Plato: Greater Hippias. Harold N. Foster translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. 

Catherine H. Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Chapter 4, section iv: “The Sophist’s Inability to Say What Is Noble.”

 

Socrates greets the prominent sophist, Hippias of Elis, newly arrived at Athens, calling him kalos (noble, beautiful) and wise—the word ‘sophist’ itself meaning ‘wise one.’ “What a long time it has been since you have put in at the port of Athens!” Well, yes, “I have no leisure, Socrates,” since the regime in Elis calls on him whenever it needs to transact business with “any of the poleis,” calling upon his ambassadorial skills, “thinking that I am the ablest judge and messenger of the words that are spoken by the several poleis“— particularly formidable Lacedaemon. After all, a truly wise man must be the best judge and also the one most capable of relaying messages accurately, and of understanding their meaning. Socrates appears impressed, indeed enthusiastic, exclaiming, “That’s what it is, Hippias, to be a truly wise and perfect man!” Hippias looks like the perfect specimen of humanness itself, traveling from polis to polis, serving Elis but in some respects a citizen of the world, or at least of Greece as a whole, its many poleis with their several regimes. He seems at once a patriot and one who transcends city-states and their regimes. What is more, privately, he makes “much money from the young,” whom he charges for his teaching, while “confer[ring] upon them still greater benefits than you receive,” even as he “benefits[s]” his own city-state, “as a man must who is not to be despised but held in high repute among the many.” Hippias seems to square all the circles. But is his seeming a reality? If, for example, he has no leisure, when does he have the time to think, to become wise, a ‘soph-ist’? Or does his sophistry mean that, having become wise already, he no longer needs to think?

As always, Socrates has a question. “What in the world is the reason why those men of old whose names are called great in respect to wisdom—Pittacus, and Bias, and the Milesian Thales with his followers—and also the later ones, down to Anaxagoras, are all or most of them, found to refrain from the affairs of the polis?” Because they were not me, Hippias replies; they “were not able to compass by their wisdom both public and private matters.” They were wise privately but lacked political wisdom. Their public reputation was a recognition by the many of their sound personal advice; they were the Dr. Phils of their time. 

Hippias affirms Socrates’ suggestion, that “your art has progressed” since then, “just as the other arts have progressed,” and so the ancients “who were concerned with wisdom are of no account in comparison with you.” This might suggest that the art of sophistry might progress still further, that Hippias might still have much to learn, that he is not fully wise after all. But Hippias doesn’t take the hint. Instead, he confides a trade secret: although he knows his superiority to the ancients, “I am in the habit of praising the ancients and our predecessors rather than the men of the present day” as “a precaution against the envy of the living and through fear of the wrath of those who are dead.” (Hippias appears to presume that the dead only get wind of his public statements, not his private ones.) Socrates makes a show of agreement, pointing to the sophist Gorgias, who came to Athens and “spoke excellently in the public assembly, and in his private capacity, by giving exhibitions and associating with the young, he earned and received a great deal of money from this city.” “Our friend here, Prodicus,” has done the same thing. [1] “But none of those ancients ever thought fit to exact money as payment for his wisdom or to give exhibitions among people of various places; so simple-minded were they, and so unconscious of the fact that money is of greatest value.” And indeed, Socrates himself, admittedly no sophist, no wise man but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, charges no money for his conversations. 

Socratic irony is lost on Hippias. “Why Socrates, you know nothing of the beauties of this. For if you were to know how much money I have made, you would be amazed.” Not only has he far surpassed the ancients, but he has bested his competitors, his contemporaries: “I pretty well think that I have made more money than any other two sophists together,” including Protagoras, older and more famous than Hippias but surpassed by him in getting money out of Sicily. Still in seeming agreement, Socrates cites the earlier sophists “of the school of Anaxagoras,” who likewise missed the money boat, and Anaxagoras himself, who made money and then lost it “so mindless was his wisdom”—he, who taught that Mind rules the universe. Hippias caps the point by aphorizing, “A wise man must be wise for himself especially, and the test of this is, who makes the most money.” Evidently, even Hippias’ service to his city-state amounts to an advertisement for himself, an indirect means of lining his pockets. And of course, Elis is his city-state; its prosperity may well redound to Hippias’ benefit. For Hippias, a ‘proof’ consists not of a logical argument, nor of a right assessment of another’s soul, but of a visible, tangible thing. He is an ’empiricist.’

But not so fast, Hippias. Have you made the most money at Lacedaemon, the city-state you have visited most frequently? This elicits Hippias’ first oath: “No, by Zeus. I never made anything at all” there. Socrates finds this obvious self-contradiction “a marvel, and a wondrous one at that.” And so he asks, your wisdom makes “better men in regard to virtue?” And yet the Lacedaemonians desire virtue as much as the citizens of other city-states and they have the money to pay him. Nor do they educate their children better than you, Hippias, as Hippias readily affirms. Nor did the fathers of the young Lacedaemonians “begrudge it to their children to become as good as possible.” Further, Lacedaemon is well-ruled, and in well-ruled city states “virtue is most highly honored”? And you are, as you say, demonstrably the best at “transmitting” virtue to others, the proof of which is seen in one’s earnings, which you didn’t get from the Lacedaemonian regime or from its citizens? 

What is more, since sophistry an art, why should it have a different effect in Lacedaemon than elsewhere? The best teacher of horsemanship could teach it Thessaly, be “most honored” there, and in all of Greece, receiving more money than all of the other teachers of that art. This being so, as Hippias concedes, “then will not he who is able to transmit the doctrines that are of most value for the acquisition of virtue be most highly honored in Lacedaemon and make the most money, if he so wishes, and in any other of the Greek poleis that is well governed?” Tell us why, then, Lacedaemon failed to lavish you with drachmas? Why, it is because they are hidebound, Hippias replies. “It is not the inherited usage of the Lacedaemonians to change their laws or to educate their children differently from what is customary.” They resist progress. Do you mean to say, Hippias, that “for the Lacedaemonians” it is “the hereditary usage not to act rightly, but to commit errors?” Surely, if a father has the choice between following the traditions of the ancestors, the ancients, and doing what is best for them, he will choose to do what is best, educate the young better, not worse? But (now changing ground) “it is not lawful for them to give [the young men] a foreign education,” Hippias explains, shifting the blame from Lacedaemonian traditionalism to their suspicion of the foreign. The Lacedaemonians love to listen to me; “they applaud me”; but they do not pay me much because “it is not the law.”

This raises the question of the status of law. “Do you say that law is an injury to the polis, or a benefit?” It is made “with benefit in view,” according to the opinion that it is beneficial, but “if the law is badly made,” if the art of lawmaking is defective in that instance, “it is injurious.” Hippias agrees that lawmakers, those who ‘craft’ the laws (as our eminently artistic American lawmakers like to say, nowadays), do so for “the greatest good to the polis,” and to fail to do so would make it “impossible to enjoy good government.” If those who make the laws “miss the good” they have “missed the lawful and the law,” yes? That is, law is an instrument crafted by lawmakers for the sake of the good, which is therefore not identical to the law. Yet to be good law, true law, the law must serve the good? Hippias cannot disagree: “Speaking accurately, Socrates, that is true, however, men are not accustomed to think so.” What men? Those who know, or those who don’t know? Why, those who don’t know, “the many.” As to those who do know, they must “think that in truth for all men that which is more beneficial is more lawful than that which is less beneficial”? Well, Hippias answers, “they think it is so in truth.” Hippias, a sophist or ‘wise one,’ that knower of truth, allows the possibility that there may be a disjunction between wisdom conceived as knowledge of the good and wisdom conceived as he conceives it, as money-making. 

If so, Socrates persists, for the Lacedaemonians it must then be “more beneficial to be educated in your education, which is foreign, than in the local education”; more, beneficial things are lawful; therefore, it is more lawful to be educated “contrary to the law” in Lacedaemon. “I agree to that,” Hippias now states, “for you seem to be making your argument in my favor.” If only the Lacedaemonians saw what Socrates sees, they would have given me money, the measure of wisdom. Arguments do not prove anything, but they can be useful. Pesky logic says otherwise, however: turning to their listeners (thus appealing to the opinion sophists seek to manipulate) Socrates says, “My friends, we find that the Lacedaemonians are law-breakers, and that too in the most important affairs—they who are regarded as the most law-abiding of men.” Their reputation, the public opinion not only of themselves but of all Greeks, is mistaken. If so, Hippias, “what sort of discourses” do these lawless upholders of law and of tradition enjoy and applaud you for? Astronomy? No. Geometry? No, some of them don’t even know arithmetic. “The processes of thought,” then? “Far from it indeed, by Zeus.” Nor harmonies. Rather than such matters of the mind, such as it were Anaxagorean concerns, they love to hear about “the genealogies of heroes and men,” the “foundations of cities in ancient times and, in short, about antiquity in general”—precisely those things progressive, master of the art of sophistry Hippias has deprecated. “For their sake”—that is, for his own sake—Hippias “has been obliged to learn all that sort of thing by heart and practice it thoroughly.” But does that not mean that Hippias cares for something other than money, only? Does he not love to be applauded, honored? 

This is enough to elicit an oath not from Hippias but now from Socrates. “By Zeus, Hippias, it is lucky for you that the Lacedaemonians do not enjoy hearing one recite the list of our archons from Solon’s time,” as it is very long. [2] But Socrates, “I can remember fifty names.” My mistake, Hippias, “I did not understand that you possess the science of memory” as well as the science of wisdom. But in both cases, what are your arts for? The Lacedaemonians “make use of you as children make use of old women, to tell stories agreeably.” They rule you, not you them; for all your supposed wisdom, betokened by wealth, they don’t pay you a dime. This brings out a “by Zeus” from the sophist; on the contrary, my reputation in Lacedaemon derives from “telling story about noble and beautiful pursuits,” exactly the virtues Socrates had initially attributed to him. I recount what the pursuits “of a young man should be.” That is, the memorized genealogies of heroes, men, and cities teach virtue. His finest speech consists of the story of Neoptolemus, who, after the fall of Troy, “asked Nestor what the noble and beautiful pursuits were,” and received a list of “many lawful and beautiful pursuits” (if not necessarily noble ones?). Hippias invites Socrates to listen to his discourse, which he will deliver at a school tomorrow. And be sure that you bring “others who are able to judge of discourses that they hear.” In the Greek poetic tradition, Nestor, the elderly adviser of warriors at Troy, gives counsel that sometimes doesn’t work out well, although this may register the unpredictability of gods or luck more than unwisdom; Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, has a decidedly mixed record in terms of both virtue (he seems to have had a cruel streak) and fortune (he founded a city but was killed by Orestes). Promising to go, “God willing” (the philosopher is more mindful of circumstances than either warriors or sophists), Socrates quickly turns to a philosophic question, having been “reminded” of the beautiful “just at the right moment.” In doing so, concocts an imaginary questioner who supposedly asked him “very insolently” how he knew what the beautiful is. The insolent questioner asks exactly the kind of question Socrates himself famously asks. Claiming that he vowed to ask the next of the “wise men” he met, in order to return to renew the dialectic with his questioner, he puts the question to Hippias. As usual, the sophist does not lack confidence. If I cannot do this, Hippias says, “my profession would be worthless and ordinary.” Indeed. Socrates promises to imitate the insolent questioner by interjecting “exceptions,” counter-examples,” to what Hippias will say.

Just, wise, men and good things are so by justice, wisdom, and goodness; beautiful things are beautiful “by the beautiful.” Very well, what is the beautiful? Hippias asserts that there is no difference between the beautiful (what the beautiful is) and beautiful things (what is beautiful). All right, but the questioner wanted to know what the beautiful is, to which Hippias answers that a beautiful maiden is beautiful—a what-is-beautiful answer, not the answer to the question. The questioner remarks that a beautiful mare is also beautiful, as are a beautiful lyre and even a beautiful pot. All of these objects share beautiful in common, but they are different things. How can what the beautiful is be the same thing as what is beautiful?

Hippias is offended at the mention of the lowly pot. “Socrates, who is the fellow? What an uncultivated person, who has the impudence to mention such worthless things in a dignified discussion!” To this ad hominem argument Socrates immediately but ironically yields: “That’s the sort of person he is, Hippias, not elegant, but vulgar, thinking of nothing but the truth.” Yet isn’t a well-wrought Grecian pot beautiful? Yes, for what it is, but “it does not deserve to be regarded as beautiful in comparison with a mare and a maiden and all the beautiful things,” things innately superior to a pot. Yes, but if we compare maidens or wise men to gods, will they too not be inferior in beauty? And even so, we have not found what “the absolute beauty,” beauty itself, is. 

Just as we begin to suspect that Hippias cannot think abstractly, only concretely and instrumentally (as would a materialist, Zuckert observes), he tells Socrates that if that is all the questioner is looking for, “nothing is easier to answer.” Beauty is that “by which all other things are adorned and by the addition of which they are made to appear beautiful.” Tell him that the beautiful “is nothing else than gold.” To the sophist, a thing is as it appears to be. The sophist, who takes money to be the coin of wisdom, takes beauty to be less than skin deep, a thing of surfaces. The wise man coats his speech with appealing words, glistening appearances. Money is gold, gold is money.

Socrates’s vulgar questioner is ready with a counter-example. Phidias the sculptor doesn’t cover his beautiful statue of Athena (goddess of the wisdom Hippias claims to possess, calling himself a ‘sophist’) with gold. His statue is made of ivory. A beautiful pot may hold soup, which may be nutritious but is seldom beautiful. The statue is ivory all the way through; it beautiful; it does not merely appear to be beautiful. Don’t even talk with this fellow “when he asks such questions,” noble-by-appearance, wise-by-appearance Hippias advises. Socrates accordingly shifts to another, related question: Is the ladle of gold or a ladle of fig wood more appropriate to spooning soup? The ladle of fig wood, Hippias replies. But why did Phidias “not make the middle parts of the eyes also of ivory, but of stone, procuring stone as similar as possible to the ivory,” since the ivory is beautiful? The beautiful stone is also beautiful, Hippias stipulates, so long as it is “appropriate.” Then, it will be ugly when not appropriate? Emphatically so—indeed, “if anyone has anything to say against this, you may say I know nothing at all.” Hippias assumes that he knows quite a lot, that he has escaped the dialectic, whereas the philosopher is famous for asserting that indeed he knows nothing except that he does not know. To prove that he knows quite a lot, Hippias ventures a definition of what a beautiful way of life is, implying that he knows not only what is beautiful but what is noble. “I say, then, that for every man and everywhere”—universally—it is “most beautiful to be rich and healthy, and honored by the Greeks, to reach old age, and, after providing a beautiful funeral for his deceased parents, to be beautifully and splendidly buried by his own offspring.” Wealth, health, honor, longevity, giver and receiver of beautiful funerals—such is the fitting, the appropriate. As Zuckert writes, “the sophist wants to be admired everywhere, by everyone” for his wisdom, but this depends upon the opinion of both the few and the many. The sophist wants self-sufficiency but depends upon reputation, granted by others. That is, the profitability of his art, whether in money or in honor, depends upon his ability to defend his art in the face of Socrates, in the face of a philosopher, in terms of the rational dialectic he would prefer to avoid.

Socrates congratulates Hippias. The philosopher now swearing by Hera, the kind goddess, for “coming to my assistance”—well, “to the best of your ability.” The appearance of Hippias is one thing, his nature another. He is neither gold nor ivory, all the way through. But, Socrates conjectures, the questioner will laugh at the answer. If so, Hippias assures him he will “be laughing at himself and will himself be laughed at by those present”; the questioner will lose ‘face,’ the appearance of wisdom, the honor that accrues to the appearance of wisdom. Not only that, Socrates says; more alarmingly, the questioner may beat me with a stick. Is he your master, Socrates? Or does Athens so “disregard justice and allow the citizens to beat one another unjustly?” On the contrary, Hippias, “the beating would be just, I think.” Now it is finally time for Hippias to ask a question: Why do you think so? Because the questioner “asked for the absolute beautiful,” that “by which everything to which it is added has the property of being beautiful.” You have evaded the question, but I, the questioner, have caught you and I shall now punish you, in justice. (Hippias could of course ask, ‘What is justice?’ but that would only suggest that he sees the questioner’s vulgar-but-true point, that the distinction between what beauty is and what is beautiful must be a real distinction, that ‘What is’ questions ‘make sense.’) The questioner will ask, bringing his own concrete example into the dialectic, if “the stranger from Elis”—patriotism cuts both ways—claims that “for Achilles it was beautiful to be buried later than his parents, and for his grandfather Aeacus, and all the others who were born of gods, and for the gods themselves”—some of whom overthrew the older gods, the Olympians having overthrown the Titans. Hippias can only sputter, recurring to an argumentum ad hominem, “these questions of the fellow’s are not even respectful to religion.” Socrates does not deny it, preferring respectfully to change the subject to the demigod hero, Heracles, who didn’t bury his parents, one of them being Zeus. Hippias continues to retreat before the dialectical onslaught. I didn’t mean to include the gods in my definition, or those who were children of gods. So, the beautiful is the fitting, the appropriate, then? Not even that, as a man might wear clothes that fit him and still be “ridiculous,” as Hippias understands. Socrates pounces, once again. “It could not be the fitting” to make things “appear more beautiful than they are,” to not “let them appear as such as they are.” 

Still, “we must”—once again—attempt “to say what that is which makes things be beautiful.” Hippias gives it another try: “the fitting, Socrates, makes things both be and appear beautiful by its presence.” He has, at last (and at least) managed to separate an idea from things. This, Socrates remarks, means that things really beautiful must also appear to be beautiful. But why, then, is there so much “strife and contention” over what things are beautiful? If they were beautiful and appeared to be beautiful, and if that connection were necessary, then no such controversy would erupt. If the fitting both makes things beautiful and makes them appear so, then the coincidence of beauty and beautiful appearance would hold; since it doesn’t the fitting can at most only make things beautiful in reality, in their being, or in their appearance. Speaking very much as a sophist, Hippias chooses to say that the fitting makes things appear beautiful; to a sophist, a word fitly spoken gilds being with an attractive surface. But this is to admit that Socrates is right; the fitting cannot produce one dimension of beauty, namely, real beauty, the beauty of a thing by nature, its ‘inner’ beauty, as it were. We still haven’t discovered what beauty is.

The putatively wise knower now scales back on his claim to know, telling Socrates that he knows “that if I should go away into solitude and meditate alone by myself, I could tell [what the beautiful is] with the most perfect accuracy.” A reader might be excused for suspecting that the honor-loving, money-loving sophist wants to escape this dialogue with whatever remains of his reputation intact. “Ah, don’t boast, Hippias”; stay with us, “for Heaven’s sake,” and “find it in my presence or, if you please, join me, as you are now doing, in looking for it.” If we find it now, I will not be a nuisance” to you, anymore—no idle threat, given the precarity of Hippias’ profession, dependent as it is on the approval of the few and the many. Socrates has caught him in another contradiction, this one not in thought but in his way of life. To save his reputation, Hippias must go; to save his reputation, Hippias must stay. Socrates has turned the sophist’s tactic of ad hominem argument against the sophist. In the event, Hippias stays, and Socrates begins the inquiry anew.

He approaches the question by invoking a new idea or ‘abstraction,’ the useful. Perhaps the beautiful is “whatever is useful for us.” For example, beautiful eyes are not those that seem to be beautiful but are sightless; beautiful eyes are “those which are able and useful for seeing.” Similarly, “the whole body is beautiful” when fully ‘functional.’ And not only natural objects but artifacts, customs, and laws. We look at each thing with regard to “how it is formed by nature, how it is wrought, how it has been enacted”; “the useful we call beautiful, and beautiful in the way in which it is useful, and for the purpose for which it is useful, and at the time when it is useful.” More than two millennia later, Americans still exclaim ‘Beautiful!” when something ‘works.’ Beleaguered Hippias quickly agrees.

Oh, but no. A powerless thing is a useless thing. If usefulness is beauty, then power is beautiful and lack of power is “disgraceful or ugly.” The money-lover likes the sound of that: “Decidedly. Other things, Socrates, testify for us that this is so, but especially political affairs; for in political affairs and in one’s own polis to be powerful is the most beautiful of all things, but to be powerless is the most disgraceful of all.” Very well, then is wisdom, your claim to power or authority, “also for this reason the most beautiful thing and ignorance the most disgraceful thing”? Maybe, Hippias cautiously rejoins. And maybe not. If a person cannot do “what he did not know how and was utterly powerless to do,” and if “men do many more bad things than good,” erring involuntarily, then the acts of the powerful cannot necessarily be beautiful and power cannot be beautiful. Hippias then suggests a qualification. The acts that one has the power to do are beautiful “if they are powerful and useful for good.” If so, Socrates says, beautiful persons and customs must be beautiful because they are beneficial, “the beautiful seems to us to be the beneficial.” 

But no. If the beautiful causes the good, if the beautiful “has the nature of a kind of father,” then the good cannot be the caused by the beautiful any more than a father can be his own son. “By Zeus,” the beautiful cannot be the good, or the good beautiful. This “does not please me at all,” Hippias says, himself swearing by Zeus. He is stuck conversing with ugly old Socrates, who pronounces himself to be “at a loss.” As for Hippias, he has nothing more to say, except to recur to his desired escape-hatch: he is “sure I shall find it after meditation.” 

Socrates happily presses on, being a man who is never at a loss for long. Perhaps “the beautiful is that which is pleasing through hearing and sight.” For example, beautiful customs and laws are beautiful for that reason; we are pleased to hear and see Lacedaemonian customs and laws, to take the ones instanced earlier. Socrates prompts Hippias to admit that sensual pleasures, not only laws and customs, are truly pleasurable. This admission may ruin the claim, however, since the act of eating and the act of sexual intercourse can be pleasant but they are hardly pleasant to hear or to see. And if you were to admit that these pleasures are beautiful, you would lose respect among the people, since they “do not seem so to most people,” and you depend upon public opinion to make money. But that is not truly dispositive, since “that is not what [the questioner] asked”: again, he asked not “what seems to most people to be beautiful, but what is so.” So, we still might say “that that part of the pleasant which comes by sight and hearing is beautiful,” despite what the many may suppose. If we say that what is pleasant through sight is beautiful, we do not mean to say that what is pleasant through the other senses is not beautiful.” All these pleasant things “have something identical which makes them beautiful,” both as individual things and collectively. Or, taking another idea, as Hippias now sees, “if we are both just, would not each of us be just also and if each is unjust, would not both again also be unjust”? Now on a roll, as the expression goes, Hippias identifies health, affliction, nobility, wisdom, honor, age and youth as the sort of characteristics the questioner has in mind. But he has a new objection.

“You see, Socrates, you do not consider the entirety of things, nor do they with whom you are in the habit of conversing, but you all test the beautiful and each individual entity by taking them separately and cutting them to pieces. For this reason, you fail to observe that embodiments of reality are by nature so great and undivided. And now you have failed to observe to such a degree that you think there is some affection or reality which pertains to both of these together, but not to each individually, or again to each, but not to both; so unreasoning and undiscerning and foolish and unreflecting is your state of mind.” That is, Hippias wants to emphasize the unity of the cosmos, its homogeneity, against the Socratic claim of a heterogeneous whole. The homogeneous cosmos fits nicely with Hippias’ sophistry because the more the cosmos is conceived as homogeneous, undifferentiated, the less reason, with its principle of non-contradiction, can understand it. As Zuckert remarks, Hippias “embodies a way of life based on such a homogeneous cosmology,” posing “an important test of the rationale for Socratic inquiry” and, one might add, to any “rationale” at all. Hippias claims to understand reality all at once and as a whole; again, as Zuckert has it, Hippias has no felt need for dialogue because he is unerotic, supposing he already has wisdom, already knows the nature of the cosmos.

Unfortunately for Hippias, “human affairs,” as Socrates replies, “are not what a man wishes, but what can”; wishful thinking doesn’t make the wish ‘come true.’ Hippias now tries to bluff his way out: “You will speak to one who knows, Socrates,” a soph-ist, “for I know the state of mind of all who are concerned with discussion; but nevertheless, if you prefer, speak.” “Well, I do prefer.”

And now, Hippias is really in for it. “Are you and I one or are you and I two?” Socrates begins. That is, are we both an odd number and an even number? Undeniably so. Therefore, “what both are, each is, and what each is, both are.” This establishes the principle of heterogeneous unity. By the same logic, “some things are so and some are not so.” Pleasures through sight and through hearing are distinct as to the senses through which they come to us, but they are both beautiful. You yourself have “conceded that both and each were beautiful.” If so, “if both are beautiful, they must be beautiful by that essence which belongs to both. So it is, with strength and “countless other cases.” That is, Socrates has proved that the cosmos is not homogeneous, that it encompasses heterogeneous parts. If so, then if a pleasurable thing may not be beautiful (as they have already agreed), pleasure is not the same as beauty; if it were, then all pleasurable things would be beautiful. 

Hippias can no longer dispute the argument. He can dispute the worth of the argument. “What do you think all [philosophizing] this amounts to? It is mere scrapings and shavings of discourse, divided into bits.” It is sophistry that is “beautiful and of great worth” because sophistry can “convince the audience,” “carry off the greatest of prizes, the salvation of oneself, one’s property, and one’s friends,” unlike these “petty arguments” of yours, “mere talk and nonsense,” by which you “appear to be a fool”—whether you are or not. Given the coming trial of Socrates, in which the philosopher fails to defend himself against his accusers in front of a jury of Athenian citizens, would Socrates not be better off if he were a sophist? To recur to the earlier argument, Hippias claims to be the noble mare, denigrating Socrates as the lowly pot. Socrates may be beautiful, but only in an inferior way.

Socrates agrees, ironically. Yes, “my dear Hippias you are blessed because you know the things a man ought to practice, and have, as you say, practiced them satisfactorily,” while “I, as it seems, am possessed by some accursed fortune, so that I am always wandering and perplexed, and, exhibiting my perplexity to you wise men, am in turn reviled by you in speech whenever I exhibit it.” Why, I am so confused, “I do not even know what the beautiful itself is.” It is questionable, then, whether I am better to be alive than dead; in this way, the sophist’s accusation loses its force, not because it is false but because it is the sophist who fails to see “the entirety of things” even while asserting the homogeneity of things. In the case at hand, the danger of capital punishment might not be a real danger at all, inasmuch as I might be better off if my fellow Athenians go ahead and kill me. That, too, is a matter for philosophic inquiry. There is, however, one sure benefit to the philosophic life. I may not know what the beautiful is, but “I think I know the meaning of the proverb, ‘beautiful things are difficult.'” To move from wishful thinking to rational thinking is difficult because the cosmos is heterogeneous, complex, in need of rational explication, not as simple as the sophist wants it to be.

 

Notes

1. Prodicus has come down to us as the teller of the story of the ‘choice of Hercules,” who chooses chaste Lady Virtue over seductive but injurious Lady Vice. Is this wholesome teaching the sort of thing that makes Prodicus Socrates’ friend, if still a sophist? No other sophist is called Socrates’ friend in this dialogue, including Hippias—despite Socrates’ friendly greeting. 
2. Plato’s readers will recall the Ion, in which Socrates dialogues with the eponymous rhapsode, a prodigy of memory who seldom bothers to think. 

 

Glenn Ellmers: The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy. New York: Encounter Books, 2023.

 

If our time is out of joint, as most agree, why is this so? In the United States, the regime of the American Founders, consisting of popular sovereignty within the framework of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, with a set of ruling offices fitted to such rule within that framework, has become entangled with a bureaucratic regime operating within the framework of hopes of historical ‘progress’—typically defined as social egalitarianism. As a result, “it has been a long time since the people of the United States fully exercised their sovereign authority to choose the officials in government whose primary job is, or is supposed to be, to protect the people’s natural rights according to the Constitution”; our ‘regime’ has become post-constitutional.”

Without forgetting the virtues of classical antiquity or of the Bible, the Founders also drew from modern political philosophers, especially Locke and Montesquieu. But modern philosophy reached a crisis when philosophers first doubted that right could be derived from nature, ‘ought’ from ‘is,’ turning first to the course of events, ‘History,’ as the source of right (on the claim that rational, and rationally discernible laws of history were sweeping mankind forward to thoroughgoing control of nature), and then to ever-louder claims that neither God, nor nature, nor History provided any source of right at all, that the meaning of human life was whatever we choose it to be. In practice, this has meant that the rationalist and anti-rationalist strains of modern philosophy, “relentlessly diverging,” have issued in, first, the rule of “scientific and bureaucratic experts in the corporate world and government,” who deploy “empirical disciplines such as engineering, sociology, epidemiology, criminology, and economic modeling to justify their rational administration of society,” obviating “the old-fashioned need for the consent of the governed,” but also in the rise of persons justifying their rule on the “nihilistic” claims of postmodernism, which dismisses “fields of knowledge an intellectual disciplines that had been considered objectively true” as “hegemonic, white, male constructs.” As usual, any criticism of a real or supposed ruling class’s right to rule implies a claim to rule by a would-be or newly ensconced ruling class, and so it has been with the New Left. The remarkable thing is that this same ruling or semi-ruling class has come to embrace both rationalism and irrationalism at the same time, a move that does indeed put the principle of non-contradiction, the soul of rationalism, to the test. But in the eyes of the new ruling class, “this irreconcilable conflict between scientific bureaucracy and woke irrationality,” this “tension between Hegel and Nietzsche” (both transformed, astonishingly, into avatars of egalitarianism) makes out-of-jointness sort of a good thing. “Permanent revolutionary struggle” has become “an end in itself.” There is no ‘end of History,” no utopia at the end of the Rainbow Coalition, “just the permanent revolution.” 

As for those who would return the United States to its founding principles, Ellmers cautions that that is easier said than done. “In what ways would James Madison’s republican government need to be adapted to the conditions of the 21st century? Which principles would remain the same and which would require updating in light of current geopolitics social media; digital capitalism; medical, military, and transportation technology?” And as to ‘family values,’ “even many hard-core MAGA voters would find the moral restrictions of the founding era oppressive.” Can philosophy, can political philosophy, get us out of the cave it has dug for ourselves?

“A major reason our political crisis is so bitter and infuriating is that both sides increasingly regard each other as simply incomprehensible”; “we no longer see reality in the same way.” On the Left, we find “a secular theology cobbled together from various modern European philosophers,” including not only Hegel and Nietzsche but (of course) Marx and, surprisingly, Heidegger. The obvious problem is that these philosophers disagree with one another, and so the Left itself is factionalized. There is the faction “focused on racial grievances” (Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter); there is the “militant anarcho-Marxist wing” (Antifa); and there is the “elite, cosmopolitan oligarchy” that provides much of the funding for the first two factions, confident that it can keep them under control, that way, conceding a place within its bureaucracies for diversity training and other gestures to appease the Wokists. (The same people supposed that they could cause the Soviet Union to ‘evolve’ into a liberal society by means of international trade, before adopting the same futile strategy to the People’s Republic of China.) Speaking of Nietzsche, the real, undemocratized one “accurately foresaw the contemporary phenomena of imperious victimology, et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur humbly groveling while arrogantly ruling.)”

And then there is the New Right. The political philosopher Leo Strauss described the problem at the outset of the Second World War. Young Germans who rejected the Kantianism of the moderate Left and the Marxism of the radical Left despised “the prospect of a planetary society ‘devoted to production and consumption only,'” one that turned even spiritual goods into commodities, fashion accessories. In this, they saw the rise of Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man,’ the one who cannot conceive of God, cannot even wish upon a star (as a pagan might) because he does not know what a star is, know that there could be anything higher than himself. Strauss wrote, “literally anything, the nothing, the chaos, the jungle, the Wild West, the Hobbian state of nature, seemed to them infinitely better” than that to the Rightists of the 1920s. And so, the young “embraced a form of irrationalism” in large measure because rationalism, as set forth by the ‘moderns,’ had become a mediocrity that called itself moderation—even when radicalized by the Marxists, who wanted nothing more than to live safely in the communes of the future, protected from all risk and aspiring to nothing more than contentment. The Hitler Youth came out of such sentiments—essentially moral sentiments, of a sort, and that was the problem. Moral reasoning was abandoned because the Right assumed that the only form of rationalism was modern rationalism.

Ellmers begins to address this dilemma by observing that the tension between reason and custom, philosophy and the city, or (if one considers the philosopher’s way of life and the way of life commended by the religions) Athens and Jerusalem, is as old as philosophy itself. Political philosophy began as an attempt to find philosophic implications in the ways of the city and some benefit to the city in philosophic inquiry—a way of striking a truce between the two. But “today’s intellectual class can offer no rational alternative to postmodern relativism and nihilism”; hence its awkward and likely unsustainable attempt to bring postmodernism into the boardroom. But “we no longer believe any account of justice or morality can be rational, trans-cultural, trans-historical, and—it seems necessary to add today—trans-racial.” “We no longer accept that there can be a theoretically true account of what is good for man.” To understand how this has happened, Ellmers turns not only to Strauss but to that arch-postmodern, Michel Foucault, on the Straussian ground that one must understand any set of arguments or opinions first of all in their own terms. 

Strauss traced modern political philosophy, modern philosophy generally, to Machiavelli, the ultimate source of modern or ‘Enlightenment’ rationalism, the rationalism that aims at conquering Fortune (as Machiavelli puts it) and nature (as his disciple, Francis Bacon, puts it) for human purposes. Neither God nor nature provides the standard for human conduct; the human mind, and especially the human will and passions, provide that standard, with this new form of reasoned inquiry as its servant. This project would not make the philosophic and political dimensions of human life coterminous, with both reconceived as ways of augmenting human power. The moderns claim that the original form of political philosophy, seen in the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon, was wrong because ineffectual. One way in which classical political philosophy was ineffectual was its failure to fully convince pious men that it was not harmful to the city—whether the city of the gods or, later, the City of God.

In his own time, Socrates met his death at the hands of Athenian citizens who suspected him of corrupting the young by inducing them to disbelieve in the gods of the cities and to disrespect their own fathers. Among our contemporaries, Ellmers identifies such academic Strauss students as Harry Neumann and Thomas G. West as persons who side with the Athenians, and he further suspects that Strauss “acknowledged the legitimacy [emphasis added] of Athens’ judgment against Socrates,” and “on a certain level he even regarded Plato as guilty”—that is, legitimately guilty, guilty of violating the laws of Athens, which were attributed to a divine lawgiver. “Relentless and profane questions about the rational grounds of justice and truth” as those things are upheld by the city’s laws may well undermine the city. Today, “both Left and right are enacting and rebelling against Plato’s legacy.” That is because “they are still operating, in important ways, within modern rationalism at its broadest and most optimistic.” This is more obvious on “the mainstream Right” in America, which still clings to “the major features of republicanism: consent, constitutional limited government, religious liberty, and national sovereignty, as well as important elements of traditional morality including the integrity of the family.” The more radical Rightists, most often the young (anticipated by the nihilist, Neumann), thrilling to “the various anti-modern thinkers who disdain the hollowness of bourgeois commercialism,” as seen in the writings of Carl Schmitt, who offers a new sort of “civic piety,” one that sees political life as the conflict between friends and enemies, fellow-citizens and foreigners. Yet this form of radicalism, as Strauss noticed decades ago, never really escapes modern rationalism, as seen in its fundamentally Hobbist conception of human life as a conflict of all against all. It departs from Hobbes not at the root of modernity but in its rejection of Hobbes’s solution to that war, the construction of a mighty Leviathan that will impose peace upon the warring persons and factions. 

While the Left, “at least on the level of slogans, still professes allegiance to many liberal principles such as equality (or equity), cosmopolitanism, universal human rights, etc.” the “ethnocentric anti-racism” of its more radical elements mimics the tightly wound communalism of the ancient polis, with its “moral seriousness and spiritual zeal found in the closed and intimate societies of the ancient world.” This “yearning for the holy city” comports badly with modern rationalism and with rationalism simply, “Plato’s cosmopolitan legacy.” 

Platonic political philosophy attempted to make and to keep philosophy within the “caste of educated gentlemen.” But Machiavelli’s prince is no gentleman, and modern philosophers have exhibited little of Plato or Aristotle’s patience in dealing with gentlemen. The political consequence of this impatience initially was as Machiavelli outlined: alternatively, the modern, absolutist prince, forcefully eliminating the aristocrat-oligarchs who stand in the way of his rule over the people, or the modern republic, also ruling at the expense of ‘the few.’ This much Tocqueville saw and described, a few centuries after Machiavelli. Tocqueville also saw how this democratizing tendency of modernity might be countered by a new type of oligarchy, no more gentlemanly than the new prince or the newly empowered people, an oligarchy composed of industrial capitalists and/or government administrators who would rule the people by giving them what they want—safety, income, and a show of deference. Modern democratization also played out in “the attempt to popularize philosophic education, the ambitious conceit at the heart of the Enlightenment,” a project that “becomes extremely dangerous if there is—as Plato suggests—a kind of tyrannical impulse lurking in the philosopher’s uninhibited eros” for wisdom, his philo-sophia. That quest leads, in Plato’s Republic, to the rule of “philosopher-kings.” In this regime, “the philosophic legislator, or tyrant (insofar as he is above the law), rules indirectly but nevertheless powerfully, not with a sword, one might say, but with a shadow,” the shadow of myths crafted by poets closely supervised by the philosophers. In Xenophon’s Hiero, the tyrant worries that the philosopher-poet Simonides might well overthrow him, become the new tyrant or man above the law. Like the tyrant, the philosopher is shameless, as indeed those animated by eros incline to be, as more than suggested in the old-fashioned term, ‘shameless hussy.’ The question, however, is the object of one’s eroticism, and where it leads.

The philosophic question then becomes, is the man above the law not only a ‘tyrant’ in the eyes of the city and its conventions but a nihilist? Are “all philosophers” nihilists? Are all “fixed moral rules and authoritative traditions” “completely groundless”? Have philosophers discovered “that every actual regime rests entirely on myth and absurdity”? Not so fast, Strauss’s student, Harry V. Jaffa, replied. In fact, political communities mix natural and conventional justice because the conventions of a viable city, one whose regime lasts for a while, must have some connection to reality. Nothing comes of nothing, and that goes for the God of the Bible, too, who exists before He brings something out of nothing. While the nihilist “argues that all justice is entirely conventional, without any natural or divine support,” with philosopher-nihilists alone strong enough to endure this truth, actual classical political philosophers (Aristotle, for example) observe that human beings have a nature, a nature that finds its purpose in the attainment of happiness understood as the exercise of the distinctively human characteristic, the exercise of human nature, which is reason. Socrates was right to understand the life ruled by reason as inquiring, skeptical, “zetetic,” but that is hardly the same thing as the denial of natural right, the attempt to replace all of nature with constructs animated by the human will. “Undiluted natural right, according to Jaffa (and, I believe, Strauss), is explosive not because it masks cosmic emptiness, but because perfect justice is too potent, too demanding, for man’s imperfect nature.” Classical political philosophy is ‘politic’ philosophy, a philosophy that understands one form of wisdom as sophia but another form of wisdom as phronesis. 

Nihilists contend that the ascent from the cave of conventional opinion, the philosopher’s ascent from the city, must collapse into the abyss of nihilism, like Icarus falling to his death from the sky. But what if, when the philosophers return to the cave (as Socrates himself insists they must, now as political philosophers) they misconceive their political mission as the democratization of philosophy, as a mission to ‘enlighten’ the citizens? Will that not denature both sophia and phronesis?

Plato himself illustrated this by writing not only his Republic or Regime but his Statesman, a dialogue on political knowledge. Knowledge implies certainty and therefore lends itself to tyranny. Socratic zeteticism prescribes what might be described as firm caution, not certainty. The Statesman “drags us through false starts, dead-ends, errors, and digressions,” imitating political debate. There is “no arithmetic precision in the art of politics, only a large measure of messiness, perhaps even futility”; if so, then political knowledge or science “cannot be simultaneously exact and complete.” Young Socrates learns that his mathematical expertise doesn’t help him much when he turns to consideration of political life because “human beings and their political needs are hard to measure properly.” Such politically necessary virtues as moderation and courage and especially justice, which has two dimensions—the “justice of equality and the justice of excellence”— do not lend themselves to mathematically precise formulae. “The city needs both sameness and difference,” unifying bonds to hold it together, to make it a city, and diversity of abilities and of interests, to enable it to supply its various needs and to adapt to changing circumstances. And when it comes to understanding human nature, what a human is, the interlocutors in the dialogue themselves fumble through an attempt to define ‘man’ himself in a quasi-mathematical process of division that yields the comical result that man is an unfeathered biped—true enough, but not quite dispositive. “In a typically Platonic way, the dialogue shows (rather than merely asserting through the speeches) that proper statesmanship resists any comprehensive and precise methodology.” 

Foucault saw this, understanding Plato’s statesman “as neither all-knowing scientist nor all-caring shepherd,” yet nonetheless “thought Plato’s rationalism played a part in the modern attempt to exercise totalitarian ‘pastoral’ power over human beings,” that the rationalism of classical political philosophy must lead to the rationalism of modern, impolitic political philosophy. Strauss disagreed. In a course he taught at the University of Chicago, he called his students’ attention to a feature of Plato’s Meno, that dialogue about teaching. “Plato,” he told them, “likes the term ‘divining.’ We all divine much more than we clearly see.” To see clearly is to know, but life is not transparent; we need to do some guessing. This doesn’t mean that laws and lawgivers offer us nothing more than guesswork and mythologizing. Lawgivers “divine fragments of the truth.” For political purposes, especially the purpose of stable unity, “the absolutization of truth is necessary—insofar as the ordinary, non-theoretical citizens understand truth.” But neither can the philosopher entirely dispense with the solid ground in which the cave has been dug. Political philosophy “begins with examining the city’s fundamental law.” In seeing its doubtful aspects, and even in ascending from the cave of convention to the light of nature, the philosopher learns two things: that his glimpses of the dazzling truth are partial, clearer and true than the view inside the cave but never comprehensive, as the sun is big and bright, and also that he “would become paralyzed if he doubted absolutely the reliability of his own senses or the intelligibility of the world.” He can ascend from the cave but he cannot live his life in the sun. He returns to the cave with new respect for its certainties and the stability they afford. He must “pass through the city” on his way out and on his way back in. Conversely, while “the statesman cannot wait on the musings of speculative thinkers” but establish the “uncomplicated respect for the sanctity of the law” citizenship demands, he must “remain flexible,” more flexible than the laws, as “a slavish obedience to tradition can lead in some circumstance to the regime’s self-destruction,” as when one might need to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during a civil war. “Necessity requires that prudence,” practical as distinguished from theoretical or speculative wisdom, “consider all possible options.” As for the citizens, they “must be united by an unshakeable common faith in the nature of the world and the basic justice of their regime, or there will not be sufficient unity to hold the city together”; “the city needs a civil religion.” But they also need to understand that the regime’s justice is indeed basic, that “the disjointed goods that define the human condition”—the justice of equality, the justice of excellence, and many others—require “moderation in both aspiration and deed.” As the saying goes, E pluribus unum. ‘Radicalism’ is exciting, but it seldom comes to much good. And just as political radicals are too often terribles simplificateurs in practice, so un-zetetic philosophers can be that in theory, failing to recognize what Strauss, following the classics, calls “noetic heterogeneity”—the recognition that nature, a unity that can be comprehended noetically, by glimpses reasoning affords the human mind—but includes “natural divisions or types” not simply reducible to a single element, such as atoms. We see dogs, individuals, ‘dog’ as a species, as ‘ideas,’ and nature as the whole in which both individuals and species are parts. We can reason about such things because the principle of non-contradiction shows both how the many things differ and in what ways they are the same. Jaffa, Ellmers recalls, “was fond of speaking about ‘the miracle of the common noun.'” Platonic political philosophy refuses to treat either the city or the cosmos by reducing its theme to a single beat. It “precludes any doctrinaire metaphysics,” as “the whole remains elusive.” Modern rationalism or Enlightenment misses that point. Ellmers remarks that modern science has in a sense discovered a correction to itself, and as a result of its faith in mathematical certainty, inasmuch as mathematical physics has brought us the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which suggests that “to capture one truth, it is necessary to let go of another.”

The attempt to achieve “complete ruling knowledge” strikes the classical political philosophers as “unnatural.” It strikes the later moderns as unnatural, too—hence the move to ‘History.’ As for the earlier moderns, it struck them as quite natural because they simplified human nature as primarily the desire first to survive and then, and above all, to acquire. If human nature is fundamentally acquisitive, then complete ruling knowledge is the one thing needful. This would lead, finally, to tyranny over “the idea of man,” a “tyranny over the whole human species,” “the total assimilation of a natural form to a human art, a true philosophic techne.” This is what the postmodernists object to, as seen in Heidegger’s animadversions against technology. And because Heidegger, for all his philosophic attention to Plato and Aristotle, failed to see the moderating, politic character of reason in those philosophers, he could make his wild, infamous claim that his philosophy registered “the inner truth and greatness” of Nazism, over against the Nazis’ rather ardent love of all technologies of conquest. The task of political philosophy today is to become politic again, which means, among other things, to argue for the importance of “civic piety,” an importance that inheres not only in its capacity to maintain political unity but in the elements of nature conventions retain, elements that reasonable men and women will identify by using their reason, their thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction.

What about “the altar of our fathers,” then? The ancient city, described by the great French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, “governed a human being with an authority so absolute that there was nothing beyond its control.” It was the opposite of Karl Popper’s “open society.” As a closed society, it justified its rule by claiming that its founder, the one who laid down its fundamental law, its regime, was a god. If it lost a war, it had been overpowered by a greater god and its citizens were rightly reduced to a condition of slavery to the conquerors and their gods. Nor is this city simply unnatural, unnatural though it may seem to ‘we moderns,’ who claim to know better. “The spirit of the closed city, with its intense and civic comradery, seems deeply embedded in the human psyche,” so much so that “part of what we are seeing in the re-emerging tribalism of both Left and Right may be a reaction to the profound emptiness in the soul created by the loss of this ‘belonging,’ an attempt to recover a sense of meaning and purpose by recreating a holy community of citizen-believers” in a world awash in “hedonistic secularism.” This is why Left and Right can no longer engage in real dialogue with one another; each regards the others as heretics, as evil. And each seeks in political life a cure for their alienation, from the angst (or at least boredom) that the designedly banal modern regimes foster as a counter to the religious wars of the early modern world.

Those religious wars differed from the Crusades conducted by the feudal regimes under the Catholic Church because they set professing Christians against professing Christians, a profoundly disturbing issue of what was intended to be a, even the religion of peace. Enter Machiavelli, charging that “Plato’s abstract, trans-political ideas of universal justice had been integrated into Christian theology,” ruining the sober realism of ancient politics, whether instantiated in poleis or in empires. “Europe now included many earthly kingdoms but had only one faith,” causing “a kind of schizophrenia, dividing citizenship from piety.” Catholic priests had replaced Plato’s philosopher-kings; initially, in Machiavelli’s estimation, this had led not to warlikeness but to lassitude, to a bizarre combination of weakness and fanaticism, otherworldliness and (merely) spiritual warfare. One way to counter this was to attempt to make Christianity into a civil religion, along the lines of the ancient city. This had the malign effect of infusing war aims with the spirit of uncompromising fanaticism, a fanaticism tapped not only by would-be Christian princes but by atheist princes masquerading as princes. With Machiavelli, “what was ultimately and most crucially lost,” and never recovered in the many iterations of ‘modernity,’ “was the classical conception of nature: the conviction that there is a fixed and intelligible order in the cosmos, outside of our will, that supplies a permanent ground of morality and justice.” As mentioned, ‘history’ and ‘science’ “become the authoritative substitutes” for natural right, but neither, “needless to say, has delivered on the promised results.” What neither history nor science can provide is “a rational understanding of the human good,” inasmuch as human nature itself must fall at the end of the project of conquering nature. As one of André Malraux’s characters laments, “Man is dead, following God, and we are left with the consequences of this strange inheritance.”

Strauss rightly saw that “faith in the rational rule of intelligent experts could not withstand the Nietzschean critique,” his realization—indeed insistence—that the science or knowledge acquired by the moderns has no moral significance (as Hume had already seen), that history or the course of events has no necessary logic to it, no more moral significance than modern science. Positivism—not only laws but all of reality made subject to human ‘positing’—will not do, and the historicism that attempts to remediate positivism is equally impotent. A partial exception to this dilemma may be seen in the regime established by the American Founders, a regime that aims at more than “comfortable self-preservation” while giving a place to both prayer and thought by limiting government to the task of guarding life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—very much including the enjoyment of physical property but also recognizing, as Madison put it, that we have a valuable form of property in those rights, by nature. This gives political life a purpose beyond convention, beyond any “easygoing moral relativism,” as Jaffa’s student, Thomas G. West, observes. This purpose is of philosophic interest, as political philosophy teaches “the inescapable primacy of the question of what is the right way of life.” 

The moderns’ error may be seen in the ‘postmoderns.’ Michel Foucault reduces not only politics but thought itself to “the power discourse,” the process whereby political power is said to produce truth. “We are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands,” Foucault writes, as power “institutionalizes, professionalizes, and rewards its pursuit.” In Ellmers’s words, Foucault claims that truth “has no other standard, or ground, or mode of existence other than what is determined by the political power structure.” This is indeed “a quite accurate description of how today’s intellectuals perceive the world, and therefore how the ruling class,” consisting of their former students, “at least to some degree, thinks and operates” in their quest for “globalism,” the Hegelian World State, from which there will be no exit—neither in politics rightly understood, which consists of ruling and being ruled, in turn, or in philosophy, which consists in dialectical conversation between philosophers and between philosophers and non-philosophers. Instead, the human person becomes “a unit in a complex mechanism which is meant to operate efficiently,” an airplane passenger. “The system makes the decisions,” not you or your fellow no-longer-citizens. It is enough to make some young men long to become Bronze Age perverts. In tune with this mood, “Foucault explains that notions of guilt, evidence, and neutrality are merely holdovers from the older power structure.” Responsibility? What might that be? And “moral responsibility” itself was only a shadow of the virtues commended by the classics. Madison’s responsible government disappears into networks wherein no one can be held responsible because no one is treated as a person. As in the political science of Harold Lasswell, who anticipated some of the postmodernist themes, propaganda symbols replace reason, classical or modern, ideology replaces both religious conviction and philosophy as the guide to the new way of life, the new regime. 

To what extent does this new regime amount to a new version of Plato’s cave, a new set of conventions? Strauss replied that the new regime wasn’t the ancient cave, with its glimmerings of nature, but a cave beneath the cave, a construct made possible by the attempt to conquer nature, an attempt which discarded even the glimmerings of nature. “By reducing the knowable to our own mental constructs, the epistemological problem is solved by condensing reality to fit our minds” in an act of will. Instead of seeing that reality exists independently “and it is our minds that must conform” to it, that “the truth is out there,” that “the universe is intelligible,” we commit what Plato’s Socrates calls (in the Meno) “misology.” [1] Foucault “saw no escape” from either the modern or the postmodern perspective. At the same time, Foucault wanted to sympathize with the pre-modern societies that have retained a non-rationalist character. This leaves him vulnerable to what another student of Strauss, Stanley Rosen, remarks: “disinterested or scientific study of power contradicts the passionate commitment of the Left,” as “the intention to liberate subjugated knowledges contradicts both scientific objectivity and the subjugating impulse of power politics.”

This is where Strauss comes in. Although the cave beneath the cave seems to preclude any philosophic ascent, so far it has left the Bible and the writings of Plato, Aristotle, and other such folk lying around. In his own classes, Strauss “sometimes warned his students about being ‘too sophisticated.'” One of them, William B. Allen, has told the story of the time he went into Strauss’s office and tried to impress the old fellow with a learned discourse on ‘Being’—rather in the style of Heidegger. “Never talk like that,” he was advised, shortly. Years before, Jaffa had taken the point, setting his primary classroom topic the American regime as understood by its founders, a regime that isn’t simply a cave, much less a cave beneath a cave, but a ruling body, an institutional structure, a way of life aiming at what is good for human beings by nature. When it came to philosophers, Jaffa showed particular interest in Aristotle, who famously calls man a political who desires to know. “These two aspects of human nature, and the problems they bring with them, reveal themselves in countless ways wherever men are found.” They are not ‘relative’ to one or a few societies, nor are they products of some law of historical progress. And if so, whatever happens, “man’s political nature can be suppressed but neve destroyed” and “the brute instincts rebelling against mankind’s technical commodification must be guided by that other aspect of human nature; the desire to know.” If the universal, homogenous state envisioned by the rationalists among the historicists prevails, ending both politics and philosophy by denaturing human beings via some technology—bioengineering docile creatures, or whatever—there is an urgent need to resist that attempt both philosophically and politically. 

As for religion, “it would perhaps be premature to say farewell to the Bible.” It has been, so far. Strauss encouraged his students to greet the Bible, to renew the dialogue between “Athens and Jerusalem.” Ellmers asks, “What are the prospects for another Great Awakening, and what form would it take?” And what are the prospects, he goes on to ask, of resisting the temptation to treat modern science as if it were a religion or, for that matter, a philosophy—as if it could supply a way of life that could support moral and political life? “Between Hegel’s total state and Nietzschean anarchy lies another choice: self-government.”

What is to be resisted, in our status as demi-citizens in the cave beneath the cave, is hopelessness. Whether or not the recovery of common sense for citizens, piety for Christians, political philosophy or at least the study of political philosophy for those so inclined, can be achieved in the United States or elsewhere, there is not only no harm in trying, but human satisfaction. Ellmers ends with a paradox, but not a contradiction: “The immoderate skepticism of Socratic eros remains the most moderate and promising alternative to our twin political dangers of rational tyranny and tribal passions, because in its original form as the awareness of ignorance that quest offers perhaps the most powerful and humanizing antidote to dogmatic certainty: wonder.”

 

Note

1. See “Teaching Virtue?” on this website, in the category “Philosophers.”

 

 

 

Timothy W. Burns: Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education.  Albany: SUNY Press, 2021. 

 

The contemporary American academic Left decries Leo Strauss as an enemy of democracy while transforming Martin Heidegger, a Nazi, into an ally, a friend of democracy and of ‘liberal education’ as the Left has redefined them. Central to this equation, however, is technology, alternatively valorized (the Internet as the means of universal ‘communication’ of peoples throughout the world) or demonized (industrialism as the violator of Goddess Earth, our Mother). Technology is the most visible form of modern science, about which the Left is similarly ambivalent. Books vilifying and defending Strauss have become a small industry within the industry of academic publishing, with dozens of titles having appeared in the past three decades or so. This succinct, extraordinarily incisive essay is one of the few that repays the effort it takes to read it. One of Professor Burns’s most important insights is that Strauss, Heidegger’s younger contemporary, has him very much in mind even in writings where Heidegger is never named.

Burns begins with an overview of his account. Regarding democracy, he remarks that Strauss’s attempt to recover classical political philosophy “does not initially bespeak a friend of democracy” because Strauss understands the classics to have “rejected democracy” on the grounds that virtue, not freedom to live as one likes (the aim of democracy) is the natural aim of human life lived at its best. While it is true that classical democracy is the rule of the many who are poor, needy, often desirous of soaking the rich in order to obtain the freedom to live as they like—rather along the lines of comical Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, singing “If I were a rich man”—and while it is also true that modern democracy is the rule of the many who are comfortable, men and women of the middling class, that very middling sort of life lends itself to complacency, even corruption, to what the classics (and the Tevye’s Bible) condemn as the vices of ease. Strauss harbors doubts about democracy, ancient and modern, even while considering it “the most decent of the available modern regimes.” Such lukewarm esteem frustrates and even infuriates the more impassioned partisans of modern democracy, for whom the regime’s ills are curable only by further democratization, as in John Dewey’s mot, “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” 

Strauss also takes issue with the scholarly majority in his account of the origins of modern democracy. Most scholars adhere to “the secularization thesis,” which takes modern democracy as “the secular manifestation of an advanced moral consciousness, first expressed within Christianity, of the equal dignity of each individual.” ‘Undemocratically’ opposing the majority view, Strauss “argued that modern democracy emerged, rather, through the modern philosophic-scientific project, and has therefore within it the very serious threat to humanity that is posed by technology,” by the kind of science that animates modernity, a science that emancipates technology, techne, art, “from moral and political control.” This potentially disastrous emancipation serves the passion for doing as one likes, not of doing what one ought—and thus, potentially, to “the dehumanization of man.” Christianity of course does no such thing. In opposing the claim that modern democracy secularizes Christianity, Strauss puts himself in apparent opposition not merely to modern scholars but to no less a political thinker than Alexis de Tocqueville.

Burns observes that Strauss “understood technological thinking to be at the very core of modern political philosophy,” which aims (with Machiavelli, Bacon, and Hobbes) to conquer nature, increasing human power over nature, by “shift[ing] human attention away from the political-moral question of the right end or ends of human life to the means to any desired end,” ultimately to the conquest of human nature itself. To do this, modern political philosophy obscures “the radical difference between the theoretical and practical/political/moral life.” This obscurantism stems not merely from materialism—Lucretius and the other Epicureans were materialists—but from what ‘Athens’ and ‘Jerusalem’ alike would have regarded as hubris, an arrogance that will lead, however, not to some secularized version of the kingdom of God but to the universal tyranny of a world state. Strauss maintains that the classics saw the possibility of technological science and rejected it as dangerous, even as the God of Israel struck down that technological marvel, the tower of Babylon, after emancipating His people from the pyramids and sorcery of Egypt. 

As for liberal education, “Plato and Aristotle did not lack social justice or a sense of it,” knowing “as well as we can know them the true principles of justice,” that “a society ruled by a privileged group is of questionable justice since social superiority and natural superiority do not necessarily coincide.” Accordingly, they understood that “only men who are truly educated, who are experienced in things noble and beautiful, ought to rule,” but also that “average men cannot fulfill this condition” because such an education requires leisure and leisure requires the wealth that few men of their time enjoyed. The classics resigned themselves to this degree of injustice because the alternative to it was “perpetual revolution, which means perpetual chaos.” Modernity’s “economy of plenty,” which makes a liberal education available to far more people, presents its own problem, however: by ‘democratizing’ the liberal arts and making them subservient to the conquest-of-nature project, the modern, centralized state deploys a political economy that encourages citizens to turn away from moral and political virtue, toward the pursuit of living as one likes, according to the passions and appetites that undermine the liberality, to say nothing of the mindfulness, that makes those arts liberal. Philosophically, this means turning away from the theoretical to the practical life and eventually to the ‘synthesis’ of theory and practice, begun by Hegel, advanced by Marx, consummated by Heidegger. Strauss denied Heidegger’s claim that the disjunction between theory and practice seen initially in Plato’s dialogues, led to the technological-philosophic proposal to conquer nature. On the contrary, the classics foresaw that possibility and rejected it. Just as Christianity is not to be credited or blamed for the rise of democracy, of civil-social egalitarianism in modernity, so Plato and Aristotle are not to be blamed for the atomic bomb.

Unlike Machiavelli, Strauss “did not consider the move to technology to have been necessary or impelled by a correction of an alleged weakness in philosophic thinking begun by the ancients that found its fuller elaboration or fate in the moderns.” Admittedly, Machiavelli was right in pointing to the problem of military defense as a weakness in classical (to say nothing of Christian) thought, but Strauss questioned the modern “use of science for this purpose.” Up until now, technological advances, good or bad, had been limited by nature, whose “periodic cataclysms in fact took care” of such double-edged circumstances. “Viewed in this light,” Strauss writes, “the natural cataclysms appear as a manifestation of the beneficence of nature.” But if nature itself were conquered, what then? A man-made cataclysm? Or a world state, perpetual peace under perpetual tyranny? Further, “both the promise and threat of technology is not limited to modern tyranny but is posed likewise by modern, liberal democracy,” whether in the form of material ruin in war or moral ruin amidst decadent affluence. In this, Strauss concurred with Tocqueville’s unforgettable, dystopian warning about “soft despotism.” [1]

Modernity’s moral crisis was delayed by Hobbes, who tempered his Machiavellian endorsement of nature conquest—expressed in his scientistic notion of life as a perpetual quest for “power,” a quest that “ceaseth only in death”—with a non-materialist (and therefore contradictory) notion of “right”—the “just use of that power”—which rests on an argument that smuggles an end into an otherwise non-teleological doctrine—the perpetuation of life itself, not a summum bonum so much as a summum malum, namely, the fear of violent death. It turns out that human beings have a distinctively human characteristic after all, the “nonmaterial capacity to conceive of ‘effects imagined’ beyond “immediately intended utility. Human beings have what would later be called ‘consciousness,’ in this case the consciousness of our own power and “hence to our becoming vainglorious—to our no longer innocently pursuing power like animals but instead our becoming capable of consumingly and wrongfully proud of our ability to acquire many powerful means to our ends.” Hobbes lauds the modern state not simply as Machiavelli does—as an instrument of power, as a means of conquering Fortuna—but as an instrument for keeping vainglorious men (particularly the titled aristocrats, whose quest for battlefield glory interferes with peaceful commerce) in their place. “Hobbes’s attention to justice,” to natural rights, “to what (he and other) citizens or subjects believe when they distinguish between a just ruler, leads him, inconsistently, to abandon his naturalist-materialist account while still presenting it as a materialist account” of man’s quest for conquering the nature upon which any doctrine of natural rights must, somehow, depend. [2] “This inconsistency is not, for Strauss, merely problematic, but helps to account for the continued, sustained role of a nonhistoricist, commonsense moral reasoning, and even greatness, in modern, liberal regimes.” Vive l’incohérence!” But Hume’s jibe about the incoherence of ‘is’ and ‘ought’ will loom, soon enough.

How, exactly, do democracy and technology link themselves together in modernity? The understanding of the natural equality of all men yields sovereignty of the people, democracy; the sovereignty of the people is intended to guarantee the equal rights of the people, rights deriving from their natural equality; the sovereignty of the people implies that no government, even a government elected by the people, is sovereign over the people, leading to separation of powers and other institutional guards against a centralized state that would otherwise aggrandize itself and compromise popular sovereignty, destroy equal rights. Such a state will serve the people’s desire for material prosperity, for doing and having what they like, by fostering the quest for the use of science for the relief of man’s estate, a project that replaces the landed gentry/aristocracy with a commercial/industrial elite, which threatens natural and civic equality from its position within the civil society beneath the state and, eventually, by co-opting the ruling institutions of that state for their own purposes. Meanwhile, the hoped-for virtues of the people decay, leading to a decline of the public spiritedness that must animate liberal democracy, if it is to resist its oligarchic enemies within, its tyrannical enemies without. At best, the “responsibility” of the people and their elected representatives (as per Madison’s tenth Federalist) replaces the sterner virtues, but this will prove insufficient to resist the blandishments of luxury or the ambitions of rulers domestic and foreign. 

There is a “deeper (and earlier) problem,” one associated with “the original, anti-biblical intention of the founders of the modern technological-scientific enterprise and its goal of ‘enlightenment’ of the people.” The way to prevent the moral decadence of a general commercial prosperity, in addition to the cultivation of such ‘bourgeois’ virtues as thrift, sobriety, and industriousness, was to make men not so much morally better as smarter, alert to the schemes of ambitious politicians and priests. This doesn’t quite meet the dilemma, however. “The late, open admission of modern science that it is (and ever was) incapable of providing any moral guidance to anyone, but (however increasingly efficient and specialized) is in fact ‘value-free,’ has finally had the result” Max Weber described: regimes consisting of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart”—a “nullity” that imagines “it has achieved a level of civilization never before achieved.” Modern technological science enables democracy or civil-social egalitarianism “to emerge,” resulting, as Burns puts it, “in the highly problematic, deeply degraded contemporary situation in which we find ourselves.”

“Unlike Heidegger,” Strauss doesn’t think that the solution to the conquest of nature is to radicalize the historicism that has been the latest manifestation of the conquest of nature. He finds in Platonic political philosophy not the origin of technological overreach but an answer to it. Plato and “the other ancient political philosophers” were “unflinchingly aware of their mortality and the passing away of all human things and of its significance.” That was why they drew “a sharp distinction between philosophy and political-moral thinking,” a distinction Heidegger seeks to erase,” “with religion and ancestral tradition”—the bugbears of the Enlightenment—having “an important and admirable role in the latter, and serving as both a bulwark for human excellence and a crucial interlocutor with philosophy.” Even in the modern liberal democracies, the magnanimous man presented as the peak of the moral virtues in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was still possible, as seen in Strauss’s great contemporary (his political counterpart, if you will) Winston Churchill, himself the author of the book, Great Contemporaries. “A faithful adherence to a liberal democratic constitutionalism whose tone and direction may be provided by a sub-political ‘aristocracy within democracy,’ one whose thinking is informed by both serious religious education in one’s ancestral traditions and the study of the Great Books” was still a reasonable, indeed indispensable stance to take. While Tocqueville had looked to his own class, the titled aristocrats, as guides of democracy, and while in England and even, if much more rarely, in Tocqueville’s France that class had delivered some great men, Strauss saw that it needed reinforcements in the persons of middle-class democrats who either emulated the great and good men they found in the course of their liberal education or at least had the ability to recognize and esteem such men when they came along. 

To clarify and elaborate on Strauss’s response to Heidegger and to the modernity (now calling itself ‘post-modernity’) he represented, Burns considers four essays: “What Is Liberal Education?”; “Liberal Education and Responsibility”; “German Nihilism”; and “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy.” It is noteworthy that Strauss doesn’t mention Heidegger in any of these writings; Burns insightfully shows how the presence of Heidegger nonetheless stands beside each of them.

“What Is Liberal Education?” is a lecture delivered at the graduation exercises of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago in June 1959. [3] Strauss begins with a definition of democracy offered by the sophist Protagoras in the Platonic dialogue named for him: democracy is “a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue,” men especially of justice and wisdom who have “formed a fully rational society.” This “remarkably elevated characterization of democracy,” what Strauss calls “a universal aristocracy” or the rule of ‘the many’ who are virtuous, turns out to be ironic. Protagoras himself doesn’t really believe it, deploying it as a sort of advertising slogan for himself and the art that he claims to teach. Protagoras indicates his contempt for democracy soon enough. Strauss omits this “denigration of democracy” from his lecture, instead referring his audience to that modern critic of previous moderns, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who writes that “If there were a people consisting of gods, it would rule itself democratically,” but since there isn’t, natural equality will need to find some other regime to protect it. Political scientists should be able to devise such a regime, yet Strauss looks in vain for any such ‘scientists’ among his contemporaries.

Contemporary political scientists laud democracy while remarking, with what they take to be tough-minded realism, that “it is elites who really run things.” Being “value-free,” social-science behaviorialism can only describe, unless it chooses to contradict itself by telling its students things like the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy; that is, contemporary political scientists “are in fact trapped in contemporary, vulgar opinion.” They intend to unmask the pretensions of political men, but Strauss unmasks the unmaskers—without going so far as to imagine that he can enlighten the would-be enlighteners. In its turn, vulgar public opinion bubbles sluggishly in civil society; contemporary democracy, Strauss ventures to say, “is indeed then not mass rule but mass culture,” “a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual and moral effort whatsoever and at a very low monetary price.” Since modern liberalism “stands or falls by the distinction between state and society, or by the recognition of a private sphere protected by the law but impervious to the law, with the understanding that, above all, religion as particular religion belongs to the private sphere,” in order to avoid the religiously motivated civil and international wars that nearly ruined Europe, the way to counter mass culture might be the institution of a non-mass culture next to it, a culture centered in colleges and universities. “Far from intending to lead a takeover of democracy by a new ‘elite,'” as some of his more captious critics charge [4], “Strauss calls for the founding of an aristocracy within the subpolitical, ‘cultural’ sphere of democracy, for the sake of cultivating habits of mind and heart needed by democracy, which cannot, as he sees it sustain itself on the thin, commercial gruel of mass culture.” Although his reminder of the example of the magnanimous statesman “is unlikely to have any effect on behavioral political scientists,” Strauss looks to those “who, reared in the fact-value distinction, need and already long to see examples of greatness” but who, in the Europe of his time, had instead fallen for the sham greatness of Hitler and Mussolini.

What, then, can be the status of greatness, of magnanimity, in democracy? While Strauss sees the merit of Tocqueville’s measured criticisms of democracy, he departs from him in several ways. In choosing Churchill as his example of a great statesman, he chooses a contemporary who works “within a liberal democracy, while Tocqueville points almost exclusively to the past for examples of greatness, and counsels contemporary democratic solutions—such as the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood, voluntary associations even of the most prosaic kind, and the democratic family—to ‘tyranny of the majority’ and ‘individualism.'” True to some degree, one should say, but Tocqueville also points to greatness in the present, and not only to what remains of the European aristocracy. Readers can see this in his account of the origins of democracy in Christianity, the main item of contention between the two thinkers. 

Burns accurately describes Strauss’s critique of Tocqueville, who advises his aristocratic friends to accept democracy, to give up the dreams of returning to rule that many still nurtured, decades after the French Revolution, and also to “abandon” the “possibilities of human greatness that [aristocracy] made possible.” “Strauss did not subscribe to what came to be called the Whig notion of democracy’s development—a variety of the secularization thesis—that lay behind Tocqueville’s judgment and counsel,” a thesis propounded by the German-influenced historian George Bancroft, shortly before Tocqueville arrived in America. One might say (although Strauss does not) that Tocqueville reommended an attitude of philosophic resignation in the face of this phenomenon, which he called “a force greater than man.” Unlike Strauss, who finds the origin of the decline of religiosity in the calculated efforts of modern philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli, Tocqueville tells his friend and correspondent Arthur de Gobineau that “the flesh would have rehabilitated itself just fine without the help of philosophers,” against Christianity. He calls Christianity “the great source of modern morality,” but no longer its guiding principle, with the Christian virtue of charity now taken over by the secular state in the form of ‘welfare,’ given “the disappearance of great individuals to whom one could have recourse in order to meet such obligations,” the aristocrats. Gobineau replies that such state-sponsored charity is no longer charity, comporting instead with what Gobineau sees as the decidedly un-Christian love of luxury and other “material pleasures” encouraged by commercial regimes. “Suffering is no longer holy,” having been reduced to the status of a socio-economic problem. 

Very uncharacteristically, Strauss misses, or perhaps makes a show of missing, some of Tocqueville’s nuance. Tocqueville attributes the origin of democracy to Christianity quite likely in order to appeal to the religious source of the aristocrats’ (and the monarchists’) claim to rule. While you once maintained that God ordained the hierarchic social and political order you ruled, in fact Christianity undermined it. But this speculation aside, Tocqueville explicitly states that Christianity undermined the ‘old regime’ of Europe, even as it seemed to reinforce it, because Christ revealed not only a teaching about God but the true teaching about man, God’s teaching about human nature: that all human beings are of the same species, their differences in virtue and talent real but not strictly dispositive in any way that could be accurately enacted in civil society or government. [5] What is more, human nature itself has greatness within it, a greatness that has gradually come to the surface of modern civil societies and the politics they support, despite the manipulation of conventions first by aristocrats and now by some states-men—i.e., men of the centralized modern state—who have worked to suppress it. “We ought not strain to make ourselves like our fathers, but to strive to attain the kind of greatness and happiness that is proper to us.” [6] This being so, the poets that once celebrated (and occasionally satirized) the pagan gods, who once suggested the greatness of the God of the Bible, can now find sublimity and beauty in man himself: “I do not need to travel through heaven and earth to discover a marvelous object full of contrasts, of infinite greatness and pettiness, of profound obscurity and singular clarity, capable of giving birth at once to pity, admiration, scorn and terror. I have only to consider myself: man comes from nothing, traverses time, and is going to disappear forever into the bosom of God. One sees him for only a moment wandering, lost, between the limits of the two abysses.” Poets in democracies should not be expected “to repopulate the universe with supernatural beings in which readers and poets themselves no longer believe…. But man remains, and he is enough for it,” man, “placed before nature and God with his passions, his doubts, his unheard-of prosperity, and his incomprehensible miseries.”  [7]

But in the end, Strauss’s quarrel is with Heidegger, not Tocqueville. He rejects the inclination of Heidegger to return to nature. To be sure, this is not the “mere romanticism” it seems, inasmuch as thermonuclear war “could compel future generations” to live in “illiterate tribes.” But tribal life has no place for philosophy, Heideggerian or otherwise. Tribal men worship their ancestors and obey ancestral custom, which they take to be “divine law.” The political life respected by the classical political philosophers that Heidegger regards as the progenitors of technological science replaced tribalism for a good reason: as Strauss puts it, those who revere customs and laws as divine “cannot be in direct contact with the original founders” of those customs and laws, and so “cannot know whether the fathers or grandfathers have not deviated from what the original founders meant, or have not defaced the divine message by merely human additions or subtractions.” Such writings therefore cannot deny the effort of philosophers, who arise within political societies, subjecting them to “rational scrutiny.” Socrates investigates “old books,” along with conversing with “young men.” Today, such investigations and conversations ought to include scrutiny of the books written by the moderns themselves, the Enlighteners, including their claim that philosophy in the service of modern science can enlighten citizens with respect to their moral and political duties and deserts. Indeed, because the books the greatest minds, the genuine philosophers, have left behind for us often contradict one another, liberal education cannot be indoctrination—an observation at least as ‘relevant’ today as it was when Strauss made it.

This leaves us with a dilemma. We non-philosophers can read the works of philosophers, but we are not their equals, let alone their superiors, superior because more ‘enlightened,’ or further along the historical curve of ‘progress.’ We must form opinions about thinkers who contradict one another, even though we are not fully competent to make such judgments. Still, we may come to occasional insights, moments of noesis noeseos, an experience quite different from the experience of pleasure or unpleasure. In this, liberal education, Strauss writes, is a “liberation from vulgarism,” and “experience in things beautiful.” This noetic experience reveals “the dignity of man” and the goodness of the world as the home of the human mind. In experiencing the satisfaction of insight, including insight into unpleasant things, we begin “to realize that all evils,” those ugly things that concentrate our minds, are in a sense necessary if there is to be understanding” and therefore to “accept all evils that may befall” us. There is beauty in understanding even the ugly.

But where does that leave those who will not receive a liberal education? The classical political philosophers were far from unmindful of them. While “modern philosophy was actively destructive of traditions, above all of the biblical tradition,” the classical philosophers were “much friendlier toward, more attentive to the preserving of, those authoritative traditions,” recognizing that they upheld the political framework which would protect their philosophic activity from barbarism, if traditionalists and politicians were not made to lose ‘face’ by philosophers. “The attribution of the rise of both technology and democracy to Christianity” by some of the Enlighteners (although many others condemned Christianity as the most formidable block against those supposed goods) “was a deliberate misunderstanding, perpetrated by the Enlightenment and its science, to hide its true intention, which from the start was to bring about the disenchantment of human life.” Such disenchantment has the malign effect of spreading not enlightenment, not rationality, but nihilism to the young, and through them to large swaths of civil society, leaving them incapable of recognizing or of appreciating genuine human greatness. At the same time, while Aristotle and other classical political philosophers saw the harshness of nature as clearly as the moderns, the moderns’ attempt to master nature’s harshness, often harshly (torturing nature in order to make her reveal her secrets, as Bacon describes it), amounts to “a failure of resignation” resulting from “a disappointed hope in the existence of a caring God and a consequent, confused sense of a ‘right to rebel'” against God, seizing (one might even say secularizing) the right to providential direction of Fortuna from God. For the classics, “the good life is the life according to nature, which means to stay within certain limits; virtue is essentially moderation.” The abandonment of moderation leads to the dangerous and dehumanizing excesses of modern politics.

Strauss offered further thoughts on liberal education in his essay, “Liberal Education and Responsibility,” first published in 1962. [8] Some of those who listened to his remarks at the Basic Program at the University of Chicago understandably had asked for clarification of his description of liberal education as “the founding of an aristocracy within democracy.” He begins with an account of the relations between the gentlemen-aristocrats of ancient Greece and the philosophers, relations which were “uneasy.” The aristocratic gentleman received “an education becoming a free man and the leisure that his wealth made available to him,” a preparation for a life devoted to ruling “nobly” his household and his city “by deed and by speech.” It is above all an education in the formation of character, attentive to “the good order of the soul and of the city,” as propounded in histories, poems, and travel books, as taught by tutors and above all by the young gentleman’s father and the other elders of the city. “There was no ‘philosophy’ in this education,” which partly accounts for the suspicions philosophers aroused among aristocrats: What were these strange men up to? The aristocrat was expected to be a man who ruled according to the interests of the whole city, not only of his class—a man of noblesse oblige. Inasmuch as his liberal education set him above those without such an education, an indispensable part of his rule was to set the tone of the city, to lend distinction and grace to it, and not to attempt to ‘enlighten’ the many who were poor, with whom he had no basis to deliberate. While the gentleman defined freedom as high-minded participation in civic life, the many who were poor inclined to define freedom as living as they liked; their freedom was prevented from becoming license because they respected the gods, the priests, the religious rites. 

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates spends much of his time conversing with aristocrats, attempting to win friends of philosophy, especially the young men, whose fathers suspect a challenge to their traditional authority. To put it roughly, for the aristocratic citizens, consideration of ‘the whole’ and of the good of the whole meant the whole of the city as protected by its gods, celebrated by its poets, whereas for the philosophers ‘the whole’ meant nature, which encompasses the city and investigates the nature of its gods. When philosophers manage their relations with the gentlemen well, some gentlemen, “on the lookout for a ‘noble’ activity for his leisure that is genuinely an end in itself and hence becoming of him as a free man,” will “be not undisposed to philosophy as a possible candidate for that activity.” A very few might pursue philosophy seriously, but a crucial number will at least regard it as nothing to persecute. 

But are philosophers rightly interested in the gentlemen and the city, beyond such efforts at prophylaxis? After all, human things perish but gentlemen are “radically disinclined to accept that this is so.” They want their fame to live forever. “Men must be certain that what they live in and live for lasts forever, for otherwise it would be hard for them to dedicate themselves fully to their cities”; “one cannot act on a grand scale without hope.” [9] Like the many, if for different reasons, they are inclined “to hold that the world is the work of a mysterious but providential eternal god or gods”—just gods who uphold justice, the rule of the best men. The pre-Socratic philosophers’ nearly exclusive attention to nature, which led to behavior offensive to liberally educated gentlemen [10], not only endangered philosophy but, in Socrates’ view, handicapped philosophizing itself. Socrates “second sailing,” his turn from the nature-centered philosophy of his predecessors to political philosophy, aimed at “a dialectical examination of the understanding of virtue that vindicated the possibility of the philosophic life, and its ‘virtue,’ over and against that of the perfect gentleman.” This leads the philosopher to a better understanding the fundamental distinction” between “the things that are what they are simply” and the “things that are what they are only for man as man,” and “for man belonging to specific groups”—different cities, different regimes. And “this fundamental distinction is at the bottom of the distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy.” If, for philosophers, a true liberal education liberates the soul not for civic life but for a life lived in the city but in some sense above and beyond it, outside the ‘Cave’ of public opinion, then that kind of liberal education “is a necessary ‘preparation,’ as Strauss here puts it, for philosophy.” [11] But insofar as a man comes actually to philosophize, he “contributes to the city only indirectly and in diluted form,” as a “humanizing and civilizing” influence. Just as the aristocrat and the democrat cannot deliberate in common, neither, really can the aristocrat and the philosopher. “The gentleman is as incapable of giving the philosopher a coherent account of his understanding of his noble life, which he considers good in itself, as he is of giving it to the people,” in view of the fact that in the end their actual rule stands on their wealth, although their claim to rule stands on their education and the good character that education aims at cultivating. While the political philosopher understands this, he also sees that the city depends upon the gentlemen, the poets, and the priests; Strauss, unlike Heidegger, sees that Plato sees that philosophers will never be kings, that Plato is not really “engaged in a rationalist attempt to guide the city.” And Aristotle explicitly writes that without the priesthood there can be no city—the city, which the philosopher intellectually transcends but in which he physically lives and in which he finds potential philosophers. Classical political philosophy “did not aim at any scientific-philosophic transformation of society or of politics,” recognizing as it did “the depth of the opinions it refuted (or backed off from refuting) in private conversations.” The philosopher lives in “awareness of the perishing of all human things,” while also understanding that non-philosophers turn away from that awareness, and that turning away makes political life possible and indeed often better than it would be if it did not turn away from that awareness. “Not a genuine encounter with mortality and the destruction of all that has come into being, and the establishment of it as a necessity, on the basis of the dialectically demonstrated incoherence of those who claim the existence of miracle-working gods, but a flight from this encounter, characterizes modern thought, including Heidegger’s ‘new thinking.'” The attempt to conquer nature is a struggle against death, against that perishing, a struggle that must end futilely in an entropic cosmos.

Accordingly, that most sober of the classical political philosophers, Aristotle, holds up the “mixed regime,” the shared, balanced rule of oligarchs and democrats, with a sober middling class as mediator between them, as the best practicable regime for the city. Strauss sees that the most nearly moderate philosophers among the moderns—Locke being a distinguished example—looks instead to a regime of popular sovereignty, a regime “to be based on equality of ‘rights'” guarded by a government staffed by representatives of the people, responsible to them, representatives taken not from the landed gentry but from a commercial and industrial elite, aimed at constituting a new liberalism, a commercial and technological society that “aims precisely at the overthrow of all such religious authorities that guided both parts of the ancient mixed regime.” Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education testifies to this turn, as his “Young Gentleman” will indeed receive a liberal education, but one based upon utility, not nobility. Obligation is no longer a matter of noblesse but of usefulness at the service of “the new doctrine of rights”—specifically, the rights to life, liberty, and property. In the Lockean commercial republic of the United States, Strauss observes, “biblical education of the people” continues but in what at least some of the Founders took to be a rearguard action against the surging spirit of enterprise. Strauss asks, can liberal education in a democratic and commercial republican regime really “perform the function once performed by religious education?”

No: “the modern conception of philosophy is fundamentally democratic” in that it “subordinates its purpose to the purpose of non-philosophers,” relieving their solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short natural lives with the production of technological marvels that replace the economy of scarcity with the economy of plenty. While early modern philosophers addressed princes, monarchs, against the aristocrats, urging them to found the modern state, whose centralization diluted and eventually ruined aristocratic rule, they eventually turned to “the direct enlightenment of the people,” “open[ing] the people up to the gifts philosophy was now bringing them.” This strategy risked the philosophy that had now retooled itself as modern science, since “the people, having received a biblical education, were led by that stern education to reject in no uncertain terms the magic that had characterized the rule of Pharaoh, or, more generally, reliance on human arts instead of on God.” But given the inclination of democrats to define freedom of doing as one likes, the change from pursuit of heavenly bliss to worldly happiness, a happiness based upon satisfaction of the desire to acquire worldly goods, not Aristotelian eudaimonia, eventually began to prevail. Commerce itself circulates money and goods beyond the borders of states and their regimes, but in a far different way from universal, ‘catholic,’ Christianity. The universalism of commerce would form the material element of any future world state. 

“Two political consequences resulted from this growing shift to popular enlightenment.” Liberal education stopped being an instrument for converting men from preoccupation with worldly goods to goods of the soul and became instead a transition from “unenlightened to enlightened self-interest.” For its part, politics and political economy centered on the dismantling of aristocratic rule, now that “the removal of what had been the necessity of relative scarcity made it possible to ‘see and to admit the element of hypocrisy’ in the rule of the gentlemanly aristocrats, or brought to light” that the regimes they ruled were really oligarchies. Both of these elements of the new liberalism pointed to the replacement of divine providence (and indeed the ‘Fate’ of the ancients) with the hope of human progress based upon enlightenment itself, that is, upon the pervasiveness of the ambitions of modern philosophy with its techniques of modern experimental science. The notion of equal rights came in as, first, religious toleration, since religious animosities interfere with the orderly pursuit of scientific experimentation, and protection of equal rights, whereby each person was invited to join “the ‘race’ to this-worldly advancement,” with losers assuaged by acts of “compassion,” the worldly replacement for Christian charity. “This development toward this-worldly advancement obviously moves in the opposite direction of return (t’shuva) to the right way given by divine law,” a point Strauss indicates in the title of his essay, “Progress and Return.” The assertion of equal rights, evidence of ‘human dignity,’ along with the salve of compassion bespoke “a redefinition of virtue, as something not difficult or rare but rather common or potentially universal,” a matter of good intentions, of moral sentiments. Against Tocqueville, Strauss argues that “far from emerging out of Christianity, the elevation of democracy to the status of the one best or only legitimate regime, because it recognizes the dignity of each man, emerges, in Strauss’s account, as a tactical political corrective of the people made as part of the scientific, technological project of enlightenment.” Behind Kant lurks Machiavelli, all along, although perhaps Kant, and surely most Kantians, don’t see him. [12]

Kant attempts to overcome Hume’s ‘Is-Ought’ problem, the problem of deriving morality from a universe without God and a nature without purpose. Modern science cannot tell us what to do with modern science; it cannot justify itself. If one says, with Machiavelli and Bacon, that it is to bring nature to heel in the service of human intentions, what justifies those intentions? “What most characterizes our age can therefore be said to be ‘hardly more than the interplay of mass taste with high-grade but strictly speaking unprincipled efficiency,'” a “sham universality,” as Strauss calls it, subservient to popular opinion. “If those who initiated that project were indeed motivated by biblical charity, then they were colossal bunglers in their exercise of that virtue, since they wiped out the very source of the virtue they found it so important to exercise. If on the other hand their claim to be motivated by biblical charity is disingenuous, as we have seen Strauss suggesting, then the result is much closer to what they in fact wished to achieve, or accords with their true motive.” This raises the question that Burns asks, whether the American Founding, an example of the “moderate Enlightenment” that esteemed natural rights, was accomplished by men who knew what they were doing. It raises the further question of whether the “social science positivism or value-free social science” Strauss deplores is “not simply a ‘German import’ to America” but “the direct result of Cartesian constructivism,” yet another offshoot of Machiavellianism, driving the moral and intellectual forces that undermined serious convictions in favor of natural rights. 

Adam Smith’s ‘moral sentiments,’ Rousseau’s ‘compassion,’ and Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ have had their adherents, but the most powerful set of doctrines that has attempted to give moral weight (some might say moral cover) to modernity has been historicism, which takes the modern theme of progress and makes it into an inevitable movement of all events towards a new ‘end’ or purpose, the ‘end of history,’ a worldwide state that will satisfy (its proponents promise us) all human needs and desires. In its mild forms, this can be seen in liberalism renamed as ‘progressivism,’ seen in America in the writings of John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, and many others, and in the neo-Kantian politicians and professors of continental Europe before and after the First World War. Its radical forms included the ‘race science’ of European Right and the ‘scientific socialism’ of the European (especially Marxist) Left. All of these claims to rule were challenged by the still more radicalized form of historicism propounded by Heidegger, to whom Strauss turns explicitly in his lecture, “German Nihilism.” [13]

German nihilism arose among “the miseducated souls of German adolescents” who looked with moral revulsion at modern civilization, with its hostility toward nature, its individualism, and its utilitarianism. They rejected Marxism as yet another example of the modernity they loathed. That is to say, German nihilism stemmed from what Strauss calls a “non-nihilistic,” indeed moralistic, “root.” That is, the young Germans took over some of the attitude of the German Romantics of a century earlier, who themselves had read Rousseau’s animadversions against ‘the bourgeois’ with avidity; in the generation before them, Nietzsche had thunderously echoed those animadversions in his portrait of the Last Man, who knows nothing of sublimity, who is the very opposite of what the French call an homme sérieux. With its flaccid toleration of vice, the “morally open society” is “the enemy of morality,” a society that “precludes sacrifices and steadfast devotion to a distinctive, common way of life held to be good and wroth of devotion.” The example of Winston Churchill, then leading his people in the Battle of Britain, would have shown them otherwise, but that example came “too late” for German youth, who eventually became swept up by the Nazis, who promised them victory over all Germany’s enemies as the pride of the Aryan race. That is, the young Germans were anything but conservatives along the lines of Georges Duhamel in France or Hermann Rauschning in Germany. [14] What the nihilists sought to annihilate was a Western civilization that had gone wrong, although initially they weren’t sure about what might replace it.

Strauss argues that the example of Churchill suggests more than simply that there is still hope for modern liberal democracy, although that was no small thing in 1941 (or now). Consideration of Churchill would “have begun a liberation from the whole inherited, taken-for-granted notion of historical reasoning, from belief in a social progression of human consciousness, a ‘wheel of history’—a sense of belonging, to use a current phrase, to the ‘right side of History’—that would have begun to make possible the recovery of an older, truer understanding of reason.” Because Churchill was an excellent example of what Aristotle calls the magnanimous or great-souled man, the ethics of ‘the ancients,’ the moral reasoning of an ancient political philosopher, still makes sense, even under the radically different historical conditions of the twentieth century. Historicists are mistaken; a man like Churchill refutes their doctrines rationally, by counterexample. His example refutes both the historicists of ‘decline’ and the historicists of ‘progress,’ since he has no superior among the statesmen of antiquity and no inferior among the statesmen of modernity.  The young Germans had been “told that their opposition to communism was necessarily against reason,” against the supposed dialectic of History; loathing the pseudo-egalitarian drabness of the Soviet Union, they accordingly “rejected reason and the modern civilization it was busy bringing into being, preferring the “decisionism” of Heidegger and the decisiveness of Hitler. But Strauss argues that there is “another kind of reasoning” than Hegelian-Marxian dialectic, reasoning “which attempts to understand the world as it is rather than to transform it,” as the moderns would, “or engage it in accord with an alleged progressive consciousness” as Marxists and Progressives would. The reasoning of the ancients rightly took truth to be unchangeable, un-historicist, but nothing in young Germans’ intellectual formation had told them that it was anything but changeable, ‘historical.’ “The timeless example of Churchillian greatness within a liberal regime…would have awakened, Strauss is claiming, the older moral reasoning because the passionate desire to defend morality, which is at the root of nihilism, is, importantly, long-standing or transhistorical.” It is the very thing that the ancient philosophers considered critically but with a saving respect because it provided the political matrix within which they might philosophize. It is also the very thing that Heidegger (and before him, Nietzsche) had misunderstood about the classical political philosophers, despite their massive learning and philosophic brilliance. Similarly, although Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their genocidal Nazi vulgarizers “abhorred the modern ideas,” supposedly of British origin (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke) the ‘will to power’ is the British idea, nature-conquest being the principal example of it.

Because the classical political philosophers were indeed philosophers, they cannot rightly be called ‘conservatives.’ Conservatism “defines its ultimate goal by a specific tradition,” but “the education Strauss hopes to awaken within liberal democracy is not hagiographic.” Nor does he accept the modern liberal philosophers’ standard of individual natural rights. Natural rights philosophers argue in the manner of the American Declaration of Independence, which sets down the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as major premises of a syllogism, and further posits that government exists to secure those rights. This means that if you violate, or convincingly threaten to violate, one or more of my natural rights, I am fully entitled to violate your natural rights in order to prevent you from, or punish you for, that violation or threat. The problem is that “this ‘ought’ can have no meaning without an appeal to justice, to a perceived, preexisting moral law, one that obliges us to serve a common good, a law that in normal circumstances forbids many voluntary acts, such as murder and theft.” And indeed, the Declaration does appeal not only to natural rights but to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. “The argument thus states, on the one hand, that we are compelled to seek our own interest, by a permanent necessity—so permanent that it justifies ‘inalienable’ selfish claims—even as it makes, on the other, a quiet or surreptitious appeal to an obligatory law that presumes our freedom from such necessity, a freedom and a duty to act for the common good, limiting and sacrificing our own good in accord with it.” What happens, in other words, if I am called to risk my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in order to defend the country whose regime is dedicated to securing those rights for me? That isn’t living according to the democratic notion of freedom, now taken over by the modern liberal democracies, of living as I like. In order to preserve itself, the regimes that uphold “the liberal democratic definition of rights”—even if it eschews historicism as the philosophic foundation of right and recurs to the natural-rights philosophy of the early moderns—must preserve, and in its ‘Churchillian’ potential does preserve, “the older moral reasoning.” It is a matter of bringing this out in the education of the young. As for their elders, they “continue to be moved by a positive notion of freedom and hence of excellence,” continuing “to respond to appeals to greatness and sacred duty and all that those appeals imply.” Hence the success of de Gaulle in France, Adenauer in West Germany, in the decades following the Second World War. 

Unfortunately, “the long-range tendency of liberal democracy is away from moral seriousness and toward permissiveness,” a tendency animated by the longings of democrats for John Lennon’s world, in which there is “nothing to kill or die for.” That is, the moralism of the young nihilists opposes the way of life, the wide path of democracy toward self-indulgence. Hence Strauss’s proposal “to promote the founding, within the cultural, subpolitical, or private sphere,” the increasingly less-than-civil society of the modern state, of an “aristocracy within democracy,” whose “moral reasoning…would endeavor to keep liberal democracy ‘closed’ not only to tyranny but also to the depravations brought on when license displaces liberty.” That moral reasoning, seen most clearly in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, aims not at scientific knowledge, at knowledge of nature (including human nature) but at practical knowledge, knowledge of means more than knowledge of ends. The ends are supplied by the regime of the political community. They may be, and are, quietly inquired into by the philosophers, who engage in dialogue with the good citizens who uphold those ends and that regime, along with the not-so-loyal citizens who oppose both. Modern philosophers who suppose that practical reasoning can subserve theoretical reasoning in an unproblematic way deceive themselves, as seen so notably in the then contemporaneous examples of Hitler and Stalin, those asserters of ‘the unity of theory and practice.’ The classical political philosophers understood that reasoning about practice mean reasoning about things that change; Aristotelian ethics is a ‘situation ethics,’ an ethics of prudential adjustment to changing circumstances. Scientific or theoretical knowledge is rather “knowledge of necessities by which motion or change comes about, the necessities that underlie all change.” This is the opposite of modern ‘pragmatism,’ as seen in (for example) the philosophy of John Dewey, who calls knowledge the “power to transform the world.” Strauss regards “the active, conquering disposition of modern science, and its deep opposition to the ‘philosophic attitude’ required for genuine science or theorizing” as a “delusion.”

He does not dispute the findings of that science, writing instead that “science teaches us that the existence of man on this planet will come to an end sometime in the future,” with “all achievements of the human race…sink[ing] into oblivion, into nothingness.” He only maintains that the serene resignation that can come from contemplating nature’s entropy lends itself to the practice of reasoned thought that guides the philosophic way of life, the true ‘Republic’ or regime, the one according to nature. “It is the essence of the philosophic attitude,” Strauss writes, “to live without delusions,” without “hope for any miracle”; philosophers “alone look at all things sub specie aeternitatis.” To refuse “every flight from the horror of life into consoling illusion,” to take “the eloquent depictions of the misery of man without God as a proof of the goodness of its case,” facing their own death and the eventual ‘death’ of the cosmos itself with “the courage to endure fearful truth,” with “hardness against the inclination of man to deceive himself about his situation”—in this, the philosophers exhibit “probity.” Probity is an especially happy choice of word, deriving as it does from the Latin probus, which means “good” in the sense of proven virtue, virtue that stands straight both “amidst these storms” (as Churchill puts it) and stands up to ‘probing’ questions of the sort philosophers ask of their fellow citizens, of one another, and of themselves. The philosopher is the true honnêtte homme. 

In his lecture on German nihilism, “Strauss is exposing both the absence of genuine resignation,” as seen in the moderns’ attempt to conquer nature with the techniques of modern science, “and the moderns’ overlooking of the genuine resignation to the ultimate destruction of all things that had in fact characterized the ancients.” For all their Machiavellianism, the modern philosophers have been too moralistic, at least in the sense that they, along with all moralists, affirm “a deeper significance to one’s life and that of one’s community than does the philosophic”—an affirmation “founded on hope of immortality.” As an honest man, the philosopher hates the lies that our souls tell themselves. But if so, where does that leave Strauss’s urging for a truce between the moral life as ordinarily understood and the philosophic life, the theme he sometimes calls the dialogue between Jerusalem and Athens? “Both religious experience and philosophy are responses, albeit radically different ones, to the unplanned human encounter with mortality,” an encounter that “awakens in all serious human beings a yearning for the noble, for a dignified life.” As such, the religious way of life “cannot be lightly dismissed,” as Enlightenment philosophes and their epigoni were apt to do. Nor should it be angrily dismissed, as it is by those animated by what Strauss calls “anti-theological ire.” The religious way of life should instead be considered, inquired into. “It is through painful, dialectical purification of this earning and of the thoughts to which it gives rise, a yearning which in classical political philosophers is called ‘erotic,’ that philosophers secure the serene if said resignation to necessity that, according to Strauss, marks the philosophic-scientific disposition or attitude,” a purification not by fire but by reasoning, without which “the philosophic disposition does not emerge an cannot be secured.” This is why Strauss shows such sympathy to the young nihilists, quite possibly including a few he met among the graduate students at the New School for Social Research. They have rejected modern rationalism; that is good. They have abandoned rationalism altogether; that is over-hasty. They have adopted a radical, very nearly apocalyptic nihilism because they have not seen the place of reasoning within moral thought, an insight which they can experience if they study Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon rather than, or perhaps better as a corrective to, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Marx, Nietzsche, and (now especially) Heidegger. The classical political philosophers, men of both probity and of prudence, never forget that for all the striking warrior virtues of Achilles, for all the Stürm und Drang that accompany the birth of tragedy, happiness is “the natural aim of man.” Moral men need not be fanatical men, as not only the classical political philosophers but Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers have demonstrated in their own arguments and actions. What the “older moral reasoning” offers “is not in its essence a philosophic, but rather a prephilosophic, prescientific reasoning,” which remains within what Strauss calls “the natural horizon of human thought,” a traditionalism that leaves room for the “awareness or discovery of nature” precisely because it remains within that horizon.

Such a traditionalism holds up the image of a providential God or set of gods who initially granted human beings a peaceful condition of life, a condition, however, conditioned upon obedience to divine law. Return to something like that condition “is done in repentance, return (t’shuva) for having lost the right way, the way indicated by that divine law.” By contrast, the modern ‘state of nature’ denies the existence of any providential divinity and presents nature as harsh but stupid, deserving of and vulnerable to human conquest. The German nihilists detested the civilization the moderns had made but, having no regard for an original, providentially ordained past, they “retained that civilization’s emphasis on autonomy” of the human will, demanding the destruction of the civilization that they rightly intuited to have somehow gone wrong. They sought not “a vision that emerges out of the natural human consciousness,” but the modern assumption that man must ‘create’ or ‘construct’ his way out of the modern crisis, after having ‘deconstructed’ the civilization that had landed itself in crisis. But their underlying moral sensibilities sought “knowledge, and not mere belief” of what is right. For that, they would need to undertake a return—some, indeed, to the divine law, with a renewed appreciation for their own religious traditions, others to the reasoning way of life lived by the old philosophers.

The fourth and final Straussian writing that Burns considers, his review of Eric Havelock’s The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, was published in 1959. [15] Eric Havelock was a Cambridge-educated classicist who held academic appointments at the University of Toronto, Harvard University, and Yale University. Active in democratic socialist politics while in Canada, he courted scholarly controversy as well, claiming that the pre-Socratic philosophers, several of whom wrote in verse, were more akin to Homer and the other oral poets than to Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers who wrote dialogues and treatises. (Plato, famously, is said to have burned the poems he wrote in his youth.) This thesis was part of Havelock’s historical claim that the shift from oral to literate ‘culture’ in ancient Greece marked a watershed in Western civilization. But more important to Strauss, as Burns shows, is the supposedly poetic character of the substance of pre-Socratic thought, its supposed piety. In this, Havelock—socialist, liberal in the ‘progressive’ sense, and positivist—gives us the opposite side of the Heidegger coin. Both men say that pre-Socratic philosophy was not committed to reason but to poeticizing, but while Heidegger celebrates this, evincing an especial sympathy for Heraclitus, Havelock celebrates what he claims to be the progressive-liberal, democratic themes of Greek philosophy and even Greek tragedy. Both men are historicists, while expecting far different outcomes of History.

Disagreeing with both, Strauss respects Heidegger but has little regard for Havelock. Positivists claim to be ‘value-free’ thinkers, yet the decry all those who question a “certain kind of democracy.” Havelock detests Plato for exactly that reason. He also distinguishes between savage and civilized men and esteems ‘progress.’ Heideggerian existentialism is more serious than positivism because it confronts the crisis of modernity and does so in an internally consistent manner. Like positivism, it dismisses classical political philosophy as obsolete, but on very different grounds: its premises are not self-evident but arbitrary, as is all thinking; its rationalist claims to universality are only products of its historical epoch; it is irreligious, advocating a civil religion, only. 

Strauss begins by contrasting Havelock’s modern liberalism with classical liberalism, recalling Aristotle’s description of the free man as a citizen as distinguished from a slave, with the virtues to match. For the classical political philosophers, ‘liberal’ also meant “freedom from stinginess or greed,” a virtue based on the notion that “there is an activity that is good in itself rather than for whatever monetary profit might come out of it,” namely, “the mind’s activity,” which need not be made subservient to bodily desires but is capable of elevating itself to consideration of the common good, the good of the city, and, potentially in some, to nature, to what is good by nature. “The genuine classic liberal is a republican and a gentleman.” Strauss finds little of this in modern liberals, who define liberty democratically, as doing as one likes, basing politics on consent (so defined), and denying “fixed norms, finding all norms to be responses to historical needs” and therefore impermanent. “Optimistic and radical,” modern liberalism allies itself with technological modern science and internationalist economics. “It is pragmatic, scientific, nontheological, and nonmetaphysical.” Whereas Greek ‘anthropologists’ considered human being as “not accidental to but necessary to any ordered whole or cosmos, which is to say that they understood the human mind and its noetic and sense perceptions to play a decisive role in the formation of being of that ordered whole (which, incidentally, can be the case only if there is no divine mind),” positivism ascribes the existence of the human mind and of human being altogether to chance. More, positivist science cannot, strictly speaking, ascribe the existence of anything to anything, restricting itself as it does to observations. In this, they are Cartesian in the sense of rejecting sense perception “as providing a natural knowledge of the world as it is,” Humean in the sense of denying any way of inferring causation from the sequence of events. In this, they contrast with the prephilosophic knowledge, which is based on sense perception and makes exactly such inferences. Once again, the distinct variations of historicism seen in Havelock and Heidegger both register the modern attempt to set human beings against nature. Havelock claims to find evidence of his form of historicist liberalism or progressivism in several of the ancient Greeks, a pretension Strauss has little difficulty batting down. The lesson Aeschylus teaches in Prometheus Bound is hardly a celebration of the protagonist’s theft of fire but rather the lesson that wisdom comes to man by the harsh path of suffering, suffering he presents as having been ordained by wise gods who know how to keep human beings in their rightful place in the cosmic order.

Heidegger extracts still another lesson, that for Aeschylus techne means ‘knowledge,’ and knowledge is far weaker than fate. Human knowledge leads not to resignation, as in the classical political philosophers, but to defiance of the gods, ultimately of fate—a futile effort. Concurring with Nietzsche’s famous claim that God is dead, Heidegger laments the “forsakenness of modern man in the midst of what is,” rejecting knowledge conceived as possessing answers and redefining it as questioning. ‘Existentialism’ means, in Heidegger’s words, to “will the essence of science understood as questioning, unguarded holding of one’s ground in the midst of the uncertainty of the totality of what-is.” It is “this will to essence” that “will create for our people,” we Germans, “its world, a world of innermost and most extreme danger, i.e., its truly spiritual world.” The only effective human defiance of fate comes not through knowledge as defined by the classical political philosophers but by poetry: “making (poein) is essential to its defiant activity as techne.” For his part, Strauss much more modestly describes all techne or art, from shoemaking to Homeric poetry, as “a pursuit which can be transmitted from teacher to pupil because it consists of rules.” There is no ‘creativity’ in it, if creation means creation out of nothing, being out of nothingness. That is quite beyond human natural capacities. Nor does Strauss overlook Heidegger’s appeal to German nationalism (“create for our people”), his ambition to guarantee national greatness “under the leadership of university teachers committed to “knowledge service” under German law. Creativity, Strauss may think, is quite beyond the capacities of university professors. Strauss considers techne “to be distinguished from (even if it stems from and hence will be related to) the knowing that is available as dianoia or as episteme; techne, as rules prescribing a transformation of what is given, already shows within it the conscious possibility of technology, and its possible autonomy from political control—an autonomy rejected by the ancients,” as seen in Aristotle’s critique of Hippodamus, the man who wanted to treat law as if it were an art, rewarding innovative lawmakers. Aristotle understood “the deep gulf separating the moral/political life from the philosophic or contemplative life, and to arts/technology as destructive of that by which a healthy society (as opposed to the philosopher) must take its bearings. Philosophy is not technology, does not lead to technology, is aware of ‘technological’ thinking, and opposes its liberation from political control,” that is, the rule of prudence, practical reason. [16] 

As to Heidegger’s claim that Platonic political philosophy, in its rationalism, somehow led to modern rationalism and its technocratic soullessness, Strauss, unlike Heidegger, “actually undertook the examination of all of Plato’s dialogues that Heidegger dismissed, at the start of his interpretation, as impossible.” [17] Heidegger’s cardinal interpretive error may be seen in his failure to understand “what a Platonic dialogue is.” In one sense, Havelock’s claim, that the move from oral teaching to written teaching makes a major difference in “the question of the relation between society and philosophy—a claim one might infer from his interest in the transition from oral to written poetry, and to writing in general—makes good sense to Strauss. But only so long as Alasdair MacIntyre’s later riposte to Havelock (“One must recall that Socrates left no writings”) is observed: the transition from oral to written dialogue is the crucial element in question. Heidegger naively assumes that Socrates is Plato’s mouthpiece in the dialogues, but this assumption is no more warranted than it would be to ascribe that role to, say, Shakespeare’s Prospero, although this too has been done.  Further, whether deliberately or not, Heidegger relates the Greek word for nature, phusis, “not to phuein (to grow) but to phaosphos (light),” ascribing growth to history, to “man’s being rooted in a human past, in a tradition, and creatively transforming that tradition.” He “fails to reckon with the possibility that the ideas are presented to Socrates’s interlocutors, especially Glaucon, as something that accords with their own moral opinions and as part of Socrates’s efforts to make philosophy acceptable to them, an effort that requires a false (‘utopian’) account of philosophy.” The image of the ascent from the cave, towards the ideas, implies that philosophy must begin with the laws and opinions of the city and not, as the pre-Socratics had it, straight to nature without regard to the city and its citizens. [18] Put simply, Strauss sees in Heidegger’s failure to appreciate the character of the Platonic dialogue the reason why Heidegger is a historicist in the sense of being a historical relativist; he sees in Heidegger’s conflation of nature with ‘enlightenment’ the reason why Heidegger is a historicist in the sense of associating ‘history’ with organicism, even as Dewey (!) does.

Havelock’s “whole thesis depends” not on his reading of the Greek poets and dramatists but on his reading of Plato’s Protagoras. Havelock wants to educate ‘the many,’ as does the sophist, Protagoras. Or so Protagoras says. But Strauss remarks that Protagoras demands money in exchange for his teaching; in reality, he favors oligarchs, not democrats. Beyond the political implications of sophistry, Socrates takes care in testing potential students for their capacity to philosophize, a capacity teachers don’t see every day. “That philosophic nature—one that craves clarity and awakeness—is, as other Platonic dialogues stress, rare, and there is no ‘teaching’ anyone’s way to it.” By contrast, Protagoras will take on any student who can afford to pay him. The Socratic standard for selecting students is nature; the Protagorean standard is a convention, money. “Havelock resembles Protagoras in being unaware of this difference between Socrates and Protagoras.” Although both men, the sophist and the positivist, take pride in what they take to be their superior knowledge, they are conventionalists without knowing it. But for neither is the term ‘natural’ “a term of distinction,” any more than it is for modern philosophers, very much including the historicists. Heidegger responds to this error by radicalizing historicism; Strauss responds by returning to classical political philosophy. This includes a recognition of “what Socratics had in common with the pre-Socratics,” in sharp distinction to the moderns: “the recognition of the need for esotericism,” in view of the fragility of the humanly indispensable city; “the recognition of the need to show that first things (whatever they might be) are not gods,” but privately, and only to those whose souls may bear this thought with resignation, not despair; “recognition of the antithesis of nature and nomos,” legal convention; “recognition of the deceptive character of the ‘world’ of nomos“; and “recognition of the crucial philosophic need to accept one’s mortality and that of all human accomplishment.” The modern liberal, Havelock being the example nearest to hand, “has lost sight of all of these things.” He would be a sophist but “lacks even the sophist’s liberation from the range of the many that moves in the direction of barbarism”—although here not entirely, for, as Tocqueville sees and foresees, modern sophists might ensconce themselves in the administrative state, raking in a lot more money and enjoying a lot more power than any sophist ever did. This aside, “the modern liberal manifests thereby evidence not of the progress that s ever on his lips, but of a regress.”

Summarizing his thoughts, Burns begins by observing that while Heidegger and Strauss both “encourage the recognition of human greatness and the preservation of a humanity perceived to be threatened by the mass society that technological science has produced,” Strauss calls not for the “new thinking” of radical historicism but “a sustained recovery of an older political thinking, one that can be broadened and deepened by a liberal education in friendly confrontation with Socratic political philosophy”—one that, moreover, treats “ancestral tradition” with respect, as needed ballast for any decent political regime and as indispensable for the beginning of philosophizing in the rare souls who will engage in it. This “preliminary activity of dialectic,” of dialogue with citizens, exercises and tests the theoretical reasoning capacities of the philosopher and the potential philosopher while showing them the prudential reasoning that citizens, and especially rulers, very often possess. Prudence will guide philosophers away from “attempt[ing] to guide a political-moral transformation or revolution” by means of “philosophic thought,” which properly aims at theoretical knowledge, knowledge of nature, not at the practical knowledge of the politician. 

As an example of what a young philosopher or potential philosopher should be, Strauss memorialized his student at the University of Chicago, Jason Aronson, whose premature death unsettled his many friends at the university. Strauss reminded them that as a Jewish man, Mr. Aronson had taken the moral commands of God to his heart while keeping the tasks of philosophy in his mind. This separation is wholesome because “the heart would impede the mind, while the mind might ‘stifle’ the heart.” “One might say that Strauss lets them stand in their necessary, implicit, and fruitful tension, while Heidegger, intent on overcoming the problem of the global dominion of technology, wishes to found, through the elaboration of the phenomenological structure of existenz, a universal education and new rootedness that would somehow combine the two.” But “this new kind of brave decisionism” lacks the prudential character that makes decisions choices, that is, reasoned decisions. Strauss elsewhere permitted himself an aphorism: “Philosophy, we have learned, must be on its guard against the wish to be edifying—philosophy can only be intrinsically edifying.” Edification is better left to God and His Bible and to the statesmanlike prudence embodied in sound political constitutions. 

Liberal education’s fostering of an “aristocracy within democracy” means neither the attempt to make college students into philosophers nor to make philosophers into politicians. It does mean that liberally educated men and women might “see in the philosophic life” a kind of life worth living, if not for himself then for some. “The example of the activity of [philosophizing could…humanize the gentleman’s political life.” This will provide “a sufficient common ground to be able to afford philosophy the dialectical activity that it needs to justify itself, and a political defense of philosophy that allow[s] it to find a home within the city.” In modernity, a philosopher can even discover some traces of the traditional moral and civic virtues in the egalitarian regimes, bringing the most conspicuous men who exhibit those virtues to the attention of students. And Burns concludes that “the critique Strauss offers of German nihilist youth is one that applies to contemporary postmodernist critics of liberal democracy, who likewise oppose science, reason, the notion of a single truth—in however apparently tame or academic a manner.” A manner that has become increasingly untamed, recently. This “untenable amalgam of Marxism and Heideggerian opposition to the West, in what has come to be called ‘identify politics,” opposed as it is to “modern constitutionalism,” “moves in the direction of a new, secular despotism.”

 

Notes

1. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, Volume II, Part Four, Chapter 6: “What Kind of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
2. On the other hand, it should be noticed that Hobbes also characterizes tyranny as merely “monarchy misliked,” a formula that inclines toward another characteristic of modern philosophic doctrine, moral relativism.
3. The full text may be found in Leo Strauss: Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
4. See, for example, Shadia Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005 (first edition published 1988) and Drury: Leo Strauss and the American Right (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994. 
5. “All the great writers of antiquity were a part of the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy established without dispute before their eyes; their minds, after expanding in several directions, were therefore found limited in that one, and it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” In this formulation, Christianity revealed not so much God as the nature of man. Strauss is much better in refuting the kind of claim Tocqueville makes about the supposed limitations of the ancient political philosophers, as distinguished from the ancient writers, showing that the philosophers were eminently capable of differentiating the gentleman-aristocrat, the man to be liberally educated, from the philosopher, an “extremely rare” human type. On this, indeed, Strauss corrects Tocqueville’s apparent historical relativism, although of course one might argue that Tocqueville argues in this way for the purpose of persuading contemporary aristocrats to think beyond their ‘class interests.’ As Strauss is famous for saying, when a competent man makes a glaring error, one may suspect that it is a deliberate error. In addressing his fellow aristocrats and those in France who still celebrated the divine right of kings to rule, Tocqueville may well have wanted to ‘sanctify’ the origins of the understanding that all men are in some sense created equal.
6. Indeed, “One might say that sovereigns in our time seek only to make great things with men. I should want them to think a little more of making great men; to attach less value to the work and more to the worker; and to remember constantly that a nation cannot long remain strong when each man in it is individually weak, and that neither social forms nor political schemes have yet been found that can make a people energetic by composing it of weak and pusillanimous citizens.” (II. iv. 7). See also Volume II, Part Four, note XXIV on the “divine idea” of the greatness of the unity “of the social power,” which Tocqueville prefers to the “human idea” of that unity.
7. See Tocqueville, ibid., II. i. 17: “On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations.” As for the historicism some (not necessarily Strauss) claim to detect in Tocqueville (misidentifying what he means by “a force greater than man”), one should consider his July 22, 1854 letter to his friend Francisque de Corcelle. Tocqueville had been visiting Germany, in which he finds political confusion but an enduring faith in “free institutions” and a desire for “political happiness.” Hegelian philosophy has been the source of the confusion. “You doubtless know the role played by philosophy in Germany for the past 50 years, particularly the school of Hegel. You are undoubtedly aware that he was the protege of governments, because his doctrine established in its political consequences that all facts were respectable and legitimate simply because they occurred and merited obedience”—a succinct description of historicist determinism, and in particular its attempt to fuse the ‘is’ of events with the ‘ought’ or morality in yet another attempt to answer the argument of David Hume. Further, and anticipating Strauss, Tocqueville remarks that “this doctrine ended up giving birth to all the anti-Christian and anti-spiritualist schools which have sought to pervert Germany for twenty years, especially for the last ten, and finally to the socialist schools which so favored the confusion of 1848”; Tocqueville likely has the writings of Feuerbach in mind. (See “Feuerbach’s Materialism” on this website, under the category “Philosophers.”) This being so, Tocqueville optimistically sees in Germany now a “revival of the religious sentiment in all the different beliefs”—that is, Christian sects—and especially among German Catholics.
8. Republished in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, op. cit.
9. Hence the title of Charles de Gaulle’s memoir of the founding of the Fifth Republic in France: Mémoires d’espoir. And his political ally and Minister of Culture, André Malraux, titled his Spanish Civil War novel, simply, L’Espoir. Even the not-so-religious Spanish republicans and their allies in the Communist Party needed a suggestion of immortality to bring them into action, to put their lives on the line.
10. See Diogenes Laertius: Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. James Miller translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
11. In an important footnote, Burns calls attention to an important difference between the classical and modern philosophers, as seen in the contrast between Aristotle and Bacon regarding the classification of the study of human nature. Aristotle considers the study of human nature “a part of natural philosophy,” whereas Bacon considers it “a part of human philosophy.” For Aristotle, man is a political animal, an animal that lives in a polis, but his nature is not simply bound to the polis; nature is a matter of theory, the political a matter of practice. Human nature is not identical with the “human things.” Bacon wants human beings to conquer nature, to subordinate it to their practice, for the human things to rule all of nature, eventually including human nature itself. 
12. To the obvious question—Strauss, are you the only philosophically inclined thinker in modern times to see all of this?—Strauss readily answers with the name of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who “recovered the fundamental difference between the understanding peculiar to political society and to the philosophic life, and hence having seen the religious foundations of the former, found unenlightened despotism (insofar as it did not rely on force) preferable to emerging enlightened despotism,” anticipating “the terror of Robespierre,” which itself foreshadowed the still worse tyrannies of Strauss’s century. 
13. “German Nihilism” is a lecture delivered in February 1941 at the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty. The occasion was a symposium on a book by Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (E. W. Dickes translation, New York: Longmans, Green, 1939). Rauschning was a German conservative, a monarchist, who joined the Nazi Party soon after it came to power but then repudiated it and fled the country, eventually arriving in the United States. The lecture may be found in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 26, Number 3, Spring 1999, pp. 353-378.
14. For an account of Duhamel’s stance, see “Anti-Americanism of the European Right, Then and Now” on this website, under the category, “Nations.”
15. Leo Strauss: “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” Review of Metaphysics, Volume 12, Number 3, March 1959, pp. 390-439. Havelock’s book was published in 1957 by Yale University Press.
16. In an illuminating footnote, Burns shows how Strauss further compares and contrasts philosophy with art and both from “the biblical alternative.” Both ancient philosophy and the arts rely on sense perception, reasoning, and noesis, an awareness of the eye of the mind rather than the physical eye. These three ways to knowledge can, should, work together, as the human intellect reasons about the pragmata the physical senses bring to its attention, eliminating contradictions, those things that cannot be at the same time, in the same part, in relation to the same thing, and then, finally ‘seeing it,’ perceiving the truth. Strauss then “distinguish[es] this awareness, informed by sense perception form the biblical alternative.” Whereas philosophy “turns to examine the ‘impersonal forces’ like moira, which, in mythology, struggle with the gods, as necessities,” the Bible “removes necessities, attributing all things to one omnipotent, mysterious God who has revealed himself and established a free covenant with men, whose experiences of God are not based on sense perception,” or, more precisely, not upon reasoning based on sense perception. For the poets, the gods were not free but ruled by fate (a point Nietzsche adopts); for the classical political philosophers, the gods don’t really exist, but human beings do, and they are ruled by necessity. For the Bible, a Person is the one who rules, freely. 
17. Further proof of the possibility of this enterprise may be seen in Catherine Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
18. “The great advantage Platonic philosophy enjoys over [pre-Platonic philosophy] is its recognition of the need to establish that the prephilosophic or prescientific ‘world,’ the human ‘world’ given its shape above all by divine law, is one that, given the unknowability of first things, cannot be lightly dismissed but must instead be shown to find its true fulfillment in the philosophic life.”