 1920s than a transformation of his mode of political intervention” [italics added]. Strauss, he argues, was forced into ‘Platonism’ by the final political crisis of the Weimar regime and the philosophic crisis it embodied. The Weimar Republic’s weakness stemmed not simply from liberalism’s softness, but more specifically from the incapacity of liberalism founded upon historicist philosophy to defend itself. The historicist claim—that all ‘epochs’ exhibit the ‘values’ of the persons who rule at a given time and place—results in a combination of moral relativism and sociopolitical anarchy incapable of defending itself. Historicist-relativist versions of liberalism cannot justify their own continued existence in the face of challenges mounted by would-be rulers who despise the liberal ‘values’ of egalitarianism and toleration—not incidentally the moral claims enabling the liberation of Jewry. Whereas initially, in the nineteenth century, historicism had resulted in nationalism (to each nation its own values), which led to German unification and strength, in the twentieth century a radical, Nietzsche-inspired historicism led to moral crisis and indeed to German defeat in the Great War, a view Strauss unknowingly shared with a then-obscure French army officer, Charles de Gaulle. [1]

To understand this radical historicism, Strauss examined the thought of Carl Schmitt, the proponent of a “political existentialism” pointing (very hard-headedly indeed) to the distinction between friends and enemies and the ensuing struggles to the death of friends with their enemies as the essence of politics and the revelation of the truth about human life. There isn’t a trace of epicureanism, or even eudaimonism, in Schmitt; he is no fuzzy-headed liberal. But, as Strauss sees, the confrontation of friends and enemies reprises Hegel’s struggle for recognition, a standard feature of historicist liberalism with its attendant desires for peace with liberty—the happy ending of mutual respect among the combatants. In asserting a ‘pessimistic’ account of the Hegelian dialectic, Schmitt offers only a ‘photographic negative’ of such liberalism. Whether pacifist or bellecist, historicist thought incorporates the Biblical and especially Christian themes it claims to overcome or at least to ‘synthesize’ within a grander ‘system.’ Recalling the imagery of Plato’s Republic and the aspiration of the philosopher to escape the ‘cave’ of political opinion and to ascend to rationally-discoverable truth, Strauss began to describe revealed religion as another nook in the cave, harder for philosopher to escape than the outer rooms, and then to see that historicism was a second cave beneath that enlarged cave. Instead of ascending to the light of the sun, philosophers were becoming more and more profound. But only in the sense of digging themselves a deeper hole. 

This meant that to philosophize under conditions of radical historicism Strauss could not just go ahead and ‘do philosophy,’ as professors like to say, but engaged in historical scholarship with respect to philosophy, revisiting the “historical problem.” Intended as a “corrective” to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which failed to overcome Biblical revelation or “theological absolutism” rationally, historicism, in incorporating or ‘synthesizing’ Biblical principles with those of Enlightenment rationalism, had produced “the illusion of a liberation from illusion,” not overcoming revelation but allowing itself to become parasitical on it. There remained “a fragile line of continuity” between Christianity, the Enlightenment, and historicism, “each position constituting itself in polemical negation of the preceding one,” each as dogmatic at its core as the other.

Seeking to indict Strauss of failing to overcome his Nietzscheism of the 1920s, Quélennec charges that “to Christian modernity, linked historically to a project of intellectual and socio-political emancipation, Strauss would oppose another model of secularization and emancipation,” namely, a philosophic emancipation found in Platonism, approached via Maimonides. As Strauss explains in his 1935 study, Philosophy and Law, Maimonides confronted Christianity without having recourse to modern rationalism in either its Enlightenment or its historicist forms, finding ‘classical’ or Platonic rationalism (and not the Aristotelianism he apparently relies on) adequate to the task of addressing the challenge of revealed religion. “The moderns, from the radical Enlightenment to radical historicism, have wrongly universalized a limited and historically situated combat,” systematically confounding ‘natural’ opinion and ‘religious’ prejudice.” To distinguish such prejudice from such opinion will enable philosophers to ascend not to the ‘sunlight’ of truth outside the cave but to the first cave, reestablishing (as Strauss puts it) “philosophy in its natural difficulty” as the first step toward reestablishing “natural philosophy” undistracted by prejudice. [2] 

Recurring to his neo-Marxist framework, Quélennec begins his final chapter with a quote from the famed neo-Marxist Louis Althusser, who denounces Plato as “this aristocrat” who “despises Athenian democracy,” proposing “a revolt against the course of things”—against ‘history’ defined as the course of events. In Althusser’s judgment, the philosopher-king merely represents Plato’s own “interests”—the “pride of philosophy.” (In this he echoes the critique of the Apostle Paul.) Quélennec begins more cautiously with Strauss, saying that Strauss defends the liberty of the philosopher against “the politicization of philosophy” seen in “modern thought from Hobbes to Marxism to existentialism,” but also against “apolitical” philosophy, the failure of many academic philosophers to begin their philosophizing with consideration of the images on the walls of the ‘cave’ of social and political opinion. But he quickly applies the Althusserian critique of Plato to Strauss, charging that Strauss shared the intention, the illusion of German conservatives, who intended to use Nazism a a bludgeon to end the liberal-democratic Weimar regime and to replace it with a “fascist, authoritarian, imperial” regime (as Strauss put it in a1933 letter to Karl Löwith), a regime he supported in principle, not merely as a political stopgap against the Nazis. At stake, then, is whether Strauss’s defense of rightist authoritarianism was a matter of principle as well as (im)prudence, and exactly what those principles were.

Strauss began with what Quélennec calls “a radical critique of Hobbes,” the founder of liberalism and therefore (despite his monarchism) of the modern ‘Left’ in political philosophy. Quélennec rightly disagrees with critics of Strauss who describe him as a neo-Hobbesian, inasmuch as Strauss rejects “modern philosophy” in principle. Strauss’s Hobbes endorses monarchy only as a means to enforce such liberal principles as modern natural right and contractualism against ecclesiastical and aristocratic authority. To put it in Quélennec’s neo-Marxist terms, Hobbes would replace the vanity of the old-regime ‘few’ with a bourgeois morality valorizing economics over politics. Strauss disputes Hobbes because Hobbes makes the human fear of violent death the summum malum of human life, substituting the securing of peace over the securing of justice, effectively making political philosophy instrumental to the presentation of life and no longer a quest for life’s purpose. Add the doctrine of materialism to this, and reason becomes a technique of rule instead of a means of discovering the principles that justify rule. This means that the ‘right to life’ trumps duties which hitherto had imposed limits on the state because those duties derive from realities that transcend the all-too-human: God and nature.

Strauss does not, however, recur to the old aristocratic celebration of courage, recognizing that Plato subordinates courage to reason; indeed, contemporary German nihilists had forgotten reason altogether. Instead, Strauss argues that “political authority” can only be “assured if it has a foundation outside itself, in a  transcendent and immutable order which is not in the free disposition of individuals.” Following the example of Plato’s Socrates, Strauss affirms the need for dialogue as the first step for philosophers, dialogue asking what justice is; the dialectical reasoning exhibited in such dialogues winnows out false arguments about justice, taking the abler participants closer to a glimpse of what justice is.

Fearful of the physical warfare that has arisen from just such dialectical struggle, Hobbes endorses a mortal and philosophic egalitarianism whereby no distinction between the philosophic ‘few’ and the unphilosophic ‘many’ remains. Because reason is impotent, the dominant passion of the ‘many,’ the fear of violent death, replaces the quest for justice as the foundation of politics. Sovereign power inheres no longer in the exercise of reason (including and especially its exercise in theological dispute) but in the exercise of will—the strong will of the sovereign. “Faced with the union of the ‘tyrant’ and the ‘masses’ in National Socialism, of which Jews living in Germany are the primary victims,” Strauss “responds not with a critical analysis of authoritarianism and of anti-semitism in its political and socio-political causes, but…with a radical negation of equality among men.” It is surpassingly odd that Quélennec ignores the way in which so many Marxists themselves treated their fellow men as if they were subhuman, murdering millions of them in the quest to eliminate the supposed political and socio-political causes of inequality. On the theoretical level, Quéennec joins his fellow neo-Marxists in praising Strauss’s critique of liberalism’s “pseudo-neutrality” and pseudo-objectivity,” but criticizes him for failing to to recognize the “socio-historical” conditions of all thought, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern.’ “The Straussian return to nature ‘forgotten’ by the moderns is itself constructing on a forgetting, the forgetting of society and history.”

Given the fact that Strauss concentrates his attention on the Platonic dialogues titled The Regime and The Laws, one must wonder how ‘forgetful’ of society Strauss really was. It rather looks as if the young Strauss consciously rejected historicist reduction of philosophy and politics to economic and social causes understood as the motors of ‘History.’ This may be seen even in Quélennec’s own account of Strauss’s approach to Platonism through the philosophy of Moses Maimonides. In studying Maimonides, Strauss concluded that the problem of Orthodoxy and Enlightenment must remain insoluble “as long as one clings to modern premises.” Strauss “puts Orthodoxy against modernity” in view of Orthodoxy’s firm endorsement of divine revelation as fundamental to Judaism. But Platonic rationalism as understood by Maimonides approaches revelation differently. But Orthodoxy and Plato center their understanding of political life on consideration of law, ultimately on the regime—the “concrete and obligatory order of life” in the political community, as Strauss puts it. Plato requires the philosopher first to make a dialectical scent from the ‘cave,’ the city, but then requires him to return and to submit to its laws even while continuing, cautiously, to philosophize. Maimonides stands with Plato on this, while adding the additional and crucial argument that the prophet, not the philosopher, is the true lawgiver, the one who has the imaginative capacity to communicate theoretical truths to ‘the many’ in a form they can comprehend. The prophet thereby serves as a link between philosophy and legislation, “a political function,” his laws aiming at the perfection of the individual, body and soul, and of the city as a whole. Judaic prophecy realizes what Platonic philosophy leaves in the realm of the (practically unattainable) ideas.

Where does this leave philosophers? While recognizing the divine law as the starting point of their inquiries, both Jewish and Muslim medieval philosophers reserved the right to interpret that law. In so doing, they also recognized the limits of reason, which cannot (for example) say whether the world is eternal or was created by God. they therefore contented themselves with indirect influence on the city—interrogating, interpreting, unifying, repairing the law in accordance with reason, establishing “a sort of State in and under the State, the ‘ideal’ State united in its disjunction with the ‘real’ State and the ideology which sustains it.” Philosophy is a ‘guide for the perplexed’ for the young and perplexed potential philosopher, who wonders about the divine law, its apparent paradoxes, and the difficulties of applying it in hard cases. Quélennec suggests that “many German philosophers” were similarly perplexed in the wake of the Nazi revolution; their “unconditional submission to the new regime often went together with a certain defense of the autonomy of the field [i.e., philosophy] in the face of direct interventions of the State in the functioning of the [academic] institution.” This was surely true of Heidegger, although not true enough; as for Strauss, it is only just to say that the moral and political content of Nazi law precluded any such submission, a refusal based precisely on the hyper-modern content of that law. Quélennec recognizes this much later, observing that Strauss criticizes the Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt for giving the ‘total’ law a folkish or democratic foundation and for endorsing the Führerprinzip. Strauss understands law as endorsed by the medieval philosophers as “a counter-model to Schmitt,” a “neo-aristocratic program which inscribes inequality of intelligences and capacities into Being.” This is partially correct, except for the “inscribed” part. Inequality of intelligences and capacities isn’t somehow imposed by philosophers upon nature; they recognize it in nature. This in no way precludes the more fundamental equality of human beings as members of the same species. Quélennec misconceives Strauss as attempting to found a “reactionary utopia.” Strauss had no truck with utopianism, ‘reactionary’ or ‘progressive,’ precisely because he was no historicist. He never assumed that ‘History,’ conceived as the course of events, is necessarily going anywhere. 

In what Quélennec calls Strauss’s first “Platonic phase”—1932-36—Strauss “linked the liberty of the philosopher to the submission to and justification of the authoritarian political order.” Obviously, in theory Strauss justified only “authoritarian” political orders founded upon the divinely revealed law as interpreted by philosophers; no modern regime of ‘the few’ qualified. Strauss did in practice justify authoritarian political orders in order to contain the Nazis, but that hardly means he endorsed them on the highest level. No less a defender of republicanism than Winston Churchill continued to hope that Mussolini’s Italy, the archetype of fascism, would either join in alliance with the commercial republics against Hitler or at least remain neutral, as Franco would do in Spain. In his second “platonic turn”—1936-38—Quélennec’s Strauss abandoned his claim that Maimonides limited reason with a prophetic-revelatory framework while adhering to Maimonides’ assertion of the political need for a prophet to address ‘the many.’ With his well-known distinction between esoteric thought and exoteric dogma in hand, Strauss now argued that the ‘esoteric’ teaching of Maimonides proved him no pious Jew but “a radical critic of religion”; Strauss adopted the same stance for himself. In practice this meant that Strauss “now describ[ed] the relation of philosophy vis-à-vis the political and religious authorities as purely defensive,” while in practice advocating not the rule of ‘the few’ but Aristotle’s mixed regime, with its compromise between the wisdom of the philosophers and the consent of the people. he also took up his claim that Plato intended his regime in speech as an ironic construct, never to be implemented in practice.

Quélennec rejects all that. In his reading of Strauss, the mixed regime was only an exoteric shell covering a call for American or “Anglo-Saxon” imperialism, or what Strauss calls (thinking of Churchill’s imperialism) a “decent hegemony.” Such an empire would be ensured by Straussian disciples practicing a “Gramscianism of the Right”—that is, a ‘long march through the institutions’ initiated in the graduate program at the University of Chicago, where Strauss spent most of the last two decades of his life. In pursuit of this alleged goal, Straussians eventually allied with ‘neo-conservatives,’ who (Quélennec rightly remarks) were not conservatives in the European sense at all but old-fashioned liberals. The proffered evidence of this is Strauss’s argument in Persecution and the Art of Writing: Some degree of persecution of politically heterodox views is natural in any political regime, including the relatively tolerant liberal regimes, because any regime must resist its most radical enemies. As far as Quélennec is concerned, this amounts to “philosophic endorsement” of McCarthyism and “Anglo-Saxon propaganda for the ‘free world.'” Although Strauss presents philosophers as persecuted, in his Rightist-Gramscian scheme they are really pulling the strings of the political figures who do the actual persecution of the regime’s enemies, discreetly defending Strauss’s “reactionary utopia.”

It should be unnecessary to observe that one need not be a ‘McCarthyite’ to support the identification and removal of foreign agents from the government of the United States. Further, Quélennec produces no evidence that the ‘neo-conservatives’ had anything to do with McCarthyism; since there is none, his silence is understandable. It should also be unnecessary to observe that the original, leftist, Gramscians propounded an equally ‘elitist’ vanguardism. So does the ‘postmodernist’ Left of today, which acts exactly as Strauss expected every regime to acting—lauding and hiring its friends, condemning and excluding its enemies. Regimes impose limits and elevate ‘elites,’ period; even democracy requires an elite, namely, the majority that rules. The charge that Strauss thereby endorses McCarthyism thus invites an obvious reply of tu quoque. As for those scare quotes around the Cold-War phrase, the ‘free world,’ it is noteworthy that Quélennec never so much as mentions Strauss’s exchange with the self-proclaimed Hegelian Soviet sympathizer Alexandre Kojève. In his one philosophic dialogue with a real ‘totalitarian’ thinker, Strauss stood on the side of liberty.

On the practical/moral level, Strauss also testified that the example of Churchill made him see that the republican regimes could still defend themselves; it was not only or event mostly as an imperialist that Churchill galvanized Strauss’s attention. That is where Strauss drew the line in practice, even as he drew it between himself and Kojève in theory, for the balance of his life. Every one of his students knew that. (As an aside, it might be added that Strauss regarded his students, or that they regarded themselves, as the core of a new, Nietzschean ‘planetary aristocracy’ can only be seriously entertained by someone who never knew those guys. Stanley Rosen, Harry Jaffa, and Allan Bloom lacked nothing in self-esteem, but there were limits to it.)

With this intelligent and stimulating essay, Quélennec climbs to the top of the substantial heap of scholars who charge Strauss and his students with elitism, authoritarianism, imperialism, and so on. With regard to “the young Strauss,” Quélennec most likely wishes that he had favored not an anti-Nazi coalition of ‘Rightist’ regimes or even an Anglo-American alliance based partly on assaults launched from territories within the British Empire, but the Popular Front strategy of the 1930s Left. Honorable men took this position, including George Orwell and André Malraux, but they also abandoned hope of ‘one big Left’ after the moral and geopolitical  realities of the Cold War sank in.  Quélennec hasn’t learned enough from them.

As for the more recent controversies, it is hard to resist the opinion that the ‘Strauss Wars’ have really amounted to not so much a critique of American foreign policy under the Reagan and Bush administrations as an attempt to discredit faculty colleagues in North America, Britain, and continental Europe. The struggle is unquestionably a political one, very much among academic ‘elites,’ over who will be permitted to teach students and thereby advance the political principles and policies of the regimes they favor. Plato was right about Socrates and Athens, philosophers and sophists, philosophers and demagogues, and from the universities of seventeenth-century Europe to the universities in the West today, such struggles continue. 

 

Notes

1. See Charles de Gaulle:  The Enemy’s House Divided. Robert Eden translation. Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
2. In this passage, Strauss does not mean “natural philosophy” in the sense of the pre-Socratics; he means rather philosophizing that begins in the polis, ‘the city,’ and ascends from there to insight into nature. 

 

 

Leo Strauss: On Hegel. Paul Franco, editor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Most readers of Strauss begin with Natural Right and History. There Strauss contrasts classical or ‘ancient’ political philosophy with ‘modern’ political philosophy. As Paul Franco remarks in his cogent introduction to On Hegel, “For Strauss the fear of violent death in Hobbes plays the same foundational role with respect to modern moral and political philosophy that radical doubt plays with respect to modern metaphysics.” Both radical doubt and fear of violent death derive “from distrust of nature”—to say nothing of God—rather than “grateful acceptance of it,” resulting in the characteristically modern philosophic attempt, instantiated in the technologies developed by modern scientists, “to actively control nature” instead of contemplating it.

In Natural Right and History Strauss remarks another contrast, one within the framework of this modern enterprise. Although the moderns would control nature, they nonetheless continue to appeal to nature, specifically human nature, as the source of moral and political right. In doing so, they also ‘lower’ the moral standard that human nature sets, inasmuch as they do not think very highly of human nature. Accordingly, thy replace the greatness of soul Aristotle upholds as the crown of ethical striving with the principles of self-preservation and acquisition. But these are still natural criteria for human conduct, down-to-earth though they are.

The tension between the attempt to conquer nature while upholding one part of nature, human nature, as the moral standard, heightens with Rousseau, in whom Strauss discerns a conception of human nature as being so malleable as hardly able to establish a usable standard at all. And so, Strauss argues, philosophers began to look elsewhere for a source of moral guidance. In the final section of Natural Right and History, Strauss finds in Edmund Burke’s celebrated denunciation of the French revolutionaries and their appeal to the natural “rights of man” a first attempt to derive right from “history”—meaning, the long course of human events which constitute the living tradition of a given people, or indeed of a given civilization. Strauss calls this new philosophic doctrine “historicism.”

Strauss’s selection of Burke as his specimen historicist may well puzzle his readers. Burke sometimes continues to profess natural-right principles and is in any event first and foremost a statesman rather than a philosopher. Just as puzzling, Strauss scarcely mentions G. W. F. Hegel, a philosopher par excellence, who elaborates an explicitly “historicist” doctrine in full and indeed systematic detail. [1]

Moreover, as Franco observes, there is a firm link between Hegel and Hobbes. “Hegel agrees with Hobbes on [the] foundational point” of modern political philosophy, locating “the origin of self-consciousness in the slave’s fear of violent death in his life-and-death struggle with the master”—the “struggle for recognition.” Hegel ‘historicizes’ the Hobbesian principle by putting it in the course of events, not in human beings as such. Under Hegel’s formulation, human nature can be as malleable as Rousseau said it was, without the consequent undermining of morality. Further, the modern project of controlling nature remains; indeed, the now-historical quest for human freedom from natural constraints makes possible not only (in Franco’s words) “the actualization of the best regime”—as Hobbes and Locke wanted to do—but (now going beyond Franco) makes his quest ‘nobler’ in its purpose than the low-but-realizable commercial monarchies and republics earlier moderns supposed possible. For Hegel, the modern state becomes not only useful but thoroughly rational to a degree even modern proponents of ‘Enlightenment’ though impossible.

Yet Strauss largely neglects Hegel in his published writings, with the exception of his exchange with the Hegelianizing Marxist and apologist for Stalin, Alexander Kojève, née Kojevnikov. That is, in the books and articles he published in his lifetime Strauss never addressed Hegel’s thought directly or in any detail. Between his accounts of Rousseau and Burke in Natural Right and History and his several engagements with Nietzsche, that grand historicist critic of Hegelian historicism, he leaves a hiatus, indeed a gulf. One wants to ask, ‘But Mr. Strauss, what about the master-historicist himself?’

We now have Strauss’s considered remarks on Hegel in the form of a well-annotated transcript of a graduate seminar on The Philosophy of History he conducted at the University of Chicago in 1965. Many of his classes were tape recorded by his students; typewritten transcripts of somewhat uneven quality have circulated for years as a sort of Straussian samizdat. In this seminar Strauss offered an interpretation of Hegel’s historicism remarkable not only for its acuity but for its equanimity. Far from a historicist himself, Strauss never descends to the level of polemical ‘critique’ so typical of latter-day adepts of ‘post-modernism.’ Indeed, he does not hesitate to correct students eager to judge Hegel too harshly and hastily.

An extraordinary caliber of students he did attract. We hear from “Mr. Shulsky”—Abram Shulsky, author of a study on Aristotle’s Politics and co-author of a standard text on the techniques of espionage; “Mr. Glenn”—Gary D. Glenn, long a mainstay of the political science department at Northern Illinois University; “Mr. Bruell”—Christopher Bruell, author of noteworthy treatments of Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle; and “Miss Heldt”—the redoubtable Catherine H. Zuckert, whose scholarship has ranged from Plato to Machiavelli to American novelists. On Hegel makes it easy to see why Strauss drew them to his classes. To l’esprit de géométrie and l’esprit de finesse he added l’esprit de politesse —a formal, old-world charm blended with witty use of American advertising slogans and news events in side-comments that obviously took his students by surprise, not expecting him to know about such things.

Strauss begins by asking: Why study Hegel “in our capacity as political scientists”? Because Hegel influenced Marx, whose latter-day disciples ruled a substantial portion of the world population at the time; because Hegel redirected intellectuals’ attention from the state to “culture” (and especially religion) “as the comprehensive theme of reflections of human society”; because The Philosophy of History consists of a series of lectures to university students, making its arguments “much more easy to follow” than those encountered in Hegel’s formal writings; and, above all, because “Hegel was the first to make the understanding of the history of political philosophy an essential ingredient of political philosophy itself.”

Strauss then introduces Hegel historically, without conceding anything to historicism as a philosophic doctrine. (“I am not a Hegelian, and I do not believe that one can say that history is rational.”) For example, he explains that “the simple formula of Hegel’s philosophy of history” is “order comes out of disorder without being intended.” In this he is obviously indebted to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” But Hegel “enlarged this” to encompass “the whole of history”; the moral sentiments Smith attributes to nature, and indeed nature itself, are reconceived by Hegel as part of a blind yet orderly movement, unfolding via rationally discernible laws, towards a fully “rational order,” one entirely conscious of itself as an order.

But how is it possible for the historically-determined philosopher to know that the ‘end of history’ has occurred? “Hegel was the first to face this difficulty: If the philosophy is the son of his time, how can he have found the eternal truth?” And Hegel’s general answer is: He can, if he lives in the moment “in which time as it were coincides with eternity,” if he lives in what Strauss calls the “absolute epoch” or “absolute moment” when the owl of Minerva not only takes flight but lands, the moment in which the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, has become wisdom itself. In this moment, the philosopher (it happens to have been Hegel, but that is of no importance) can solve the fundamental problem of Plato’s “dialectics of the ideas.” Platonic dialectic poses the problem of how the ideas, beings of a different order of being from the things we see around us, somehow generate those things? Hegelian dialectic, understood for the first time at the end of history, because of the end of history, reveals how this happens—why “the whole realm of ideas necessarily externalizes into nature on the one hand and mind on the other hand”—by the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit (which Hegel also calls “God), its dialectical work now completed. Hegel’s new theory of logic posits a dialectic that doesn’t merely catch opinionated folk in self-contradiction but rather works through contradictions, through the clash of contradictory opinions and actions (such as wars and factions) toward ever-grander syntheses of opposites, culminating in the final synthesis, the end of history. [2] With Hegel’s new logic, reason doesn’t simply discern contradiction; “reason thinks through contradiction.” In this, Strauss says, “Hegel surely is the most radical rationalist that ever wrote,” the one who understood reason as “something which is not merely a faculty of man” but instead subsumed all of being under the rubric of a reason not ‘above’ empirical reality, as in Plato, but as immanent in it, and immanent in the course of events in the empirical world. “God” isn’t transcendent but immanent. “There is nothing outside of reason, nothing which is not rational.” 

Politically, this means that political life is no longer architectonic, as Plato and Aristotle maintained. “The political life is part of a larger whole,” the life of the “collective mind, folk-mind”—a “culture” consisting of language, religion, arts, and (on the material side) natural descent, climate, and geography. “The folk-mind is the mediation between nature and mind.” No folk-mind dies but instead “becomes the matter for a higher principle embodied in another people”—a rational process in Hegel’s sense of the dialectical, namely, the clash of opposites leading to a new synthesis. In turn, “each folk-mind is a part, or facet, or stage of the mind, the world-mind” or Absolute Spirit, “and this is therefore a reconciliation between the universal and the particular.” It is also a reconciliation of good and evil, inasmuch as both are necessary elements of the world-historical dialectic. In this, Hegel satisfies himself that he has solved the theologians’ ‘problem of evil,’ while at the same time vindicating the religions, especially Christianity, as philosophically necessary steps toward full human self-consciousness or wisdom. His new dialectic also solves the philosophic problem posed by Hume, the problem of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ Contra Hume, at the end of history one can indeed see how the ‘ought’ derives from the ‘is,’ because what is has worked toward what ought to be, what must be, namely, the end or purpose of history.

These matters being so, after his philosophic introduction Hegel divides his lectures on the philosophy of history into four parts, each corresponding to a culture, a folk-mind: the Oriental world; the Greek world; the Roman world; and the Germanic world, wherein the historically-unfolding Absolute Spirit or World Mind has reached its culmination in Hegel’s comprehensive rational system. Even in ‘pre-history,’ in Africa, we already see the human intention to oppose itself to external nature in the practice of sorcery and even of cannibalism, which form parts of African religion. But Asia is where history proper began. In Africa and elsewhere, the sorcerer assumes that the world around him “remains subject to arbitrariness”—manipulable at his command; he is a radical ‘subjectivist.’ The Chinese were the first to understand the world around them as ‘objective,’ as having a stubborn reality of its own. But in making this advance, Chinese civilization (and Asian civilization generally) run to the opposite extreme. They lack “an inner sense, pointing in the right direction,” instead obeying the Emperor’s commands “as a matter of course” because they are supposed to be the “Mandates of Heaven.” this paternalism and its accompanying rule by administration, leads finally to cultural-political ossification, as “there is no life, so to speak, in the state. it all depends on the man at the top.” In such civilizations as China, India, or ancient Judea there can be no “science and political liberty” because while there is an understanding that the world has an objective integrity of its own, there is no sense of rational opposition of human beings to this given order. This (Strauss emphasizes) has nothing to do with biological racialism; he quotes Carl Schmitt as saying that “the moment Hitler came to power…Hegel died” in Germany.

India is superior to China in that for the Chinese the highest thing is “a visible heaven,” whereas Hindus “go beyond and peer through heaven, as it were, and discover a spiritual principle—nothingness as the ground of everything—and this is an act of liberation.” It is not a liberation of reason, but it is a precondition of reasoning. In Persia we see another advance. The Persians “view the whole historical process as a fight” between opposites, between light and darkness, goodness and evil. “The point is that this highest, the light, does not absorb the individual things or human beings but lets them be what they are; whereas for the Hindu, nothingness leads to the negation of the particulars, Nirvana.” The Persian insight provides a foundation both for dialectic and for individuation—not yet understood rationally, but posited.

Notice that as Hegel uncovers these gradual advances in human thought in Asia, he moves geographically closer and closer toward the West. Phoenicia is the next step, where a a people goes to sea, trading as far away as the British Isles, and therefore needing a plan, needing to engage in practical if not theoretical reasoning about how to survive at sea, pursuing an active way of life, industrious and not merely agricultural or ‘vegetative.’ what is more the Phoenician god, Adonis, dies: “The death of God is the highest point of Phoenicia, and Hegel implies that there is some connection between this concept of the death of God—that the negativity belongs to the spirit itself—and what he had said about the industrial character of Phoenicia.” Neither commerce and industry nor a religion in which God dies bespeaks a way of life settled in a condition of changelessness. It prefigures Christianity and the Cross. “In the Old Testament there is indeed for the first time the primacy of the spirit,” the Persian light now the first sign of a Creator -God, a god of freedom, superior to material ‘givenness.’ In this, Hegel takes up Burke’s distinction between the beautiful—the harmonious, the natural, the created—and the sublime—the creative, but also the suffering, the sacrificial, the dialectical—and this may be the link Strauss sees between Hegel’s progressivism and Burke’s traditionalism. “For Hegel, the true is radically distinguished from the beautiful and higher than it,” while for “Plato and Aristotle, somehow the true and beautiful coincide on the highest level, the ideas.” But they did not set out to conquer nature, only to contemplate and apprehend it.

Yet Asia still does not produce the rational. The rational came to light “in the free, joyful spirit of Greece,” in the Apollonian command, “man, know thyself.” In answering the riddle posed by the Asian sphinx, Oedipus “overthrew the sphinx from the rock,” liberating the Oriental spirit, “which Egypt had advanced so far as to propose the problem.” “The answer is “that the inwardness of nature is the thought that has its existence only in the human consciousness.” In the realm of historical action, the same transition occurred when the Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis, marking the limit of Persian imperialism, an imperialism that could never form itself into “a harmonious whole” and which now retreated against “Greek organization,” itself an expression of the liberated human spirit.

Hegel ignored the Greek understanding of art as imitation. Greek art, preeminently Greek poetry, is in his view rather a form of religion. “That is its peculiar greatness and freedom,” seen in the triumph of the Olympian gods over the old cthonic gods, Chronos and Ouranos. The freedom implied in art is not yet the full, modern freedom, as it retains what Hegel calls “an essential relation to some stimulus supplied by Nature,” something external to the human spirit. “Nevertheless,” Strauss says, “the freedom of the mind is recognized within these limits, and therefore Greece is higher than the Orient.” Among the arts practiced by the Greeks was rhetoric, the art of debate, the art of democratic politics, the nucleus of Socratic debate or dialectic. In negating traditional opinions and practices (and getting himself killed for it) Socrates and his dialectic still come from them, in some sense express them.

The defect of the Greek world is seen in the slavery that undergirds its democratic politics. For the Greeks, freedom consists of controlling the passions; they do not see that innate freedom of the human mind “by virtue of which every man is by nature free,” responsible, “and therefore an object of respect.” There is reason in Greece, but no “right of subjectivity,” no conscience—only the virtue of the self-governing citizen. The self-governing citizen shares in ruling the tiny polis; there is no central state, no sense of “a distinction between the people and the government,” and thus no realm of privacy, of personal subjectivity, and therefore of individual rights. Socrates provides the beginning of the salutary corruption of the Greek folk-mind by causing “the awakening of subjectivity.” But a fuller freedom of spirit, of conscience, and of individual rights must await the founding of Christianity.

But first came the conqueror of Greece—its dialectical opponent, Rome. Rome would eventuate in Christianity, “the complete break with naturalness” and its replacement (or at least displacement) in the Christian soul with Spirit. Before this though could occur, there needed to be a midway point; classical Rome provided this with the concept of personality. “Personality,” Strauss remarks, “is not individuality.” “The concept of personality is a legal concept”; in Rome, all men were understood to be “legal persons,” human beings with ‘standing’ in court. “Out of the full person of formal law there will grow the fuller individuality later on.” At the same time, legal standing in court implies conventionality, artificiality. The emphasis on the Roman citizen as a legal person comports with the fact that “Rome was from the outset not natural in any way; nor did it have the originality going together with naturalness.” On the contrary, it originated in fratricidal violence, the story of Romulus and Remus—a story, Strauss emphasizes, that the Romans told about themselves. “A nation which can tell this story about its own origin thereby reveals its soul,” whether the story is factually true or not.”

Rome “constitutes a progress beyond Greece” because “there is no longer the tutelage of nature which is in Greece,” no longer “the charming union of nature and mind which is charming and therefore also deceptive and untrue.” Rome’s origins were ugly and it ended in the ugly rule of emperor-tyrants. Rome had a civil religion but according to Hegel (following Machiavelli) it was a sham. The emptiness and misery of classical Rome was called ‘sin’ by Christians. And the sin it lived by—especially its unending, unjust imperial wars—aspired to universality, to worldwide empire. In attempting to save the old republic, Cicero wasted his time.” “Looking at this thing in hindsight,” Hegel “sees what wonderful things came out of this terrible Caesarism, namely, the emergence of Christianity and the modern world.”

Hegel’s “section of Christianity…is in a way the most important part of the whole work.” Roman imperialism brought the Romans to Transalpine Gaul, Germany, and Britain—to the Europe which would become the center of Christendom and then the center of modernity. Rome also prepared for Christianity by its universality of thought as well as action, by “purif[ying] the human mind and heart from all particularity because it recognized only the individual as an abstract legal person.” Christianity would take the Jewish claim that man is sinful, “wholly alienated from God and yet to be redeemed by God,” combine it with Roman universality while rejecting Rome itself as sinful, and finally give all of these themes a “visible, sensual certainty” by worshipping Jesus, “God’s son…incarnated as man.”

The final step will be the “spiritual” understanding of Jesus “as opposed to the carnal understanding,” that is, a fully rationalist form of ‘Christianity’ now purged of the miracles and the doctrine of sanctity or holiness. Science will replace miracles, mastering nature; immanence will replace the separation of Spirit and human nature. “The recognition of the rights of man, the recognition of the infinite value of the individual…this is the full realization of Christianity” according to Hegel. The rational Absolute Spirit replaces the Holy Spirit.

Strauss distinguishes Hegel’s philosophy of history from political philosophy. Political philosophy “was based from the very beginning on the difference between the good and the ancestral; the agathon and the patrium,” as seen in the second book of Aristotle’s Politics. To Plato’s Socrates, inquiring after the good in the Athenian marketplace by rationally testing the opinions of his fellow citizens, “the various forms of the ancestral” to which men characteristically appeal when struggling to define the good “are divinations or fragments of the good, and even souled fragments of it.” “Hegel says: No, there is an order among these ancestrals”—indeed, “an ascending order,” as they appear over the centuries. “Not only is the end toward which they point…rational, the way towards the end is itself rational” and therefore as necessary in its progress as a logical proof. “At the end there is complete reconciliation of reason and tradition” in the fully rational administrative state.

Classical philosophy was “cosmological,” “concerned with men within the cosmos,” with natural beings within the natural order. Changes in “human thoughts and human societies” were understood “within the cosmic context,” within nature as a whole. Well before Hegel, modern philosophy had rejected this. Hobbes asserts that “we understand only what we make, i.e., if we merely discover something, it is essentially unintelligible”; Descartes agrees, as for him “the beginning is the thinking ego, not the cosmos.” For the moderns, “the thinking, understanding subject is the origin of all meaning,” and the rights of man are “subjective rights.” As early as Machiavelli, one sees disdain for the “imagined commonwealths” of the ancients, pagan and Biblical—commonwealths said to be outside and indeed above men. Modern ‘subjectivity’ is, Strauss maintains, “the necessary but not sufficient condition of the discovery of history.” Modern ‘subjects’ or ‘selves’ consult their own desires and reach out to grasp, to manipulate, to control external nature, not to guide themselves by its laws or by some idea of the good discernible in it. This project of the conquest of nature is understood to be progressive.

“All of these kinds of things came together and made it compelling for man in the eighteenth century to say that the human mind necessarily progresses and its results necessarily spread. And then by the spread of knowledge the people become enlightened and opinion is changed; and if opinion is changed, power is changed, because power will now move in a different direction than it moved before it was enlightened.” This “altered the nature not only of political philosophy but of political life very profoundly.” Hegel synthesized all of these elements into his philosophy; this synthesis was the “absolute speech” in which Christianity, itself predicting the advent of a new heaven and a new earth, “becomes completely secularized,” instantiated by human rationality. “Christianity has become fully understood, i.e., religion has been transformed into philosophy by Hegel at the University of Berlin.” Similarly, the arts that once depicted the gods—whether Athena or Christ Pantocrator—are replaced by “philosophy, including science,” and especially the scientific art, technology, and by “the rational state, revealing itself in reasonable laws,” implemented in accordance with the principles of scientific administration. This is no longer political philosophy because it is no longer political—no longer an interplay of ruling and being ruled but instead a matter of consensual obedience to rational regulation. And it is no longer philosophy, either, but the wisdom for which philosophers had long searched but never found until the dialectic of the Absolute Spirit rested in Hegel’s fully rational and comprehensive system of thought and of action, now unified.

How would Hegel reply to what now calls itself ‘postmodernism,’ the refusal of the authority of the administrative state and indeed of reason itself? Hegel as illuminated by Strauss makes this quite clear: The ‘end of history is the peak of the roof, but the owl of Minerva which takes wing from it descends to catch rodents. From the heights, history has nowhere to go but down, or perhaps around. And so it has, into a democratized Nietzscheism for the Last Man.

 

Notes

1. For a step-by-step exposition of The Philosophy of History, see the five articles posted in the “Philosophers” section of this website.
2. See Stanley Rosen: G.W.F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), discussed in “Historicity and Reason: Two Studies,” on this website in the “Philosophers” section of this website.

 

Nicholas Maxwell: In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life. Montreal: McGill-Queens University, 2017.

 

Before Socrates, philosophers attempted to understand nature by direct observation. In doing so, they ignored the reputation of philosophy and of philosophers—soon considered at best odd and laughable, at worst dangerous to the city and deserving of exile or death. They also ignored the distortions to their own quest for wisdom imposed upon them by the opinions and customs of their political communities—unexamined assumptions that they had never considered philosophically. The polis endangered philosophy in two ways, one ‘external’ the other ‘internal.’ Externally, it threatened the lives and way of life of philosophers. Internally, it interfered with self-knowledge and therefore with the philosophic quest for wisdom; nonetheless, if considered carefully, political life might prove ‘epistemologically’ useful to philosophers. [1] By turning to political philosophy as the gateway to philosophy, by showing how philosophy might be both ‘politic’ and political, Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon showed how philosophers might better guard themselves from persecution while enhancing the philosophic way of life, refining its understanding of the nature philosophers had characteristically inquired into.

For more than a century, philosophy as practiced in academia has eschewed both political philosophy and the natural philosophy it corrected. Politics has been consigned to the realm of the irrational (‘values’) and sub-philosophical ratiocination (‘facts’ uncovered by ‘political science’). Nature has been consigned to ‘science,’ consisting of theorizing founded upon mathematics and of practical, empirical experimentation intended to test the theories mathematics generated and, when confirming them, to put meat on their bones. Maxwell sets out to redeem philosophy as originally understood, as natural philosophy. “The central thesis of this book is that we need to reform philosophy and join it to science to recreate a modern version of natural philosophy; we need to do this in the interests of rigor, intellectual honesty, and so that science may serve the best interests of humanity.” “The best interests of humanity” suggests politics, although not the real politics of existing political communities; it suggests the politics or quasi-politics of some future ‘world state,’ the politics of ‘globalism.’ At the same time, the task of defining “the best interests of humanity” might well lead some academic philosophers to a renewed version of the Socratic turn, once they see that there is no such things as “humanity” as a politically organized entity. Maxwell himself hasn’t quite seen that, yet, looking instead to an imagined future wherein “our immense global problems” can be addressed “in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, thus helping us make progress towards a good world—or at least as good a world as possible.” This best of all possible worlds might leave little room for politics as such, and, if so, might not be the best of all possible worlds. Or so a Socratic philosopher might suspect.

Maxwell does see this latter point when he looks around his own setting in a university—universities being eminently political institutions, where ‘ruling’ and ‘being ruled’ go on all the time. “We urgently need to reorganize universities so that they become devoted to seeking and promoting wisdom by rational means—as opposed to just acquiring knowledge, as at present” or, one might add, just advancing ideological dogmas, as at present in so many of them. This means regime change for the academy. “Academic inquiry needs to be reorganized so that its basic task becomes to seek and realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, thus including knowledge, technological know-how, and understanding, but much else besides.” The regime of the modern university remains Weberian, affecting “our very psyches” by “the way we split off reason and intellect from feeling and desire, fact from value, science from art.” As Socrates might put it, modern academic philosophy has taken the philo out of philo-sophia.

Modern science emerged from modern philosophy, and not always by turning away from political philosophy, as any reader of Francis Bacon will attest. Yet some of modern science at least seemed apolitical. Maxwell thus can assert, “Modern science began as natural philosophy,” as “one mutually interacting, integrated endeavor” aimed at “improv[ing] our knowledge and understanding of the universe” and “improv[ing] our understanding of ourselves as a part of it.” Natural philosophy made “profound” and indeed “unprecedented” discoveries then, in the seventeenth century, beginning with Galileo and Kepler, reaching its peak with Newton, ending with Locke. “And then natural philosophy died,” splitting “into science on the one hand, and philosophy on the other.” “But the two fragments, science and philosophy, are defective shadows of the glorious unified endeavor of natural philosophy.” This is “at root, a philosophical blunder” or series of such.

What made modern natural philosophy modern? Galileo affirmed the atomism of the ancient natural science of Democritus, founded on “the key metaphysical tenet” that “the universe is made up of atoms in motion or, more generally, of physical entities in motion whose physical properties can be depicted in mathematical terms.” By so doing, Galileo “invok[ed] a key paradox inherent in the new natural philosophy: on the one hand there is an appeal to observation and experiment, while on the other hand, the new (or revitalized) metaphysical vision of the universe—atomism, or the corpuscular hypothesis—tells us that perception is profoundly delusive,” since we can’t see atoms with ‘the naked eye.’ “This paradox, unresolved, played an important role in driving science and philosophy apart.” Where the ancient atomists were sure of themselves, the modern atomists were not. Perhaps with a glance over their shoulders at revealed religion, eminently sure of itself, modern atomists saw in their atomism a claim that rested too much on faith to be quite scientific but too much on observation of nature to be religious.

The sundering of philosophy from natural science did not and could not happen quickly because modern science needed philosophy; “natural scientists disagreed about crucial questions of method,” of how to go about the quest for knowledge, which is what ‘science’ means. “Should evidence alone decide which theories are accepted and rejected, or does reason play a role as well?” Like the ancient natural scientists, the moderns looked to the heavens rather than to the political regimes immediately before them, but in doing so they understood that “mathematics had an important role to play in science, along with observation and experiment.” Since “mathematical truths can be established by reason alone,” reason must “have an important role in science.” Modern natural scientists disagreed on what role that should be. Some held that “all knowledge comes through the senses, via experience”; reason plays the role of handmaiden to such ’empirical’ knowledge. Where, for example, does mathematics fit into Locke, that admirer of the eminently mathematical Mr. Newton? “Others—most notably Descartes and Leibniz—held that reason plays a vital role in natural philosophy,” developing new and powerful mathematical ways of knowing such as the calculus. 

These controversies had both intellectual and moral implications. Given atomism, “how is it possible for human beings to acquire knowledge of the universe”? And “how is it possible for people to be conscious, free, and of value if immersed in the physical universe,” a universe consisting of nothing but “colorless, soundless, odorless corpuscles which interact only by contact”—that is, randomly? In sum, how can I know? And how can I choose? 

Aristotle had answered these questions by positing four causes of natural effects: efficient, material, formal, and final. In his theory, “change comes about because objects strive to actualize their inherent potentialities, much as an acorn strives to actualize its potential to become an oak tree”; “purpose, goal-seeking,” ‘final’ causation “is built into the constitution of things.” Aristotle additionally claims that the earth, located at the center of the universe, exhibits “imperfection, change, decay,” none of which “observe precise, mathematical laws,” in contrast to the heavens, where “perfection, no decay,” prevail and “the motions of heavenly bodies” do observe precise mathematical laws.” In this sense the heavens are ‘above’ the earth both literally and in the sense of full self-realization. The new astronomy removed the earth from its cosmic centrality, seeing it as only “one planet among the others that encircle the sun,” partaking both of the mathematical precision observed in orbiting bodies. This means that “apparently wayward, haphazard terrestrial phenomena such as weather, growth, and decay, all occur, perhaps, in accordance with unknown, mathematically precise law.” At the same time, this also “may be taken to imply that since the earth is a part of the heavens, and imperfection, change, growth, and decay are everywhere apparent on earth, all this obtains on other heavenly bodies too.” ‘They’ are no better than ‘we’ are; as Tocqueville might have put it, modern science discovered that there is more democracy in the universe than Aristotle had thought. Begun by Copernicus, the culmination of the astronomical revolution culminates in Newton, via Kepler and Galileo (who, “more than any other single individual, was responsible for the demise of Aristotelianism”) and the adoption of the ‘mathematical’ understanding of nature, “or what we now call modern science.” If the moon has mountains and craters, if Jupiter has four moves revolving around it, where does that leave Aristotelian physics? [2]. No thoroughgoing empiricist, Galileo insisted that “physical objects and natural phenomena exhibit mathematical structure.” While appealing to “observation and experiment,” he equally insisted that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” and ultimately of simple mathematics, especially geometry. Empiricism and reason, experiment and mathematics: natural science. 

For his part, with the help of the calculus—the geometry not of stable forms but of changing ones—Newton “put forward the first fundamental dynamical theory of physics ever,” the theory of gravitation. His Principia of 1687 “demonstrated how his universal law of gravitation was able to predict and explain the motions of the planets, moons, and comets of the solar system, together with a wealth of other phenomena as well.” Universal: the law of gravitation prevails on earth as it does in the heavens, and it explains why “the motions of the moons and the planets must deviate slightly from perfect Keplerian motion due to mutual gravitational attraction—the final, devastatingly convincing evidence in support of Newtonian theory.” 

Newton made another natural-philosophic ‘move’ that had serious effects on subsequent philosophy. Asserting that he had derived his theory from observing the phenomena, he admitted (as he wrote) that he had “not been able to discover the cause of [the] properties of gravity from the phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.” In experimental philosophy, “particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.” The subsequent Enlightenment movement, advanced most notably by the French Encyclopedists, taught that “no longer do natural philosophers need to engage in fruitless debate about metaphysics, philosophy, epistemology, and methodology.” Indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth century ‘metaphysics’ had become something of a byword for fruitlessness, and not incidentally a means of dismissing revelation even as it narrowed the scope of scientific reasoning. Under this dispensation, “new theories, in order to be acceptable, must meet two requirements: they must accord sufficiently well with the new metaphysical view of the universe” (namely, an atomism whereby the behavior of atoms conforms to “precise mathematical laws”); and “they must meet with sufficient empirical success, as tested by “the empirical method of careful observation and experimentation.” Only by meeting these requirements will science be “an endeavor that seeks to make progress in knowledge,” although (as Maxwell cautions) this progress must not to be taken as inevitable or even good.

It is noteworthy that Maxwell himself pays no attention to the moral and political foundation of modern science in Machiavelli, namely, the invitation to conquer Fortuna or, as his follower Bacon put it, to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate. Even on his own, strictly ‘natural-scientistic’ terms, however, Maxwell shows that modern science makes a metaphysical assumption, an assumption that underlies its physics. “A central concern of this book is to demonstrate that empiricism is not enough. Science needs evidence and metaphysics.” And if so, “we need a new conception of science which acknowledges explicitly metaphysical assumptions of science so that they can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved.” He calls this new conception of science “aim-oriented empiricism,” a term which suggests that some form of teleology must be brought back into our understanding of nature and of science or knowledge of nature. The very notion of a scientific method itself suggests that there must be some telos the method aims at, and that there might be madness in one’s method, or sanity, because of that.

Maxwell next considers modern natural science in more detail. As noted, Newton “makes the amazing claim to have derived his law of gravitation solely from the phenomena by induction,” a claim that led eventually to the abandonment of natural philosophy, its split into ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ begun in the eighteenth century and effected thoroughly by the nineteenth. But Newton has a method, his “rules of reason,” all of which “concern simplicity or unity” and “in effect make implicit metaphysical assumptions concerning the simplicity or unity of nature.” That is “a big assumption,” and a metaphysical one at that. So, for example, Newton’s first rule of reason tells us that “Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes” (very democratic, Tocqueville would smile)—obviously “a big, highly problematic metaphysical assumption about the nature of the universe.” What is more, despite his avowal of strict deduction of the law of gravitation from observation of the phenomena, elsewhere “Newton is quite explicit himself that metaphysical hypotheses are involved and required” in his science. “Could it even be that Newton here knowingly practiced something like a confidence trick?” Was he an ‘politic’ writer, after all, a practitioner of exoteric writing, including the art of deliberate self-contradiction, at the service of an esoteric teaching? Is Newton’s natural science more Socratic than it seems?

As Maxwell remarks, in subsequent editions of the Principia he replaced his rules of reason with “nine propositions, all baldly entitled hypotheses.” “Newton had powerful motives for attempting to convince his readers that his law had been derived solely from the phenomena,” at least in the first edition of his book, being “fully aware of the fact that his law of gravitation, apparently postulating the existence of a force operating across empty space, without any agency to convey it, would be found by some to be thoroughly objectionable”—some and perhaps most, being theologians committed to the notion of divine providence, others being natural scientists committed to atomist-empiricist induction. “Newton hated controversy,” and “may have hoped that his claim” in the first edition “to have derived his law solely from the phenomena would mean that the law [of gravitation] would not become a matter of controversy.” At the same time, Newton also rejected the metaphysics of the new science, that “the universe has a harmonious mathematical structure, and that all natural phenomena are the outcome of particles interacting in accordance with precise physical law.” Newton professed to affirm the theologians’ well-known ‘argument from design,’ that (as he put it) “this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Maxwell quotes a letter Newton wrote in 1692, saying, “When I wrote my treatise about our [solar] system, I had an eye on such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose.” In sum, Newton engaged in “a conscious cover-up,” first seeming to accept the Baconian, empiricist-experimentalist understanding of science as “derived by induction from the phenomena, solely from evidence,” and then following this revision of modern science with a revision of Christian theology whereby certain natural phenomena really are thoroughly natural—not providential in any immediate sense but nonetheless derived from the deity’s initial rational act of creation. 

This might have led to a debate over what Newton’s real method was. What actually happened was a debate in which Newton’s putative empiricist inductivism was ranged against the ‘rationalism’ of Descartes, a contrast (one might add) that eventually broadened into the familiar claim that the English are empirical, practical, soberly down-to-earth, and that the French are abstract, theoretical, and dangerously utopian. “No one thought to distinguish Newton’s physics from his [self-advertised] methodology.” Instead of comparing and contrasting Newton with Kepler and Galileo, contemporaries focused on “the great battle” between Newton and Descartes. As is well known, Descartes answered the question of skepticism by the method of skepticism itself, by doubting “everything it was possible to doubt,” including both his own senses and his reason. “But he could not doubt that he was doubting, or, in other words, thinking”; ergo, “I think, therefore I am.” “Having established beyond doubt that his conscious mind exists,” Descartes went on to claim that because he can “entertain the idea of a Being more perfect than himself,” such a Being “must exist, since, if He did not, He would lack perfection.” This second claim, the dubiousness of which Maxwell hints at, contrasts noticeably with Newton’s argument from design, which is perhaps no more demonstrable but rather more plausible. In any event, Descartes then argued that because such certain and distinct ideas as “I think, therefore I am” form the basis of knowledge, this royal road to knowledge leads us to acknowledging the clear and distinct science of geometry as the master science. In turn, the empirical phenomena may, must, be understood geometrically, insofar as we can attain any certain knowledge of them. This in turn led to him to claim that nature consists of atoms—invisible, intangible “corpuscles”—which are “whirling about in space in vortices,” that is, in geometrically measurable patterns. Descartes puts natural-science atomism firmly under the rule of geometric patterns In his own exercise of doubt, Maxwell observes that “the difficult and profound mathematical structure of modern theoretical physics hardly seems to bear out” the reduction of physical laws to clear and distinct ideas. However, whereas the Cartesians’ insistence that any empirical success in scientific discovery which contradicts “the Cartesian idea that natural phenomena are the outcome of the motion and impact of extended particles” must be invalid partakes of dogmatism, they “were absolutely correct to demand that physical theories must comply with metaphysical principles (in addition to empirical considerations) in order to be acceptable.” That their metaphysics was false is no objection to metaphysics itself.

Nonetheless, the French Enlightenment did just that. Voltaire, for example, in his Lettres Philosophiques sided with ‘England,’ “praised Bacon, Locke, and Newton at the expense of Descartes,” promptly earning himself condemnation by the French Catholic Church and what would have been a prison term in the Bastille, had he not exiled himself. “Voltaire cast Bacon as the founding father of English empiricism, and even claimed he had anticipated Newton’s law of gravitation.” The Church knew a competing set of saints when it saw one. “With the defeat of Descartes and the triumph of Newton, and Newtonian empiricism, in France around 1750, modern science was well on its triumphant way,” beginning to act independently of philosophy, even if its practitioners refrained from declaring that independence, still calling their task “natural philosophy.” Metaphysics was scrupulously ruled out of rationalism, “empiricism dominated subsequent scientific developments, and authentic natural philosophy became all but invisible.”    

But Einstein brought on his revolution in modern physics not by following the method of experimentation but with mathematics. His discovery that space-time itself is curved by matter, and matter by space-time, shows that there is no force of gravity at all, but rather a set of necessary pathways along which matter travels—at the same time without necessarily colliding, as in modern atomism. Quantum theory took this even further, proposing that particles of matter “exhibit wave-like features, and wave-like entities such as light exhibit particle-like features too.” Quantum theory replaces the Newtonian and Einsteinian deterministic theories with probabilistic ones. 

Well and good, empiricists will reply, but how can you seriously question the spectacular real-world success of the experimental method in science? And how do you explain the failure of philosophy, or what is left of it, to make any noticeable progress at all? The Apostle Paul’s mockery of philosophers as men who are ever seeking but never finding finds its parallel in the critique of philosophy by defenders of modern science. The endless and often trivial wrangles that characterize ‘analytic philosophy,’ dominant in many Anglo-American philosophy ‘departments’ to this day, seems to confirm that critique. [3].

In a sentence that may surprise and delight contemporary defenders of political philosophy, Maxwell contends (in language almost identical to that of Leo Strauss) that “the proper task of philosophy is to keep alive awareness, in the public domain, of our most fundamental problems, our fundamental problems of knowledge and understanding, and our fundamental problems of living, personal, social and global—especially those that are most important and urgent.” To this, Strauss would replace “global” with “political,” and remark that a philosopher will seek criteria by which to define the important and the urgent. He would nonetheless surely endorse Maxwell’s claim that “philosophy has the task of keeping alive awareness of the important role that fundamental problems, and our attempts at solving them, have in all aspects of life and thought.” Strauss doubts that philosophy should “encourage everyone to become philosophers,” but he would undoubtedly concur with Maxwell in maintaining that philosophy “does not have its own particular intellectual territory, its unique field of expertise.” Philosophy orients itself by “the fundamental problem of all of thought and life”: “How can our human world, and the world of sentient life more generally, imbued with perceptual qualities, consciousness, free will, meaning, and value exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?” From this question flows other “slightly less fundamental problems, ranging from “the fundamental nature of the physical universe,” to the connection (if any) between free will and physical determinism, and to questions concerning justice, friendship, and love. In a paraphrase of Weber’s lament about specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, Maxwell writes, “relentless, unmitigated specialization has produced a situation such that our fundamental problem is scarcely considered at all in the university,” or in education and research generally.

It was David Hume, Maxwell sees, who called attention to the unclothed condition of the emperor, Induction. According to the doctrine of “standard empiricism,” evidence “decides what theories are accepted and rejected in science”; “in science, no factual thesis about the world, or about the phenomena, can be accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independently of empirical considerations” as established by careful observation and experimentation. Hume argued that “for all we know, the course of nature may suddenly change, so as to falsify any or all” existing scientific theories, however well established they may be. “It is not evidence that rules out” any alternative theory “but some kind of underlying assumption of uniformity or unity.” That underlying assumption amounts to “some kind of assumption about the nature of the universe”—what Karl Popper would call a “conjecture,” “no more than a guess about that of which we are most ignorant, the ultimate nature of the universe.” “Rationality requires that assumptions that are influential, problematic, and implicit be made explicit so that they can be subjected to imaginative and critical scrutiny, in an attempt to improve them.” Like Socrates, scientists need to be brought to the knowledge that they do not know. But this means that they need to become more like philosophers, less like ‘knowers,’ that is, ‘scientists.’

The grand assumption of science, and of philosophy generally, is what Maxwell calls “physicalism,” which he may mean literally as “naturalism” (‘physis-ism), as distinguished from ‘spiritualism’ or the belief that “spirits, demons, gods, or God govern the way natural phenomena occur.” Given the latter assumption, it’s “quite rational to adopt such methods as prayer, sacrifice, consultation of prophets, oracles, omens and dreams.” Absent that assumption, one will prefer to deploy mathematics, experimentation, and thinking generally governed by reason, by thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. This means that “metaphysics determines methodology.” Choosing the wrong metaphysics will likely result in ineffectual methods of attempting to produce desired results. Witch doctors typically enjoy less discernible success than medical doctors, even if good results sometimes follow from incantations, bad from prescriptions. This fact doesn’t necessarily faze us, as “humanity has found it extraordinarily difficult to accept that mere impersonal regularities govern natural phenomena.” Hence Babylonians “failed to develop astronomy” even as they took “very precise astronomical measurements,” and China “made a wealth of technological discoveries” without developing science. Both of these regimes were quite ’empirical,’ but in both cases, “the one element missing was the vital metaphysical view of physicalism,” the concept of nature.

Given this “big, persistent, metaphysical assumption,” the next questions are: “What ought this metaphysical thesis concerning the unity of nature to be? How can we best go about improving it?” Maxwell proposes “aim-oriented empiricism” as the way to reestablish natural philosophy. Aim-oriented empiricism consists of a hierarchy of seven assumptions. They are:

1. That the universe is partially knowable. “If this assumption is false, we will not be able to acquire knowledge whatever we assume.” Just because, as Aristotle says, man wants to know doesn’t mean he can. Nonetheless, to say we know that we do not know is itself knowledge, and would mean that the assumption must be true. If instead we say we don’t even know that, then we are claiming to know that we don’t know that we don’t know—the regression is infinite.
2. That the universe is meta-knowable. By this Maxwell means that “there is some rationally discoverable thesis about the nature of the universe which, if true and if accepted, makes it possible progressively to improve methods for the improvement of knowledge.” By “rationally discoverable” he means that the thesis “is not an arbitrary choice from infinitely many analogous theses.” “Not only can we acquire knowledge; we can acquire knowledge about how to acquire knowledge.” 
3. That the universe is comprehensible. This means “that the universe is such that there is something (God, tribe of gods, cosmic goal, physical entity, cosmic program, or whatever), which exists everywhere in an unchanging form and which, in some sense, determines or is responsible for everything that changes (all change and diversity in the world in principle being explicable and understandable in terms of the underlying unchanging something).” Maxwell additionally claims that this “something” is “present throughout all phenomena,” although that may imply an additional assumption of ‘pantheism,’ the denial of a Creator-God, separate from His creation.
4. That the universe is physically comprehensible. That is, “the universe is made up [of] one unified self-interacting physical entity (or one kind of entity), all change and diversity being in principle explicable in terms of this entity.” This means “that the universe is such that some yet-to-be-discovered unified physical theory of everything is true.” “Physicalism” is the name Maxwell gives to this thesis.
5. The best current specific version of physicalism. Maxwell’s term for this is “the blueprint,” and, like all blueprints, it is subject to alteration or to rejection and replacement.
6. Accepted fundamental physical theories. Currently, they are general relativity and quantum mechanics.
7. Empirical data.

Far, then, from being the most certain of all, empirical data are the most subject to change, whereas the thesis that the universe is partially knowable could only be revised if we obtained a sort of God-like knowledge, albeit quite likely without God-like power, and could therefore assert, ‘The universe is not only partially but entirely knowable, and we know this because we have attained thorough knowledge of it.’ As it is, however, every one of these categories is open to revision, revisions being increasingly more difficult as one goes up the scale.

Maxwell considers aim-oriented empiricism to provide physics “with a meta-methodology which facilitates improvement of the metaphysical assumptions and associate methods as physics advances…. As knowledge in physics improves, so metaphysical assumptions and methods improve as well, or, in other words, knowledge about how to improve knowledge improves.” An example of this might be the discovery of an impasse, an aporia, as seen in Socratic dialogues. Consideration of such a logical impasse, or an empirical impasse, can lead to improved understanding of what the problem is, and eventually to a possible rational resolution of it. 

Maxwell takes his example from physics, as befits his natural-philosophy approach. “Einstein first discovered general relativity in the form of a metaphysical idea: gravitation is the variable curvature of space-time induced by matter and energy. He then had to work hard to turn this into a precise, testable physical theory.” With Newton, however, “not only did the then-current metaphysical ideas not lead to the new theory—they actually obstructed the correct interpretation of the new theory once it had been formulated.” The “standard empiricism” of Bacon, which Newton initially claimed as his own, “is refuted by its abject failure to solve the problem of induction,” as standard empiricism can’t even explain “the way theories are selected in physics.” “In physics only unified theories are ever accepted, with endlessly many empirically more successful disunified theories invariably being ignored: this means physics makes the big, implicit assumption that the universe is such that all disunified theories are false.” An assumption Newton shared with all physicists—this being an ’empirical fact’ about physicists, so to speak. Aim-oriented empiricism, by contrast, “faces no such contradiction” because “it openly acknowledges that persistent preference for unified theories in physics means that physics accepts a highly problematic metaphysical conjecture concerning the underlying unity of the universe,” part of the “hierarchy of conjectures” Maxwell has itemized. “What is really decisive is that aim-oriented empiricism succeeds in solving the problem of induction,” a problem fatal to the standard empiricism that denies the empirical reality of what physicists actually do. “Far better to adopt the view that physics does accept a substantial metaphysical thesis about the nature of the universe, even if this thesis is a pure conjecture.” “The key argument for authentic natural philosophy” is the need to acknowledge that this assumption, that there is an underlying unity of the universe, “may be critically assessed, developed and, we may hope, improved.” Aim-oriented empiricism enables natural philosophers to discover their self-deceptions “because it requires us to explore the widest range of possible metaphysical conjectures, and associated methods, at different levels” of Maxwell’s ‘assumptions’ hierarchy. 

There are two grounds for accepting such meta-knowability. First, throughout “the human endeavor to improve knowledge” there has been “a positive feedback between metaphysical conjectures and associated methods, on the one hand, and the growth of empirical scientific knowledge.” Otherwise, “we would still be stuck with Aristotelian science, or even the practices of witch doctors and shamans.” Inquiry into nature “becomes more rigorous intellectually if implicit assumptions are acknowledged explicitly,” whether or not such rigor results in empirical successes. Second, “as a result of accepting meta-knowability, our pursuit of knowledge may have much to gain and little to lose” because in that acceptance “we decide, in effect, that it is worthwhile to try to improve knowledge about how to improve knowledge.” Is it possible “that in the future intrinsically unpredictable changes in the laws of nature may occur which render our current knowledge obsolete”? Yes, but one gains nothing from “foregoing the attempt to acquire knowledge” for that reason.

“Hume famously argued that what exists at one moment cannot necessarily determine what exists at the next moment”—the application of the critique of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to the idea of physical causation. But the argument does not show that such necessary causation is impossible. The assumption of such causation is less absurd than its denial, given the observable regularities we find in the sequence of events. “Meta-knowability implies that, if we have no experience of them,” apparently causeless events “do not occur.” This is the empirical part of aim-oriented empiricism. The “aim-oriented” part of it acknowledges the act that “even our most modest items of common sense knowledge” imply major metaphysical and physical assumptions—that, for example, some undetected cosmic fire will not engulf me before I finish writing this sentence, an event that might make my effort to do so vain indeed. “Practical certainty has this usually unacknowledged conjectural and cosmological dimension inherent in it.” “If the success of science is illusory in a way we could not in principle discover, then this is a possibility we face whatever we assume; it is not something we can do anything about, and deserves to be ignored. If, on the other hand, the success of science is illusory in a way which can in principle be discovered, then aim-oriented empirical science provides us with the best means of unmasking the illusion. Either way, physicalism deserves to be accepted even in practical contexts.”

What, then, of the most practical “context” of all, ethics? Our “most fundamental problem of all” is the question, “How can our human world, and the world of sentient life more generally, imbued with perceptual qualities, consciousness, free will, meaning, and value, exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?” Descartes “quite clearly attempts to solve this problem” of the apparent contradiction between the human world and the physical universe by embracing it—by positing a dualism of morality and nature founded upon the distinction between the mind understood as wholly immaterial and nature as wholly material; the mind imposes its forms upon inchoate matter. But if so, how can the immaterial mind and the physical brain interact? “Given Cartesian dualism, there can only be free will if physical laws are violated in the brain,” but how can this be so? Worse, how can the clear and distinct ideas we conceive in our minds tell us anything about “the universe around us”? “How can experience deliver knowledge about the real world around us” to a mind that has no physical nature? From Locke to Berkeley to Hume to Kant to the analytic philosophers, the dilemma has persisted. The ‘analytics’ finally dismissed the problem as meaningless.

But no one really thinks that it is. To solve it in terms of aim-oriented empiricism, Maxwell has recourse to a form of historicism. Being an empiricist, he cannot adopt the ‘idealist’ version of historicism propounded by Hegel. He instead invokes Darwin’s evolutionism, which “helps explain how and why purposeful living things can evolve—have evolved—in a physicalist universe.” Maxwell corrects Darwin’s Darwinism (or perhaps simply emphasizes the teaching of The Descent of Man, in which Darwin himself extends the claims of The Origin of Species) by saying that “the mechanisms of evolution themselves evolve as life evolves, purposive action playing an increasingly important role, especially when evolution by cultural means comes into play as a result of learning and imitation.” In this way “Darwinian evolution merges seamlessly with human history.” The mind-nature dualism of Descartes troubles itself with the false assumption “that physics could be in principle comprehensive and complete about the world around us,” whereas in fact physics “seeks to depict only a highly selected aspect of all that there is—the causally efficacious aspect, as it might be called, which determines how events unfold.” That is, theoretical physics “seeks to depict that which everything has in common with everything else.” That “does not mean that a complete physics would tell us everything factual about the world around us”—i.e., “what things look like, sound like feel like, or what it is like to be a certain kind of physical system (such as a living person.” A person blind from birth doesn’t know what redness is, but is not “debarred thereby from understanding all physics, including optics and the theory of color perception.” Physics “must omit these experiential qualities,” as to attempt to do so “would destroy the unity and explanatory power of physical theory.” Maxwell traces this distinction between the physical and the experiential to Spinoza, and then to Darwin, whose theory of evolution tells us what common sense also tells us, that “animals which could not see aspects of their environments, but only the contents of their own minds, would not last long in the real world.” The philosophers who follow Descartes “made a bad mistake” by supposing that “we really, most directly see, not aspects of the things in the environment around us, but rather the contents of our minds.” This subjectivist “blunder, perhaps more than any other, has condemned so much philosophy to irrelevance, and triviality.” This “initial blunder” severed philosophy from science. But “the insoluble consciousness/brain problem is created by the failure to formulate it properly in the first place.” This has led to what amounts to a political problem, the problem of the regime of modern academia, which restricts inquiry “to specialized research…ill-equipped to help humanity resolve problems of the real world.” Thus “humanity suffers from the failings of modern philosophy—failings most philosophers, even today, seem entirely unaware of.”

Modern philosophy makes a mistake in abandoning modern science to scientists. But does modern science really need philosophy? Maxwell argues that it does because aimed-oriented empiricism can improve science in ways the standard empiricism scientists typically adopt cannot. Among other benefits, aim-oriented empiricism can tell scientists what the greatest scientists (Isaac Newton, James Clark Maxwell, Albert Einstein) actually did, which was not ’empirical’ as that term has come to be defined by modern scientists. As the term implies, aim-oriented empiricism raises the question of what modern science is for. Following Machiavelli, Bacon assigned science the task of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate. But is that what science should be for? And is the answer to that question outside the realm of science. It is, but only if science is conceived as sundered from questions of ethics and politics, only if science is ‘value-free.’ But is it? 

Maxwell isn’t out to return to pre-modern science. “If Aristotle’s view of the cosmos had led to a much more empirically successful research program for physics than Galileo’s Aristotle’s vision would be today accepted…instead of physicalism” in the modern sense. Modern physicalism is “empirically fruitful.” What does it mean to say that? “A metaphysical thesis, B, is empirically fruitful if a series of theories, T(1), T(2), [etc.], each more empirically successful than its predecessor, can be regarded as drawing every closer to capturing B in the form of a testable theory,” that is, if the series of theories can be unified. “The demand that a theory must be unified to be acceptable is thus a quasi-empirical demand. It commits physics to accepting the hierarchy of theses” outlined in Maxwell’s seven-level list, “all of which could be false, and could, in increasingly extreme circumstances, require revision.” Standard empiricism, strictly applied, can’t establish such hierarchical differentiation. Aim-oriented empiricism can. 

Maxwell illustrates this point by arguing that Newtonian physics might have been led to Einsteinian physics more rapidly, had it been undertaken in the spirit of aim-oriented empiricism. That form of empiricism would also have quickly suggested that “the apparent contradiction between ‘waves’ and ‘particles’ in quantum theory must be addressed by “develop[ing] a version of quantum theory which specifies precisely what electrons, atoms, molecules may be when not undergoing observation.” In both of these cases he suggests ways in which scientists might have proceeded, both of which involve the thesis that “nature might be fundamentally probabilistic,” not deterministic in the strict way in which determinism is typically conceived. His point is not to prove such a hypothesis (he readily concedes that he isn’t a physicist or a mathematician) but that such matters “cannot really be discussed within standard-empiricism physics” at all. “The correct interpretation of Newtonian theory, Maxwellian electrodynamics, and quantum theory have all been delayed, for several decades, because persistent attempts have been made to interpret these theories in terms of outdated metaphysics.” 

Consider, he suggests, cosmology, and think of a pivotal event in ancient natural philosophy. “Parmenides held that the universe is an unchanging homogeneous sphere” in which “all change and diversity is…an illusion” because change and diversity involve contradiction. Democritus rejoined that change and diversity do exist, but so does nothingness. The cosmos consists of atoms in motion, each surrounded by nothing, their collisions and combinations accounting for change and diversity. “Physicalism as I have formulated it” in its modern sense “emerges from Democritus’ reply to Parmenides.” But what if we “declare that Parmenides’ homogeneous sphere is a state of the entire universe, exhibiting unity, at a very special time, namely the moment at or just before the big bang,” that “state of extreme unity” that preceded the atomistic world (considerably revised from that of Democritus) that we now accept? The ‘big bang’ was then “an instant of spontaneous symmetry-breaking: the outcome is a multitude of virtual prior-to-big-bang states, virtual Parmenidean spheres, as it were,” from then on “unfolding” by means “of the interactions between these multitudinous virtual prior-to-the big-bang entities.” The cosmos “is composed of billions upon billions of fleeting virtual big-bang cosmic states of supreme Parmenidean unity.” Whereas Democritean atomism posits a dualism of empty space in contrast with solid, un-splittable atoms, “cosmic atomism” holds that being and nothingness inhere in everything, that change and diversity inhere “throughout all phenomena,” determine, perhaps probabilistically, the evolution of all phenomena. Maxwell does not claim that this conjecture is true, but rather that it is an atomism more consistent with Einsteinian physics, which posits space as curvilinear, and therefore not empty or shapeless. And he adds that standard empiricism rules out such conjecture, to the disadvantage of physics theorizing.

More generally, “there is no agreed, acceptable, unproblematic metaphysical blueprint for physics today.” Contemporary physics confronts “four fundamental problems”: 1) Is nature deterministic or probabilistic? 2) How “is justice to be done to the quantum domain without any appeal being made to measurement? 3) How are general relativity and quantum theory to be unified? 4) How, and to what extent, is matter-and-force on the one hand, and space-time on the other, to be unified? Maxwell contends that metaphysics will form the prelude to new physical theories that address these problems, as indeed metaphysics did in the thought of Newton and of Einstein, whether they admitted it or not.

What about the natural sciences—chemistry and biology, among others? Each division of natural science “needs to articulate and implement its own version of aim-oriented empiricism.” Not only will this acknowledge that scientific methods will vary from one division to another, and not only will this acknowledge that the aims of each division will differ somewhat from the aims of the others, but, “and most important,” aim-oriented empiricism “facilitates positive feedback between improving scientific knowledge and improving aims and methods (improving knowledge about how to improve knowledge” because aim-oriented empiricism is hierarchical, thereby enabling the scientist to ‘classify’ each step of his thinking in a coherent order.. “This positive feedback feature is, in my view, the nub of scientific rationality.” 

Take, for example, scientific aims. Standard empiricism cannot say what scientific aims should be. Yet, ’empirically’ or as a matter of fact “all branches of natural science seek truth that is of value, either intrinsically or intellectually because of its inherent interest to us, or in a amore utilitarian way in that it can be used to obtain other things of value—health, prosperity, travel, entertainment, that is, the whole technological panoply of the modern world.” “We want science to discover that which is significant or of value”; “values, of one kind or another…pervade all of science.” Maxwell cautions that this doesn’t mean that “considerations of value can be permitted to influence judgments of truth”; “that it would be desirable or of value for something to be true does not, in itself, make it more likely to be true,” and we are better off not with wishful thinking but with skeptical thinking, with rigorous testing of happy-sounding claims of truth. We need to know what we don’t know, but we also need to know what we need to know, while never confusing what we suppose we know about what we need to know to be genuine knowledge. “Standard empiricism prohibits all this, in demanding that metaphysical ideas, and ideas about what is of value, are excluded from the intellectual domain of science.” If modern science “cannot determine what is just, or good” then it is intrinsically aimless, unable to distinguish trivial knowledge from important knowledge and therefore unknowing. This is why “we need to see science, ultimately, as a part of , or as contributing to, philosophy, rather than see philosophy as something that needs to be excluded from science.”

How can modern natural science be better integrated into philosophy overall? Here is where Aristotle’s idea of teleology re-enters, although Maxwell is too shy to say it that way. “All living things are purposive in character”; they pursue goals. “Darwinian theory tells us what the basic goal of living things is: to survive and reproduce. All other goals pursued by living things contribute to this basic goal.” This doesn’t mean that evolution itself is purposive; Darwin regarded it as determined by “random inherited variations and natural selection,” factors “devoid of purpose.” Nor does this mean that all living things are conscious in pursuing survival and reproduction, that a living thing “knows what it is doing.” It only means that that’s what they do. Now, (and again unacknowledged by Maxwell), Aristotle would regard such a claim as too narrow. Living things do not necessarily act as if they ‘treat’ goals other than survival and reproduction as subservient to (as he puts it) mere life. They rather act, consciously or not, to fulfill their own nature, to flourish in accordance with their nature. Maxwell might or might not admit this, but he would quite likely say, ‘That is why the natural sciences need aim-oriented empiricism—precisely to enable such an Aristotelian considerations to be entertained.’

Among those organisms that are conscious, observers notice “an enriched form of purposive explanation, which I shall call personalistic explanation,” explanations “enriched by imaginative identification with the person, or being, whose actions are being explained and understood.” Conscious beings are capable of “evolution by cultural means,” by “something like Lamarckian evolution,” whereby behavior becomes inherited, and habitual, inherited traits might eventuate in physical changes via ‘cultural’ selection. “Darwinian theory must itself make use of both kinds of explanation, physical and purposive—or, when sentient and conscious beings are involved, physical and personalistic.” This, Maxwell argues, might “help us understand how purposive, and personalistic, life has come to be in an ultimately purposeless universe.” Purposiveness evidently enhances evolution, in that sexual selection (“typically [by] females”) has the effect of enhancing “certain characteristic features” in a given species; Maxwell gives as his example the peacocks’ “splendid tails,” which have become more splendid over time because peahens have preferred peacocks that are endowed with them. And in the most self-conscious and ‘cultural’ being, the human being, language has developed, endowing human beings and human beings alone with “art, science, democracy, justice, elaborate technology, planned social progress, even wisdom.”

That doesn’t show how purposiveness originated, only that it was evolutionarily useful when it did. Maxwell can only go so far as to suggest that “we need a new version of Darwinism which interprets the theory to be about life, not genes, which recognizes that all life is purposive in character, and which holds that the mechanisms of evolution themselves evolve so as to incorporate purposiveness in increasingly substantial ways until something like Lamarckian evolution emerges with the arrival of evolution by cultural means.” 

The cultural means he has in mind primarily is education, which should be reoriented to encourage the “mammalian instinct” of “inquisitiveness.” Without it, “the fundamental impulse behind science has been lost.” To prevent this from continuing to happen in the schools, Maxwell recommends a “problem-oriented approach to scientific education” whereby teachers would set students to attempt to solve a “genuine, even unsolved scientific problem.” This would “cause curiosity to flourish and not die” in part by having students follow up on their “own questions—to transform feeling of stupidity and bafflement into articulated questions” and thus to bring them not only to science but to natural philosophy, to an awareness of the fundamental problems.

More generally, can aim-oriented empiricism be “exploited by the general human endeavor to make progress towards as good a world as possible,” in personal life as well as public life? In terms of public life, under aim-oriented empiricism “social science emerges, not primarily as a science devoted to improving knowledge about social phenomena, but rather as a social methodology or social philosophy, devoted to helping humanity learn from, and exploit, the methodological methods of natural science in order to make social progress towards as good a world as possible. We especially we need a revolution in academic inquiry so that the basic intellectual aim becomes to promote wisdom—wisdom being construed to be the capacity and active endeavor to realize (apprehend and create) what is of value to life, for oneself and others.” [4] In terms familiar to readers of Aristotle, this would entail sophia or theoretical wisdom—culminating in a glimpse of human nature—and phronēsis or practical wisdom, which aims at real-world actions that will induce that nature to flourish.

Modern science has decisively informed modern philosophy from Descartes onward; “natural science creates the problems philosophy seeks to solve,” the problems addressed by “political philosophy, moral philosophy, aesthetics.” Modern science “has major and very alarming implications for questions about what is of value,” seeming to show that “all of human life” amounts to nothing more than physics, that free will and consciousness are illusions. “Do arguments concerning rival political systems make sense if everything is governed by physical law?” Since “our moral, political, and artistic life takes place in the real world, and it is science that tells us what sort of world this is, what it tells us cannot just be ignored.” Does modern science tell us that “moral nihilism” or moral relativism is true? “Or can we make sense of the idea that value qualities exist in the real world—some people objectively possessing moral qualities such as friendliness or courage, some works of art being objectively beautiful, graceful, passionate, profound? Is our world imbued with value features, or does science prohibit the existence of such features altogether?” It is philosophy which must give aims to aim-oriented empiricism, since standard empiricism rules itself out of so doing. What modern science tells us will set limits to our practical sense of how to realize our aims, but it cannot tell us what they are. That is, instead of reading the morally, politically, and esthetically nihilistic implications of modern science into our aims, it is necessary to see that modern science by its character rules out teleology, and therefore in principle cannot tell us anything about aims. This is a limitation on modern science, not a limitation on philosophy, and philosophic nihilists merely register a category mistake. What is more, the modern “philosophy of science” “helps to undermine the very thing it seeks to understand” by preventing itself from addressing why science is good, in the first place. “Only when science and the philosophy of science join together in creating aim-oriented empiricist science—thus recreating natural philosophy—can we have a genuinely rigorous kind of science.”

For its part, the rational method of science will “help us improve problematic aims.” One’s “basic aims often are bad choices,” but if we consider our aims in the light of reason we will make fewer such choices. This means that “the whole character of philosophy needs to change” by “ceas[ing] to be a specialized discipline alongside other disciplines, obsessed with its own esoteric, specialized puzzles,” but rather “become again what it once was, that endeavor which seeks to keep alive awareness of our most urgent fundamental problems,” problems that concern “humanity as a whole and planet earth.” “Philosophy needs to become again what it was for Socrates: the attempt to devote reason to the growth of wisdom in life.” 

Maxwell therefore titles his final chapter “Implications of Natural Philosophy for the Problems of Citizenship.” These implications, he maintains, are “profound and revolutionary,” leading, “potentially, to a new kind of academic enterprise–wisdom-inquiry.” “Humanity faces two great problems of learning: learning about the nature of the universe and our place in it, and learning how to create as good, as wise, as civilized a world as possible.” The first task is a theoretical problem, the second a practical one. “We cracked the first problem in the seventeenth century” with the discovery of modern natural philosophy,” with its “method for progressively improving knowledge and understanding of the natural world”—the “famous empirical method” which Maxwell has attempted to rescue from those who have obscured or misunderstood it along the lines of standard empiricism. “As long as humanity’s power to act was limited, lack of wisdom, of enlightenment, did not matter too much: humanity lacked the means to inflict too much damage on itself or the planet,” but now that the method, so misconceived, has succeeded to the extent that human beings actually can conquer nature—if hardly all of it, enough of it to transform the planet earth and humanity itself— then “wisdom has become, not a personal luxury, but a global necessity.” Having solved the first “great problem of learning,” it has become crucial to solve the second. What is more, we can “learn from our solution to the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one,” to “apply these general, progress-achieving methods to social life—to the unending task of creating a better, wiser world.” Unending: although human beings aim at ends, there will be no ‘end of history.’ Sensibly enough, Maxwell concedes that “the aim of creating global civilization is inherently and profoundly problematic.”

Indeed so. Maxwell criticizes the Enlightenment for seeking to apply a “generalized scientific method, not to social life, but merely to social science.” It helped social scientists “improve knowledge of social phenomena” without “helping humanity learn how to become more civilized by rational means.” “This is the blunder that is at the root of our current failure to have solved the second great problem of learning.” By “civilized” Maxwell mean “a state of affairs in which there is an end to war, dictatorships, population growth, extreme inequalities of wealth, and the establishment of a democratic, liberal world government and a sustainable world industry and agriculture.” 

Well, that’s quite a mouthful, and some if it tastes like mush. Here is the problem with Maxwell’s solution to the problem. First, in addressing the problem of how to learn about the nature of the universe, “we” didn’t actually crack the problem. Natural philosophers did, and those natural philosophers lived in the West and nowhere else, indeed in certain countries in the West and not, initially, others. This suggests that Socrates was right: that political philosophy comes before natural philosophy in order of rank, in priority, if not in chronology. If the modern political-philosophic enterprise begins with Machiavelli, then reaches into natural science with Bacon, then ‘we’ in the twenty-first century are looking at a ‘global’ problem of the nations and their political regimes, not simply at a problem for ‘the planet’ or for ‘humanity,’ neither of which exist under one regime. Maxwell tacitly admits this in a “world government” with a particular regime, liberal democracy. Second, this means that the problem of “learning how to create as good, as wise, as civilized a world as possible” can only be addressed, let alone solved, at the level of nations and their political regimes. That is (for example) the problem of education cannot be severed from the problem of regimes as it manifests itself within each nation, but especially the most powerful nations, and as they defend and advance their regime interests and their regime principles in competition (sometimes violent competition) with one another. Why would the rulers of China, of Russia, or of Iran cooperate with the rulers of the United States? As a matter of fact, they don’t, as the cacophony of the ‘United Nations’ attests, to say nothing of cyber warfare, control of information flows, and other forms of conflict so obviously demonstrate. 

Maxwell sees this, in the end, at least to the extent that he writes, “Politics, which cannot be taught by knowledge-inquiry, becomes central to wisdom-inquiry, political creeds and actions being subjected to imaginative and critical scrutiny.” Indeed, “economics, politics, sociology, and so on, are not, fundamentally, sciences, and do not, fundamentally, have the task of improving knowledge about social phenomena.” They rather “articulate problems of living,” propose and assess policies, ranking those problems and policies into a hierarchy of aims. In this, they share with the humanities the task of “enhancing our ability to enter imaginatively into the problems and lives of others,” especially (one might add) when presented in the literary form of dialogue, as Socrates is portrayed to have done. 

What can these inquiries into politics learn from natural-science empiricism as Maxwell understands it? Several things. Although human civil societies can scarcely be subjected to the double-blind experimental method—for starters, controlling the variables is a dauntingly balky task—some “proposals for action can be shown to be unacceptable quite decisively as a result of experience acquired through attempting to put the proposal into action.” The attempt to act in accordance with the proposal sometimes wrecks the aim of the proposal, as for example the many attempts to impose civil-social equality by empowering a centralized state charged with enforcing it, a regime change which more or less universally succeeds in instituting a new ruling class, and the civil-social inequality that goes with that institution. Given the difficulties of rigorously-controlled social experimentation, aim-oriented empiricists will need to resort to thought experiments and to ‘comparative politics’ (whereby they consider the results of regime paths actually taken); the sloppiness inherent in such inquiries counsels the virtue of patience, especially inasmuch as “humanity does not have the aptitude or desire for wisdom that scientists have for knowledge,” as Maxwell drily remarks. 

What institutional reforms could be attempted? Maxwell ends by thinking about the regimes he knows best, those of the modern universities. “Every national university system needs to include a national shadow government, seeking to do virtually, free of the constraints of power, what the actual national government ought to be doing. The hope would be that virtual and actual governments would learn from each other.” This may strike one as a wan hope. At present, it is as likely that virtual and actual governments would corrupt each other, primarily because that is what they have been doing, lately. Modern university administrators are anything but “free from the constraints of power.” Almost all of them depend upon monetary support from governments, support that quite understandably comes not with strings but often with chain attached. Further, they have increasingly accepted constraints imposed by militant student groups, often egged on by faculty, to bend the educational purposes and methods of the universities in directions not suggested by aim-oriented empiricism. 

“The world’s universities need to include a virtual world government which seeks to do what an actual elected world government ought to do, if it existed,” “working out how an actual democratically elected world government might be created.” But why would this happen? Why would a consortium of the world’s universities instead replicate that other world-government experiment, the woebegone United Nations? More fundamentally, would a world government, even one (somehow) democratically elected, be a good thing for humanity to have? 

The good thing about “aim-oriented empiricism” is that it does allow the intellectual leg-room to walk into and around such a question, and many others. In this, Maxwell is a good Peripatetic. 

 

 

 

Notes

1. On the philosophic necessity of political philosophy, see Delba Winthrop: Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science (2019), reviewed on this site under the title, “What Good Is Democracy?” and Heinrich Meier: “Why is Political Philosophy?” in Meier: Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion (2019), discussed on this site under the title, “Chateaubriand and Political Philosophy.”
2. For a defense of Aristotelian physics in light of modern physics, see David Bolotin: An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to His Manner of Writing (1997), reviewed on this site under the title, “Aristotelian Physics.”
3. See Stephen Schwartz: A Brief History of Analytical Philosophy (2012), reviewed on this website under the title, “What Is Analytic Philosophy?” For critiques of analytic philosophy, see Henry B. Veatch: Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (1969), reviewed on this site under the title, “Is Logic ‘About’ Anything?” and Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis (1980), reviewed on this site under the title, “Delimiting Philosophy.”
4. Maxwell elaborates this point in two books: From Knowledge to Wisdom: A Revolution for Science and the Humanities (London: Pentire Press, 2007) and Science and Enlightenment: Two Great Problems of Learning (Cham: Springer, 2019).