Julien Benda: Exercise d’un Enterré Vif: Juin 1940-Août 1944. Paris: Gallimard, 1946.

 

Hitler’s tyranny perfected the arts of killing people and mesmerizing Germans, but it also displayed a considerable talent for putting the peoples it conquered into a condition of moral hazard. Ordinarily, a conquered people elicits our pity at its suffering, our admiration for its resistance. But by carefully setting moral traps for its subjects—you may survive, but only by collaborating actively in our crimes, or passively, by pretending not to see them—the Nazis dis-spirited those of their victims they permitted to live, turning ordinary moral sensibilities against those who retained them, and into the service of the new regime which despised them. Even after the end of the war, with the Nazis defeated and expelled, the liberated peoples needed to find a way to live not only with what had been done to them, but worse, what they had been induced to do to themselves. When Charles de Gaulle met André Malraux in the months after the Allies had ended the Occupation, he asked what most impressed him about Paris, since Malraux’s return. “The lies.” For the French, and for peoples throughout Europe, it wasn’t easy to look in the mirror, in those days.

In a sense, Julien Benda’s moral circumstance during the war years was easier than most. By 1940 he was a man in his late seventies, hardly expected to join the Resistance. As a Jew, he could be admired simply for surviving; with the help of a friend, he fled Nazi-occupied Paris for the relatively safe city of Carcassone, far to the south and ruled by the puppet government at Vichy. There, he mostly stayed indoors, boring his surveillants, who were reduced to writing reports along the lines of ‘Observed going to the corner store; returned home with groceries,’ dossiers sometimes enlivened with animadversions about the seeming-innocence but suspected perfidy of all Jews. In his own description, Benda was “one buried alive.” His “exercise” consisted of self-examination—the only kind available to him, as the Nazis had confiscated his books. “The solitude and absence of dissipation” during the war years allowed his mind to exercise itself in considering “the whole truth of its nature,” intellectual and moral. He did this not as an act of self-absorption but “in the hope of bestowing to the science of Man an exact observation”(7). What he writes is an apology or defense of the ‘way’ or regime of his life of the mind, a defense against the intellectual and moral ways that had ‘buried’ him in the estimation of his fellow ‘intellectuals’ long before the war, and would keep him so buried for the remainder of his life, long after he had returned to Paris. He had enjoyed a brief moment in the public sun after the 1927 of his book La Trahison des Clercs, in which he opposed the regnant intellectual trends of historical determinism (he called it “divinized realism” and traced its origins to Hegel), and the preference for race-conscious and class-conscious willing and militant action over impartial thinking. He did so in the name of European civilization’s traditional esteem for classical philosophy and (mostly) humane Christianity. Critics of the book complained that Benda praises abstract thought while talking about himself and settling scores with his contemporaries; they ignored the genre of the book, which amounts to a sort of informal brief before the court of public opinion, not a treatise on epistemology. To do that, he should indeed be talking about himself and his adversaries.

He devotes most of his book to his understanding of the proper ‘way’ or ‘regime’ of the intellect. “The dominant order of my mind is the appetite for thought” (10). Although “strongly sensitive to poetry and to a beautiful form in art,” he prefers science to art. What is more (and a reader of Plato will recall Socrates’ argument in the Philebus), thought has its beauty, too, in the comprehensive theory and the profound satisfaction of the noetic moment. Politically, a due consideration for the practice of “thought in itself” beyond “particularistic passions”—such passions as individual self-interest, and especially nationalism—might establish “a real sentiment for peace among men” (12-13), although Benda doesn’t expect such an ethos to develop. The condition of “incessant inquietude” in the modern world hardly conduces to such thought. And that inquietude finds intellectual support among intellectuals themselves, philosophers like Henri Bergson (like Benda, a philosopher and ‘assimilated’ Jewish man), who misunderstand the nature of the cosmos itself as a condition of conflict, of perpetual and chaotic movement, and who as a consequence valorized “the fury of the moment” (13). Against “Nietzsche and German romanticism,” which anticipate Bergonism, Benda contends that the “aversion to the Apollonian is one of the things which makes me foreign to my time” (16-17).

He prefers the thinkers of the French seventeenth century, first of all Descartes, whom he associates not with the ‘Machiavellianization’ of science but with the attempt to examine his own mind in the hope of “leaving the moving sand to reach the rock in the clay” (16), a stable vantage point affording serenity and happiness. Benda seeks to understand “the nature of Man,” not man’s supposed “destiny”—the ever-receding ‘End of History’ promised by historicists. For this, he rejects subjectivism, the valorization of the imagination over reason, the preference for images over abstraction; to illustrate abstract thoughts, examples will suffice. He deplores the attempt by intellectuals to undermine their own strength by turning away from ideas to sense-impressions. An animal learns the temperature of a liquid by “dipping its paw into it,” whereas a man learns its temperature “by reading a number on a glass column,” a thermometer; “for me, the superior consciousness is that of the man; but for my contemporaries it is that of the animal” (25). With rigorous logic, he “honor[s] science for its method, not for its results” (26)—general theories derived from experimental testing of grand hypotheses impress him more than the inventions such theories may lead to.

Such theories, such thought, inevitably will be presented to the public, which leads Benda to a consideration of literary style. True to his seventeenth-century neo-classical models, he prefers correctness and simplicity to “beautiful images and musicality” in prose. He wants a writer to give readers facts, deploring “the French superstition of the form” (176), that is, the exaltation of mannered elegance of style over substance. Accordingly, he praises Xenophon over Plato, Polybius (“the most intelligent of the historians of antiquity” [176]), Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Taine, and Renan. He deplores such “false thinkers” (28) as Nietzsche, Paul Valéry, Alain, and André Gide (whom he singles out for several pages of criticism). Those who go into “ecstasies before pure acrobatics of words” only confuse themselves (32). He forthrightly concedes, “I myself am in some measure a littérateur and not a thinker” (36). Indeed, while abandoning his engineering studies (an initial attempt to follow in his father’s footstep), and switching to the study of history at the Sorbonne, he retained his esteem for science, and saw that science very much needed ‘literary,’ or at least literate defenders against the mythopoetic adepts of the doctrine of historicism. “Real thought is extremely rare, in all the world” (36), as the popularity of the various historical determinisms shows. Such doctrines mimic the dialectic of philosophy but do not really practice, basing their appeal on the passion for social, political, and economic justice. But like all passions, even “the spirit of justice” confuses the mind, obscures comprehension (32) by goading men to act indignantly but not thoughtfully. When it comes to justice, moral indignation is not enough.

Benda gets down to cases. Among contemporary French intellectuals, Paul Valéry displays “verbal virtuosity” but little else, placing metaphors before reasoning and neglecting to provide proofs for his assertions; he isn’t a philosopher but a sophist, at base an adherent of “intellectual nihilism” (47). The much-esteemed musicality of his verse appeals to intellectually fashionable Nietzschean motifs. Émile Chartier, a pacifist who published under the pen-name “Alain,” isn’t so much a sophist but a rhetorician or demagogue (47), and proved worse than useless in the years leading up to the Second World War. Benda reserves his most detailed criticism for Gide, who desires not truth but approval; in his vanity, he cannot say, as Socrates does to Gorgias, “I am, although alone, of another opinion” (39). Benda suspects that Gide took a disliking to him because Benda never mentioned him in his books. Although (or perhaps because) incapable of understanding Marxism, Gide became enraptured with the Soviet Union, whose rulers feted him when he visited it, then groveled to the Germans when they rolled into Paris in 1940; at the time, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was still in effect, so his obeisance to the twin tyrannies did not put him in jeopardy. “There was in [Gide], as with certain reptiles, a sort of genius of perfidy which, as is frequent among men of letters, will often be translated into brilliant formulas” (45). When Gide ventured a personal attack on Benda in print, their younger, mutual acquaintance André Malraux assured Benda, “There is only one way to hurt you as a man of letters; it is to show that your books are worthless” (42). Benda took comfort in that, while not neglecting to repay Gide in his own ad hominem coin.

His decades-long association with his fellow intellectuals in the offices of the ardently republican Nouvelle Revue Française and elsewhere persuades Benda that conversation with them is “vain talk, required by social propriety” but intellectually worthless. “The man concerned with clear ideas must resign himself to live alone, in the company of a few strong books, and renounce any trade in ideas with the secular” (63)—by which he means those who read and think about “the books of the moment,” those favored by current opinion (153-154). “My taste for serious thought has condemned me to a near-total solitude,” “set[ting] me apart from normal humanity” (64). With equanimity, he allows, “As is just, I pay for it” (64). Insofar as he is artful—after all, he does write for publication—his literary style “attaches itself more to the relations of ideas than to… individual taste; looks for sharp edges not flowing outlines; takes for its models the moeurs of architecture, not those of musical flow”; “in short, it’s just the opposite of what the world demands of this task” (66). In this he prefers such writers as de Staël, Tocqueville, and Taine, who, in “evinc[ing] a scientific method, are not literary, and are no longer held to be such” (70-71). With respect to his readership, he has been rewarded not with numbers but with “a small number of really fanatical admirers” (77). (He means that in a good way.) So convinced is he that association with other intellectuals only serves to drag down a serious thinker, “For my whole life I have wished that my thought should appear in a journal where I could write alone. It’s a dream that I still do not give up.” (78)  He would have loved the blogosphere. However, he does not expect vindication from posterity, which more likely than not will remain as feckless as his contemporaries. He continues to write more to further his own philosophic quest than to impress the public—”to realize myself, to elucidate my ideas, to know who I am” (96-97).

The problem is fundamental to the relationship of society to thought. Men in society “demand that certain true problems be hidden; it is by the instinct of self-preservation that they are pleased to hear those who dissimulate such truths under literary flowers and flee from him who shows them the truth in its hardness” (90). The genuine intellectual “is a monster and must not forget it” (92), both for the sake of society’s good and his own. “My love for the exercise of thought merits the name of passion in the sense that when I can do it, I experience full joy and forget many external circumstances that make normal people suffer” (91-92). For a philosopher (especially one who practices some of the habits of Cartesian introspection in the service of forming clear and distinct ideas), there can be a certain charm to being buried alive.

But can such a monstre be sacré or, failing that, at least good in his own uncommon way? The second section of L’Exercise describes “my moral nature” (102). In contrast to his solitary intellectual life, this has a strong political element. Without allowing the passion for justice cloud his intellect, Benda found himself “detesting injustice “(104) when “the moral values to which I assign first rank”—order, discipline, tradition, and the national interest (all at the service of a republican regime of intellectual, moral, and political liberty)—”were in jeopardy” (103). He lists five such occasions. The first of these was the Boulangiste movement of the 1880s, when General Georges Boulanger and his followers nearly overthrew the Third Republic on a program of Revanche (revenge against the Germans, who had defeated France and seized the provinces of Alsace Lorraine in 1871); Révision (revision of the republican constitution framed as a result of the disgrace incurred by the Bonapartists who had lost the war); and Restauration (the return of the monarchy).   The second was the famous Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish officer in the French Army was falsely accused of treason by anti-Semitic, right-wing elements, again intend on discrediting the republican regime. German aggression in 1914, touching off the Great War, was the third such crisis, followed by the rise of Fascism and Nazism in the subsequent decade. Finally, there was the “Sixth of February” uprising in 1934, when a gaggle of right-wing organizations, including Action Française and the Croix-le-Feu, rioted near the National Assembly and forced the resignation of President of the National Council Edouard Daladier. This last near-coup provoked leftist counter-demonstrations and, in the Parisian intellectual milieu, the formation of the Comité de viligilances des intellectuels antifascistes (members including Gide, Alain, and Malraux), a precursor of the Popular Front movement. Although Benda himself did not join the Comité or the Popular Front, on the pages of the NRF he denounced fascism so strongly that he alienated the pacifist Alain and other French appeasers, who pinned their hopes on the Nazi-Soviet Pact and called Benda a war-monger. On all of these occasions, he came particularly to detest “this recent thing, of which Nietzsche has been the high priest: the esthetics of injustice” (104), including the praise of cruelty and its underlying will-to-power metaphysic. “I had the idea that Cain sketched a dogma to justify his crime” (105); it is “the primitive man,” whom “Nietzsche calls the normal man,” who “finds a joy in the commission of injustice” (106) justified by his “master-morality” (110). Under these circumstances, “Vive les esclaves!” (110)

A consequence of Nietzschean ‘primitivism’—not only unintended but denounced by Nietzsche himself, it should be said, who advocated the establishment of an international aristocracy and despised the German nationalism of his own time—resulted in “racism” (107), “the return to collective punishment [which] marks a huge regression in human morals” (108), “installing in Europe the moeurs of the Asiatic sovereigns” (109). Against this new regime of despotism, Benda looks not to French thinkers, who now sacrifice “private interest to the general interest” (111) in concurrence with Rousseau, but to the “Anglo-Saxon” respect for “the rule of law and proprieties” (110). He quotes Tocqueville, saying that absolute power rests on our contempt for fellow-citizens, and identifies the moral flaw of “primitive man”: “He practices the gift, which derives from love, and not the exchange, which postulates justice” (112). He refers to the custom of small, tribal societies, which form social networks based on acts of generosity, often entailing obligation and therefore subordination on the part of the recipient in contrast to larger, more complex societies which form social networks based on impersonal, rational calculation of mutual advantage under the principle of equal value received by both parties to the transaction. Justice, he writes, is regulative and stable, standing ‘above’ human social life, providing an objective standard for it, all in contrast with the shifting alliances of intra- and inter-tribal relations, as it were ’embedded’ in tribal custom.

As a republican liberal, he also rejects radical social egalitarianism, revolutionary fervor animated by a passion for deploying force majeure to eradicate the slightest perceived injustice. Hence his measured endorsement of “the democratic regime,” which he finds good insofar as it attacks unjust civil inequality, bad when impassioned majorities attack other, weaker nations, as seen in colonial wars. Further, while anti-democratic regimes valorize “the artistic spectacle of a society hierarchized in the manner of a cathedral” (esthetically pleasing to look at, but no place to live), democracies exhibit the contrary folly; in them, the dominance of “the greater number necessarily implies the triumph of the agreeable”—with a concurrent “indifference to serious thought” (121). In making this point he can integrate his intellectual preference for science over art into his moral position, defending intellectual probity, the scrupulous treatment of both ideas and human beings, and an esteem for intellectual and moral systems which offer enduring principles against historicist relativism and temporality. His anti-sensualist, anti-sensationalist, anti-estheticist critique of the worship of talent and ‘genius’ over truth and morality—liberty wrongly understood—brings him so far as to defend the much maligned Americans. “I would like to see the Americans not to humble themselves so much because they have little artistic sense, but proudly answer the Latin who makes them ashamed that they may have better virtues” (128).

By integrating the life of intellect with moral life, Benda eschews the ‘fact/value’ distinction, based on the assumption that reasoning and morality do not mix. Toleration understood as “simply wanting liberty for others” (136) is one thing; tolerance misunderstood as moral relativism (often the result of intellectual laziness or moral cowardice) quite another. “My attachment to intellectual probity brings a smile to the secularists in the name of their ‘skepticism'” (129). But the new theory of relativity in physics does not apply to human nature, and therefore to morality; nor does particle-wave theory refute the principle of reason or non-contradiction, which states (in its original, Socratic formulation) the same thing will not do or suffer the same thing, at the same time, in relation to the same part, and not that the same thing might be understood as two different ‘things’ if considered in relation to different methods of observation, at different times. “My will to see respect for the human person is for me a position of judgment, not sentiment, and has nothing to do with love  of the person, with humanitarianism, and especially with pity” (140)—here glancing again at Nietzsche’s fulminations. Not human life so much as human dignity counts; that is, the moral fact of equal human rights does not preclude a moral hierarchy among human persons. George Washington and Edmond Genêt both esteemed equal, unalienable rights, but whom would you entrust with high political responsibility?

Benda concludes his apologia or self-defense with a defense of Jewishness. The ancient Israelites were never ‘nationalists.’ Their prophets “never stopped denouncing the immorality of their own people,” along with that of foreign idolaters; indeed, the anti-Semites’ oldest and most virulent charge, that ‘the Jews’ were ‘Christ-killers,’ only affirms this, inasmuch as Jesus, “the most sublime among them,” was (of course) Jewish! (137-138). In sharp contrast, anti-Semites denounce Jews and other races, but never their own. For nationalists, as for over-indulgent parents, the love of one’s own always trumps the love of truth. The “respect for truth”—abstract, impartial, enduring—upheld by both “the religion of the scientific spirit,” seen, albeit in different ways, in both the Greek philosophers and in Descartes, and by “the religion of justice,” upheld by Judaism, taken together, characterizes precisely “many assimilated Jews in Western culture” (149-150). Jews like Julien Benda.

 

Susan Orr: Jerusalem and Athens: Reason and Revelation in the Works of Leo Strauss. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 24, Number 2, Winter 1997. Republished with permission.

 

For many students, the political philosophizing of Leo Strauss first comes to sight in the opposition between natural right and historicism, or perhaps in the opposition between ancient and modern. But for Strauss himself, according to his account in the Preface to the English translation of Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, political philosophy came to sight when, as “a young Jew born and raised in Germany,” he “found himself in the grip of the theological-political predicament” (New York: Schocken Books, 1965, 1). Understood in light of the high rather than the low, this predicament resolves into the opposition or apparent opposition between revelation and reason. Strauss very nearly begins his account of the results of his investigation by admitting that unassisted human reason—thought unaided by divine revelation and governed by the principle of non-contradiction—cannot refute the testimony of the Bible. Aware of the political dangers of this admission, which becomes even more acute when Biblical motifs are ‘secularized,’ Strauss, famously turns to an investigation of premodern political philosophy, wandering far from Jerusalem, but without ever forgetting what Jerusalem stands for.

Susan Orr has written a commentary on “Jerusalem and Athens,” an essay that is in some sense central to Strauss’s Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Concerned that some of Strauss’s students have wandered altogether too far from what Jerusalem, Orr seeks to remind them, and all students of Strauss, of what Jerusalem stands for in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. At the end of her introduction she frames the question this way: Leo Strauss, “cautious nihilist” or “reluctant believer” (18)? Thus, in good Straussian fashion, she compels us to ask if Strauss might have been a reluctant nihilist or a cautious believer, or perhaps neither a nihilist nor a believer, but something else (for example, a Platonic political philosopher).

Orr’s introduction is the first of seven chapters. In Chapter 2, “Preliminary Reflections,” she observes that Athens and Jerusalem represent “the two great traditions of philosophy and faith” (22), of human guidance, freedom, contemplation, and progress as distinguished from divine guidance, obedience, and return. She thereby compels us to consider whether philosophy and faith are equally traditions, or if both are traditions. She goes on to present an elegant and accurate outline of Strauss’s essay, commenting that the central section is devoted to “Greek counterparts” of the Biblical account of genesis, of God’s creation, and that the central paragraph of the essay “deals with the curse of Canaan, the excellence of Nimrod, and the Tower of Babel—a paragraph which, “according to Strauss, contains the biblical understanding of the beginning of man as a political animal” (32). This observation compels us to consider that the phrase “political animal” most immediately calls to mind the political thought of Aristotle, a student of Plato.

Chapter 3 contains an ingenious argument concerning one aspect of the theme of beginning or genesis. Strauss observes that for “Jerusalem” the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, whereas for “Athens” the beginning of wisdom is wonder. Orr asks, Is not Biblical awe akin to Greek wonder? (She thus draws our attention to Strauss’s own denial, in another place, that awe is akin to wonder.) Orr continues: By emphasizing fear, not awe, Strauss artfully conceals “the compelling rationality of Jerusalem”; he does this because he is “lulling the atheists to sleep” (49). Why would sing this lullaby of Broadway? Because in his time and place the reigning opinion was atheistic. To be a man of faith in the modern world is to blaspheme against a militant and powerful atheism, an atheism that will confine the scholar of religious faith to some academic ghetto.

In singing this song, Strauss partakes of an art common to Jerusalem and Athens, Orr argues. Strauss prepares dogmatic atheists to awaken to what will be for them a new, reasoned consideration of “Jerusalem” (56). In the essay itself, of course, Strauss contrasts ‘scientific’ Biblical criticism not with the Bible itself but with natural theology. Strauss remarks that he will begin on the surface of the Bible, where both orthodox believers and ‘scientific’ historians begin.

In her central chapter, Orr writes that Strauss describes Jewish and Islamic revelation as perfect law, not dogma, as rational systems, even if revealed through a mere human being, a prophet. She is artfully silent on Strauss’s description of the “loyal philosophers” or falasifa as non-orthodox. Orr observes that Strauss’s emphasis on the coherence, rather than the divine inspiration of the Biblical account of genesis once again softens the dogmatism of atheists, who will now admire that coherence without bristling prematurely at the question of its source. Neither Strauss, nor Orr following Strauss, shirks the question of the Bible’s source. Orr writes that Strauss “says that man shares with God” not so much reason as an “ability to change his ways” (69). If God is “unpredictable,” then philosophy, governed by the principle of non-contradiction, “cannot touch” Him (69). It might be added that philosophy, then, cannot touch man either, that political philosophy is impossible, and that Heidegger is right. If the “seeming contradictions” of God in the Bible demonstrate the ability of God to change His ways, this does admit “the possibility that the Bible is inspired” (73), but it leaves open whether the Bible was inspired by God or by (equally changeable) men. In pointing to “the fundamental inscrutability of God” (86), one might suspect that Strauss invites us to wonder rather than to fear. But if one wonders rather than fears, one need not engage in either early-Heideggerian assertiveness or late-Heideggerian passivity.

According to the Bible, human life is not originally political. God intended man to be an apolitical being of childlike innocence governed by God. Man was not intended to know the good, morally or intellectually. “The difference between the Bible’s first discussion of politics and, for instance, Aristotle’s assertion that man is political by nature is astonishing” (83), Orr rightly comments. Strauss’s central paragraph describes “political life… as we know it now” (90): The human, Nimrodian attempt to united mankind by force fails when God destroys the Tower of Babel and confuses the tongues of the inhabitants, scattering human beings to the ends of the earth. This prevents “a worldwide kingdom” (90). One might add to Orr’s account that in this paragraph Strauss sides with the Biblical teaching against not only Nimrod but Hegel, (most immediately) Kojève, and all who would commit the sin against the Holy Spirit by replacing the Holy Spirit with the Absolute Spirit. By doing so, Strauss does not necessarily commit himself fully to Biblical conviction, but rather challenges us to see why ‘universalizing’ reason does not commit us to universal or worldwide government.

Perhaps these wonderings about God, including his wonderings about God’s justice in the story of Abraham and Isaac, lead Strauss to shift his attention from Genesis to Exodus, specifically, to the teaching on God’s name. Here Strauss says “I believe,” not “I know,” and translates the Tetragrammaton not as “I am that I am” but “I shall be what I shall be.” This reemphasizes the changeability of God, even as it emphasizes the covenants, the promises of God. Covenants require predictability, one might note. Following Strauss, Orr argues that “I am that I am” is too metaphysical to fit Biblical thought, too Being-oriented. “[O]ne can even go further” and “say that it is difficult even to speak abstractly in Hebrew” (93). God ‘is,’ so to speak, pure willing, not pure thought thinking itself; God is a person, not an ‘it.’ This tends to make the God of the Bible very close to Allah of the Koran—possibly too close. If God is pure willing, pure, arbitrary, “I shall be what I shall be,” then why does He exhibit such remarkable consistency throughout the Hebrew Scriptures? It is true that He ‘changes His mind’ from time to time, but only in response to the words and actions of men, themselves created with the capacity for free will.

In her fifth chapter, Orr discusses Strauss’s account of the “Greek counterparts” of Genesis, centrally, the account handed down by Hesiod. Now that he has atheists thinking rather than merely disbelieving, Strauss here admits that the Torah is not a coherent whole, but a compilation. Strauss uncompromisingly prefers the Biblical God, who is wise, and whose jealousy of man’s love stems “not out of need, but out of concern for us” (103), to Hesiod’s Zeus, who is jealous of Metis because Metis has wisdom Zeus lacks. Aristotle reflects “Greek” presuppositions in asking “whether it is prudent to call a man happy until after he is dead so as not to provoke the envy of the gods” (103). (Elsewhere, we know, Strauss in effect questions the piety of Aristotle, by noticing that the classical political philosophers, including Aristotle, exhibit the ancient city more as a natural not as a holy city [The City and Man, 240-241]. This may mean that the Philosopher feared human envy more than divine.) At any rate, the gods of Greece are ruled by fate, by a force; the ultimate power in the Greek universe is impersonal, ‘beyond good and evil.’ Aristotle’s god, not to be confused with fate, is pure thought thinking itself. Pure thought thinking itself transcends justice and injustice, although it does not transcend goodness. Be that as it may, Aristotle’s god is not a jealous god, any more than the God of the Bible is an envious one. To reflect upon the differences and similarities between envious, jealous, and neither envious nor jealous gods is to reflect upon the theme of ‘Jerusalem and Athens’—though not, to be sure, to exhaust it. Plato’s god is closer to the Biblical God than Aristotle’s. Orr notes that Plato’s theology, with its talk of providence, is both the closest “Greek” thing to the Biblical account of God and likely to be a noble lie (114).

In the sixth chapter, Orr turns to the second, much shorter, part of Strauss’s essay. In “On Socrates and the Prophets,” Strauss shows how not to bring the Bible and Plato together. He sets up a contrast between himself and the Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. The diverge on the issue of historicism. “By combining the social ideals of Plato and the prophets, [Cohen] envisioned a world of the future in which there would be no suffering, and no distinctions among men” (128). Orr thereby points us to the reflection that historicism is that part of philosophic thought that most closely imitates Biblical providence. Has philosophy corrupted religion, or vice-versa? (Or has each corrupted the other?) Perhaps this is the reason why Strauss distinguishes reason from revelation, even when he takes pains to defend revelation from charges of irrationality.

The problem of historicism, and of the politics historicism spawns, raises the problem of false prophets. In one of her most insightful passages, Orr remarks that Strauss does not “make the traditional arguments for distinguishing false from true prophets”; that false prophets are those who contradict Mosaic law; that true prophets “demonstrate the veracity of their calling through miracles” (136). Rather, in Strauss’s words, “false prophets trust in flesh, even if that flesh is the temple in Jerusalem, the promised land, nay, the chosen people itself, nay, God’s promise to the chosen people if that promise is taken to be an unconditional promise and not part of a Covenant” (136). This attack on materialism is indeed a kind of Platonism and stands in opposition to all prophecy-of-the-flesh, whether it be dialectical materialism or the dialectical immaterialism of the Absolute Spirit. This stance comports with Strauss’s opinion that Socrates is “by Strauss’s definition, a pious man” (140), one “who investigates the human things and leaves divine things alone” (141). Moreover, “[f]rom Socrates and therefore philosophy’s perspective, the prophets have a beneficial purpose” (143); philosophy “lacks teeth” (144), but prophets, as orators, do not, and (one might add) philosophers might influence the thought of prophets. That it is not a good thing for prophets’ impulses to rule philosophers may be seen in the history of historicism.

In her concluding chapter, Orr accurately asserts that Socrates, unlike Nietzsche, does not hold it possible to unite Jerusalem and Athens, to synthesize reason and revelation. Strauss thereby establishes himself as “the new guide”—a better guide than Nietzsche—for perplexed moderns.

A gentle but firm guide to the perplexed reader of Strauss, Orr proceeds with careful judgment, slowing down impatient souls who want to the philosopher to ‘get to the point.’ She knows that a philosopher wants his student to be the one who gets to the point, and none too hastily. The impulse to get to the point too hastily yields an undue agitation for eschatological relief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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