Henry B. Veatch: Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969.

 

If modern science aims at the conquest of nature, must it not finally aim at the conquest of human nature? And if it aims at the conquest of human nature, must it not somehow conquer reason, long held to be the distinctive human characteristic? To conquer reason, must it not prove reason inadequate? And if it needs to do that rationally, does that convict science of incoherence, ruin its status as ‘science,’ that is, as knowledge?

Or does modern science and the modern philosophy that generated it and continues to support it merely need to posit a different kind of reason, a different form of logic, against the ‘classical’ kind, enunciated by Socrates and elaborated by Aristotle? Nietzsche at times seems to take the first path, attacking reason itself, whereas more ‘mainstream’ philosophers—Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and a host of academic followers of one or more of them—take the second, wider path, proposing a new kind of logic while challenging the capacity of classical logic to answer the question it attempts to answer, namely, ‘What is…?’

Veatch takes his title from C. P. Snow, whose 1959 lecture, “The Two Cultures,” had just been reprinted with an addendum. Snow contrasted the culture of scientists with that of “literary intellectuals,” observing that (for example) were Albert Einstein to meet T. S. Eliot they would listen to one another with mutual incomprehension. This would not have been the case, had met Alexander Pope (assuming that one of them brought along a good translator). Veatch remarks that in contemporary intellectual life things have gone beyond two cultures; there are actually two logics now, one for the humanities and another for the sciences, including mathematics. By broadening the field from literary studies to the humanities generally, he brings in the question of the purpose of philosophy, now classified as among the humanities but formerly encompassing the sciences, too. His book engages the celebrated Battle of the Books by conceiving it as at core a struggle for the soul of philosophy, and therefore of philosophers. He astutely sees that political science, founded upon political philosophy, as a sharply-contested part of the battlefield. Whereas formerly “the student of political science had to pore over his Plato and Aristotle, his Machiavelli and Bodin, his Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau,” if present trends continue “the political scientist of the near future will have to know statistics and the latest computer techniques.”

To put it in Jonathan Swift’s original imagery, the spiders war against the bees. “The achievement” of modern analytic philosophy “might be said to consist largely in its having determined both in detail and with some precision the proper requisites of a genuine and unmitigated spider-logic,” a logic whose proponents moreover regard as superior to “the more traditional bee-logic.” Veatch intends “to show that a bee-logic has a proper integrity of its own,” and indeed that modern analytic logic “ought to be subordinate to the properly architectonic knowledge of the more humanistic and philosophic variety.” Like Socrates, Plato, and above all Aristotle, author of systematic treatments of logic, philosophers should begin “by accepting what we are presented with in our everyday experience and analyzing it with a view to disclosing the principles and elements and causes that are directly there and present in it.”

Take modern physics as seen in Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Is it not “passing strange” that its logic, “for all of its elaboration, provides no means either for saying or for thinking what anything is?” But ‘we moderns’ don’t find it strange at all. Aristotelian causality focuses on the internally-generated actions of a thing—the four causes—without ignoring (moderns claim) the importance of the circumstances in which the thing finds itself. ‘Modern’ or Newtonian causality focuses on the external relations among things—planets as they orbit the sun—that is, on systems or networks. Later philosophers have extended this approach to logic. “The logic of all modern knowledge could very properly be said to be a logic of how things work, how they behave, what their relationships are to other things, what verifiable or falsifiable consequences they may have, how they may be manipulated, what uses they may be put to”; the question of what things are has been pushed aside. Spiders are “concerned only with their networks, and not with what their networks describe,” although it should be observed that real spiders do aim at catching real flies.

Why? According to modern logic, “no subject-predicate proposition can ever involve an affirmation of what something is,” because “nothing ever is its property or quality as such.” To say “That leaf is green” literally means that a particular leaf is greenness, that the leaf is the color green; what an absurdity, since “a thing is a thing and not a property.” But, as former U.S. president Bill Clinton once said, following Aristotle in his epistemology if not in his ethics, that depends on what ‘is’ is: “In an Aristotelian context the ‘is’ relationship can never hold between a substance and one of its accidents.” In this case, the substance (that leaf) “may well be green, but it can never be the quality of greenness itself” because its greenness is accidental to its nature, its ‘being,’ as a leaf. A leaf might be green, but it might also be red or brown. The fact of its ‘leafness’ does not necessarily entail the fact of its color. “If it could,” then “a substance would in effect cease to be a substance and become what it is not, viz., an accident, or more specifically a quality.” Therefore, “it is of the utmost importance not to confuse the logical relationship of subject and predicate with the ontological relationship of substance and accident; the former involves an ‘is’-relationship, the latter does not.”

As distinct from classical “what-logic,” modern “relating-logic” may be seen in Wittgenstein’s adjurations, “Look not for the meaning but for the use” and “Treat of the network, not of what the network describes.” If philosophers treat logic, and especially logical analysis, as a relation “not a dissection”—that is, not as analysis, in the ordinary meaning of the term—they imitate modern natural science, which defines planets (for example) in relation to other planets and to the sun, doubting that it can go very far into the substance of objects that are so far away. Turning to ethics and politics, the “traditional conception of the humanities” held that they offered “a knowledge at once theoretical and practical, of what man is and of what it means to be human.” Modern-scientific attempts to define ‘humanness’ rely on such methods as the ‘personality test,’ which establish correlations between certain questions and certain character traits—a correlation “between a true or false answer to a given question and the sort of behavior that has been defined as being characteristic of the trait in question.” So, if the answer ‘Yes’ to the question “I like pickles” correlates with the trait of dominance, the person who answers ‘Yes’ to that question (and to other questions so correlated) will be described as a ‘dominant personality type,’ although the preference for pickles may in fact be entirely accidental to the trait. This may well turn out to be a tolerably accurate way of predicting human behavior (hence the move toward a ‘behavioral’ political ‘science’), but when extended to logic it can only cause trouble.

What is more, in ethics and politics such empirical/relational techniques may fail precisely on the basis of their intended usefulness. In reading the memoirs of the Earl of Clarendon, “we might on the basis of our understanding of the Earl’s character venture a prediction as to what would be likely to happen to him, or even as to the likelihood of his coming to a tragic end. But this would in no wise be on the order of a scientific prediction. In fact, it could not even be compared with a prediction as to the angle of refraction of a light ray, given the angle of incidence.” I don’t need to know what the light ray is in order to get good results in terms of predicting its behavior. To attempt to predict what became of the Earl by applying the scientific technique would likely lead nowhere. “It is precisely the virtue of properly scientific predictions that they can be made, and even ought to be made, in the absence of any knowledge of the ‘whats’ of the things in question,” but not so the Earl, or ourselves; for ethical and political purposes, including predictions, we need very much to know what sort of person he, and we, are. “However irrelevant the intelligibility of a what-logic may be for scientific purposes, it is not therefore necessarily irrelevant for all purposes.” Indeed, “there are certain kinds of questions which a context-logic is in principle incapable of providing answers to, and a kind of intelligibility in respect to which only a what-logic can give satisfaction.”

Veatch disposes of the historicist objection to ‘what-logic’: that it is “the result of nothing more than a historical accident, viz., that the basic sentence form of Indo-European languages just happened to be of a structure not unlike that of subject-predicate.” In the half-century since Veatch wrote, we know that in fact thinkers in non-Indo-European languages taught themselves to reason, too, but Veatch addresses the matter in principle, observing that “there is no reason to suppose that there might not be any number of alternative ways of symbolizing the form or structure of the logical tool that comes into play whenever we attempt to understand things for what they are.” If we find one, good. And Aristotle’s writings themselves “came to be transmitted to the Latin west” through Arabic-speakers; “Arabic is not an Indo-European language” and in fact lacks “a subject-predicate form of sentence structure.”

What is the subject-predicate relation, exactly? It is “one in which the subject term in the statement stands for what we are talking about, or are concerned to know about, and the predicate signifies what we take such a subject to be, or what in our judgment it is.” Within this definition there is room for subdivisions: genus (Socrates is an animal); differentia (Socrates is rational); species (Socrates is a man); property (Socrates is a language-user); and accident (Socrates is snub-nosed). To say “A modern logician is a human being” (a claim about ‘whatness’) doesn’t mean the same thing as to say “If x is a modern logician, then he is a human being” because the modern logician in question might be an angel or a demon. What-logic requires you to know the subject-matter, whereas the relating-logic works with letters or symbols. Thus Kant defines an “analytic judgment” as one in which “the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is covertly contained in this concept.” Modern analytic logic ‘abstracts’ from being, effectively unpacking one side of the sentence in the other side of it—it expresses a necessity, and very nearly a tautology. To say “All bodies are extended” is merely to say that the notion of extension is contained in the notion of body. Further, “if such a necessary truth, supposedly about extended bodies” (or whatever else), “is not dependent upon our knowing anything at all about such bodies, then surely cannot be a truth about extended bodies.” If, by contrast, we take “All bodies are extended” as a what-statement, then we are talking about “the very nature of such bodies” as objects in the physical world that we are seeking to know.

“The challenge which the notion of analytic truth poses for a what-logic is not simply that of an alternative logic. Rather, the decisive challenge lies in the fact that the proponents of analytic truths invariably assume that what-statements are nothing but analytic, that they are directly and properly reducible to analytic truths indeed, that there are no proper what-statements at all, and hence no such thing as a what-logic of any kind.” The challenge, Veatch argues, rests on a non sequitur. To speak abstractly, to speak of concepts, is to speak ambiguously. A ‘concept’ might mean an “idea or concept in the mind which means or signifies something other than itself” or “that which is thus conceived or mean or signified, i.e., the object that is so meant or conceived.” There is no logical reason to suppose that a true statement about the notion necessarily amounts to a true statement about the thing. “What could ever have possessed Kant, not to mention almost the entire company of contemporary analytic philosophers, to have supposed that because a truth was a necessary truth, in the sense that its denial would be self-contradictory, it could not therefore possibly be a truth about the world?” They “commit the fallacy of confusing use with mention.” The distinction between objects and concepts of objects remains “a necessary and inescapable distinction.”

“Things are what they are,” and “our knowledge and understanding of things can ultimately come only though a recognition of this.” Put differently, “it might simply be said that nothing can be or exist without being something,” without being something “necessarily, and not just contingently.” Much-decried ‘essentialism’ is, well, essential to human thought. A figure said to be a triangle either is or is not one, and to suppose otherwise is to contradict oneself—never a sound move in logic. Further, “what-statements being assertions about the world rather than simply about words or concepts, it is clear that what gets analyzed in such a statement is no mere concept, but rather the thing or entity which that concept is a concept of, or to which it ‘refers,’ to use Kant’s term.” Truth-statements stated in what-logic might turn out to be false; ‘man is a rational animal’ might be right or wrong, in terms of what man is. Truth-statements stated in relating-logic cannot be false, because in that case ‘man is a rational animal’ means that ‘rational animal’ is already packed into the concept, ‘man.’

Veatch hastens to add that none of this means that modern relating-logic has no place—that it is an illegitimate path for the human mind to walk. What-statements “must be subject to a dual criterion, so far as the conditions of their truth are concerned”: first, are they coherent analytically; second, are they consistent with our experience in the world. “We have only to step outside the philosophy classroom and into the open air of everyday human existence to realize that the things and events of the world are what they are necessarily and self-evidently; but for us to know what motion is, or what hydrogen is, or what the color red is, or what we ourselves as human beings are, we can do no other than accept the tutelage of experience, both in its initial promptings and in its continuing corrections.”

Although relating-logic does have an important place in philosophy, because it now enjoys dominance among academic philosophers Veatch devotes a chapter to its “exigencies and disabilities.” “What must the enterprise of human knowledge and understanding be like, so long as one restricts oneself simply to the instruments and devices of a relating-logic and solemnly forswears the use of what-statements altogether?” Wittgenstein sets down the rule: “Grammar is autonomous and not dictated by reality.” It is pure convention. You enjoy absolute freedom to ‘define your terms,’ but, having defined them, the analyst must stick strictly to unpacking what he, or perhaps his society, has loaded into them. If I define ‘planet’ as an object moving in a circular orbit, that’s it. In relating-logic, “it is not merely the relation of things to other things that is the means of their being known and understood, but rather our human convention whereby things are related to other things that are the resource of knowledge.”; “all necessary connections are confined exclusively to the sphere of the linguistic and the logical,” “represent[ing] only our human devices for relating and connecting things, and not any real connections or relations in things themselves.” This radicalizes Hume, who “was at least concerned about necessities in fact.” Relating-logic suspects that “people, in thinking they are talking about real necessities or real impossibilities in things, may in fact be talking only about rules for the use of certain words.”

This, Veatch counter-argues, exemplifies “the fallacy of inverted intentionality.” He means that “a statement of first intention is construed as a statement of second intention; and yet the condition of the second intention is that the statement of the first intention be taken at face value.” For example, to say, as one analytic philosopher does, that the statement, ‘a thing cannot be red and green at the same time’ “is but a veiled grammatical rule for the use of ‘red’ and ‘green'” is to invert the intention of pointing out such a contradiction. ‘Red’ and ‘green’ have no meaning aside from their meaning in the real world, unless one assigns a purely arbitrary definition to those terms. To do that would be to make it seem “as if the very forces of nature had been drained of their force.” If, as Wittgenstein asserts, “meaning simply is use,” use in language only, “determined by our grammatical rules,” then logicians have disqualified logic from participation in science—that is, science understood as the attempt to gain knowledge of the world and/or (in modernity) to gain effective means of controlling the world. “The question is how a logic which cannot serve as a means either of description or of explanation can possibly be considered as an organon or as an instrument of knowledge and understanding.” Such a logic, Veatch allows, “can perhaps be of some slight use and value” in science. Here he has recourse to remarks by philosopher of science Ernest Nagel, who argues that even if we could perceive molecules (for example), “molecular theory would still continue to formulate the traits of molecules in relational terms”—that is, “in terms of relations of molecules to other molecules and to other things” and “not in terms of any of their qualities that might be directly apprehended through our organs of sense”—in order to allow scientists to understand and to predict “the occurrence of events and the relations of their interdependence in terms of pervasive structural patterns into which they enter.” Insofar as scientists direct their study at understanding relations, relating-logic makes sense, since in effect the ‘game’ they are investigating is really a pattern in nature; if it were not, if it were merely a verbal construct, a grammar, then it could not predict anything in the real world, but would lead only to conclusions about our own arbitrary or conventional concepts.

What, then, should the status of ‘what-logic’ be? After all, “the very idea that a knowledge of essences is possible is enough to inflame all the right-thinking, right-minded philosophers of this world.” “With this we are brought face to face with both Hume and Kant.”

To say that “each thing is what it is and therefore has its proper nature or essence or character,” is to say something that “holds only if the thing in question is truly one thing or one being.” The worry that we can’t be sure if we are contemplating a thing that has an essence bothers them in a way that it doesn’t bother (for example) Aristotle. Aristotle is comfortable with a “frank recognition of fallibilism” in our attempts to understand nature. Hume and Kant, by contrast, claim that the everyday world “is not, strictly speaking, given to us as such in experience” but rather “must be in some way or another either inferred from or constituted out of what is given.” Veatch replies, why assume so? Why assume that human understanding infers, or orders, or even constructs and fabricates what it takes to be reality” “Why should not its primary role be, rather, one of apprehension and description?” Why should it not be what it seems to be? This turns epistemological skepticism back on itself. This leaves room both for ‘common sense’ and for error.

So, when Bertrand Russell tells us that when we see a man walking down the street, all we ‘really’ see are “patches of color arranged in various patterns and succeeding one another in various ways,” there must be “something amiss” in his assertion. He has confused “an epistemological ultimate with an ontological or metaphysical ultimate.” “Just because I can be sure that a certain sense datum exists even when I can’t be sure about anything else, does it follow that such a datum can exist without anything else?” It does not follow; it is “a non sequitur.” Similarly, when Hume denies the principle of causation as a logical necessity, he elevates the correct logical denial of the principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc beyond its pay grade. If something that didn’t exist suddenly did, would we not rather think that “there must be some reason or cause for its having done so.” “Written on the very face of any contingent event or happening is its very dependence on at least some outside cause or causes.” And so “while Hume may have awakened Kant from certain of his dogmatic slumbers, he at the same time lulled him into still others.” As an aside, one might wonder if the intervention of Christianity between Aristotle’s time and Hume’s (and earlier, Descartes’s) may have so raised the stakes respecting the need for certainty in knowledge that it induced modern philosophers to raise the epistemological bar too high, to claim that philosophic ‘method’ could deliver surer results than the Holy Spirit Himself. But I digress.

The radical character of relating-logic brought Karl Popper to the conclusion that Newton himself was mistaken in supposing that his theory could in any way have been derived logically from his observations. Einstein concurred, calling “the fundamentals of scientific theory” “purely fictitious,” “free inventions of the human mind,” not abstractions from experience at all. Veatch comments, “What we observe here is the phenomenon of a what-logic being displaced by a relating-logic,” a denial that induction of causes and effects from the nature of objects is logical. According to Hume and his philosophic progeny, “since full-bodied objects like apples are never given in experience, then it is clearly impossible that from repeated experiences of objects like these one could ever by a process of induction arrive at a knowledge of what such objects are.” Induction can only be deployed in the attempt “to relate things to others as ’causes’ and ‘effects,’ rather than to lead to an understanding of what they are in their very natures,” or from those very natures.

Kant takes the logical next step. If “the given data of experience do not come to us in intelligible patterns,” and if no such patterns can be “abstracted or deduced from the presented data,” then “the order of nature” doesn’t disclose “nature in itself but rather an order which we human beings bestow upon and endow nature with.” Veatch calls this the “foundation stone of almost the entire edifice of contemporary philosophy of science.” Moreover, as “free creations and inventions of the human mind” the categories “through which we order our world and thus render it intelligible” as a ‘world’ “are held to be variable and subject to change, one set being used at one time and in one age, perhaps, and another at a different time and in a different age.” Here historicism, the philosophic doctrine of the historicity of reality, begins. Ptolomaic astronomy and Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics, are only “different ways of organizing the data of our experience to make them fit into a particular ordered pattern of a universe,” the ordered pattern itself being both conventional and changeable over time. In politics (one might note) this enables Kant to imagine that his wish for perpetual peace might be instantiated. If historicism is true, why not? The authors of The Federalist would have replied that human nature likely prevents such a “visionary” scheme. But now human nature is out the window.

Veatch makes a further, and crucial point. One way to avoid “falling into the fallacy of inverted intentionality” would be to renounce intentionality itself. In effect, this has been done by those forms of historicism that posit historical determinism. Just as extreme Calvinists reject human free will in favor of a providentialism ‘totalistically’ understood, so too do Marxists (for example) and ‘race theorists’ reject free will for ‘laws of History.’ Human intention is not only ineffectual but illusory, they contend. Similarly, literary scholars might deny that the intention of the author of a poem or a novel matters, that (most recently and radically) the reader should be free to ‘deconstruct’ and ‘re-imagine’ a literary work into whatever framework suits the current Zeitgeist. In 1969, literary studies had yet to become the morass they would soon be, but Veatch does see the effects of the critique of ‘what-logic’ in the visual arts. “It was reason,” the Surrealists charged, “that exercised its dictatorship upon men, forcing them to observe and abide by a supposed rational in things.” But according to the latest reasoners, “such order is not really there; it is only imposed by reason.” Therefore, “Let man free himself from this dictatorship of reason”; let Kantian Transcendentalism become frankly sur-real, a warrant for the valorization of dreams, intoxication—warrant for a madness that is the only true sanity, given reason’s suicide. The resulting “antics” have “never been reported of our revered contemporary logicians—not even of Bertrand Russell,” although here one might demur, in view of Lord Russell’s antic private and public lives if not of his academic work, which was more copious than idiosyncratic.

Returning to history, Veatch insists that at least there it seems that the distinction between what-logic and relating-logic needs to be retained, at least insofar as philosophers claim that historical laws exist. But this too faces challenge from Popper and others. Their critique aims at the establishment of such laws understood as scientific findings; the laws in question must be relational, not substantive. But why, Veatch asks, must historical explanation be scientific? “In our lives all of us derive, from history and from our everyday experience, a kind of knowledge and understanding” that amounts to practical wisdom, a “knowledge of the world in which the universal tends to be neither clearly articulated nor clearly exhibited” in the manner of, say, the law of gravity. Such knowledge, as Socrates came to see, forms “the source or seed-bed of philosophy and of all the humanities”; dialectical reasoning may correct it, but it can never begin anywhere else. You can get to a logically ‘cleaned-up’ understanding of the world through common-sense, through experience of the world, but never by eschewing such knowledge altogether. In this, Aristotle was right to make the phrase ‘political philosophy.’

From ‘history’ so understood one can derive ethical lessons from facts, pace Max Weber. The supposed fallacy of deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’ simply registers the dominance of relating-logic over what-logic. “Why not say that the virtue and vice of human actions escape us, not because virtue and vice are not matters of fact, but rather because of the way we approach such actions the way we look at them,” Veatch writes, ending his sentence with a period and not a question mark. When we call so-and-so “a stuffed shirt or a pompous ass, just what do we mean by this, if not that he is quite obviously and as a matter of fact a rather poor specimen of a human being?” The judgment of so-and-so “turns entirely” on “a more basic judgment as to what man is and what it means to be human.” To put relating-logic to work for purposes of moral judgment commits us to the aforementioned fallacy of inverted intentionality.

Veatch concludes by observing that “with respect to the humanities, while our neo-analytic philosophy may concede them no end of value in terms of the aesthetic, and also perhaps the moral, uplift which those who cultivate them may experience, there must be no pretending that the pursuit of these disciplines can yield anything that in any proper sense may be called knowledge,” inasmuch as “in the context of a relating-logic all necessary connections involve only analytic truths and reflect nothing of the way things are in fact and in reality” but are “no more than devices or constructs of our own that enable us to get from one point to another in the cognitive process.” As would be seen in years following 1969, when Veatch wrote, what can be constructed can be deconstructed, completing the process of nihilism or indiscriminate ‘democratization’ of thought itself. Stronger souls will then take that opportunity to impose their own impassioned constructions upon others, thereby undermining social and political democracy in the name of social and political democracy.

Veatch hopes for a compromise, whereby relating-logic stays within the realm of scientific theory, if not practice, and what-logic rules everywhere else. Relations do matter in nature itself, and so relating-logic may help to clarify our thoughts respecting those relations, so long as its practitioners do not suppose that it means that such a logic refutes what-logic. When considering Newton’s apple and the gravitational law he once was imagined to have derived from its fall, “we do not have to suppose that the initial common-sense knowledge of apples from which we started out has now to be given up or considered outmoded.” Just as what-logic cannot tell us much about relations—it cannot discover the Second Law of Thermodynamics—so relating-logic cannot tell us much about ‘whatness.’ “Recognize the difference between the two logics and abide by it,” Veatch recommends. In philosophy (taking the example nearest to his heart), one wants to know “not just what man is but what the very nature of things is.” “What other instrument would do for this purpose than precisely something on the order of a what-logic?” Indeed, “what philosophy is competent to know as regards man and the nature of things is something that the sciences are totally and in principle incapable of granting.” Scientific knowledge is knowledge, but not “knowledge in any primary sense, much less the paradigm of knowledge.” We only suppose so because we confuse “social position with genuine merit,” the prestige of modern science with the actual science or knowledge it brings. This means that the logic espoused by those overly impressed with the results of modern science remains enmeshed in the conventions philosophers have intended to move beyond, whether in the Platonic ascent from the city or the Baconian critique of the idols.

 

 

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

 

Following Machiavelli’s adjuration to dominate Fortuna, Francis Bacon proposed the conquest of nature “for the relief of man’s estate,” an estate that his follower, Thomas Hobbes, would describe as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If, roughly speaking, the first step in this conquest was precise navigation, the second industrialism, the third electrification, the fourth the discovery and harnessing (more or less) of nuclear energy, the fifth information technology, then Conquest of Nature 6.0 is “gene editing,” the power to alter the genetic composition of living organisms. Eventually, this power will be used “to change the genome of our own species in ways that are hereditable, forever altering the genetic composition of humankind”—thereby “direct[ing] the evolution of our own species.” On the seventh ‘day,’ humanity will rest, inasmuch as human nature itself will become something else.

This is why so many of us hope for divine intervention, unconvinced as we are that ‘something else’ will necessarily be better. But to the book at hand….

Doudna and Sternberg are biochemists, and readers will see that they must be contemporary scientists of some sort when they read this sentence: “What will we, a fractious species whose members can’t agree on much, choose to do with this awesome power?” The answer is that the question is ill-formed: As a species, we won’t decide anything; there is no United States of the World to make such a decision. Decisions (plural) will be made by the regimes ruling the various countries whose scientists know how to do such things. The scientist’s classification of human beings as a species, while profoundly important, tells us little about how members of that species deliberate, choose, and act because modern science does not conceive of human beings as their distinguished predecessor, Aristotle, did: as political animals. It may be that modern scientists prefer some form of ‘species-being’ to be apolitical, not only ruled by persons wielding the ‘science of administration’ but by scientists wielding the power to transform fundamentally rulers and ruled alike. The authors here see that as a problem, but they see no solution beyond appealing to scientists worldwide to decelerate the research. It may well be that there is no solution; real politics, conducted under real regimes with real differences of opinion regarding what human nature is and what should be done with it, will permit no ‘global’ solution.

Until now, “the Homo sapiens genome has been shaped by the twin forces of random mutation and natural selection.” With the discovery of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick in 1953, biologists saw that living organisms have their own “secret language” or code, which “provides instructions to produce a particular protein inside the cell.” Ribonucleic acid (RNA) serves as the biochemical Apollo in this process, “transform[ing] the instructions contained in DNA into proteins.” “RNA acts as messenger, ferrying information from the nucleus, where the DNA is stored, to the outer regions of the cell, where proteins get produced.” “This overall flow of genetic information—from DNA to RNA to protein—is known as the central dogma of molecular biology, and it is the language used to communicate and express life.” The year 2001 saw not a space odyssey but the completion of an odyssey into the interior of human life, as scientists finished the Human Genome Project, which provided a comprehensive map of the genetic structure of our species.

Initially, scientists conceived of this knowledge as the pathway to the discovery of cures for hard-to-treat diseases and improved food sources. Doudna and Sternberg offer a clear account of advances in the field since the millennium, which have been substantial. Doudna has been a pioneer in the latest technology that enables the manipulation of genes, CRISPR, or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” “Clustered” means that certain ‘letters’ of DNA exist only in one part of the chromosome within a cell. The ‘letters’ are arrayed in a uniform pattern which is “nearly the same when read in either direction, just like a palindrome such as ‘senile felines.'” “I had never heard of DNA repeating itself with this kind of precision and uniformity, where every repetition was truly identical and always separated from its neighbor by a similarly sized, random spacer sequence,” Doudna recalls. If “every cell had a different CRISPR array due to the unique sequences interspaced between the repeats,” whereas “every other part of the DNA was nearly identical in each of these cells,” then the “CRISPRs were probably the fastest-evolving region in the genome,” the part of the cell that enabled the cell “to change or adapt quickly in response to something the cells encountered in their environment.” In a bacterium, for example, this rapid-response capacity enables the organism “to fight off viruses,” those banes of microbial existence, with “a warrior protein” that can “seek and destroy viral DNA.” They, and viruses, can also become immune to human-designed attacks by antibiotic and antiviral medications.

Thus in the space of fewer than two decades, microbiology “had advanced from a loose collection of interesting but inconclusive studies to a broad, unified theory about the inner workings of a microbial adaptive immune system.” If so, then in principle “the genome would become as malleable as a piece of literary prose at the mercy of an editor’s red pen.” This goes beyond mere editing to “genome engineering, a reflection of the supreme mastery that scientists held over genetic material inside living cells.” Scientists can now mutate cells or “destroy a gene’s ability to produce a functional protein”; they call the latter effect a “gene knockout,” a shutoff of the gene’s natural function. “Think of the cell as the largest symphony in the world, made up of more than twenty thousand different instruments. In a healthy, normal-functioning cell, the various symphonic voices are perfectly balanced; in malignant cancer cells or infected cells, the balance is disrupted, with some instruments playing too loud and others too soft.” But who or what is nature’s equivalent of Oscar Levant, playing all the instruments? Now, potentially, the microbiologists or biochemists, if “armed with the complete CRISPR toolkit.” “It often feels like the genome-engineering applications made possible by CRISPR are limited only by our collective imagination.” But, as someone famously asked, what do mean by ‘us’? After all, witty Oscar was also a bit daft. Who rules? And what for?

As Tocqueville would have predicted, given its “low cost and ease of use,” this technology will become democratized, making a “once-esoteric practice into a hobby or a craft, just like home-brewing beer”—which, the thirsty authors hasten to add, is already being done with the CRISPR “toolkit.” “The democratization of CRISPR will accelerate the process of research and development,” in turn “lead[ing] to uses of this technology that people are not yet prepared for,” “whose effects can’t be contained within the lab.” “With our mastery over the code of life comes a level of responsibility for which we, as individuals and as a species, are woefully unprepared.” ‘We’ will continue to be woefully unprepared if ‘we’ think of ourselves as individuals and species, and not also as regimes and states.

Doudna and Sternberg quite sensibly observe that human beings have exerted influence over the “evolutionary process” of organisms for centuries by artificial selection or breeding, as distinguished from natural selection. The roil over ‘genetically-altered’ foods does indeed seem a fuss over not much, since human beings have been doing it for a long time. The authors cite Luther Burbank’s 1901 statement averring that natural species are “as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter or colors on the artist’s canvas, and can readily be molded into more beautiful forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.” Almost all foods have been so altered, obscuring the distinction between natural and unnatural. In this sense, gene editing only offers a much more precise way of effecting such alterations. Such alterations might be far from benign, inasmuch as “there’s no way to guarantee that this incredibly powerful tool won’t wind up in the hands of people who have no compunction about using gene drives to cause harm,” devising ‘gene bombs’ “to target the human microbiome or major food sources.”

Accordingly, the authors distinguish between two types of cells that can be ‘edited.’ Somatic cells are specific to an individual organism; gene editing might cure my genetically-induced disease (or, in the wrong hands, cause one). Their good or bad effects are limited to the organism whose cells are altered. Germ cells are “any cells whose genome can be inherited by subsequent generations.” Figuring out how to alter germ cells is harder than figuring out how to alter somatic cells, but it promises a much more elegant solution to the problem of disease, as “reversing a disease-causing mutation in a single human germ cell is much simpler than trying to do the same thing inside some of the fitty trillion somatic cells that make up a human body.” The task will be to get CRISPR into the body of the patient, “to the tissue where the disease is exerting its greatest effect”; scientists are working on that. But this only ratchets up the urgency of the ethical-political questions arising from the invention of this power. “Whether we’ll ever have the intellectual and moral capacity to guide our own genetic destiny is an open question.” Making “heritable changes to the human genome” should be resisted, the authors recommend, although it must be observed that their recommendation has not been followed. After all, why would the Chinese communist regime, in principle committed to the manipulation of human ‘evolution’ through political-economic revolution, wielding mass-slaughter of peasants as one of its weapons, halt at the use of a biological tool which offers a much less crude way of achieving the desired outcomes? Why not enforce communal equality by designing human beings capable of no other life than one of communal equality?

Somewhat comically, the authors’ principal worry seems to be that such a prospect might hurt the scientists, “set[ting] many members of the public against this fledgling technology despite its enormous potential for good.” As they more or less acknowledge, given the character of their regime, the Chinese rulers do not need to worry so much about public opinion, and so have directed their scientists to forge ahead. American intelligence agencies have already listed genome editing “as one of the six weapons of mass destruction and proliferation that nation-states might try to develop, at great risk to America.” Leave it to the spooks to think politically, when the scientists would rather not.

What of religion as a source of possible constraints? The authors make short work of it. Religious “perspectives vary widely.” Christians often “regard the embryo as a person from conception,” while Jews and Muslims don’t. Since the human embryo is the most obvious site for germ-cell manipulation, such discrepancies could bring religious warfare back with higher-tech swords and scimitars.

Hemming and hawing somewhat, the authors begin to wonder, is it really a problem at all, however? There may be no principled constraints on such research. For example, “The argument that germline editing is somehow unnatural doesn’t carry much weight”; the distinction between natural and unnatural they judge “a false dichotomy, and if it prevents us from alleviating human suffering, it’s also a dangerous one.” (One might add that if, on the other hand, germline editing might elevate the status of some at the expense of the human suffering of others, that result might be dangerous, too.) Or what if (again, as Tocqueville would suggest) germline editing would elevate the status of some by alleviating the suffering of others—by anesthetizing them into a condition of dronelike docility without dronelike laziness? (“Timid and industrious herd animals,” in Tocqueville’s phrase.) The authors scramble to distinguish gene editing from eugenics, which has rightly taken on such a bad odor in recent decades, but what is gene editing but a more precise and reliable form of eugenics, a word that describes the aspirations of gene editors more accurately than any term gene editors have devised?

More radically, is the dichotomy between natural and unnatural false? In urging that it is, the authors ask if a coral reef, which is natural, really differs in any meaningful way from a “megalopolis like Tokyo,” a thing usually considered unnatural. The example is more complex than it seems, if human beings are by their nature political animals. If so, then in some respects Tokyo must be natural inasmuch as it’s a ‘polis,’ however ‘megalo’ it may be. The reason one balks at the claim is that the coral reef has no customs or conventions; it must be what it is, given the nature of the animals that built it. There is no such necessity about a megalopolis; whatever their size, political communities mix human nature—identifiably the same, everywhere—with habits, opinions, institutions that vary considerably from place to place, time to time. It makes sense to ask if a given political community is good for the human beings who inhabit it; it doesn’t make sense to ask if a given coral reef is good for the beings that inhabit it, unless some exogenous force—pollution, for example—has damaged it.

The authors finally approach the question of political regimes in the last ten pages of their book. They raise the question of justice. How would we edit genes “equitably—that is, in a way that improves human health across the board, not just in certain groups”? In the future, “people with more money” might “live healthier and longer lives thanks to their privileged sets of genes” and not merely because they can afford better health care. But, like all matters of distributive justice, the issue will be settled by the character of the regime in which it arises. This is why the authors raise a smile when they claim that “governments are simply not going to begin forcing parents to edit their children’s genes.” Really? Why not? Governments have been known to kill people because their genes were defective, or supposed to be. Why not wield the micro-scalpel instead of the truncheon?

And then there is the matter of foreign policy, which the authors do not neglect to remark. “Any prohibitions on germline gene editing in the United States would effectively cede leadership in this area to other nations—something Americans are arguably already doing with our existing bans on federal funding for germline editing,” which one suspects to be their primary concern in all of this. Indeed, “once a game-changing technology is unleashed on the world, it is impossible to contain it.” They end the book with a whine about how non-scientists don’t trust scientists, anymore. By the same token, one wonders why they trust their fellow scientists, especially those in the pay of foreign and hostile governments.

Are there natural limits to human efforts to manipulate natural limits? Evidently there are some, as seen in the use, and the non-use, of nuclear weapons. A technology that threatens to obliterate me if I use it to obliterate you, because you might use it against me in your dying moments, has yet to be used against any country that maintains a nuclear arsenal that might survive nuclear attack. Deterrence works. Similarly, although regimes might attempt to breed supermen, even enhance them with artificial intelligence and other powers, it seems unlikely that any regime would design such a ‘race’ of warriors without taking firm precautions against their rebellion. The main threat would be a regime that intends to transform the rulers themselves into such warriors, a regime animated by some notion of trans-humanity. Such regimes have already existed, but they’ve never had such powerful technological means at their disposal.

 

Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds.: Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2016.

 

Looking at his colleagues on the faculty of the University of Chicago and elsewhere in academia in the aftermath of the Second World War, refugee scholar Leo Strauss raised an embarrassing question: How was it that political scientists had failed to recognize tyranny when they saw it arise during the years between the world wars? Most immediately, he observed, Max Weber’s insistence that social scientists separate ‘facts’ from ‘values’ prevented these impressively-trained academics from identifying what anyone should want to know first of all about any ruler, namely, does this ruler take it as his right and even his duty to kill and imprison law-abiding citizens? To study political regimes as if they are bacteria in a petri dish isn’t really science; it is a professional deformation. Genuine understanding of political life would need to come from somewhere other than social science as conceived by Strauss’s contemporaries. Famously, he looked far behind them, to the political philosophers of Greek antiquity, as better guides to understanding politics than even the most celebrated ‘hard-nosed realists’ among ‘the moderns’: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx.

Today, as the living memory of Nazism dies with the generation that saw it, and after the collapse of Nazism’s great rival in tyranny, the Soviet Union, the need to identify tyranny, and to distinguish it from other forms of one-man rule—constitutional mo0narchy, absolute monarchy, military dictatorship and the like—remains with us. The contributors to this volume address a debate that took place between Strauss and the Paris-based émigré philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and admirer not merely of tyranny but of Stalinism, whose lectures on Hegel in the years before the war had influenced a generation of French intellectuals. Although some of them (most notably Raymond Aron) rejected the arguments for the necessity of statism and tyranny in advancing ‘History,’ others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty perhaps most vehemently) adopted and even radicalized what they heard from the Master.

What is tyranny? When we hear tyrants, and even ordinary politicians in democracies invoke ‘historical progress’ or ‘change’ as their slogans, what are they really talking about?

To understand tyranny in the modern world, Strauss engaged in a sly but serious provocation: He commended study of a long-forgotten short dialogue written by Xenophon—then as now hardly a staple of university syllabi, even in ‘Classics’ departments, let alone in social-science classrooms. Xenophon’s Hiero, subtitled On Tyranny, recounts an imaginary dialogue between the eponymous Syracusan tyrant and the poet Simonides of Cleos, a rival of Pindar whose practice of demanding money for his poems and whose reputation for wisdom made him into a sort of proto-Sophistic wise man in the eyes of later generations. In 1948 Strauss published a translation of the dialogue along with his own detailed and subtle interpretation; more than a straightforward exegesis, Strauss’s essay raised the issue of the relation between ancient or ‘classical’ and modern tyranny. He sent the book to his friend Kojève, who agreed to review it, and also agreed to have the dialogue, Strauss’s commentary, his review, and Strauss’s rejoinder published in a new edition, which appeared in 1954.

Xenophon’s Simonides opens the dialogue by asking Hiero how the tyrannical life and private life differ in terms of pleasures and pains—Hiero having followed both of these ways of life, whereas Simonides has never lived as a tyrant. Frequently (and perhaps rhetorically) swearing by Zeus, Hiero maintains that his physical pleasures are now weaker than they were when he was a private man because they are satiated by easy and repeated gratification. As for the gentler pleasures, the tyrant’s life is a lonely one; in loving he never knows if his love is truly returned, and he can trust no one, not even his family. A tyrant must fear the decent and brave, the wise (presumably including Simonides), and the just. At the central point of the dialogue, Hiero avers that even killing one’s suspected enemies cannot relieve the tyrant’s condition. “When, because of their fear, they do away with such men, who is left for them to use except the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish?” Far from being capable of helping his friends and mastering his enemies, the tyrant finds that his friends fear him and his enemies are too numerous to master. But if he killed them all, he would have no one left to rule.

No stranger to rhetoric himself, Simnonides comes to the rescue of this poor tyrant in distress. Hiero, he intones, I know how you can rule and still be loved. First (and in this the ‘classical’ thinker anticipates Machiavelli) reward farmers, importers, and inventors a person who benefit the polis. Command your mercenaries to guard not only your own person but all your subjects. Finally, spend your money for the public good. “If you prove superior to your friends in beneficence, your enemies will be utterly unable to resist you” and, “while being happy, you will not be envied for being happy.” On that cheery note the dialogue ends; the tyrant rewards the poet with silence. Historians do tell us that Hiero did not have him killed.

In Strauss’s reading, the Hiero provides modern thinkers with a window into the thought of the classical philosophers on the now-misunderstood but crucial problem of tyranny, and on political life generally. Behind the fact-value distinction of Max Weber lies not simply an approach to social science but a philosophical doctrine, the doctrine or family of doctrines Strauss calls “historicism.” For all his talk about ‘ideals,’ Weber assumed that ideals are culturally determined; cultures arise, grow, then wither; that is to say, they are fundamentally ‘historical’—beings transformed in the course of time. While academic historians understand the term ‘historicism’ to mean simply to ‘contextualize’ the actions, thoughts, and persons of the past, showing how contemporary events relate to one another, Strauss offers a philosophic definition. Historicism in this sense means that “the foundations of human thought are laid by specific experiences which are not, as  matter of principal, coeval with human thought as such”; every human thought is ‘relative to’ the historical time-frame in which it is conceived, and it has no necessary validity beyond that time-frame.

The moral and political result of historicist thinking proved catastrophic in the generation immediately following Weber’s for while the ancient Greeks in fact identified and described tyranny, in the eyes of Strauss’s contemporaries that definition had little or no relevance to our own time and place. Similarly, while those Greeks in fact made certain value judgements about tyranny as so defined, their values were not our values. We can have little or nothing to learn from Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon, even if our antiquarians may enjoy learning about them.

Assuming that the classical description and judgment of tyranny no longer had anything to teach us; assuming that the very notion of a ‘value-laden’ political science couldn’t be scientific at all because ‘values’ lie outside the boundaries of the knowable, and endure as mere sentimental reflections of the factual conditions of a given time and place; inclined to suppose that tyranny itself need no longer concern them, because humanity had moved on, progressing beyond such a thing, twentieth-century historicists failed adequately to assess such men as Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. More these new tyrants formed ambitions well beyond those of someone like Hiero or even Alexander the Great; armed with historicist doctrines, the new tyrants sought a “perpetual and universal tyranny” over not only human actions but human thoughts. Historicism itself advances this “collectivization of thought” because it enables tyrants to claim that their rule will enact the most ‘progressive,’ the most ‘advanced’ ideas of this historical time-frame.

To put this in terms of the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Socrates maintains that a philosopher can ascend from the convention opinions of his polis and begin to understand the nature (including the human nature) obscured by those opinions. The way to do this is through dialectic or the clash of opinions sorted out by reasoning—that is, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. As Socrates repeatedly shows, conventional opinions rationally examined will turn up many incoherencies; although dialectical conversations may embarrass and even infuriate non-philosophers who cherish their opinions, they enable the philosopher to progress toward a clearer and more accurate understanding of the natural order or cosmos. By contrast, historicists locate dialectic not in conversations among individuals engaged in rational discussion but in the collisions of masses of people—social classes, nations, even civilizations—struggling for dominance over time. This reconceived dialectic lends itself precisely to the “collectivization” of thought seen in modern tyrannies.

Strauss argues that in order to learn from the classics we will need to re-learn how to learn from them. Strauss subjects Xenophon’s Hiero to intense and detailed scrutiny with a view not to understanding it as an expression of its ‘time,’ relativizing it in relation to a putative ‘march of History,’ but rather to understanding it on its own terms. He intends to teach his readers how to read a philosophic dialogue as its author intended it to be read. In addition to improving our strictly ‘historical’ understanding of the classics (how, he asks, can we claim to understand the past unless we see what the people who lived then were trying to do?), in addition to helping us to identify tyranny when we see it, whenever it arises, study of philosophizing as presented in the form of a dialogue requires us to think not only theoretically but practically. By this Strauss means that to understand the dialectical subtleties of even the simplest philosophic dialogue we will need not only to understand the arguments of the participants but also the conversational situation in which they meet, the significance not only of their words but their actions, and indeed their silences—exactly what we all do when we engage in our own conversations. The dialogue form as a literary genre (not unlike a novel by, as Strauss suggests, Jane Austen) makes us think prudentially. Philosophic treatises typically don’t invite us to do that, but we should, especially when thinking about politics.

In considering the concluding speech of the Hiero in light of this careful way of reading, Strauss comes too doubt that it is right to hold out hope for the benefactor-tyrant Simonides extols. Such a tyrant will scarcely be immune from envy. Hiero’s problem isn’t that he hasn’t found the right techniques of tyrannical rule but that he wants his subjects to love him. Simonides’ wisdom, as seen in his own way of life, consists in wanting not love but honor, and that from a few understanding friends and not from everybody. While the tyrant makes himself dependent upon ‘the many,’ Simonides enjoys relative self-sufficiency. His pains are few because his needs are so modest; The tyrant needs a city; the wise man “may live as a stranger” in Syracuse or any polis. Simonides moved freely from his native Cleos to Athens to Syracuse, while Hiero stayed tied to one place. Even “the best city”—whether ruled by a beneficent tyrant or a virtuous citizenry—remains “morally and intellectually on a lower plane than the best individual.” And respecting the pleasures enjoyed by individuals, the “highest pleasure” is experienced by him who tracks his own “progress in wisdom and virtue,” even as he acknowledges that “no man can be simply wise.” Although no individual can be simply wise, no polis can be wise at all, and the tyrant in his self-imposed neediness cannot make it so.

Kojève rises to the challenge with a brilliant critique of Strauss’s argument, a critique now made available to us in a translation of the original, unedited version as an appendix to the Burns-Frost collection. He agrees that the problems of tyranny identified by Xenophon “are still ours,” but he rejects the classical ciritique of tyranny and the natural-right theory underlying it. Simonides errs in practical terms because he fails to tell Hiero any specific steps he should take to implement the reforms he urges. Further, and contra Strauss, although the reforms may have been impractical at the time, they are commonplaces of modern statism. Strauss “cannot admit that what was ‘true’ for Xenophon could be ‘false’ for us.” In these initial comments Kojève already hints at his deeper objections to Strauss and the classics: They fail to combine or ‘synthesize’ theory and practice in the manner attempted by Hegel and Marx.

Simonides also errs in defining honor as the province of “real men,” whom Kojève supposes to be aristocrats. We moderns now know that labor can be a source of pride and joy; therefore, everyone from a tyrants to a street sweeper can gain satisfaction from a job well done. Hegel has taught us that we can synthesize honor and labor, Master and Slave, thought and action. Hiero’s dilemma has been fully explained by Hegel as “the tragedy of the Master” in the pre-modern world, but the dialectic of History removed this tragedy long ago. As Hegel also teaches us, Xenophon gets the tragedy wrong in the first place; the tyrant doesn’t really want love, he (and his subjects) want recognition. They will get that, but only at the end of History in the universal and homogeneous state—universal because it extends throughout the world, homogeneous because it it all find equal recognition for their work. This state is “the goal and outcome of the collective labor of all and of each”; in this Kojève hints at the Marxian cast of his Hegelianism.

As for Strauss, Kojève maintains that he misunderstands the condition of philosophy. Insofar as History has ended we can and must abandon philo-sophy—literally the love of wisdom—because wisdom itself has been attained. The philosopher-king gives way to the Wise Man-King, recognized by all and therefore obeyed without coercion. In fact, at the end of History, only “administrative questions” remain, so the Wise Man may be able to retire completely as the (non-Hegelian but Marxist_ “classless society” takes shape. “The tyrant who here initiates the real political movement toward homogeneity followed the teaching of the intellectual who deliberately transformed the ideal of the philosopher so that it might cease to be a ‘utopian ideal'”—an ideal which Hegel prematurely claimed to have been brought about by the Napoleonic Empire For “intellectual” read “Marx”; for “the tyrant” read “Stalin.” So long as History hasn’t instantiated the universal and homogeneous State, the philosopher must exercise his human freedom by actively negating the ‘given’ social and political order, supporting the “Tyrant-Philosopher” who aims to bring it to fruition.

Kojève also departs in an important way from Hegel ‘ontologically.’ Hegel posits the existence of the “Absolute Spirit.” The Absolute Spirit differs sharply from the Biblical Holy Spirit in two ways: it isn’t holy, separate from ‘Creation’; and it isn’t a Person but a form of energy which converts itself into matter but remains immanent in matter as well as in all human thought and action. Kojève excludes matter or nature from the historical dialectic, which for him consists only in man’s progressive attempts to master brute nature. That is to say, Kojève retains the modern and particularly the Kantian esteem for human freedom, which in strictly Hegelian (and of course in materialist-Marxian)thought cannot exist. Aided by intellectuals, the Philosopher-Tyrant’s task is to hasten human progress; this supports the historicist ontology which asserts that Being is not eternal (the “theistic conception of Truth,” whether Biblical or classical) but rather that Being is Becoming (the stance of “radical Hegelian atheism”). Being will continue to ‘become’ or change until it reaches its end, its culmination, as this exclusively human reality “creates itself over time.”

Because human reality creates itself over time, Kojève argues, Strauss is entirely wrong to endorse the classical philosophers’ attempt to ascend from the Cave of political conventions to the sunlight of Nature by don’t of the logical efforts of the individual philosopher. No mere individual, not even the philosopher, can perceive the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth until the collective human advancement that is History has reached its final, grand synthesis, wherein all contradictions disappear into the universality and homogeneity of the World State. This is philosophically necessary because, absent that State, the philosopher cannot know with certainty that he is not mad, or that he and his circle of philosophic friends are not prejudiced.

How will philosophers (and the rest of us) knw that History really progresses dialectically, and how will we know that it has reached its culmination? In other words, how do we know that this grand Kantian-Hegelian-Marxist narrative is not simply the grandest of grand illusions, a spectacular, all-encompassing instance of the madness of crowds? The criterion of truth, Kojève explains, remains the one discovered by Machiavelli and systematized by Bacon: experimental manipulation. We know if a bridge is well-constructed if it doesn’t collapse; we confirm our anthropological theories by building  state that doesn’t collapse, putting ideas into practice, synthesizing what earlier philosophers separated into ‘rationalism’ and ’empiricism.’ Machiavelli’s notion of “effectual truth,” which he held out against the classics’ contemplation of nature, will allow the Wise Man at the end of History to contemplate the completed Whole, but in the meantime philosophers should not and cannot afford such a luxury. Until History ends, philosophers must not behold but negate, experiment, build and rebuild. The dialectic of History is properly not a verbal argument; it is “played out on the historical plane of active social life where one argues by acts of Work (against Nature) and of Struggle (against men).”

Given this unity of theory and practice, “There is therefore [contra Strauss and the classics] in principle no difference whatsoever between the statesman and the philosopher; both seek recognition and both act with a view to deserving it.” The “consistent atheist” “replaces
God… by Society (the State) and History.” Instead of glimpsing the holy Creator-god’s Last Judgment in the Book of Revelation, we now say ‘Let History judge,’ and we will need a new ‘Bible’ or comprehensive account of the whole, which will be possible to write only after History has ended. Kojève was still working on it at the time of his death.

Reading Kojève’s essay, one is tempted to think, ‘They don’t write book reviews like that, anymore.’ But they didn’t then, either, and Strauss was delighted; “Kojève belongs to the very few who know how to think and who love to think.” Citing not only Xenophon but also Empedocles and Plato in his rejoinder, Strauss begins by observing that “the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the possibility of the popularization of philosophy or science” were both known to the classics. He proceeds to answer Kojève’s critique point by point.

On the complaint that Simonides doesn’t tell Hiero exactly how to enact the reforms he proposes, Strauss replies that “the criticism may be said to be based on an insufficient appreciation of the value of utopias”—outlines of “the best social order.” Xenophon regards such an outline as a standard, but rarely if ever an achievable one. Truly to reform a tyranny would be to get rid of it altogether, to shift eh power wielded by the tyrant’s mercenaries to the citizens, who would no longer be tyrannized. Xenophon more modestly suggests one specific step Hiero might take, to abandon his participation in the Olympian and Pythian games—this, on the grounds that a tyrant should not lower himself to compete against private men—and to redirect his energies toward competing against  his fellow rulers in foreign cities in making his citizens happier than theirs. Strauss pointedly observes that Stalin hasn’t done this, as evidenced by his secret police and labor camps.

On the criticism that Xenophon fails to synthesize honor and work, as Hegel does, Strauss remarks that the classics regarded neither honor nor work as the highest good; after all, a criminal might take pride in a job well done. If the ‘ancient’/aristocratic love of honor and the ‘Protestant’/bourgeois esteem for work, synthesized, produce modern tyranny, then we have “effect[ed] the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities both of which made very strict demands on self-restraint”: “Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition.” Hegel as understood by Kojève gives us not a higher morality but Hobbes’s Leviathan on steroids, and modern leviathans were big enough, already. Under conditions of modern statism, we are usually better off with “liberal or constitutional democracy.” A universal empire ruled by a tyrant who is unlikely to be either philosophic or wise will exacerbate, not cure, the ills of modernity.

Regarding Kojève’s argument that only History can judge if a philosopher is mad or prejudiced, Strauss replies that “the mass party,” the engine of political life in the modern state, is even worse than “snobbish silence or whispering” within a coterie of philosophic friends because it inclines to crush dissenting voices, including philosophic whispers. In Strauss’s estimation, Kojève asks too much of both individual philosophers and History when he demands “subjective certainty” of human thought. “Philosophy in the original meaning of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance.” This is the closest we can get, humanly speaking, to certain knowledge, inasmuch as “one cannot know what one does not know without knowing that one does not know.” Beyond that, philosophy entails only “genuine awareness” of “the fundamental and comprehensive problems,” about which the philosopher will form reasonable and revisable views, “neither dogmatic nor skeptic” but “zetetic”—from the Greek zētēo, meaning “seeking” or “inquiring.” In this view, both dogmatism and skepticism wall themselves away from the continued quest for wisdom; “zetetic” philosophy continues to love wisdom, to pursue it without fainting.

On Kojève’s Hegelian insistence that tyrants seek not love but honor, and philosophers do, too, Strauss rejoins, “the classics identified satisfaction with happiness.” Because “no one can find solid happiness in what he knows to be paltry and ephemeral,” genuine human satisfaction can only occur when a man “looks up in search for the eternal order.” The political man, however, attaches himself to perishable human being; he needs them to need him, and to feel that they do. Like a mother who loves her child, he love them because they are ‘his own’ subjects, not in a genuine spirit of self-sacrifice, as Kojève (actually following Hiero’s rhetorical self-portrait) claims. Insofar as the philosopher does attach himself to his fellow human beings—talking with them in the marketplace, for example—he acknowledges first of all that he is human, more self-sufficient than anyone else to be sure, but no god. He therefore will interest himself in the laws and customs of the marketplace, he frequents, which in turn requires him to consider the regime of the polis in which that marketplace is located. For this reason, he may advise the ruler or rulers, with the care exemplified by Xenophon’s Simonides. Finally, “of all perishable things known to us, those which reflect [the eternal order] most, or which are most akin to that order, are the souls of men”; accordingly, the philosopher will delight at the ‘sight’ of a well-ordered sou. He will want to gather such souls around him, and to help “the young whos souls are by nature fitted for it” to “acquire good order of their souls” by the practice of philosophizing. This also directs his attention to the regime, which may or may not leave philosophers to pursue this task in peace. In doing so he seeks not ‘recognition’ but progress in the direction of wisdom; ‘recognition’ by the subjects of a universal and homogeneous state, even if achievable, would only mean you have succeeded in impressing large number of folks who don’t really understand what you’re talking about. That is a formula for distraction, not intellectual certitude.

Strauss further argues that  the universal and homogeneous state will not even succeed in its own terms, because in it men (indeed “real men”) will arise to negate the tyranny, whether it be that of the wise man or the administrative drones he leaves in his wake. And if the universal and homogeneous state actually did succeed, eradicating not only all existing real men but preventing their existence in tall future times, we would not have fully human men but the Last Man mocked by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—who, insofar as he thinks of the eternal order merely asks idly, not really wanting to know, “What is a star?” And then turns to People magazine for the answer—or rather to the National Enquirer, wherein the motto, “Inquiring minds want to know,” takes on a decidedly non-skeptical cast.

Thus, Strauss concludes, Kojève is right to think “the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.” It will also entail an inhuman universal tyranny. he is only wrong in calling this good.

Each of the nine scholars contributing essays to Philosophy, History, and Tyranny calls attention to a different and illuminating dimension of the Strauss-Kojève debate. Timothy W. Burns begins with an excellent account of what might be described as the not-easily-seen philosophic background of the debate, beginning with the thought of Martin Heidegger, philosopher and Nazi, whose writings both men had studied with great care before the world war. Among the intellectual forebears of modern tyranny present in their debate, Marx stands out more clearly, but Kojève had also supplemented Hegelianism with Heidegger’s ‘existential’ preoccupation with death; that is, not only Hegel but Heidegger addressed the Hobbesian fear of death. Strauss saw Kojève was defending Hegelian rationalism from the long line of anti-rationalist thinkers—Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, culminating with Heidegger. He did this by showing how the fear of death could be incorporated within Hegelianism in the figure of the Slave who overcomes the fear of death in his struggle with the Master. To argue that was to redeem Hegelianism from the charge that Hegel had failed to ascend from philosophy to wisdom, that the Absolute Spirit hadn’t put an end to History because Nietzsche, or Heidegger, had refuted him. Burns learnedly situates the principal figures of ‘historical’ thought in this internecine debate—both the true historicists, who posit an end of History, and the historical relativists who posit ‘folk minds’ which clash or cooperate with one another in an endless struggle. Burns can then clarify Strauss’s achievement in rejecting this massive and pervasive habit of ‘historical thinking’ and turning instead to the classics and to nature—not incidentally defending the original understanding of the philosophic way of life, which all of the historical thinkers challenged, whether from the standpoint of Hegelian absolutism or cultural relativism.

Having situated the Strauss-Kojève debate in the history of philosophy, Burns saves his most philosophic insight for the conclusion. Although Strauss comes across as the man of greater moral sobriety, Kojève, for all his modern/Machiavellian esteem for a certain form of tyranny nonetheless remains much more in the grip of moralism. By contending that reason itself cannot transcend ‘the city’ but rather evolves with it into the all-comprehending condition of universality and homogeneity, Kojève does not fully achieve the understanding of the classical philosophers, who ascended from the cave to noetic glimpses of nature. The justice of the philosopher is not the same as the justice of the polis because the latter form of justice is attenuated by the need for self-defense in war the justice of the wise tyrant in the universal and homogeneous state will be similarly attenuated by the need either to maintain his rule against manly challenges or to debase the entire population into ‘Last Men’ unworthy of his attention. This is why Socrates held misology, the hatred of reasoned argument, to be a vice even worse than sins against the morality of the polis. In the philosopher, whose way of life is least compromised by the compromised morality of the polis and its laws, because he organizes his life around reasoning, and thereby approaches justice (initially by asking what it is) more nearly than the statesman, let alone the modern tyrant.

Murray S. Y. Bessette provides the philosophic background of Kojève’s reply to Strauss, well complementing Burns’s essay. In his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, delivered between 1933 and 1939 and published after the war, Kojève enunciated the principal themes of all his subsequent work. Here is where we see why he so forcefully refutes Simonides’ charge that Hiero could be motivated by a desire to be loved. Love is natural; humans share it with animals. Its frustration does move man to action, to freely negate the given, and thus acts as a counterbalance to passive contemplation. But unlike recognition, love is for someone—human or divine. “While human, [it] is not humanizing” because it lacks the capacity to make us want to overcome our animal nature, to overcome the fear of those who dominate us by mastering the fear for the safety of our bodies, readying our spirits for rational thought and action. Contra Aristotle, there is no such person as a natural slave because slavery occurs accidentally, through the bad luck of having encountered someone stronger or smarter or tougher than you are. You will end your slavery only when you see a good opportunity to challenge his rule, when the slave can “reasonably risk [his life] with a belief in the possibility of victory.” This opportunity comes as the slave works, through his work, inasmuch as even servile labor requires him to master his desires in order to do his job. Underneath the ruling gaze of the mastery, the slave husbands the spiritual resources needed for the “final Fight” to overthrow him. Although I have said “him,” the struggle isn’t limited to male adults but encompasses women and even children; although initially incapable of winning a fight for recognition, the latter will achieve recognition not only through iducation but through the “socialist Society” which will take over parenting from individual parents. “The abolition of the final human Master inaugurates the birth of the Master state,” the entity which “replaces the biblical God as the guarantor of the truth of wisdom.” All being satisfied with their status of equal recognition within this state, none will aspire to rebel against what one might call the Last Master. Bessette thus makes it easier to see why Kojève so dislikes Aristotle’s definition of virtue as the metrion or ‘mean’ between two extremes. Without the starker conflict between good and evil, without the clash of moral and political opposites, no dialectic; without dialectic, no History and no end of History. Aristotelian balance between extr4emes only slows this dialectic, clogging History’s flow.

The conflict between good and evil recalls the world as understood in the Bible. Daniel E. Burns remarks that no commentator has properly appreciated the role of Biblical thought in Kojève’s thought, a role Kojève himself obscures by insisting upon his atheism. he begins with that bête noir of Biblical thought, Epicureanism, a form of ancient atheism which Kojève classifies as actually theistic because it believes Being to be eternal, not changing. All those who believe this need to posit some version of intuitive cognition, whether by natural reasoning or divine revelation, and no such thinker can distinguish himself from madmen and false prophets, who are equally certain of their putative insights. The Socratic circle of philosophic friends doesn’t overcome this problem because for every Socrates there might be one or more Jim Joneses or Charles Mansons—malicious crackpots who gather disciples around them. As for Socrates himself, his move to the marketplace was a step in the right direction, but only the all-encompassing ‘marketplace’ of the universal and homogeneous state can settle the problem of cognition once and for all. That is, the Biblical ‘end time,’ wherein God will reign over a new Heaven and a new Earth, far more closely represents the end of History than anything ‘theists’ believe. The End of History is the “Christian idea” secularized —made rational and real. The religious paraphernalia that went with that idea will then “be more than refuted; it would be outlived.” Kojève charges that Strauss and his classics simply cannot account for the Biblical vision, which will become true by dint of human thought and effort, without the assistance of a personal God.

Burns writes that Strauss “does agree that Hegel’s political philosophy is part of an effort to respond to a challenge that the Bible poses to the enterprise of philosophy as such,” an effort that began with Machiavelli in opposition to such philosophers as Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, who sought to integrate Biblical and classical-philosophic teachings. The modern-philosophic effort responds to the Biblical challenge, which holds the certainties of divine revelation over the head of classical zeteticism (“always searching, never finding,” in the Apostle Paul’s scornful estimation), by positing the sure knowledge of making. the human maker proves to himself and everyone else that he understands the efficient causes of production in the real world. If these productions satisfy him and others, why speculate further on human ends? Strauss responds to the modern project first by noting that the classics did in fact understand that technological innovation could be encouraged, but advised against it as dangerous to any regime and its laws, which require the respectful obedience that only stability can foster. “There are natural limits preventing the full success of the Machiavellian project.” which sacrifices the moderation underpinning self-knowledge, without which human beings have no wisdom at all. The limitlessness promised by the technological mastery of chance and of nature destroys, and was intended by Machiavelli to destroy, the sense of limits, of legal restraint, that non-philosophers find in piety and philosophers find in rational inquiry. In addition, Strauss simply does not share Kojève’s “revolt against the idea that the history of the world has no ‘meaning.'” Strauss finds meaning in nature, not history.

The next two essays, by Nasser Behnegar and Bryan-Paul Frost, take opposite sides in the debate, with Behnegar arguing on behalf of Strauss and Frost making the case for Kojève. On the matter of utopia, Behnegar notes Struass’s criticism of the modern utopias: In order to make ideals seem realizable, they lower the standards set by the classics. And in regard to Strauss’s reminder to Kojève that Simonides does in fact offer Hiero a practical step to take—to avoid competing in the chariot races in Pan-Hellenic competitions—he brings to light the important fact that such contests were religious festivals; “victory in them was tantamount to receiving Zeus’s or Apollo’s approval.” This suggests that Simonides was warning Hiero against delegitimizing his own authority if he happened to lose. Bot the critique of utopias and the warning against risking apparent divine disfavor point to Strauss’s deeper critique of Hegelianism: It “combines the rule of the philosophers with an egalitarian political order that emerges through the power of emancipated passions.” The modern philosophic quest for epistemological certainty in some respects reflects the need to appeal to ‘the people,’ who are not likely to rule themselves by the zetetic skepticism that  philosophers practice. Philosophers and citizens both care about human things, but the kind of care which animates them differs in kind, not in degree; what is right for one is wrong for the other, and Hegelianism can never overcome that. Nor can the statesman-tyrant synthesize these two kinds of caring in his own soul; rulers care for citizens (or subjects) first of all because they are ‘their own,’ as a mother loves her child, but also as instruments of their own ambitions. As for the people themselves, they in turn would use rulers—for protection and for the promotion of their prosperity generally. In this polis of necessarily somewhat ‘low’ concerns, the philosopher will work the apertures, fish for young potential philosophers in the unstill waters of the marketplace, needing toleration rom his fellow-citizens but not any excessively ordered, Spartan-lie regime that would shut him down. “The coming of Kojève’s regime will be the end of philosophy on earth, not because the quest for wisdom will be replaced by wisdom but because the quest for wisdom will be successfully suppressed”; meanwhile, “the politicization of philosophy runs the danger of infecting the philosopher with the vice of the political man.”

Frost’s essay, literally the central essay of the book, provides a spirited defense of Kojève. Frost cites Hegel’s denial that we can know nature as certainly as we can know the human things which are verified by virtue of their social-historical success. This is why the social criterion of recognition and especially of mutual recognition looms so large for historicists; nature, like the God of the Bible, hides behind clouds of unknowing, but when we’re being treated with contempt we know it. Strauss cannot really know if nature is eternal and unchanging or a being of Heraclitean flux, but he can readily judge if a man like Kojève respects him. And not only Strauss: “Contrary to Strauss, Kojève does not think ‘the masses’ are utterly incompetent judges” even of the philosopher’s opinions, insofar as these opinions remain in the realm of social and political life. We all know when we’re being hosed. And if philosophy is the quest for wisdom and not wisdom itself, how does Strauss know that the masses are incompetent judges? How does he know that philosophy is the best way of life? Or (again given the criterion of certainty) how does he know anything? “Philosophy would be futile if it did not culminate in wisdom itself.” Inasmuch as Strauss himself admits that the classical philosopher cannot prove his claim that the well-ordered souls that please him are really more akin to the eternal order than chaotic souls are, where does that leave him?

As for the universal and homogeneous state, is it so very bad? Modern men do in fact accept a substantial state already, empowered to care for them, watching over them like a vigilant mother. Universalized, such a state would prevent the scourge of war, “offer[ing] the prospect of peace, prosperity, and security.” “Are these such terrible things to enjoy, and might they not be worth the purchase price, even on Strauss’s own terms?” Under modern conditions, what better alternative has Strauss to offer? Frost ends on a not e of what might be described as liberal Kojèvism: “As for whether one might argue that Kojève himself won the debate outright, would it be too brash to say that only Time (=History = Being = Truth) will tell?” Surely not too brash, this argument might well prove perhaps both too historicist for Strauss and too uncertain and indecisive for Kojève. For a reply to Frost, one might turn not so much to Strauss but to Tocqueville and his critique of “soft despotism.”

Neither Strauss nor Kojève supposed the debate to have been settled in their published exchange, as they continued to correspond for years. Mark Jo. Lutz ably summarizes their continued dialogue. Interpretation here proves especially helpful because the two men wrote not for general readers but as (so to speak) one philosopher to another; when they weren’t talking about the logistics of a projected but never-to-be meeting with conversation, a high degree of abstruseness prevailed, especially on Kojève’s side of the correspondence. Lutz remarks that Strauss describes “the desire to converse with other philosophers” as “natural,” “a spontaneous, recurring, and lasting feature of philosophic life,” and not at all indicative of a need for recognition.

Kojève objects to any Platonic dualism founded on a mathematized physics on the one hand and an understanding of the human soul on the other; for his part, Strauss complains that Kojève has set up his own dualism by failing to account (as Hegel himself tried to do) for nature, and simply setting it aside to concentrate his attention on History. Strauss continues to reject the several historicisms of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, while Kojève upholds a mixture of these. Moreover, “Kojève assumes the ideas are concepts”—realizable ideals—”and that Plato is interested only in concepts and not in the soul” On the contrary, Platonic ideals are not ‘realizable’ at all, the ‘ideal’ polis of the Republic is intended ironically, and Plato’s Socrates sees into the soul of every person he knows, including himself. To Strauss’s criticism that Hegel’s project won’t satisfy anyone but the Last Man, Kojève cheerfully agrees that “in the universal and homogeneous state the great majority of people, whom he characterizes as ‘animals’ or ‘automata,’ will become easily satisfied by simple gratifications such as sports, art, and eroticism” for them, there will be no need for spirituality and its negations at the end of History, and that will prevent any popularly-based revolutions. As for the elites, the philosophers will eventually “acquire wisdom and become ‘gods,'” while “the recognition-hungry tyrants” will administer the greater machine that rules all the lesser automata. In other words, to Strauss’s civic concerns Kojève answers with a shrug of the shoulders; the end of History will become the much-sought-after eternal order, and that will be that. He continues to regard nature as necessitarian, radically unfree, as well as unteleological , which makes ‘natural right’ an oxymoron; in this he resembles a historicist Hume in maintaining that no ‘Ought’ can be derived from the natural ‘Is.’

In response, Strauss denies that the citizen-morality of (for example) a Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic is truly just; it is a matter of convention. In view of the self-contradictory character of convention as revealed by dialectical conversations, one cannot derive an ‘Ought’ directly from such an all-too-human ‘Is.’ this notwithstanding, the philosopher must take citizen-morality seriously, understanding it “on its own terms” rather than rushing to reduce it to class interests or other history-bound circumstances. The universal existence of citizen-morality of one sort or another tells us things about human nature, and nature is the object of the philosopher’s inquiry. Looking at historical circumstances to explain citizen-morality will misdirect the philosopher’s mind from glimpsing reflections of nature in conventions. Serious thinking about citizen-morality will also lead the philosopher to think about the guarantors of that morality, the gods of the polis, and thereby lead him to the question of “what the gods are and thus into the question whether there is an eternal order or realm of necessity or whether there is a ruling intelligence that can alter the prevailing order at will.” “Historical thinking’ is the wrong way into these questions because it is a closed system, with the proverbial ‘turtles’ (in this case, historical events) ‘all the way down. ‘

This brings Strauss to a consideration of the ‘Idea’ in Plato. By nature, each living being has an identifiable character; as Strauss puts it, this character aims at “the end of the individual being belonging to the class” of which it is a member; “in this sense” the end or purpose pursued by the individual “transcends” the individual, as seen in ‘the animal’s desire for procreation or for the perpetuation of the class.” Human nature, the idea of the human aims at a “complex” end “because man is both simply a part of the whole (like the lion or the worm) and that unique part of the whole which is open to the whole.” The quest for justice, for the natural end, the naturally right way of life for man, goes beyond the perfection of individual humans. But as citizens we do not see the implications of that. In Lutz’s words, “Our concern for justice can appear to be our complete end, but it cannot perfect us, either because it is not necessarily accompanied by wisdom about the whole or because our concern with justice can stand in the way of the desire to know the truth about the whole.” The idea of man as situated within the natural order of which he can be a knowing (if not all-knowing) part requires us to wonder about the Good, the good of the whole natural order.

At this point, readers of the collection will have ventured quite far from the initial concern with tyranny and what Strauss regarded as the incapacity of contemporary political scientists to understand it. In one of the finest essays in the volume, Waller R. Newell brings us back to earth, without forgetting the larger philosophic questions raised by our life on earth, in modern states.

Kojève insists on a politics, indeed a metaphysics of sharp dualities—of good and evil, Master and Slave, of historical dialectic. Newell observes that Strauss to some degree plays along with this, insisting that we must choose between philosophy and political liberty on the one hand and the rule of modern tyrants in a World State which would snuff out philosophy on earth. Strauss offers no “middle range,” instead making it sound as if “the independence of the philosophic life is the only certain defense against tyranny, particularly the modern version of tyranny.” It seems as if Strauss concurs with Kojève’s claim that wisdom can be divorced from moderation, that the wisdom of the classics is in some sense continuous with the wisdom of the moderns and their immoderate pursuit of the conquest of nature by means of science or knowledge. Newell demurs, arguing that, just as Strauss contends each Platonic dialogue leaves out some important feature seen in other dialogues, with only the full corpus of Platonic writings constituting the whole of his thought, so too Strauss’s commentary on the Hiero and his exchange with Kojève afford only a partial glimpse into his understanding of political philosophy.

For starters, Strauss sees that “Kojève-Hegel is not necessarily simply Hegel.” Kojève’s Hegel does not encompass Hegel’s own account of the “sacred restraints” the classical philosophers saw as animating and moderating the polis. Socrates in the Republic makes the radical claims that the philosopher’s study of “the Idea of the Good” generates practical as well as theoretical wisdom and that civic education, not only philosophy, “offers an account of a well-ordered soul that is at best indirectly connected to philosophizing and should function as an independent source of psychological immunity in the citizenry, or among the ‘gentlemen’ to the temptation to tyrannize.” But in his exchange with Kojève, Newell argues, Strauss downplays this latter account, centering on classical politics not classical civic education as the antidote to modern tyranny. Buy if there really is an eternal natural order, including a persistent human nature, can the universal, homogeneous state really threaten to end philosophy on earth?

In his other writings, Strauss points to Platonic psychology as evidence against the fearful Hobbesian struggle for self-preservation and honor, later seen in historicism as the struggle for recognition leading to self-preservation in a permanently self-preserving World State. Love, not fear, much less Heidegger’s existential anxiety, more truly animates the human soul. Strauss knew Xenophon’s Hiero, but he also knew Plato’s Symposium, with the Ladder of Love that stretches between animals and gods. For human beings ‘in themselves,’ abstracted from the whole, love of wisdom also mediates “between the charms of excessive homogeneity (typified by mathematics) and excessive heterogeneity (the realm of statecraft and education)”. Philosophy, “graced by nature’s grace,” as Strauss rather un-Biblically puts it, accounts for each of these realms of human thought while refusing to succumb to the “charms” of either. In contesting modern tyranny on the grounds as it were of a dialogue by Xenophon, who “presents a comparatively sharper divide between the philosophic life and the city” than Plato does, Strauss meets Kojève on grounds closer to Kojève’s own thought than he might otherwise do. He is taking a worthwhile risk, but it is a risk because things finally cannot be left on the grounds of such sharp dualism.

Newell also tries to rescue Hegel from Kojève’s Hegel, although in some of this he probably goes too far, and farther than Strauss would go. The real Hegel understands that “the God of Abraham unfolds historically in time, changing nature and  human nature,” in this resembling the activity of the world itself as conceived by historicists—most prominently Hegel, who writes of “the self-actualization of God in History.” The problem here is that the God of Abraham doesn’t “unfold” over time, the way Hegel’s ‘God’ or Absolute Spirit does. The God of Abraham creates the universe ex nihilo, not by unfolding Himself dialectically; insofar as He changes nature and human nature, He punishes human beings in response to their disobedience and redeems them through an infusion of His (not nature’s) grace. God isn’t embodied in His creation, immanent; as Newell rightly observes, Hegel’s Christianity “may have been a kind of deism or pantheism.” But this means it isn’t Christian. So in saying that “For Strauss… Hegel’s philosophy is not, as Kojève asserts, atheistic,” Newell misses Strauss’s understanding of the distinctions between Jerusalem and Athens, the grace of grace of God and the grace of nature, and also Kojève’s special use of ‘atheism’ to mean the denial that Being is stable or fundamentally changeless. Strauss’s esteem for Hegel’s recovery of the classics, which Newell rightly highlights, was always tempered by his equal recognition that Hegel did not understand the classics s they understood themselves, and that this would not do.

This notwithstanding, Newell is surely right to say that “Kojève’s Hegel” differs from “Hegel’s Hegel” by making the Master-Slave dialectic central to the dialectic of History simply. Hegel is more political and less individualistic-moral because the locus of human history manifests itself in the political evolution of polis to empire to modern state to (eventually) world-state. To concentrate on the Master-Slave dialectic is to make Hegel more consonant with Marx than he really is; Kojève “combines the reductionist materialism of Marx”—particularly the class struggle of capitalists and workers, the modern masters and slaves—”with the historical and cultural breadth of Hegel,” adding Heideggerian-existential ‘nothingness’ as the negation that drives the historical process. For Kojève, unlike either Hegel or Heidegger, “the progress of history is purely anthropocentric.” Newell astutely observes Kojève’s resemblance to Fichte, “the ultimate proponent of man’s untrammeled will to conquer and reshape nature,” and it would be a dull reader who doesn’t delight in his line, “As Fichte was to Jacobinism, so might we say Kojève was to Stalinism.”

What is more, Newell is right again to conclude by observing that the real Hegel detested Jacobinism and surely would have detested Stalinism even more. His universal and homogeneous state was an attempt to combine bureaucracy with parliamentarianism, with a monarch who simply ‘signs off’ on legislation produced by the legislature. Tocqueville didn’t think this synthesis fully possible or desirable, and I think he was right, but it is quite far from it to the mass-murdering Man of Steel. “Kojève was an unconditional friend of Soviet communism, while Strauss was a conditional friend of liberal democracy.” “Strauss’s focus on the centrality of the regime therefore serves more than ever to remind us that in the modern world freedom can only be exercised in the modern nation-state with its individual liberties and representative political institutions, and that all political movements claiming to be able to create ‘global’ peace and justice are at best naïve and at worst open the door to aspiring universal tyrannies.”

While Hegel figures explicitly in the debate, Richard L. Velkley considers the unspoken presence of Martin Heidegger, the subject of Strauss’s allusion in the final paragraph of his “Restatement,” where he says, “We [i.e., he and Kojève] have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore [here quoting Livy] ‘mad themselves obsequiously subservient while lording it over others,’ were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk about Being”—this last phrase glancing at Heidegger’s best-known book, Being and Time. Heidegger, Strauss implies, made his peace with the Nazis in part because he failed to engage in political philosophy, attempting to jump directly into ‘ontological’ contemplation without first attending to the opinions of citizens who have already arrived at answers about the gods and the cosmos. Some of those opinions may have dark consequences for philosophy along with every other aspect of human life; Heidegger didn’t consider that, but even (the Stalinist) Kojève is ready to do that.

Velkley recalls that Strauss had high respect for Heidegger in many ways, calling him “the only great thinker of our time,” the one whose profound etymologically-based interpretations of Greek philosophy had enabled Strauss and others to see “the roots of the [philosophic] tradition as they are,” and to wonder about “the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy.” Moreover, Heidegger’s original contribution to modern philosophy was impossible to overlook; in his thought, Strauss wrote, “modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity.” Kojève felt no less indebted. Heidegger corrected Hegel by refusing any attempt to bring nature into the realm of History, replacing Hegelian monism (the Absolute Spirit) with the dualism Kant had initiated. Heidegger also corrected Marxist materialism, vindicating human freedom—again, following Kant. As Velkley remarks, Kojève didn’t follow Heidegger into an affirmation of the nation-state, an affirmation which, coupled with radical historicism, inclined Heidegger to sympathy with the malevolent tyranny of the Right. Velkley offers a clear and helpful overview of Kojève’s desired synthesis (never effected to his own satisfaction) of these philosophers, which combined Hegelian dialectic, culminating in the ‘end of history,’ when explaining the human world, Platonic geometry for understanding the structure of the cosmos, Aristotelian teleology for understanding biology, and Kantianism to explain the dynamics, the movement of the cosmos. Overall, “Kojève nonetheless continued to insist that Hegel ended the evolution of philosophy by transforming philosophy into a System of Knowledge.”

The editors give the last word to James H. Nichols, the author of Alexandre Kojève: Philosophy at the End of History. He picks up the theme of his book here, outlining Kojève’s never-finished attempt to formulate a thoroughgoing update of Hegel’s system. “How could one show that history had ended?” In this, he goes deeper into Kojève’s thought than Kojève himself does in his critique of Strauss, relying on arguments taken from the lectures on Hegel and the correspondence. To demonstrate History’s conclusion, one needed to establish the “circularity” of philosophic thought. By this Hegel and Kojève mean that a thinker will begin with a question—for example, ‘What am I?’—and then follow “a logically necessary series of answers and questions” that wind back to the original question. When, in Kojève’s words, “it is clear that all possible questions-answers have been exhausted,” that “a total answer has been obtained,” that each answer fits logically into the whole of knowledge, then the end of history has occurred. And indeed, in Kojève’s argument, as Nichols puts it, “Hegel’s whole encyclopedic system of knowledge shows that all previous philosophical arguments find their necessary place in the definitive systematic wisdom that gives an adequate account of, and thus ends, the evolution of philosophy.” what was left for Kojève to do was to complete “the considerable philosophic work yet to be done to complete the [in-principle completed] system.”

Nichols holds out the tantalizing prospect that Kojève’s Hegelianism had a touch of “Socratic irony” to it; after all, unlike Hegel, he regards nature as “in a decisive sense mysterious to us,” better approached through mathematics than through discourse, and therefore not easily integrated into any logos or ‘Word,’ Hegelian or other. A famous recent attempt to complete or supplement Hegel by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (the title of which shows an awareness both of Kojève’s argument and Strauss’s critique), goes even farther. To the best of my knowledge, Nichols is the only one of the seemingly innumerable commentators on that book who has notices the way Fukuyama subsumes Hegel’s grand narrative into “a Platonic conception of the nature of the human soul”; Fukuyama locates “the fight for recognition” in human nature, specifically, Socrates’ description of “thymos or spiritedness,” which he distinguishes from reason or logos and also from the bodily appetites. (As a side note, I can report that several years ago I asked Fukuyama about his ‘Platonism,’ and he affirmed it.)

As for Strauss, he answered Kojève’s defense of the Hegelian system in his actions as well as his arguments. Nichols recalls his own encounter with Strauss in a classroom, only a few years before Strauss died. After discussing his own work on Plato’s Euthydemus, a dialogue which addresses the question of the possibility of philosophy and how it might be distinguished from sophistry, Strauss told the class about Kojève’s contrasting approach. In his own thought and life, Strauss treated these questions as open, still alive—thus indicating that the circle of human thought has not yet closed.